(National) Education Politics

Via NPR: “In Turkey, Schools Will Stop Teaching Evolution This Fall.”

More on Betsy DeVos’ investment in Neurocore in the upgrade/downgrade section below. More on immigration and education in the immigration section below.

(State and Local) Education Politics

“Daniel Loeb’s Racially Charged Post Could Be Sticking Point for Expansion of Success Academy Charter Schools,” says The Wall Street Journal. Related: a Twitter thread from Leo Casey about the various connections the Success Academy chain has to Trump and his wealth right-wing backers the Mercers.

Via The San Francisco Chronicle: “Mystery of SF schools’ budget persists as new year starts.” Teachers cannot afford to live in San Francisco, and “23 classrooms lacked teachers six days before the students’ return.”

Via Maine Public Radio: “ Do Laptops Help Learning? A Look At The Only Statewide School Laptop Program.” That’s the statewide laptop program in Maine – thanks Seymour! – that current governor Paul LePage is eager to dismantle.

“Over 1k student-issued iPads are unaccounted for” in a school system in West Virginia, The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports.

Immigration and Education

In the UK, “Theresa May under fire as student visa myth exposed,” The Guardian reports. “New data, published by the Office for National Statistics and based on recently created exit checks at Britain’s borders, showed just 4,600 overstayed their visa last year. Estimates for previous years had been close to 100,000.”

Via The Nation: “Trump’s Border Security May Search Your Social Media by ‘Tone’.”

Via Education Week: “Setback for DACA Supporters Places Program’s Fate Squarely in Trump’s Hands.”

“Trump seriously considering ending DACA,” Axios says.

More on court cases surrounding immigration in the section below.

Education in the Courts

Via The New York Times: “Tucson’s Mexican Studies Program Was a Victim of ‘Racial Animus,’ Judge Says.” More via The LA Times.

Via The LA Times: “A lawsuit claims a Pasadena principal threatened to set immigration officers on a mother and a caretaker.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The loan servicer tasked with handling federal loan forgiveness programs overcharged borrowers and prevented them from making qualifying payments that would put them on track for loan forgiveness, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey alleged in a lawsuit filed in Suffolk Superior Court Wednesday.” The company in question: FedLoan Servicing. More from Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy.

Via The AP: “A Pittsburgh-area school with a history of racial tension created a culture of verbal abuse and excessive force that allowed resource officers to shock students with stun guns and body-slam them, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed Wednesday.” The school: Woodland Hills High School.

Testing, Testing…

“What You Should Know About The New Summer SAT,” according to NPR.

Via AL.com: “Alabama State Board of Education (SBOE) member Ella Bell wants to know why we can’t force special needs children into an institution in an effort to help improve test scores in Alabama’s public schools.” Um, because of federal law and students’ civil rights?

Via The New York Times: “Struggling Schools Improve on Test Scores, but Not All Are Safe.”

The Business of Student Loans

“You can now buy $400 pants with a subprime loan,” The Outline notes in an article about Affirm, which also offers private student loans (marketed particularly towards those in coding bootcamps).

More on legal cases involving student loan servers in the courts section above; more on loan forgiveness and for-profits in the for-profit section above; more on student loan companies raising venture capital in the venture capital section below.

The “New” For-Profit Higher Ed

Via Inside Higher Ed: “As Charlotte School of Law officially announces it will shut down, the Department of Education sets out potential options for former students. Those who withdrew from the troubled program before the spring will face a tougher path to discharging federal student loans.”

Inside Higher Ed reviews Law Mart: Justice, Access and For-Profit Law Schools, a new book on for-profit law schools by University of Illinois Springfield professor Riaz Tejani.

Via The New York Times: “As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check.”

More on bootcamps and EQUIP in the “business of job training” section below.

Elsewhere on Campus…

Inside Higher Ed reports on what’s happened to students who attended recent white nationalist / white supremacist rallies. More via Time: “Student Who Attended Charlottesville White Supremacist Rally Leaves Boston University After Backlash.”

Via The Washington Post: “U-Va. to examine campus response to Charlottesville protests.”

“Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Stephen Bannon Are Invited to Speak at UC-Berkeley,” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Penn State has denied white nationalist Richard Spencer’s request to speak on campus.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “How One White Nationalist Became – and Remains – a Thorn in Texas A&M’s Side.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education is tracking Confederate monuments on college campuses.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Duke University on Saturday announced that it had removed a statue of Robert E. Lee from the entrance to the university chapel. On Sunday night, the University of Texas at Austin announced it would remove statues of Lee and three other Confederate leaders from a prominent campus location. And Bowdoin College on Saturday said that it would take down a plaque honoring Jefferson Davis and college alumni who fought for the Confederacy.” More on the statue at Duke via the university’s newspaper.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “UNC Says It Can’t Legally Remove Confederate Statue, Despite Governor’s Guidance.”

Via The Telegraph: “Egyptian academic accused of ‘glorifying Satan’ after teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost.” The scholar in question: Dr Mona Prince, a lecturer at Suez University.

Brandeis University was closed on Wednesday after receiving “emailed threats.”

University of Cincinnati’s servers crashed on the first day of school, The News Record reports.

Via The West Australian: “Mobile devices drive student suspensions.”

Via The Dallas Morning News: “Highland Park ISD parent calls book on poverty ‘socialist, Marxist’.” The book in question, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, is used in an AP English class.

Accreditation and Certification

Via NPR: “Some Liberty University Grads Are Returning Their Diplomas To Protest Trump.”

Seton Hall University announced that it’s now offering a Cybersecurity Certification. It’ll be offered through “New Horizons, a CompTIA Platinum Partner, to custom craft a ‘Boot Camp’ introduction to cybersecurity.” It’s fascinating to see long-time tech training companies like CompTIA rebrand themselves as “bootcamps.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Via The Washington Post: “‘The leading edge of a much larger iceberg’: New Jersey high school disbands football team.”

Via The AP: “A Washington state high school football coach took advantage of his position when he prayed on the field after games, and he’s not entitled to immediately get his job back, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.”

From the HR Department

Via The Washington Post: “Graduate students won right to organize as employees, but that victory is in peril under Trump.”

“80% Of America’s Teachers Are White,” Liz Dwyer reminds us, and “ It’s not just students of color who benefit from a diverse teaching force.”

New York "City Will Move Sidelined Teachers From Limbo to Classrooms," The NYT reports.

The Business of Job Training

Inside Higher Ed notes that the new GI Bill signed by President Trump “includes a $75 million program to let military veterans use federal benefits for technology courses through noncollege providers – another potential challenge to traditional higher ed.” That’s $75 million for EQUIP, which “allows a handful of boot camps and online course providers to be eligible for federal financial aid through partnerships with accredited colleges.”

Via The Eater: “KFC’s New Employee Training Game Is a Virtual Reality Nightmare.”

The New Stack on “Coding in Prison: The Dev Shop at San Quentin.” There’s been a lot of positive press about this program, but little of it asks difficult questions about the use of prison labor. (Instead, it tends to laud the effort simply because it’s coding.) The inmates are paid $16.77 per hour – but that’s not what they actually earn, as the prison takes part of the money to pay for “room and board” among other things.

Via MIT Technology Review: “The Myth of the Skills Gap.”

Via Buzzfeed: “17 Alexa Skills That Don’t Need To Exist.”

This Week in Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

“Can Technology Help Prevent Improper Pell Payments?” asks RealClear Education.

“Is the U.S. Education System Ready for CS for All?” asks Jennifer Wong in Communication of the ACM.

(Reminder: according to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”)

Upgrades and Downgrades

Via Education Week: US Secretary of Education Betsy "DeVos Invested in Company Under Investigation for Misleading Claims.“ The company is Neurocore, which the National Advertising Division has formally recommended to ”stop making a wide range of advertising claims and stop promoting many of its user testimonials."

Edsurge has a puff piece about VIPKID, which announced it had raised a huge amount of money this week: “What’s It Like Tutoring for VIPKID, the Chinese Company That Just Raised $200 Million?” (More details on the funding in the investment section below.) No disclosure in this article that Edsurge shares an investor with VIPKID. And no critical analysis of race, imperialism, labor, and ed-tech either.

From the press release: “Amazon Announces TenMarks Writing – New Online Curriculum for Teachers That Combines Rigor and Fun to Unlock the Writer in Every Student.” Rigor and fun! More details from EdWeek’s Market Brief.

Via Edsurge: “​Open Up Resources Announces First Full Math Curriculum – And Its Plans for Profitability.” Open Up Resources is a non-profit – LOL – whose CEO Larry Singer used to be the managing director for Pearson’s K–12 marketing sales.

Melinda Gates has an op-ed in The Washington Post: “I spent my career in technology. I wasn’t prepared for its effect on my kids.” One might say that this is deeply ironic; but then again, Melinda Gates and her husband’s push for more technology in schools was never about her kids.

Edsurge invites readers to “Meet the 5 Education Technology Startups From Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 Class.” These are: Lambda School, Mystery Science, Nimble, Peergrade, and Py. You can tell a lot about what Silicon Valley imagine the future of education to look like – a business, obviously – based on these investments.

Mindwires Consulting’s Phil Hill writes about the latest from the LMS provider Instructure, noting “culture as a competitive weapon.”

Barnes & Noble partners with Target to take on Amazon. Walmart and Google partner to take on Amazon.

Via Reuters: “LexisNexis, a provider of legal, regulatory and business information, said on Tuesday it had withdrawn two products from the Chinese market in March this year after it was asked to remove some content.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Facing intense criticism for caving to censors, Cambridge University Press restores access to more than 300 journal articles it had blocked in China – but the problem for publishers isn’t going away. Chinese authorities also try to block articles from another journal.”

Robots and Other Ed-Tech SF

Via The AP: “Why AI visionary Andrew Ng teaches humans to teach computers.”

Via Singularity Hub: “Why Education Is the Hardest Sector of the Economy to Automate.” But Singularity Hub does believe it’s possible nonetheless.

“Teaching Robots to Learn Teaches the Students Too,” says Campus Technology.

“A Future of Genetically Engineered Children Is Closer Than You’d Think,” says Mother Jones. Wheeee.

(Venture) Philanthropy and the Business of Ed Reform

Via Bloomberg: Bill "Gates Makes Largest Donation Since 2000 With $5 Billion Gift.“ The ”gift" goes to the Gates Foundation – 64 million Microsoft shares.

Venture Capital and the Business of Ed-Tech

VIPKID has raised $200 million in Series D funding from Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, Sinovation Ventures, and YP Capital. The online tutoring company has raised $325 million total.

Prodigy Finance has raised $40 million in Series C funding from Index Ventures, AlphaCode Club, and Balderton Capital. The student loan provider has raised $52.5 million total.

School Speciality has acquired Triumph Learning.

Privacy, Surveillance, and Information Security

Via the BBC: “Sensor tracks who is driving in your neighbourhood.” This nifty example of racist technology comes from Flock and is backed by Y Combinator.

Via Business Insider: “People are paying $80,000 for ‘family architects’ to fix their kids through 24/7 surveillance.”

Via The Verge: “Transgender YouTubers had their videos grabbed to train facial recognition software.”

Research, “Research,” and Reports

Via Pacific Standard: “A New Report Finds Higher Education Funding Is Still Not Back to Pre-Recession Levels.”

“What If Students Have More Confidence in Growth Mindsets Than Their Teachers?” asks Jack McDermott, marketing director for Panorama Education in Edsurge. (Edsurge and Panorama Education share several investors, although there’s no disclosure of that in this article.)

Via Education Week: “Closing Failing Schools Doesn’t Help Most Students, Study Finds.”

“Oldest Kids In Class Do Better, Even Through College,” says NPR. I was always the youngest. Go me.

Via Education Dive: “Cultivating emotional resilience in teachers improves the classroom for all.”

Via EdWeek’s Market Brief: “The Private School Market Is Overwhelmingly a Small-School Market.”

Via EDUCAUSE: “Trend Watch 2017: Which IT Trends Is Higher Education Responding To?”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Study finds that technology spending spurs gains in colleges’ outputs – but they vary depending on the institution.”

According to “market research,” “VR, AR, 3D Printing and Data Analytics Overtake Visual Tech Market in Education,” Campus Technology predicts.

“AR and VR poised to climb out of the ‘trough of dillusionment’ on Gartner Hype Cycle,” Boing Boing predicts.

Via EdWeek’s Market Brief: “Education Procurement Hits Two-Year High in 2nd Quarter of 2017.”

Via The New York Times: “Even With Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges Than 35 Years Ago.”

“According to the National Retail Federation, 60% of the $29.5 billion spent on back-to-school shopping nationwide will be spent on electronics,” says Education Dive rewriting a press release rewritten by Ed-Tech Magazine.

It’s time for my least favorite “back-to-school” ritual: Beloit College’s “mind-set list.”

Icon credits: The Noun Project

from Hack Education http://ift.tt/2gbjlQz
via IFTTT

Charlottesville and UVA

Hundreds of white supremacists marched at the University of Virginia campus Friday night, carrying torches and chanting “blood and soil.” On Saturday, the Unite the Right rally met again in the streets of Charlottesville. A counter protester was killed when a white nationalist allegedly ran his car into a crowd of people.

President Trump did not condemn the violence of the white supremacists. Instead he blamed “both sides,” later insisting that “very fine people” were marching with the neo-Nazis.

There’s more on white nationalists on campus in the “meanwhile on campus” section below.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “As White Supremacists Wreak Havoc, a University Becomes a Crisis Center.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “As UVa’s Leaders Equivocate, Professors Shine an Ethical Light.”

UVA’s Siva Vaidhyanathan in The New York Times: “Why the Nazis Came to Charlottesville.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “UVa Employee Suffers a Stroke After Campus Clash With White Supremacists.”

Via The LA Times: “Who was responsible for the violence in Charlottesville? Here’s what witnesses say.”

An op-ed in The LA Times: “What UVA did wrong when white supremacists came to campus.”

“Tennessee’s former education commissioner called on Betsy DeVos to resign as the nation’s education chief Thursday because of her boss’s ambivalent response to racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Chalkbeat reports.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ first response – two tweets, inititally – just talked about “hate-filled rhetoric,” but she sent an email to her staff on Thursday that was more forceful. Via Chalkbeat: “In departure from Trump, Betsy DeVos calls out ‘racist bigots’ in Charlottesville.” Her note did not mention Trump. Actions, of course, speak louder than words.

“Nazis in Charlottesville” by UVA’s Daniel Willingham.

Via NPR: “Resources For Educators To Use In The Wake Of Charlottesville.”

“7 Ways Teachers Can Respond to the Evil of Charlottesville, Starting Now” by Xian Franzinger Barrett.

Tune into the Contrafabulists podcast this weekend, when Kin Lane and I will discuss the response (or lack thereof) from the tech industry, including Cloudflare, Spotify, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Google, the EFF, and others.

(Other National) Education Politics

“Transcript of Education Secretary DeVos’ Interview with AP” – via the AP, of course.

“How Did ‘Copyright Piracy’ Language Get Into ESSA, the K–12 Law?” asks Education Week.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “President Trump Wednesday signed an update of the Post–9/11 GI Bill into law after the bipartisan legislation swiftly made it out of both chambers of Congress.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “In a letter sent today to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked for information about the work of senior counsel Robert Eitel to determine if he broke conflict-of-interest laws.” Eitel was an exec at Bridgepoint Education.

Via Pacific Standard: “The Afterlife of Big Ideas in Education Reform.”

More about (US) national education politics and policies in the student loan section and for-profit higher ed sections below.

Meanwhile, in the UK: “Learndirect training contract withdrawn over standards concerns,” the BBC reports. “Learndirect, which offers apprenticeships and adult training at sites across England, is responsible for almost 73,000 trainees and employs more than 1,600 staff.”

(Other State and Local) Education Politics

Via The Buffalo News: “Carl Paladino’s polarizing time on [the Buffalo NY] School Board comes to an end.” “Polarizing” is a nice way of putting it, I suppose.

Via Politico: “Following months of criticism, Eva Moskowitz distances herself from Trump.” Moskowitz is the head of the Success Academy chain of charter schools.

Via the AP: “A new Tennessee law requiring public school districts to provide student data to charter schools faces its first tests with pushback from districts.”

Immigration and Education

“Five Years In, What’s Next For DACA?” asks NPR’s Claudio Sanchez.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Law Professions: ‘No Question’ DACA is Legal.”

Education in the Courts

From a press release issued by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York: “Individual Who Compromised Over 1,000 Email Accounts At A New York City University Pleads Guilty.”

Via The New York Times: “Another Silicon Valley Start-Up Faces Sexual Harassment Claims.” This time, it’s SoFi, a private student loan provider.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Lawsuits From Students Accused of Sex Assault Cost Many Colleges More Than $200,000.”

Testing, Testing…

PARCC Inc, best known as one of the Common Core test-makers, is “moving in a new direction,” Politico reports. The new focus: “classroom tools and services geared toward school districts.”

The Business of Student Loans

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking a proposed settlement against Aequitas Capital Management for assisting Corinthian Colleges with providing private loans to its students.”

The “New” For-Profit Higher Ed

The Charlotte School of Law has closed its doors. Story via Inside Higher Ed.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “U.S. Continues to Delay, Soften Gainful-Employment Rules.”

Via Vice: “Trump’s ‘Forever GI Bill’ won’t stop for-profit schools from preying on vets.”

Via Bloomberg: “This Coding School Wants Graduates to Share Their Income.” That’s the New York Code and Design Academy, which is owned by Strayer Education.

App Academy, another bootcamp that uses income-sharing agreements in lieu of tuition, reportedly announced in an email this week that it would move from a percentage of income – 18% of graduates’ first year salary – to a flat fee: $28,000.

Online Education and the Once and Future “MOOC”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Cumulative Growth in Number of MOOCs, 2011–17.”

Meanwhile (Elsewhere) on Campus…

“White Nationalists Are The New Face Of Campus Free Speech,” says Buzzfeed.

Via The New York Times: “After Charlottesville Violence, Colleges Brace for More Clashes.”

Since the events at UVA last weekend, several universities have declined white nationalists’ requests to hold events on their campuses. These include Michigan State University, University of Florida, Louisiana State University, and Texas A&M.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “When Your Students Attend White Supremacist Rallies.”

Via the Southern Poverty Law Center: “The Alt-Right On Campus: What Students Need To Know.”

Please note correction to my Scientific American column on campus madness re: the violence at Middlebury College. https://t.co/JPO3LY9Omr http://pic.twitter.com/KaZWTTpO6o

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) August 17, 2017

“Have You Experienced or Witnessed a Hate Crime or Bias Incident?” asks Education Week, which has joined the Documenting Hate project.

An interactive from Politico: “Symbols of the Confederacy still dot the South.” This includes some 109 public schools named for Confederate icons. “Of these schools, nearly 25 percent have a student body that is primarily black.”

Via NPR: “Ethnic Studies: A Movement Born Of A Ban.”

Via NPR: “High-Achieving, Low-Income Students: Where Elite Colleges Are Falling Short.”

Via Boing Boing: “School to parents: a $100 donation gets your kids to the front of the lunch line.”

“In some districts, free summer ‘crash courses’ are trying to meet the needs of students who can’t afford to attend traditional pre-K programs,” The Atlantic reports.

Accreditation and Certification

Via Education Week: “Records show five more administrators in an Ohio school district could lose their state educator licenses in connection with an investigation that found student data was falsified to improve district performance ratings.”

Via The Atlantic: “The Onerous, Arbitrary, Unaccountable World of Occupational Licensing.”

From the HR Department

Via The Houston Chronicle: “Texas assistant principal reassigned after writing alt-right kids’ book.”

“The superintendent of one of the nation’s largest online charter schools is retiring amid its court battle with Ohio officials over at least $60 million in disputed funding,” the AP reports. That’s Rick Teeters, head of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

The Business of Job Training

Via Edsurge: “Nonprofit Bootcamps Want to Make Coding Accessible to Low-Income Learners.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Purdue University unveiled another outside-the-box move Thursday, announcing a five-year deal with one of India’s largest technology outsourcing firms, Infosys, under which the university will perform joint research and provide training and classes for the company’s employees.”

Via Techcrunch: “UPS is developing virtual reality tech to train its drivers.”

This Week in Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

“Are pre-K ‘cram courses’ an adequate substitute for full programs?” asks Education Dive.

(Reminder: according to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”)

Upgrades and Downgrades

Me in The Baffler on “How Silicon Valley’s brand of behaviorism has entered the classroom.” Featuring ClassDojo and HeroK12.

Via Edsurge: “Software Helps Instructors Stop Mangling Hard-to-Pronounce Student Names.”

Via The New York Times: “Cambridge University Press Removes Academic Articles on Chinese Site.”

Mindwire Consulting’s Michael Feldstein reports from BbWorld: “Blackboard May Be Turning Around.”

“What Do We Mean When We Say ‘Social And Emotional Skills’?” asks Mindshift.

Robots and Other Ed-Tech SF

Via MIT Technology Review: “Growing Up with Alexa.”

Via The Atlantic: “The Value of Bringing Drones to the Classroom.”

(Venture) Philanthropy and the Business of Ed Reform

the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative AMA on Reddit is going great http://pic.twitter.com/90GKLD52MH

— Dave Gershgorn (@davegershgorn) August 14, 2017

Venture Capital and the Business of Ed-Tech

Zuoyebang, a tutoring app owned by Baidu, has raised $150 million in Series C funding from H Capital, GGV Capital, Legend Capital, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global Mauritius Fund, and Xianghe Capital. The subsidiary has raised $210 million total.

Lightneer has raised $5 million in seed funding from Reach Capital, Brighteye Ventures, GSV Acceleration, and IPR.VC. The educational game-maker has raised $9.04 million total.

Curriculum maker Activate Learning has acquired curriculum maker IT’S ABOUT TIME.

Harris School Solutions has acquired JR3 WebSmart.

“Andrew Ng is raising a $150M AI Fund,” Techcrunch reports.

Privacy, Surveillance, and Information Security

“2017 Data Breaches Hit Half-Year Record High,” says the Identity Theft Resource Center. Breaches in education account for 11% of these.

“Everything’s Bigger in Texas … Including (Maybe) the Data Breaches,” says EdTech Strategies’ Doug Levin.

Via Fox Business: “Texas schools create high-tech ID badges to track students on buses.”

Edsurge on data interoperability.

Via GeekWire: “Alexa goes to college: Amazon and Arizona State putting 1,600 Echo Dots in dorm rooms.” What happens to students’ data here?!

From the Future of Privacy Forum: “Location Controls in iOS 11 Highlight the Role of Platforms.”

Via Go To Hellman: “PubMed Lets Google Track User Searches.”

JISC lauds the “intelligent campus,” and I have to say, touting Chinese universities’ surveillance of students is not really such a great model, folks.

There’s more on information security (or lack thereof) in the courts section above.

Research, “Research,” and Reports

“Surprise, Trump’s Education Ideas Are Polarizing,” says NPR’s Anya Kamenetz, reporting on the latest Education Next poll. Support for charter schools, for example, fell by 12% from last year’s survey. (The poll data.) EdTech Strategies’ Doug Levin says that this year’s poll is “much improved.” More on the survey from Inside Higher Ed and from Politico.

Via Education Week: “Ed-Tech Companies Should Open Algorithms to Scrutiny, Report Suggests.” The report in question – “Asleep at the Switch: Schoolhouse Commercialism, Student Privacy, and the Failure of Policymaking” – comes from the National Education Policy Center.

“Are Small Colleges Doomed? Not So Fast,” says The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Via Crunchbase: “Here Are The Top Schools Among Founders Who Raise Big Dollars.” I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that the top school is Stanford.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Colleges With the Highest Average Pay for Full Professors, 2015–16.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The percentage of student loan borrowers leaving college owing $20,000 or more doubled over about a decade, according to a report released Wednesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”

Via Chalkbeat: “Silicon Valley’s school integration paradox: More black and Hispanic students get to college – and get arrested.”

“Studies Are Usually Bunk, Study Shows,” The Wall Street Journal claims, in an attempt to support the arguments made by fired Google engineer James Damore (and undermine those challenging him).

“Science doesn’t explain tech’s diversity problem – history does” by Sarah Jeong and Rachel Becker.

Icon credits: The Noun Project

from Hack Education http://ift.tt/2v8gQ3p
via IFTTT

(National) Education Politics

The AP interviews US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who laments “she didn’t decry racism enough.”

Via Politico: “New marching orders from Betsy DeVos’ civil rights chief have the Education Department churning through civil rights complaints. The department has closed more than 1,500 complaints of discrimination at the nation’s schools – including dismissing more than 900 outright — in the two months since Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Candice Jackson took steps she said were aimed at reducing a massive backlog.”

Via Education Week: “ESSA Point Man Jason Botel to Leave Education Dept. Post, Sources Say.” Before joining the Trump administration, Botel had founded a KIPP school in Baltimore.

Via Education Week: “E-Rate, Other Universal-Service Funds to Be Transferred to U.S. Treasury.”

Via The New York Times: “Britain Turns to Chinese Textbooks to Improve Its Math Scores.”

(State and Local) Education Politics

Via The New York Times: “Daniel Loeb, a Cuomo Donor, Makes Racial Remark About Black Leader.” Loeb is the chairman of the Success Academy charter school chain.

Via The NY Daily News: “Critics slam $669G contract for former NYC school official’s math program.” That’s Joel Rose’s School of One software.

Via The LA Times: “Former L.A. schools food guru charged with mishandling district funds.” David Binkle, that is, LAUSD’s former food services director.

Via The New York Times: New York governor “Cuomo to Give Colleges $7 Million for Courses in Prisons.”

Chicago Public Schools will lay off 950 employees.

Via The Chicago Sun Times: “Chance the Rapper pushing to #supportCPS.”

Immigration and Education

Via Buzzfeed: “More Chinese Students Are Coming To US High Schools To Get Into American Colleges.”

Via The Intercept: “These Are the Technology Firms Lining Up to Build Trump’s ‘Extreme Vetting’ Program.”

Education in the Courts

Not really ed-tech-related, except for all those companies saying they’re “Uber for education.” Via The New York Times: “Uber Investor Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud.”

Not really ed-tech related, except that Vinod Khosla is a venture capitalist. (His education portfolio.) Via The Mercury News: “Court orders tech billionaire to open up Martins Beach.”

Via Vulture: “LeVar Burton Sued for Using His Reading Rainbow Catchphrase on His Podcast.”

Via The Verge: “Disney sued for allegedly spying on children through 42 gaming apps.”

Via Gamasutra: “Parents take Subway Surfers devs to court over alleged misuse of kids’ data.”

Via The Atlantic: “The JCC Bomb-Threat Suspect Had a Client.” Michael Kadar, who’s been accused of making over two hundred threats to Jewish Community Centers and schools, offered his services online: $30 to email a bomb threat to a school.

Via The Wall Street Journal: “Judge Rejects Bankrupt Woman’s Bid to Cancel $333,423 Student Loan Bill.”

Testing, Testing…

The Chronicle of Higher Education reads “New Venture Will Offer Free Courses That Students Can Take for College Credit.” The courses are for AP exams, which some colleges do count for credit, I suppose and are being offered through Modern States Education Alliance, which is run by Steven Klinsky, a private equity firm.

Via The New York Times: “More Law Schools Begin Accepting GRE Test Results.”

The Business of Student Loans

OpenSecrets.org on how the student loan industry and higher ed institutions spend their lobbying dollars: “The politics behind your college and how you pay for it.”

“Trump’s Student-Loan Plan Could Be A Great Deal For Undergrads,” says Buzzfeed – as long as you’re not poor.

Via The New York Times: “$78,000 of Debt for a Harvard Theater Degree.”

More on student loans in the for-profit higher ed section below and the court section above.

The “New” For-Profit Higher Ed

“Purdue-Kaplan online university one step closer to reality,” the Journal & Courier reports. More via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Via The New York Times: “U.S. to Help Remove Debt Burden for Students Defrauded by For-Profit Chain.” That is, for the 36,000 students who attended Wilfred American Education Corporation’s beauty and secretary schools.

Via The Atlantic: “The Future of a Once-Doomed Law School.” That’s the for-profit Charlotte School of Law, which might be “saved by Trump-era regulatory rollbacks.”

“The Obama administration shut down Globe U, but an affiliated university bought four of its Wisconsin campuses with the backing of the Trump administration and a state regulator with a tough reputation on for-profits,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “2-Pronged Strategy Against ‘Gainful’ Rule.”

Via Reuters: “Some U.S. coding boot camps stumble in a crowded field.”

Online Education and the Once and Future “MOOC”

Via Edsurge: “Andrew Ng, Co-Founder of Coursera, Returns to MOOC Teaching With New AI Course.” More via Wired.

Harvard will offer a new, online business analytics certificate program through 2U. Edsurge has a story about this too – no disclosure that John Katzman, one of the founders of 2U, is an Edsurge investor.

Meanwhile on Campus…

Via the Dallas News: “Self-published ‘Pepe the Frog’ kids’ book is conservative but not alt-right, Denton ISD admin says.” JFC, can you imagine having to send your kid to this principal’s school?!

“Who’s Taking College Spots From Top Asian Americans?” asks ProPublica. “Privileged Whites.”

Chalkbeat on vouchers in Indiana: “Choice for most: In nation’s largest voucher program, $16 million went to schools with anti-LGBT policies.”

The New York Times on “mastery based learning”: “A New Kind of Classroom: No Grades, No Failing, No Hurry.”

Inside Higher Ed profiles career and technical education at Arkansas State University Newport: “Men Flock to Short-Term Career Ed.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The University of Texas at Austin has unveiled Stampede2, said to be the most powerful supercomputer at any campus in the U.S.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Marygrove College to Eliminate All Undergraduate Programs.”

Holy shit. “Iowa State University seeks 7 percent annual tuition hike for each of next 5 years,” The Des Moines Register reports.

Sara Goldrick-Rab recommends professors put a statement about “basic needs security” on their syllabi.

Accreditation and Certification

Via Inside Higher Ed: “$147,000 for a One-Year Master’s? In Journalism?” A master of science in data journalism from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. (Disclosure: I’m heading to the school in a couple of weeks for a Spencer Fellowship, which pays me, thank god.)

“The University of Maine at Presque Isle has created an online, competency-based degree aimed at adult students,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Go, School Sports Team!

An op-ed in The LA Times: “Josh Rosen is right to question the value of student-athletes’ education.” Rosen is UCLA’s quarterback.

Recommended viewing: Last Chance U on Netflix. Season Two was recently released.

Via NPR: “NCAA Will Require Athletes And Coaches To Complete Sexual Violence Education.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Big-Time Sports Programs Tighten Rules on Athletes With Sexual-Assault Records.”

The Google Memo

I’m putting this into its own category. It’s part an HR story, but it’s also a culture of tech story. And if you think it has nothing to do with education, I don’t even know what to say to you.

Via Motherboard: “Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral’.”

Via Wired: “Internal Messages Show Some Googlers Supported Fired Engineer’s Manifesto.”

Via The Guardian’s Julie Carrie Wong: “Segregated Valley: the ugly truth about Google and diversity in tech.”

“A Googler’s Would-Be Manifesto Reveals Tech’s Rotten Core” by Ian Bogost.

Via Gizmodo: “Fired Google Memo Writer Took Part in Controversial, ‘Sexist’ Skit While at Harvard for Which Administration Issued Formal Apology.”

Via Recode: “Google CEO Sundar Pichai canceled an all-hands meeting about gender controversy due to employee worries of online harassment.”

From the HR Department

ISTE has hired Joseph South as its Chief Learning Officer. South previously worked at the US Department of Education and K12 Inc.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s CTO, Brian Pinkerton, is leaving the company.

“​Pearson to Lay Off 3,000 More Employees,” says Edsurge.

The Business of Job Training

Via the Coursera blog: “What’s Next in Employee Learning: Virtual Reality.”

Via The New York Times: “At Walmart Academy, Training Better Managers. But With a Better Future?”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “McDonald’s brings a flexible approach and free career and college advising to its tuition assistance program, which is aimed in part at keeping employees on the job longer.”

“In the push to expand ‘earn-while-you-learn’ programs, what lessons can the U.S. take from approaches in Germany and Switzerland?” asks Inside Higher Ed.

This Week in Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

“Is a Spotify approach the future of curriculum?” asks Education Dive.

“Will blockchain change the face of K–12 record storage and tracking?” asks Education Dive.

“Can Minecraft Camp Help Open Up The Tech World To Low-Income Kids?” asks Mindshift.

(Reminder: according to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”)

Upgrades and Downgrades

Larry Cuban on personalized learning: part 1 and part 2.

Jen Howard on “What Happened to Google’s Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?”

Via Techcrunch: “Sony wants to digitize education records using the blockchain.”

“‘Schoolifying’ Minecraft Without Ruining It” by NPR’s Anya Kamenetz.

The Wall Street Journal predicts “The End of Typing: The Next Billion Mobile Users Will Rely on Video and Voice.” I mean, as long as data isn’t an issue and tech companies can build voice recognition software that recognizes languages other than English and accents other than Californian.

The Internet Archive’s Jason Scott on “Celebrating 30 Years of HyperCard.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education on Elsevier “becoming a data company.”

“The Culture Wars Have Come to Silicon Valley,” The New York Times pronounces, with a look at internal tussles between Facebook board members Peter Thiel and Reed Hastings.

“Peter Thiel Has Been Hedging His Bet On Donald Trump,” Buzzfeed claims.

Phil Hill on an “LMS Revival: D2L picking up new customers and showing they can listen.”

“The Giant Inflatable Trump Chicken of Ed Tech” by Michael Feldstein.

Robots and Other Ed-Tech SF

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “‘Driverless’ Van Turns Out to Be Va. Tech Researcher Costumed as Car Seat.”

(Venture) Philanthropy and the Business of Ed Reform

Wired argues that “Jeff Bezos Should Put His Billions Into Libraries.” It reminded me, not of Carnegie who the article mentions, but of Gates, who initially started funding libraries – public and collective access to digital technologies – before turning to school reform and “personalized learning” efforts.

Venture Capital and the Business of Ed-Tech

Tinkergarten has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding from Owl Ventures, Omidyar Network, and Reach Capital. The company has $8.3 million total.

The private equity firm Thoma Bravo has acquired Frontline Education.

Impero Software has been acquired by Investment Technology Partners which paid $36.3 million.

Barnes & Noble Education has acquired Student Brands, which includes the Cram and StudyMode homework help sites.

I missed this news back in February: Chegg acquired RefMe.

More from EdWeek’s Market Brief on ACT’s investment last week in the venture firm New Markets Venture Partners.

Privacy, Surveillance, and Information Security

NIST has changes its recommendations for passwords.

Via Arkansas Online: “License plate readers at University of Arkansas to be delayed.”

Via Education Week: “Risky Practices With Students’ Data Security Are Common, Survey Suggests.”

Data and “Research”

ProPublica has updated its “Nonprofit Explorer,” which provides financial data on tax-exempt organizations. Khan Academy, for example, had $27.9 million in revenue in 2015, and its executive compensation was $2.8 million.

Via The Verge: “Kik has become ‘the defacto app’ for child predators, according to an investigative report.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Most competency-based education programs remain nascent, highly localized and of limited size, according a new report from Eduventures, Ellucian and the American Council on Education.”

“How Minecraft Supports Social and Emotional Learning in K–12 Education” – a new report from Getting Smart.

Via Campus Technology: “Report: VR and AR to Double Each Year Through 2021.” Yeah, I’ll be watching this prediction.

“There are 2.4 million fewer college students than there were five years ago,” says Hechinger Report, proving a map to visualize the demographic shift.

Via Axios: “Wall Street outpaces Silicon Valley on gender equality.”

Via Campus Technology: “This academic year, the average cost of college students’ required course materials dropped to $579, down from $602 last year and $701 in 2007–2008, according to a new report from the National Association of College Stores.”

The Pew Research Center on the future of trust online.

Via The New York Times: “A Few Telling Freshman Trends.”

A report from The Century Foundation on outsourcing and ed-tech: “The Private Side of Public Higher Education.” (Here’s IHE’s coverage.)

Icon credits: The Noun Project

from Hack Education http://ift.tt/2vN2B8D
via IFTTT