Presidential Campaign Politics 
Welp. It’s almost over.
Via NPR: “What Trump And Clinton Have To Say About Education.”
This seems dumb but you know, it makes for a headline: “ Higher ed split 50–50 on Clinton vs. Trump,” according to Education Dive.
Blah Blah Blah. [Peter Thiel](Tech Billionaire Backing Trump Suggests Silicon Valley Is Out of Touch). Blah Blah Blah.
Via The NYT: “Making Sense of the Two Candidates’ Plans on Student Debt.”
Education Politics 
Via the Roll Call: “Democrats Eye Debt-Free College Push in Next Congress.”
From the press release: “The U.S. Department of Education today launched the EdSim Challenge, a $680,000 competition to design the next-generation of educational simulations that strengthen career and technical skills. The Challenge calls upon the virtual reality, video game developer, and educational technology communities to submit concepts for immersive simulations that will prepare students for the globally competitive workforce of the 21st century.”
Via The Recorder: “Four cities including Boston could face downgrades in their bond ratings if state voters approve an expansion of charter schools, a major credit rating agency suggested this week.” Moody’s says passing the measure would be a “credit negative.”
Education in the Courts 
Via SCOTUSblog: “The most famous goldendoodle in America was outside the Supreme Court today, accompanied by some of his service dog friends. A Michigan school district's refusal to allow Wonder, a trained service dog, to go to school with E.F., a student who was born with cerebral palsy and whose mobility is impaired, was the catalyst for the first oral argument of the day, in Fry v. Napoleon Community Schools.” More on the case from David Perry.
Via The Guardian: “Parliament alone has the power to trigger Brexit by notifying Brussels of the UK’s intention to leave the European Union, the high court has ruled. The judgment, delivered by the lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, is likely to slow the pace of Britain's departure from the EU and is a huge setback for Theresa May, who had insisted the government alone would decide when to trigger the process.”
Via The Wall Street Journal: “A bankruptcy judge on Wednesday temporarily barred regulators from continuing litigation against ITT Educational Services Inc., questioning whether there is any point in calling the defunct school operator to account for alleged fraud.”
A follow-up to something in last week’s news. From the Foundation for Individual’s Rights in Education: “In a decision issued last week in Keefe v. Adams, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit rejected a nursing student’s claim that his free speech and due process rights were violated when his school punished him for his off-campus Facebook posts. The decision strikes a blow to the rights of students in professional-level programs.”
There’s more on court cases in the accreditation and the sports sections below.
Testing, Testing… 
Via EdSource: “Testing company fined in California for second year.” The testing company in question: ETS.
Online Education (The Once and Future “MOOC”) 
“Coursera’s new monthly subscriptions could monetize procrastination,” says Techcrunch. In other words, MOOCs are now gym memberships. You pay because you feel guilty about not being fit.
Babson College has joined edX.
Via Inside Higher Ed: “The Georgia Institute of Technology is expanding its model of low-cost online computer science education to undergraduates. The institute on Tuesday said it has partnered with massive open online course provider edX and McGraw-Hill Education to offer a fully online introductory coding course. Initially, the course will be available to anyone as a MOOC with an optional $99 identity-verified certificate. After piloting the course next spring among its own students, Georgia Tech intends to offer another incentive for completion: college credit.”
Via Edsurge: “Why Udacity and EdX Want to Trademark the Degrees of the Future – and What’s at Stake for Students.”
Via Techcrunch: “IBM Watson and Udacity want developers to learn AI online.”
Education Week has published a series of articles on virtual schools: “Cyber Charters vs. ‘Multi-District Online Schools’.” “Problems With For-Profit Management of Pa. Cybers.” “Outsized Influence: Online Charters Bring Lobbying ‘A’ Game to States.” “A Virtual Mess: Inside Colorado’s Largest Online Charter School.”
Coding Bootcamps (The Once and Future “For-Profit Higher Ed”) 
“Investors are getting jittery about whether the U.S. Department of Education will approve the proposed sale of the Apollo Education Group, owner of the University of Phoenix, to a group of three private equity firms,” Inside Higher Ed reports.
Via eCampusNews: “Trilogy Education Services partners with University of California, Berkeley Extension to launch coding boot camp.”
Via Inside Higher Ed via Wikileaks: “A former adviser to Bill Clinton co-founded a corporate consulting firm that did communications work for Education Management Corporation, a for-profit college chain, as well as a company that does student-loan default-prevention.”
Heritage College, a for-profit chain with ten campuses around the US, is shutting down, effective immediately.
Via Inside Higher Ed: “A private Indian university system planning to expand into the U.S. recently purchased a 170-acre, 11-building campus on Long Island but has canceled plans to acquire two campuses of the for-profit Art Institutes, one in Boston and one in New York City, after the deal came under scrutiny from state regulators in Massachusetts.”
More on the ongoing legal action against ITT in the for-profit higher ed section above.
Meanwhile on Campus 
Racism. The problem Crash failed to solve. More from John Oliver.
Via Inside Higher Ed: “Delta State University, which has been the last public university in Mississippi to fly the state flag, announced Thursday that it would stop doing so.”
“To Prevent Sexual Assault, Do Colleges Target Serial Offenders?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Via IHE: “Trustees at Indiana Tech in Fort Wayne have voted to close the institution’s law school at the end of June 2017.”
Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: CUNY’s Hunter College Violated Title IX, Education Dept. Says
The University of New Mexico has come under fire for spending some $7000 on an (unsuccessful) expedition in search of Bigfoot.
Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “U. of Oregon Censures Professor Who Attended Halloween Party in Blackface.”
Accreditation and Certification 
Via Inside Higher Ed: “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has asked an appeals court to throw out a lower court’s ruling that the federal agency lacks the authority to investigate accreditors’ oversight of for-profit colleges.”
My partner Kin Lane has been tracking on the ways in which tech companies are using certification to promote fields that might not quite be “a thing” yet.
There’s a story on “micromaster’s” in the Betteridge’s Law of Headlines section below, as well as one in the MOOC section above.
Go, School Sports Team! 
Via Inside Higher Ed: “Bringing to an end a five-year investigation into sex offenses involving a former assistant football coach, the U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday that it will fine Pennsylvania State University nearly $2.4 million for failing to comply with federal crime disclosure laws.”
Via The Harvard Crimson: “Harvard has cancelled the men's soccer team's season after an Office of General Counsel review found that the team continued to produce vulgar and explicit documents rating women on their perceived sexual appeal and physical appearance.”
Via The New York Times: “How the University of Alabama Became a National Player.”
From the HR Department 
Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Yale Graduate Students’ ‘Microunit’ Unionization Strategy Could Have Nationwide Implications.”
This Week in Betteridge’s Law of Headlines 
Via eCampus News: “Is higher ed finding its ideal in micro-master’s?”
Upgrades and Downgrades 
“Meet Dot, the new children’s show character inspiring girls to embrace tech,” Mashable coos. Dot is the product of Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark, so I’m sure this idea was forwarded on merit on not on nepotism.
Via Edsurge: “The Case for Learning Engineers in Education.” Hahahahahaha. No. What bullshit. But if you read Edsurge seriously and not ironically, then perhaps you think this is genius.
“Minecraft: Education Edition officially launches,” and Techcrunch has all the press release-ness, as do all the education technology outlets, but I’ll link Techcrunch because at least they’re honest in how they are beholden to this reporting regime.
Via Campus Technology: “Top 10 Education Technologies that Will Be Dead and Gone in the Next Decade.” I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the prediction that print will be “dead and gone” in ten years time is inaccurate.
“Is Your School Toyota or General Motors?” asks Edsurge.
Via eCampus News: “How chatbots will change the face of campus technology.”
“VR’s Higher-Ed Adoption Starts With Student Creation,” insists Edsurge.
Via e-Literate: “Instructure’s Current Market Position.”
Funding and Acquisitions (The Business of Ed-Tech) 
Knowbox has raised $15million from Genesis Capital. The mobile app developer has raised $25.76 million total.
Pi-top has raised $4.3 million from Hambro Perks and Committed Capital. The learn-to-code company has raised $4.34 million total.
CollegeVine has raised $3.1 million from Morningside Technology Ventures and University Ventures. The company, formerly known as Admissions Hero, connects high school students to college mentors.
“Triseum, a Bryan, Texas-based developer of learning games, has closed an additional $2 million in funding led by existing private investors, enabling the company to further build out its products, operations and team. The company did not name the investors.” – all that is from EdWeek’s Market Brief.
Mightifier has raised $250,000 in seed funding from xEdu and Courage Ventures Seed 1 for an app that develops “social emotional skills.”
Shark Tank contestant Brightwheel has acquired MyChild. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is just getting started giving away money – this week the organization awarded $2.25 million to Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation to support professional development,” Edsurge reports. The organization is working with Declara to create a social network for PD. (Declara is funded, in part, by Peter Thiel. (WHAT A SMALL WORLD THAT NO ONE AT EDSURGE COMMENTS UPON)
Data, Privacy, and Surveillance 
Via The Guardian: “ Virtual assistants such as Amazon’s Echo break US child privacy law, experts say.”
Via NPR: “How One University Used Big Data To Boost Graduation Rates.”
Via Inside Higher Ed: “The FBI and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday announced the arrest of a Phoenix-based man who attempted to gain access to more than 2,000 university email accounts at more than 75 colleges and universities.”
Data and “Research” 
Via Inside Higher Ed: “Students are more likely to drop out of college if they lose even small amounts of financial aid – regardless of their grade point average – according to a study from the Education Advisory Board, a research and consulting firm based in Washington.”
Via Education Week: “Tracing Personalized Learning Research Back to the 1970s.”
Via Educause by way of the Center for Digital Education: “Top 10 Higher Ed IT Issues of 2017.”
Via Inside Higher Ed: “STEM Jobs and the ‘Ideal Worker’ Woman.”
Via The New York Times: “For Schoolchildren, Weights Rise Along With Summer Temperatures.”
A response to the NMC report on digital literacies from Lee Skallerup Baines and Autumm Caines.
“Silicon Valley gender gap is widening,” says The USA Today.
Via Inside Higher Ed: “An analysis released today by the Humanities Indicators Project shows how different job patterns are for those with humanities Ph.D.s (where academic work remains the norm) compared to other fields, which except for the arts send the vast majority of Ph.D.s to jobs outside higher education. Not surprisingly given some of the fields that employ nonhumanities Ph.D.s, people with humanities Ph.D.s earn less than Ph.D. recipients in other fields. The new analysis also shows substantial gender gaps in the pay of Ph.D.s across disciplines.”
Via Campus Technology: “Tablet Market Slumps in Third Quarter 2016, Though it’s Better Than Q2.”
Via Inside Higher Ed: “The first audits of the employment data that law schools report about their recent graduates have generated concern among watchdogs, with a series of reviews finding several deficiencies that raise questions about the class of 2015’s reported outcomes.”
Via Quartz: “A new study shows how Star Trek jokes and geek culture make women feel unwelcome in computer science.”
Via NPR: “300 Million Children Are Breathing ’Extremely Toxic’ Air, UNICEF Says.”
Icon credits: The Noun Project