Allie Nicodemo and Lia Petronio:
The deadly school shooting this month in Parkland, Florida, has ignited national outrage and calls for action on gun reform. But while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern.
Madison School Board Seat 1 candidates Anna Moffit and Gloria Reyes kicked off campaign season with a forum on arts education, the first of four discussions scheduled so far.
The forum, held at the Arts and Literature Lab in Madison’s Atwood neighborhood was moderated by Oscar Mireles, Madison’s poet laureate and director of Omega School.
Moffit seeks a second term on the board against challenger Reyes.
Moffit said the district as a whole needs to prioritize the arts across mediums, and called out a lack of spoken word and digital art programs available to students. Moffit said she would defer to educators to determine what mediums the district should focus on.
The next scheduled Madison School Board candidate forum — co-hosted by the Cap Times, Delta Sigma Theta Alumnae, Simpson Street Free Press and Mt. Zion Baptist Church — will take place on March 6 at Mt. Zion, 2019 Fisher St.
I was called a Nazi because of my friendship with the infamous neo-Nazi known on the internet as weev—his given name is Andrew Auernheimer; he helps run the anti-Semitic website The Daily Stormer. In my pacifism, I can’t reject a friendship, even when a friend has taken such a horrifying path. I am not the judge of who is capable of improving as a person. This philosophy also requires me to confront him about his terrible beliefs and their terrible consequences. I have been doing this since before his brief time as a cause célèbre in 2012—I believe it’d be hypocritical for me to turn away from this obligation. weev is just one of many terrible people I’ve cared for in my life. I don’t support what my terrible friend believes or does. But I strongly advocate for people with a good sense of themselves and their values to engage with their terrible friends, coworkers, and relatives, to lovingly confront them for as long as it takes, and it would be wrong to not do so myself. I had what I now see as the advantage of coming from a family of terrible people. This taught me that not everyone worthy of love is worthy of emulation. It also taught me that being given terrible ideas is not a destiny, and that intervention can change lives.
Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool. Engagement is not the one true answer to the societal problems destabilizing America today, but there is no one true answer. The way forward is as multifarious and diverse as America is, and a method of nonviolent confrontation and accountability, arising from my pacifism, is what I can bring to helping my society.
“What is the greatest commandment in the law?
37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Whether gaining a specialized skill, navigating the college application process, or mastering high- level classes or a language, these four La Follette students are a part of key MMSD initiatives designed to help students succeed academically. Cap Times reporter Amber C. Walker shadowed the four over the course of several days throughout the first semester, which ended Jan. 22. The students were recommended by La Follette principal Sean Storch.
For all La Follette students, the semester had its wins — teachers asked tough questions, students stayed up late studying for exams and close bonds flourished. It also had its low points — tempers flared, police were called and student engagement fluctuated. And during the last two weeks of Feburary, La Follette made headlines for physical altercations involving students, and the discovery of a handgun on campus. As the La Follette community and MMSD administrators strategize to find solutions for the small group of students who need more support, these four students work to thrive despite the challenges.
Most Americans think government error is more responsible than a lack of gun control for the Valentine’s Day massacre at a Florida high school.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 54% of American Adults believe the failure of government agencies to respond to numerous warning signs from the prospective killer is more to blame for the mass shooting. Thirty-three percent (33%) attribute the deaths more to a lack of adequate gun control. Eleven percent (11%) opt for something else. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Among Americans who have children of elementary or secondary school age, 61% think the government is more to blame. Just 23% of these adults fault a lack of adequate gun control more.
On February 17, 2009, Barack Obama signed one of the most sweeping federal education reforms in American history. You may not have heard of it. His program was a federal grant, called “Race to the Top,” which was doled out on a competitive basis. If states wanted the money, they needed to implement reforms to their education systems: build methods to assess the growth of students and the success of schools, to recruit and reward effective teachers, and to turn around the lowest-performing schools. The total amount of money in the grants, $4.3 billion, was relatively modest, but because it was being dangled in the midst of a historic recession that cratered state budgets, governors were desperate for the cash and eagerly carried out reforms in order to get it. The result was “a marked surge” in school reform, rooted in studying data and spreading best practices. Among other reforms encouraged by Race to the Top, Washington, D.C., adopted a new teacher contract that raised salaries across the board while adding performance pay, and New York City increased its allotment of public charter schools, to cite just two notable examples.
Why did this historic measure attract so little attention? One reason is that it was tucked into a $787 billion fiscal stimulus bill, which was drafted at a time the global economy was hanging by a thread. Another reason is that, since the policy split both parties, nobody had an incentive to talk about it. Teachers’ unions hated the entire premise of the reforms, which spurred states to adopt policies that gave more money to the most effective teachers and allowed schools to replace the least effective ones. Obama was loath to highlight a policy that aggravated a constituency he needed to motivate Democratic voters, so he rarely mentioned his reforms.
Much more on Race to The Top, here.
If colleges and universities are to compete, they will need to adapt. But they have become bastions of bureaucracy often beholden to donors and state governments, and are therefore unlikely to do so. Even if they did, such adaptation would require continuing to abandon less-profitable areas of scholarship such as the humanities and social sciences, areas once considered synonymous with “higher education.”
That means an even greater focus on business, legal, and research programs that ensure profitability, morphing America’s great educational institutions into little more than white-collar versions of the trade school model. That will truly be the death knell for American higher education as we have come to know it. American colleges and universities may well continue to exist in some form, but they will no longer be the epicenters of broad knowledge that rightly defined them—a demise that, at least in part, is of their own making.
The hallowed halls of America’s once-great education institutions have become little more than intellectually hollow echo chambers, grand structures that serve little purpose outside the parroting of platitudes from romantic yet impractical philosophies that, despite their repeated historical failures, simply will not die. The sober majority has taken notice, and the free market is responding in kind. Soon America’s ivory tower will be just another rubbled ruin proclaiming its past greatness.
The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm.
According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago that purports to predict which people are likely drivers or victims of violence.
The partnership has been extended three times, with the third extension scheduled to expire on February 21st, 2018. The city of New Orleans and Palantir have not responded to questions about the program’s current status.
Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process
I mentioned earlier that public officials carry out the public’s wishes, but only subject to the structural limitations on government power. In America, that begins at the top with our federal and state Constitutions, but also consists of federal limitations placed on states and state limitations placed on municipalities. But those limitations must be more than just paper barriers. The USSR, for example, had a bill of rights giving people even more freedom than we have in America. But there was no enforcement of those rights, so they were worthless.
One of the most precarious problems facing our founders was how to actually ensure that the
limitations they created were enforced. Their solution was the compartmentalization of government
powers, “setting power against power” – division of responsibility not only between the three branches of government, but between the state and federal governments. So unlike Soviet Russia, we have methods of enforcement. But how can people know if those limits are being evaded without access to information about the government? It requires constant vigilance and access to the inner workings of
government to ensure that each portion of government stays in its proper sphere of authority.All of these benefits of transparency help keep the source of government power where it belongs – with the sovereign people. More information leads to more informed voters. More information of abuses leads to people pushing back. My job at WILL is largely to challenge government officials when they are
violating people’s rights at any level. Government transparency is absolutely vital to that pursuit. It often takes government records to identify and prove government misdeeds.
Thanks to business’s growing enthusiasm for older models, she seems to be getting more, not less, successful. She has been on a cereal box, featured in a Beyoncé video and starred in a campaign for Virgin America. Once you have seen her unusual face, you find yourself recognising it in adverts.
Today, she is sitting in a pool of bright winter sunlight on the patio of Next Door, Kimbal’s latest venture, in Longmont, Colorado. It is the day before Thanksgiving and tomorrow 30 members of the Musk family will gather for a meal Kimbal is cooking at his home in nearby Boulder.
He, on the other side of the table, has his mother’s easy smile. After starting two technology companies with Elon – Zip2 and PayPal – in 2004 he became a founding father of the farm-to-table movement. He has built 13 restaurants since then and has more on the way. They specialise in unprocessed, locally sourced foods.
“If I have any gift at all,” Zadie Smith admits in one of the essays in Feel Free, “it’s for dialogue—that trick of breathing what-looks-like-life into a collection of written sentences.” Smith does voices. Sometimes literally: an audio recording of her reading her story “Escape from New York,” includes the treat that is impressions of its three characters, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her fiction, of course, is full of voices, but the rendering of this familiar trio and their escape occupies that fertile gray area somewhere between entirely real and entirely fabricated. It isn’t mimicry, which leads nowhere, but a curious sort of imaginary impersonation, which leads everywhere.
Imaginary impersonation sounds like a purely fictional mode, yet it’s the way she approaches all writing, which brings together “three precarious, uncertain elements: language, the world, the self.” It is these three, she tells us in her introduction, that constitute writing “(for me)”. The parentheses are important because it’s the final category that’s the real kicker. Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity. So it is that instead of a straight “introductory essay for a book of Billie Holiday photos,” Smith writes a bravura monologue, a virtuosic act of ventriloquism. Tellingly, it’s in the second person: Zadie-as-Billie-as-“you”.