Teachers receive emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

Teachers receive emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

White Plains teachers flooded with emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

Hours after Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that public employees do not have to pay union fees if they don’t join their labor organization, teachers in the White Plains school district began receiving emails advising them how to opt out of the union.

The emails were sent by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a conservative nonprofit that has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations in recent years from the foundation started by U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her husband.

Mark Stanton, a calculus teacher at White Plains High School, grew up in Michigan and immediately recognized the Mackinac name and its connection to the DeVoses, who are also from that state.

“I was surprised by the speed at which that arrived,” Stanton said. “It’s clearly part of a very obvious, broad effort to chip away at teachers unions, public unions.”

Lindsay Killen, vice president for strategic outreach and communications at the Mackinac Center, said the purpose of the emails and other materials — as part of a $10 million campaign the organization is launching for the rest of the year on this issue — is to educate public employees on the court decision.

“The goal is that every public employee across the country will know and understand what their rights are,” Killen said. “We are reaching out to all public employees Continue reading: Teachers receive emails from DeVos-funded Mackinac org post-Janus

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR

More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer

Here's a little pop quiz.

Multiple-choice tests are useful because:

A: They're cheap to score.

B: They can be scored quickly.

C: They score without human bias.

D: All of the above.

It would take a computer about a nano-second to mark "D" as the correct answer. That's easy.

But now, machines are also grading students' essays. Computers are scoring long form answers on anything from the fall of the Roman Empire, to the pros and cons of government regulations.

Developers of so-called "robo-graders" say they understand why many students and teachers would be skeptical of the idea. But they insist, with computers already doing jobs as complicated and as fraught as driving cars, detecting cancer, and carrying on conversations, they can certainly handle grading students' essays.

"I've been working on this now for about 25 years, and I feel that ... the time is right and it's really starting to be used now," says Peter Foltz, a research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He's also vice president for research for Pearson, the company whose automated scoring program graded some 34 million student essays on state and national high-stakes tests last year. "There will always be people who don't trust it ... but we're seeing a lot more breakthroughs in areas like content understanding, and AI is now able to do things which they couldn't do really well before."

Foltz says computers "learn" what's considered good writing by analyzing essays graded by humans. Then, the automated programs score essays themselves by scanning for those same features.

"We have artificial intelligence techniques which can judge anywhere from 50 to 100 features," Foltz says. That includes not only basics like spelling and grammar, but also whether a student is on topic, the coherence or the flow of an argument, and the complexity of word choice and sentence structure. "We've done a number of studies to show that the scoring can be highly accurate," he says.

To demonstrate, he takes a not-so-stellar sample essay, rife with spelling mistakes and Continue reading: More States Opting To 'Robo-Grade' Student Essays By Computer : NPR

The Fraud of Computer Scoring on the Common Core Exams - Network For Public Education - https://wp.me/s3bR9v-6488 via @Network4pubEd

Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think

How Private Prisons Take Tax Dollars Away from Fixing Our Criminal Justice System – In the Public Interest - https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/?p=6994

Buried under all the bad news this week was a glimmer of progress. No, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win in New York’s 14th Congressional District — that’s way more than a glimmer. I’m talking about the order from a California judge to reunite separated undocumented immigrant families within 30 days.

Who knows whether and how the Trump administration will implement the order? But one thing’s for sure: if Trump continues to criminalize immigration, the need for detention space will continue to grow.

That’s music to the ears of the private prison industry, particularly CoreCivic and GEO Group, two publicly traded corporations that currently detain over two-thirds of undocumented immigrants. It’s music to their investors too — both have seen their stocks skyrocket in recent weeks.

Because this is what they’ve been waiting for. As we document in a new report, CoreCivic and GEO Group both have been getting in the game of offering loans to governments to build jails, prisons, and detention centers. Both have turned private equity financing, also known as “public-private partnerships,” into a central growth strategy after they became Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in 2013. In other words, private prison corporations want to be landlords.

Why? Because REIT status allows them to dodge corporate-level taxation. Last year alone, GEO Group avoided almost $44 million in taxes.

So here comes the federal government desperate for more cages to lock up undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security is considering adding space for 15,000 more adults and children in family detention centers. The agency already hired GEO Group in 2017 to finance, design, build, operate, and maintain a new 1,000-bed adult detention facility in Texas, which is expected to be up and running later this year.

All of this has the corporations salivating. A couple weeks ago, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told his company’s investors, this is “the most robust kind of sales environment we’ve seen in probably 10 years, not only on the federal side with the dynamics with ICE and [U.S.] Marshals, but also with these activities on the state side.”

GEO Group and CoreCivic now stand more ready than ever to, as they describe it, “partner” with the Trump administration and “understand and Continue reading: Private prison corporations could cash in on Trump’s immigration policy even more than you think