Florida lawmakers sent Gov. Ron DeSantis a Republican-crafted bill last week to create a new voucher program for students to attend private schools, including religious ones, using taxpayer dollars traditionally spent on public schools.

Florida's governor signed a bill that will allow schools to arm classroom teachers, part of a longer list of school safety changes made after a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last year.

The nation's largest tax-credit scholarship program doesn't seem to have hurt the academics of students who remain in public schools, a new study shows.

Idaho lawmakers were upset to learn that nearly $17 million dedicated to giving teachers in leadership positions and assistants bonuses hasn't been distributed.

Idaho's highest court says teachers are not public figures and a former teacher need not prove that news outlets acted with malice in stories about sexual misconduct.

A superintendent outlines the importance of various groups coming together to address teacher recruitment and retention challenges in Idaho.

If we want to work towards true inclusivity, we must show that perpetuating oppressive beliefs, intentional or not, has a consequence on something or someone other than those oppressed.

Representatives from school districts, state education agencies, and institutions of higher education in Idaho convene to discuss teacher recruitment and retention.

A viral video of Dover, N.H., high school students singing a song about the Ku Klux Klan to the tune of "Jingle Bells" is causing outrage.

A new generation of Iowans are preparing to caucus for the first time. Here's how their teachers are preparing them, and what it says about civics education in 2020.

Impact Academy at Orchard Lake is among a growing number of public schools where teachers have a say in what goes on, from the learning approach to staffing and scheduling.

The Minnesota court of appeals has again rejected a lawsuit alleging that teacher tenure and seniority rights in public schools saddle students of color with ineffective teachers and therefore violate those students' right to an adequate education.

A private-public partnership is moving forward with efforts to recruit and retain teachers by building housing for educators in rural West Virginia.

As Oklahoma teachers prepare for day four of their statewide walkout, here's a guide to the larger picture of teacher protests.

Teachers will receive a 5 percent raise, pending a vote by the state legislature. School will resume Thursday.

The West Virginia Senate trimmed the proposed pay raise for teachers from 5 percent to 4 percent, prompting union officials to declare that the strike will continue indefinitely.

The statewide teacher strike could end today if both chambers of the legislature pass the bill to deliver a 5 percent raise to all school employees.

Teachers across the state will walk out of their classrooms on Tuesday to protest an education bill going through the state legislature.

Lawmakers effectively killed the controversial education bill that had prompted the second statewide strike in two years.

The West Virginia House of Delegates passed its version of a sweeping education omnibus bill, which would allow the state's first charter schools.

A Greenville, Miss. teacher was fired and a superintendent placed on administrative leave after a video of a student being dragged by her hair surfaced on social media.

The Mississippi education department will be the first to operate a teacher residency program, which aims to increase retention and diversity in the profession.

Governors' races in Kentucky and Mississippi took center stage, testing the political muscle of teacher activists and yielding possible policy implications for everything from public employee pensions to teacher pay.

Recruiters already are offering bonuses, free housing, and airfare to entice teachers to their remote districts—and the competition is about to get worse.

The Michigan ruling could be a signal of what's to come after the case on union fees that's currently being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the aftermath of this spring's teacher protests, more educators are running for state office—and the National Education Association is seizing on the political moment.

The state's budget bill, which Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law this week, caps annual raises for end-of-career-teachers, lowering the pension they can receive.

One more teacher was elected to state legislature in a closely contested race.

A union lobbyist who worked just one day as a substitute teacher is entitled to a pension worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars annually, the Illinois supreme court has ruled.

Unless they come to an agreement with the district, Chicago Teachers Union members plan to stop work Oct. 17. And the fight is about more than just pay.

Teachers in the nation's third-largest school system are fighting for salary increases, class-size caps, and a written commitment for more nurses, social workers, and librarians—as well as investments some say are outside the scope of collective bargaining.

In a civics lesson come to life, this Missouri high school government teacher is running for state legislature.

Zhixin Zhou, Ping Li.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1302--1347.

Abstract:
The Chernoff coefficient is known to be an upper bound of Bayes error probability in classification problem. In this paper, we will develop a rate optimal Chernoff bound on the Bayes error probability. The new bound is not only an upper bound but also a lower bound of Bayes error probability up to a constant factor. Moreover, we will apply this result to community detection in the stochastic block models. As a clustering problem, the optimal misclassification rate of community detection problem can be characterized by our rate optimal Chernoff bound. This can be formalized by deriving a minimax error rate over certain parameter space of stochastic block models, then achieving such an error rate by a feasible algorithm employing multiple steps of EM type updates.

The transfer learning technique is widely used to learning in one context and applying it to another, i.e. the capacity to apply acquired knowledge and skills to new situations. But is it possible to transfer the learning from a deep neural network to a weaker neural network? Is it possible to improve the performance of a weak neural network using the knowledge acquired by a more powerful neural network? In this work, during the training process of a weak network, we add a loss function that minimizes the distance between the features previously learned from a strong neural network with the features that the weak network must try to learn. To demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach, we conducted a large number of experiments using three known datasets and demonstrated that a weak neural network can increase its performance if its learning process is driven by a more powerful neural network.

Wei-Kuo Chen.

Source: The Annals of Statistics, Volume 47, Number 5, 2734--2756.

Abstract:
We consider the problem of detecting a deformation from a symmetric Gaussian random $p$-tensor $(pgeq3)$ with a rank-one spike sampled from the Rademacher prior. Recently, in Lesieur et al. (Barbier, Krzakala, Macris, Miolane and Zdeborová (2017)), it was proved that there exists a critical threshold $eta_{p}$ so that when the signal-to-noise ratio exceeds $eta_{p}$, one can distinguish the spiked and unspiked tensors and weakly recover the prior via the minimal mean-square-error method. On the other side, Perry, Wein and Bandeira (Perry, Wein and Bandeira (2017)) proved that there exists a $eta_{p}'<eta_{p}$ such that any statistical hypothesis test cannot distinguish these two tensors, in the sense that their total variation distance asymptotically vanishes, when the signa-to-noise ratio is less than $eta_{p}'$. In this work, we show that $eta_{p}$ is indeed the critical threshold that strictly separates the distinguishability and indistinguishability between the two tensors under the total variation distance. Our approach is based on a subtle analysis of the high temperature behavior of the pure $p$-spin model with Ising spin, arising initially from the field of spin glasses. In particular, we identify the signal-to-noise criticality $eta_{p}$ as the critical temperature, distinguishing the high and low temperature behavior, of the Ising pure $p$-spin mean-field spin glass model.

ACT and the American Federation of Teachers are partnering to provide free resources as educators increasingly switch to distance learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The post ACT and Teachers’ Union Partner to Provide Remote Learning Resources Amid Pandemic appeared first on Market Brief.

Soil is where it all begins. Few people know that soils are a non-renewable resource. It takes over 1000 years to make 1 cm of soil. This means that in our lifetime, all the soil we see is all there is.

For the first time, the indigenous community is allowed to gather the cherished plant on protected land

The National Cherry Blossom Festival has moved online due to the novel coronavirus pandemic

Their coloration is unusual. Their fate, sadly, is not

But the scientists still aren’t sure what the birds are saying

A recent excavation located the first physical evidence of the capital of the Maya kingdom of Sak Tz'i', founded in 750 B.C.

No SARS-CoV-2 infections have yet been detected in our closest living relatives. But there is precedent for viruses jumping from people to other great apes

Matilda McCrear was just 2 when she was captured and brought to Alabama on the "Clotilda"

A treasure trove of new fossils unearthed in Australia reveals some raunchily-positioned bugs