Dell Cameron:

A misconfigured online database has exposed new details of China’s tyrannical surveillance apparatus, which the country’s government has used to further suppress one of its most persecuted populations.

In the past year, there’s been an uptick of reporting on China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. In August, for instance, Business Insider detailed how the mostly Muslim minority group, largely confined to China’s Xinjiang region, came to occupy “one of the most intrusive police states in the world.” That same month, a story in the Atlantic described how a million Turkic Muslims in China are being detained in so-called interment camps; forced, on top of being tortured and killed, to renounce the very faith that underpins their social identity—to adopt in its place a philosophy more consistent with that of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Here we see, at gunpoint, the involuntary “re-education” of entire communities and the manual obliteration of a culture through an apartheid predicated on extreme religious prejudice. Nothing could be worse.

Behind all of this is a grotesque technological achievement whereby billions of dollars have been poured into the intensive monitoring of a people who, by the sheer mathematics of it all, could pose no real extremist threat to the security of the Red Giant. There’s no question that China has unleashed a surveillance apparatus unprecedented in its scale to collect even the most granular details about the daily lives of its citizens. New examples of that seem to arrive each day.

This week, one security researcher reportedly found himself peering through the looking glass after stumbling upon a massive database reportedly controlled by a Chinese firm called SenseNets, which had inadvertently left its shades undrawn.

Emily Esfahani Smith:

The new translation of Characters, by the philosopher Theophrastus (Aristotle’s favorite student), presents 30 brief vignettes of vulgarians, dullards, and yokels who populated the streets of ancient Athens—and who continue to make their presence known in ours. The rascals he profiles—from “The Newshound” and “The Arrogant Man” to “The Social Climber” and “The Flatterer”—are figures straight out of contemporary headlines. We meet, for example, “The Obnoxious Man,” who compulsively exposes himself in front of women. Characters like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose; Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton; Michael Avenatti and Stormy Daniels would have amused Theophrastus endlessly with their behavior. Civilization may be 2,400 years older, but human nature is apparently much the same.

Unlike this gallery of rogues, Theophrastus was beloved during his time. Born as Tyrtamus around 371 bc on Lesbos, he came to Athens in his youth and found his way to Aristotle’s philosophical school, the Lyceum, where the great philosopher rechristened him Theophrastus (“divine in speech”), according to the concise and helpful introduction that opens this volume, written by classicist James Romm of Bard College. Considered the father of botany for his writings on plants—though he covered a wide range of topics, from the gods and stars to human sweat and hair—Theophrastus not only became Aristotle’s favorite student but also revered by the citizens of Athens. His philosophy lectures at the Lyceum attracted thousands of Athenians, and when he died at 85, an ancient source tells us that “the whole population of Athens, honouring him greatly, followed him to the grave.”

This isn’t to say that Theophrastus did not encounter the seamier side of human nature. As a foreigner, he was considered an outsider in Athens and was made to remember it. “In legal terms,” writes Romm, “Theophrastus and Aristotle were ‘metics,’ resident aliens, who had no political rights and could not own property.” Once, when Theophrastus asked an old woman in the marketplace about the price of her goods, she responded disdainfully by calling him “foreigner.” “Though he might acquire fine Attic speech and join Aristotle’s high-minded school, he was still a ‘bowl carrier,’” writes Romm, referring to the role metics were relegated to in Athenian state processions.

Dave Bangert:

Purdue President Mitch Daniels, bemoaning the civics literacy of American university students, including those on the West Lafayette campus, on Monday pushed faculty to help come up with a test to guarantee students who graduate can at least pass the same test given to newly naturalized citizens.

“It’s hardly a new issue,” Daniels told the University Senate, a faculty-heavy body that represents various academic departments at Purdue.

“You can make the argument, ‘Shouldn’t this have already been dealt with before students got here?’” Daniels said after his discussion with the University Senate. “As I told the Senate today, yes, it should have. I’d make the argument that it should be solved by middle school.”

Daniels said he didn’t know of other universities with a similar graduation requirement, but he said he was interested in at least knowing students at Purdue had basic knowledge about the American system. Daniels suggested that incoming freshmen would be told about the test the day they arrived on campus for Boiler Gold Rush – the university’s orientation program – and then they would be allowed to take the test any time, whether the next day or four years later, all the way up to the day before graduation.

He said if done right, the test would be over in five or 10 minutes.

Citizen Stewart:

Are we more harmed by black paint on a white face, or the fact that black rates of high school dropouts is double that of whites and college completion for LatinX and black students lags far behind whites?

You will ask why must you choose? Both are bad. These simple binaries aren’t instructive in any way.

“I can do both,” you’ll say, meaning you can be outraged by examples of racism and address the miseducation of black children.

I call your bluff. Yes, you can do both, but you don’t. Searching your social media reads like a clanging gong of outrage-by-the-minute stories that are here today, gone tomorrow. Your intellectual consumption is mostly empty calories.

As much as people say they call out both incidents of petty racism and America’s education tragedy, they don’t.

I understand why they publicly and privately challenge me for grinding on this unreasonable point about prioritizing the education failure that I see as smothering our children over the sheep rush toward each angering news item of the day. I understand, but I won’t relent. The easiest way to disable an intelligent person is to confuse his ability to differentiate between things that matter and those things that seem to matter but don’t.

Where is your social media post about the objectionable statewide test scores of public schools across every state?

Surely the fact that more black children are on track for economic alienation than self-sufficiency warrants as much fury as the kid with the #MAGA hat staring like a soulless psychopath at the Native American elder.

Where is your Facebook post about the 4.5 million children Congress discovered were sexually abused by staff in public schools?

Caroline Goldstein:

The Beijing-born artist Ai Weiwei has been such an outspoken critic of China’s human rights violations that he landed in government custody back in 2011 and endured years of surveillance afterward. But now he’s turning his critical eye toward the West, as tensions escalate between the US, Canada, and China.

In an extensive statement released today via the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, where a large-scale exhibition of Ai’s work will open on February 28, the artist chastises the West as “the hidden force behind China’s rise” and accuses it of “profiting from the status quo.”

The statement arrives at a particularly fraught moment during Western negotiations with China. The recent arrest of telecom giant Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in Canada (at the behest of the US) has been met with apparent retaliatory detainment of Canadian citizens by Chinese officials. A resolution doesn’t appear to be at close hand.

Citizen Stewart:

I got an email from an @AP reporter. The subject: “black charter schools debate.” It said: “This is Sally Ho, national education reporter with the Associated Press. I am working on a story about the black charter school debate in light of increasing enrollment in the community.”

When we talked Ho framed the issue as if it were a black civil war where billionaire-funded groups were fighting traditional groups like the NAACP. I told her that there is no war in the black community about charter schools. It’s a divisive manufactured story.

I told her research constantly tells us black people are among the most reliable supporters of charters and school choice. The majority of black people are clear about their support. If any segment of black “leaders” disagrees, they’re disagreeing with their own people.

Ho’s story, as expected, insinuated that our leading black organizations, including the Urban League, UNCF, 100 Black Men, and so on, are charter school friendly merely because they receive grant funding from the Walton Family Foundation. So disrepctful for an outsider to write.

Here is her insulting and sloppy attempt at a graphic depicting Walton at the center of a black universe. She assigns black agency to white masters. Given the history of these organizations and their missions, she trades in at least accidental millennial hipster racism. Gross.

On the other side, Ho pooh-poohed the idea that the NAACP and Movement For Black Lives are themselves publicly aligned with the teachers’ union campaigns against charters as a fulfillment of their grant funding from the unions. She told me she tired of that framing because….

teachers working through their unions on behalf of their profession isn’t the same things as the outsized role wealthy pro-charter people play in education policy. It’s a huge admission for a “journalist” to make. Facts be damned.

———-

Listen, all I'm saying is don't be out here dissing people for being funded by hedge billionaires if you're being funded by hedge fund billionaires.

That dog don't hunt. pic.twitter.com/Kt9GRX0aZe

— Citizen Stewart (@citizenstewart) January 18, 2019

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

John Garnaut:

They are all engineers of ideological conformity and cogs in the revolutionary machine.

Among the many things that China’s modern leaders did – including overseeing the greatest burst of market liberalisation and poverty alleviation the world has ever seen – those who won the internal political battles have retained the totalitarian aspiration of engineering the human soul in order to lead them towards the ever-receding and ever-changing utopian destination.

This is not to say that China could not have turned out differently. Elite politics from Mao’s death to the Tiananmen massacres was a genuine contest of ideas.

But ideology won that contest.

Today the PRC is the only ruling communist party that has never split with Stalin, with the partial exception of North Korea. Stalin’s portrait stood alongside Marx, Engels and Lenin in Tiananmen Square – six metres tall – right up to the early 1980s, at which point the portraits were moved indoors.

For a long time we all took comfort in thinking that this ideological aspiration existed only on paper, an object of lip service, while China’s 1.4 billion citizens got on with the job of building families and communities and seeking knowledge and prosperity.

Citizen Stewart:

Childhood ain’t what it used to be. Our fluorescent colored, artificial fruit scented, bubble-wrapped perversion today of the growing years of children may seem like evolution but in truth, it’s a regression.

No, I’m not casting nostalgia as fact and pandering to your generation X (or boomer) illusion of your rugged past captured in Polaroids of Big Wheels, Evil Knieval ramps for banana seat bikes, or those golden years when kids were allowed to be kids, get dirty, and play so hard they needed the reinforced knees of Tough Skins from Sears.

The ironically mature childhood I speak of was long before then.

Before James Maury Henson gave birth in 1955 to Kermit the Frog, ancestor to all Muppets we know and love; before 1957 when Belgian artist Pierre Culliford created Les Schtroumpfs (The Smurfs); and before 1929 when Walter Elias Disney produced “Silly Symphonies,” a historic movie that introduced friends of Mickey Mouse including Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto; before all of that was a mischevious tiny army whose adventures were meant to teach children life lessons.

They were known as The Brownies and they were sprung from the imagination of Palmer Cox, a Canadian-born (1840) railroad worker and carpenter in California before who became a full-time illustrator in New York 1875. The Brownies series made him a millionaire and resourced him well enough to build a “Brownie castle” as his home back in Quebec where he died in the summer of 1924

Abdi Latif Dahir:

Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China.

The country’s curriculum development institute (KICD) has said the design and scope of the mandarin syllabus have been completed and will be rolled in out in 2020. Primary school pupils from grade four (aged 10) and onwards will be able to take the course, the head of the agency Julius Jwan told Xinhua news agency. Jwan said the language is being introduced given Mandarin’s growing global rise, and the deepening political and economic connections between Kenya and China.

“The place of China in the world economy has also grown to be so strong that Kenya stands to benefit if its citizens can understand Mandarin,” Jwan noted. Kenya follows in the footsteps of South Africa which began teaching the language in schools in 2014 and Uganda which is planning mandatory Mandarin lessons for high school students.

Kenya is currently in the midst of rolling out a new educational curriculum to improve educational quality and focus on skills that would make graduates more employable in the labor market. Just last year, education officials rolled out the roadmap for the first pilot of the new curricula for students in pre-school and standards one and two.

Russell Berman and Peter Thiel :

The current historical moment appears to be marked by opposition to globalization, which has emerged in many countries in the vanous forms of populism, restrictive trade policies, attacks on “neo-liberalism,” protest parties and localism. These positions are sometimes accompanied by appeals to national interests and cultural traditions. This new mood is viewed as a break with a previous paradigm of international institutions and “world citizenship.”

This seminar proceeds from this contemporary reassertion of state sovereignty against market processes and internationalist claims in order to inquire into the historical, theoretical and cultural roots of the problem. Has the process of globalization stalled? What are the implications for the state and its aspiration for sovereignty? And how does technology, which contributed so much to the process of globalization, fit into this picture, especially in the guise of new technologies? This seminar therefore explores the tensions between state and maricet, their cultural contexts, technological innovation, and the importance of community belonging.

Enrollment is limited: To be considered for enrollment in this course, please complete and submit the short application available at the Explorecourses site by October 19, 2018, ll:59pm P5T. Students accepted to participate in this course will be notified on October 26, 2018 by 6:00pm. Auditors are not permitted. Application:

Max Rivlin-Nadler:

These details and others were revealed in more than 1,000 pages of previously unseen Customs and Border Protection training documents, which were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union after a four-year legal battle and shared exclusively with The Intercept. The documents were finally released to the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project this past August in response to a 2014 Freedom of Information Act request that focused on the policies of Border Patrol’s “roving patrols” — units that operate outside of ports of entry and checkpoints, often venturing far into the country’s interior. These roving patrols can question, detain, and arrest individuals they suspect of having illegally crossed the border or having smuggled drugs or other contraband into the country.

During the course of the FOIA litigation, CBP argued that releasing the documents would be a violation of attorney-client privilege between CBP’s legal branch and its officers in the field. A federal judge dismissed that claim last year, after finding that the Enforcement Law Course did not contain confidential information flowing from client to attorney. Despite this finding, parts of the course, including the entire section related to the use of surveillance, have been redacted. A judge also allowed a chapter on instructions regarding courtroom testimony to be redacted, finding that it conveyed litigation strategy.

What’s included in the documents, however, is a portrait of an agency that acknowledges that citizens and noncitizens alike are covered by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, while also instructing officers on expansive ways to circumvent it.

Max Planck:

The President and scientific council members of the Max Planck Society (MPS), one of the world’s largest research performing organizations, counting 14,000 scientists who publish 12K new research articles a year—around 1500 of which in Elsevier journals, have mandated the Max Planck Digital Library to discontinue their Elsevier subscription when the current agreement expires on December 31, 2018. With this move the Society joins nearly 200 universities and research institutions in Germany who have already cancelled their individual agreements with Elsevier in the course of 2016 and 2017 and affirmed their support of the national licensing framework Projekt DEAL, led by the German Rector’s Conference.

In response to the untenably increasing cost of access to scholarly journals and, more importantly, the stifling effect of the antiquated paywall system on the research process, Projekt DEAL was established to negotiate nationwide transformative agreements as a means to transition from the current subscription system to one based on open access publishing models that enable complete and immediate access to the latest research for scholars and citizens alike, free of cost or other barriers. “DEAL is fully in line with the objectives of the OA2020 Initiative, which is strongly supported by the Max Planck Society,’ emphasized MPS President Martin Stratmann.

The transformative agreement that the DEAL negotiators propose to the major academic publishers is a “publish and read” model covering open access publication of all scholarly articles by authors affiliated with German institutions and, at the same time, grant reading access for German institutions to the publisher’s entire portfolio of electronic journals still behind paywalls.

Merrilee Pickett:

I attended a Madison City Council police oversight committee meeting and was surprised that I was one of only a handful of citizens in attendance. The others in attendance were the usual people who are quoted in the local media, and who evidently have great influence over members of the City Council.

Was the poor attendance because of the location or the time of the meetings? Are Madison residents apathetic about police issues? Or is it because the majority of residents (black, white, brown and members of the LGBT community) think the Madison Police Department is run well and well-staffed? Are they generally very supportive of a fine police department?

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Alex:

“The bipartisan passage of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act is a significant step toward a more efficient, more effective government that uses evidence and data to improve results for the American people,” said Michele Jolin, CEO and co-founder of Results for America, in a statement. “We commend Speaker Ryan, Senator Murray and their bipartisan colleagues in both chambers for advancing legislation that will help build evidence about the federally-funded practices, policies and programs that deliver the best outcomes. By ensuring that each federal agency has an evaluation officer, an evaluation policy and evidence-building plans, we can maximize the impact of public investments.”

“The OPEN Government Data Act will ensure that the federal government releases valuable data sets, follows best practices in data management, and commits to making data available to the public in a non-proprietary and electronic format,” said Daniel Castro, in a statement. “Today’s vote marks a major bipartisan victory for open data. This legislation will generate substantial returns for the public and private sectors alike in the years to come.”

“The passage of the OPEN Government Data Act is a win for the open data community”, said Sarah Joy Hays, Acting Executive Director of the Data Coalition, in a statement. “The Data Coalition has proudly supported this legislation for over three years, along with dozens of other organizations. The bill sets a presumption that all government information should be open data by default: machine-readable and freely-reusable. Ultimately, it will improve the way our government runs and serves its citizens. This would not have been possible without the support of Speaker Paul Ryan (WI-1-R), Senators Patty Murray (WA-D), Brian Schatz (HI-D), Ben Sasse (NE-R), and Rep. Derek Kilmer (WA-6-D). Our Coalition urges the President to promptly sign this open data bill into law.”

Citizen Stewart:

Less than 1% black proficiency (as opposed to a startling 9% for the state overall)?

Man, y’all better keep the eye on the prize and put the outrage where it is supposed to be. Student achievement this bad paints a picture of the future none of us want.

Yes, I think it’s terrible that a referee with history of racism required a black student athlete to cut his hair or forfeit his match, I’m more bothered by the fact that we’re outraged at that and not at the fact that his school is failing students like him so spectacularly.

Related: “The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”.

Jeff Francis:

What this means is that the government decided to convert the pension payments into the Petro cryptocurrency. This was done without any prior notice or the consent of the people receiving the pensions.

Senior citizens who get a pension now have to navigate through the carnet de la patria system and find the process that allows them to convert the Petro into bolivars and then send the fiat to a local bank. (This is necessary as you can’t use the Petro for anything currently.) Needless to say, the site does everything possible make this as hard as it can be.

Compounding the issue is that people who had not signed up to be part of the carnet de la patria system found their pensions converted. This means that they have to create an account and deal with the official government website in order to access the funds they’re entitled to.

Citizen Stewart:

To be specific, one of my sons is a daily witness to minor and major forms of bullying between races and classes of students in his new school. Some of it amounts to the kids-will-be-kids variety of abuse like relentlessly making fun of ears or nose sizes or other immutable characteristics.

Other times its nuisance crimes like having his personal property purposefully broken by other people’s children.

And, too often for my comfort, it is the threat of violence or actual violence.

In most of those cases, I give my kids all the bad advice I was given back in the era of disco.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

“Never start a fight, but always finish one.”

“If you feel you’re going to lose a fight, make sure your opponent gets so many scars they never want to try you again.”

And, most famously, “respect everyone, but if they put their hands on you punch them in the throat.”

Luckily I’m married and my wife offers our kids responsible strategies to use when they encounter trouble at school.

The fact that we need to focus so intently on working with our kids on navigating don’t wild school environments where adults have too little control is a sign that has “exit” written all over it.

But, it gets worse. My elementary school-age daughter reports to us she has been punched has had her hair pulled, and was spit on by a boy in her class.

Playtime is over.

This is where the SIS transforms into the SIT and SID.

Joanne has more.

Gary L. Kriewald:

It appears we are headed toward a School Board election that promises something new: a candidate whose voice will do more than add sound and fury to the liberal echo chamber that is Madison politics.

David Blaska has the background, experience and most importantly the courage to expose the abuses and neglect of those in charge of our schools.

Having been shouted down and bullied at several meetings of the Madison School Board over the past several months, Blaska is uniquely qualified to expose the pusillanimous hand-wringing that passes for decision-making by those who shape educational policy in this city. He has seen firsthand how a small cadre of vocal extremists, called Freedom Inc., have cowed the current School Board with their unique brand of cop-hating venom.

When ordinary citizens are afraid to attend meetings for fear of being harassed by a mob of fanatical ideologues, we are witnessing a system that has shamelessly abandoned its mandate.

If elected, Blaska may be a lone voice crying in the wilderness, but at least it will be a voice unafraid of speaking truth to power.

Gary L. Kriewald, Madison

Chris Rickert:

It starts with safety and discipline,” said Blaska, who on his blog has been sharply critical of the district’s deliberations over whether to continue stationing Madison police officers in the high schools.

Despite raucous protests by the activist group Freedom Inc., a committee of the board recommended on Sept. 26 that the police officers, called educational resource officers, or EROs, remain in the schools. Protests against EROs by the same group shut down a School Board meeting on Oct. 29 to approve the budget. It was approved two days later in a special meeting.

Blaska also criticized the district’s Behavior Education Plan as “too bureaucratic” and the “product of too many administrators and too many meetings.” The plan — which was rolled out in 2014 and runs to 77 pages for elementary schools and 82 pages for middle and high schools — is largely an attempt to move away from “zero tolerance” policies and reduce the disproportionately high number of students of color who are expelled or suspended. It is undergoing revisions this year.

He said he would try to get the BEP down to about eight pages while giving teachers and administrators more discretion over how they handle student behavior in their schools.

Incumbent Dean Loumos, who chaired the ERO committee, said he was “not at all” vulnerable to criticism about the way he has handled security issues.

Negassi Tesfamichael:

Blaska has frequently criticized members of Freedom Inc., the local social justice advocacy group that has spoken out at recent School Board meetings against the use of educational resource officers in the city’s four comprehensive high schools.

Protests that broke out during the public comment period at the School Board’s October meeting led to a vote to adjourn the meeting early. Blaska has lamented that some do not feel safe attending School Board meetings because of the “far-left mob.”

Blaska in recent blog posts has called on Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to prosecute the the protesters who shut down the October meeting.

Notes and links:

Dean Loumos

Cris Carusi

David Blaska

A majority of the Madison School Board rejected the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter School (2011).

Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts.

Compare Madison, WI high school graduation rates and academic achievement data.

The Madison School District’s “Strategic Framework”.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before:

On November 7, Superintendent Art Rainwater made his annual report to the Board of Education on progress toward meeting the district’s student achievement goal in reading. As he did last fall, the superintendent made some interesting claims about the district’s success in closing the academic achievement gap “based on race”.

According to Mr. Rainwater, the place to look for evidence of a closing achievement gap is the comparison of the percentage of African American third graders who score at the lowest level of performance on statewide tests and the percentage of other racial groups scoring at that level. He says that, after accounting for income differences, there is no gap associated with race at the lowest level of achievement in reading. He made the same claim last year, telling the Wisconsin State Journal on September 24, 2004, “for those kids for whom an ability to read would prevent them from being successful, we’ve reduced that percentage very substantially, and basically, for all practical purposes, closed the gap”. Last Monday, he stated that the gap between percentages scoring at the lowest level “is the original gap” that the board set out to close.

Unfortunately, that is not the achievement gap that the board aimed to close.

2006: “They’re all Rich White Kids, and they’ll do just fine, NOT!”

2009: An emphasis on adult employment.

2013: What will be different, this time?

Madison Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, 2015:

Shortly after the office was proposed, Cheatham said non-district-authorized charter schools have “no consistent record of improving education for children, but they do drain resources from public schools, without any control in our local community or school board.”

“Rather than invest in what we know works in education, this proposal puts resources in strategies with mixed results at the expense of our public school students,” she said in May 2015

2013: What will be different, this time?

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, lead by Governor Elect, Tony Evers, has waived Massachusetts’ style elementary teacher content knowledge requirements for thousands of teachers.

Sergio Chapa:

“I will be honest with you, it troubles me that the American people seem to want to know so little about issues, that they are satisfied with a 128 characters,” Tillerson told Schieffer.

Tillerson voiced those concerns even further in his conversation.

“I don’t want that to come across as a criticism of him,” Tillerson said. “It’s really a concern that I have about us as Americans and us as a society and us as citizens”

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

Vermont Agency of Education:

The State Board of Education’s Final Report of Decisions and Order on Statewide School District Mergers is a requirement of Act 46. It is the conclusion of a multiyear process to create more sustainable and efficient school governance structures and improve access to quality PreK-12 education for all Vermont students.

Creating the Plan
In crafting the Final Report of Decisions and Order, the Board paid careful attention to the goals and requirements of Act 46. Additionally, the Board encouraged input and testimony from all affected districts and from the citizens of Vermont. While there were many tough decisions, the Board was careful to adhere to the Vermont General Assembly’s requirements as laid out in the law.

By the Numbers
The goal of Act 46 is to improve education outcomes and equity by creating larger and more efficient school governance structures. The Board’s Final Report of Decisions and Order has:

Merged 45 districts in 39 towns to form 11 new union school districts.
Enlarged 3 existing union school districts.

Created a net reduction of 34 districts.

Conditionally required an additional 4 districts to merge with 4 existing union districts.

When the impacts of Act 46 are combined with those of predecessor legislation (Act 153 of 2010 and Act 156 of 2012), the results are:

206 districts in 185 towns have formed 50 new union school districts (a reduction of 156) districts.
63% percent of Vermont K-12 students will live in a new union school district created by Acts 46, 153 and 156 (as of July 1, 2019).
84.4% of students will reside in a new union school district or a pre-existing supervisory district (preferred structure) such as Burlington or Springfield SDs.

Rodney Brooks:

The answer, in a word, is experience. The difference between the possible and the practical can only be discovered by trying things out. Therefore, even though the physics suggests that a thing will work, if it has not even been demonstrated in the lab you can consider that thing to be a long way off. If it has been demonstrated in prototypes only, then it is still distant. If versions have been deployed at scale, and most of the necessary refinements are of an evolutionary character, then perhaps it may become available fairly soon. Even then, if no one wants to use the thing, it will languish in the warehouse, no matter how much enthusiasm there is among the technologists who developed it.

It’s well worth considering what makes a potential technology easy or hard to develop, because a mistake can lead to unwise decisions. Take, for instance, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor that’s now under construction in France at an estimated cost of US $22 billion. If governments around the world believe that this herculean effort will automatically lead to success and therefore to near-term commercial fusion reactors, and if they plan their national energy strategies around that assumption, their citizens may very well be disappointed.

Here I present a short list of technology projects that are now under way or at least under serious discussion. In each case I’ll point out features that tend to make a technology easy or hard to bring to market.

Nick Summers:

Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet division focused on smart cities, is caught in a battle over information privacy. The team has lost its lead expert and consultant, Ann Cavoukian, over a proposed data trust that would approve and manage the collection of information inside Quayside, a conceptual smart neighborhood in Toronto. Cavoukian, the former information and privacy commissioner for Ontario, disagrees with the current plan because it would give the trust power to approve data collection that isn’t anonymized or “de-identified” at the source. “I had a really hard time with that,” she told Engadget. “I just couldn’t… I couldn’t live with that.”

Cavoukian’s exit joins the mounting skepticism over Sidewalk Labs and the urban data that will be harvested through Quayside, the first section of a planned smart district called Sidewalk Toronto. Sidewalk Labs has always maintained that the neighborhood will follow ‘privacy by design’, a framework by Cavoukian that was first published in the mid-1990s. The approach ensures that privacy is considered at every part of the design process, balancing the rights of citizens with the access required to create smarter, more efficient and environmentally friendly living spaces.

Andrew Ferguson:

Among the 50 states, Illinois’s income tax rate is only middling, ranking from 25th to 36th depending on who’s doing the counting, but overall its total average tax burden, according to the economic research firm WalletHub, is the worst in the country. A home-owning family in Illinois earning the U.S. median income of $55,000 can expect to pay 14.89 percent of that to the state. For comparison’s sake, they would pay 11.86 percent if they moved next door to Indiana and just 5.67 percent for number one Alaska. Only New Jersey—New Jersey!—has higher property taxes. In many Illinois municipalities it’s not unusual for owners of a house assessed in the $150,000-$200,000 range to be paying more in property taxes than in principal and interest on their mortgage.

After he laid out all these unhappy facts with tables and charts at his office at Bradley University’s Foster College of Business in Peoria, I asked Joshua Lewer, chairman of the economics department, how his fellow Illinoisans were reacting to the mess. (Lewer, by the way, has seen his property tax rise by 60 percent over the last decade while the value of his home stayed flat.) “A lot of them just leave,” he shrugged, with that familiar Illinois air of resignation. Out-migration has been a problem in the deindustrialized states of the Midwest for two generations, but Illinois has managed to outdo its rivals. From 2015 to 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau tells us, 114,000 residents left Illinois, an out-migration rate of 9 per 1,000 citizens. The next highest neighboring state was Michigan, with a rate lower than 3 for every 1,000. Jobs are returning with the Trump boom—indeed, nearly every business owner you talk to is hoping to hire—but at a slower pace than elsewhere. Wage growth is second to last in the country since the 2008 recession.

Nathan Robinson:

There are so many bad opinions crammed into this single Wall Street Journal op-ed by Yale professor David Gelertner that I cannot hope to address them within the finite period of a human lifespan. Primarily, Gelertner argues that hatred of Donald Trump is hatred of America. Here is a large chunk of the op-ed for you to read and enjoy with me:

Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared. The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten. For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful. Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know do hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of… In truth they are dumb as sheep. Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is… He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones. [T]he Trump-hater truly does hate the average American—male or female, black or white. Often he hates America, too.

My God! Where does one start? I suppose it’s futile to insist that despite writing a book on what a loathsome person Donald Trump is, I do not, in fact, hate America. Or to point out that there are many people who dislike Trump and go to church. Or to show that there’s no such thing as having your “only ideology” be “getting the job done,” because everything depends on which job you choose to do. Or to note that there are many extremely valid reasons to be horrified by Trump, like his intentionally malicious immigration policies and his deadly and irresponsible rejection of climate science. Or to deconstruct this idea of the “average American,” who always seems to be a goddamn farmer. (Besides, there are countless farmers, machinists, and factory hands who also think the president is a cruel and stupid man.) Perhaps I might note that I like vulgarity and bluntness, mistrust intellectuals, and enjoy Simple Ideas That Work. (Though I do find “American Exceptionalism” to be a downright silly notion. The only respect in which America is exceptional is that it is exceptionally convinced of its own exceptionalism.)

Rita Koganzon:

But all this takes place in the context of inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship, but are not open to its input about how they should be run. The comparison to the Venetian Republic is not so far off, for it is a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed.

Gray’s almost unswervingly positive accounts of the faculty and administrators at every institution, even those which slighted her in ways that would today inspire national protest campaigns, are especially striking. By contemporary standards, Gray has pretty good cause for resentment. She is a Jew (at least by the expansive Nazi definition) who fled Germany with her family in 1934, she was a female academic in the 1950s and ’60s, and she is a multiple winner of the “first woman” prize for holding major administrative positions at American universities. She should have a list of grievances long enough to constitute a book of its own, but there is hardly a trace of bitterness in her account, and indeed, a surprising gratitude instead, even toward institutions that were expressly hostile to her—like Harvard, where women were prohibited from entering the college library and made to enter department meetings through a side door. Gray did not protest any of this, but she ended up occupying buildings in a different and more consequential way, namely by governing many of these institutions and overseeing the reversal of discriminatory policies.

Diane Ravitch via Will Fitzhugh:

This is an exciting time for history education. States across the nation are strengthening their history curricula and expecting youngsters to learn more American and world history.

Even the vitriolic controversy over the national history standards serves to remind us that people care passionately about history. Not only is there a rekindled interest in history in the schools, but also, public history is bringing stories of the past to millions of people in museums, exhibitions, movies, and on television. The wonderful television programs created by Ken and Ric Burns have demonstrated that there is a large and avid public for history as a tale well told. There is now even a cable television station called the History Channel.

Yet all is not well with the teaching of history in the schools. The most authoritative source for student achievement is the National Assessment of Educational Progress; American history was last tested in 1994. The results were bleak. NAEP results are reported by achievement levels, with the highest called “advanced,” then “proficient,” then “basic.” Those who fail to reach the basic level are described as “below basic.” In the 1994 assessment, 57% of high school seniors scored “below basic” in American history (in public schools, the proportion “below basic” was 59%). These seniors had taken a U.S. history course in either 11th or 12th grade; their scores were unaffected by whether they studied history in the same year as the test or not. The NAEP results in history were worse than in any other subject area.

There are many reasons for this poor performance in history, and together we could probably come up with a long list of culprits, including television, popular culture, after-school jobs, a general social disregard for history, and so on.

But important as all these are, I will focus today on the most important variable that is within the purview and direct control of public policy: the preparation of those who teach history.

It seems a truism that students will not learn much history unless their teachers know it. This gets to the core of our discussion. Who prepares our history teachers now? Who should prepare our history teachers?

It should be self-evident that those who teach history should themselves have studied history. If they don’t know it, how can they teach it? If they don’t enjoy learning about it themselves, how can they transmit a love for history to students? How is it possible to teach what you do not know?

The only authoritative national data on the preparation of teachers are gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics in the U.S. Department of Education. Its “Schools and Staffing Survey” reports on whether teachers have earned a major or minor in the main academic field that they teach. The data refer to teachers in grades 7-12, where teachers usually teach specific subject matter like mathematics, science, and history.

NCES surveys assume that those persons who lack either a major or a minor in their main academic field are teaching out of field. In 1996, NCES reported that “over half of all public school students enrolled in history or world civilization classes in grades 7-12…were taught by teachers who did not have at least a minor in history.” This disturbing finding compels us to ask, what is the educational preparation of those now teaching history? In a few states, people can be licensed to teach social studies without ever having taken a single college course in history. Presumably these are exceptions; what is the rule?

Last July, the National Center for Education Statistics released a report called “America’s Teachers: Profile of a Profession, 1993-1994.” This report contains some startling statistics. It found that a substantial number—28% of the nation’s public school teachers—had neither a major nor a minor in the main academic subject they were teaching. That includes 39.5% of science teachers; 25% of English teachers; 34% of mathematics teachers; 13.4% of foreign language teachers; and 17% of social studies teachers. The figures are even worse in private schools.

Since I was particularly interested in the state of history teaching, I asked analysts at NCES to determine the proportion of social studies teachers who had a major or a minor in history, and the proportion of history teachers who had studied history.

Thanks to the generous assistance of Pat Forgione, U.S. Commissioner of Education Statistics, Marty Orland, Kerry Gruber, Marilyn McMillen, and Steve Broughman of NCES, I learned the following:

Of those teachers who describe themselves as social studies teachers, that is, those who teach social studies in middle school or secondary school, only 18.5% have either a major or a minor in history. That is, 81.5% of social studies teachers did not study history in college either as a major or as a minor. In case you think you didn’t hear me correctly, let me say it again: 81.5% of social studies teachers did not study history in college either as a major or a minor. This figure helps to explain why history is no longer the center of the social studies, since so few social studies teachers have ever studied history.

Of those who teach one or more history courses, 55% do not have at least a minor in history. Of those who teach two or more history courses, 53% do not have a major or a minor in history; of those who teach one history course, 64% lack either a major or a minor in history.

Fifty-nine percent of students in middle school and 43% of students in high school study history with a teacher who did not earn at least a history minor in college.

Who did prepare our nation’s teachers of history and social studies? What did they study in college? Perhaps you assume that most social studies teachers earned their degrees in one of the social sciences, like sociology, psychology, economics, or political science, or in literature or the humanities. Wrong. Most social studies teachers received their undergraduate degree in education.

Among all those who identify themselves as social studies teachers, 71% took their undergraduate degree in education. When the 18.5% with history degrees are removed from the pool, 79% of the remaining social studies teachers have their undergraduate degree in education. What is the educational background of the social studies teachers who did not major or minor in history? About one out of seven (14%) gained an undergraduate degree in social studies education. However, about two-thirds (65%) have an education degree that is not related to any academic discipline, from such fields as special education, secondary education, bilingual education, curriculum and instruction, educational administration, counseling and guidance, or any one of a score of other pedagogical studies.

Of the social studies teachers who did not study history, a majority—53%—have not received an advanced degree; 42% have an advanced degree in education. Only 2% of these social studies teachers—the ones who lack at least a minor in history—have an advanced degree in any academic field. Put another way, of those social studies teachers who have received any advanced degree, 89% are in pedagogy, not history or the social sciences.

Now suppose we move from the universe of social studies teachers in the middle and upper grades to the more limited universe composed only of history teachers. As I said before, 55% of history teachers have neither a major nor minor in history. What did this 55% of history teachers study?

Nearly 77% have an undergraduate degree in education, 11% have an undergraduate degree in a social science other than history, and 5% earned their degree in some other academic subject.

But perhaps, one hopes, these history teachers who did not study history in college took a master’s degree in history, economics, sociology, political science, or one of the other social sciences. Wrong again. Fifty-three percent do not have a master’s degree, and of the 47% in this group who earned a master’s degree, 40% gained it in education, and only 3% in any academic field.

One can see a strong contrast between the preparation of those history teachers who studied history in college and those who did not. Those who earned at least a minor in history have a far stronger academic preparation, both as undergraduates and at the graduate level. Among those who have at least a minor in history in college, 22% have an undergraduate degree in education, 72% in history or one of the social sciences, and 4% in other academic subjects. Among this same group, 30% earned master’s degrees in education, 21% in history or another social science, and 1% in other academic fields.

From these numbers, it becomes clear that those who earned at least a minor in history as undergraduates are far likelier to earn a master’s degree in history or one of the social sciences than those who do not have at least a minor in history.

A picture begins to emerge of the social studies profession, in relation to history. The vast majority of social studies teachers—81.5%—as well as 55% of history teachers—did not major or minor in history, nor did they earn a graduate degree in history.

The typical social studies teacher has an undergraduate degree in education and, if she or he has a master’s degree, it too is in education.

At this point, it seems important to ask: How can teachers teach what they have not studied? How can students learn challenging subject matter from teachers who have not chosen to study what they are teaching? How can teachers create engaging, innovative and even playful ways to present ideas that they have not mastered themselves? How can teachers whose own knowledge of history is fragmentary help students debate and think critically about controversial issues?

This portrait of the social studies profession must be seen in a context in which states are expecting students to study not only U.S. History but increasingly more difficult courses in world history. How are students going to learn world history from someone who has never studied world history? How many universities even offer a course called “world history?” How many teachers in the United States are qualified to teach the rigorous content in the history standards prepared by the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA? The teacher who must teach a course that includes unfamiliar material will rely on the textbook as a primary source of information and is unlikely to raise questions or pose issues or develop activities that give the spark of life to the words in the textbook.

What I wonder is: Why do state officials grant teaching credentials to people to teach a subject that they have not studied? Why is teacher certification based on completion of education courses rather than on mastery of what is to be taught? Why not require future teachers of history to have a major or at least a strong minor in history?

In what other profession would public officials be so haphazard, so indifferent to professional preparation? Imagine going to a hospital and finding that the credentialing system permits scrub nurses to perform surgery. Or boarding an airliner and finding that ticket clerks have been certified to fly the planes. In education, placing teachers into out-of-field positions has become the usual, the acceptable and the normal.

In my view, it is professional malpractice when state officials do not require teachers to demonstrate—either by appropriate credentials or examination—that they know what they are supposed to teach. I say this not only about history teachers, but about teachers of every other core academic subject. Why should American students learn science, mathematics, or history from people who did not study those fields? Is it unreasonable to expect teachers to have studied what they will teach? There may be the exceptional instance where a gifted teacher really knows and loves history but chose not to study it in college or graduate school, but I suspect that those exceptions are rare indeed.

Who should prepare history teachers?

Ideally, future teachers should know their subject and know how to teach it. History teachers should study history in college. They should certainly have at least a minor and preferably a major in history, including American and world history courses. With states expanding the requirements in world history, it becomes essential for future teachers to study the history of Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and India. Imagine taking on the challenge of history teaching today without so much as a minor in history.

In addition, future history teachers should include the study of social sciences and literature as part of their preparation to teach. They should learn pedagogical methods, either in appropriate courses or in an apprenticeship setting with mentors. Their graduate studies should concentrate on history, the humanities and social sciences.

There are very possibly areas of fruitful collaboration between schools of education and colleges of liberal arts and sciences. Together, they should be able to work out a good balance between the knowledge and skills that good history teachers need to be effective in the classroom. That is, if they are willing to work together, as they have not in the past.

Of one thing I am quite sure: schools of education are not the appropriate place to prepare history teachers. One reason is simply the status quo. Schools of education are currently preparing most future teachers of social studies and of history, and they are not learning history. This is not an indictment of schools of education: They don’t teach history, so why should they be blamed if their students do not learn what the ed schools do not teach?

But there is another reason to urge that schools of education are not the right place to prepare history teachers. If we go back to the origins of the social studies, we will find that the field was created as an escape from the teaching of history. The founder of the social studies was Thomas Jesse Jones. He was probably the first person to teach a course called “the social studies” at Hampton Institute, an industrial and trade school for African-Americans and Indians in Virginia. Jones believed that history was useless to poor minorities; it was not history study that they needed, but the right sort of skills and attitudes to fit them into the existing social order.

Jones was a staff member at the U.S. Bureau of Education, where he produced a large federal report on “Negro Education” in 1916. In that report, Jones expressed disapproval of academic schooling for Negro children. He believed that what they needed was vocational and industrial training. He urged instruction in planting, sewing, cooking, and woodworking. Their parents and community leaders wanted them to get collegiate type schooling, but Jones insisted they were wrong. He thought that they had a mistaken suspicion “that the white people are urging a caste education which confines them to industrial pursuits.”

Jones was a former social worker, and he thought that education should adjust youngsters to their society and their prospects; the study of history didn’t do that. Many other progressive educators agreed with Jones that history was not only useless but elitist. What, after all, was the good of learning about ancient civilizations? How did knowledge of obscure worlds make anyone a better citizen? How did it prepare youngsters for labor in the factories and fields? Social studies, on the other hand, could teach youngsters the right attitudes and adjust them to the industrial order. Social studies was socially efficient; history was not. History was far too individualistic, and its results were not predictable. Students might even learn to think for themselves. This was not socially efficient. Better, thought Thomas Jesse Jones and likeminded educators, to teach only the history that connected to children’s immediate interests and better to concentrate on current events and existing social institutions because ordinary boys and girls could not possibly be interested in remote civilizations or faraway places. The trouble with history, it seemed, was that it frequently didn’t have a social purpose at all; too often, it was geared toward satisfying the student’s imagination or curiosity, which was a socially useless goal.

Jones was in the mainstream of progressive education; industrial and vocational education was in vogue. It was no surprise when Thomas Jesse Jones—father of the social studies—was named the chair of the committee appointed by the National Education Association to reorganize a new field in the high school curriculum. His committee’s report, released in 1916, established the social studies. The Committee on Social Studies proclaimed that “good citizenship” would be the goal of social studies.

Henceforth, the study of history would be subject to what the Committee called:

The test of good citizenship. The old chronicler who recorded the deeds of kings and warriors and neglected the labors of the common man is dead. The great palaces and cathedrals and pyramids are often but the empty shells of a parasitic growth on the working group. The elaborate descriptions of these old tombs are but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals compared to the record of the joy and sorrows, the hopes and disappointments of the masses, who are infinitely more important than any arrangement of wood and stone and iron. In this spirit recent history is more important than that of ancient times; the history of our own country than that of foreign lands; the record of our own institutions and activities than that of strangers; the labors and plans of the multitudes than the pleasures and dreams of the few.

The Committee on Social Studies stressed that social efficiency was “the keynote of modern education,” and “instruction in all subjects should contribute to this end.” In the future, social studies would be devoted to teaching students to have the right attitudes and to enable them to adjust to the “present social environment and conditions.”

These modern, progressive views were hailed in the nation’s schools of education. There was a consensus among pedagogical leaders of the day that history was only for the tiny minority who planned to go to college. The great majority of youngsters who came from working families, it was agreed, did not need to study history.

In light of these views, implanted in schools of education in their early years, it becomes understandable why history education is seldom found in our nation’s schools of education. There are professors who teach the history of education, but the programs that prepare teachers of American history and world history have been rare. Schools of education teach science education, math education, and social studies education, but not history education. Unfortunately, history continues to be treated as an elitist subject, because the anti-historical attitudes forged in the nineteen-teens persisted long after they lost any validity.

So now we must rely on the movies and television to teach history. Periodically there will be a hit show like Braveheart or Glory or Roots or The Civil War, and we know that for many youngsters it will be their best chance to learn history just for the fun of it. We just have to hope that the dramatic liberties that the filmmakers take are not too farfetched.

We should do better. We know that history is exciting, interesting, engaging, fascinating. We know that kids can get turned on to the history of ancient Egypt, modern China, the Aztecs, or a zillion other times and places and peoples. But we also suspect that, without teachers who themselves know and love history, the excitement doesn’t happen, indeed can’t happen.

I cannot conclude without pointing to the curriculum in the early grades, where the social studies has had an especially deleterious effect. We do not need historians teaching first, second and third grade. But we should have teachers in the early grades who understand the value of biographies, myths, legends, and history stories. Sadly, due to the power of the current social studies curriculum, little kids are compelled to learn abstract or trivial ideas about families and communities. Not only does this bore kids and teachers, but it gives youngsters a sense of insignificance. Why not introduce them to the lives of men and women who created, invented, struggled, discovered, and broke new ground? What the social studies now teaches is that the world is shaped by social and economic trends that are beyond anyone’s control; what history teaches is that one persistent, determined man or woman can change the world.

If we are to maintain the movement for history education, we must insist that states establish a strong history curriculum across the grades and that they require future teachers of history to have at least a minor in history.

Given the current state of the field, given the fact that 81.5% of current social studies teachers and 55% of current history teachers do not have even a minor in history, this will be an uphill battle. But it is the most important battle in the struggle to restore and improve history education.

Will Fitzhugh at the Concord Review.

Will Fitzhugh:

The extra-large ubiquitous Literacy Community is under siege from universal dissatisfaction with the Writing skills of both students and graduates, and this is a complaint of very long standing.

The Community response is to request more money and time to spend on sentence structure, paragraphing, voice, tone, and other mechanical Writing paraphernalia.

It never seems to occur to them that if students read more, they would know more, and in that way actually have some knowledge they wanted to write about. But reading and knowledge never seem to find their way into discussions of Literacy in Our Schools.

When teaching our students to write, not only are standards set very low in most high schools, limiting students to the five-paragraph essay, responses to a document-based question, or the personal (or college) essay about matters which are often no one else’s business, but we often so load up students with formulae and guidelines that the importance of writing when the author has something to say gets lost in the maze of processes.

On the one hand writing is difficult enough to do, and academic writing is especially difficult if the student hasn’t read anything, and on the other hand teachers feel the need to have students “produce” writing, however short or superficial that writing may be. So writing consultants and writing teachers feel they must come up with guidelines, parameters, checklists, and the like, as props to substitute for students’ absent motivation to describe or express in writing something they have learned.

Samuel Johnson once said, “an author will turn over half a library to produce one book,” the point being, as I understand it, that good writing must be based on extensive reading. But reading is just the step that is left out of the “Writing Process” in too many instances. The result is that students in fact do not have much to say, so of course they don’t have much they want to communicate in writing.

Enter the guidelines. Students are told to write a topic sentence, to express one idea per paragraph, to follow the structure of Introduction, Body, Conclusion, to follow the Twelve Steps to Effective Writing, and the like. This the students can be made to do, but the result is too often empty, formulaic writing which students come to despise, and which does not prepare them for the serious academic papers they may be asked to do in college.

I fear that the history book report, at least at the high school level in too many places, has died in the United States. Perhaps people will contact me with welcome evidence to the contrary, but where it is no longer done, students have not only been discouraged from reading nonfiction, but also have been lead to believe that they can and must write to formula without knowing something—for instance about the contents of a good book—before they write.

A nationally famous teacher of teachers of writing once told me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much…” This is a splendid example of the divorce between content [reading and knowledge] and process [techniques] in common writing instruction.

Reading and writing are inseparable partners, in my view. In letters from authors of essays published in The Concord Review since 1987, they often say that they read so much about something in history that they reached a point where they felt a strong need to tell people what they had found out. The knowledge they had acquired had given them the desire to write well so that others could share and appreciate it as they did.

This is where good academic writing should start. When the motivation is there, born from knowledge gained, then the writing process follows a much more natural and straightforward path. Then the student can write, read what they have written, and see what they have left out, what they need to learn more about, and what they have failed to express as clearly as they wanted to. Then they read more, re-write, and do all the natural things that have always lead to good academic writing, whether in history or in any other subject.

At that point the guidelines are no longer needed, because the student has become immersed in the real work of expressing the meaning and value of something they know is worth writing about. This writing helps them discover the limits of their own understanding of the subject and allows them to see more clearly what they themselves think about the subject. The process of critiquing their own writing becomes natural and automatic. This is not to deny, of course, the value of reading what they have written to a friend or of giving it to a teacher for criticism and advice. But the writing techniques and processes no longer stop up the natural springs for the motivation to write.

As students are encouraged to learn more before they write, their writing will gradually extend past the five-paragraph size so often constraining the craft of writing in our schools. The Page Per Year Plan© suggests that all public high school Seniors could be expected to write a twelve-page history research paper, if they had written an eleven-page paper their Junior year, a ten-page paper their Sophomore year, and a nine-page paper their Freshman year, and so on all the way back through the five-page paper in Fifth Grade and even to a one-page paper on a topic other than themselves their first year in school. With the Page Per Year Plan©, every Senior in high school will have learned, for that twelve-page paper, more about some topic probably than anyone else in their class knows, perhaps even more than any of their teachers knows about that subject. They will have had in the course of writing longer papers each year, that first taste of being a scholar which will serve them so well in higher education and beyond.

Writing is always much harder when the student has nothing to communicate, and the proliferating paraphernalia of structural aids from writing consultants and teachers often simply encumber students and alienate them from the essential benefits of writing. John Adams urged his fellow citizens to “Dare to read, think, speak and write” so that they could contribute to the civilization we have been given to enjoy and preserve. Let us endeavor to allow students to discover, through their own academic reading and writing, both the discipline and the satisfactions of reading and of writing carefully and well.

In 1625, Francis Bacon wrote, “Reading maketh a Full man, Conference a Ready man, and Writing an Exact man.” These benefits are surely among those we should not withhold from our K-12 students.

The Concord Review, 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776

www.tcr.org 978-443-0022 fitzhugh@tcr.org

Ryan Gallagher and Lee Fang:

According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it. Subsequently, Google human resources personnel emailed employees who were believed to have accessed or saved copies of the memo and ordered them to immediately delete it from their computers. Emails demanding deletion of the memo contained “pixel trackers” that notified human resource managers when their messages had been read, recipients determined.

The Dragonfly memo reveals that a prototype of the censored search engine was being developed as an app for both Android and iOS devices, and would force users to sign in so they could use the service. The memo confirms, as The Intercept first reported last week, that users’ searches would be associated with their personal phone number. The memo adds that Chinese users’ movements would also be stored, along with the IP address of their device and links they clicked on. It accuses developers working on the project of creating “spying tools” for the Chinese government to monitor its citizens.

People’s search histories, location information, and other private data would be sent out of China to a database in Taiwan, the memo states. But the data would also be provided to employees of a Chinese company who would be granted “unilateral access” to the system.

To launch the censored search engine, Google set up a “joint venture” partnership with an unnamed Chinese company. The search engine will “blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all when people enter certain words or phrases, according to documents seen by The Intercept. Blacklisted search terms on a prototype of the search engine include “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin, said sources familiar with the project.

According to the memo, aside from being able to access users’ search data, the Chinese partner company could add to the censorship blacklists: It would be able to “selectively edit search result pages … unilaterally, and with few controls seemingly in place.”

Xu Zhiyong:

Xu Zhiyong was released from prison on July 16 after serving four years for his role in the New Citizens Movement. Xu is a seminal figure in China’s rights defense movement with the founding of “Gongmeng” (公盟) in 2003, a NGO providing legal assistance to victims of social injustice. It was a training ground for some of the earliest human rights lawyers and took on some of the most high-profile cases of the time. Gongmeng was shut down by the government in 2009. After that Xu Zhiyong and colleagues sought new ways to continue their work for change, resulting in the New Citizens Movement. Between 2013 and 2014, dozens of participants were thrown in jail, including Xu himself. China Change had extensive coverage of the movement and the crackdown, and a lengthy interview titled “Who Is Xu Ziyong?” Scroll down midway for a new, 6-minute video in which Xu Zhiyong speaks about his current projects and hopes for the future. The following article was first posted on July 20 in Xu’s new blog, and China Change is pleased to offer a complete translation of it. –– The Editors

Damien Ma and Neil Thomas:

That problem was the CCP itself. Most Chinese were well aware that the Party had drifted toward crony capitalism, as corruption swelled within its rank-and-file. The CCP brand reached its nadir when the Bo Xilai crisis—in which the populist and ambitious leader of Chongqing was purged and jailed after his wife murdered a British national—exploded in early 2012, reinforcing the growing cynicism the Chinese public held toward its government.

The crisis shook the CCP just before Xi took the reins of the world’s largest political party. Xi’s urgent task, then, which likely had consensus approval from other senior leaders, was to strengthen a weakened Party through a massive anti-corruption campaign and a reimagined Party narrative to win the hearts and minds of Chinese people.

These twin efforts were of equal importance to Xi’s goals and were mutually reinforcing in their implementation. From the CCP’s vantage point, faltering public trust was as much an existential threat to its legitimacy as a potential economic collapse. The Party understood that it must stand for something beyond perpetuating its own power and its cadres’ self-enrichment. Indeed, the CCP had to fill its platform with more compelling ideas—or face a credibility crisis of monumental proportions. In this context, Xi’s Chinese Dream set the stage for the elevation of ideological work to a level perhaps not seen since the Mao era.

Propaganda often gets short shrift in mainstream coverage of Chinese politics, possibly because the propaganda apparatus is frustratingly opaque and its effectiveness hard to measure. But the CCP, as a Leninist ruling party that demands political unity among its 89 million members and public compliance with its dictates from nearly 1.4 billion Chinese citizens, invests enormous resources in the promulgation of official ideologies, media management, and public opinion guidance.

Propaganda work is so instrumental to the political system that the Central Propaganda Department (CPD), established in 1924, is almost as old as the CCP itself, which was founded three years earlier in 1921. Since 1992, the propaganda system has been overseen by a PBSC member, who heads the Central Leading Small Group on Propaganda and Thought Work (CLSGPTW). This system is responsible for all Party publicity and for the supervision of all information domains in China and, to the extent possible, abroad. That it was so important for Xi to be the first top leader since Deng Xiaoping to enshrine his name in the Party Constitution—under the aegis of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”—is a testament to the tight control and crucial role of political expression under CCP rule.

Tanner Greer:

There is a crisis in Xinjiang. The details are murky. The Communist Party of China has little incentive to reveal the inner workings of the vast system of surveillance and terror it has built to control the 12 million Uighur and Kazakh citizens of China’s westernmost region. From the party’s perspective, the further away the global spotlight is from its activities the better.

But we now have a rough outline of what is happening to the people of the region. In response to growing tensions between Han Chinese and the Uighur population of Xinjiang itself, the recruitment of Uighurs to fight in the Syrian civil war, and several terrorist attacks orchestrated by Uighur separatists, the party launched what it called the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism. Despite its name, the campaign’s targets are not limited to terrorists. No Uighur living in Xinjiang can escape the shadow of the party nor can members of other ethnic minorities, especially Kazakhs.

Some of the methods used to surveil and coerce the population of Xinjiang are straight from the dystopian imagination: The party has collected the DNA, iris scans, and voice samples of the province’s Uighur population, regularly scans the contents of their digital devices, uses digitally coded ID cards to track their movements, and trains CCTV cameras on their homes, streets, and marketplaces.

Amanda Ripley:

Before the automobile, before the Statue of Liberty, before the vast majority of contemporary colleges existed, the rising cost of higher education was shocking the American conscience: “Gentlemen have to pay for their sons in one year more than they spent themselves in the whole four years of their course,” The New York Times lamented in 1875.

Decadence was to blame, the writer argued: fancy student apartments, expensive meals, and “the mania for athletic sports.”

Today, the U.S. spends more on college than almost any other country, according to the 2018 Education at a Glance report, released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

All told, including the contributions of individual families and the government (in the form of student loans, grants, and other assistance), Americans spend about $30,000 per student a year—nearly twice as much as the average developed country. “The U.S. is in a class of its own,” says Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the OECD, and he does not mean this as a compliment. “Spending per student is exorbitant, and it has virtually no relationship to the value that students could possibly get in exchange.”

Only one country spends more per student, and that country is Luxembourg—where tuition is nevertheless free for students, thanks to government outlays. In fact, a third of developed countries offer college free of charge to their citizens. (And another third keep tuition very cheap—less than $2,400 a year.) Finland makes college free even to foreign students from other European Union countries. The farther away you get from the United States, the more baffling it looks.

This back-to-school season, The Atlantic is investigating a classic American mystery: Why does college cost so much? And is it worth it?

Associated Press:

China is eliminating a trio of agencies responsible for enforcing family planning policies in a further sign the government may be planning to scrap long-standing limits on the number of children its citizens can have.

The move was part of a reorganization of the National Health Commission announced Monday that creates a new single department called the Division of Population Monitoring and Family Development responsible for “establishing and perfecting a specialized system for supporting families.”

Expectations of an end to birth limits were also raised by the appearance of a postage stamp last month featuring smiling mother and father pigs with three piglets.

Alarmed by the rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce, China abandoned its notorious one-child policy two years ago to allow two children, producing a nearly 8 percent increase in births in 2016, with nearly half of the babies born to couples who already had a child.

However, that appeared to have been a one-time increase, with 17.2 million births in the country last year, down from 17.9 million in 2016. Meanwhile, the proportion of the population aged 60 or older increased last year to 17.3 percent.

Related: Choose Life.

Citizen Stewart:

When we talk dollars and cents in public education, there are a few truisms: teachers are paid too little, schools are underfunded, private and charter schools “drain” funds from traditional districts, and when schools can’t make ends meet it is the result of things done to them and never stuff they do.

The public buys that story and many in the education industry eager to supply endless examples to multiply the trope. Those of us saying school spending is at least equal to school funding as an issue are forced to wear t-shirts that say “I am the day after Christmas.”

If raising concerns about lax controls on public spending makes me December 26th, I’m okay with it.

There are two ways to say we need more money in education. The first is to demand taxpayers give more, and the second is to require elected officials to stop squandering what they already get.

Almost everyone has the former covered, but the latter gets crickets.

I’ve blogged and Tweeted, and begged and pleaded, about the repeating instances of poor stewardship of public dollars. I’ve talked about the millions of public dollars misspent for unneeded technology; a $72 million high school football stadium; the $152 million bill New York pays for teachers that don’t teach; the $300 million Los Angeles Unified School District paid out in sex abuse settlements; the school board that signed an irresponsible decade-long teachers’ contract with 4% raises locked in; the high school rebuild that started at $30 million for a 1,600 seat school but ballooned to $250 million due to poor planning and limp oversight; or the school district under scrutiny for waste and “cronyism” in its $300 million bonding program.

David Gelernter:

Welcome to Yale. Please disregard what you’ve been told so far, and follow these instructions.

1. Understand that you’re here to learn how to be good citizens of the United States. Many of you come from Japan or Ghana or France, and we’re glad to have you. But Yale can’t teach you to be a good Japanese citizen; we don’t know how. Nor can we teach you to be a “global citizen” or “citizen of the world,” because there is no such thing. The “globe” has no citizens, because the globe, as such, has no art, religion, music, literature, theater, traditions, folk songs, heroes, traumas or TV stations; no tastes, fads, styles, treasures or shared experience. So you might as well learn to be good Americans for now.

Like all nations, America is defined by its shared experience, and by the enemies it’s made: the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Japanese imperialists and the Soviet Union, among others—in just the past century or so. We are the one nation that always marks itself “C-minus: room for improvement!” Americans work constantly to clarify, concentrate and distill our principles and become more like ourselves—more like the luminous city on a hill to which all nations look up.

2. You are now a part-owner of Western civilization. This should be no surprise: You have come, after all, to one of the country’s leading schools for training Western leaders. You can tell this and other American colleges are Western because they are dedicated to noisy public argument about the truth, to the teaching of history without chauvinism, factionalism or (theoretically) self-hatred, and to competition among everyone over everything. Furthermore, we love sports more every year, starting at age 2, until at last we die of sheer boredom.

3. Now that you are a college student, learn skills. Everything else can wait. Learning science, mathematics or engineering centers on learning skills. Much of the arts, letters and history is centered on skills too. Learn as much music as you can. Master at least one foreign language completely. Reading and writing English are the most important skills of all.

4. Listen skeptically. Grade-school education is built on the myth that the teacher knows what he’s doing. Here, things are different. Never close your mind to the possibility that your teacher—despite his authoritative tone, his many books, papers, patents, theorems or epic poems, his international reputation and his world-wide following—might not know what he’s talking about.

:

Ms. Khan was born in London to Pakistani parents who emigrated to the United States when she was 11. She is now 29, an Amazon critic whose Amazon account is largely inactive, newly married to a Texas doctor who uses his Amazon Prime account all the time. Ms. Khan was supposed to move this summer to Los Angeles, where she had a clerkship with Stephen Reinhardt, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge and liberal icon, but he suddenly died in March. Instead, Ms. Khan is set to start a fellowship at Columbia this fall, and is considering other projects as well. There is no shortage of parties that want her advice on how to reckon with Big Tech.

“As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies,” she said. “But as citizens, as workers, and as entrepreneurs, we recognize that their power is troubling. We need a new framework, a new vocabulary for how to assess and address their dominance.”

At the S.M.U. library in Dallas, Ms. Khan was finding that vocabulary. These dead books, many from an era that predated the price-based era of monopoly law, were an influence and an inspiration. She was planning to expand her essay into a book, she said in an interview here in June.

Then her life shifted, and she abruptly went from an outsider proposing reform to an insider formulating policy. Rohit Chopra, a new Democratic commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, pulled her in as a temporary adviser in July, at a time when urgent questions about privacy, data, competition and antitrust were suddenly in the air. The F.T.C. is holding a series of hearings this fall, the first of their type since 1995, on whether a changing economy requires changing enforcement attitudes.

The hearings will begin on Sept. 13 at Georgetown University Law Center. Two panels will debate whether antitrust should keep its narrow focus or, as Ms. Khan urges, expand its range.

Peter McPherson and Philip Trostel:

If students across the country judged the value of college by headlines alone, they would come away with a bleak view of higher education. Rising costs. Diminishing value. Questionable career prospects. It’s a small miracle students enroll in college at all. Yet despite the widespread cynicism about higher education, more people are going to college than ever before.

They know investing in their future offers something far more promising than headlines suggest. Students who enroll cite increased earning potential and improved job prospects as their top reasons for pursuing a degree. The value of a college education has never been higher. The close link between college attainment and wages, employment prospects, and job satisfaction is as strong as ever. Even many of the most strident critics of higher education still strongly encourage their own children to pursue a college education. But we need to widen our view beyond individuals to gauge the full value of higher education.

By framing college as an individual benefit alone, we risk omitting the immense societal benefits of college-educated residents and citizens. Compared with individuals whose highest degree is a high school diploma, college graduates are 3.5 times less likely to be impoverished, nearly five times less likely to be imprisoned and almost four times less likely to smoke tobacco regularly. Working-age Americans with bachelor’s degrees are 44 percent more likely to report being in good or excellent health. In 2012, life expectancy at age 25 was an astonishing decade longer for those going to college.

Bruce Vail:

Public school teachers in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly in late August to authorize a strike over stalled contract negotiations, but the issues really energizing the union membership go far beyond a new contract. Instead, say union leaders and rank-and-file members, the teachers are growing increasingly alarmed at a small clique of billionaires that has won considerable sway over the L.A. school board and is aggressively promoting charter schools as a replacement for public education.

In a stunning display of solidarity, 98 percent of some 28,000 union members voted to authorize strike action. Arlene Inouye, co-chair of the contract bargaining committee of United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) union, tells In These Times that the vote reflects the dismay of the teachers and other education professionals at the actions of the school board.

Via Citizen Stewart:

Read this piece and realize teacher unions almost NEVER talk about improving teaching, learning, or outcomes. 33% of their agenda is preventing students from having other options, 33% it fighting any accountability for results, and 33% is demanding cash.

Chen Guangcheng:

The recent news that Google is working on a search engine for China’s highly censored Internet reminded me of a Chinese saying: “to have your spine pointed at.” Back home in China, if someone who has done something immoral or unethical is seen walking down the street, others might point at the person’s back after he passes, chastising and cursing him under their breath. Alternatively, if a person is known to be planning to do something unethical, he will be warned against “doing something that gets your spine pointed at.” And the designation is anything but temporary. Anyone who has been singled out this way should prepare for years of ostracization.

Back in 2010, Google grandly announced that it was leaving China’s vast consumer market, citing its hallowed principle of “do no evil.” The company said that it had decided to choose user privacy over profits rather than collaborate with the Communist Party regime in the surveillance of Chinese citizens. I was in prison when I heard this unfolding news, having myself been tracked, traced, spied on and kidnapped, and later tried on bogus charges and sentenced to more than four years in prison for my human rights work. In prison I labored secretly for months to secure a forbidden shortwave radio, which I kept hidden in a used milk carton. I listened to programs like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia at night while wrapped under my quilt, the speaker pressed close to my ear at the lowest possible volume. Having had my freedom denied me by the Chinese Communist Party, the news of this upstart tech company risking lost revenue to do the right thing gave me real hope.

Christina Larson:

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.

For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?

Maria Repnikova:

In the summer of 2008, when I interviewed for an internship at Google London headquarters, one of the questions was whether I would have supported Google’s entry into the Chinese market in 2006. This was two years prior to Google’s official and dramatic exit from China on account of ethical considerations.

My answer at the time was yes. I argued that some information access is better than none. In my view, the polarizing human rights narrative about the Chinese market is more concerned with our Western sensibilities than with the actual demands of Chinese citizens. While we want them to be liberated from the chains of the Communist Party, Chinese citizens may be more concerned with food safety, clean air, and consumer rights – information they may find on Google.

Eight years after its exit, Google faces a similar dilemma, but some things have changed. China’s tech sector became competitive on the global market and Chinese citizens experience more intensive censorship and surveillance than they had back in 2010. China became simultaneously more globalized and more closed. And American tech giants, including Google, are dealing with more regulations in Western markets and competition from Chinese artificial intelligence.

Once again, a number of human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, but also Google’s own employees who have been kept in the dark about this project, are decrying this decision as unethical.

The ethical lines, however, remain blurry.

What’s on Weibo:

A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial ‘no child tax’ measure proposed by two Chinese academics has set off a wave of criticism on Chinese social media this week. The proposal was published in Xinhua Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Jiangsu Communist Party branch, on August 14, and was authored by Nanjing University economics professors Liu Zhibiao (刘志彪) and Zhang Ye (张晔). In their proposal, Liu and Zhang suggest various measures to prevent a supposed demographic crisis in mainland China. Their idea of imposing taxes on those who do not have a second child particularly sparked anger online. The authors plead for a so-called ‘maternity fund system’ (生育基金制度) in which citizens under the age of 40, regardless of gender, have to pay a certain percentage of their income in some sort of ‘tax fund’ as long as they do not bear a second child. They write:

Tom Whipple on “Editing a Human”:

Doudna was in for a shock. “One attendee [at the conference] pulled me aside and said three manuscripts had been submitted to journals involving experiments on human embryos. He said, ‘You should know this is happening.’” The labs in China had destroyed the embryos they had developed, and the modification had been only partial. Far sooner than predicted, a threshold had been crossed.

The Francis Crick Institute in London is conducting its own experiments on creating fully edited human embryos, though as its goal is scientific discovery not designer babies, it destroys the embryos.

Terrency Jeffrey:

“The production of TKO-BLT mice to obtain healthy mice with high level reconstitution of human cells and tissues requires specialized methods that are presented in detail,” says the abstract at the top of the article.

“The methods in this manuscript will help prevent duplication of the empirical work done to optimize this humanization protocol and maximize the future success of others endeavoring to produce TKO-BLT mice,” the researchers say in their introduction.

The researchers stated that they “routinely produced cohorts of approximately 40 TKO-BLT mice from a single tissue donor.”

They indicated that the human tissue donors were at 17 to 22 weeks gestational age and that their tissue was provided to the researchers by Advanced Bioscience Resources, which is a non-profit organization located in Alameda, Calif.

This summary of recent newsfeed items reminds me of Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time lyrics:

Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.

Adam Segal:

For almost five decades, the United States has guided the growth of the Internet. From its origins as a small Pentagon program to its status as a global platform that connects more than half of the world’s population and tens of billions of devices, the Internet has long been an American project. Yet today, the United States has ceded leadership in cyberspace to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping has outlined his plans to turn China into a “cyber-superpower.” Already, more people in China have access to the Internet than in any other country, but Xi has grander plans. Through domestic regulations, technological innovation, and foreign policy, China aims to build an “impregnable” cyberdefense system, give itself a greater voice in Internet governance, foster more world-class companies, and lead the globe in advanced technologies.
 
 China’s continued rise as a cyber-superpower is not guaranteed. Top-down, state-led efforts at innovation in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and other ambitious technologies may well fail. Chinese technology companies will face economic and political pressures as they globalize. Chinese citizens, although they appear to have little expectation of privacy from their government, may demand more from private firms. The United States may reenergize its own digital diplomacy, and the U.S. economy may rediscover the dynamism that allowed it create so much of the modern world’s technology.
 
 But given China’s size and technological sophistication, Beijing has a good chance of succeeding—thereby remaking cyberspace in its own image. If this happens, the Internet will be less global and less open. A major part of it will run Chinese applications over Chinese-made hardware. And Beijing will reap the economic, diplomatic, national security, and intelligence benefits that once flowed to Washington.

Joe Seyton:

So it came as no surprise that Paul lauded Trump for taking away Brennan’s security clearance. “I urged the President to do this. I filibustered Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA in 2013, and his behavior in government and out of it demonstrate why he should not be allowed near classified information,” Paul said in a statement. “He participated in a shredding of constitutional rights, lied to Congress, and has been monetizing and making partisan political use of his clearance since his departure.”

In an interview yesterday with WKU Public Radio, Paul said he wants other ex-Obama administration intelligence officials, including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice, to lose their clearances as well.

According to the Kentucky Republican, Clapper lied before the Senate Intelligence Committee when he was asked in March 2013 by Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) if U.S. intelligence was spying on American citizens. “When he was asked by Sen. Wyden if the NSA was collecting information on Americans, private information, he said no and that was a lie,” Paul said. “Later, Edward Snowden revealed that they were collecting all Americans’ phone information.”

Citizen Stewart:

I mention that routine because last week I felt like a victim of Sandburg’s non-wrath when Twitter’s anti-school reform voices suggested school reformers were wearing facial egg because “King” LeBron James’ celebrated new school opened in Akron, Ohio as a “traditional” public school rather than a charter.

Frankly, I didn’t get the joke.

Why would charter school supporters feel rebuffed by a new school opening in a city that desperately needs new schools?

Diane Ravitch and her digital accessories told us. I guess reform robots are such one-dimensional creatures that we expect every new school to be a charter.

“I salute LeBron James for investing his funding in a public school, not a charter school,” Ravich crowed.

That’s a tired language trick intended to frame charters as unpublic. It’s an intentional mark of dishonesty. As she said years ago: “charter schools are public schools.”

Citizen Stewart:

“I shared it, and I’m not sorry I did…And I meant it because it shows hypocrisy in our country. Some people can get away with it and some people can’t. It was not racist…It had nothing to do with color. It had nothing to do with race…I’ve seen all kinds of people say vile, ugly remarks on the media, on television and some of ’em get in trouble. Some of ’em don’t. I thought that was a way to show the hypocrisy that happens.”

Were Pike easily disregarded as one sock lost in the dryer we could move on.

But she is not aberrant. She’s more common than we think. Elections are weak. It takes little to win a board seat in many of America’s podunks.

If you watch school boards as I do, you get to see just how nutty then can be, and it should worry you.

Watch a few of Seattle’s or Minneapolis’ school board meetings for instance and you’ll likely feel as though someone put peyote in your tea and turned on Mork and Mindy reruns.

Ransom:

An increasing number of countries are passing laws that facilitate the mass surveillance of Internet traffic. In response, governments and citizens are increasingly paying attention to the countries that their Internet traffic traverses. In some cases, countries are taking extreme steps, such as building new Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which allow networks to interconnect directly, and encouraging local interconnection to keep local traffic local. We find that although many of these efforts are extensive, they are often futile, due to the inherent lack of hosting and route diversity for many popular sites. By measuring the country-level paths to popular domains, we characterize transnational routing detours. We find that traffic is traversing known surveillance states, even when the traffic originates and ends in a country that does not conduct mass surveillance. Then, we investigate how clients can use overlay network relays and the open DNS resolver infrastructure to prevent their traffic from traversing certain jurisdictions. We find that 84% of paths originating in Brazil traverse the United States, but when relays are used for country avoidance, only 37% of Brazilian paths traverse the United States. Using the open DNS resolver infrastructure allows Kenyan clients to avoid the United States on 17% more paths. Unfortunately, we find that some of the more prominent surveillance states (e.g., the U.S.) are also some of the least avoidable countries.

Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg:

Local watchdogs and litigators say a City of Madison initiative and its multiple committees should provide the public with greater transparency.

In a unanimous 2017 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that committees created by local governmental bodies in Wisconsin are themselves governmental bodies subject to the state’s open meetings law.

Wisconsin open meetings law states: “All meetings of all state and local governmental bodies shall be publicly held in places reasonably accessible to members of the public and shall be open to all citizens at all times unless otherwise expressly provided by law.”

Public bodies are required to give notice of the time, date, location and general agenda of all meetings at least 24 hours in advance. Even when, “for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical…in no case may the notice be provided less than 2 hours in advance of [a] meeting.”

Gideon Rachman:

The west’s metropolitan elites have not yet turned against democracy. But some may harbour doubts. In Britain, many ardent Remainers are eager to overturn Britain’s vote to leave the EU. In the US, as the political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa point out, “the trend toward openness to nondemocratic alternatives is especially strong among citizens who are both young and rich . . . In 1995 only 6 per cent of rich young Americans believed that it would be a ‘good’ thing for the army to take over; today, this view is held by 35 per cent of rich young Americans.”

If some big-city voters are ambivalent about democracy, small-town voters are increasingly drawn to the nationalism expressed
by the likes of presidents Trump and Erdogan. Resurgent nationalism can raise international tension, but the widening urban-rural divide suggests that the most explosive political pressures may now lie within countries — rather than between them.

(Urban) Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, despite spending far more than most.

Dennis Normile:

Frustrated with a string of unexplained U.S. visa denials, a top Chinese brain scientist has decided to go public, copying numerous journalists on a 17 July email to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing pleading his case.

“Most embassies try to make more friends for their countries; the U.S. embassy is not afraid of offending people and making enemies,” says Rao Yi, a high-profile neuroscientist at Peking University in Beijing who studied and worked in the United States for 22 years. His difficulty obtaining a visa is particularly ironic, given that he has been invited to attend a workshop by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a government agency based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Rao, 56, earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience in 1991 from University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and did a postdoc at Harvard University. He was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for 10 years and later joined Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois, where he rose to be a full professor. Along the way, he acquired U.S. citizenship. He returned to China in 2007 to become dean of Peking University’s School of Life Sciences. He later gave up his U.S. citizenship.

Jana Winter:

Federal air marshals have begun following ordinary US citizens not suspected of a crime or on any terrorist watch list and collecting extensive information about their movements and behavior under a new domestic surveillance program that is drawing criticism from within the agency.

The previously undisclosed program, called “Quiet Skies,” specifically targets travelers who “are not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base,” according to a Transportation Security Administration bulletin in March.

The internal bulletin describes the program’s goal as thwarting threats to commercial aircraft “posed by unknown or partially known terrorists,” and gives the agency broad discretion over which air travelers to focus on and how closely they are tracked.

Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks:

President Trump’s confrontation with China is beginning to ripple through American academic and research institutions, as a crackdown on visas for certain Chinese citizens has left the higher education community wondering how it will adapt to the administration’s effort to stop intellectual property theft and slow China’s push for technological supremacy.

Educators and academic groups fear that the additional scrutiny could hinder scientific innovation, alienate talented applicants or intensify aggressions toward Chinese scientists already in the country.

Academics are already wrestling with the increased attention. At an aerospace conference in Georgia last month, Ella Atkins, a University of Michigan professor, recalled a colleague approaching her with a dilemma.

Citizen Stewart:

Education Week likes to frustrate me in the morning. Reading their article today about the retreat of the anti-testing suburban opt-out movement, I should have been happy, but a few word-bytes in it are restating flimsy complaints about the testing of public school students and that put vinegar in my coffee.

I despise vinegar.

There was the superintendent in Bedford, New Hampshire who said: “I would love to get away from this obsession with standardized testing.” The problem he says is how being “locked in” to doing annual assessments makes it difficult for his district to “try new forms of instruction.”

Why?

Victor Davis Hanson:

Populism is today seen both as a pejorative and positive noun. In fact, in the present age, there are two sorts of populism. Both strains originated in classical times and persisted in the West until today.

One in antiquity was known as the base populism. It involved the unfettered urban “mob,” or what the Athenians disapprovingly dubbed the ochlos and the Romans disparagingly called the turba. Such popular movements were spearheaded by the so-called demagogoi (“leaders of the people”) or in Roman times the more radical popular tribunes.

These were largely urban movements. Protesters focused on the redistribution of property, radical democratization, taxes on the wealthy, the cancellation of debts, vast increases in public entitlements, and civic employment. The French Revolution and European upheavals of 1848 reflect some of the same themes. Today, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon all stand in the same current. Often, urban intellectuals, aristocrats, and elites—from the patrician Roman Republican street agitator Publius Clodius Pulcher and the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, to present-day billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer—have sought to assist the urban protesters. Perhaps these gentleman- agitators thought they could offer money, prestige, or greater wisdom, thereby channeling and elevating shared populist agendas.

The antithesis to such radical populism was likely thought by ancient conservative historians to be the “good” populism of the past—and what the contemporary media might call the “bad” populism of the present: the push-back of small property owners and the middle classes against the power of oppressive government, steep taxation, and internationalism, coupled with unhappiness over imperialism and foreign wars and a preference for liberty rather than mandated equality. Think of the second century B.C. Gracchi brothers rather than Juvenal’s “bread-and-circuses” imperial Roman underclass, the American rather than the French Revolution, or the Tea Party versus Occupy Wall Street.

The mesoi, or “middle guys,” both predated and remained somewhat at odds with contemporary radical Athenian democracy. Yet these agrarian property-owning classes were also originally responsible for the Greek city-state and thus for Western civilization itself. The Jeffersonian idea of preserving ownership of a family plot, and passing on farms through codified inheritance laws and property rights, were the themes of the constitutions of the early polis. The citizen—neither a peasant nor a subject—remained rooted to a particular plot of ground, and thereby enjoyed the tripartite rights of citizenship: military service, voting rights in the assembly, and the ability to be self-supporting and autonomous. The mesoi, then, lent stability to otherwise often volatile consensual politics.

Joel Kotkin:

Indeed, as researcher Greg Ferenstein suggests, the new oligarchs favor an active state that will subsidize worker housing or even a guaranteed minimum income, and keep their businesses off the hook for providing decent benefits to their ever expanding cadre of gig-economy serfs. He points out that the former head of Uber, Travis Kalanick, was a strong supporter of Obamacare and that many top tech executives—including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—favor a government-provided guaranteed annual wage to help, in part, allay fears about what happens to most of the workforce as their industries and jobs are “disrupted.”

Geography plays a role here as well. With the biggest concentrations of wealth now in the most “progressive” regions—the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Seattle—moguls must operate in an environment dominated by fervent anti-Trump social-justice and green advocacy. Many big tech employees—nearly 40 percent in the Bay Area, by some estimates—are noncitizens, with little reason to be concerned about how the wealth in these corners is, or is not, spread across the nation.

So it’s no surprise that woke employees at Microsoft, horrified by the brutalism of Trump’s immigration policies, have decided not to cooperate with ICE. Not to be outdone, Amazon workers compare their company’s cooperation with immigration authorities to IBM’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. Similarly Google workers are refusing to help with drones used to combat terrorists, while Apple is actively working to make it difficult for police to break into phones used in committing crimes, including in the aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist massacre.

So powerful, and self-referential, are these companies—and their highly compensated workers—that they are increasingly willing to deny even the idea of national interest when that does not suit their political notions. Unlike businesses that worry about competition or mass opinion, these oligarchic companies can demonize half of the country with impunity. At the end of the day, even Trumpians depend on these systems unless they want to look at Chinese alternatives.

Lotus Ruan:

This paper examines Chinese state policy on big data industries and analyses the laws and regulations on data collection that companies in China are required to comply with. It also looks at how those rules may affect foreign companies eyeing the China market. Case studies are included to demonstrate the ongoing tensions between big data applications and privacy. The paper concludes by outlining the implications and lessons for other countries…

This paper highlights the conflict between the fast-developing big data technologies and citizens’ diminishing rights to privacy and data security in China. A review of major Chinese big-data-related policy initiatives shows that many of those policies reflect special interest from Chinese authorities, its public security forces in particular, in potentially using data-driven analytic technologies for more effective and extensive surveillance and social control.

Dambisa Moyo:

I have been examining electoral systems across the world. In many democracies, including the US and UK, migrants are required to pass government-sanctioned civic tests in order to gain citizenship. So, in this vein, why not give all voters a test of their knowledge? This would ensure minimum standards that should lead to higher-quality decision-making by the electorate. The message this would send is that voting is not just a right, but one that has to be earned. Such testing would not only lead to a better-informed electorate, but also to voters who are more actively engaged.

Of course, such a system would be truly democratic only if everybody had a fair chance of casting their vote. It is vital that those with fewer life opportunities have their say, and we cannot have a system that is skewed against the worst educated, which would leave poorer people even more marginalised and unrepresented than they already are. To that end, the knowledge needed should be part of the core curriculum, with young people tested in their final year of secondary education. Governments could also organise tests for those over school age.

But if we raise the bar for voters, we must also do so for politicians. Improving the quality and credibility of political leaders is essential to enhancing democracy’s legitimacy. One approach is to move away from the career politician model by setting minimum experience requirements for politicians.

AJ Dellinger:

Last year, Canada introduced a new lottery system used to extend permanent-resident status to the parents and grandparents of Canadian citizens. The process was designed to randomly select applicants in order to make the process fairer than the old first-come, first-served system. There’s just one problem: the software used to run the lottery isn’t actually random.

The Globe and Mail reported the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) uses Microsoft Excel to run the immigration lottery to select 10,000 people for permanent resident status from a field of about 100,000 applications received each year. Experts warned that the random number generating function in Excel isn’t actually random and may put some applicants at a disadvantage.

First, it’s best to understand just how the lottery system works. An Access to Information request filed by The Globe and Mail shows that IRCC inputs the application number for every person entering the lottery into Excel, then assigns them a random number to each using a variation of the program’s RAND command. They then sort the list from smallest to largest based on the random number assigned and take the first 10,000 applications with the lowest numbers.

The system puts a lot of faith in Excel’s random function, which it might not deserve. According to Université de Montréal computer science professor Pierre L’Ecuyer, Excel is “very bad” at generating random numbers because it relies on an old generator that is out of date. He also warned that Excel doesn’t pass statistical tests and is less random than it appears, which means some people in the lottery may actually have a lower chance of being selected than others.

The Economist:

THEY’RE watching you. When you walk to work, CCTV cameras film you and, increasingly, recognise your face. Drive out of town, and number-plate-reading cameras capture your journey. The smartphone in your pocket leaves a constant digital trail. Browse the web in the privacy of your home, and your actions are logged and analysed. The resulting data can be crunched to create a minute-by-minute record of your life.

Under an authoritarian government such as China’s, digital monitoring is turning a nasty police state into a terrifying, all-knowing one. Especially in the western region of Xinjiang, China is applying artificial intelligence (AI) and mass surveillance to create a 21st-century panopticon and impose total control over millions of Uighurs, a Turkic-language Muslim minority (see Briefing). In Western democracies, police and intelligence agencies are using the same surveillance tools to solve and deter crimes and prevent terrorism (see Technology Quarterly). The results are effective, yet deeply worrying.

Between freedom and oppression stands a system to seek the consent of citizens, maintain checks and balances on governments and, when it comes to surveillance, set rules to restrain those who collect and process information. But with data so plentiful and easy to gather, these protections are being eroded. Privacy rules designed for the landline phone, postbox and filing cabinet urgently need to be strengthened for the age of the smartphone, e-mail and cloud computing.

Jochen Bittner:

To claim we are living through a new Cold War is both an understatement and a category mistake. The 20th-century face-off between the Communist East and the Capitalist West was, ideology aside, about two superpowers trying to contain each other. The global conflict of today is far less static.

What we are witnessing instead is a new Great Game, a collision of great powers that are trying to roll back one another’s spheres of influence. Unlike the Great Game of the 19th century between the British and the Russian Empire that culminated in the fight for dominance over Afghanistan, today’s Great Game is global, more complex and much more dangerous.

Call it the Game of Threes. It involves three prime players, Russia, China and the West, which are competing in three ways: geographically, intellectually and economically. And there are three places where the different claims to power clash: Syria, Ukraine and the Pacific. Many of the defining conflicts of our time can be defined through some combination of those three sets.

To differing degrees, governments and citizens from Cairo to Copenhagen have grown skeptical about whether liberal democracy and postwar internationalism have been, or will be, the right choice for them. To all those doubters, China and Russia stand ready as alternative models and protective powers, offering new arrangements for bilateral and multilateral alignments. You don’t want to follow international law, European integration or anti-corruption schemes? Follow us!

Gerry Shih:

Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese _ even foreign citizens _ in mass internment camps.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticize yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” said Bekali, who broke down in tears as he described the camp. “I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”

Since last spring, Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Muslim Chinese — and even foreign citizens — in mass internment camps. This detention campaign has swept across Xinjiang, a territory half the area of India, leading to what a U.S. commission on China last month said is “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”

Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism. Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese.

The internment program aims to rewire the political thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very identities. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year, with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork. Detainees who most vigorously criticize the people and things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.

Dale Coulter:

This week is the time to show appreciation for the teachers in our lives. The official Teacher Appreciation Day is May 8, but the entire week may be set aside. Given the challenges we face in education at all levels, it is important to acknowledge those persons central to the process. Despite administrative bloat and the rise of the online university with its master course models and other mechanisms for automating learning, the teacher remains pivotal.

Classical and medieval education centered on the tutorial. This mentoring model worked with small cohorts of students who were guided through multiple disciplines over the course of years, sometimes by the same person. At the Abbey of St. Victor in the twelfth century, students went through the seven liberal arts under the steady hand of a single master, most likely Hugh of St. Victor until his death in 1144.

The teacher was to embody virtue as well as communicate it, and students traveled thousands of miles to study with the best. Bernard of Clairvaux sent a letter to Hugh of St. Victor recommending a promising Italian named Peter as a student. After studying with Hugh and probably also Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard went on to become bishop of Paris and write the standard textbook for theology.

With the rise of mass education, the tutorial model has been replaced by models that accommodate higher numbers of students. The classroom lecture became the standard way to automate the educational process for most of the twentieth century. This was especially the case in colleges after the explosion of enrollments in the wake of the G.I. Bill. In the classroom, the teacher became the expert whose task was to distill a body of knowledge through interaction with primary sources or by communicating the contents of the curriculum and its texts. The teacher as mentor was woven into the teacher as expert.

After the emergence of developmental psychology in the 1960s, public schools entered the age of self-actualization, with the teacher forming part of a team that included the school counselor. Under this model, the teacher became a social worker who facilitated holistic growth. The mentor model did not go away entirely; rather, it remained in the form of “individualized learning plans” in the context of larger class settings. Class sizes rose steadily, with some teachers facing more than thirty students in a high school class while at the same time being required to individualize assignments so as to accommodate diverse learning styles.

Anyone who has worked in education for any length of time knows that the models keep changing. And yet, the more they change, the more they stay the same. The educational process may have one of two goals: to produce citizens, or to produce workers. America has never decided which goal is the more important. Do we want to turn out citizens who understand the history of the nation and can function as a morally responsible electorate? Or do we want to turn out workers who can enter the workforce immediately and contribute to economic development? The answer is always “yes” to both. In practice, we swing between one pole and the other. Currently, we are swinging away from the citizen pole, which is grounded in the humanities, and toward the worker pole, which is invested in STEM and vocational education.

Melanie Asmar:

The document, called the Budget Transparency Guidebook, details how the state’s largest school district spends the $10,806 it budgets for each of its 92,600 students. Most of that money – $6,854 per student – goes directly to schools to spend as they see fit.

The rest – $3,952 per student – is spent on services that benefit schools but are budgeted centrally. The document provides a description of each service and what it costs.

It’s a bold move, but perhaps not a surprising one from a district unafraid to experiment with new and controversial ideas, such as giving all district-run schools the flexibility to choose their own curriculum, or encouraging all students to request to attend any school in the district.

The goal, Superintendent Tom Boasberg said, is to be more upfront with taxpayers about how Denver Public Schools spends its money. The district has asked Denver voters three times in the past decade to approve tax increases to benefit schools. Their willingness to do so is one of the reasons Denver can afford to spend about $10,000 per student although the state sends less than that. Colorado ranks nearer to the bottom than the top in the country for education spending.

The citizens budget is now long forgotten.

Madison spends nearly $20,000 per student.

BJ Campbell:

If we look at raw dialectic alone, we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.” If you don’t believe my presumed probability, cook up your own, based on whatever givens and data pool you’d like, and plug it in. The equations are right up there. Steelman my argument in whatever way you like, and the answer will still probably scare you.

Eyes on the Horizon
In 2010, 8.5 million tourists visited Syria, accounting for 14% of their entire GDP. Eight years later, they have almost half a million dead citizens, and ten million more displaced into Europe. They didn’t see this coming, because if they did, they would have fled sooner. Nobody notices the signs of impending doom unless they’re looking carefully.

Further, the elites of a nation rarely take it on the chin. They can hop on a plane. The poor, disenfranchised, and defenseless experience the preponderance of the suffering, violence, and death. They’re the ones that should be worried.

Pretend you’re someone with your eyes on the horizon. What would you be looking for, exactly? Increasing partisanship. Civil disorder. Coup rhetoric. A widening wealth gap. A further entrenching oligarchy.

Dysfunctional governance. The rise of violent extremist ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. Violent street protests. People marching with masks and dressing like the Italian Blackshirts. Attempts at large scale political assassination. Any one of those might not necessarily be the canary in the coal mine, but all of them in aggregate might be alarming to someone with their eyes on the horizon. Someone with disproportionate faith in the state is naturally inclined to disregard these sorts of events as a cognitive bias, while someone with little faith in the state might take these signs to mean they should buy a few more boxes of ammunition.

Robert Pondisco:

“The effectiveness of public schools in developing engaged citizens has rarely been examined empirically,” notes a new Mathematica report on the impact on civic participation of Democracy Prep, a network of charter schools that educates more than 5,000 students, mostly in New York City. Perhaps not, but it’s certainly been assumed. We remain sentimentally attached to a gauzy myth of the American common school ideal and its presumed role in citizen-making, even without evidence of its effectiveness.

The number of Democracy Prep alumni who are of voting age is relatively small. Founded in 2006, and with 22 schools in five cities, the network only graduated its first class in 2013. But Mathematica’s study, using the most conservative interpretation of its data, found that “Democracy Prep increases the voter registration rates of its students by about 16 percentage points and increases the voting rates of its students by about 12 percentage points.” As a summary from the American Enterprise Institute notes, “the raw numbers were even stronger, a 24-point increase in both, which suggest Democracy Prep doubled its students’ likelihood to register and vote.”

Joan Delaney:

Killing innocent people on demand for their organs on a mass scale is such an abhorrence that many find it hard or even impossible to believe.

“We are reminded of the constant historical lesson of ‘never again’ once we recognize massive atrocities that are hard to fathom,” said Prof. Gary Goldsand, director of the University of Alberta’s John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre, at a National Health Ethics Week event at the University of Ottawa on April 5.

Goldsand was referring to the state-orchestrated forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience in China, in which compelling evidence has led to multiple international actions, including U.S. and European Parliament resolutions and changes to laws in several countries around citizens travelling to China for transplants.

“It just goes without saying that there should be an absolute transparent line,” Goldsand said, adding that for the doctors and other health professionals in China involved in this practice, “it’s a fundamental breach of the principles that we hold most dear.”

Goldsand was a panellist speaking via video link at a discussion after the public screening of the documentary “Hard to Believe.”

The multiple-award-winning film explores how transplant surgeons in China are basically committing murder while hospitals and the Chinese communist regime profit hugely and the world has largely turned a blind eye.

Brendan O’Neill:

On freedom of speech, Britain has become the laughing stock of the Western world. People actually laugh at us. I recently gave a talk in Brazil on political correctness and I told the audience about the arrest and conviction of a Scottish man for publishing a video of his girlfriend’s pug doing a Nazi salute for a joke and they laughed. Loudly. Some of them refused to believed it was true. I found the news report on my iPhone and showed them. They laughed again. Brazilians, inhabitants of a nation not that long out of military dictatorship, are shocked at how illiberal Britain has become.

As we should be, too. Censorship in this country is out of control. Yesterday, that ‘Nazi pug’ man, Martin Meechan, often referred to by his YouTuber name Count Dankula, received his sentence for making a joke in a video: an £800 fine. A criminal record and a fine for taking the piss out of a pug. Or as the law defines it, in the 2003 Communications Act Mr Meechan was charged under, for being ‘grossly offensive’. The British state now punishes citizens for offensive humour, for tasteless jokes. Let’s hope no cop ever overhears the off-colour joke you might make in the pub or you could be had up for jokecrimes, too. We should be as alarmed about this as my Brazilian audience was.

Jon Henley:

Europe’s first national government-backed experiment in giving citizens free cash will end next year after Finland decided not to extend its widely publicised basic income trial and to explore alternative welfare schemes instead.

Since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 have been paid a monthly €560 (£475) , with no requirement to seek or accept employment. Any recipients who took a job continued to receive the same amount.

The government has turned down a request for extra funding from Kela, the Finnish social security agency, to expand the two-year pilot to a group of employees this year, and said payments to current participants will end next January.

It has also introduced legislation making some benefits for unemployed people contingent on taking training or working at least 18 hours in three months. “The government is making changes taking the system away from basic income,” Kela’s Miska Simanainen told the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.

The scheme – aimed primarily at seeing whether a guaranteed income might incentivise people to take up paid work by smoothing out gaps in the welfare system – is strictly speaking not a universal basic income (UBI) trial, because the payments are made to a restricted group and are not enough to live on.

Related: Venezuela food riots.

Matt A.V. Chaban:

For all of Sunset Park’s celebrated taquerias, dim sum parlors and picturesque piers, the most popular destination in that neighborhood might just be the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Despite its squat concrete frame and fluorescent lights — a far cry from the neighboring brownstones — the library draws a capacity crowd most days.

On a recent afternoon, students from down the block and around the world scribbled out homework, studied with tutors, practiced English and honed their chess skills. On the walls, posters promoted not just reading but citizenship services and business-planning classes. Parents and children alike sat at banks of computers, indulging in a world of knowledge that many New Yorkers take for granted.

Visual Capitalist:

Are richer countries also the happiest?

This chart compares GDP per capita with the self-reported happiness of citizens In each country.

The resulting correlation Is quite clear, especially early on In a country’s development. However, as GDP per capita rises, this relationship tends to have a tot more variance – and certain regions and countries become obvious outllers that are worth Investigating In more detail.

Osita Nwanevu:

On Jan. 24, it was announced that former White House adviser and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon had accepted an invitation from University of Chicago business school professor Luigi Zingales to participate in a debate on campus. “I can hardly think of a more important issue for new citizens and business leaders of the world than the backlash against globalization and immigration that is taking place not just in America, but in all the Western World,” Zingales wrote in a statement. “Whether you agree with him or not (and I personally do not), Mr. Bannon has come to interpret and represent this backlash in America.”

Zingales and university administrators have, predictably, spent the past several weeks dealing with a backlash of their own. Over 1,000 alumni, more than 100 faculty members, the executives of student government and nearly a dozen student groups have voiced their opposition to the event in various mediums. “[W]hen speakers who question the intellect and full humanity of people of color are invited to campus to ‘debate’ their worthiness as citizens and people, ” a faculty open letter read, “the message is clear that the University’s commitment to freedom of expression will come at the expense of those most vulnerable in our community.” Off-campus, many have scorned those protesting the invitation. “The school has a long tradition of valuing free speech and thought, recognizing that a university is — wait for it — a place of ideas and learning,” the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board wrote after the announcement. “The ‘cure’ for repellent ideas, school President Robert Maynard Hutchins said generations ago, ‘lies through open discussion rather than through inhibition.’

The Guardian:

Andria Zafirakou has been functioning on three hours’ sleep a night for weeks, but looks radiant. “It’s adrenaline, it’s excitement, it’s everything.” Nominated by current and former colleagues for the Varkey Foundation’s annual Global Teacher prize, dubbed the Nobel for teaching, last month Zafirakou learned she had been shortlisted from a field of more than 30,000 entries. She flew out to Dubai last week to join nine other finalists from all over the world for a star-studded awards ceremony hosted by Trevor Noah, and arrived home on Wednesday the winner of the $1m prize. The nominees were judged on, among other things, the progress made by pupils, achievements outside the classroom and in helping children become “global citizens”.

Politicians and dignitaries, the media and 100 of her schoolchildren were waiting to welcome her at Heathrow, from where she was whisked straight to parliament to meet Theresa May. The prime minister and education secretary’s praise for the arts and textiles teacher could not have been more lavish; she is, declared Damian Hinds, “truly inspiring”.

Zafirakou still hasn’t made it home to Brent, north-west London, when we meet later that day. The 39-year-old has the dazed air of a woman who barely recognises herself as she stares at her photo on the front of London’s Evening Standard. “My whole life has been transformed,” she laughs breathlessly. Amid all the wonderment of her fairytale week, however, there is one obvious irony. Had Zafirakou prioritised the targets the government sets for her profession, and focused all her energies on its official performance measures, she would never have been considered for the award. She won, instead, by being the kind of teacher our education system actively discourages.

Will Fitzhugh is founder and editor of The Concord Review, which publishes outstanding historical essays by high school students. I have long been an admirer of the publication and of Will for sustaining it without support from any major foundations, which are too engaged in reinventing the schools rather than supporting the work of excellent history students and teachers. You can subscribe by contacting him at fitzhugh@tcr.org.

He writes:

A few years ago, at a conference in Boston, David Steiner, then Commissioner of Education for New York State, said, about History: “It is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”

Since then, David Coleman, of the Common Core and the College Board, have decided that any historical topic, for instance the Gettysburg Address, should be taught in the absence of any historical context—about the Civil War, President Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg—or anything else. This fits well with the “Close Reading” teachings of the “New Criticism” approach to literature in which Coleman received his academic training. This doctrine insists that any knowledge about the author or the historical context should be avoided in the analytic study of “texts.”

The Common Core, thanks to Coleman, has promoted the message that History, too, is nothing but a collection of “texts,” and it all should be studied as just language, not as knowledge dependent on the context in which it is embedded.

Not only does this promote ignorance, it also encourages schools to form Humanities Departments, in which English teachers, who may or may not know any History, are assigned to teach History as “text.” This is already happening in a few Massachusetts high schools, and may be found elsewhere in the country.

The dominance of English teachers over reading and writing in our schools has long meant that the great majority of our high school graduates have never been asked to read one complete History book in their academic careers.

Good English teachers do a fine job of teaching novels and personal and creative writing, but it is a Common Core mistake to expect them to teach the History in which they have little or no academic background. Treating History as contextless “text” is not a solution to this problem.

The ignorance of History among our high school graduates is a standing joke to those who think it is funny, and NAEP has found that only about 18% know enough to pass the U.S. citizenship exam.

In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch writes that: “In a 1785 letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors in History: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon [Anabasis], Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin.”

We may no longer imagine that many of our high school students will read their History in Latin, but we should expect that somehow they may be liberated from the deeply irresponsible Common Core curriculum that, in restricting the study of the past to the literary analysis of “texts,” essentially removes as much actual History from our schools as it possibly can.

Via Will Fitzhugh.

Sean O’Kane:

Starting in May, Chinese citizens who rank low on the country’s burgeoning “social credit” system will be in danger of being banned from buying plane or train tickets for up to a year, according to statements recently released by the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

With the social credit system, the Chinese government rates citizens based on things like criminal behavior and financial misdeeds, but also on what they buy, say, and do. Those with low “scores” have to deal with penalties and restrictions. China has been working towards rolling out a full version of the system by 2020, but some early versions of it are already in place.

Previously, the Chinese government had focused on restricting the travel of people with massive amounts of debt, like LeEco and Faraday Future founder Jia Yueting, who made the Supreme People’s Court blacklist late last year.

Poynter:

The Poynter Institute will lead a project funded by Google.org called MediaWise, a groundbreaking endeavor aimed at helping middle and high school students be smarter consumers of news and information online.

Google is investing $3 million over two years in MediaWise, which will bring together experts from the Local Media Association, the Stanford Graduate School of Education and Poynter. MediaWise will feature a curriculum to be taught in classrooms and a first-of-its-kind teen fact-checking initiative online. The project aims to reach a million students, with at least 50 percent coming from underserved or low-income communities.

“Democracy works best when citizens can make decisions for themselves based on accurate, independent and honest information,” said Poynter Institute president Neil Brown. “Poynter is honored to be part of MediaWise, which aims to help the next generation of voters have that power, and to reduce the spread of misinformation, which is polluting our civic life.”

Darwin BondGraham:

Berkeley’s police and other city departments hoping to acquire new surveillance technologies will now have to disclose publicly the equipment or software they’re seeking to acquire and justify the acquisition before gaining approval.

The Berkeley City Council approved a new law last night that subjects surveillance technologies to sweeping civilian oversight, making Berkeley the first city in California to do so.

“Last night’s unanimous vote by the Berkeley City Council was another strong indicator that citizens are demanding input into how powerful surveillance equipment is used in their community and who gets access to the data,” said Brian Hofer, a member of the civil liberties group Oakland Privacy.

Under the new law, city departments must show that the benefits of a new surveillance technology outweigh possible harms to privacy and civil liberties, before gaining permission to buy and use these tools.

Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison:

It includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles – mostly belonging to registered US voters – were harvested from the site in the largest ever breach of Facebook data.

Facebook on Friday said that it was also suspending Wylie from accessing the platform while it carried out its investigation, despite his role as a whistleblower.

At the time of the data breach, Wylie was a Cambridge Analytica employee, but Facebook described him as working for Eunoia Technologies, a firm he set up on his own after leaving his former employer in late 2014.

The evidence he supplied to authorities in the UK and US includes a letter from Facebook’s own lawyers sent to him in August 2016, asking him to destroy any data he held that had been collected by GSR, the company set up by Kogan to harvest the profiles.

Related: “strip mining humanity”

The 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and Facebook.

Dan Ball (2013): How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data.

Former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s role in the 2016 Clinton campaign.

Eric Schmidt and Wikileaks.

Aggregating Data.

Obama, Facebook and 2012.

Ex-Obama Campaign Director Drops Bombshell Claim on Facebook: ‘They Were on Our Side’:

A former Obama campaign official is claiming that Facebook knowingly allowed them to mine massive amounts of Facebook data — more than they would’ve allowed someone else to do — because they were supportive of the campaign.

In a Sunday tweet thread, Carol Davidsen, former director of integration and media analytics for Obama for America, said the 2012 campaign led Facebook to “suck out the whole social graph” and target potential voters. They would then use that data to do things like append their email lists.

Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters:

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”

Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown: Brendan Nyhan.

Zeynep Tufekci:

Yep. Facebook non-users get profiled, too. This is our online infrastructure: dossiers are accumulated whatever you do.

How Obama’s Team Used Big Data to Rally Voters:

In the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s targeters had assigned every voter in the country a pair of scores based on the probability that the individual would perform two distinct actions that mattered to the campaign: casting a ballot and supporting Obama. These scores were derived from an unprecedented volume of ongoing survey work. For each battleground state every week, the campaign’s call centers conducted 5,000 to 10,000 so-called short-form interviews that quickly gauged a voter’s preferences, and 1,000 interviews in a long-form version that was more like a traditional poll. To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voter—as many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts.

Mea Culpa formulas.

Facebook Data of 1.2 Million Users from 2005 Released: Limited Exposure, but Very Problematic by Michael Zimmer

The Flight of the Zuckerberg:

20 Quick Thoughts About The Facebook Scandal

Seb Joseph:

“Barack Obama was the one that made data targeting in political advertising cool. When he did it, people said he was smart. Now, we’re pissed off at Cambridge Analytica for doing the same thing because Donald Trump got elected.”

“Governments have been trying to find agencies that can do what Cambridge Analytica did for Donald Trump for years. There have been briefs in the past from both Labour and Conservative [political parties] saying, ‘Can you help us win an election?’ I’ve seen them, so the governments have known what’s possible.”

A republic requires interested and engaged citizens.

The long term Madison K-12 reading disaster has a very steep price, far beyond our $20,000 per student annual expenditures.