randomgemsfromothers

[randomgemsfromothers]

s

Deconstructing Race Multicultural Education Beyond the Color-Bind Jabari Mahiri Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 Copyright © 2017 by Teachers College, Columbia University Cover designer/cover photo/photographer/stock house credit lines ?????????? All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher. For reprint permission and other subsidiary rights requests, please contact Teachers College Press, Rights Dept. Ethnography offers all of us the chance to step outside our narrow cultural backgrounds, to set aside our socially inherited ethnocentrism, if only for a brief period, and to apprehend the world from the viewpoint of other human beings. —James Spradley (1979, v) Kobié Jr. is caramel colored. He was 3 years old when this chapter was written. His family soon started calling him Santi, short for his middle name, Santiago. In the United States where he was born, he is seen as a black1 boy. But his identity is more complex than that. Santi’s father was born and grew up in Chicago and identifies as African American. He majored in French and minored in math at Morehouse College. Santi’s mother identifies as Latina and completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was born in Popayá, a town in southwestern Colombia. At 5 she immigrated to the United States with her mother, who identifies as white and who was also born in Colombia. Santi’s grandfather on his mother’s side is indigenous Colombian and has lived his whole life in Colombia. Santi’s mother and grandmother are fluent in Spanish and English, and he too is bilingual in these languages. 1Lowercase letters are used for color-coded designations of racial categories throughout the book (except for the Series Foreword). CHAPTER 1 Writing Wrongs 3 Hélio was 8 when this chapter was written. Like his first cousin Santi, he was born in the United States. His dad, like his dad’s brother, grew up in Chicago; he graduated from Morehouse with a double major in physics and Spanish. Hélio’s mother is a French citizen and defined in her country as Caucasian. Her mother is Polish and Italian and her father is German. She met Hélio’s father while they were both completing doctorate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley. Hélio is fluent in English and French, so his uncle can communicate with him in French and English, while his father can communicate with his cousin Santi in Spanish and English. Hélio has a light complexion. When with his mother in the United States, he is seen as white; when with his father, he is seen as biracial. But his identity is more complex than that. Hélio and Santi are not anomalies. Like every individual in the United States (and the world), they are physically, linguistically, geographically, historically, and personal- culturally situated in families; in communities and communities of practice; in social, affinity, and religious groups; and in educational and other institutions within society. Their identities are constituted by rich arrays and confluences of forces and factors stemming from how each is distinctively and fluidly situated. A core motive and focus for this book is “writing the wrongs” of hierarchy and hypocrisy perpetuated by how these children are socially constructed in U.S. society. The research and writing of this book occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign and election. Since the November 8 results, significant increases in hate crimes and harassment against Muslims, Latinos, Jews, African Americans, LGBTQ Americans, and other minority and vulnerable groups have been continually documented and reported. Trump’s deliberate denigration of these groups leading up to and subsequent to the 4 election reinvigorated and validated white supremacists’ views that reject the value of multiculturalism and instead promote an imagined white, Christian European heritage. Clearly, his rhetoric and selection of people into leadership positions in his administration have emboldened white identity politics and increased discord and division in our society. One of the many painful examples is the incident at JFK Airport in New York shortly after his inauguration, in which Robin Rhodes, a 57-year-old man from Worchester, Massachusetts, physically and verbally assaulted a female Delta Airlines employee who was wearing a hijab. He kicked her and ranted profanities about Islam and also said, “Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you” (Bever, 2013). Significantly, Trump’s election was predicated on the fact that 58% of people identified as white voted for him. Deconstructing race is particularly imperative in the corrosive post-election climate facilitated by his election, and the roles of multicultural education are all the more pivotal. Race is a socially constructed idea that humans can be divided into distinct groups based on inborn traits that differentiate them from members of other groups. This conception is core to practices of racism. There is no scientific justification for race. All humans are mixed! And, scientists have demonstrated that there is no physical existence of races. Yet, race is a social fact with a violent history and hierarchy that has resulted in differential and disturbing experiences of racism predicated on beliefs that races do exist. My argument for deconstructing race is grounded in insights from scholars who have guided my thinking, as well as extensive ethnographic interviews of people identified within the five most generally referenced racial categories in the United States—in essence, what I’ve learned from the literature joined with what I’ve learned from lives of others. 5 LEARNING FROM THE LIVES OF OTHERS What I’ve learned from the literature and scholarship on race as well as prospects for deconstructing it are taken up in Chapters 2 and 3 and threaded through the subsequent chapters. This literature and scholarship provided compelling examples of writing the wrongs of race by explicating myriad false premises and contradictions in racial ideologies and narratives past and present. Initially, this book was conceived exclusively as a discussion of scholarship on these issues. However, after conversations with Relene,2 who became the first of 20 interviewees, I decided to bring perspectives and stories from people’s lives into dialogue with literature and scholarship. I saw the book’s focus being substantively illuminated by my conscious attempt to step outside my own cultural background and, as Spradley suggested in the quote that begins this chapter, to “apprehend the world from the viewpoint of other human beings” (1979, p. v). Consequently, in-depth descriptions and stories of people’s actual lives were joined with selected literature and scholarship as ways of writing the wrongs of race. I was reminded of the critically acclaimed movie, The Lives of Others (Wiedermann, Berg, & von Donnersmarck, 2006), which won an Oscar for best foreign film. The story was set before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when East Germany’s population was closely monitored by the state secret police, the Stasi. Only a few citizens were permitted to lead private lives, among them a renowned pro-Socialist playwright. Eventually, he too was subject to surveillance, and a Stasi policeman was ordered to secretly monitor the conversations in his apartment to discover any incriminating activities by the group of 2Pseudonyms for all interviewees have been selected to reflect real names in terms of cultural connections like ethnic, linguistic, geographic, or religious origins. 6 artists who frequently met there. However, what the policeman learned in listening in on their lives ended up changing his life and politics. Of course, I received permission to interview the adults who volunteered for this project, but as with the “secret sharer” in The Lives of Others, my personal views and understandings were shaped and changed by what I learned. Wacquant (2008) also argued for and demonstrated the significance of extending scholarship with ethnographic investigations. Spradley (1979), who provided a comprehensive framework for ethnographic interviewing, went so far as to say, “Perhaps the most important force behind the quiet ethnographic revolution is the widespread realization that cultural diversity is one of the great gifts bestowed on the human species” (p. v). Spradley (1979), Denzin and Lincoln (2003), Frank (2009), and Saldana (2009) oriented my approach to conducting the interviews and analyzing the transcripts and field note data. Coding across data sources was converted into larger descriptive categories and later merged into the major themes discussed in Chapter 3. Because I feel that not only academics, but all readers should understand the approaches used to generate and document claims being made about people’s lives, I discuss these methods as part of the Introduction to this book. Ultimately, I would like readers to respond as Joseph Wood, one of many pre-publication “ghost” readers, did. He put himself in the shoes of the interviewees and mused over inaccuracies of his own racial identity. Indeed, how do we all construct identity in contrast to how it is socially constructed for us? The qualitative work began when I interviewed Relene at Seoul International Airport in May of 2014. I completed the remaining 19 interviews, four adults identified in each of 7 the categories of European, African, Asian, and Hispanic American and American Indian/Alaskan Native, over the next 2 years. They agreed to be audiotaped, so in addition to their voices, I captured facial expressions, gestures, and body language as they spoke, often passionately and painfully, about these issues. I met Relene at the 2014 Korean Association of Multicultural Education Conference (KAME), in which I co-presented a paper with Grace Kim where I introduced the concept of “micro-cultures” as a way of re-thinking identity beyond what I called “the color-bind.” Kim provided illuminating examples from her research on participatory culture at a Korean website called Dramacrazy (Mahiri & Kim, 2016; Kim, 2016). As Relene and I discussed our research interests, I also learned that she had come to the United States with her family from the Caribbean Island of Dominica as an immigrant in late adolescence. This positioning had sharpened the focus of her “inner eyes”—an image from the “Prologue” of Invisible Man (Ellison, 1947) that I will discuss in Chapter 2. As we talked about the focus of this book project, I could see the significance of pre- interview conversations. I listened for information and ideas that, if she agreed to be interviewed, would inform my questions to help her deeply probe her experiences. For example, although she has dark brown skin, she talked about how her teenage experiences in Boston made her feel like she was “passing for black.” This was more than a year before Rachel Dolezal was outed by her parents on June 15, 2015 as a white woman passing for black. I will return to the controversy surrounding Ms. Dolezal in Chapter 5, but here I provide a glimpse of how Relene came to her own sense of “passing.” Of African- Caribbean heritage, she identifies as a black woman who became a naturalized U.S. 8 citizen. She noted, “U.S. society tends to identify me as an African American woman, meaning a U.S.-born black.” But her experiences in Boston not only revealed her marginalization from blacks born in the United States, they also reflected her being the victim of intense discrimination by them. Yet, she and other West Indian immigrants wanted to be accepted by the Boston black community. So she adopted cultural practices—behaviors and styles of dress, music, food, and language—that eventually allowed her to pass for black. Essentially, she performed overt cultural components of being black, in part, to avoid “blacklash.” Below the surface association with being black, however, Relene’s life is much more complex—as is everyone’s. Her truer self, her unique and dynamic positionality, practices, choices, and perspectives were not visible through the veil of race used to define her, whether by those who saw themselves as black or white. After interviewing Relene, I realized that gathering information and ideas in pre- interview conversations allowed me to initially have to ask only two questions of each interviewee: How do you feel U.S. society identifies you? And, How do you identify yourself? Because I was interested in how the interviewee’s identities and affinities were mediated by digital media and hip-hop culture, I closed each interview with two final questions: In what ways did you previously and do you currently participate in digital culture? And, In what ways, if any, did you previously and do you currently participate in hip-hop culture? Each interview involved following up on things interviewees revealed in response to these four questions in an open-ended, dialogical way. These four questions allowed me to explore if and how the interviewees’ identities and affinities that 9 were revealed through their positioning, practices, choices, and perspectives complicated or obviated assigned racial categories. Each formal interview lasted from 2 to 3 hours, and I also had follow-up conversations with all the interviewees to explore additional questions. I didn’t record or take notes during conversations prior to or subsequent to the formal interviews, but shortly afterwards, I wrote expansive descriptive and reflective fieldnotes to capture what I had learned. These notes became part of the data for analysis. Every interview was transcribed, read a number of times, and inductively coded to develop categories, as well as to identify any outlier considerations within and across racial, gender, sexual diversity, and generational designations. Like Relene, the other 19 interviewees bravely intimated how they constructed, negotiated, rejected, erased, or deliberately distinguished key aspects of their identities. They also discussed how they saw their identities being invisibilized, homogenized, or boxed in rigid categories. They used and explained terms like “pigmentocracy,” “blacxican,” “Mexica,” “racial indeterminacy,” “gender ambiguity,” “pretending to be white,” “clapback,” and “selective identities” that illuminated intricate aspects of their mercurial lives. Consequently, they revealed complexity, specificity, and fluidity of their personal-cultural identities and affinities that could not be contained within or explained by reductive conceptions of race. All 20 are U.S. citizens. One criteria was that each interviewee self-identify in one of the five ascribed racial categories. One person discussed in the Chapter 5 who has an African American and a German parent did not affirm an African American identity, but indicated that she is often seen that way. Within these categories, I selected two women 10 and two men with one of them being identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ). This held for all groups except American Indian/Alaskan Natives, in which no one identified as LGBTQ. However, interviews with two of the American Indians spoke incisively to considerations of gender and sexual orientation. Another criterion was that interviewees be between the ages of 21 and 45 years old, which was true for all except one subject who was 47 when interviewed. This age specification was to get perspectives of interviewees who were born and developed into adults since the rise of the digital age and the birth of hip-hop in the early 1970s. While honoring these selection criteria, I drew mainly on snowballing my personal, social, and professional relationships and networks to identify participants. Like the narrator in James McPherson’s short story “Elbow Room” (1986), I was hunting for good stories. This may be seen as a limitation, but I feel that the significance of the study is in what is revealed about its focus through the sustained, close exploration of the practices, choices, and perspectives of the interviewees. Though beginning in self-acknowledged racial categories, the questions and dialogues allowed the interviewees to reflect on how their identities have been shaped by personal and social experiences, histories, trajectories, choices, and views that don’t fit easily into assigned categories of race. KEY CONCEPTS We are all born into a social position and with physical features that contribute to our sense of who we are. But social positioning and physical features are not (or should not be) determinative of identity. Against the grain of social constructions, this book reveals how people’s identities are ultimately determined by a wide range of personal-cultural 11 practices, choices, and perspectives. The practices engaged in throughout our lives are tied to major and minor life choices as well as perspectives we develop about ourselves and others at the intersection of personal, social, material, and spiritual worlds. The lives of the interviewees provided evidence for how the intersections and interactions of these components reflected the actual identities of individuals, rather than the essentialized racial categories that Brodkin (1998) noted are “assigned” by white supremacy. “Micro-cultures” (with a hyphen) is a key concept that captures the numerous components of positioning, practices, choices, and perspectives that make up the unique identities of each individual. This idea builds upon, but is distinguished from, Banks’ (2013) concepts of “microcultures” (without a hyphen) and “multiple group memberships,” as discussed in Chapter 9. I describe micro-cultural identities and practices as being mediated by language, and, like language, as being both acquired and learned. But they are also constituted and mediated through digital texts and tools that dramatically increase the range of how they can be engaged or enacted. At any moment, the vertical axis of these virtually limitless combinations of components—like fingerprints—reflect and define the ultimate uniqueness of individuals. On multiple horizontal axes, alignments of components also reflect similarities of individuals to specific others in shared or connected experiences within histories and geographies— within time and space. Unlike fingerprints, the combinations of micro-cultural components are dynamic and constantly changing (Mahiri, 2015; Mahiri & Kim, 2016; Mahiri & Ilten-Gee, 2017). From this perspective each life might be seen as a river fed by many distinct tributaries flowing into the sea of humanity. 12 The core argument of this book is that the continually emerging, rapidly changing micro-cultural identities and practices of individuals cannot be contained in the static racial categories assigned by white supremacy. Although many scholars of multicultural education have complicated these categories to illustrate more nuanced understandings of individual and group differences within them, and, although individuals and groups have struggled to construct identities of themselves within these assigned categories, the lives and literature discussed in this book challenge the very use of these categories as viable ways to identify people. The scholarship reviewed and the people interviewed reveal the deceit of racial categories. As the multicultural paradigm continues to evolve, these categories themselves must be changed. A beginning step in this direction has already been taken in the 2010 census by backing away from identifying Hispanics as a race, as I discuss in Chapter 3. In Chapter 7, I build on the language used to identify Hispanics in the 2010 census to offer a more accurate and viable way of defining people without resorting to race as a classification. Teaching and learning that directly acknowledge and decisively build upon the micro-cultural identities and affinities of youth and adults will substantially contribute to deconstructing reductive, color-coded, racial categories and thus contribute to dismantling the hierarchies and binaries upon which white supremacy is based. Of course, this challenge must go beyond mere recognition of micro-cultures. Mills (1997), along with many other scholars, recognized that “racism [as manifested through white supremacy] is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal and informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties” (p. 3). 13 Negating the effects of racism, power, and privilege wielded historically and contemporarily by groups that define themselves as white will take time and deliberate, strategic acts of deconstructing race. Some LGBTQ individuals and groups have demonstrated the viability of resisting and transforming restrictive understandings of sexual diversity, particularly over the past 50 years. It may take another 50 years of conscious work to transform understandings of human diversity before we can right the wrongs of race that white supremacy has specified and reinforced, both for its proponents and for those it oppresses and exploits. Facilitating this process in teaching and learning contexts within and beyond schools is a pivotal challenge of multicultural education. In conjunction with micro-cultures, “identity contingencies” (Steele, 2010) is another key concept used to address how social constructions of identity can be predicated on physical characteristics and used as the basis for stereotypes and resulting stereotype responses. Steele and many other researchers building on his work have indicated how identity contingencies like skin color, facial features, hair type, and body size are linked to how people are socially constructed and treated in society, as well as how they interact with the world. Stereotypes associated with identity contingencies can forcefully and problematically shape people’s identities and development. Identity contingencies and associated stereotypes underlie how individual identities are constituted and responded to in U.S. society, and they factor in as components of an individual’s micro-cultural positioning that must be understood. Digital media is also integral to micro-cultural identities. Two of Gee’s (2003) 36 Principles of learning with new media—the “Identity Principle” and “Affinity 14 Principle”—are additional concepts that clarify how individual identities move beyond racially defined categories. In defining the “Identity Principle,” Gee noted that Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices and ample opportunity to mediate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, their virtual identities, and a projective identity. (2003, p. 208) Individual identities are also linked to affinities with other individuals and groups in both real and virtual spaces. Regarding the “Affinity Principle,” Gee (2003) noted that membership and participation in affinity groups or affinity spaces (the virtual sites of interaction) are defined primarily by shared endeavors, goals, and practices, rather than shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture (p. 212). An additional concept from Gee (2013, 2015) that is important regarding micro- cultures is his delineation of the nature of activity-based identities. This concept focuses on the freely chosen practices of an individual that contribute to grounding a sense of self. Gee contrasted activity-based identities to relational identities. Relational identities are closely related to identities that are socially constructed and also connect to Steele’s notion of identity contingencies. Gee noted that relational identities most often work to efface rather that reflect diversity, but when accepted and owned they can be like activity-based identities. Activity-based and relational identities also were 2 of the 13 categories that surfaced in the interview data. These practices can reflect resident and emerging forms of social organization or what Gee (1991) earlier referred to as discourse communities. He described how discourse communities come with “identity kits” that include how to act, 15 talk, and take on specific roles that others in the community recognize. Relene essentially was performing components of the identity kit needed to get recognized as black in Boston. Finally, Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality (which examines how various social, cultural, and biological categories of identity intersect) was another useful concept for seeing the complexity of numerous elements of identity that are simultaneously yet differentially impacted within oppressive systems. Again, all of these intersecting and interacting components are multiplied through the use of digital texts and tools. CHAPTER OVERVIEWS Chapters 2 and 3 discuss literature and scholarship that explicate crucial prospects and imperatives of deconstructing race. Chapter 2 is not a traditional literature review. It discusses works primarily by literary writers who I feel were inherently “Deconstructing Race.” The idea was to begin discussion of the book’s focus with writers who are central to American literature and, therefore, generally familiar to readers throughout the United States and the world. Although authors in this group have written many novels, Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947) is the only novel discussed. Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1992) is a critique of how literature by white authors works to make race and difference invisible. Baldwin’s A Rap on Race (1971, with Margaret Mead) powerfully captures racial dynamics from a half century ago and reminds us of how little things have changed. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk (1903) is used to frame this dialogue on race among these four American writers. The chapter begins with ideas from Derrida (1981/1972) on deconstruction and also discusses multicultural education with respect race. It concludes 16 with a discussion of why deconstructing race is imperative, particularly in light of the contemporary re-emergence of white identity politics. Chapter 3 is a traditional review of scholarship. After discussing prospects and imperatives of “Deconstructing Race” in Chapter 2, this chapter begins with Du Bois’ (1903) characterization that the problems of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. It then discusses scholarship that addresses how the problem of the 21st century is “The Color-Bind.” Discussions of the color-bind in this chapter are not color-blind. Rather than not seeing or denying the reality of difference, the color-bind reflects on- going attempts to contain people in fabricated racial categories, shackling minds and imaginations in divisions of difference. Scholarship in this chapter illuminates how and why this has occurred historically and contemporarily in sections on “Prisons of Identity” and “Prisms of Identity.” It reveals how these constraints on human identity are sustained for each racial group through societal forces and institutions like the U.S. census. This chapter argues that breaking out of the color-bind frees us to better appreciate and embrace our differences, but also to see vital commonalities in our human experiences beyond the blinders of race. The next five chapters present stories and perspectives of the diverse group of interviewees whose lives, like all our lives in the United States, are forcibly fixed primarily within five general categories of race. As the final section of Chapter 2 connects the issues of this book to the current controversy of re-emerging white identity politics, the chapter by chapter discussions and stories of the interviewees are also connected to current controversies. All but one of the titles of these chapters came from statements made by individual interviewees. These titles signal a conceptual and 17 linguistic shift towards negating the color-codes that define racial categories: “Pretending to be White,” “Passing for Black,” “No Body’s Yellow,” “The Brown Box,” and “Red Rum.�� Chapter 4, “Pretending to be White,” has a slightly different purpose and structure from the other four chapters on the interviewees. It begins by defining and discussing the 13 key categories that surfaced in the coding of data and how they connected under three major themes that variously distinguished and united the stories of all 20 interviewees. This chapter is used to demonstrate how each of the 13 categories reflected in the three major themes of “hyper-diversity,” “stereotyping,” and “identity constructions” are specifically evidenced in the lives of all four interviewees discussed. The same level of evidence supports the discussions of the other 16 interviewees, but with this group, the categories from the data are embedded in the telling of their stories. Chapter 5, which presents the stories of four African Americans, is framed with a discussion of the Rachel Dolezal controversy, while Chapter 6, which presents the stories of four Asian Americans, begins with the controversy surrounding the response to the 2017 Oscars by Korean rapper Johnathan Park, who talked about knocking down racial walls. Chapter 7, which presents the stories of four Hispanic Americans, begins with a discussion of how identity is framed for Hispanics as connected to the most recent U.S. census. I suggest that this framing offers a way forward in thinking about the issue of identity for all people in the United States. Chapter 8, on Native Americans, is framed by the crisis at Standing Rock, and the stories of those four interviewees reflect ways of thinking about our humanity that also suggests a way forward. 18 Chapter 9 brings findings from the five chapters on interviewees together within a framework of “Micro-cultures” that builds upon and is distinguished from Banks’ (2013) concept of “microcultures” without a hyphen. The concept of micro-cultures with the hyphen is fully explicated as a framework for understanding the significance of the findings from the interview data of the previous chapters. The final chapter synthesizes findings and discussions from the earlier chapters and suggests “Challenges of Multicultural Education” in moving beyond the color-bind. It portrays “Multicultural Education 2.0” through discussion and examples of teaching and learning in schools that work to more fully realize the prospects of our country’s diversity and humanity. 19

[randomgemsfromothers]

f

Growth Model

Published Online: September 11, 2009

Published in Print: September 16, 2009, as Growth Model

Lisa Stone, a program director for Teach For America, observes a corps member’s class at Ballou Senior High School in Washington. Program directors are responsible for boosting teacher effectiveness. — Christopher Powers/Education Week

Long criticized for the short duration of its training, Teach For America has invested heavily in the professional development of its teacher corps.

By Stephen Sawchuk Washington

Lisa Stone is hard to interview as she walks down the halls of Ballou Senior High School. And that’s for the simple reason that she’s enormously popular.

“Ms. Guido! Ms. Guido!” call students, referring to Ms. Stone by her maiden name. She smiles apologetically at the reporter and photographer trailing her as she stops to listen to updates on the students’ classes, new teachers, summer adventures.

A former history teacher at this high school, located in a poor, mostly black neighborhood across the Anacostia River from the Capitol, Ms. Stone finally breaks free. She heads toward the classroom where English teacher Adam Janosko, a second-year Teach For America corps member, has begun reviewing with his sophomores an article on the benefits of attending college.

After ducking inside the classroom, Ms. Stone sits down, snaps open a laptop, and starts taking notes on an electronic chart. In the left-hand column, she records time stamps. In a middle column, she describes Mr. Janosko’s words and actions. And in the right-hand column, she makes notes that will form the basis of feedback she’ll provide to him over the next day or two.

Ms. Stone is one of 200 “program directors” for Teach For America, the selective program that takes graduates from top colleges and universities, trains them intensively over one summer, and places them in some of the hardest-to-staff schools in the country. Long famous—or infamous, depending on whom you talk to—for those features, the program is now attracting attention for the rapidity with which it refines its professional-development system and its commitment to helping its recruits exhibit effective teaching practices.

The role of the program directors has changed dramatically over the past five years, even as the organization has boomed in size, to about 7,000 corps members.

While Molly Smith instructs her 9th grade English class at Ballou Senior High School, in the District of Columbia, Lisa Stone takes notes on her laptop that she’ll later share with the teacher to inform her practice. While Molly Smith instructs her 9th grade English class at Ballou Senior High School, in the District of Columbia, Lisa Stone takes notes on her laptop that she’ll later share with the teacher to inform her practice. —Christopher Powers/Education Week At one time, program directors had more of a support role—“to keep corps members satisfied,” in Ms. Stone’s words. Now, they are charged with enabling the members to develop into highly effective teachers.

TFA’s shift over the past decade toward measuring and promoting its teachers’ ability to boost student performance has caused the organization to reconfigure not just program directors’ roles, but nearly all its other support components.

It has overhauled its five-week summer training, known as “Institute,” to incorporate the new focus. Program directors, who cover small regions, now have fewer corps members—typically around 30—to observe and have more time to respond to their needs. Most recently, TFA has added an on-demand system of Web supports.

Such changes have been informed by data that help the organization determine which aspects of its professional development appear to enhance teacher effectiveness and which don’t.

Teaching as Leadership Rubric The Teaching as Leadership framework serves as a “common language” across TFA systems for promoting effective teaching. Corps members are taught the basics during their summer institute, program directors use it during their periodic observations of corps members, and the resources available on TFAnet align with the measures.

Program Directors

Each program director oversees a cadre of corps members. The directors observe each member in a series of periodic visits and offer feedback keyed to the Teaching as Leadership measures on candidates’ teaching practices. Corps members can seek additional help from program directors as needed.

Assessments

Each corps member, with help from a TFA program director, devises assessments to measure student progress. The assessments are used to benchmark corps members’ success in moving students forward and identify areas that need attention. The data also are collected by TFA headquarters and used to tweak training and professional-support processes.

TFAnet

This online portal responds to teachers’ needs for “on demand” help. Here, teachers can access:

• Videotaped examples of teaching practices that match the escalating levels of performance on the Teaching as Leadership framework

• A resource exchange containing assessments, lesson plans, and curricula, each rated by corps members on its usefulness

• Blogs and networked communities

Communities

These local communities of TFA corps members meet on a monthly basis. The communities are typically organized by region, subject, and grade level, and run by corps members in their second year.

“Our vision of support has evolved as our understanding of teacher effectiveness, and clarity about what it is, has increased,” said Steven Farr, TFA’s vice president for knowledge development.

Changing Times

TFA corps members from just a few years ago can easily pinpoint how the training has evolved since their own time in the classroom.

Jonathon Stewart, a 2005 Oakland, Calif., corps member, recalls that the organization began to push forward on highlighting student-achievement data during his initiation and subsequent evaluations, but adds that “we weren’t talking about it in meaningful conversations then.”

Nevertheless, former corps members agree that TFA leaders have always been open to suggestions about how to improve their recruits’ training.

“TFA elicits a lot of feedback from corps members, and they take it seriously,” said Andrea Palmer, a 2006 Phoenix corps member who now teaches in a charter school in Denver. “If you have an opinion that’s well founded, and you take it to the correct person, things are going to happen, and they are going to happen quickly.”

In an interview this month, Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder and chief executive officer, said the organization strove to become more nimble in providing support as it became clear that merely recruiting top talent would not ensure candidates’ success.

“Initially, we probably underestimated what it would take to train and support our teachers to truly succeed with their students in some of the most challenging teaching situations in the country,” Ms. Kopp said. “We have spent years trying to understand what the most successful teachers in underresourced communities do to obtain great results.”

The turning point, Mr. Farr said, occurred in the early 2000s, when the group conceived of teaching as embracing five types of leadership traits, and then worked over several years to translate those traits into a set of professional standards. Known as the Teaching as Leadership, or TAL, framework, it spells out how successful teachers grow to embody those traits in their teaching.

TAL has something in common with other popular teaching frameworks, such as the one created by teacher-evaluation consultant Charlotte Danielson. Where it differs, though, is in its penetration across TFA’s training program.

Measuring Effectiveness

Teach For America now unabashedly defines effectiveness in terms of how its teachers’ students perform. All corps members are expected to reach at least one of these goals: move student learning forward by 1½ grade levels, close achievement gaps by 20 percent, or ensure that 80 percent of students have met grade-level standards.

During the first few months of school, in what TFA calls “round zero,” corps members and program directors select the assessments that will be used to gauge that progress and determine the areas that the teachers themselves must work on to meet their goals.

For each of three successive improvement “rounds,” the program directors review the data generated from the assessments, observe the teachers, and take detailed notes about teachers’ instruction. Then, they review the instructive practices with the corps members and make plans for improvement using TAL as the basis of their discussions.

“It is a co-investigation process, a problem-solving approach,” Ms. Kopp summarized.

Molly Smith reviews a lesson on the purposes of writing. The placard reflects goals she’s set for the school year. All TFA teacher must set specific student-achievement goals. Molly Smith reviews a lesson on the purposes of writing. The placard reflects goals she’s set for the school year. All TFA teacher must set specific student-achievement goals. —Christopher Powers/Education Week The feedback, corps members say, often exceeds the utility of district-mandated development and principals’ evaluations because of its ongoing nature, its basis in data, and the pathway to improvement spelled out in the TAL framework.

“It’s hard to go from TFA professional development, where every single minute of your time is effectively used, and then go to district meetings that are usually not as effective,” said Ms. Palmer, the onetime Phoenix corps member.

Mitchell London, a 2008 corps member in Arkansas, recalls sitting through mandatory district sessions in which teachers were taught how to log on to the district’s e-mail system and warned not to send chain messages.

“To compare the TFA support and that provided in my high school would be like comparing the greatest crème brûlée you’ve ever had to a piece of French toast wrapped around a stick of butter,” he said. “Our [district’s] development was in name only. It was so erratic. There was very little in the school structure that fostered holistic teacher development.”

The data from the assessments also are used for program improvement. Analysts at TFA headquarters in New York City pore over the information to determine which teachers appear to be getting the greatest gains, and then investigate what those teachers are doing differently in their classes. The results are fed back to inform continuing refinement of the summer training and the periodic evaluations.

TFA is also beginning a study with financial backing from the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to determine which strands and components of the Teaching as Leadership guidelines are most highly correlated with student achievement, said Ted Quinn, who oversees the group’s data-analysis efforts as its vice president of strategy and research.

Online Support

The continual revision and improvement of professional training of this sort does not come cheaply. TFA now spends some $20,000 developing each corps member, double the cost just a few years ago.

The creation of TFA’s newest support mechanism, a Web portal known as TFAnet (members only), accounts for some of the added expense. A version of the Web site has existed since the early 2000s, but corps members from even a year or two ago described it as “Web 1.0”—not interactive, not well organized, and not particularly helpful. That has since changed.

One of the site’s most popular features is a resource exchange that helps teachers find assessments, lesson plans, tips, and strategies so they’re not constantly reinventing the wheel. It debuted in 2008 with 6,500 materials; now, there are more than 20,000.

A feature officials are still improving is an online version of the TAL framework. It allows users to locate materials related to each strand and each proficiency level, and corps members can download videotaped examples, both weak and exemplary, depicting teacher instruction on a particular skill.

Aside from supplementing program directors’ personalized feedback, those videos serve as handy references for teachers in isolated locales, where few colleagues may exhibit best practices in person.

Parallel System?

The group’s commitment to supporting and constantly improving the quality of its training has attracted kudos from outside observers.

The director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank, said that this focus sets TFA apart from other teacher-training and -development efforts that have not yet institutionalized the use of data to continually adjust practice.

“We’re still having this enormous fight about whether we should link this data. There isn’t a big appetite for it,” said Andrew J. Rotherham. “TFA is much further ahead of where most folks are on this.”

Others, though, harbor reservations about the group’s system from a conceptual standpoint. One thing that worries Stephanie Hirsh, the executive director of the Dallas-based National Staff Development Council, is that in some cases, TFA’s system operates parallel to, rather than integrated within, a school’s culture.

“If you build the strongest possible induction model for people that come with this background, and equip them with the technology of teaching, will that help individuals improve? Yes, and I think TFA shows evidence of that,” said Ms. Hirsh, whose group promotes school-based learning teams for professional development. “But is the process one that could be replicated to all teachers in a school and produce schoolwide change? I don’t think so, because it has [teachers]working on isolated instances of practice.”

Ms. Kopp agrees that creating communities of practice for school improvement is vital to reform, but for TFA, views the issue of as one of limited resources. “Ultimately, our schools and districts should be taking that on,” she said. “It’s simply a question of what we have the bandwidth to do.”

Mr. Farr, the TFA vice president, added that the organization has stressed the importance of humility and encouraged corps members to form relationships with veteran teachers in their schools.

“We think of this as layers of support, not carved-out niches,” he said.

Corps members add that the presence of a critical mass of TFA teachers in a school can catalyze the establishment of learning communities.

Ms. Stone, who taught history during her tenure here at Ballou, was so horrified after a year in which only 6 percent of students passed the district reading exam that she and other corps members set up a “10th grade academy” to home in on problem areas. Scores jumped about 20 percentage points the following year.

Today, Ms. Stone’s classroom visits as a TFA program director are fairly informal, as the teachers she’s here to observe haven’t yet finished “round zero.” But she’s already pleased with what she sees.

She notes that Mr. Janosko has set strong behavior expectations for his English students early in the year, and he’s holding them to it. “Expect a phone call home,” the no-nonsense instructor says to a student who’s acting up in the back of the classroom.

Around the corner and up two flights of stairs, Molly Smith is instructing students to think about an author’s purpose in writing. When Ms. Stone finishes her observation, she writes a note complimenting the young teacher for asking her students lots of open-ended questions—and reminding her not to give away the answers too quickly. She leaves the note on Ms. Smith’s desk, along with two oatmeal cookies.

As Ms. Stone departs Ballou to visit her other charges, a young man walking past the school calls out the familiar refrain: “Ms. Guido!”

It’s clear from Ms. Stone’s response that despite her transition to a mentor, she will always, at heart, be a teacher.

“Hi, sweetheart,” she replies. Then she frowns. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”

Vol. 29, Issue 03, Pages 27-29

You must be logged in to leave a comment. Login | Register Back to Top Back to Top

[randomgemsfromothers]

dx

What Engaging Managers Do DifferentlyJun 23, 2015

43,622 views

1,505 Likes

166 Comments

Share on LinkedIn

Share on Facebook

Share on Google Plus

Share on Twitter

It’s the main thing a leader is supposed to do—engaging people—and yet the truth is very few of the smart, driven managers we talk with every year come naturally to it.

Business experts have been talking about the need for engagement since the early 1990s. And yet despite this, in most companies nothing changes. Workers are not getting more engaged. On the contrary, they are disengaging in droves.

Something is missing.

What we’ve found in all our research is this: To achieve higher levels of engagement, managers have to find out what really motivates each of their people—individually. Managing is more of a one-on-one game than we may have realized.

Here’s a quick example to illustrate the point. One of the best leaders of people we know is William Lovett, coach of the Jaguars, an inner-city high school basketball team in East Orange, New Jersey. This is a part of the world where they take their basketball very seriously. Games are loud, pulse pounding, and insanely competitive. You can only imagine the challenge of coaching talented 14- to 17-year-olds who need a helping hand.

William is a whiz with xs and os, but the reason he wins so many games is that his players would walk through fire for him. He cares about them as individuals and they know it. The first hour of every practice is homework time. He makes sure the kids go to class, stay out of trouble, and eat right. He has been coach of the year twice, and almost every one of his kids goes on to college.

Watching him in action is a graduate-school lesson in leadership.

In a run-up contest before the city championships this spring, the Jaguars were playing a cross-town rival. Before the end of the first half, one of coach Lovett’s star players started slacking off on defense, was a little late on the help-side defense and slow to get back after a basket. Coach Lovett pulled the kid off the court and yelled a blue streak while the young player sat on the bench fuming. Yet only a few minutes later another player grew cold. This kid missed a few 3-point shots, his specialty, and committed a turnover. William called that young man off the court, patted him on the back, told him to shake it off and warmly assured him he’d be out again soon.

“What’s up with that?” we asked Coach Lovett after the game. He confided, “Oh, there’s no way I could yell at him, it would destroy his confidence. But (the first player), I found he doesn’t respond unless I get in his face. It’s a challenge to him to prove me wrong.”

And sure enough, in the second half both players responded with increased effort and focus and the Jaguars won going away.

The problem most managers face in the busy corporate world is they try to treat everyone the same. We aren’t. Every person on this planet has a thumbprint-like makeup of what makes him or her most engaged 9-to-5.

Over the last ten years we have interviewed more than 850,000 working adults around the globe for our books. What that has revealed is that most engaged people have aligned more of their work with their core motivations. As for those who are most unhappy at work, as you might expect, their jobs are out of alignment with what they are passionate about. They aren’t doing what they love, on the contrary their work is demoralizing.

Yes, it might take a bit more work for a manager, but the most successful leaders we’ve interviewed have discovered the way to help their employees have more engaged and successful work lives is helping each person on the team understand his or her motivations; and then doing a little sculpting of the nature of their jobs or tasks to better match duties with passions. This “job sculpting” can have a huge payback for leaders, as it can help diagnose how each team member’s specific tasks are (or are not) aligned with his or her motivations, and uncover subtle changes that can lead to increases in morale, engagement, and results.

As we’ve shared this in our consulting work it has resonated with some. Last year we were working with a large medical center suffering from low engagement and high turnover in its nursing ranks. Valuable CNAs, LPNs, and RNs were walking out the door almost as fast as the organization could hire them. As we spoke with the senior-most leader, he reached an epiphany: “The more I’m thinking about this issue the more I believe we’ve missed the mark with our nurses. What motivates a labor-and-delivery nurse is vastly different from what motivates an emergency room nurse or an oncology nurse. But we’ve been treating them all the same—they have all been ‘nurses’ to us. We need to start understanding what really motivates an individual joining a particular team, or even someone who’s been here for a long time. We need to put people in the right roles, for sure, but we also need to give each nurse specific assignments they’ll find motivating.”

Well said.

So, as a manager, how do you find out what motivates your people? As one starter, you might sit down with each of your people individually and ask them a few simple starter questions. Here’s how the conversation could go:

Tell me about your best work experience ever – Think about a time in your life when you were most engaged at work, you gave extra effort without being asked, you believed your work really made a difference.

Write down a few of those “best-work” specifics –Why exactly was that your best work experience? What specific assignments did you have? How did your manager act toward you?

Now, think about what’s really important to you at work? – Identify those key concepts that jump out at you from the list as the most motivating to you. What insights do you gain into what’s important to you at work right now? How might we use those ideas in sculpting your job a little to be more motivating and engaging to you?

Of course there are going to be things about all of our jobs people find disengaging, and that’s not going to completely change. Someone has to take out the garbage, after all. But smart managers realize just a little sculpting can go a long way. The fact is, when we worry about our people’s careers—their top priority—they begin to worry more about our goals.

As managers we must discard the vague notions of engagement and get to a more granular, individualized level in assessing what engages each of our people.

That’s what we’ve found, but we’d love to hear your thoughts. What engages you? What do you think engages others?

[randomgemsfromothers]

d

A study at Strayer University found that most people think success is about achieving your personal goals.

Ultra successful people delight themselves by blowing their personal goals out of the water. They succeed along many different dimensions of life—their friendships, their physical and mental health, their families, and their jobs (which they are not only good at but also enjoy).

TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that ultra successful people have a lot in common. In particular, 90% of them are skilled at managing their emotions in order to stay focused, calm, and productive.

These super successful folks have high emotional intelligence (EQ), a quality that’s critical to achieving your dreams.

While I’ve run across numerous effective strategies that ultra successful people employ to reach their goals, what follows are twelve of the best. Some of these may seem obvious, but the real challenge lies in recognizing when you need to use them and having the wherewithal to actually do so.

1. They’re Composed

Ultra successful people are composed because they constantly monitor their emotions, they understand them, and they use this knowledge in the moment to react to challenging situations with self-control. When things go downhill, they are persistently calm and frustratingly content (frustrating to those who aren’t, at least). They know that no matter how good or bad things get, everything changes with time. All they can do is adapt and adjust to stay happy and in control.

2. They’re Knowledgeable

Super successful people know more than others do because they’re constantly working to increase their self-awareness. They vow constant growth. Whenever they have a spare moment, they fill it with self-education. They don’t do this because it’s “the right thing to do”; they do it because it’s their passion. They’re always looking for opportunities to improve and new things to learn about themselves and the world around them. Instead of succumbing to their fear of looking stupid, truly exceptional people just ask the questions on their mind, because they would rather learn something new than appear smart.

3. They’re Deliberate

Ultra successful people reach decisions by thinking things out, seeking advice from others, and sleeping on it. They know that (as studies show) impulsively relying too much on gut-instinct is ineffective and misleading. Being able to slow down and logically think things through makes all the difference.

4. They Speak with Certainty

It’s rare to hear super successful people utter things like “Um,” “I’m not sure,” and “I think.” Successful people speak assertively because they know that it’s difficult to get people to listen to you if you can’t deliver your ideas with conviction.

5. They Use Positive Body Language

Becoming cognizant of your gestures, expressions, and tone of voice (and making certain they’re positive) draws people to you like ants to a picnic. Using an enthusiastic tone, uncrossing your arms, maintaining eye contact, and leaning towards the person who’s speaking are all forms of positive body language that super successful people use to draw others in. Positive body language makes all the difference in a conversation because how you say something can be more important than what you say.

6. They Leave a Strong First Impression

Research shows that most people decide whether or not they like you within the first seven seconds of meeting you. They then spend the rest of the conversation internally justifying their initial reaction. This may sound terrifying, but by knowing this, you can take advantage of it to make huge gains in how people respond to you. First impressions are tied intimately to positive body language. A strong posture, a firm handshake, a smile, and open shoulders help ensure that your first impression is a good one.

7. They Seek Out Small Victories

Successful people like to challenge themselves and compete, even when their efforts yield only small victories. Small victories build new androgen receptors in the areas of the brain responsible for reward and motivation. The increase in androgen receptors increases the influence of testosterone, which further increases their confidence and eagerness to tackle future challenges. When you achieve a series of small victories, the boost in your confidence can last for months.

8. They’re Fearless

Fear is nothing more than a lingering emotion that’s fueled by your imagination.Danger is real. It’s the uncomfortable rush of adrenaline you get when you almost step in front of a bus. Fear is a choice. Exceptional people know this better than anyone does, so they flip fear on its head. Instead of letting fear take over, they are addicted to the euphoric feeling they get from conquering their fears.

9. They’re Graceful

Graceful people are the perfect combination of strong and gentle. They don’t resort to intimidation, anger, or manipulation to get a point across because their gentle, self-assured nature gets the job done. The word gentle often carries a negative connotation (especially in the workplace), but in reality, it’s the gentleness of being graceful that gives ultra successful people their power. They’re approachable, likeable, and easy to get along with—all qualities that make people highly amenable to their ideas.

10. They’re Honest

Super successful people trust that honesty and integrity, though painful at times, always work out for the best in the long run. They know that honesty allows for genuine connections with people in a way that dishonesty can’t and that lying always comes back to bite you in the end. In fact, a Notre Dame study showed that people who often lied experienced more mental health problems than their more honest counterparts.

11. They’re Grateful

Ultra successful people know that it took a lot of ambition, passion, and hard work to get where they are in life. They also know that their mentors, colleagues, families, and friends all played a huge role in their success. Instead of basking in the glory of achievement, super successful people recognize others for the wonderful things they’ve done for them.

12. They’re Appreciative

Truly exceptional people are able to achieve so much because they know the importance of slowing down and appreciating everything they already have. They know that a huge amount of their positivity, grit, and motivation comes from their ability to stay grounded and appreciate the opportunities that life has given them thus far.

Bringing It All Together

These habits can make any of us more successful if we use them every day. Give them a try and see where they take you.

What other habits set ultra successful people apart? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world's leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, TIME, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.

[randomgemsfromothers]

f

When I was growing up, my father owned a small business. And when I say small, I mean small: It was my father and an occasional day laborer. My mother, brothers, and I would help do the silkscreen printing on the drapery fabrics he sold. We were an all-hands-on-deck operation, guided by my father’s belief that if you worked hard and did what you were supposed to do, opportunities would be there for you.

Despite generations of progress on so many other fronts, it’s still too hard to get a business started today. Hard work is no longer enough to guarantee opportunity. Credit is too tough to come by. Too many regulatory and licensing requirements are uneven and uncertain.

And yet, as I travel around the country, I hear signs of optimism. Just yesterday, I sat down with a group of small business owners at Bike Tech in Cedar Falls, Iowa. I met a young man named Brad Magg. He started his first catering business at 15 with a loan from a local bank — they were willing to take a chance on a very young entrepreneur after years of watching him sell baked goods while in elementary school. At 20, Brad decided he wanted to start a restaurant — just as the owner of the local ice cream shop, Goldie's, was getting ready to retire. He bought the business from Goldie herself (and liked the name so much he kept it). Like many business owners, Brad struggled to make ends meet during the Great Recession, so he sought help from a Small Business Administration program in his town. With support and sheer determination, he was able to save his business. Today Goldie's Ice Cream Shoppe has grown from one and a half employees to almost 30.

That’s the spirit that got Americans through the Great Recession. And as we come back from the crisis, potential new business owners and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Des Moines to Brooklyn are ready to seize the moment. All they need are policies that help them get ahead instead of holding them back.

That’s why I want to be a small business president. Throughout this campaign, I’ll be proposing specific ways to help jump-start small business, including:

1. Cutting the red tape that holds back small businesses and entrepreneurs. It should not take longer to start a business in the U.S. than it does in Canada, Korea, or France.

2. Expanding access to capital.Small business owners need access to financing and credit to build, grow, expand, and hire. Lending has recovered since the crisis, but it’s still hard for new firms to get credit. A Federal Reserve Survey found that the current market is especially hard for the smallest firms and startups. And despite the fact that millions more women have opened businesses and become their own boss in recent years, they're still starting out with about half the financial capital as their male counterparts.

3. Providing tax relief and tax simplification for small business.The smallest businesses, with one to five employees, spend 150 hours and $1,100 per employee on federal tax compliance. That’s more than 20 times higher than the average for far larger firms. We’ve got to fix that.

4. Expanding access to new markets.Every American small business should be able to tap new markets — whether they are across their city, across their state, or around the world. Some American businesses are already doing this through new platforms, such as Etsy and Ebay.

The early lessons I learned about hard work and entrepreneurship have stuck with me all my life — a sentence my father would be thrilled to read. In the weeks and months to come, I want to have more conversations with people on the frontlines — people like Brad in Iowa, who have seen firsthand what’s working and what isn’t. Then, we need to build their experiences into our policies —because small businesses are the backbone of our economy, and they have as much to teach us as ever.

[randomgemsfromothers]

f

Those salutes to American servicemen and women we all watch on the Jumbotron during halftime of NFL games? Turns out they are paid promotions costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

It's a familiar scene to most Americans. The poignant moment when a soldier is honored for his or her service before a cheering crowd during halftime of an NFL game. It turns out, however, that at least some of these patriotic displays are not what they seem. A New Jersey-based website, NJ.com, has a detailed report that reveals the Department of Defense is paying millions of dollars to many NFL teams in what are essentially paid promotions to honor America's heroes. When the Jets paused to honor soldiers of the New Jersey Army National Guard at home games during the past four years, it was more than a heartfelt salute to the military — it was also worth a good stack of taxpayer money, records show. The Department of Defense and the Jersey Guard paid the Jets a total of $377,000 from 2011 to 2014 for the salutes and other advertising, according to federal contracts. Overall, the Defense Department has paid 14 NFL teams $5.4 million during that time, of which $5.3 million was paid by the National Guard to 11 teams under similar contracts.

This does not mean, of course, that all halftime events featuring troops or veterans are paid promotions. However, the fact that many are could undermine such efforts and "leaves a bad taste in your mouth" one lawmaker said. "Those of us go to sporting events and see them honoring the heroes," said Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake in an interview with NJ.com. "You get a good feeling in your heart. Then to find out they're doing it because they're compensated for it, it leaves you underwhelmed. It seems a little unseemly." It's hardly a secret that the NFL is one of the leading recruitment vehicles for the U.S. military. The problem, Flake implies, is that these events are portrayed as genuine moments of gratitude expressed to America's servicemen, not advertisements.

[randomgemsfromothers]

f

Manuel

Breakthrough College Student

Champions Event Speech

 Good evening. My name is Manuel. I am currently a junior at Texas State University. I am president of my school’s chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and a volunteer for the outreach organization called University Ambassadors.

 I have been in Breakthrough since I was in 6th grade. I have two younger siblings who are also in Breakthrough - Eric who graduated high school in 2011 and is now serving in the Marines, and my youngest brother Ricky, an 8th grader at Dobie Middle School. Eric couldn’t be here with us today but I’m glad to have Ricky and my mom, Yolanda Estrada, by my side.

 My first memory of Breakthrough is of the summer program at UT campus. I must confess that at first I didn’t really want to be there. I never realized I signed up to not only spend 6 entire weeks in school, but also to do 2 hours of homework every night! My feelings quickly changed, though, and I think that’s because the environment of Breakthrough was so different from school as I knew it. Everyone was there because they were excited to be there. Doing my work didn’t seem as bad when I wasn’t the only one doing it.  That was a revelation for me – that I needed to surround myself with others who want to be there, to be doing the good work - and that’s something I’ve held onto to this day.

 At the same time that I started my Breakthrough journey, my home life changed drastically. My parents divorced and my dad left the family. My mom had to take on second job to try to make ends meet. Because no one else could, I started taking care of my brothers. My youngest brother, Ricky, was only 4 and I took on the task of picking him up from pre-K, taking him home, fixing him something to eat, and helping to clean and maintain the house. Right before I left middle school, we had to move out of the house I had been living in since I was 2. I entered a phase in my life where moving was the norm. We settled into a pattern of staying in an apartment only long enough to find the next one that had a free month’s rent. Throughout high school I moved an average of 3 times a year. I never got used to it. Whoever said that things get better with practice, never had to move as much as I did.  

 Despite all this movement, I went to one of the highest performing high schools in town, the Liberal Arts and Science Academy. While still in middle school, Breakthrough encouraged me to apply, helped edit my essays, and made sure I followed through with everything I was supposed. I really liked LASA, though I wasn’t a typical student. I would wake up at 5:00 to be able to catch the bus to cross town to school and I would get home about 12 hours later.  As soon as I could my sophomore year, I started working to help support at home. I added 40 hours a week of full time work at Albertson’s to my busy schedule. I remember some nights arriving home at 1:00 in the morning and opening my books to get ready for a Chemistry or US History test.   I can honestly tell you that I could not have done it without Breakthrough’s support. I remember my advisor, Liz, visiting me at school every week. She made me keep school a top priority, helping me stay organized and looking ahead to tests and deadlines. This help was invaluable, as were the college visits, SAT preparation, and college application support. I was really excited to be accepted to Texas State and grateful for all the help I’d received along the way.

 I think many college students, who aren’t first generation, have a different experience upon entering college.  Fall came and I remember feeling so excited about this new course load but the money struggles snuck up on me. Because of the state’s continued budget cuts my aid was not nearly enough to cover my expenses. On top of that my mom needed help back home. Because I wasn’t able to work as much, and give money to help her with the household expenses, we got yet another eviction notice. I found myself at a crossroads, not knowing what to do. I knew I wanted to finish college, that graduating as a Texas State Bobcat was my dream. But, how could I let my family down? I talked at length with my mom and with two different Breakthrough staff members. In the end, I made the toughest decision of my life and withdrew from Texas State. We found a new home and I started working an overnight job as stocker. While I was glad to no longer be at the crossroads, I knew in my heart that I was down the path I didn’t want to be. I was living to support my family with the least-skilled job in town. If I ever needed a refresher course in why I wanted to graduate from college it was that brief experience when I wasn’t in school, when I felt like I’d stopped moving forward and had given up on pushing myself forward to reach my dreams. I’m proud to say that, with the help of my Breakthrough “college coach,” I was able to re-enroll one year later at Texas State with a much better financial aid package. I will graduate from Texas State with a major in Political Science in May 2013.

 I want to close by saying that I don’t think my story is that unusual. In fact, I know from talking to lots of Breakthrough students, that their experiences are a lot like mine. You may even have heard some of them at other Breakthrough events. I actually think my story is the story of all first-generation college goers. 34 years ago, my mom, Yolanda Estrada, graduated as the salutatorian from Rio Hondo High School in the valley. She was overjoyed to be the first in her family to go to college, a good one called the University of Texas. Then, just like me, there was trouble at home and she had to return to the valley to look after my grandmother. She never got a chance to get that college degree. Some people ask me, “Why do you work so hard? What makes you care so much?” I tell them it’s because I have a dream to finish - my mom’s dream. I think Breakthrough has helped me in ways that my mom didn’t have. I’m here to tell you that I might not be in college if Breakthrough wasn’t in my life. I would be like many of my friends still stocking shelves. And, I’m also proud to say that my mom re-enrolled in college just last fall. I spend my days at Texas State while she heads to the University of Texas to finish that degree in Elementary Education.

 Though one speech alone cannot do justice to my gratitude, I am glad I’ve had this opportunity tonight. Thank you to everyone here for supporting a program that can make stories like mine possible.

[randomgemsfromothers]

d

WASHINGTON — “I am a lawyer’s judge,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said last year. “I write very technically.”

That was true at the time. But something has changed in the current Supreme Court term. In opinions concerning human rights abuses, the death penalty and, most notably, affirmative action, Justice Sotomayor has found her voice.

“She’s setting a public agenda,” said Cristina Rodriguez, a law professor at Yale. “She’s looking for her moments. And her willingness to talk about how biography informs judgments challenges a lot of people’s notions about what the law is supposed to do.”

Justice Sotomayor, 59, is approaching her fifth anniversary on the Supreme Court, where she has emerged as an increasingly confident figure. In the last term, she asked more questions than any other justice. In the current one, she has staked out positions that have led to testy exchanges with colleagues across the ideological spectrum.

Continue reading the main story FEATURED COMMENT

Chris Mexico You can be sure that the life experiences of every member of the court, including where they have found themselves in the race and gender hierarchies that so powerfully shape our life chances, color their decisions. 444 COMMENTS She is a kind of folk hero to the adoring crowds who attend her public appearances by the thousands. Her memoir, which told the story of her ascent from a housing project in the Bronx, was a best seller. Some call her “the people’s justice.”

Photo

Justice Sonia Sotomayor Credit Robert Galbraith/Reuters Others attacked her in unusually personal terms after she became the first beneficiary of affirmative action to defend the practice from the Supreme Court bench, summarizing in emphatic and impassioned tones her 58-page dissent from a ruling upholding Michigan’s ban on using race in admissions decisions at the state’s public universities.

“Race matters,” she wrote, “because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’ ”

National Review called the dissent “legally illiterate” and “a case study in the moral and legal corrosion that inevitably results from elevating ethnic-identity politics over the law.” Linda Chavez, a New York Post columnist, said Justice Sotomayor was “unable to divorce her legal reasoning from her own sense of racial grievance.”

Advertisement

Both articles said Justice Sotomayor’s reasoning was of a piece with her most famous comment, made in a 2001 speech as a federal appeals court judge.

“I would hope,” she said, “that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” At her 2009 confirmation hearings, Justice Sotomayor disavowed the remark, saying it was a “rhetorical flourish that fell flat.”

Last month’s dissent, in Schuette v. BAMN, was a mix of legal analysis, historical overview and policy arguments. It looked closely at the governing precedents, reminded readers of the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, decried recent “discriminatory changes to voting procedures” and reproduced graphs on declining enrollment rates for black and Hispanic students at public universities in states that have banned race-conscious admissions. But what stood out was a fairly brief reflection about what it was like to grow up Puerto Rican in New York City.

“Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No, where are you really from?’ regardless of how many generations her family has been in the country,” she wrote. “Race matters to a young person addressed by a stranger in a foreign language, which he does not understand because only English was spoken at home.”

Justice Sotomayor seemed eager to tangle with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was raised in middle-class comfort in Indiana. She called his views on race “out of touch with reality.”

He responded with a tart concurrence. “It is not ‘out of touch with reality,’ ” he wrote, “to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and — if so — that the preferences do more harm than good.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, the other beneficiary of affirmative action on the court, did not write separately in last month’s decision. But he has made plain, in a memoir and in earlier opinions, that he views racial preferences as toxic.

“When blacks take positions in the highest places of government, industry or academia,” he wrote in a 2003 dissent, “it is an open question today whether their skin color played a part in their advancement.”

Justices Sotomayor and Thomas both graduated from Yale Law School, and they wrote about their experiences in their memoirs. She found her time there intimidating and inspiring. He called his decision to attend a mistake.

“I felt as though I’d been tricked, that some of the people who claimed to be helping me were in fact hurting me,” he wrote. “It was futile for me to suppose I could escape the stigmatizing effects of racial preference.”

In her Supreme Court opinions, Justice Sotomayor has introduced a new vocabulary. She was the first to use the term “undocumented immigrant.”

In her recent dissent, she proposed another change. “Although the term ‘affirmative action’ is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies,” she wrote, “I instead use the term ‘race-sensitive admissions policies.’ ” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in the Michigan case, which was decided by a 6-to-2 vote. But the two justices have recently been trading barbed footnotes. In a January concurrence, Justice Sotomayor said the other eight justices had created “deep injustice” by making it harder to sue foreign companies in American courts for complicity in human rights abuses abroad.

Justice Ginsburg, an understated writer, responded in vehement detail that her colleague had mischaracterized the trial record and misinterpreted the leading precedent.

In 2012, dissenting in an 8-to-1 decision on eyewitness testimony, Justice Sotomayor similarly accused the majority of ignoring its own precedents and a wealth of new knowledge. Justice Ginsburg responded that Justice Sotomayor was “inventing a ‘longstanding rule’ that never existed.”

In February, in a public interview at Yale Law School conducted by Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter who teaches there, Justice Sotomayor said she had never issued an oral dissent, an unusual move that happens just a handful of times a term and is meant to signal profound disagreement.

“Announcing it from the bench is like entertainment for the press,” she said.

In the Yale interview, she reflected on the role of dissents and their varying audiences.

“Often, you’re talking to Congress,” she said. “Sometimes, you’re talking to the executive branch. Sometimes, you’re talking to the public in the sense of engaging them around an issue that might get missed.”

She gave an example, and it again involved racial stereotypes.

The case arose from a federal prosecutor’s comments at a 2011 drug trial in Texas. The remarks, she wrote, “tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation.”

The defendant, Bongani C. Calhoun, testified that he had not known his companions had planned to buy drugs. The prosecutor, Sam L. Ponder, responded with a skeptical inquiry.

“You’ve got African-Americans, you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money,” he said. “Doesn’t that tell you — a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, ‘This is a drug deal?’ ”

Mr. Calhoun was convicted, and the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Justice Sotomayor said the court was right not to intervene because Mr. Calhoun’s lawyer had failed to object.

But she nonetheless issued a statement “to dispel any doubt” about “our tolerance of a federal prosecutor’s racially charged remark.”

Mr. Ponder’s statement, she wrote, “was pernicious in its attempt to substitute racial stereotype for evidence, and racial prejudice for reason.”

Justice Sotomayor issued a similar protest in November, dissenting from the court’s refusal to hear a challenge to an Alabama law that allows judges to override jury determinations calling for life sentences. She listed the names of 95 inmates sentenced to death thanks to such overrides.

That dissent, she said at Yale, had another purpose: “to get my colleagues thinking.”

[randomgemsfromothers]

x

As Paul Gigot reported in his Potomac Watch column, one of the names on President Clinton's list of possible Supreme Court nominees is Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal district court judge from New York. The "Souter strategy" is what's being talked about here: Get her on to the Second Circuit, then elevate her to the Supreme Court as soon as an opening occurs. This is what happened with David Souter, who in the space of six short months found himself first on the First Circuit and then, faster than you can say "original intent," on the Supreme Court.

If this is Mr. Clinton's game plan, so far the Senate Judiciary Committee has obliged. Her nomination, made last June, breezed through Senate Judiciary in March with only Senators Kyl and Ashcroft objecting, and is now awaiting a full Senate confirmation vote. And waiting and waiting. Chester Straub and Rosemary Pooler were both confirmed to the Second Circuit last week, even though they were nominated months after Judge Sotomayor.

We'd like to think the Republicans may be having second thoughts about Judge Sotomayor and are deliberately delaying her confirmation until seeing whether Justice Stevens announces his retirement when the current Court term ends this month. Perhaps someone took the trouble to look at an opinion she issued just a few days after winning the approval of the Judiciary Committee. In it, she ordered a Manhattan business coalition to pay back wages to homeless workers who claimed they were being exploited as slave labor. The workers were being paid less than minimum wage.

The defendants were two Midtown business improvement districts known as the Grand Central Partnership and the 34th Street Partnership. Their president, Dan Biederman, discussed the case with us recently.

One of the Partnerships' most impressive accomplishments was helping the vagrants who used to hang around and sleep on area streets develop the everyday coping skills necessary for holding down a job. Many of the unfortunate men and women who found themselves adrift in Grand Central Terminal had a history of drug or alcohol abuse.

One thing they didn't have was a history of employment--at least not a history that would look good on any resume. Before the Partnerships would recommend them for permanent jobs with the local businesses that had been painstakingly persuaded to take a chance on the homeless, they had to prove they'd mastered such basic skills as showing up on time and taking direction. To that end, the Partnerships placed them in a social-service program called Pathways to Employment, which provided temporary sanitation, security, office and laundry jobs. "We were the last resort for these people," says Mr. Biederman.

Note the past tense in the previous paragraph. That program is now virtually defunct, thanks to Judge Sotomayor, whose ruling priced it out of existence. She said that participants in Pathways to Employment didn't qualify as trainees because some of them eventually performed "productive work," even occasionally filling in for permanent employees who were paid the minimum wage. She was particularly galled that some of the Pathways to Employment jobs were part of programs that generated revenue for the defendants--a recycling program, for example, and a homeless-outreach program--and that Mr. Biederman earned a salary of $335,000. "The economic reality," she wrote, "is that the PTE participants benefited from the defendants' efforts, but the defendants benefited more."

At Judge Sotomayor's order, a magistrate judge is now tallying up the damages to the plaintiffs and, of course, the legal expenses, which were provided by the white-shoe firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Stein & Hamilton. Some victory. In the meantime, the Partnerships are planning an appeal to the Second Circuit, the same court to which Judge Sotomayor's nomination is pending.

The Second Circuit is currently considering an appeal to another Sotomayor opinion. The judge ruled last summer that a would-be lawyer whose learning disabilities made it impossible for her to read well enough to distinguish between "indicted" and "indicated" and caused her to write backward at times was entitled to special accommodation under the Americans With Disabilities Act in taking the New York State bar exam.

By now New Yorkers are accustomed to this sort of antic judicial thinking. But why impose it on the whole country? The Senate Judiciary Committee should take another look at Judge Sotomayor's nomination.

[randomgemsfromothers]

s

WASHINGTON — She was “a child with dreams,” as she once said, the little girl who learned at 8 that she had diabetes, who lost her father when she was 9, who devoured Nancy Drew books and spent Saturday nights playing bingo, marking the cards with chickpeas, in the squat red brick housing projects of the East Bronx.

She was the history major and Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton who spent her first year at that bastion of the Ivy League “too intimidated to ask questions.” She was the tough-minded New York City prosecutor, and later the corporate lawyer with the dazzling international clients. She was the federal judge who “saved baseball” by siding with the players’ union during a strike.

Now Sonia Sotomayor — a self-described “Nuyorican” whose mother, a nurse, and father, a factory worker, left Puerto Rico during World War II — is President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, with a chance to make history as only the third woman and first Hispanic to sit on the highest court in the land. Her up-by-the-bootstraps tale, an only-in-America story that in many ways mirrors Mr. Obama’s own, is one reason for her selection, and it is the animating characteristic of her approach to both life and the law.

“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see,” Judge Sotomayor (pronounced so-toe-my-OR) said in 2001, in a lecture titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” “My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

From her days going to the movies with cousins to see Cantinflas, a Mexican comedian whom she once called the “Abbott and Costello of my generation,” to her current life in the rarefied world of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor, 54, has traveled what Mr. Obama called “an extraordinary journey.”

In her 2001 address, she spoke longingly of the “sound of merengue at all our family parties” and the Puerto Rican delicacies — patitas de cerdo con garbanzos (pigs’ feet with beans) and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito (pigs’ tongue and ears) — that appealed to the “particularly adventurous taste buds” that she called “a very special part of my being Latina.”

Today, Judge Sotomayor’s culinary tastes range from tuna fish and cottage cheese for lunch with clerks in her chambers, to her standard order at the Blue Ribbon Bakery: smoked sturgeon on toast, with Dijon mustard, onions and capers. She works out three times a week, putting in three miles on the treadmill in the court’s gym. Divorced and with no children, she enjoys the ballet and theater and lives in a condominium in Greenwich Village — both a subway ride and a world away from the housing projects where she grew up.

Yet a few things have not changed: her feeling of herself as “not completely a part of the worlds I inhabit,” as she said in one speech; her drive and ambition; and her willingness to speak up about her own identity as a Latina and a woman. In many ways, she is walking through a door she pushed open herself. On the bench, Judge Sotomayor may be a careful deliberator, but off it she has been a tireless advocate for Latinos.

In 1976, she wrote her senior thesis at Princeton on Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, and dedicated it in part “to the people of my island — for the rich history that is mine.” She has lectured at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. In 2001, she was a speaker at a Princeton-sponsored conference titled “Puerto Ricans: Second-Class Citizens in ‘Our’ Democracy?’”

In describing his criteria for a Supreme Court pick, Mr. Obama said he was looking for empathy — a word that conservatives, who are already attacking Judge Sotomayor, have described as code for an activist judge with liberal views who will impose her own agenda on the law. Her critics also raise questions about her judicial temperament, saying she can be abrupt and impatient on the bench.

But Judge Sotomayor’s friends say she is simply someone who will bring the “common touch” that the president has said he prizes to her understanding of the law.

“I think she’s compassionate and empathetic, and I think she is going to really listen to people who are alleging that they have been victimized in some way,” said Robert H. Klonoff, dean of the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who attended Yale Law with Judge Sotomayor and considers her a friend. Dean Klonoff, who last saw the judge in her New York chambers the day after Mr. Obama’s election, compares her to Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first black justice, for the perspective he says she would bring to the court.

“She had such a different path,” he said. “There were so many people that had Roman numerals after their names and long histories of family members who had gone to Yale, and here was this woman who was from the projects, not hiding her views at all, just totally outspoken. She’s one of those where, even at a school with great people, I knew that she was going to go on and do amazing things.”

Childhood in the East Bronx

There was something of a pioneer spirit among the Puerto Ricans who settled into the East Bronx after braving tenements farther south or poverty back on the island. To settle into the Bronxdale Houses, as Sonia Sotomayor’s family ultimately did in the 1960s, was to find a haven of sorts, according to people who lived there then.

“Here was a paradise,” said Ricardo Velez, who was among the earliest tenants when he moved to his apartment in 1956. “It was beautiful.”

This was the place where Sonia’s parents, Celina and Juan Sotomayor, intended to raise their children — Ms. Sotomayor and her brother, Juan, who is now a doctor in Syracuse. The couple met and married during World War II after Celina was discharged from the Women’s Army Corps, the WACS, the outlet for women of her generation to give to the war effort. Celina Sotomayor had left Puerto Rico at 17 to sign up, shipping off to Georgia for her training with no relatives in the mainland United States.

While her husband worked at a tool-and-die factory, Celina Sotomayor — by all accounts the driving force in her daughter’s life — went on to become a telephone operator at Prospect Hospital, a small private hospital in the South Bronx, and later received her practical nurse’s license. The family’s life was upended when Sonia’s father died at 42, in part from heart complications that had kept him out of the Army. Celina Sotomayor, a widow with two young children and no savings, began working six days a week.

Her daughter retreated into books. Sonia Sotomayor loved the Nancy Drew mysteries, she once said, and yearned to be a police detective. But the doctor who had diagnosed her diabetes told her that she would not be able to do that kind of work. (The White House says Judge Sotomayor’s diabetes, a disease that can ultimately cause blindness, heart disease and kidney ailments, has been under control through insulin injections and careful monitoring for decades and does not affect her work.)

A ‘Perry Mason’ Moment

She also spent hours watching “Perry Mason” on television. An episode that ended with the camera fixed on the judge helped her set a new career goal, she told The Associated Press in 1998. “I realized that the judge was the most important player in the room,” she said at the time.

The Bronxdale Houses were still ethnically mixed when the Sotomayors lived there, and neighbors say it felt mostly safe. But Judge Sotomayor recalled in a 1998 interview with The A.P. that temptation was lurking nearby.

“There were working poor in the projects,” she said. “There were poor poor in the projects. There were sick poor in the projects. There were addicts and non-addicts and all sorts of people, every one of them with problems, and each group with a different response, different methods of survival, different reactions to the adversity they were facing. And you saw kids making choices.”

Parents made choices, too. For Celina Sotomayor, education was the highest priority; she bought her children an Encyclopaedia Britannica, a novelty in the projects. “She was famous for the encyclopedia,” said Milagros Baez O’Toole, a cousin.

Roman Catholic schools of that era were embraced by many working-class Puerto Rican parents who saw the public schools as too rowdy and dangerous. The Sotomayor family, which is Catholic, was among them. Judge Sotomayor attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Northeast Bronx, which opened in 1959 and earned a reputation as a school for high achievers. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.

Jeri Faulkner, who was a freshman when Judge Sotomayor was a senior, remembers black students sat at one table in the cafeteria, and Latino students at another. But Ms. Faulkner, who is now the school’s dean of students, said Ms. Sotomayor inspired her.

“As a freshman, when you’re looking at seniors, you’re a little awestruck with them,” Ms. Faulkner said. “She was smart. She always had time for you if you needed to speak to her. She didn’t belittle your questions. She wasn’t aloof. She was one of us.”

When Ms. Sotomayor entered Cardinal Spellman in the late 1960s, boys and girls were rigidly segregated into opposing wings of the school, with a nun stationed at a central point to enforce gender separation. But this “co-institutional” arrangement was abandoned while she was there, and the sexes mixed freely by the time she graduated. Ms. Sotomayor had a sweetheart, Kevin E. Noonan. “She was irrepressible, very popular, very bright, very dynamic,” said one classmate who asked not to be named. “She wasn’t overbearing about it, but you knew she was in the room.”

By then, the Sotomayor family had moved to a new apartment in Co-op City — a clear step up from the projects. The family’s Co-op City kitchen table became a regular gathering spot for food and conversation for Sonia’s classmates and debate team buddies.

“Sonia was very much the ruler of the kitchen-table debate,” said Kenneth K. Moy, the son of Chinese immigrants who was a year ahead of her at both Spellman and later Princeton. “She was very analytical, even back then. It was clear to people who knew her that if she wasn’t going to be a lawyer, she was going to be in public life somehow.”

Mr. Moy said Ms. Sotomayor’s crowd was a diverse mix of students that included immigrants from struggling families and others from well-to-do parts of Westchester County. They endlessly hashed over not only school gossip, but also Vietnam — where their friends were serving in a war that had divided the school — as well as the country, race relations and social justice, he said.

Sonia’s mother, Celina, would return home after long hours working as a nurse and feed the crowd of teenagers rice and beans and sometimes pork chops. “I can’t tell you how many times I said, ‘Is there another pork chop?’ — and there was,” said Mr. Moy, now a lawyer in Oakland, Calif. Later, he urged his friend to follow him to Princeton. But he was candid, he said, about what she would face there as a Puerto Rican from a modest background.

“I told her I don’t want you to come here with any illusions,” Mr. Moy recalled. “Social isolation is going to be a part of your experience, and you have to have the strength of character to get through intact.”

Adjusting to Princeton

When Ms. Sotomayor arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1972, she was one of the only Latinos there: there were no professors, no administrators, and only a double-digit number of students. Princeton women were sharply outnumbered as well; the first ones had been admitted only a few years earlier, and some alumni had protested their increasing ranks. (Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who graduated just a few months before Ms. Sotomayor arrived, belonged to one of the groups that protested.)

Ms. Sotomayor was terrified: she barely raised her hand in class initially, and years later, she confessed to a friend at Yale Law School that she could “barely write” when she arrived at Princeton. So she barricaded herself in the library, earning a reputation as a grind (her diligence would pay off with her eventual election to Phi Beta Kappa). She spent her summers inhaling children’s classics, grammar books and literature that many Princeton peers had already conquered at Choate or Exeter.

She also readily accepted help. When Ms. Sotomayor arrived in Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s history class in the spring of her freshman year, for example, she seemed unprepared, Ms. Malkiel recalled in an e-mail message. But Ms. Malkiel tutored her in how to read sources and write analytically, and by late in the semester, Ms. Sotomayor was flourishing.

By her junior year or so, “I don’t remember her being shy or reticent about much of anything,” said Jerry Cox, a classmate.

Ms. Sotomayor also became involved in campus politics. After heavy lobbying, she joined Acción Puertorriqueña, an organization working for more opportunity for Puerto Rican students.

“Sonia had to be persuaded to join us,” said Margarita Rosa, a friend from high school. “We were a ragtag-looking bunch, and she was always methodical in her decision making.”

Soon Ms. Sotomayor was co-chairwoman of the organization, which filed a formal letter of complaint with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, accusing the university of discrimination in hiring and admission.

“The facts imply and reflect a total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture,” she wrote in an opinion article in The Daily Princetonian. “In effect, they represent an effort — a successful effort so far — to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.”

In her student thesis, which she dedicated to nine friends and family members, Ms. Sotomayor wrote about Puerto Rico’s long struggle for political and economic self-determination. While Muñoz Marín created great hope among Puerto Ricans, “the island has continued to be plagued by unemployment, absentee ownership and dependency on mainland revenues,” she concluded. When Ms. Sotomayor graduated, she was awarded the Pyne Prize, the university’s highest undergraduate award, presented for a combination of strong grades and extracurricular work. Even before she won, everyone on campus seemed to know who she was. “I certainly admired her from afar,” said Randall Kennedy, now a professor at Harvard Law School and along with Ms. Sotomayor, a member of Princeton’s Board of Trustees.

Ms. Sotomayor went straight to Yale Law School, where she researched and wrote her way onto the law review by analyzing the arcane constitutional issues that would determine whether Puerto Rico would be allowed to maintain access to its seabed if it became a state.

Even when she described positions with which she disagreed, “she was scrupulous about giving the strongest form,” said Stephen L. Carter, who edited her submission and said Ms. Sotomayor was just as tolerant a debater in class.

Her submission was “inspired by deep social concern about having the poorest area in American jurisdiction survive economically,” said Edward Rubin, another editor. “It was very scholarly and balanced even though it was inspired by social concern.” Classmates remember just how hard she worked on it, polishing and repolishing it again.

At Princeton, Ms. Sotomayor had volunteered with Latino patients at a state psychiatric hospital in Trenton, and now she showed a similar desire to pull away from her elite environment. “She felt an affinity with the African-American janitor, the workers, people in the cafeteria,” recalled Rudolph Aragon, a classmate and who headed the Latin, Asian and Native American association with Ms. Sotomayor. “There were so few minority students that we had to combine forces,” he said.

Her closest friends at the school were all outsiders: Mr. Aragon, who is Mexican-American, along with three other students — a fellow Puerto Rican, a Mohawk Indian and an African-American, he recalled.

After hours they would retreat to one another’s apartments for baseball games — Ms. Sotomayor watched ecstatically as Reggie Jackson delivered the 1977 World Series to the Yankees — or to a local club where the law students danced alongside the locals. Ms. Sotomayor was still a grind, her friends said, but she also smoked, drank beer and danced a mean salsa.

She somehow seemed older than her classmates, several said — perhaps because of her difficult childhood, or maybe because she was already married. (She and Mr. Noonan, who would become a biologist and later a biotech patent lawyer, wed in the summer of 1976, but divorced seven years later.) And she knew exactly what she wanted after graduation: to be a litigator. She was “tough, clear, very quick on her feet,” said Martha Minow, now a Harvard Law School professor who advised the White House on the selection.

An Imposing Prosecutor

She would soon get plenty of practice. In 1979, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, hired Ms. Sotomayor on the recommendation of José A. Cabranes, then a teacher at Yale Law School and now a federal appeals court judge. She became a young prosecutor in a city struggling with a drug- related crime wave, joining a trial unit that handled everything from misdemeanors to homicides.

“Some of the judges like to push around young assistants and get them to dispose of cases,” Mr. Morgenthau recalled. “Well, no one pushed around Sonia Sotomayor; she stood up to the judges, in an appropriate way.”

In her fifth year in the office, she was interviewed for The New York Times Magazine about the prosecutors working for Mr. Morgenthau. She was described as an imposing woman of 29 who smoked incessantly, and spoke of how she had coped in a job that some liberal friends disapproved of.

“I had more problems during my first year in the office with the low-grade crimes — the shoplifting, the prostitution, the minor assault cases,” she said. “In large measure, in those cases you were dealing with socioeconomic crimes, crimes that could be the product of the environment and of poverty.

“Once I started doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter how liberal I am, I’m still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.”

In 1984, Ms. Sotomayor left the district attorney’s office and joined Pavia & Harcourt, a boutique commercial law firm in Manhattan.

“We had an opening for a litigator, and her résumé was perfect,” said George M. Pavia, the managing partner who hired her. “She’s an excellent lawyer, a careful preparer of cases, liberal, but not doctrinaire, not wild-eyed.”

A large part of Ms. Sotomayor’s work was fighting the counterfeiters who copied products of Fendi, the luxury goods company, and its well-known “double F” logo. Sometimes, that meant suing counterfeiters to stop them from importing fake Fendi goods.

At other times, it involved more derring-do: if the firm had a tip from the United States Customs Office about a suspicious shipment, Ms. Sotomayor would often be involved in the risky maneuver of going to the warehouse to have the merchandise seized. One incident that figures largely in firm lore was a seizure in Chinatown, where the counterfeiters ran away, and Ms. Sotomayor got on a motorcycle and gave chase.

In July 1987, Mario M. Cuomo, then the governor, appointed Ms. Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, which helps low-income people get loans to buy homes. In 1992, when she left the unpaid board position, it passed a resolution honoring her for consistently defending the rights of the disadvantaged to secure affordable housing” and serving as the conscience of the board concerning “the negative effects of gentrification.”

A Docket of Notable Cases

In 1991, the first President George Bush nominated Ms. Sotomayor to be a federal district judge in the Southern District of New York. But she was informally selected by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, who shared her working-class and parochial school roots and who was convinced, former aides said, that Ms. Sotomayor would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

Leaving private practice for public service meant that she would never be as wealthy as many of her peers. Financial disclosure forms that Ms. Sotomayor filed in 2007 show that her primary asset is her Greenwich Village condo, which she bought in 1998 with the help of two mortgages totaling $324,000 from Chase Manhattan Bank. Her last reported savings account balance was between $50,000 and $100,000, and she held no stocks or other significant investments. In addition to her judicial salary, she earned small sums for teaching at the law schools at New York University and Columbia University.

But her confirmation, in August 1992, made her the first Hispanic federal judge in the state. She joined a federal district courthouse in New York City whose docket is rich with everything from so-called drug mule cases to white-collar crimes and securities litigation.

She had several notable cases as a district judge on religious liberties. In 1993, she struck down as unconstitutional a White Plains law that prohibited the displaying of a menorah in a park. In 1994, she ordered New York prison officials to allow inmates to wear beads of the Santeria religion under their belts, even though prison officials said the beads were gang symbols.

Other notable cases included a 1995 ruling in which she ordered the government to make public a photocopy of a torn-up note found in the briefcase of a former White House counsel, Vincent Foster, who committed suicide. And in 1998, she ruled that homeless people working for the Grand Central Partnership, a business consortium, had to be paid the minimum wage.

But Judge Sotomayor’s most celebrated case came in 1995, when she ended a prolonged baseball strike by ruling forcefully against the baseball team owners and in favor of the ballplayers, resulting in a quick resumption of play. For a brief period, she was widely celebrated, at least in those cities with major-league teams, as the savior of baseball.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated her to become a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York. In filling out her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Judge Sotomayor seemed to evoke the same concerns for the real-world impact of rulings that Mr. Obama has said he is seeking.

“Judges must be extraordinarily sensitive to the impact of their decisions and function within, and respectful of, the Constitution,” she wrote. She arrived at her hearing with a New York construction contractor, Peter White, whom she introduced as “my fiancé” and who was photographed helping her on with her robe after she was sworn in as an appellate court judge. The relationship ended not long after that, roughly 10 years ago, according to a friend.

It took the Senate more than a year to confirm her. Republicans delayed a vote, drawing an accusation from Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is now the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, that they feared that Mr. Clinton would try to elevate her to the Supreme Court.

But Alfonse M. D’Amato, then a Republican senator from New York, eventually helped push through a vote, and she was confirmed 67 to 29 in October 1998. Among those voting in her favor was Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who remains a leading Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Over the next decade, Judge Sotomayor would hear appeals in more than 3,000 cases, writing about 380 majority opinions. The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two, although it rejected her reasoning while accepting the outcome in one of those it upheld.

A No-Nonsense Reputation

She would develop a reputation for asking tough questions at oral arguments and for being sometimes brusque and curt with lawyers who were not prepared to answer them.

The 2009 edition of the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which includes anonymous comments evaluating judges by lawyers who appear before them, presents a mixed portrait of Judge Sotomayor. Most of the unnamed lawyers interviewed said she had good legal ability and wrote good opinions. But several also spoke very negatively of her manner from the bench, saying she could be abusive of lawyers appearing before her and using words like “bully,” “nasty” and “a terror.”

But one former clerk defended her style.

“Personality- and style-wise, she is a dynamo,” said Lisa Zornberg, who clerked for her in 1997-98 and is now an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. Lawyers “who come before her know she always shows up on her game” and “doesn’t tolerate unpreparedness, nor should she.”

Judge Sotomayor has had several rulings that indicate a generally more liberal judicial philosophy than a majority of justices on the current Supreme Court, leading some conservatives to label her a “judicial activist.”

In 2000, for example, she wrote an opinion that would have allowed a man to sue a government contractor he accused of violating his constitutional rights. In 2007, she wrote an opinion interpreting an environmental law in a way that would favor more stringent protections, even if it cost power plant owners more money. The Supreme Court reversed both decisions.

The ruling by Judge Sotomayor that has attracted the most attention was a 2008 case upholding an affirmative action program at the New Haven Fire Department. A group of white firefighters sued because the city threw out the results of a test for promotions after few minority firefighters scored well on it. The Supreme Court is now reviewing that result.

Several of Judge Sotomayor’s appeals court clerks described her as a rigorous boss. Her clerks’ offices surround her own office and are within earshot, and she calls out to them when she has questions. She sometimes asks for the full records of trial transcripts and motions for a case that was on appeal, something her experience as a district judge has made her more interested in than some other judges.

Judge Sotomayor has also developed a reputation for treating her clerks as a family — taking a strong interest in their personal lives and careers, attending their weddings, keeping framed pictures of her former clerks and later, their children, in her office, and keeping in touch with them as a friend and mentor. She has told friends that one of her greatest regrets is that she herself was never a law clerk.

James R. Levine, a New York lawyer who clerked for Judge Sotomayor in 2001-2, recalled that during his interview with her as a law student, the first question she asked was about himself and his family, while every other judge with whom he interviewed had first asked about issues like the topic of his law review note. The interview would turn intellectually rigorous, he said, but first she wanted to get to know him as a person.

Staying True to Her Roots

She has also tried to stay down to earth, friends say. Melissa Murray, who worked for the judge from 2003-4 and is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recalled going to a Yankees game with Judge Sotomayor. The judge, a Yankees fan, bought tickets in the bleachers, which Ms. Murray said the judge preferred as a more “authentic experience,” and she appeared to be known to several in the crowd.

“We were on the way to the bleachers and people were, like, ‘Judge! Judge!’ ” Ms. Murray recalled. “She is really well known in the South Bronx and kind of a role model in the community.”

Ms. Rosa, the friend who also went from a low-income childhood to Princeton and law school, said that the experiences that someone like Judge Sotomayor accumulated in her rise from the housing projects of the Bronx to the threshold of the Supreme Court would leave a vivid understanding of how the world works.

“We came up in a period of time with a sense of conscience about social justice,” Ms. Rosa said. “It grounded us in a set of values that told us our lives could be about something more than ourselves and the size of our bank account. That is a lesson many of us carry.”

In her 2001 speech, Judge Sotomayor reflected on how she applies that lesson.

“Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion,” she said.

“I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations,” Judge Sotomayor added. “I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage, but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

Contributors to this article include Jo Becker, David Gonzalez, Jodi Kantor, Serge F. Kovaleski, William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser, Manny Fernandez, Karen Zraick, Colin Moynihan, Richard Pérez-Peña and Michael Powell and Tamar Lewin from New York; and Charlie Savage, Scott Shane and Neil A. Lewis from Washington. Kitty Bennett, Itai Maytal and Barclay Walsh contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 29, 2009 A Woman in the News article on Wednesday about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, misstated, in some editions, the year in which she was confirmed as the first Hispanic judge on the federal bench in New York State. It was 1992, not 2002. The article also misspelled, in some editions, the given name of the former Republican senator from New York State who helped push through the October 1998 vote in which Judge Sotomayor was confirmed as a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York. He is Alfonse M. D’Amato, not Alphonse.

[randomgemsfromothers]

why

Why You Should Never Work at a Startup Apr 17, 2015 81,719Views 517Likes 237Comments You’re graduating or recently graduated. Congratulations. Here comes the future. And life is really going to get interesting. This is true for graduates this year and just about anyone who is just getting started in his or her career.

As a graduating senior, you have put time and energy into success. You studied hard, got the right grades, and will earn your degree from one of the world's most prestigious universities. You can do anything -- what choice will you make next?

Some of you will stay in school to pursue advanced degrees. Others will choose to join the workforce. Many of you will choose the path of entrepreneurship and look longingly at the startups in the Bay Area.

As someone who graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has been CEO of three startups, I relate to that desire. We are fortunate to have quickly grown our current company, Aha!, from a startup to an emerging software powerhouse.

I also have worked at a number of large businesses too. Citrix [CTXS] acquired my last company and I spent three years as a VP of Product and Strategy.

The past few years have seen startup mania. Some articles lure you to "heed the siren song" of starting your own business. Others call startups "the new master's degree." But I must caution against being dismissive of starting your career in a larger company. Businesses with thousands of employees are training grounds that can shape your career. They teach you what you're great at, how you're most productive, and what you want to gain out of work.

Early on in your career, one thing matters above all else -- always choose the option that offers the most personal growth. In this regard, most startups fail.

For new graduates fresh out of college, startups limit:

Learning At companies with thousands of employees, you'll get a front row seat to how businesses function. These companies also tend to have strong training programs -- they are willing and able to invest in the right graduates so they can train them to be leaders over time. Startups are often strapped for resources. Their CEOs will focus on what you can do for them -- not the other way around. For that reason, startups are often better options for entrepreneurs who have more experience.

Diversity Within big businesses, you'll meet diverse groups of people. As you network and make friends within the company, they will share their insights and become your best career advisors. Remember a startup is a small business. They tend to be homogenous; founding teams often knew each other from previous companies and have migrated to create something new. This is a great option for you years down the line. But right out of college, this can limit your growth and lead to burnout.

Opportunities A manager once told me that your twenties are for learning what you don't want to do. There's a lot of truth in that statement. Many join startups once they have a solid idea of where they are going and how they want to get there. Larger organizations allow you to build your network, learn new skills, and figure out how you're most productive. Regardless of which path you choose, that knowledge will help you.

For employees who have worked for a few years to hone their skills and narrow their passions, startups can be a rewarding path. But for many of you, they may stunt your development.

Larger companies are often maligned for their bureaucracy and lack of innovation. And they definitely have it. But they are also great places for recent grads to improve their skills and find their passions. Your earliest jobs might not leave you feeling the most fulfilled. But if you are astute, you can create your own career path.

This path might take you up the corporate ranks, or lead you to build something that matters as your own boss. Regardless, I think global corporations with thousands of employees have a lot to teach you about work and what you really love to do.

[randomgemsfromothers]

f

Democrats claim to be a multi-ethnic "coalition of the ascendant," but identity politics has inherent contradictions. Witness the victory this week by three liberal Asian-American lawmakers in blocking Sacramento's Democratic supermajority from trying to overturn California's ban on racial preferences (Prop. 209).

In January, Democratic state senators voted unanimously with little debate to place a constitutional amendment gutting Prop. 209 on the November ballot, which requires a two-thirds vote of both legislative chambers. The Assembly was poised to consider the amendment this month when Democratic Senators Ted Lieu of Torrance, Carol Liu of Pasadena and Leland Yee of San Francisco objected.

"In the past few weeks, we have heard from thousands of people throughout California voicing their concerns about the potential impacts," the senators wrote Assembly Speaker John Perez last week, adding that "as lifelong advocates for the Asian-American and other communities, we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children."

Political Diary editor Jason Riley explains why Asian-American lawmakers blocked attempts to restore racial preferences in college admissions. Photo credit: Getty Images.

Their concerns are well founded. In 1996, California voters approved Prop. 209 to block public institutions, notably state universities, from discriminating by race. Asian-American freshman enrollment at the University of California's 10-flagship universities has since climbed to 40.2% from 36.6% and to 47% from 39.7% at Berkeley.

Admissions rates for Asian Americans relative to other minority groups have also soared. In 1996, Asian Americans were about two-thirds as likely to get into Berkeley as blacks or Hispanics, not controlling for other factors. Today Asian Americans stand a 50% better shot of being admitted. Prop. 209's ban on racial preferences has helped Asian Americans by forcing admissions officers to focus on such academic qualifications as high-school grades and test scores.

Liberals argue that race-based admissions are necessary to increase black and Hispanic representation, but minority enrollment has increased since 1996 at the University of California. Hispanics now make up 28.1% of the UC system's freshman class, up from 13.8% in 1996, while black enrollment has ticked up to 4% from 3.8%.

Prop. 209 has shown that there are other ways to increase black and Hispanic enrollment than racial preferences. For instance, the University of California grants the top 9% of students in each high-school class automatic admission, though not necessarily to their first school choice. Blacks and Hispanics are now more likely to enroll at lower-tier campuses, but they graduate at higher rates.

Democratic leaders say they are merely delaying the referendum for discussion, but they know that pushing for Prop. 209's repeal risks alienating the growing block of Asian-American voters in the same way Republicans have alienated Hispanics. Asian Americans were 11% of California voters in 2012 compared to 6% in 2008, and nearly 80% of them voted for President Obama.

Prop. 209 has been upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court. But the U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule on Michigan's Prop. 2, which is based on Prop. 209, and liberals hope this will provide grounds for a new lawsuit to overturn California's ban on racial preferences. Note to Asian Americans: Democratic Attorney General Kamala Harris and Governor Jerry Brown have both argued for its repeal.

[randomgemsfromothers]

asian

State legislators in California have shelved an attempt to reverse the state's ban on racial preferences in college admissions. And it's noteworthy that Asian-American lawmakers put a stop to the effort.

"The proposed constitutional amendment by Sen. Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) would have removed references to higher education from Proposition 209, an initiative passed by voters in 1996 that bans consideration by government institutions of race, ethnicity and sex in hiring, school admissions and contracting," reports the Los Angeles Times. "The amendment, SCA 5, passed the Senate in January on a party-line vote. But the amendment has faced a growing backlash from some Chinese Americans over the last couple of weeks, and on Monday, Speaker John A. Perez (D-Los Angeles) announced that the measure was being returned to the Senate without any Assembly action."

OPINION VIDEOPolitical Diary editor Jason Riley explains why Asian-American lawmakers blocked attempts to restore racial preferences in college admissions. Photo credit: Getty Images.

It's not uncommon for Asian-American politicians and interest groups to align with their black and Hispanic counterparts. But affirmative action policies have exposed some rifts. In 2012, the 80-20 National Asian-American Educational Foundation, the National Federation of Indian American Associations and two other groups filed an amicus brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, an affirmative action case that was before the Supreme Court.

"As aspiring applicants capable of graduating from these institutions outnumber available seats, the utilization of race as a 'plus factor' for some inexorably applies race as a 'minus factor' against those on the other side of the equation," said the brief. "Particularly hard-hit are Asian American students, who demonstrate academic excellence at disproportionately high rates but often find the value of their work discounted on account of either their race, or nebulous criteria alluding to it."

The harm to Asian college applicants prior to Prop. 209 can be seen in the freshman enrollment figures at highly selective schools like the University of California, Berkeley. In 1995, Asians were 35 percent of Berkeley freshman. Over the next decade, that number grew to almost 47 percent in the absence of race-conscious admissions policies. Clearly, these high-achievers were having their race used against them by college officials wary of Asian overrepresentation on campus. Why should Chinese and Indian students want to return to a policy that discriminated against them for being smart? Perhaps affirmative action's defenders can explain why blacks deserve preference over Asians to address the past behavior of whites.

[randomgemsfromothers]

water

While the recent rains in California are welcome, they’ve barely made a dent in the enduring drought, now in its fourth year. Solving the state’s water problem will take radical solutions, and they can begin with “virtual water.”

This concept describes water that is used to produce food or other commodities, such as cotton. When those commodities are shipped out of state, virtual water is exported. Today California exports about six trillion gallons of virtual water, or about 500 gallons per resident a day.

How can this happen amid drought? The answer is mispricing. A free market would raise the price of water, reflecting its scarcity, and lead to a reduction in the export of virtual water. But California water markets are anything but free. A long history of local politics, complicated regulation and seemingly arbitrary controls on distribution have led to gross inefficiency.

Water trades amount to some two million acre-feet, barely 5% of California’s actual usage. Twenty-two of the state’s 58 counties have ordinances restricting sale of ground water outside the county. These ordinances, combined with local pressures, recently undermined the transfer of water from the Modesto Irrigation District to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission—though the commission would have paid $700 per acre-foot, or 70 times more than local farmers. Because of these practices and difficulties in transferring water through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, half of all water sales in the region are local.

Richvale, Calif. ENLARGE Richvale, Calif. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS The result is myriad misdirected incentives. Exhibit A is the almond industry.

California produces about 80% of the world’s almonds. The state’s 940,000 acres of almonds consume about 1.2 trillion gallons of water a year, or about 600 gallons of water per pound of nuts. So how much does all that water cost? Answer: It depends.

In 2014 Oakdale Irrigation District farmers spent about a penny for the water to produce a pound of almonds. Lodi farmers who use well water paid about seven cents a pound. Meanwhile, a farmer who tried in 2013 to purchase desalinized water in San Diego to grow almonds would have paid about $4 per pound.

Producing almonds is highly profitable when water is cheap. With adequate irrigation, new varieties of trees and a surge in almond prices, farmers can net $5,000 per acre, even become overnight millionaires.

This can certainly be a better strategy than growing less-profitable tomatoes—which use about 26 gallons of water per pound. But the advantage of growing tomatoes is that if water is in short supply in any year, you don’t plant them. Almond trees have to be watered every year, drought or glut.

The availability of cheap water made California almond production possible. In the 1970s a little more than 100,000 acres of almonds were under cultivation; today it is nearly 10 times more. Because of the increased use of irrigation, improved trees and better methods, orchard yields have more than doubled. But those trees are thirsty, and almond production uses about 10% of California’s total water supply.

This can’t continue much longer. Given the competing needs of the state’s residents and farmers—and the rapid depletion of the region’s great underground aquifers—something is going to snap.

California needs to use a lot less virtual water, but without putting unreasonable burdens on the state’s farmers. Here is how it might work.

Suppose an almond farmer could sell real water to any buyer, regardless of county boundaries, at market prices—many hundreds of dollars per acre-foot—if he agreed to cut his usage in half, say, by drawing only two acre-feet, instead of four, from his wells.

He would then be given an option to keep one acre-foot for his own use and sell one acre-foot at a very high price. He might have to curtail all or part of his almond orchard and grow more water-efficient crops. But he also might make enough money selling his water to make that decision worthwhile.

Using a similar strategy across its agricultural industry, California might be able to reverse the economic logic that has driven farmers to plant more water-intensive crops. This skewed system of economic rewards has led California farmers in the past 10 years to plant 30% more strawberries, 44% more almonds, 80% more raspberries, and 102% more pistachios—all while reducing the planting of less water-intensive crops such as asparagus by 57% and cantaloupes by 22%.

The devil is in the details, notably in getting all that water distributed and sold. But if markets and exchanges can be created for everything from carbon emissions to placing kids in schools, surely they can be built to price and sell virtual water.

This would take creative thinking, something California is known for, and trust in the power of free markets. Almost anything would be better, and fairer, than the current contradictory and self-defeating regulations. We are running out of time. It is time to do something else we Californians are known for—taking risks on innovation.

[randomgemsfromothers]

x

The students concluded their letter by stating they would instead be attending the Occupy Boston demonstration then under way. Counter protesters showed up in that class and Mankiw replied to his students in an article in The New York Times.[33][34] An editorial in the student-run Harvard Crimson condemned the protest.[35] Harvard Crimson in its editorial stated that:

"While it is true that Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, who was lecturing during the walkout, has conservative views and held a position in the Bush Administration, we take issue with the claim that his class is inherently biased because he is the professor and author of its textbook. The truth is that Ec 10, a requirement for economics concentrators, provides a necessary academic grounding for the study of economics as a social science. Professor Mankiw’s curriculum sticks to the basics of economic theory without straying into partisan debate. We struggle to believe that we must defend his textbook, much maligned by the protesters, which is both peer reviewed and widely used.

Furthermore, the students protesting the class who desire that he give more time to other, less accepted schools of economic thought—like Marxism—would do well to remember that such interrogation is the domain of social theory, not economic theory. Supply-and-demand economics is a popular idea of how society is organized, and Mankiw’s Ec 10 never presents itself as more than that. As such, including other theories would simply muddy the waters of what is intended; Ec 10 is an introductory class that lays the foundation for future, more nuanced, study.

That being said, even if Ec 10 were as biased as the protesters claim it is, students walking out to protest its ideology set a dangerous precedent in an academic institution that prides itself on open discourse. This type of protest ignores opposition rather than engages with it. Instead of challenging a professor to back up his claims, it tries to remove him from the dialogue."

[randomgemsfromothers]

a

Principles of Economics, 6E

economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” So wrote Alfred Marshall, the great 19th-century economist, in his textbook, Principles of Economics. Although we have learned much about the economy since Marshall’s time, this definition of economics is as true today as it

was in 1890, when the first edition of his text was published. Why should you, as a student at the beginning of the 21st century, embark on

the study of economics? There are three reasons. The first reason to study economics is that it will help you understand the

world in which you live. There are many questions about the economy that might spark your curiosity. Why are apartments so hard to find in New York City? Why do airlines charge less for a round-trip ticket if the traveler stays over a Saturday night? Why is Johnny Depp paid so much to star in movies? Why are living stan- dards so meager in many African countries? Why do some countries have high rates of inflation while others have stable prices? Why are jobs easy to find in some years and hard to find in others? These are just a few of the questions that a course in economics will help you answer.

The second reason to study economics is that it will make you a more astute participant in the economy. As you go about your life, you make many economic decisions. While you are a student, you decide how many years to stay in school. Once you take a job, you decide how much of your income to spend, how much to save, and how to invest your savings. Someday you may find yourself running a small business or a large corporation, and you will decide what prices to charge for your products. The insights developed in the coming chapters will give you a new perspective on how best to make these decisions. Studying economics will not by itself make you rich, but it will give you some tools that may help in that endeavor.

The third reason to study economics is that it will give you a better understand- ing of both the potential and the limits of economic policy. Economic questions are always on the minds of policymakers in mayors’ offices, governors’ mansions, and the White House. What are the burdens associated with alternative forms of taxation? What are the effects of free trade with other countries? What is the best way to protect the environment? How does a government budget deficit affect the economy? As a voter, you help choose the policies that guide the allocation of society’s resources. An understanding of economics will help you carry out that responsibility. And who knows: Perhaps someday you will end up as one of those policymakers yourself.

Thus, the principles of economics can be applied in many of life’s situations. Whether the future finds you reading the newspaper, running a business, or sit- ting in the Oval Office, you will be glad that you studied economics

[randomgemsfromothers]

a

n December, Backupify joined with Datto to create the first Total Data Protection Platform to protect your business data no matter where it lives. The combined offering, in addition to the Backupify products you already know and love, provides comprehensive options for backup, disaster recovery and business continuity for companies of all sizes, ranging from small- and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises. More details can be found here.

As part of enhancing our cloud-to-cloud backup product line, over the coming months, all Backupify services including compute infrastructure and data storage will migrate to the Datto Cloud. The Datto Cloud already backs up 1 million Datto customer computers a day and is purpose-built for security, speed and reliability.

Of course, all of your current backups will be preserved as we move to the Datto Cloud.

We'll be migrating core services and previous backups over the next couple of months and will publish a complete schedule for this work shortly. We don’t anticipate there will be any impact to our services during this work.

Once we have completed our migration to the Datto Cloud, all of your future backups will automatically be stored and replicated in multiple geographically-redundant Datto Cloud datacenters.

Once the integration is complete, customers will benefit from:

Even better data protection as a result of additional geographic storage redundancy for all backups. Improved system performance that comes from running on a cloud optimized for backup and restore. Leveraging Datto products to back up your on-premise devices in addition to your Saas apps means that your data will be stored in one, unified platform using the Datto Cloud. Coming later in 2015: Improved support, at no additional charge, including access to Datto’s 24/7/365 telephone support technicians for assistance with data backup or recovery. If you should have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Emily Glass VP of Customer Care Datto, Inc.