Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader sends the above video:

It occurs to me that this isn’t the first time parents like Louis C.K. have been upset about not being able to help their children with their math homework. Remember the New Math movement? Tom Lehrer wrote a song about it. As he sardonically says in the introduction, “The important thing is to understand what you’re doing, not to get the right answer.”

But another reader takes the idea of problem solving more seriously:

I don’t know a whole lot about the Common Core, nor about NCLB. But I am a scientist, so I know that Louis CK is complaining about the form of the questions. No longer is math addition and multiplications, like it was in his school days. No more: 34+98=, 102/3=, or 21×5=.  Currently, questions come as paragraphs full of words with the numerical issue hidden in them. So the current math questions are riddles in words that sometimes barely seem to contain numbers. Before getting to the numerical question, kids needs to decipher the question and reduce it to numbers. This adds a layer of complexity to the problem. It also requires problem solving, a life skill much more important than arithmetic. Incidentally, it is a skill that academics have been screaming for for years to get into pre-academic education.

I have taught basic physics at a university. A major frustration is that most students consider physics a numbers game. Get the formula, find the numbers, punch them into your calculator and tada!: an answer. That is not physics. Academics of all stripes face such oversimplification issues. Science and other complex issues are not simple. In modern society, we need people who can tackle complex problems – be it filling out a tax form, evaluating complex personal relations, getting ahead in your job, or redefining the way (paid) news is brought. We need people who can think critically.

Another is on the same page:

My younger son, who at 8 has been taught under Common Core standards since kindergarten, loves math. He loves all the different techniques they are teaching him and has a deeper understanding of math than his older brother, who was taught to memorize math facts. That I don’t know what he is doing half the time is a feature for him, not a bug.

Also, my Ph.D husband just “took” the NY sixth grade Common Core math test posted online and said it is absolutely the way math should be taught, with multi-step problems that require critical thinking. He was just concerned about how it is scored – in his mind, multi-step problems should be graded for partial credit – and if it was perhaps too much to expect of a sixth grader. But he wasn’t sure. He certainly thought the adults who claim they can’t answer the problems are either lying or were woefully unprepared by their schools.

But another reader is worried about how students with disabilities will fare under the new standards:

I don’t like the insinuation by your reader that merely getting the right answer isn’t enough, and that you have to show your work to show you “understand the math.” For someone who struggled to “do well” in math, even though I was very good at it, this makes my blood boil.

Allow me to explain: My fine motor skills are crippled to the point that I can only write by hand at a very slow speed. I remember taking an extra hour or skipping recess just to complete a paper or test – not because I was verbose, but because it took me that long to just to write the same amount of material. After getting this documented and implemented into an IEP/504 plan, I was able to get some accommodation in all my subjects through use of a word processor … except in math.

Math was hell to me, but not because I had problems doing it. In order to compensate for my disability, I learned the formulas enough to calculate the math in my head and use the space provided as scratch paper. I was thus able to get high SAT scores in math (in the 700 range, pre-2004 tests). But math teachers, very similar to your reader, did not like that. They wanted me to “show my work.” The problem with “showing my work” is that it turns what is supposed to be a 30-minute-long assignment into a 90-minute assignment (or sloppy 45-minute one), and made an hour-long homework assignment two and a half hours long, chewing into other subjects. It also made it very hard to stay focused, which made it difficult to get problems right.

Efforts to accommodate me were often ignored, not least because the math teachers had no idea how to handle a disabled student who was actually good at math, and doing it by computer was obviously out of the question. I was a C student for the most part, except in the two years I had one teacher who did accommodate me, and my first-year calculus course in college, which was taught by a disabled professor.

Common Core tests will be administered by computer, so maybe that will make life easier for a new generation of disabled students. Or maybe that will create new problems; a reader who graduated from high school in 2006 says his experience with proficiency exams left him skeptical:

One day in my 11th-grade AP English class, our teacher had us read a few essays other kids had written for our state assessment exams. We were provided with the definitions of the scoring structure and asked to apply the correct label to each of the four essays. We all easy identified the “needs improvement” and “advanced” essays, but when it came to identifying the “basic” and the “proficient” essay, almost all of us switched the two. Why? Because while both of the essays showed about the same level of comprehension, the “proficient” one was overly complicated in a way that detracted from the content, while the “basic” essay was straight to the point. With these Common Core standards, it looks like the feds and the states are doubling down on useless confusion.

Read the entire discussion thread here.

Alibaba, China’s answer to Amazon, has filed a prospectus (pdf) with the SEC for what might turn out to be the biggest Internet IPO ever:

The real figure is expected to climb to between $15 billion and $20 billion as the company gets closer to its actual sale. If it lands in the upper end of that range, Alibaba could easily eclipse Facebook’s $16 billion, making it the largest Internet IPO in history. The biggest IPO of any type on record was done by the Agricultural Bank of China, which raised $22.1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Whatever valuation Alibaba lands on, the IPO is expected to be a windfall for Yahoo. Marissa Mayer’s company holds a 22.6 percent stake in the Chinese e-commerce platform and plans to sell a chunk of that in the public offering. Depending on Alibaba’s valuation, that deal could hand Yahoo a $10 billion to $15 billion pile of cash.

Nick Bilton looks at just how huge the company is:

As of 2013, it had 231 million active users across its services, including Alibaba.com, a site where small businesses sell goods to companies abroad, and Tmall.com, a site on which Western companies like Apple and Nike market their products. Each active user, according to the company, makes 49 purchases a year. All told, the company said it now processed more than 11 billion orders a year. …

With its scale, Alibaba has generated lots of jobs. At the end of last year, Alibaba said it had 20,884 full-time employees — all of whom were located in China. Facebook, in comparison, has 6,818. As for the value of the company itself, Alibaba is expected to have a share price that could value the company at roughly $200 billion. (Amazon.com is valued at $137 billion; Facebook is valued at $150 billion.)

All the big numbers in Alibaba’s prospectus reveal how much potential there is to grow in China, a market which the company thinks hasn’t been fully tapped yet. Alibaba said that only 618 million people use the Internet in a country of 1.35 billion people. Of those, 302 million shop online. The company also has potential to increase its mobile users; 500 million people are connected to the Internet using mobile devices.

But Bershidsky doubts that Alibaba, whose success in China depends partly on state largesse, will make much headway internationally:

The charming story of English teacher Jack Ma setting up Alibaba in a small apartment must be understood in the context of Beijing’s efforts to help the company thrive and expand. Alibaba’s cloud division, in particular, has benefited from government funding under a special five-year plan to boost cloud-computing development. The division accounted for about 1.4 percent of Alibaba’s revenue in the nine months to Dec. 31.

The Chinese national champions’ business is mainly local. As Ma himself said about eBay more than 10 years ago, “EBay is a shark in the ocean. We are a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we will lose. But if we fight in the river, we will win.”

John Aziz, on the other hand, thinks that Alibaba has great potential even without the hoped-for international reach:

The really exciting thing for Alibaba is that China is still a market where the majority of people don’t even have internet access yet (just 42 percent had it at the end of 2013 compared to 81 percent in the U.S.). China is still rapidly industrializing, and millions of people are still moving from the countryside into the cities, providing a huge amount of room for Alibaba to grow in China.

Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, named the company Alibaba based on his impression that it was a name that could be recognized globally, by people from India, Germany, Japan, China, the United States, and so on. His ambitions have always been global. And Alibaba’s original business model was about connecting manufacturers in China to firms in the West. Whether the obvious love Chinese consumers have for Alibaba’s services can translate to Western consumers remains to be seen. But expect to see much, much more of them in the coming years.

Mona Chalabi puts the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls in grim context:

I’m using GDELT, the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, an enormous catalog “of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world.” There are copious types of “behavior” it records, including protests, deportations, assassinations and kidnappings (technically, events categorized as “abduct, hijack, take hostage”). GDELT is updated daily using thousands of broadcast, print and online news sources in more than 100 languages, and includes events back to 1979.

We were able to extract every Nigerian kidnapping in the database over the past quarter-century — 25,247 in all.

GDELT’s data shows that the number of kidnappings over the past three decades has risen from just two in 1983 to 3,608 in 2013. It’s an increase so large that it’s probably not solely the result of better reporting or the rise in (and online availability of) news reports on the topic.

Maya Shwader points to some other depressing statistics:

Sadly, the exploitation of young girls is not exactly uncommon in Nigeria.

According to Girls Not Brides, 39 percent of girls in Nigeria are married off before their 18th birthday. Sixteen percent are married before they turn 15. Only 23 of Nigeria’s 36 states have adopted the 2003 UN Child Right’s Act, which declares that anyone under the age of 18 is a child. One of the states that failed to ratify the Child Rights Act was Borno, where these girls were kidnapped.

Worse yet: Nigeria has one of the highest numbers of enslaved people in the world: between 670,000 and 740,000 people out of a total population of 168.8 million. For women and girls, and even boys, this often means sexual slavery.

Alexis Okeowo discovers that the Nigerian military may have missed an opportunity to prevent the kidnapping:

[Amnesty International researcher Makmid] Kamara and I each spoke to Chibok residents who said that they had heard Boko Haram was coming to the town up to two hours before the kidnapping. They alerted security officials, but the military only sent more troops several hours after the abduction. “There is a big disconnect between the security personnel and the community. People don’t trust the military to give information to them because they fear that they will be arrested or seen as conspirators or suspects,” Kamara said. “It’s getting increasingly difficult for people to approach the security forces to provide valuable information on planned attacks or things like that.” If and when a Nigerian military operation takes place to recover the girls, observers worry that soldiers will continue to violate the human rights of northeastern Nigerians.

Boko Haram, meanwhile, has carried out a brutal attack on a northern town, exploiting a security gap created by the search for the missing girls:

Around 300 people were killed in a Boko Haram invasion of the northern Nigerian town of Gamboru Ngala in the state of Borno, AFP reports, with a local leader saying the insurgents spent 12 hours killing defenseless citizens with rifles, IEDs, rocket launchers, and more. “The attackers stormed the communities in the night when residents were still sleeping, setting ablaze houses, shops and residents who tried to escaped from the fire, were shot,” said Senator Ahmed Zannah, who is from the area.

Nigerian newspaper Vanguard reports that security forces meant to protect the town were going after the kidnapping victims and “moved to the Lake Chad axis when they received [an] intelligence report that some gunmen were sighted with abducted schoolgirls moving to the area.” That’s when the terror began.

Washington is offering to help with the search, but Alice Speri advises us not to expect too much:

“To be frank it means they’ll send a handful of FBI agents over to advise in hostage negotiations and a potential rescue operation, it’s very unlikely we are launching any US military forces to go do the mission,” Dan O’Shea, a former US Navy SEAL who spent several years working on hostage rescue operations in Iraq, told VICE News. “They are not US citizens, there’s no US equity at stake, to risk US assets. We are paying more lip service than anything else.”

Mashable obtained more details on US involvement:

Department of Defense spokesperson Lt. Col. Myles Caggins told Mashable that the AFRICOM team, part of the larger State Department-led “coordination cell” that will operate at the embassy, will have a planning and coordination role to support the Nigerian government. The military personnel heading to the country will not, he said, physically search for the girls — or the militant Islamist group Boko Haram.

A reader in Nigeria shares his view:

This is a genuinely bad situation, no matter how you look at it, but it deserves a complete portrayal which I think has been largely lost in your coverage.  It is being portrayed, rightly or wrongly, as an issue about women’s rights, slavery, and a war on education in Nigeria; neither of which are fully accurate when you examine this in full context. Nigeria is a relatively modern country where women are roughly as educated as men. Boko Haram may not like Western education, but that doesn’t mean they have any chance of ending it in a country where its people value education in terms that led to a recent comparison to Chinese, Indians, Jews – any more than the ’90s clinic bombers had of ending abortion in America.

This is not a clean-cut issue with a clean-cut solution. It’s about elusive violent Islamic salafi jihadists terrorizing the northern part of Nigeria; a region that is tremendously impoverished and uneducated for historical reasons; a government incapable of fully addressing the issue over the years; a Nigerian population (especially the largely Westernized southerners) that has become somewhat complacent about, and largely detached, emotionally and geographically, from, Boko Haram’s violence, which has mostly occurred in the aforementioned northern part.

The abuse of women (girls in this case) is nauseating and horrific, but this issue does not boil down to a women’s rights issue, education of girls in Nigeria, slavery, or hashtags that paints a very complex situation in simplistic and sensational terms.

Previous Dish on the kidnappings here, here, here, and here.

Derek Thompson relays the findings of a new report (pdf) from the Guttmacher Institute showing that teen pregnancy has become much less common over the past 30 years and that abortions among teens are also on the decline:

Even though increasing proportions of women ages 18 and 19 reported having sex, the smallest portion on record are getting pregnant. “Changes in contraceptive use are likely driving this trend,” write authors Kathryn Kost and Stanley Henshaw. Previous studies have found that media awareness of teen moms, like the eponymous MTV show “Teen Moms,” are also responsible for declining pregnancies, although the 30-year trend suggests that there’s something else (presumably sex education and wider use of contraceptives) besides a new MTV show driving the trend.

Katie McDonough thanks birth control and sex ed:

Reproductive rights advocates echoed the sentiment. “The good news is that we know what works to prevent teen pregnancy. Sex education works. Ensuring that teens have access to birth control works,” Leslie Kantor, Planned Parenthood’s vice president of education, said of the report. “When young people have accurate information and resources, they make responsible decisions.” Someone should alert Bill O’Reilly about this news so that maybe he’ll stop obsessing over Beyoncé already.

But Tara Culp-Ressler notes that most adults think teen pregnancy is on the rise:

Perhaps it seems like things are getting worse because there’s always a new trend that inspires moral panic about teens’ risky sexual behavior — like sexting, “raunchy” pop songs, the college “hook up culture,” and TV shows’ supposed “glamorization” of teen pregnancy. Social conservatives also often raise concerns about the fact that Americans are increasingly having sex and children outside of marriage, equating changing family structures with bad choices. And it doesn’t help that the public health campaigns to discourage teen pregnancy often rely on doom-and-gloom messages to shame teens for making terrible decisions that will ruin their lives.

Ultimately, the fact that more teens are successfully using birth control doesn’t fit into our larger societal narrative that kids are always irresponsible. Americans tend to be reluctant to trust teenagers to manage their own sexual health, and often treat sex as something that’s totally outside kids’ realm of understanding.

David Dayen lays into Jordan Weissmann’s “scare tactics” regarding Seattle’s proposed $15 minimum wage:

Seattle actually sought out studies on what would happen after a large minimum wage increase. In March, Mayor Murray released a report from three professors at UC Berkeley who looked at the impact of local wage laws on employment, and specifically whether businesses move outside local borders for lower labor costs. Simply put, the researchers found no such dynamic.

Matt Taylor also doubts the wage hike will crash the city’s economy:

“What is important is the phase-in period rather than the number,” said Dean Baker, an economist and founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“It’s fair to say if we were going to make it $15 next year I’d be very worried. But if you make it [that] over 7 years, there’s 15 percent inflation or somewhere around there, so in today’s dollars a $15 minimum wage would be something in the order of $12.75 [by the time it takes effect]. Right off the bat that sounds less worrisome. You’re not going to see firms going out of business because of this.” …

So please, let’s not start panicking about endtimes for Seattle and its utopian ideals of economic fairness. It’s necessary to at least pause and consider research that shows minimum wage hikes can have a modest negative affect on overall employment—specifically among teenagers—but as Slate’s $15 wage critic Jordan Weissmann himself points out, that side effect is perfectly acceptable so long as most workers are making out better in the long run. What data is there to suggest that will not be the case for Seattle?

Danny Vinik thinks it’s an important experiment even if it runs the risk of backfiring:

Massachusetts implemented the first non-compulsory minimum-wage law in 1912. Within the next eight years, 12 other states and the District of Columbia had their own minimum wage laws, although the Supreme Court struck down D.C.’s law that set a minimum wage for women and child laborers. In 1938, Congress passed a national minimum wage as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act and it eventually withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

The Massachusetts law could have been a disaster for its citizens, as no one knew for sure how a minimum wage would affect the economy. Instead, it laid the groundwork for a national minimum wage. Seattle’s low-wage workers may ultimately suffer for its $15 minimum wage, as conservatives and even some liberals are predicting. If it succeeds, though, Democrats would have a case for a higher national minimum wage than $10.10. We won’t know unless we try—a scary prospect for Seattle, but exciting for the rest of us.