By Steve Stecklow and Alexandra Harney/Reuters

SHANGHAI/SHELTER ISLAND, New York – Thomas Benson once ran a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Stephen Gessner served as president of the school board for New York’s Shelter Island.
More recently, they’ve been opening doors for Chinese education companies seeking a competitive edge: getting their students direct access to admissions officers at top U.S. universities.
Over the past seven years, Benson and Gessner have worked as consultants for three major Chinese companies. They recruited dozens of U.S. admissions officers to fly to China and meet in person with the companies’ student clients, with the companies picking up most of the travel expenses. Among the schools that participated: Cornell University, the University of Chicago, Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley.
Two companies Benson and Gessner have represented – New Oriental Education & Technology Group and Dipont Education Management Group – offer services to students that go far beyond meet-and-greets with admissions officers.
Eight former and current New Oriental employees and 17 former Dipont employees told Reuters the firms have engaged in college application fraud, including writing application essays and teacher recommendations, and falsifying high school transcripts.

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Posted on December 15, 2016

By Trevor Timm/Freedom of the Press Foundation

In the summer of 2009, less than a year after President Obama took office, one of the first orders of business for the newly empaneled Senate Judiciary Committee was passing a long-stalled federal ‘media shield’ bill, which would finally provide a uniform level of protection to reporters who get subpoenaed to testify against their sources in court.
The bill, which had previously been scuttled by Republican Congress, now had strong support in a Democratic Congress, and seemingly, a newly-elected Democratic president, who had co-sponsored an almost identical bill when he was a senator.
But just as it looked like the bill would sail through Congress and make its way to the president’s desk, it was stopped in its tracks. President Obama suddenly reversed course from his previous position and announced he would oppose the bill if the Senate didn’t carve out a giant national security exception that would make the important protections within it all but meaningless.

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Posted on December 14, 2016

By Deirdre Fulton/Common Dreams

Corporate tax havens around the world are starving countries of billions of dollars needed to tackle poverty and inequality, according to a new report from Oxfam that identifies the 15 nations and territories leading this “global race to the bottom.”
In order of significance, those 15 worst tax havens are: Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore, Ireland, Luxembourg, Curacao, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Bahamas, Jersey, Barbados, Mauritius, and the British Virgin Islands.
They landed on the “world’s worst” list because they employ damaging tax policies “such as zero corporate tax rates, the provision of unfair and unproductive tax incentives, and a lack of cooperation with international processes against tax avoidance (including measures to increase financial transparency),” Oxfam says.
In these countries, big businesses are dodging taxes “on an industrial scale,” forcing governments to reduce public spending or raise taxes on average citizens in order to make up for lost revenues. According to the non-profit, this level of tax dodging costs poor countries at least $100 billion every year.

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Posted on December 13, 2016

By Marybeth Gasman/The Hechinger Report

While giving a talk about Minority Serving Institutions at a higher education forum last fall, I was asked a question pertaining to the lack of faculty of color at many majority institutions, especially more elite institutions.
My response was frank: “The reason we don’t have more faculty of color among college faculty is that we don’t want them. We simply don’t want them.” Those in the audience were surprised by my candor and gave me a round of applause for the honesty.
Given the short amount of time I had on the stage, I couldn’t explain the evidence behind my statement. I will do so here.

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Posted on December 12, 2016

By Les Leopold/Common Dreams

Alarms are ringing from left, right and center over the $7 million grant by the state of Indiana to induce Carrier to keep 800 (not 1,100) jobs from moving to Mexico. (This downward revision comes from the Carrier Steelworkers local union president Chuck Jones, who courageously called Trump out for inflating the numbers. Trump has tweeted back twice to attack Jones, who now is receiving threatening calls from anonymous Trump supporters.)
Conservative pundits, so lost in their free market fictions, claim that Trump is interfering with the pristine operation of this system. He is picking winners and losers! He will ignite a trade war with his reckless tariffs! He will drive up prices of consumer goods! He will destroy more jobs than he will save!

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Posted on December 10, 2016

By Richard Tofel/ProPublica

Far from ending with President-elect Trump’s announcement that he will separate himself from the management of his business empire, the constitutional debate about the meaning of the Emoluments Clause – and whether Trump will be violating it – is likely just beginning.
That’s because the Emoluments Clause seems to bar Trump’s ownership of his business. It has little to do with his management of it. Trump’s recent tweets said he would be “completely out of business operations.”
But unless Trump sells or gives his business to his children before taking office, the Emoluments Clause would almost certainly be violated. Even if he does sell or give it away, any retained residual interest, or any sale payout based on the company’s results, would still give him a stake in its fortunes, again fairly clearly violating the Constitution.

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Posted on December 9, 2016

By Valerie Volcovici/Reuters

Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.
Now, a group of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56 million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told Reuters in exclusive interviews.
The group proposes to put those lands into private ownership – a politically explosive idea that could upend more than a century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as sovereign nations.

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Posted on December 8, 2016

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Just one-third of students rate their school culture positively, according to data released this week by the San Francisco-based nonprofit YouthTruth Student.
The stat wouldn’t make for a good consumer report, but it’s amazing what we can learn when we consider youths’ perspectives.
“Students are the experts on their own experience,” says Sonya Heisters of YouthTruth. “It’s important that education decision-makers, from principals to superintendents, and from education funders to the education secretary, listen to this feedback.”
A positive school climate has been shown to boost academic achievement. So why aren’t there more of these studies?
Unfortunately, school leaders would rather not make any data available than share how students feel they’re treated.

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Posted on December 7, 2016

By Eric Umansky/ProPublica

All the way back in March, Dartmouth political science professor Brendan Nyhan wrote a prescient tweetstorm about how journalists and others should call out Donald Trump’s routine violation of modern norms of democratic discourse.
ProPublica’s Eric Umansky sat down with Nyhan, who is also a contributor to the New York Times’ Upshot, to talk about what journalists should treat as newsworthy now that Trump is about to enter office.
The discussion follows our last podcast, where we talked with Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen about how journalists need to begin imagining the unimaginable.

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Posted on December 6, 2016

By Dorothy Espelage/The Conversation

Over the past two decades, the national media has given considerable attention to disturbing stories of youth suicides that have resulted in part from bullying.
The subject of bullying has also been a plot line in movies such as Bully and in some popular TV shows.
And amidst the greater awareness of the subject, scientists have gained a better understanding of what constitutes bullying, why some youth bully and why others are victimized. There is also a better understanding of the short- and long-term effects of bullying.
However, in spite of all these efforts, intervention programs to reduce bullying have had limited success.

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Posted on December 5, 2016