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Annysa Johnson: A handful of supporters also testified, urging lawmakers to pass the measures. “These referendums are just out of control. We’re spending way too much money, and our taxes are way too high,” said conservative activist Orville Seymer of the group Citizens for Responsible Government. The two were among more than a dozen witnesses […]
Jennifer Wang: Last November, the citizens of Madison supported a referendum to offset the drastic budget cuts forced upon our schools in recent years. The Madison Metropolitan School District has let class sizes expand for the past few years to cope with funding shortfalls. In this first budget cycle after the referendum, I ask the […]
Tom Ricks: But Orwell likely would have been fascinated about the next step these innovative new corporations took. Nowadays they produce goods that intrude far deeper into private life than ever was done by the titans of 20th century industry. It is not uncommon today to, say, search online for an airfare one day, and […]
Leighton Akio Woodhouse: IMMIGRATIONS AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT imprisons more than 10,000 parents of American citizens in California each year, according to a report released today by Human Rights Watch. The report, entitled “I Still Need You,” analyzes the impact of immigration enforcement policy on immigrant families in California and finds that parents with U.S. citizen […]
Natasha Singer: CHICAGO — The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill. In a social-science class last year, the students each grabbed a Google-powered laptop. They opened Google Classroom, an app where teachers make assignments. Then they clicked on Google Docs, a […]
David Matthews: In 2016, German universities enjoyed another big rise in the international student population, according to the latest data. Germany recorded close to a 7 percent increase in international students coming to the country. This follows a jump of nearly 8 percent the previous year. Numbers have risen about 30 percent since 2012. In […]
Lynn Paramore: You’ve probably heard the news that the celebrated post-WW II beating heart of America known as the middle class has gone from “burdened,” to “squeezed” to “dying.” But you might have heard less about what exactly is emerging in its place. In a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in […]
John McGinnis: My friend Heather Mac Donald is the latest speaker to be prevented from presenting on a college campus—this time at Claremont McKenna. Heather’s talk was to show how policing saves citizens’ lives, including those of African-Americans. Heather is the one of the most eloquent speakers I know. It is outrageous that some students […]
Simon Makin: One bad apple spoils the barrel, so the saying goes. But what if the barrel itself is rotten? A number of studies have shown that seeing a peer behave unethically increases people’s dishonesty in laboratory tests. What is much harder to investigate is how this kind of influence operates at a societal level. […]
Will Fitzhugh: Will Fitzhugh, Founder, The Concord Review, Inc. 23 March 2017, Harvard Faculty Club Thanks, Bill, [Bill Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Harvard College] for the kind introduction, and for decades of encouragement and support. You know, in addition to managing 40,000 applications, he also runs marathons… Thanks also to our High […]
Patricia Simms: Q. How has your role in the Wisconsin political landscape changed in the last five to 10 years? Is there more or less of a hunger for “impartial” data? A. In Wisconsin, the political landscape has evolved over the past 30 to 40 years with the advent of the full-time professional legislature, the […]
Mike Mullen: As detailed in a report from Tony Webster earlier this week, a Hennepin County judge has granted the Edina Police Department an extraordinary degree of access to citizens’ Google history, as cops attempt to crack the case of an attempted wire transfer fraud. In specific, police want to know who has searched for […]
seri: The victims—70,000 American citizens and 50,000 permanent residents—were detained without formal charges, and had no means of appeal. In 1982 the Federal government openly acknowledged that the rationale of “military necessity” had been unfounded, and that the policy of internment arose from popular racism exacerbated by a failure of leadership. But 75 years later, […]
Justin Fenton and Kevin Rector: Seven Baltimore police officers who served in a high-profile gun unit were indicted Wednesday on federal racketeering charges — allegations that throw into question scores of cases aimed at getting weapons off the streets. The officers are accused of shaking down citizens, filing false court paperwork and making fraudulent overtime […]
Dan Wang: When the pie isn’t growing, it makes sense to dedicate yourself to protecting your own share. “What I find striking about contemporary America is how much we are slowing things down, how much we are digging ourselves in, and how much we are investing in stability,” Cowen writes. I’d put it in the […]
Handelsblatt: According to a confidential presentation obtained by the German business weekly WirtschaftsWoche, Handelsblatt’s sister publication, Telefonica is offering to sell customer information to retail chains and shopping centers. Documents intended for retail managers showed the company had mined specific “insights” about age, gender, origin and movement from its 44 million mobile customers. Telefonica is the […]
Kevin Carey: But even as school choice is poised to go national, a wave of new research has emerged suggesting that private school vouchers may harm students who receive them. The results are startling — the worst in the history of the field, researchers say. While many policy ideas have murky origins, vouchers emerged fully […]
Jesdica Batke: Beijing’s update of national-level religious regulations is part and parcel of a larger governance effort. This effort is designed to construct a latticework of legislation for managing citizens’ activities and minimizing international influences. If these regulations are implemented uniformly—which is always a big if in the PRC—in some cases they will offer greater […]
Jonathan Zdziarski: With the current US administration pondering the possibility of forcing foreign travelers to give up their social media passwords at the border, a lot of recent and justifiable concern has been raised about data privacy. The first mistake you could make is presuming that such a policy won’t affect US citizens. For decades, […]
ELIANA JOHNSON and ELI STOKOLS: Many political onlookers described Trump’s election as a “black swan” event: unexpected but enormously consequential. The term was popularized by Nassim Taleb, the best-selling author whose 2014 book Antifragile—which has been read and circulated by Bannon and his aides—reads like a user’s guide to the Trump insurgency. It’s a broadside […]
John Simons: Political changes in the U.S. and United Kingdom may be spurring some graduate business-school students to look elsewhere for their degrees. More than a third (37%) of 760 prospective M.B.A. candidates who are non-U.S. citizens say they are less likely to pursue a graduate business degree in the U.S. because of the outcome […]
Thomas Ricks Each of us will have a different view of where the right balance lies, and what I’d like future reality to be and what I suspect will be the case, will no doubt be different. But my guess is that the next decade or more will show a constant tension between the security […]
Benjamin Snyder: his final week in office, President Obama made several feel-good moves that played to his base. He transferred 10 Guantanamo detainees to Oman. He commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning. He donated his children’s swing set to a D.C. shelter. And then there was his decision to significantly strengthen the surveillance state. […]
Safiya U. Noble: igital media platforms like Google and Facebook may disavow responsibility for the results of their algorithms, but they can have tremendous — and disturbing — social effects. Racist and sexist bias, misinformation, and profiling are frequently unnoticed byproducts of those algorithms. And unlike public institutions (like the library), Google and Facebook have […]
Jonathan Shaw: DO PEOPLE BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY when they think they are being watched? When former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the mass surveillance of American citizens in June 2013, the question suddenly grew in importance. Can the behavior of an entire population, even in a modern democracy, be changed by awareness of surveillance? […]
Peter Wood: National Findings: Traditional civic literacy is in deep decay in America. The New Civics, a movement devoted to progressive activism, has taken over civics education. “Service-learning” and “civic engagement” are the most common labels this movement uses, but it also calls itself global civics, deliberative democracy, and intercultural learning. The New Civics movement […]
Rob Scmitz: The Shanghai city government thinks it can make citizens more honest through a smartphone app. The city released the app, Honest Shanghai, in November during “honesty week,” a celebration of virtuous behavior throughout the city. Here’s how the app works: You sign up using your national ID number. The app uses facial recognition […]
Christina Hoff Summers: But less excitable analysts are drawing more sober conclusions: Perhaps the women’s movement is too elitist and out of touch with ordinary citizens, especially working-class women. That seems right, but I would go one step further. Today’s feminism is not merely out of touch with everyday Americans; it’s out of touch with […]
Tim Chambers: “What arrangements and plans have been made relative to concentration camps in the Hawaiian Islands for dangerous or undesirable aliens or citizens in the event of national emergency?” — Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, August 10, 1936 in a note to the military Joint Board
Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham (PDF): BRMS was founded to empower its students to thrive as citizens, entrepreneurs, leaders, collaborators, and innovators, working to restore the natural world and to better the cultural environment while creating just, nourishing, and sustainable communities. Today, BRMS embraces this through an urban agriculture lens and a philosophy of participatory, place-based learning […]
Evgeny Morozov Amazon also unveiled its cloud-based artificial intelligence services, including systems for recognising objects in images, processing speech commands, and operating chatbot applications. Thus, it’s joining Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM in the already crowded field of advanced AI. For Amazon, this is hardly new territory. By now, it must have built a robust […]
Gwynn Guildord: People everywhere are down on democracy. Especially young people. In fact, so rampant is democratic indifference and disengagement among millennials that a shocking share of them are open to trying something new—like, say, government by military coup. That’s according to research by Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University researcher, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a […]
Israeli interior minister Aryeh Deri has called for all Israeli citizens to obtain a mandatory biometric identity card, with their personal information stored on a national digital database, according to a report by The Times of Israel. As detailed in a memorandum, in the next two weeks citizens will be permitted to comment on the […]
Walter Dellinger: First and foremost, he will have been chosen by the constitutional rules currently in place. This alone is a source of legitimacy. Moreover, we simply do not and cannot know who would have won a national popular-vote contest had one been held. In such a case, both candidates would have run fundamentally different […]
Caleb Crain It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from […]
Micah Lee Thanks to 16 years of relentless and illegal expansion of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, Trump is about to have more tools of surveillance at his disposal than any tyrant ever has. Those preparing for the long fight ahead must protect themselves, even if doing so can be technically complicated. The […]
Camille Bromley vetlana Alexievich is someone who often answers a question with a story about other people. She has no lack of these stories, having spent more than three decades interviewing citizens of the U.S.S.R. and ex-Soviet states about their daily lived experience. In her books, each of which revolves around a central event—the Soviet-Afghan […]
Jessica Dickler Many millennials don’t know what they owe on their student loans, what interest rate they are paying or whether college was worth it, according to a survey released Thursday by Citizens Bank. A startling 6 in 10 millennials said they have no idea when their loans will be paid off and more than […]
Francine Prose: Search the Internet for news stories about public libraries in America and chances are that, sooner or later, the phrase “on the front lines” will come up. The war that is being referred to, and that libraries have been quietly waging since the September 11 attacks, is in defense of free speech and […]
Jeff Guo: Recently, Johns Hopkins University political scientists Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsberg conducted a study of the unglamorous D.C. bureaucrat. These are the people who keep the federal government humming — the Hill staffers, the project managers and all those desk workers who vaguely describe themselves as “analysts.” As Bachner and Ginsberg argue, civil […]
Michelle Ray: It may have never been formally codified into law, but freedom of choice may be one of the most important liberties we hope to enjoy as American citizens. It’s one we exercise daily, from the food we choose to eat to the products we choose to buy. We choose our leaders, and even […]
Thomas Kane: IN NOVEMBER, VOTERS in Massachusetts will decide whether to raise the cap on charter school enrollment. The irony is that for most voters—those living in suburban and rural communities with charter enrollment far below the current cap—the vote is inconsequential. The charter cap applies to the percentage each school district’s spending which can […]
Kate Irby: With costly healthcare, a stereotype of obesity and a culture of creatively fatty foods, “healthy” probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind when you think of the United States. But according to the Legatum Prosperity Index’s findings for 2015, the U.S. is the healthiest country in the world. However, when it […]
Tressiemc: I have watched many cities burn over the past two years. I cried over Ferguson. I cried over Baltimore. But there’s nothing like seeing your hometown on social media with a hashtag. I don’t want to talk about my family and friends. Worrying about them keeps me up at night. I don’t want to […]
Kaleem Caire, via a kind email: On Sunday, October 2, 2016 from 2pm to 4pm CST, more than 130 local Black men will participate in Madison’s Premiere Black Male Photo Shoot on the steps of Wisconsin’s State Capitol, City Hall and the Monona Terrace. The photo shoot has been organized One City Early Learning Centers […]
Emily Deruy Are American colleges supposed to prepare future citizens for civically engaged adulthood? Or is their job to provide student consumers a market-driven good so they’re capable of becoming productive participants in the economy? That’s the framing of a debate about the future of higher education in the new film Starving the Beast, which […]
William Galston: The populist revolt against governing elites sweeping advanced democracies is the latest chapter in the oldest political story. Every society, regardless of its form of government, has a ruling class. The crucial question is whether elites rule in their own interest or for the common good. In the decades after World War II, […]
Dan Butin: have been mulling over David Theo Goldberg’s recent essay: “Coming Soon To You: Uber U.” It is a story of decline, of the university in ruins, of a powerful vision of the liberal arts impaled on the stake of profits. “The immediate future for academe,” Goldberg writes in his penultimate paragraph, “is one […]
Kashmir Hill Facebook’s ability to figure out the “people we might know” is sometimes eerie. Many a Facebook user has been creeped out when a one-time Tinder date or an ex-boss from 10 years ago suddenly pops up as a friend recommendation. How does the big blue giant know? While some of these incredibly accurate […]
Michael Lind Intellectuals — a category that includes academics, opinion journalists, and think tank experts — are freaks. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. I myself have spent most of my life in one of the three roles mentioned above. I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds […]
Michael Lind: Intellectuals — a category that includes academics, opinion journalists, and think tank experts — are freaks. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. I myself have spent most of my life in one of the three roles mentioned above. I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds […]
Alec MacGillis & Propublica: Sometime during the past few years, the country started talking differently about white Americans of modest means. Early in the Obama era, the ennobling language of campaign pundits prevailed. There was much discussion of “white working-class voters,” with whom the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama, were having such trouble connecting. Never […]
Mary Grabar: Hamilton College has for years had an open curriculum, allowing students the freedom to shape their education as they think best. Whether that’s a good idea is debatable, but the college is about to move in the opposite direction by instituting a “diversity requirement” for all students. As a resident fellow at the […]
Our community, via the quite traditional Madison School District, has long tolerated disastrous reading results. Has anything changed? The District’s 2015-2016 “annual report” includes a bit of data on reading and math: Tap for larger versions. Unfortunately, the annual report lacks a significant amount of data, from enrollment to staffing and total spending. Boston publishes […]
Stephen Black: Last thursday, I lost my job. Despite conversations with over thirty colleagues who professed support for the renewal of my contract, the Deans at the university where I’ve worked since 2008 weren’t listening. Like a piece of once-glistening pork left out on a counter, I’ve expired. Of course, I know I’m already well […]
Jared Walczak: States tax real property in a variety of ways: some impose a rate or a millage—the amount of tax per thousand dollars of value—on the fair market value of the property, while others impose it on some percentage (the assessment ratio) of the market value, yielding an assessed value. Some states have equalization […]
Glen Butler: The mindset that we are helpless without weapons is not only self-defeating, but dangerous, and government policy that reinforces this perception is a flawed one. A September 2013 FBI report found that of the 160 active shooter incidents in the U.S. between 2010 and 2013, 21 (13.1 percent) ended after unarmed citizens made […]
Myron Magnet: Haunting this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs. We have lost the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic election of […]
Sam Thielman: A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (Foia) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols […]
Nick Anderson: University does not require history majors to take a course in U.S. history. Nor do Georgetown University, the University of Maryland and many other highly regarded schools. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni says that’s a problem. The council, based in Washington, recently surveyed the requirements for history majors at top colleges […]
Yoni Applebaum: American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a liberal arts grad,” said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program. That presents […]
Kurt Kohlstedt: Big-box stores promise convenience and jobs for suburbs and small towns, but have a mixed reputation with designers and citizens. Many see big boxes as icons of unsustainable sprawl, reinforcing car culture with highway-oriented access and expansive parking lots. These boxy buildings not only take up vast amounts of land but often also […]
undercommon collective: No specter is haunting the university; the university is haunting us. While we are accustomed to imagining “the university” as an enlightening institution that works in the public interest, we, The Undercommoning Project, hold that: in an age of skyrocketing tuition prices, soaring student debt, the hyperexploitation of precarious service workers, the proliferation […]
Malcolm Harris: Kids used to play outside more. They would hopscotch through the streets, assembling games of stickball and breaking glass soda bottles for fun. Parents would tell their children to be home for dinner and then forget about them until dark. That golden age of unstructured play was real — scholars place it in the second […]
Jonathan Mayera, Patrick Mutchlera, and John C. Mitchell: Since 2013, a stream of disclosures has prompted reconsideration of surveillance law and policy. One of the most controversial principles, both in the United States and abroad, is that communications metadata receives substantially less protection than communications content. Several nations currently collect telephone metadata in bulk, including […]
Danielle Allen: Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Danielle Allen calls for a paradigm shift in the way we think about education, moving away from instrumentalism to the cultivation of civic and social engagement. I find the notion of citizenship as “co-creating” and “world-building” compelling, and I have seen the most profound manifestations of […]
Discover Maps: visual interface to the world’s scientific knowledge that can be used by anyone in order to dramatically improve the discoverability of research results. We are going to provide a large-scale system of open, interactive and interlinked knowledge maps spanning all fields of research. Around these maps, we will develop a space for collective […]
Tanva Misra: In the medieval period, empires battled and colluded with each other in the quest for land. The resulting system, in which nations became the main actors on the global stage, is perhaps the one most of us know best. But it’s changing. We’re now moving toward a new era where insular, political boundaries are […]
Charles Cooke: In her harrowing 1892 treatise on the horrors of lynching in the post-bellum American South, the journalist, suffragist, and civil-rights champion Ida B. Wells established for her readers the value of bearing arms. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year,” Wells recorded, “the only case where the proposed lynching did not […]
Dave Baskerville (7 April 2016) Mr. Ed Hughes, Member, MMSD Board 4/7/16 Ed, I finally got around to reading your “Eight Lessons Learned” article in the 3/9/16 edition of CT. Interesting/thanks. As you know from our previous discussions, we have similar thinking on some of the MMSD challenges, not on others. For the sake of […]
Ellie Bothwell: When US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders painted a picture of the perfect model of higher education, he didn’t reference Harvard, Yale or Stanford; instead he cited universities in Germany and Scandinavia. He held up their education systems as ones that the US should ape when pledging to make tuition free at public colleges […]
Kelly Baker: Almost 39 years ago, Audre Lorde gave a talk on silence, language, and action at the Modern Language Association. “I have come to believe over and over again,” she notes, “that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or […]
The Blaze: Liberal education aims to liberate the mind from prejudice — the prejudice of birth, public opinion, our own distorted and inflated opinions of ourselves — in preparation for citizenship and freedom,” Milikh said. “But modern universities too often flatter and protect prejudices. It says there’s almost nothing to learn. ‘Come as you are, […]
Dana Goldstein: In his new book The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions, political scientist Andrew Hacker proposes replacing algebra II and calculus in the high school and college curriculum with a practical course in statistics for citizenship (more on that later). Only mathematicians and some engineers actually use advanced math in their day-to-day work, […]
David Gelernter, via Will Fitzhugh: Donald Trump is succeeding, we’re told, because he appeals to angry voters—but that’s obvious; tell me more. Why are they angry, and how does he appeal to them? In 2016, Americans want to vote for a person and not a white paper. If you care about America’s fate under Obama, […]
Peggy Noonan: If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being […]
Rick Noack: Tuition to U.S. universities has surged 500 percent since 1985 and continues to rise. But German universities offer free education to everyone — including Americans. The number of American students enrolled in German universities has risen steadily in recent years. Currently, an estimated 10,000 U.S. citizens are studying at German colleges — nearly […]
Steve Nuemann: The idea that schoolchildren should become philosophers will be scoffed at by school boards, teachers, parents, and philosophers alike. The latter will question whether kids can even do philosophy, while the former likely have only a passing familiarity with it, if any — possibly leading them to conclude that it’s beyond useless. Yet […]
Chrotopher Phillips: An era of sweeping cultural change in America, the postwar years saw the rise of beatniks and hippies, the birth of feminism, and the release of the first video game. It was also the era of new math. Introduced to US schools in the late 1950s and 1960s, the new math was a […]
Justin Fox: have also been studies that purport to measure risk aversion by country. One recent attempt using Gallup polling data on happiness, by Nestor Gandelman of Universad ORT in Uruguay and Ruben Hernandez-Murillo of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found the Dutch to be among the least risk-averse people on the planet […]
Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa: When citizens lose faith in liberal democracy, they will eventually start to consider illiberal forms of government. This is beginning to happen. Most Americans are still horrified by the idea of living in an authoritarian regime, but the number of citizens who are open to some form of illiberal rule […]
Dave Baskerville: Madison will elect three School Board members in the spring. Our school taxes are set to rise 4.9 percent to accommodate a $504 million budget. A very well qualified and able superintendent is in place and will in several ways make the schools better. So what’s missing? Simply no mention or concern by […]
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman: The European Court of Justice, Europe’s highest court, has just ruled that the Safe Harbor, an arrangement between the European Union and the United States allowing for the transfer of personal data, is legally invalid. Few non-specialists have heard of the Safe Harbor. Even so, this ruling is going to […]
Laura Waters: But you have to understand where I’m coming from. My parents were both UFT members (my dad was a high school teacher and my mom was a high school social worker) and we practically davened to Albert Shanker, AFT’s founder. I knew all the words to Woody Guthrie’s labor hymn, “There Once was […]
Will Fitzhugh: Some people say that when offenses are old enough, they should be allowed to lie undisturbed, and while the Crow may feel that way about the Sioux, and the Croatians about the Magyars, and the Rus about the Huns, and the Parthians about the Romans, we Saxons should never forget what the Normans […]
Dr Hurd: Schools have long since lost sight of what education actually is. Government schools are particularly guilty. Public schools are government schools. If we called them what they are — government schools — many of us might not be so prone to defend them. By their very definition, the purpose of nationalized, federally subsidized […]
Jennifer Reuf: So unions protect the working conditions of teachers, which protects the learning environments for children. If you want decent learning conditions for students, protect decent working conditions for their teachers. It is no coincidence that there is a record shortage of teachers to staff Wisconsin’s famously excellent public schools this year. A colleague […]
John Cassidy: If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment and prosperity. The consensus dates back at least to 1636, when the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Harvard College […]
The Economist: DEBATES over how to fund higher education never lie dormant for long. In Britain, recently, there have been reforms about twice a decade; the last one, which hiked tuition fees, all but killed off the Liberal Democrats, members of the previous coalition government. In America, concerns abound over soaring costs and towering student […]
Megan Guess: A school district in southeastern Iowa has purchased 13 small, clip-on cameras that principals and assistant principals will wear during their interactions with students and parents. The district is one of the first schools to encourage the use of body cameras among administrators, echoing the growth of support for body cameras on police […]
Wheeler Report (PDF): For this reason, many of us were initially encouraged when you indicated that you would defund Wisconsin’s participation in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) via your proposed 2015-2017 biennial budget. We hoped for substantive movement, at long last, on an issue that affects most children, parents, and teachers in Wisconsin. However, […]
Andrew DelBanco: Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life “the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” These words come from Horace Mann, whose goal was to establish primary schooling for all children—no small ambition when he announced […]
Gerald Graff COMPLAINTS THAT American high school and college graduates can’t write have been pervasive for so long that they almost go without saying. Last year, when the Society for Human Resource Management asked managers about the skills of recent college graduates, 49 percent of them rated those graduates deficient in “the knowledge and basic […]
Maria Sanchez Diez: Some people in the Dutch city of Utrecht might soon get a windfall of extra cash, as part of a daring new experiment with the idea of “basic income.” Basic income is an unconditional and regular payment meant to provide enough money to cover a person’s basic living cost. In January of […]
British Academy: Count Us In graphicA dramatic improvement in the UK population’s mastery of basic numeracy and statistics needs to happen if the country is to take advantage of the data revolution now sweeping the globe. That’s the verdict of a major British Academy report Count Us In: Quantitative skills for a new generation. The […]
Andrew Delbanco: Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life “the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” These words come from Horace Mann, whose goal was to establish primary schooling for all children—no small ambition when he announced […]
Michael Grunwald: Most parents will do just about anything for their children, especially when it comes to education. Predictably, at a time when college costs are exploding and students are staggering under more than $1 trillion in debt, one opportunistic lender is making huge profits on loans to their doting moms and dads. Less predictably, […]
Janet Lorin: Chris Winiarz, a 31-year-old money manager with a Northwestern MBA, jumped at a student-loan deal of a lifetime. A startup called SoFi offered to refinance his $45,000 in federal debt, slashing his interest rate to 2.69 percent from 6.55 percent. Winiarz will pay off his obligation three years early, saving about $9,500 and […]
Yevgeny Feyman, via a kind reader: Last year, as part of a contract deal with the teachers’ union, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he and the city’s unions had agreed to cut $3.4 billion in worker health-care costs over four years. Even with these “savings,” though, Gotham’s health-insurance spending is projected to grow 6 […]