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Fraternity Hazing

Caitlin Flanagan’s harrowing Atlantic piece on the death of the Penn State student Tim Piazza at a fraternity hazing underscored the high stakes of debates around fraternity safety and drinking culture. This graph from The Economist provides a history of hazing deaths at U.S. universities.

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Sexual Violence in Schools

Courtesy of The74

College sexual-assault issues have been at the forefront of the national conversation this year. But the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has also seen a surge in sexual-violence complaints at K-12 schools, where administrators are often ill-equipped to handle such cases. (Hover over each bar in the graph to see specific amounts of complaints in K-12 and higher ed.)

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Political Polarization at College

Colleges have long been hotbeds for political fervor, but this year political divisions on campus seemed to reach new heights. A national survey of college freshmen across the U.S. found that these students were more politically polarized in 2017 than they have been in the last 51 years. Roughly 36 percent of students aligned themselves with liberal or far-left ideology, while about 22 percent identified as conservative or far right. There was also a significant gender chasm—roughly 41 percent of women identified as liberal or far left compared to 29 percent of men, the largest gender divide since 1966 when the survey was first administered.

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Partisan Disdain for Higher Education

For the first time since 2010, a majority of Republicans say colleges & universities have a negative impact on U.S. https://t.co/vN5Vl3O61m pic.twitter.com/TUU35FWuIf — Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) July 10, 2017

This past year saw a sharp rise in Republican distrust of higher education, with some contending that a backlash against campus identity politics or a less-educated Republican demographic is to blame. The Atlantic’s David Graham argued that whatever the cause, the effects of this trend could be significant: “If more than a third of the country, and six in 10 Republicans, think that institutions of higher education are harming the country, it’s hard to imagine that won’t eventually result in larger drops in enrollment.”

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School Segregation

Thirty states currently have policies that allow communities to secede from their school districts. These moves often exacerbate the segregation of schools on the basis of race and socioeconomic status. This map from an EdBuild report on school-district secessions offers a breakdown of 71 communities that have tried to secede from their school districts since 2000.

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School Performance

Many Americans are pessimistic about the country’s school systems, but recent data paints a new, more hopeful picture of some districts’ abilities to overcome challenges. The data, based on around 300 million elementary-school test scores from over 11,000 school districts, challenge assumptions about how and why schools succeed. In Chicago, for example, students were found to learn faster than in most other school systems in the U.S., despite the institutional and socioeconomic obstacles the Chicago school system faces. The interactive version of this graphic is available at the New York Times article here.