Ideas, Actions, and Inspiration for a Better Tomorrow - October 3 Edition

Policing, Mentors

How Peer Mentorship Can Change Police Departments’ Cultures

"Geoffrey Alpert has, since 1975, been researching how police conduct themselves, and one finding borne out in his work is that many police officers see themselves as “warriors” against crime. He’s seen that dynamic on display as he’s studied studied racial profiling and the use of force in some of the nation’s most controversial departments, including in Miami and Los Angeles.

Alpert, who is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina, has advised police departments throughout the country on how to reduce the use of force and increase trust between the public and law enforcement. One change he commonly recommends is for police officers to provide more constructive criticism to each other.

For The Atlantic’s series on mentorship, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” I spoke with Alpert about how the balance of affirmation and criticism plays out in police departments, as well as in conversations with his own students. The interview that follows has been edited for length and clarity."

Technology, Prosthetics, Inspiration

Today’s feel-good story:

This 3D-printed robotic arm could be the most advanced and most realistic yet

Higher Education, Testing

Students, Rejoice – Standardized testing may soon be dead

"The GRE’s shortcomings haven’t gone unnoticed by admissions committees, which in recent years have pushed to reduce reliance on the exam scores. Even the ETS is encouraging programs to de-emphasize GRE scores and not use them as cutoffs. Some programs at the University of California, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgetown University recently dropped GRE requirements. In 2015, the president of the American Astronomical Society wrote an open letter urging the chairs of departments in the field to rethink the role of the GRE. In response, several astronomy programs, including Harvard’s, removed the test from their physics requirements.

The latest to bail is the University of Michigan’s Program in Biomedical Sciences (PIBS) program. “For a long time there was really no point in discussing [it],” says professor Scott Barolo, PIBS director, since students needed the score for pre-doctoral grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. But in 2010 the NIH dropped its GRE requirement, and NSF followed suit in 2015. “So it became clear that there were no institutional or funding barriers to reconsidering this decision,” says Barolo. After debating the issue at a town hall session, PIBS announced on August 18 that it would drop the GRE starting next year."

Housing Affordability

Gov. Brown just signed 15 housing bills. Here's how they're supposed to help the affordability crisis

"Gov. Jerry Brown has finalized lawmakers’ most robust response to California’s housing affordability problems in recent memory.

The “15 good bills” Brown signed into law here Friday morning include a new fee on real estate transactions and a $4-billion bond on the 2018 ballot that together could raise close to $1 billion a year in the near term to help subsidize new homes for low-income residents.

"It is a big challenge. We have risen to it this year,” Brown said.

The governor signed the legislation surrounded by lawmakers and advocates at Hunters View, a $450-million project in San Francisco that is redeveloping what was once crumbling public housing into new homes for 700 low- and middle-income families. Speakers at the ceremony hailed the package of bills as a sea change in how the state handles housing issues.

“Today California begins a pivot from a housing-last policy to a housing-first policy,” said Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who wrote one of the key measures.

Still, the array of new laws Brown signed Friday will hardly put a dent in the state’s housing problems. Developers need to build about 100,000 new homes each year beyond what’s already planned, simply to keep pace with California’s population growth.

Here’s a rundown of how the bills aim to address different factors that add to the state’s housing problems:"

Identity Protection, Cell Phones

9 Smart Ways to Protect Your Phone Data  

Click on the title to watch the video. 

Ideas, Actions, and Inspiration for a Better Tomorrow - September 27 Edition

Black Lives, Feminism, Role Models

How Black Women Have Impacted Feminism over Time

"Even if their stories weren't told in the headlines or transcribed in the history books, black women have always been at the front line in the fight for equality. Many of the struggles and rewards we have today are off of the shoulders of black women, both known and unknown. These women are essential in understanding feminism and the fight for civil rights.

Composed of various class backgrounds, sexual orientations, and voices, black women are anchored in intersectionality — a term developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1993 to describe the oppression individuals face due to their position in society. From speaking about issues of empowerment and suffrage to making the connections between race, ability, and gender into conversations around equality, black women have long been teaching about the multifaceted and interlocking systems of oppressions that effected marginalized people.

To better explain this history, The National Museum of African American History and Cultureproduced #APeoplesJourney: African American Women and the Struggle for Equality, an animated visual media that displays the roles of black women feminists through time, in partnership with YouTube for Good.

Lanae Spruce, manager of social media and digital management for NMAAHC, described the video to Teen Vogue as an opportunity to amplify women and tell stories they never heard before about black women leaders; to highlight those stories and expand upon narratives in order to instill a platform that describes the rights of black people and women."

Immigration, Workplace

Column: Forget the border wall, Mr. President. Look to the hole in worksite enforcement rules

“Presented as a compassionate but pragmatic compromise, IRCA coupled a one-time amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants with an employer sanctions regime to punish those who knowingly hired persons not authorized to work in the United States.

But the law came into the world with a fatal defect. Because of the clout of strange-bedfellows — a left-right coalition that united immigrant rights activists, Latino politicians, businesses, and libertarians — IRCA was stripped of a mandate for the executive branch to develop a secure means of verifying that workers were authorized. Instead, workers were allowed to present documents from a wide assortment of easily counterfeited identifiers, and employers were required to accept any document that “reasonably appears on its face to be genuine.”

The result was a proliferation of counterfeit documents and fraud on a massive scale. Far from stopping illegal immigration, IRCA had actually stimulated it, according to Philip Martin, an immigration scholar at the University of California at Davis. “Perhaps the most important effect of immigration reform was to spread unauthorized workers from the Southwest to the rest of the country,” said Martin.”

Middle East, Women

Saudi women just won the right to drive

"Saudi Arabia’s extreme repression of women has long been illustrated by their prohibition from driving. Some women who have protested that restriction — or flouted it — have been harshly penalized or arrested.

Late Tuesday night local time, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman issued a royal decree declaring that women will soon be allowed to apply for drivers’ licenses and drive legally.

The decree is a win for women, but it’s also a tactical win for the state. Refusing to allow women to drive has been a public relations disaster for the Saudis for years. Giving them the keys, they hope, will not only ease public international pressure but also give women the chance to contribute more to the economy.

Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam. The ban on women drivers has long been explained as being religiously motivated, but it is the only country in the world, of any religion, that had instituted such a ban."

Rural America, Higher Education

The Rural Higher-Education Crisis

"It’s not that rural students aren’t academically prepared. They score better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress than urban students and graduate from high school at a higher percentage than the national average, the U.S. Department of Education reports. At the regional high school Gordon attended in Lenox, Iowa, the graduation rate is typically at or near an impressive 100 percent.

Yet even the highest-income white students from rural areas are less likely to go to college right from high school than their well-off white city and suburban counterparts, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, which tracks this data: 61 percent, compared to 72 percent from urban schools and 74 percent from suburban ones.

Overall, 59 percent of rural high-school grads—white and nonwhite, at every income level—go to college the subsequent fall, a lower proportion than the 62 percent of urban and 67 percent of suburban graduates who do, the clearinghouse says. Forty-two percent of people ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in all of higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but only 29 percent come from rural areas, compared to nearly 48 percent from cities.

The reasons for this are as myriad as they are consequential, affecting everything from regional economic competitiveness to widening political division."

Politics

Sights set on 2018, the Women’s March is throwing a convention

"When an estimated 4 million people turned up for the Women’s March protest in Washington, D.C., and 650 sister marches across the United States in January, just a day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, both participants and observers asked, “What’s next?”

Nearly eight months later, the march’s organizers are planning a major follow-up event: a multi-day forum, called the “The Women’s Convention,” aimed at building support ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The convention is scheduled to take place in Detroit on Oct. 27-29.

We need to take the organizing power we gained from the Women’s March and convert that into political power,” said Bob Bland, the national co-chair of the Women’s March on Washington. “Our goal is for people to come out of this with revolutionary new knowledge, training and connections.”

The convention is the latest high-profile effort to maintain the grassroots energy from the January march, which was likely the single largest protest in U.S. history. Organizers expect 5,000 people will attend the convention; nearly 1,500 people have registered so far."