An anonymous reader shares a report: Recent film program graduates of Columbia University who took out federal student loans had a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning their master's degrees, half of the borrowers were making less than $30,000 a year. The Columbia program offers the most extreme example of how elite universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master's degrees that don't provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data. Recent Columbia film alumni had the highest debt compared with earnings among graduates of any major university master's program in the U.S., the Journal found. The New York City university is among the world's most prestigious schools, and its $11.3 billion endowment ranks it the nation's eighth wealthiest private school.

For years, faculty, staff and students have appealed unsuccessfully to administrators to tap that wealth to aid more graduate students, according to current and former faculty and administrators, and dozens of students. Taxpayers will be on the hook for whatever is left unpaid. Lured by the aura of degrees from top-flight institutions, many master's students at universities across the U.S. took on debt beyond what their pay would support, the Journal analysis of federal data on borrowers found. At Columbia, such students graduated from programs including history, social work and architecture. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said the Education Department data in the Journal analysis can't fully assess salary prospects because it covers only earnings and loan repayments two years after graduation. "Nevertheless," he said, "this is not what we want it to be."

At New York University, graduates with a master's degree in publishing borrowed a median $116,000 and had an annual median income of $42,000 two years after the program, the data on recent borrowers show. At Northwestern University, half of those who earned degrees in speech-language pathology borrowed $148,000 or more, and the graduates had a median income of $60,000 two years later. Graduates of the University of Southern California's marriage and family counseling program borrowed a median $124,000 and half earned $50,000 or less over the same period. "NYU is always focused on affordability, and an important part of that is, of course, to help prospective students make informed decisions," said spokesman John Beckman. Northwestern spokeswoman Hilary Hurd Anyaso said the speech-language pathology program is among the best in the world, leading to a "gratifying career path that is in high demand." USC spokeswoman Lauren Bartlett said providing students financial support and employment opportunities was a priority for the school.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The fintech company Greenlight says that its app and debit card for kids is a financial literacy tool that gives parents "superpowers" to set strict controls on their children's spending. Parents can use the app to pay allowances, choose which stores the connected debit cards work at, set spending limits, and receive instant notifications whenever their child makes a purchase. But there's one thing Greenlight makes it very hard for parents to control: What the company does with the mountains of sensitive data it collects about children. Greenlight reserves the right to share that personal information -- including names, birth dates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles -- with "ad and marketing vendors," "insurance companies," "collection agencies," and the catch-all category of "other service providers," according to its privacy policy. Greenlight's policy also says that it can use the data it collects to deliver "tailored content" advertisements, a kind of marketing that youth privacy and education advocates say is particularly manipulative and damaging for children.

The Atlanta-based company told Motherboard that, despite what parents must agree to when they sign up for the app, Greenlight doesn't "monetize or sell customer data in any way." In an email, a company spokesperson said Greenlight inserted those permissions into its privacy policy "in case we ever decide to offer merchant-funded offers to parents in the future based on aggregated and anonymous information." The permissions listed in the policy do not just apply to aggregated and anonymous information, however. They appear under sections titled "Personal Information We Collect and How," "How we Use Personal Information," and "How We Share Personal Information." They also do not only apply to parents, because by signing up for the service, parents must sign away the data rights of their children as well.

A shortage of drivers in the U.S. is propelling prices for Uber and Lyft rides to record highs and pushing the services to rethink how they attract gig workers. From a report: Uber and Lyft are pouring millions of dollars into incentives for drivers to return, a short-term fix that has helped alleviate the scarcity and tempered fare increases in some areas but that has also raised the companies' costs. The labor crunch isn't projected to end anytime soon. Some analysts expect the problem will persist through the third quarter, pressuring Uber and Lyft to deal with shifting dynamics of gig labor that they acknowledge will require long-term solutions.

Executives say the model they built their businesses on -- luring riders with deep discounts and then incentivizing drivers to provide those rides -- can't be the model that sustains them. "This is a moment of deep introspection and reflection for a company like ours to pause and say, 'How do we make the proposition for drivers more attractive longer term?" said Carrol Chang, Uber's chief of driver operations for the U.S. and Canada. "It is absolutely a reckoning," she said. Ms. Chang's team, tasked with managing the shortage for Uber, is in talks to fund education and career-building programs for drivers. Lyft is exploring a new partnership aimed at reducing drivers' expenses, which could involve sizable discounts on gas or insurance or help with buying vehicles, according to a person familiar with its plans. Both companies recently began emailing drivers more insights into earnings opportunities, previously a black box for them.

A Los Angeles summer camp is offering children as young as 5 "a crash course in all things crypto," reports NBC News: In a sign of the bubbling enthusiasm for digital currencies, the Crypto Kids Camp began Monday in a warehouse in a busy port district. Over five days, the camp combines activities that would be common at any summer camp with a crash course in how to think about, buy and even mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies... The camp is part of a trend toward young adults and even children becoming immersed in cryptocurrency through online trading exchanges, school clubs, social media and other outlets. In Georgia, state lawmakers this year considered a bill to require high school students to take a course on personal finance including cryptocurrency...

Children attend the camp for a one-week session where each day they learn about a different emerging technology. Camp founder Najah Roberts has an acronym, BEASTMODE, to keep track of the breadth of material they cover: Blockchain, Evolution of money, Artificial intelligence, Security (cyber), Technology (virtual reality), Mining and machine learning, Online gaming, Drones and Engineering.

Campers this week included children from as far away as Texas and New Jersey, staying with parents in hotel rooms, she said. There's no minimum age to buy or hold an online token such as bitcoin, just as there isn't a minimum age to hold U.S. dollars and cents. Many cryptocurrency exchanges have a minimum age in their terms of service, often 18 years old, and enforce the requirement through banking-style know-your-customer rules, but not all exchanges do....

Eventually they want to encourage public schools to adopt similar programs, not just in Los Angeles but also nationwide. "We want to get it set up to the point where it's in each city," she said.
One 18-year-old said the camp taught them how to build a mining machine from scratch that helped them make $200.

When MIT and Harvard University started edX nearly a decade ago, it was touted as a nonprofit alternative to for-profit online course providers. Today, the universities announced that they are selling edX to one of those for-profit providers for $800 million. From a report: edX had fallen behind rivals like Coursera, a similar platform founded by Stanford University professors, in fundraising and reach, though it still boasts 35 million users and more than 3,000 courses. Leaders of edX cited the pandemic as a factor that led to the sale. "Covid drove an explosion in remote learning, which spurred huge investments into edX's commercial competitors," wrote MIT's president L. Rafael Reif, in an open letter today. "This put edX, as a nonprofit, at a financial disadvantage. This new path recognizes this reality and offers a solution that allows edX to continue to support and maintain the key aspects of its mission."

What happens now is a bit complicated. 2U, a so-called Online Program Management company that helps traditional colleges start and run online degree programs, says it will operate edX as a separate subsidiary that will be structured as a public benefit corporation. That means it will be for profit.

Writing on CNN, an American historian looks at the Supreme Court's recent 8-1 ruling in favor of the free-speech rights of Brandi Levy, who as a 14-year-old cheerleader had posted a photo to Snapchat cursing out her school and its cheerleading program. But the historian also suggests where this ruling came up short: In recent decades the Court has sought to widen public schools' parental and paternalist reach, shrinking the sphere of students' free speech rights... In Levy's case, she was using social media off-campus, outside of school hours, to express a criticism of an extracurricular activity. If her school could control that speech, then there would be very little space left for Levy to express herself.

Yet the Court took too modest an approach to students' rights. The Mahanoy decision was much narrower than the lower court's. The Third Circuit had ruled that the school had no right to interfere with off-campus speech, a decision that would have significantly expanded students' rights. In Mahanoy, the Court ruled that schools may still regulate student speech off-campus, depending on the circumstances (though did not lay out a framework for those circumstances, leaving that to future court decisions)...

[P]ublic schools are more properly (if less creatively) understood as, well, the schools of democracy, where students are taught and guided and given an opportunity to test out the rights of citizenship. Social media have become an integral part of students' public identity — indeed, of many adults' public identity. Students should be taught about the inevitable permanence of ephemeral speech. A Snapchat snap, an Instagram story, a Twitter fleet, all designed to disappear, can easily be made permanent. Levy thought she was making a relatively private, fleeting statement, only to find it memorialized in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

But students should also have more speech protections, be allowed to criticize the institutions in which they spend so much of their time — and be largely free of their school's oversight when they are beyond the schoolhouse gates.

Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, announced his resignation as a trustee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Wednesday, according to a press release. Interesting Engineering reports: Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they were getting divorced in May of 2021. For many, it was an earth-shattering announcement, one that raises a host of questions about the future of their foundation and its quest to end disease worldwide. This latest announcement adds to the growing number of questions about what's in store for the many enterprises currently being managed by the Gates Foundation. The foundation supplies grants to researchers studying polio, nutrition, agriculture, global education, sanitation, HIV, malaria, tobacco control, vaccines, gender inequality...and we're just getting started.

At the age of 90, Buffet has donated $41 billion worth of Berkshire stock to the five foundations. In today's announcement, he added that he has donated an extra $4.1 billion, but he didn't give a reason for his decision. "Today is a milestone for me," Buffett wrote in a statement. "In 2006, I pledged to distribute all of my Berkshire Hathaway shares -- more than 99% of my net worth -- to philanthropy. With today's $4.1 billion distribution, I'm halfway there."

"For years I have been a trustee -- an inactive trustee at that -- of only one recipient of my funds, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMG). I am now resigning from that post, just as I have done at all corporate boards other than Berkshire's," Buffett said. "The CEO of BMG is Mark Suzman, an outstanding recent selection who has my full support. My goals are 100% in sync with those of the foundation, and my physical participation is in no way needed to achieve these goals."

schwit1 shares a report from CNN: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former high school cheerleader who argued that she could not be punished by her public school for posting a profanity-laced caption on Snapchat when she was off school grounds. The case involving a Pennsylvania teenager was closely watched to see how the court would handle the free speech rights of some 50 million public school children and the concerns of schools over off-campus and online speech that could amount to a disruption of the school's mission or rise to the level of bullying or threats.

The 8-1 majority opinion was penned by Justice Stephen Breyer. "It might be tempting to dismiss (the student's) words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary," Breyer wrote. Breyer said that the court has made clear that students "do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression even 'at the school house gate.'" "But," he said, "we have also made clear that courts must apply the First Amendment in light of the special characteristics of the school environment." "The school itself has an interest in protecting a student's unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus. America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy," the opinion read.

Breyer disagreed with the reasoning of a lower court opinion that held that a school could never regulate speech that takes place off campus, but at the same time he declined to set forth what he called "a broad, highly general First Amendment rules stating just what counts as 'off-campus speech." Instead, he allowed that while the cheerleader's post were "crude" they "did not amount to fighting words." He said that while she used "vulgarity" her speech was not "obscene." In addition, her post appeared "outside of school hours from a location outside of school" and they did not target any member of the school community with "abusive" language. He added that she used her own personal cellphone and her audience consisted of a private circle of Snapchat friends. Breyer said "these features of her speech" diminish the school's interest in punishing her. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. He wrote that students like the former cheerleader "who are active in extracurricular programs have a greater potential, by virtue of their participation, to harm those programs." He added: "For example, a profanity-laced screed delivered on social media or at the mall has a much different effect on a football program when done by a regular student than when done by the captain of the football team. So, too, here."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blender is one of the most important open source projects, as the 3D graphics application suite is used by countless people at home, for business, and in education. The software can be used on many platforms, such as Windows, Mac, and of course, Linux. Today, Ubuntu-maker Canonical announces it will offer paid enterprise support for Blender LTS. Surprisingly, this support will not only be for Ubuntu users. Heck, it isn't even limited to Linux installations. Actually, Canonical will offer this support to Blender LTS users on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob writes: The old RAD/content authoring system, ToolBook, appears to be entering the final phase of its EOL process. Sumtotal/Skillsoft (the current owner, under which meaningful development effectively ceased) 'may' refuse software activations after the end of 2021, and does not provide a format-compatible replacement. Similarly, they are halting their support services, and will not allow contracts to be renewed.

This may have significant ramifications for the education/training sector, and I have reason to believe that the body of the work dependent on this software is significantly larger than one might expect out of a wayward VisualBasic competitor from the 90s.

The software, which was offered for sale until relatively recently (I'm unsure of the date of cutoff), has not received an update since 2014, nor a major version update since 2011. As such, I'd like to increase the visibility of this particular EOL, in the hopes that interested parties will take notice and have an opportunity to begin the process of moving their courseware out of this format...

If one has never encountered this software before, it is "interesting", to say the least, as is the history of Asymetrix (one of Paul Allen's ventures) and later Sumtotal Systems, through 90s and early 2000s. If one does not care to look into it, it can be thought of as some sort of bizarro-world amalgam of features from Visual Basic and HyperCard.

Linus Torvalds was "clearly unamused" by a "humanoid conspiracy theory, and also on its discussion in a Linux kernel topic thread," reports Neowin. They add that Torvalds "weighed in quite heavily with some very strong language, mixed with some biology lessons..."

Here's an excerpt from Torvalds' response (as shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm): Please keep your insane and technically incorrect anti-vax comments to yourself.

You don't know what you are talking about, you don't know what mRNA is, and you're spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do so unwittingly, because of bad education. Maybe you do so because you've talked to "experts" or watched youtube videos by charlatans that don't know what they are talking about.

But dammit, regardless of where you have gotten your mis-information from, any Linux kernel discussion list isn't going to have your idiotic drivel pass uncontested from me.

Vaccines have saved the lives of literally tens of millions of people.

Just for your edification in case you are actually willing to be educated: mRNA doesn't change your genetic sequence in any way. It is the exact same intermediate - and temporary - kind of material that your cells generate internally all the time as part of your normal cell processes, and all that the mRNA vaccines do is to add a dose their own specialized sequence that then makes your normal cell machinery generate that spike protein so that your body learns how to recognize it.

The half-life of mRNA is a few hours. Any injected mRNA will be all gone from your body in a day or two. It doesn't change anything long-term, except for that natural "your body now knows how to recognize and fight off a new foreign protein" (which then tends to fade over time too, but lasts a lot longer than a few days). And yes, while your body learns to fight off that foreign material, you may feel like shit for a while. That's normal, and it's your natural response to your cells spending resources on learning how to deal with the new threat.

And of the vaccines, the mRNA ones are the most modern, and the most targeted - exactly because they do *not* need to have any of the other genetic material that you traditionally have in a vaccine (ie no need for basically the whole - if weakened - bacterial or virus genetic material). So the mRNA vaccines actually have *less* of that foreign material in them than traditional vaccines do. And a *lot* less than the very real and actual COVID-19 virus that is spreading in your neighborhood.

Honestly, anybody who has told you differently, and who has told you that it changes your genetic material, is simply uneducated. You need to stop believing the anti-vax lies, and you need to start protecting your family and the people around you. Get vaccinated...

Get vaccinated. Stop believing the anti-vax lies.

And if you insist on believing in the crazy conspiracy theories, at least SHUT THE HELL UP about it on Linux kernel discussion lists.

Dartmouth's Geisel medical school is dropping its investigation into alleged online cheating, the New York Times reports: In March, Dartmouth charged 17 students with cheating based on a review of certain online-activity data on Canvas — a popular learning-management system where professors post assignments and students submit their work — during remote exams. The school quickly dropped seven of the cases after at least two students argued that administrators had mistaken automated Canvas activity for human cheating. Now Dartmouth is also dropping allegations against the remaining 10 students, some of whom faced expulsion, suspension, course failures and misconduct marks on their academic records that could have derailed their medical careers.

"I have decided to dismiss all the honor code charges," Duane Compton, dean of the medical school, said in an email to the Geisel community Wednesday evening, adding that the students' academic records would not be affected. "I have apologized to the students for what they have been through."

Dartmouth's decision to dismiss the charges followed a software review by The New York Times, which found that students' devices could automatically generate Canvas activity data even when no one was using them. Dartmouth's practices were condemned by some alumni along with some faculty at other medical schools.

A Dartmouth spokesman said the school could not comment further on the dropping of the charges for privacy reasons.
"The moral of the current story is clear," argued the Times reporter on Twitter.

"Colleges that use surveillance tech can end up erroneously accusing some of their best students."

In a blog post this morning, Google announced plans to increase its update cadence for Chromebooks. Like Chrome, its operating system will now also follow a four-week Stable channel before moving to the next major milestone release. Android Police reports: Google will deliver fresh features more rapidly to Chromebooks starting with Chrome OS 96 -- all while keeping it stable, secure, and speedy. To adapt to the rigorous update release schedule, Google will skip Chrome OS 95, which will help it bridge the gap between M94 and Chrome's new four-week rollout strategy. Enterprise and education folks can opt enroll in an Extended Stable option for Chromebooks, which will update every 6 months. In light of the new rollout strategy, Google updated its documentation and pushed an update to its release calendar. The company will share plans about the choices Chrome OS administrators will have for milestone updates "in the coming months."

Undergraduate college enrollment fell again this spring, down nearly 5% from a year ago. That means 727,000 fewer students, according to new data from the National Student Clearinghouse. NPR reports: "That's really dramatic," says Doug Shapiro, who leads the clearinghouse's research center. Fall enrollment numbers had indicated things were bad, with a 3.6% undergraduate decline compared with a year earlier, but experts were waiting to see if those students who held off in the fall would enroll in the spring. That didn't appear to happen. "Despite all kinds of hopes and expectations that things would get better, they've only gotten worse in the spring," Shapiro says. "It's really the end of a truly frightening year for higher education. There will be no easy fixes or quick bounce backs."

Overall enrollment in undergraduate and graduate programs has been trending downward since around 2012, and that was true again this spring, which saw a 3.5% decline -- seven times worse than the drop from spring 2019 to spring 2020. The National Student Clearinghouse attributed that decline entirely to undergraduates across all sectors, including for-profit colleges. Community colleges, which often enroll more low-income students and students of color, remained hardest hit by far, making up more than 65% of the total undergraduate enrollment losses this spring. On average, U.S. community colleges saw an enrollment drop of 9.5%, which translates to 476,000 fewer students. [...] Based on her conversations with students, [Heidi Aldes, dean of enrollment management at Minneapolis College, a community college in Minnesota] attributes the enrollment decline to a number of factors, including being online, the "pandemic paralysis" community members felt when COVID-19 first hit, and the financial situations families found themselves in.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: With increased demand from the pandemic, Canalys reports that U.S. PC shipments were up 73% over the same period last year. That added up to a total of 34 million units sold. While Apple had a good quarter with sales up 36%, it was surpassed by HP, which sold 11 million units in total with annual growth up an astonishing 122.6%. As Canalys pointed out, the first quarter tends to be a weaker one for Apple hardware following the holiday season, but it's a big move for HP nonetheless. Other companies boasting big growth numbers include Samsung at 116% and Lenovo at 92.8%. Dell was up 29.2%, fairly modest compared with the rest of the group.

Overall though it was a stunning quarter as units flew off the shelves. Canalys Research Analyst Brian Lynch says some of this can be attributed to the increased demand from 2020 as people moved to work and school from home and needed new machines to get their work done, but regardless the growth was unrivaled historically. " Q1 2021 still rates as one of the best first quarters the industry has ever seen. Vendors have prioritized fulfilling U.S. backlogs before supply issues are addressed in other parts of the world," Lynch said in a statement. Perhaps not surprisingly, low-cost Chromebooks were the most popular item as people looking to refresh their devices, especially for education purposes, turned to the lower end of the PC market, which likely had a negative impact on higher-priced Apple products, as well contributing to its drop from the top spot. According to Canalys, Chromebook sales were up a whopping 548% with Samsung leading that growth with an astonishing 1,963% growth rate. "Asus, HP and Lenovo all reported Chromebook sales rates up over 900%," adds TechCrunch.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation: As people around the world escape poverty, you might expect their energy use to increase. But my research in Nepal, Vietnam, and Zambia found the opposite: lower levels of deprivation were linked to lower levels of energy demand. What is behind this counterintuitive finding? [...] We found that households that do have access to clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food -- that is, those not in extreme poverty -- can use as little as half the energy of the national average in their country. This is important, as it goes directly against the argument that more resources and energy will be needed for people in the global south to escape extreme poverty. The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.

In Zambia, Nepal, and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed -- more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking. But do households with higher incomes and more devices have a better chance of escaping poverty? Some do, but having higher incomes and mobile phones are not either prerequisites or guarantees of having basic needs satisfied. Richer households without access to electricity or sanitation are not spared from having malnourished children or health problems from using charcoal. Ironically, for most households, it is easier to obtain a mobile phone than a clean, nonpolluting fuel for cooking. Therefore, measuring progress via household income leads to an incomplete understanding of poverty and its deprivations.

So what? Are we arguing against the global south using more energy for development? No: instead of focusing on how much energy is used, we are pointing to the importance of collective services (like electricity, indoor sanitation and public transport) for alleviating the multiple deprivations of poverty. In addressing these issues we cannot shy away from asking why so many countries in the global south have such a low capacity to invest in those services. It has to do with the fact that poverty does not just happen: it is created via interlinked systems of wealth extraction such as structural adjustment, or high costs of servicing national debts. Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice. Investing in vital collective services underpins both.

Jeff Bezos will go to space next month when his company, Blue Origin, launches its first passenger-carrying mission. From a report: The 57-year-old, who plans to travel alongside his brother, Mark, made the announcement in an Instagram post Monday. The scheduled launch next month will be about two weeks after the billionaire plans to step down as chief executive officer of Amazon.com. "Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space," Bezos said in the post. "On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend."

Blue Origin is one of several high-profile space-tourism companies backed by a wealthy entrepreneur, alongside Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies and Richard Branson-backed Virgin Galactic Holdings. Both of those companies are making plans to carry paying customers. Blue Origin is auctioning off a seat on its New Shepard rocket for the July 20 flight, an 11-minute trip to suborbital space that will reach an altitude of about 100 kilometers (62 miles). The spot will be the only one available for purchase on the flight, and the proceeds will go to a Blue Origin foundation that promotes math and science education.

An anonymous reader writes: This week the GitHub Yearbook went live, with 6794 "graduates" featured on a special web page showcasing "any student who has graduated, or plans to graduate, in 2021... This includes bootcamps, code camps, high school graduates, Master's graduates, Ph. D. Graduates, etc." (Students were added by submitting a pull request — as long as they'd also signed up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack.) The first 5,000 graduates received "swag," including a custom holographic card with their GitHub stats.

But Saturday sees a special ceremony where these students will "walk" the stage at GitHub Graduation (starting at 9 a.m. PST). "We'll be hearing from special guests, giving out exclusive swag, and highlighting student stories and projects from around the world," explains the event's web page.

Calling it "a day to celebrate our craft, our community, and how technology moves the world forward," a post on GitHub's blog invites viewers "to welcome them to a global community of innovative thinkers and impactful builders." It acknowledges the special challenges of 2021, saying "This year, thousands of students from around the world came together and redefined the world we live in, how we learn, and how we move forward," adding "We are honored to be part of the experience and eager to celebrate this milestone...."

"During a devastating year, these graduates shined a light on what is possible. We saw project after project showcasing not only their skills, but also their passion and perseverance. This class is unstoppable!"

The European Commission will on Thursday propose the introduction of so-called digital wallets that will offer access to a range of services across the EU for the bloc's 450 million citizens, in a further step toward closer integration in the aftermath of the pandemic. From a report: "Under the new rules, European Digital Identity Wallets will be available to everyone," according to a draft of the proposals seen by Bloomberg. The wallets will allow European Union citizens to digitally identify themselves, and store identity data and official documents such as driving licenses, medical prescriptions or education qualifications. Several member states already provide digital forms of identity, so the proposed new app would interact with existing systems while providing EU citizens with the right to a service that is recognized across the bloc. The wallet wouldn't be obligatory.

A plan to reimagine math instruction for 6 million California students has become ensnared in equity and fairness issues -- with critics saying proposed guidelines will hold back gifted students and supporters saying it will, over time, give all kindergartners through 12th-graders a better chance to excel. From a report: The proposed new guidelines aim to accelerate achievement while making mathematical understanding more accessible and valuable to as many students as possible, including those shut out from high-level math in the past because they had been "tracked" in lower level classes. The guidelines call on educators generally to keep all students in the same courses until their junior year in high school, when they can choose advanced subjects, including calculus, statistics and other forms of data science.

Although still a draft, the Mathematics Framework achieved a milestone Wednesday, earning approval from the state's Instructional Quality Commission. The members of that body moved the framework along, approving numerous recommendations that a writing team is expected to incorporate. The commission told writers to remove a document that had become a point of contention for critics. It described its goals as calling out systemic racism in mathematics, while helping educators create more inclusive, successful classrooms. Critics said it needlessly injected race into the study of math. The state Board of Education is scheduled to have the final say in November.