the one person in the executive branch who is almost guaranteed not to be fired and is, at the same time, most able to speak independently about what matters in the country: Melania Trump.
It’s time we listened to Melania.
.. Social and emotional learning is an idea whose time has come. It builds from neuroscience that reveals that our brains are both malleable and dependent on the strength of our relationships.
.. In one study, social and emotional learning programs were shown to reduce behavior problems and increase test scores. In another, they were shown to improve physical and mental health outcomes — and with gains that persist up to 18 years.
.. a focus on integrating social and emotional learning resulted in a steep drop in discipline problems as well as an improvement in test scores.
Advice to New Grads: Scale or Bail
Want to change the world? Don’t bother volunteering—get a real, ‘boring’ job.
If you’re volunteering at shelters or working for most nonprofits, that’s all very nice, but it’s one-off. You’re one of the privileged few who have the education to create lasting change. It may feel good to ladle soup to the hungry, but you’re wasting valuable brain waves that could be spent ushering in a future in which no one is hungry to begin with.
There’s a word that was probably never mentioned by your professors: Scale. No, not the stuff on the bottom of your bong or bathtub. It’s the concept of taking a small idea and finding ways to implement it for thousands, or millions, or even billions. Without scale, ideas are no more than hot air. Stop doing the one-off two-step. It’s time to scale up.\
Don’t spend all your time caring for the sick. Prevent disease. Gene therapy, early detection and immunotherapy can change the trajectory of disease because they scale. Don’t build temporary shelters. Figure out how to 3-D print real homes quickly and cheaply. Why tutor a few students when you can capture lessons from best-of-breed teachers and deliver them electronically to millions? That’s scale.
.. There is too much talk of sustainability, the fight over slices of a pie, zero-sum games. That’s the wrong framework. You need sustainability only if you stick to one-off moves.
.. detoxifying oppression
.. Channel that energy to change the stagnant status quo through scale in education, banking and especially government.
.. listen to Bono. As he told Georgetown students a few years ago, “Entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.”
College May Not Be Worth It Anymore
African-American college dropouts on average earn less than do white Americans with only a high school degree.
.. It’s a cruel irony that a college degree is worth less to people who most need a boost: those born poor.
.. What all this suggests is that the college-degree premium may really be a no-college-degree penalty. It’s not necessarily college that gives people the leverage to build a better working life, it’s that not having a degree decreases whatever leverage they might otherwise have.
This distinction is more than semantic. It is key to understanding the growing chasm between educational attainment and life prospects. For most of us, it’s not our education that determines our employment trajectory but rather where that education positions us in relation to others.
Martin Luther King: ‘We Can’t Keep On Blaming the White Man’
Fifty years after his death, many pay lip service to his ideals, but far too few are following his example.
It almost goes without saying that the leading civil-rights organizations today can no longer count people of that caliber in their ranks. Which may be the clearest indication yet that the movement is over and that the right side prevailed. If black Americans were still faced with legitimate threats to civil rights—such as legal discrimination or voter disenfranchisement—we would see true successors to the King-era luminaries step forward, not the pretenders in place today who have turned a movement into an industry, if not a racket.
Racial gaps that were steadily narrowing in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s would expand in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, which suggests that the disparities that continue today aren’t being driven by racism, notwithstanding claims to the contrary from liberals and their allies in the media. It also suggests that attitudes toward
- marriage,
- education,
- work and
- the rule of law
play a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge. More marches won’t address out-of-wedlock childbearing. More sit-ins won’t lower black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.