If institutions of higher learning want to maintain their tax-favored status, they should abolish legacy preferences. If they don’t—if they go on practicing white people’s affirmative action—they deserve to be knocked off the comfortable perch on which they now sit.

... I left this comment

I’m sympathetic to the overall sentiment, but I’m always worried when an organization’s activities are judged against an arbitrary measure of “nonprofitness”. The strength of the sector—hard fought over 150 years of legislation and case law—is the breadth of allowable activity. The danger of reform is codifying subjective and contemporary distaste as unlawful behavior, thus limiting the ability of truly transformative organizations to form or function. How might Howard University, for example, find egalitarian social benefit in favoring legacy students?

When an organization’s status as a “nonprofit” is the basis for allegations of hypocrisy I find that the outcome usually furthers the goals of those who wish to do away with the nonprofit sector by doing away with taxes entirely (and by extension their social and redistributive benefits). Which is not to dismiss all nonprofit reform (I am quite in support of transparency and reporting), but the real issue here is not “How can we get more poor kids into Harvard?” but “Harvard should not be your only or best option.”

And I agree with the response I received back from the Nonprofiteer---which goes to the strength of dialogue as tool for navigating between two extremes:

Fair point–and I may have overstated my own (so new?). I certainly am not part of the group you describe which opposes taxes–far from it. But the nonprofit community has long regarded itself as above criticism, and I think the portions of it which foster inequality should be called to account. Perhaps depriving those institutions of their nonprofit status is using a sledgehammer where a scalpel would be preferable–I’m certainly open to that possibility. But that there is an ailment to be addressed strikes me as indisputable.

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From the community created and curated http://olpcmap.net :

This second map was launched at OLPC San Francisco Community Summit. Marina Zd collected some good pictures of the other maps being created there:

I was invited to attend the summit because of my experience in organizing community events like the Grassroots Uses of Technology Conference. Bottoms-up, participatory and community-centric planning is not a core competency of OLPC (to put it gently), and I was asked to advise on how to better recognize, support and grow the existing—but poorly-connected—communities that are part of the broader OLPC ecosystem. This meant more prosaic things like making sure every session has a volunteer notetaker, but then that’s the kind of thing that helps build a participatory community. Just look at everyone who has added themselves to the map.

But not to  rip on that report either, since it verifies a lot of anecdotes about the impact of OLPC deployments:

Teachers in Ethiopia praised the ease in which they were able to adapt the XO to their existing curricula and its complimentary nature to their lesson plans. They noted that the introduction of the XO forced them to outline a daily schedule and their class objectives each morning, facilitating more effective planning and a more productive day in school. Teachers in the Solomon Islands repeatedly mention how the XO helps them to record children’s activities, monitor their progress, and track their assignments. In Haiti, most teachers noted in their interviews that it was much easier to edit their students’ work on the XO laptop and as such they were able to spend more time working one-on-one with students and less time lecturing.

.…

Increased specialized attention, motivation and enthusiasm for learning, and confidence in children’s futures as a result of skills and knowledge building are huge components in building child confidence and drastically improving attendance, thereby decreasing dropout rates in the long-run, and producing a more well-educated society. Similar overwhelmingly positive statements about child confidence and the feelings of being “special” and worthwhile as a result of the introduction of laptops into the community for the children are found in reports from Alabama in the United States all the way to remote indigenous communities in Western Australia.

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Roy Alexander, creator of the 3-D Periodic Table, recently commented on my blog since I had posted previously about his unique construction. Below is from his “The Argument for 3-D Periodic Table” (emphasis original):

The theory of multiple intelligences has grabbed the attention of many educators around the country, and hundreds of schools are currently using its philosophy to apply to the various student learning styles.

Students generally fall into more than one of Gardner’s multiple intelligences. Those other than word-, number-, and reasoning-smart may deliberately avoid or fail at the ordinary academics. Teachers, most of them of the above intelligences, may have difficulty perceiving the needs of the others. It is important to address all the students, in Chemistry as in other school subjects.

All students have some of all the intelligences, most leaning more toward one or several. A 3-D model of the periodic table touches on some of the intelligences often ignored, as well as addressing students capable of critical thinking. The periodic table is introduced at the beginning of chemistry, and so is of great importance.

The construction of the 3-D model, an interactive and kinesthetic activity, has the student physically handle specific segments of the table, and deliberately place them in their correct locations relative to all the other parts, helping them to learn the names of the segments and see how obvious and logical the periods are.

The naturalist in students can identify the dimensionality of the periodic table with all other parts of nature — which are all also three dimensional. This association removes the table from the purely abstract to represent, as it informationally does, all of reality.

In a classroom session, the common experience of all to make their own periodic table (and to have it for themselves — perhaps to show to parents, siblings, etc. …and have to then explain something about it) provides, initially, an interpersonal experience with classmates, and then a sense (and reality) of ownership. The flat tables will always be there for quick and easy reference, but the foundation for that table, will be solid — literally.

The pictured 3-D models used in the introduction to chemistry, promote quick and easy familiarity with the periodic table for the new student.

Students characterized by the first of Gardner’s three intelligences; ” Linguistic (“word smart”), Logical-mathematical (“number/reasoning smart”), and Spatial intelligence (“picture smart”), can have the speed and clarity of their understanding of the flat table in universal use enhanced by enlisting other parts of their own intelligences.

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Portrayal of labors struggles as senseless, avoidable contests created by unions’ unwillingness to negotiate in good faith,

Focus on Company wage “offers” omitting or underplaying reference to takebacks, and employee grievances, making the workers appear irrational, greedy and self-destructive

No coverage given to management salaries, bonuses or compensation and how they are inconsistent with concessions demanded by workers

Emphasis on the impact rather than the causes of strikes, laying the blame for the strike totally on the union and detailing the damage the strike does to the economy and public weal.

Failure to consider the harm caused to the workers’ interests if they were to give up the strike

Unwillingness or inability to cover stories of union solidarity and mutual support

Portrayal of the government (including the courts and police) as a neutral arbiter upholding the public interests when it is rather protecting corporate properties and bodyguarding strike-breakers.

To that, I would add “Failure to recognize Union benefits/protections as an aspiration for all workers, not spoils for the few”. The interview I was listening to (and what got me steamed) kept dismissively coming back to “Why should unions demand protections from arbitrary and capricious management? No one else expects that.” Which made me keep saying back “Well why the fuck not?”

Also, just in general, I get annoyed when the union workers aren’t placed within the context of the community as a whole? What does your child’s education mean in the context of a society where their work will have no value?

Update: A comment by Jen shared in Google Reader:

I would add, the idea that worker protections encourage mediocrity because people are removed from the “competitiveness” (i.e. fear) that easy firing gives. Job security doesn’t cause lack of motivation; bad management does.

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Only those who have power, for example, can define what is correct or incorrect. Only those who have power can decide what constitutes intellectualism. Once the intellectual parameters are set, those who want to be considered intellectuals must meet hte requirements of the profile dictated by the elite class. To be intellectual one must do what those with the power to define intellectualism do.

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as nonintellectual.

I am auditing a class this semester on Quantitative Reasoning with Prof. Marilyn Frankenstein offered through the College of Public and Community Service at Umass Boston. The above quote was mentioned in our first class and taken from Literacy: Reading the World & The Word by Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo (who is also on the UMass Boston faculty).

Connect this to the oft criticized communications of today’s youth despite the slowly emerging recognition of a New Literacy:

… young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

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City of Angels dvd
…a seventh-grade English class was asked one morning if there were too many standardized tests. Every hand in the room shot up to answer with a defiant yes. But at the same time, the students all agreed that receiving money for doing well on a test was a good idea, saying it made school more exciting, and made doing well more socially acceptable.

Sounds an awful lot like the standard beef with millenials: entitlement and “everyone gets a trophy”. Of course, 7th graders are too young to be millenials, so maybe millenials are already in school administrative positions. The eldest (born 1981) would be 27.

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The primary tenet of mathematical modeling is simplification. We quickly realized that when trying to simplify the process, we needed to know what information we wanted to gain from the model. The standard (and incredibly simple) SIR model, for example, answers the question “how many people will be infected at any one time?”, not necessarily, “how many will recover or die?”.

To put it into mathematical terms, if we’re going to reduce the number of dimensions (by simplifying), we want to make sure that the information we’re left with has useful meaning for the situation.

Which also leads me to thinking about reductionism and holism.

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One should never be too surprised by what they might find in a restroom. I was impressed though with what I learned from a sign hanging above a urinal at the National Zoo in Washington, DC.
“Spray it, don’t say it!

Urine spraying is ok–if you’re a lobster that is

Lobsters don’t speak, but they do greet–by spraying urine at each other. That’s one one way they communicate…”

There was another person in the restroom washing his hands when I took the picture; I calmly allayed any fears he may have had by telling him, “It’s okay, I’m a photographer.”

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