NAEP READING AND MATH
According to data from the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” the nation’s fourth- and eighth-graders continued their steady upward trend in reading and mathematics, posting the highest scores ever on the test. Notably, after remaining flat for the last decade, scores edged up in eighth-grade reading. Also, Hispanic achievement is up since 2011, and higher-achieving students are making greater progress than in recent years. Nevertheless, the increases are modest — American students still score significantly below their peers from high-performing nations — and the majority of achievement gaps have remained unchanged since 2011. Tennessee, the District of Columbia, and the Department of Defense Education Activity showed statistically significant improvement in all four grade/subject combinations. California, Hawaii, and Washington also showed real progress.
Tag: Financial Literacy
Financial Literacy: federal student loan borrowers repayment options
The Department’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) announced an outreach campaign to groups of federal student loan borrowers to ensure they know and understand all their repayment options. The new outreach augments the day-to-day communications provided by borrowers’ student loan servicers. FSA’s campaign is aimed at reducing borrower delinquency and default and improving awareness of income-driven repayment plans, which allow borrowers to repay their student loans on a sliding scale that adjusts their payments based on their income and family size.
· A FSA blog post identifies “Four Things You Need to Know About Repaying Your Student Loans.”
· A FSA blog post addresses “Which Student Loan Repayment Plan Should You Choose?”
Financial Literacy – college rating system: give your public input about rising college costs #valuecollege
COLLEGE RATING SYSTEM
In a Federal Register notice published October 30, the Department announced four public forums across the country to gather public input about President Obama’s proposals to address rising college costs and make college more affordable for American families. The first forum was held at California State University at Dominguez Hills on November 6; future forums will be held at George Mason University (VA) on November 13, the University of Northern Iowa on November 15, and Louisiana State University on November 21. These forums coincide with the Department’s upcoming Request for Information to ask experts to weigh-in on methods for creating a college rating system that would better inform students and encourage institutions to improve. “One of the best ways to address the challenges to our higher education system is through shared input,” Secretary Duncan asserted. “We plan to engage as many stakeholder groups and individuals as possible to help us develop proposals that are useful to students and take into account the diversity of America’s colleges and universities.”
Those who wish to present comments or feedback at a public forum should register by sending a message at least three days prior to the forum to co*************@**.gov. Walk-in registrations will also be accepted for any remaining time slots, on a first-come, first-served basis. Each participant will have five minutes. Transcripts of the forums will be posted on the College Affordability web site. For those unable to attend a forum in person, ideas may be submitted to co*************@**.gov. Also, anyone can join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #valuecollege.
Early next year, the Department will also host a technical symposium where external experts can engage in further discussion and deliberate on these issues in depth. The agency will then publish a summary of the recommendations that were developed as a result of the Request for Information and the symposium, as well as other resources identified by those participating in the symposium, on the College Affordability web site. The Department will use all the feedback it receives to inform the development of college rating metrics, which it will share in the spring for public comment.
Conservatives erase Internet history
Conservatives erase Internet history
By Mark Ballard on November 12, 2013 5:02 PM
The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election. Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics. But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010. It also struck the record of their past speeches off internet engines including Google, which had been a role model for Cameron and Osborne’s “open source politics”. And it erased the official record of their speeches from the Internet Archive, the public record of the net – with an effect as alarming as sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park.
Sometime after 5 October, when Computer Weekly last took a snapshot of a Conservative speech from the Internet Archive, the Tory speech and news archive was eradicated. Conservatives posted a robot blocker on their website, which told search engines and the Internet Archive they were no longer permitted to keep a record of the Conservative Party web archive. The Internet Archive was unavailable for comment. But a fortnight after Computer Weekly started asking its San Francisco HQ for an explanation, the Conservative speeches have begun reappearing on its site. CW had asked the Internet Archive to explain how the historic record of the lead party in the coalition that holds power in the UK could simply be erased. The Conservative Party’s robot blocker forced the Internet Archive to remove the entire record of speeches and news it had collected, in 1,158 snapshots it took of the Conservative website since 8 May 1999.
The Conservative bot blocker listed all the pages barred for public consumption thus (excerpt):
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2000/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2001/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2002/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2003/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2004/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2005/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2006/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2007/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2008/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2009/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/05/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2000/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2001/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2002/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2003/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2004/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2005/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2006/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2007/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2008/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2009/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/05/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2000/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2001/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2002/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2003/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2004/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2005/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2006/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2007/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2008/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2009/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/05/
For pages at these addresses, the Internet Archive reported: “Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt”.
An administrator at the Internet Archive HQ in San Francisco said its guidance for lawyers explained the mechanism. That was that if a website, like Conservatives.com, put up a robot blocker, those pages it blocked would simply be erased from the record as a matter of etiquette. The erasure had the effect of hiding Conservative speeches in a secretive corner of the internet like those that shelter the military, secret services, gangsters and paedophiles. The Conservative Party HQ was unavailable for comment. A spokesman said he had referred the matter to a “website guy”, who was out of the office. It wasn’t always going to be like this. Such as when the prime minister first floated his groovy idea that the democratisation of information would transform politics, at the Google Zeitgeist Europe Conference, on 22 May 2006. “You’ve begun the process of democratising the world’s information,” he told the Googlers. “Democratising is the right word to use because by making more information available to more people, you’re giving them more power. “Above all, the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power – whether it’s government, big business, or the traditional media,” said Cameron, who was then campaigning for power as leader of the Conservative opposition. Cameron was going to make sure the information revolution would hold people like prime ministers to account, he said another speech on 11 October 2007, at the Google Zeitgeist Conference in San Francisco. “It’s clear to me that political leaders will have to learn to let go,” he said then. “Let go of the information that we’ve guarded so jealously.” Transparency would make public officials accountable to the people, said Cameron then. He was riding at the front of the wave that would wash us into a new world, and a new age. Likewise the chancellor, who on delivering his landmark “Open Source Politics” speech at the Royal Society of Arts on 8 March 2007, declared his ambition was “to recast the political settlement for the digital age”. “We need to harness the Internet to help us become more accountable, more transparent and more accessible – and so bridge the gap between government and governed,” said Osborne. “The democratization of access to information… is eroding traditional power and informational imbalances. “No longer is there an asymmetry of information between the individual and the state, or between the layperson and the expert,” said the Chancellor when he was campaigning for election.
If the Conservative Party had moved its speeches and news archive to a more convenient location it had managed to do it in a way that hid it from the search engines. It might before long end up at the Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, which keeps the official Conservative Party archive of really old stuff like speeches from the days before the internet. The robot blocker – a robots.txt file – tells software bots run by sites like Google and the Internet Archive to bog off. The bots grab web pages for the benefit of plebs like those Cameron and Osborne claimed to be speaking for in those years before they were elected. The bots were what made the democratization of information possible. It was bots that inspired Cameron and Osborne. It was bots that were going to free us from serfdom in the way they said we would be. Without the bots you just had pockets of power and privilege for those in the know. Without the bots you just had the same old concentration of wealth and power there had always been, since long before the Internet Archive started taking snapshots of the Conservative website in 1999.