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Students cannot be ‘poisoned’ with ‘false, biased’ information says Hong Kong’s Carrie Lam, vowing action

Kelly Ho: Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has claimed that students should be protected from being “poisoned” as she said that “false and biased” information had spread on campuses. She also rejected criticism on her administration’s Covid-19 measures and warned against legislative filibustering and “foreign interference.” In an interview with state-run newspaper Ta Kung Pao published […]

For Sale: College Campus, Convenient to New York City, Castle Included

Oshrat Carmiel: The College of New Rochelle has a 15.6-acre campus with tree-lined paths and a 19th-century castle and it’s just 20 miles from New York City. But is it worth $50 million? The school, founded as a Catholic women’s college in 1904, filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 20, crushed under the burden of $80 […]

Madison City Council members warned about illegal meetings

: In a memo to council members on Wednesday, which mentions a local political party but doesn’t name Progressive Dane, May wrote, “I was deeply disturbed to hear reports this week that seven or eight alders met privately to discuss matters on the City Council agenda. Such meetings almost certainly involve negative quorums on some […]

One New York Special-Needs School Is Ahead of the Curve With Remote Learning

Lee Hawkins: When New York City special-needs teacher Marie Cornicelli learned in March that the city’s 1.1 million public-school students would be migrating to remote learning, she expected the foray into “crazy, unknown and unfamiliar territory” to be a difficult one. “I wondered if my students would be able to do the work well at […]

One thing way worse than standardized testing is unstandardized testing

Chris Stewart: Sometimes I feel like I’m the last man standing in favor of standardized testing. I don’t think people know that when I ask “how are the children,” I’m usually asking about their intellectual care and development. I’m an education activist so when you answer, I expect to hear results from a relatively objective […]

Sacramento City Schools Superintendent Aguilar Takes a Big Pay Increase While Schools Closed

Katy Grimes: In March 2019, California Globe reported Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jorge Aguilar and seven other administrators spent more than $35,000 to attend a six-day conference at the Harvard Business School, while the district teetered on the verge of insolvency, and under the threat of state takeover as it struggled with a […]

Civics: How Competitive Are City and County Legislative Seats?

Public Policy Forum: The level of competition varies in these counties, but in none are even half the seats contested. Eleven of Brown County’s 26 seats (42.3%) are contested placing it at the top of the list, while none of Waukesha County’s 25 seats are competitive. In Wisconsin’s two largest counties, few seats are up […]

Civics: Toronto is gathering cellphone location data from telecoms to find out where people are still congregating amid coronavirus shutdown: Tory

Mural Hemmadi: The City of Toronto is obtaining cellphone data from wireless carriers to help it identify where people have assembled in groups, part of its attempts to slow the spread of COVID-19, Mayor John Tory said on Monday. But city staff said Tuesday morning the city doesn’t plan to collect such data. “We had […]

Civics: I documented every surveillance camera on my way to work in New York City, and it revealed a dystopian reality

James Pasley: As Arthur Holland Michel, who wrote a book about high-tech surveillance, told The Atlantic in June, “Someday, most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance.” New York City has an estimated 9,000 cameras linked to a system the New York Police Department calls the “Domain […]

Three months into Seattle’s new $600 million-plus education levy, where has the money been going?

Neal Morton: A year after Seattle voters approved the city’s largest-ever education tax, money has started flowing from the $600 million-plus levy to expand preschool classrooms and get more students into college. The city’s education department also recently announced a $400,000 initiative with the YWCA Seattle-King-Snohomish to help youth experiencing homelessness. And for the first time, charter […]

China’s Political Correctness: One Country, No Arguments

Li Yuan: Hong Kong’s protests have disrupted Yang Yang’s family life. Though the 29-year-old lives in mainland China, he was inspired by the demonstrations to write a song about freedom and upload it to the internet. When censors deleted it, he complained to his family. They weren’t sympathetic. “How can you support Hong Kong separatists?” […]

Hong Kong school week kicks off with citywide student protests against anti-mask law arrests

Chan Ho-him, Brian Wong, Kelley Ho and Joanne Ma: Hundreds of secondary school students protested against Hong Kong’s anti-mask law on Tuesday in a show of solidarity with schoolmates arrested during the ongoing citywide protests. Forming human chains and staging sit-ins, students across the city voiced support for peers ­arrested under the law since its […]

At Boston Public Schools, even the city’s most politically connected can get the runaround

James Vaznis: A preschool seat in the Boston Public Schools often seems harder to come by than a winning Megabucks ticket, even for some of the city’s most politically connected residents. City Councilor Michelle Wu struck out getting a seat for her 4-year-old son, Blaise, who was waitlisted earlier this year at the Sumner Elementary […]

Edgewood would need city permission to make field changes under Plan Commission recommendation

Abigail Becker: Currently, schools without a campus master plan located within the Campus Institutional zoning district do not need approval from the city to create uses that occur outside of an enclosed building. These types of uses include outdoor sports and recreational facilities. The main change within the zoning text amendment is that all entities […]

The Progressive Dystopia Of NEw York City Schools

Rod Dreher: You have to read this long Atlantic piece by George Packer, in which he describes the disillusioning of him and his wife — good urban liberals — by the militant wokeness that overtook the New York City public schools that their children attended (and that their son still attends). The piece begins with […]

Much ado about nothing: City of Madison education comMittee; ReAding?

Scott Girard: Bidar said it would be a challenge to become a decision-making body, given that any initiatives would require approval by three different legislative bodies, but there’s still value in the committee. “Once we have clarity and agreement around what we want to be, it’s sharing the information with the rest of our colleagues,” […]

Loneliness Is a Big Problem

John Maxwell: Lately, I’ve been having an alarming amount of conversations arise about the burdens of loneliness, alienation, rootlessness, and a lack of belonging that many of my peers feel, especially in the Bay Area. I feel it too. Everyone has a gazillion friends and events to attend. But there’s a palpable lack of social […]

Two Madisons: The Education and Opportunity Gap in Wisconsin’s Fastest Growing City

Will Flanders: At Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), there exist two distinct school systems. Despite its economic growth, low-income families in Madison are more likely to stay poor for their entire lives. While 60% of white students at MMSD are proficient or higher on the Forward exam, only 9.8% of African Americans are proficient. This […]

Pop culture lionizes the dazzling brilliance of money managers on the autism spectrum. Reality rarely measures up.

Amanda Cantrell: Three weeks after I enrolled my youngest child in a neighborhood nursery school in Brooklyn, I got the call. An administrator and my child’s lead teacher urgently wanted to meet with my husband and me. Our daughter, it turned out, was wandering out of the classroom. She wasn’t making eye contact. She didn’t […]

The Death of Social Reciprocity in the Era of Digital Distraction

Brian Solis: You’re walking along the street, and bump into a friend. After a quick hello, this friend compliments you. What do you do in response? Most likely, offer a compliment in return. Or, at the least, say thank you. A few steps further down the street, you see someone drop a wallet. You pick […]

Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities.

Gail Heriot: On April 23, 2019, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights released a report entitled Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities. This Statement is part of that report. In the report, the Commission finds “Students of color as a whole, as […]

The Future of the City Is Childless America’s urban rebirth is missing something key—actual births.

Derek Thompson: A few years ago, I lived in a walkup apartment in the East Village of New York. Every so often descending the stairway, I would catch a glimpse of a particular family with young children in its Sisyphean attempts to reach the fourth floor. The mom would fold the stroller to the size […]

“The liberal studies curriculum is a failure,” Tung said. “It is one of the reasons behind the youth problems today.”

Jeffie Lam: Veteran liberal studies teacher Kwan Chin-ki felt the subject helped raise awareness of societal issues among students but there was not a direct link to young Hongkongers’ participation in politics. Meanwhile, presidents of three universities called on different parties to resolve the rift through constructive dialogue. HKU president and vice-chancellor Professor Zhang Xiang […]

I BabySit for the One Percent

Margaret Grace Myers: “It’s like Uber, for babysitting,” is something that sounds vaguely like a joke and is one of the ways that I make rent every month. This could be an essay about the horrors of the gig economy and how you can have two master’s degrees and a full-time job and still not […]

Alone The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness.

Kay Hymowitz: Americans are suffering from a bad case of loneliness. The number of people in the United States living alone has gone through the studio-apartment roof. A study released by the insurance company Cigna last spring made headlines with its announcement: “Only around half of Americans say they have meaningful, daily face-to-face social interactions.” […]

Increasing the density of America’s cities is a crucial part of progressive city planning.

Benjamin Schneider: If I asked my neighbors in San Francisco if they’d support a policy that reduces fossil-fuel consumption, protects unspoiled wildlands, increases economic mobility, and creates more affordable housing, they would probably all say yes. But if I told them such a policy would legalize small apartment buildings in our neighborhood of charming, million-dollar […]

Residents of the majority-white southeast corner of Baton Rouge want to make their own city, complete with its own schools, breaking away from the majority-black parts of town.

Adam Harris: Last fall, Lanus ran for school board and won. His campaign was criticized for receiving outside funding, but his central message resonated with voters: The schools in Baton Rouge had been inequitable for too long, and it was time for a change. “If you look anywhere south of Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge—which […]

Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system

Zack Whittaker: Smart cities are designed to make life easier for their residents: better traffic management by clearing routes, making sure the public transport is running on time and having cameras keeping a watchful eye from above. But what happens when that data leaks? One such database was open for weeks for anyone to look […]

Civics: Dallas Has Now Lost 82 Cases Against Robert Groden. Someone Call Guinness.

Jim Schutze: It’s sort of remarkable, is it not, almost as if they have a small research team somewhere in the city attorney’s office. Twice a year someone tells them, “Scour the books for something Groden isn’t doing wrong so we can charge him with it and get ourselves kicked out of court again.” Kizzia […]

Civics: Xinjiang phone app exposes how Chinese police monitor Uighur Muslims

Yuan Yang: China’s “intelligence-led policing”, which relies on gathering data to identify possible or repeat offenders, was partly copied from the British police, who pioneered the approach in the 1990s, Mr Walton said. The IJOP app prompts police to gather a vast range of details about individuals they are interrogating. In addition, the app presents […]

Declassified U2 spy plane images reveal bygone Middle Eastern archaeological features

University of Pennsylvania: In the 1950s and early ’60s, with the Cold War at its peak, the United States flew U2 spy planes across Europe, the Middle East, and central eastern Asia, taking images of interesting military targets. Though the missions typically connected Point A to Point B, say an air field and an important […]

Silence + Conformity = Complicity — reflections on university life in China today

Geremie R. Barme: On 30 March 2019 we received the text of a powerful article by an academic at Tsinghua University written in support of Professor Xu Zhangrun. We believed we had a clear understanding that China Heritage had permission to publish that text in translation. We were mistaken. Subsequent to publication, we were belatedly […]

“ the shift from information scarcity to information abundance”

David Perell: America’s biggest Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are losing market share. Across consumer goods industries, brand loyalty is dying. The percentage of affluent consumers in the top 5% of household income who can identify their favorite brand is in sharp decline (see Figure 1). The reason is simple: brands are about trust and […]

Felicity Huffman, Lori Loughlin among 50 indicted in largest-ever case alleging bribery to get kids into colleges

Joey Garrison and Maria Puente: Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin and nine college coaches are among the 50 people charged Tuesday in what federal officials say is the nation’s largest-ever college admissions bribery case prosecuted by the Justice Department. The Justice Department charged 33 affluent parents, which include CEOs and television stars, with taking […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The Middle Class Is Shrinking Everywhere — In Chicago It’s Almost Gone

Linda Lutton: Chicago’s middle class, once the backbone of the city, is declining so swiftly that it’s almost gone, and a set of maps from a local university lays that reality bare. The dynamic stands to affect nearly everything about Chicago going forward, from politics to schools to who will live here. “It raises a […]

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Contrary to media hype, tech firms and millennials not flocking to “superstar” cities.| City Journal

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: When Amazon decided to locate its second headquarters in New York, it cited the supposed advantages of the city’s talent base. Now that progressive politicians have chased Amazon out of town, the tech booster chorus has been working overtime to prove that Gotham, and other big, dense, expensive cities, are […]

Civics: The Dawn of the Little Red Phone

David Bandurski: Gone are the days when you can simply ignore that stack of Party newspapers in the corner of the office, or switch off the Party’s nightly newcast, “Xinwen Lianbo.” The app’s name, “Xi Study Strong Nation,” or Xue Xi Qiang Guo (学习强国), is derived from a now widely used official pun on the […]

Civics: Bad judgment in Racine: City attorney and judge kept routine public records secret

Bill Lueders: This led to a determination that the vast majority of case records must be made public, as they should have been all along. As the Journal Times reported, the released invoices show Racine taxpayers have shelled out nearly $18,000 to fund Letteney’s crusade against Weidner. This went to pay two attorneys $350 and […]

“One issue state officials say they have detected as they monitor the effectiveness of the READ Act is that not all teachers are up to date on how best to teach reading.”

Christopher Osher: But districts are free to use their READ Act per-pupil funds on whatever curriculum they want, even on interventions researchers have found ineffective. “Typically, as with any education policy, we’re only given so much authority on what we can tell districts to do and what we monitor for,” Colsman said in an interview […]

Charter School Funding: Inequity in the City

Patrick J. Wolf Larry D. Maloney Jay F. May Corey A. DeAngelis: One might assume that policymakers moved swiftly to remedy the injustice of charter school funding inequity revealed in the 2005 report. Sadly, that was not the case. We re-examined the charter school funding gap using data from 2006-07 and adding seven more states […]

The Union Fight That Defined Beto O’Rourke’s City Council Days

Walker Bragman: At the height of the conflict, O’Rourke publicly mused about disbanding the police union, calling it “out of control” and lamenting his colleagues’ unwillingness to stand up to the powerful political force. A year later, he was calling for “better checks on collective bargaining in the public sector.” The fight came at one […]

Bill Daley proposes merging Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges

Fran Spielman: Bill Daley wants to turn America’s third-largest school system into what he calls the “nation’s first pre-K-through-14” system — by merging the Chicago Public Schools with the City Colleges of Chicago. By turning two giant bureaucracies into one, Daley hopes to generate as much as $50 million worth of administrative savings — enough […]

‘Alternative’ at Madison’s Shabazz City High also means whiter, more affluent

Chris Rickert: In June, after she’d lost her bid for a second term on the board, Moffit emailed district general counsel Matthew Bell and executive director of student services John Harper a copy of a letter sent to a prospective Shabazz student letting the student’s family know that the student hadn’t met the criteria for […]

Civics: Meet New York City’s highest-earning official. He’s a debt collector for predatory lenders.

Zachary R. Mider and Zeke Faux: In theory, Barbarovich’s reach ends at the city limits. In practice, it spans the nation. From a third-floor office near Coney Island in Brooklyn, he has grabbed cash from a physician in California, a roofer in Florida and a cattle auctioneer in Illinois. Borrowers say he and other marshals […]

Who made key mistakes in Parkland school shooting? Nine months later, no one held accountable

David Fleshler and Megan O’Matz: Despite an extraordinary series of governmental failures leading to the bloodshed in Parkland, just a few low-level employees have faced consequences over errors that may have cost lives. But not the school administrators who failed to act on warnings of weak security at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, or the […]

Why Big Cities Thrive, and Smaller Ones Are Being Left Behind

Eduardo Porter: You don’t want to be hit by a recession in a city like Steubenville, Ohio. Eight years into the economic recovery, there are thousands fewer jobs in the metropolitan area that joins Steubenville with Weirton, W.Va., than there were at the onset of the Great Recession. Hourly wages are lower than they were […]

City didn’t tell all homeowners that some metered homes showed high lead levels

Fran Spielman: Chicago’s Department of Water Management has known since June that 17.2 percent of tested Chicago homes with water meters had elevated lead levels, but failed to notify owners of all 165,000 metered homes, continued to install meters and is only now offering those homeowners free, $60 filtration systems. The testing, quietly done by […]

Google’s smart city dream is turning into a privacy nightmare

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 […]

“Students who are flourishing are not the ones typically transferring schools.”

Erin Richards: Test scores tell another story. Less than 5 percent of students are proficient in English and math on the state exam. The vast majority score “below basic,” the lowest category, in both subjects. Despite devoted teachers, a spirit of achievement, extra money and five years of attention from Milwaukee’s best minds in business […]

New Records Reveal What It Takes to Be One of the 75 NYC Teachers Fired for Misconduct or Incompetence Between 2015 and 2016

David Cantor: Seventy-five tenured teachers found guilty of abuse or incompetence — many of them male, veteran educators assigned to struggling New York City schools — were fired over 16 months in 2015 and 2016, an analysis of disciplinary records obtained by The 74 has found. Educators were terminated for choking students, publicly taunting children […]

Civics: This Iowa city forged an unusual friendship with China and its president. Then came the soybean tariffs.

Jeanne Whalen: This spring, residents of this Mississippi River city published a book celebrating three decades of friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who first visited as a regional official in 1985 to learn about modern farming practices. That visit, and one Xi made in 2012, helped forge a relationship that turned China into a […]

City of Madison Initiative Demonstrates Lack of Transparency: MOST fails to provide public with information and access to meetings and records

Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg: In the five years since the group’s inception, MOST has not given the public notice of its meetings times, dates, locations, and agendas, allowing little to no oversight. According to an internal document from a 2014 meeting, MOST formalized an “Action Team” that began meeting twice a month starting July […]

Civics: When a U.S. citizen heard he was on his own country’s drone target list, he wasn’t sure he believed it. After five near-misses, he does – and is suing the United States to contest his own execution

Matt Taibbi: How to Survive America’s Kill List Bilal Abdul Kareem is an expert in staying alive. Born Darrell Lamont Phelps, he grew up just north of the Bronx in Mount Vernon, New York. He did what lots of kids in his neighborhood were doing in the late Seventies and Eighties: He spent his time […]

Comparing City Street Orientations

Geoff Boeing: We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860  In 1960, one hundred years after Emerson’s quote, Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, his treatise on the legibility of urban patterns. How coherent is a city’s spatial organization? How do these patterns help or hinder […]

Turkey’s ‘Mathematics Village’: Changing education one equation at a time

Jeremie Berlioux: Morning sun rays filter through colourful stained glass windows, shining on a group of teenagers and students in their 20s sitting on wooden benches having breakfast. Near the small Turkish village of Sirince, which sits above the Aegean Sea about 10 kilometres away from the ruins of Turkey’s ancient Greek city Ephesus, this […]

A $24 million New York City program was supposed to prepare more black and Latino men for college. But a new study found it

Alex Zimmerman: With just 10 percent of male students of color graduating “college ready” at the time, city officials hoped to boost that number by giving extra money and support to schools that already made strides getting those students to graduation. With extra resources, the theory went, those same schools might be able to nudge […]

“But more importantly, their parents do not rely on school programming to prepare their children for TJ admissions or any other milestone on their way to top STEM careers.”

Hilde Kahn, via Will Fitzhugh: One of few bright spots in the just-released National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results was an increase in the number of students reaching “advanced” level in both math and reading at the 4th- and 8th-grades. But the results masked large racial and economic disparities. While 30 percent of Asian […]

“Globaloney”

Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven Altman (PDF): Proceeding to country-level results, the ten most glob- ally connected countries in 2015 were (in descending order): the Netherlands, Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the United Arab Emirates. On the depth dimension of the index, which compares countries’ inter- national flows to the […]

Which is the most ideologically diverse American city?

Tyler Cowen: 1. Houston. It still has plenty of Texas conservatives, but enough non-conservatives to elect a lesbian mayor. Mexicans fit along a political spectrum of their own. 2. Washington, D.C. and environs. The intellectual class in this city is about half conservative/Republican/libertarian and always will be — just don’t think too hard about who […]

Stop enrollment fraud? D.C. school officials are often the ones committing it.

Peter Jamison, Emma Brown: Alarming news reached the upper ranks of D.C. Public Schools in spring 2013. In a city where families from Maryland have been known to illegally send their children to the public schools at the expense of District taxpayers, a new perpetrator had been found. She sat in the chancellor’s office. Angela […]

Gloria Reyes wins the one Contested Madison School Board seat.

Karen Rivedal: “Sometimes we get to the point where it’s a detriment in our community because we are so scared of being called racist,” Reyes said. “We have to call that out, get over it and be able to move on as a community to help support all students. And we have to have a […]

Can money attract more minorities into the teaching profession?

Michael Hansen : Many education policymakers and practitioners across the country recognize the need to recruit and retain more racial and ethnic minorities into the teaching profession. As we’ve previously discussed in our ongoing teacher diversity series, there is credible evidence that minority teachers can boost a range of minority student outcomes, yet minorities are […]

Commentary on K-12 Tax, spending and Outcomes: Kansas City and Madison

2018 – Kansas City Star Editorial: Taylor was blunt in linking educational attainment with dollars spent. “The analysis finds a strong, positive relationship between educational outcomes and educational costs,” Taylor concluded. She also said a 1 percentage point increase in graduation rates is associated with a 1.2 percent increase in costs in lower grades and […]

The Looming Capacity Crisis in Computer Science Education

Julia McCandless/a>: Not long ago, computer science was considered a specialized field for a niche industry. Today, things have changed. As technology continues to grow, it has become more necessary for employees to hone computer skills in nearly all industries. This growing demand has experts like Professor Eric Roberts warning of a looming “capacity crisis” […]

Madison students get hands-on experience working on city vehicles

Pamela Cotant: The fleet service high school apprenticeship program was launched this semester at the division’s central repair shop on North First Street. The students, who are paired with automotive technician mentors, are learning how to inspect and repair equipment like police squad cars, parks department pickup trucks, engineering cargo vans and fire department ambulances. […]

A New Zealand City the Size of Berkeley, CA, Has Been Studying Aging for 45 Years. Here’s What They Discovered.

Elysium Health: Some 45 years later, Silva’s project, The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, or the Dunedin Study, has far outpaced his goals, and even his participation. He retired as its director in 2000, but the study is still running, with a stunning 95 percent of its original 1,093 participants from a range of […]

From Disruption to Dystopia: Silicon Valley Envisions the City of the Future

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 […]

13 Baltimore City High Schools, zero students proficient in math

Chris Papst: Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state test scores released this fall. We paged through 16,000 lines of data and uncovered this: Of Baltimore City’s 39 High Schools, 13 had zero students proficient in math. Digging further, we found another six high schools where one percent tested proficient. Add it up – in half the […]

Destroying the city to save the robocar

Brian Sherwood-Jones: Special report Behind the mostly fake “battle” about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for […]

Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories

Sam Anderson: A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat […]

CPS, City Colleges expand coding programs with help from Apple

Ally Marotti: Starting this spring, more Chicago Public Schools students will have a new language to learn: the one spoken by iPhone apps and Apple’s iOS operating system. The tech giant is teaming up with the city to get its coding curriculum into more CPS classrooms and into the City Colleges of Chicago, and area […]

New York City says testing waiver sought by state could lower standards for students with disabilities

Monica Disare: New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia at Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School. New York State wants to allow some students with disabilities to take below-grade-level exams — a plan that special-education advocates opposed and New York City officials questioned, arguing that would […]

Buffalo shows turnaround of urban schools is possible, but it takes a lot more than just money

Amadou Diallo:: Although Say Yes’s allure of free college tuition was immediately obvious in a city where 54 percent of children live in poverty, many initially viewed the program with skepticism. Dedecker, who was instrumental in bringing the program to Buffalo, recalled low expectations at the outset from almost everyone. “One of the most common […]

One-Way Salesman Finds Fast Path Home

Mark Kim: salesman has to visit every major city in the U.S. What is the cheapest way to hit them all exactly once and then return to the headquarters? The computation of the single best answer for what is known as the traveling salesman problem is famously infeasible. Nevertheless, computer scientists have long known how […]

Who runs Alameda, city manager … or the fire union?

Daniel Borenstein: In Alameda, an island community with a long history of strong labor influence, the city manager could lose her job because she resisted political pressure to hire a union leader as fire chief. The people who probably should be removed from City Hall are council members Malia Vella and Jim Oddie, who apparently […]

Civics: Rule of Law Edition – City attorney: Madison Mayor Paul Soglin should have sought approval before removing Confederate monument

Lisa Speckhard Pasque:/a> Two community members weren’t sure Soglin had the authority to order removal of the plaques unilaterally. David Wallner, chair of the Board of Park Commissioners, and Stuart Levitan, chair of the Landmarks Commission, separately contacted the city attorney questioning the legal authority of the move. Because the entire cemetery is designated as […]

The College Try Liz Waite and Kersheral Jessup couldn’t afford a higher education, let alone rent. But they worked and scrounged and slept on couches to put themselves through school. Will their degrees be worth it?

Ashley Powers: “Hey,” the text began. It was from the friend she’d been crashing with for the past few nights. “Would you move back into your godmoms until you find another place?” She sighed. It was just before 8 a.m. one Thursday this spring, and Liz Waite had a million other things she’d rather stress […]

Police use of ‘StingRay’ cellphone tracker requires search warrant, appeals court rules

Tom Jackman A device that tricks cellphones into sending it their location information and has been used quietly by police and federal agents for years, requires a search warrant before it is turned on, an appeals court in Washington ruled Thursday. It is the fourth such ruling by either a state appeals court or federal […]

Artificial intelligence pioneer says we need to start over

Steve LeVine: In 1986, Geoffrey Hinton co-authored a paper that, four decades later, is central to the explosion of artificial intelligence. But Hinton says his breakthrough method should be dispensed with, and a new path to AI found. Speaking with Axios on the sidelines of an AI conference in Toronto on Wednesday, Hinton, a professor […]

Return of the city-state

James Bartlett: If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. By 476 CE it was gone. To the people living […]

Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing?

Tim Harford: But given the huge investment this involved, they were often disappointed with the savings. Until about 1910, plenty of entrepreneurs looked at the new electrical drive system and opted for good old-fashioned steam.  Why? Because to take advantage of electricity, factory owners had to think in a very different way. They could, of course, […]

Creating the honest man

Kai Strittmatter: It is actually very simple, the professor in Beijing says. “There are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. Now imagine a world in which the good ones are rewarded and the bad ones punished”. A world in which those who respect their parents, avoid jaywalking, and pay […]

“No institution in America has done more to perpetuate segregation than public schools”

Peter Cunningham: No institution in America has done more to perpetuate segregation than public schools. Until 1954, segregated schools were legal in America and it was the standard practice in much of the South. Less recognized, but equally pernicious, is the structural segregation all across America, where zoned school systems maintain racial and economic segregation. […]

Are Smartphones Making Us Stupid?

Christopher Bergland: Cognitive capacity and overall brain power are significantly reduced when your smartphone is within glancing distance—even if it’s turned off and face down—according to a recent study. This new report from the University of Texas at Austin, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity,” was published in […]

RFP 15196 – Educational Oversight of City of Milwaukee Charter Schools

City of Milwaukee: For this RFP, the City of Milwaukee is using a Bonfire portal for accepting and evaluating proposals digitally. All required documents are available for download on the Bonfire portal. Your submission must be uploaded, submitted, and finalized prior to the Closing Time of May 30, 2017 at 2:00 PM CST. We strongly […]

Hidden Money: The Outsized Role of Parent Contributions in School Finance

Catherine Brown, Scott Sargrad, and Meg Benner: In 2014, parents of students at Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest Washington, D.C., spent over $470,000 of their own money to support the school’s programs.1 With just under 290 students enrolled for the 2013-14 school year, this means that, in addition to public funding, Horace Mann spent […]

Commentary On New York City’s Elite High Schools

Damon Hewitt: If the administration is truly committed to admitting black and Latino students who deserve to be in specialized high schools, it must find the courage to disrupt the status quo and ask the harder questions. For example, why not ask how the schools could do a better job — not of expanding or […]

Duke Reports a Sexual Assault Rate 5 X as High as Our Most Dangerous City

KC Johnson: Over the last few years, we have become all but immune to what, under any other circumstances, would be a fantastic claim—that one in five female undergraduates will be victims of sexual assault. This rate would translate to several hundreds of thousands of violent crime victims (with almost all of the incidents unnoticed) […]

Edina police ask for whole city’s Google searches, and a judge says yes

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 […]

Three Years of Nights Violence convulses the city after dark. Reporting on it leaves its own scars.

Peter Nickeas: Snow reflected light from dirty yellow streetlamps, casting an industrial glow over the neighborhood. The sky was an eerie shade of lavender. A police officer wanted to know who I was, then told me I’d get a better picture of the body if I circled back through the alley to the other side […]

Fujian School Bans Foreign Shoes to Halt Students’ One-Upmanship

Wang Lianzhang: Foreign shoes were given the boot at a secondary school in eastern China in an effort to cure students of their sneaker fever. According to a February post on Hupu.com, a popular internet forum on sports, a teacher told parents in a group chat message that students would only be allowed to wear […]

L.A. Voter Guide: In Board of Education Races, Follow the Money

Jason McGahan: A reported 81 cents of every dollar contributed to the L.A. city election has been spent on supporting or opposing one candidate or another for school board, according to the L.A. City Ethics Commission. Most of it is coming from backers of public charter schools. So far this year, charter backers are outspending […]

A Hidden Hellscape “I questioned whether I was still in the U.S.”

Stephanie Farr and Sam Wood: But pressure is mounting from a confluence of political, societal, and economic forces to finally clean up this gulch of horrors for good. From a task force convened by the mayor to address the city’s opioid epidemic, to growing development around the site, and an increase in rail traffic, a […]

San Francisco Asks: Where Have All the Children Gone?

Thomas Fuller: In a compact studio apartment on the fringes of the Castro district here a young couple live with their demanding 7-year-old, whom they dote on and take everywhere: a Scottish terrier named Olive. Raising children is on the agenda for Daisy Yeung, a high school science teacher, and Slin Lee, a software engineer. […]

How one education nonprofit is seeking to create a groundswell of parent engagement

Erin Hinrichs: When Rashad Turner stepped down from his leadership role with Black Lives Matter in the city of St. Paul in early September, he pinned his decision on a single point of contention: National leadership of both BLM and the NAACP had recently called for a moratorium on charter schools, a move that he, […]

Madison School District “Capacity Report”

Madison School District Administration (PDF): 1. Most MMSD schools are not over capacity. One elementary school and no middle or high schools had a Third Friday enrollment above their calculated capacity as currently configured. 2. Eighteen of the 32 elementary schools, three of the 12 middle schools, and one of the five high schools had […]

In New York City’s dysfunctional high school admissions system, even ‘unscreened’ schools have tools to sort students

Monica Disare It’s 5 p.m. and the open house for prospective students at Pace High School in Chinatown is just getting underway. As students arrive, they are handed a clipboard with a survey. They scribble away for the first 20 minutes or so, explaining the struggles they have overcome and which components of Pace they […]

Udacity plans to build its own open-source self-driving car

Darrell Etherington: Sebastian Thrun’s online education startup Udacity recently created a self-driving car engineering nanodegree, and on stage at Disrupt today Thrun revealed that the company intends to build its own self-driving car as part of the program, and that it also intends to open source the technology that results, so that “anyone” can try […]

Civics: Printing Money Goes Haywire in Venezuela

Megan McArdle: Venezuela seems to be hovering on the edge of tipping into hyperinflation. Or perhaps it has already fallen into the abyss. Given the paucity of official data — the none-too-believable official figures were last published in February — it’s a little hard to tell. The best guess we have at the value of […]

The 5-year-old needed a hand. She got one at Clear Lake’s library.

Kyrie O’Connor: Buying a 3-D printer was out of the question, of course. “Our next option was to find somebody who had one,” she said. This is where the Clear Lake City-County Freeman Branch Library, and its staff members Jim Johnson and Patrick Ferrell, came in. Ferrell manages the Maker Space at the library, part […]