schoolinfosystem.org
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Zeynep Tufekci: Also *ahem*. A good number of us had been objecting and pointing out the broader harms of the interaction between Facebook’s business model and politics even when it appeared to benefit Obama/Democrats. Related: “strip mining humanity” The 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns and Facebook. Dan Ball (2013): How the Obama campaign won the […]
Nathan Heller: It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, […]
Walter aolson: Jeremiah Quinlan, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, has written a letter to the Wall Street Journal responding to my opinion piece last week. Countering a claim I never made, he asserts that civic activism in an applying student is not “the only attribute we look for.” Interestingly, Quinlan does not distance his […]
David Arsen, Thomas A. DeLuca, Yongmei Ni and Michael Bates: Like other states, Michigan has implemented a number of policies to change governance and administrative arrangements in local school districts deem to be in financial emergency. This paper examines two questions: (1) Which districts get into financial trouble and why? and (2) Among fiscally distressed […]
Ava Kofman: Police in Lancashire, a county in northwest England, have rolled out a program to broadcast crime updates, photos of wanted and missing people, and safety notifications to Amazon Echo owners. Since February, the free app has been available to those using Alexa, a cloud-based voice assistant hooked up to the Echo smart speaker. […]
Ted Bridis: The federal government censored, withheld or said it couldn’t find records sought by citizens, journalists and others more often last year than at any point in the past decade, according to an Associated Press analysis of new data. The calculations cover eight months under President Donald Trump, the first hints about how his […]
Annalisa Merelli: In 1982, John Beck—a strategy advisor and former business professor at Harvard and UCLA—was a 22-year-old Harvard student working on his thesis on juvenile crime in Japan. In the 1980s, Japan had seen an uncharacteristic increase in juvenile crime, which was associated with bōsōzoku (暴走族), or biker gangs. These groups, Beck says, comprised […]
Patrick Deneen: When I present the noble lie to students in my classes, it rankles—as Socrates predicted it would. They dislike the idea that the just polity must be based upon a deception. But what irritates them even more is the suggestion that the just city must be based upon inequality. As good liberal democratic […]
Sean Rossman: California ranked last in urban air quality and 45th in “low pollution health risk,” although it was 13th in drinking water quality. The state also found itself second-to-last in voter participation, 44th in community engagement and 38th in social support. Despite its beaches, redwood trees and Hollywood glam, the state’s blemishes are often […]
Joel Kotkin: In reality, immigrants vary tremendously, but some of their contributions to the economy are very real, with higher levels of labor participation than natives. Newcomers tend to be disproportionately more entrepreneurial than native born Americans — both on Main Street and Silicon Valley — at a time when our startup culture has weakened. […]
Glennon Doyle Melton: Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student […]
Megan McArdle: Danish social cohesion works great for Danes. It’s not so great, though, at doing another thing modern advanced economies need: Absorbing outsiders. In the U.S., the unemployment rate of foreign-born workers is almost a percentage point lower than that of native-born citizens. In Denmark, it’s almost 6 percentage points higher, more than double […]
Anthony Esolen, via Rod Dreher: And this goes under the heading for that ever-bulging file, I Knew It Was Bad; I Had No Idea How Bad It Was. One thing the author says here jibes with another datum I found some years ago. She says that seventy or eighty years ago — I cannot remember […]
J Nathan Matias: To find out the answer, Nikki Bourassa (@nikkiboura) and I organized a road trip from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society to visit the American Museum of Tort Law in Winchester Connecticut– the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to any part of the law. (I am deeply grateful to […]
Joe Kotkin: The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in […]
Matthew Feeney: A passenger on a bus at Fort Lauderdale’s Greyhound station recently recorded disturbing footage of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers walking up the bus’ aisle and asking for proof of citizenship. Although nothing new, it’s sad to see American law enforcement conducting the kind of “Papers Please” stops that many Americans usually […]
Jacob Mchangama: rom 1980 – 2003 the number of countries with a free press grew from 51 to 78. This increase was also proportionately significant. In 1980 34% of the world’s then 161 countries had a free press. In 2003 41% of the world’s 193 countries had newspapers free to criticize their own governments and […]
Steve Coll: On March 29th, in Pontiac, Michigan, Sergio Perez appeared in a county courtroom to seek sole custody of his son and two daughters, who were between eleven and seventeen years old. The children lived with Sergio’s estranged wife, Rose, and, he told me recently, he was concerned about them. His wife had taken […]
Mallory Locklear: India’s government Aadhaar database, which holds personal information of over one billion Indian citizens, was allegedly breached, BuzzFeed News reports. Along with demographic info, the database also contains biometric data like fingerprints and iris scans. Indian publication The Tribune reported earlier today that it was able to access any registered citizen’s demographics after […]
Thales: Many of my readers may be aware of the fact that, though I live in Florida, I’m pretty well-traveled. My father was in the military, and as a military brat I’ve lived in many different parts of the country, and been to almost all the lower 48 states at some point or another. We […]
Chris Stewart: The story goes something like this: “corporate education reform” is a conspiracy to “privatize” public education and to turn a public good into a private cash cow for business profiteers. With education spending topping $600 billion, we would be naive to believe this isn’t an irresistible target for “privatization.” And, this word, “privatization,” […]
Nathan VanderKlippe : Liu Hu spent two decades pushing hard at the bounds of censorship in China. An accomplished journalist, he used a blog to accuse high-level officials of corruption and wrongdoing and to publish details of misconduct by authorities. In late 2013, he was arrested and accused of “fabricating and spreading rumours.” Late in […]
Anne Chapmen & Rob Henken: In April 2016, the Public Policy Forum published Help Wanted: An analysis of the teacher pipeline in metro Milwaukee.2 This was the third in a series of reports on public school educators in the Milwaukee area. Help Wanted set out to better understand how the public teacher workforce in the […]
Dorsa Derakhshani: Right now in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the World Chess Championships are underway. But some world champions are noticeably absent: The Israeli players were blocked from participating when Saudi Arabia denied them visas. Chess — a game that I have loved since I first sat down at a board — is pure. It doesn’t […]
Nick Gillespie: Historian and entrepreneur Thaddeus Russell has a bone to pick with American higher education. It’s not simply that maverick opinions that stray from a liberal-progressive orthodoxy get squashed in classroom discussions and tenure decisions. Russell says the federal Department of Education effectively manages an accreditation system that controls the number and character of […]
James Grossman: Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the history major has lost significant market share in academia, declining from 2.2% of all undergraduate degrees to 1.7%. The graduating class of 2014, the most recent for which there are national data, included 9% fewer history majors than the previous year’s cohort, compounding […]
Charlie Savage: alling the Trump administration’s position “disingenuous” and “troubling,” a federal judge on Saturday ordered the Pentagon to permit a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union to meet with a United States citizen who has been imprisoned in military custody for three months after being deemed an enemy combatant. In a novel case […]
Wenxin Fan and Natasha Khan: Schoolchildren in a bucolic region in western China famed for steam trains and jasmine flowers thought little of it when police interrupted classes and asked all the boys to spit into small plastic boxes. They weren’t told why, according to the accounts of several children involved. From kindergartens through high […]
Chris Stewart: Here comes a shocker, not everyone is on board. The Wisconsin Education Association Council have slammed the program because they say it doesn’t “meet the needs of all students,” and “elected officials should provide stable funding for public schools and include educators in developing solutions instead of fragmented approaches that siphon more from […]
Merics: The Social Credit System“ is designed to monitor and rate citizens and companies in China and to guide their behavior. „It is a wide-reaching project that touches on almost all aspects of everyday life,“ the authors Mareike Ohlberg, Bertram Lang and Shazeda Ahmed write in the new MERICS China Monitor „Central Planning, local experiments: […]
Laura Nicolae: In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again. My father ran from a government that […]
Jonathan Hafetz : For nearly two months, the U.S. military has been detaining an American citizen at a secret jail in Iraq, denying him access to a lawyer and even refusing to release his name. The Trump administration is calling the citizen an “enemy combatant,” claiming he was fighting for ISIS in Syria, but it […]
Jane Robbins: The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act (FEPA – S 2046), passed by the House as HR 4174, encourages all federal agencies to share the data they maintain on American citizens and to make that data available for “research” by outside interests. All this would be done according to rules set by each agency […]
Han Rights Watch: The Chinese government should stop building big data policing platforms that aggregate and analyze massive amounts of citizens’ personal information, Human Rights Watch said today. This abusive “Police Cloud” system is designed to track and predict the activities of activists, dissidents, and ethnic minorities, including those authorities say have “extreme thoughts,” among […]
Julie Grace: In an ideal world, Jeff Kasuboski, superintendent of the Wautoma Area School District in central Wisconsin, would revamp his after-school program. Rather than students interacting only with kids their own age, he’d have them volunteer and spend time with an “untapped resource” — senior citizens. But because the coordinator of the after-school program, […]
Joshua Brustein: Donald Trump came into office promising a restrictive new approach to immigration and there has been little question about his intention to follow through — with one seeming exception. Despite its enthusiastic rhetoric about the H-1B program, which provides temporary visas to high-skilled workers, the administration failed to make significant changes in time […]
Glenn Reynolds: In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, we heard a lot about America’s division into two mutually hostile camps: A largely coastal, urban party run by educated elites, and a largely rural and suburban “Flyover Country” party composed of people who did not attend elite schools and who do not see themselves […]
Nicholas Tampio: In early 2017, Scientific American published a symposium on the threat that ‘big nudging’ poses to democracy. Big Data is the phenomena whereby governments and corporations collect and analyse information provided by measuring sensors and internet searches. Nudging is the view that governments should build choice architectures that make it easier for people […]
Vivienne Walta>: Given Estonia’s history, the invention of Skype in this country was ironic. While Americans were buying their first cell phones, about a quarter-century ago, Estonians were shut off from the world as an outpost of the Soviet Union. You could easily wait 10 years to be assigned a landline phone. By the time […]
Christopher Donnelly: This paper asks whether legislators are able to benefit from opposing their party on one or more high-profile issues. Such a strategy likely entails a tradeoff, as it might on the one hand attract cross-over support from opposite-party voters but, on the other hand, alienate co-partisan voters who make up the legislator’s “primary […]
Megha Rajagopalan: This is a city where growing a beard can get you reported to the police. So can inviting too many people to your wedding, or naming your child Muhammad or Medina. Driving or taking a bus to a neighboring town, you’d hit checkpoints where armed police officers might search your phone for banned […]
Stephen Chen: China is building the world’s most powerful facial recognition system with the power to identify any one of its 1.3 billion citizens within three seconds. The goal is for the system to able to match someone’s face to their ID photo with about 90 per cent accuracy. The project, launched by the Ministry […]
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: “Advocates of a writing process tended to stress autobiographical narrative writing, not informational or expository writing.” It sounds excessively dramatic to say that Common Core’s English language arts (ELA) standards threaten the study of history. In this essay we show why, in the words of a high school teacher, “if […]
Aaron Carroll: As our recent eight-nation bracket tournament showed, many people think the United States health care system has a lot of problems. So it seems reasonable to think of policy changes that make things better, not worse. Making it harder for immigrants to come here to practice medicine would fail that test. The American […]
Jason Leopold & Jessica Garrison: The intelligence division at the Treasury Department has repeatedly and systematically violated domestic surveillance laws by snooping on the private financial records of US citizens and companies, according to government sources. Over the past year, at least a dozen employees in another branch of the Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes […]
Mary Jordan & Kevin Sullivan: Richard Dever had swabbed the campground shower stalls and emptied 20 garbage cans, and now he climbed slowly onto a John Deere mower to cut a couple acres of grass. “I’m going to work until I die, if I can, because I need the money,” said Dever, 74, who drove […]
Jan-Werner Müller: One might think that the obvious answer to voter ignorance is education, and the answer to the more specific quandary of voter unreasonableness is perhaps some sort of civic reeducation. But the political philosopher Jason Brennan is having none of this argument. In his book Against Democracy, Brennan points to evidence that the […]
Franklin Foer: All the values that Silicon Valley professes are the values of the 60s. The big tech companies present themselves as platforms for personal liberation. Everyone has the right to speak their mind on social media, to fulfil their intellectual and democratic potential, to express their individuality. Where television had been a passive medium […]
Timothy Volker: The Free Software Foundation Europe and a broad group of organisations including Creative Commons are supporting the Public Money, Public Code campaign. The initiative calls for the adoption of policies that require that software paid for by the public be made broadly available as Free and Open Source Software. Nearly 40 organisations and […]
Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter . Many Americans are disgusted and concerned about the dysfunction and abysmal results from Washington, D.C., and so are we. However, this paper is not about adding to the depressing national dialog about politics, but about how to change the system by taking action that will work. Too […]
Denver Business Journal Embracing innovation and taking calculated risks are two core values that successful companies encourage every day. Whether they are in Tokyo, Silicon Valley, London, Bangalore or Denver, companies that embrace the unknown and challenge conventional wisdom position themselves for a greatness traditional companies that play it safe will never experience. We are […]
Aliya Ram: The US and UK governments have almost doubled their requests to obtain data from technology, media and telecoms companies over the past three years, highlighting a growing regulatory burden for businesses that are preparing for many more requests, under tough new EU privacy rules. The number of times 26 companies — including AOL, […]
US State Department It has been 19 years since the enactment of the International Religious Freedom Act, landmark legislation that placed the promotion of religious freedom as a central element of America’s foreign policy. The United States promotes religious freedom as a moral imperative. As importantly, we promote religious freedom because countries that effectively safeguard […]
Axibase: Expatriation has been increasing each year by roughly 30% since 2010, which featured abnormally high expatriation rates, most likely attributable to the economic turndown of the Great Recession which began in the United States as a result of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. American citizenship is often sought after for the economic opportunity that comes […]
Mikel Holt & Collin Roth:: National teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten has a message for the thousands of students, parents, and teachers enrolled or teaching at private voucher schools: You are the pawns of bigots. In a recent speech to the American Federation of Teachers annual convention, Weingarten said, “Make no mistake: This use of […]
Patrick Lawrence: Three, regardless of what one may think about the investigations and conclusions I will now outline—and, as noted, these investigations continue—there is a bottom line attaching to them. We can even call it a red line. Under no circumstance can it be acceptable that the relevant authorities—the National Security Agency, the Justice Department […]
Citizen Stewart: In all my writing about public schools you’ll find a consistent claim that public schools are insufficient to the task of educating black children. That message angers people, especially those working in district public schools who feel under “attack” by big money school reformers who want to “privatize” public education. Often I publish […]
Keith Humphreys The most rigorous study yet of the effects of marijuana legalization has identified a disturbing result: College students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate. Economists Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz took advantage of a decision by Maastricht, a city in the Netherlands, […]
Neil Heinen: Baskerville is hoping to have 10,000 signees. “What they’re saying are two things,” says Baskerville, “one … from all political perspectives, we agree on these two stretch targets. And we want you, governor, gubernatorial candidates, school superintendents, to make these goals.” Baskerville has a scorecard, something he considers crucial, which will be updated […]
Steve Coll: President Obama deported more people than any of his immediate predecessors did—a record that is a stain on his legacy—but he did change course during his second term, to insure that ice prioritized the deportations of felons, not of law abiders. “After eight years of struggle, we ended up with a very substantial […]
Alex Emmons: DONALD TRUMP’S JUSTICE Department revived a federal program on Wednesday that gives state and local law enforcement more power to seize property from people who haven’t been charged, let alone convicted, of a crime. The practice — known as “civil asset forfeiture” — became widespread as part of the drug crackdown in the […]
ycombinator news: Turkey reached another milestone of propaganda thanks to the total control of the communications. Right know when you make a phone call using your mobile phone, before ringing starts citizens are forced to listen to 10 seconds voice recording of the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Here is a demonstration: https://twitter.com/sendika_org/status/886343590208835584 Here is a […]
Concord Coalition:: Why we need your help to change budget decisions When faced with a challenge as complex as the nation’s fiscal future, it can be easy to feel helpless and discouraged. The numbers involved can seem intractable and the problems may seem daunting. But there are things YOU can do to help America’s fiscal […]
Electronic Frontier Foundation:: In this era of unprecedented digital surveillance and widespread political upheaval, the data stored on our cell phones, laptops, and especially our online services are a magnet for government actors seeking to track citizens, journalists, and activists. In 2016, the United States government sent at least 49,868 requests to Facebook for user […]