Charter school looks past 'No Excuses' to a more forgiving policy

Borrowing from practices of a program called the Responsive Classroom, Ascend began to retrain teachers to focus on social and emotional development. This provided the framework for creative problem solving to help prevent conflicts between students, or between teachers and students, from escalating.

The chair circle is a regular feature. Just before Christmas a group of girls who were arguing over boys and accusations that had been made on social media asked him to convene a circle. He told them, as he often does, to "attack the situation rather than one another." When it's over, he has the students pose for a circle selfie.

Across the network, suspension rates dropped to 4.2 percent in the 2015-16 school year from 9.5 percent in 2012-2013.

"Our big purpose here is to create agency," Mr Wilson told me. "Our view is not about grit. Our students have a lot of grit, look at their lives. But if all you have experienced is unrelenting structure how do you emerge with autonomy?"

New York Times, March 12, 2017

"We're a coalition country"

"In Europe we all see the developments in the United States, and that's not where we want to go because we see it as chaos," said Janka Stoker, a professor in the School of Economics and Business at the University of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. "We're a coalition country, we don't always like the coalitions, but we know it gives stability and people know here that we have to work together," Ms. Stoker said.

--New York Times, March 17, 2017, after election that added seats in Parliament for the Green Party and fewer seats for right wing populist Geert Wilders

Italian musicians are deported

Members of the Italian post-punk trio Soviet Soviet, booked to play at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, were detained in Seattle on Wednesday and eventually deported by United States Customs and Border Protection officials as immigration enforcement under the Trump administration continues to cause tension.

On Facebook, Soviet Soviet said that its three members were separately interrogated for four hours before they were handcuffed and taken to jail, and that they were denied the opportunity to make phone calls. "We were relieved to fly back home and distance ourselves from that violent, stressful and humiliating situation."

New York Times, March 13, 2017

Dialogue

"If the two sides decide that the only way forward is to just launch strikes on each other, then that is just what they decided to do. But a good cup of tea and some dialogue never hurt nobody."--Bilal Abdul Kareem, raised as Darrell Lamont Phelps in Mount Vernon

"An American in Syria Offering a Window on Jihad" NYTimes March 11 Saturday Profile by Ben Hubbard

Newness and God

"Unrelenting newness made for something like blindness. It was as if sight did not function properly in the absence of understanding." (p.96)

"...[W]hat he truly felt was that God was just a way for a man to interrogate his own heart." (p. 286)

The Lieutenant, Kate Grenville 2009

An alternative "built on ideals and hope and optimism"

"A lot of people are disappointed in politics. What we want to do with Greens is be an alternative for center parties. But this is not an alternative built with fear and hate, but an alternative built on ideals and hope and optimism."

--Jesse Klaver, 30, "Greens make inroads before Dutch election as leader of the far right appears to falter, NY Times, March 11, 2017, reportrd by Alissa J. Rubin and Christopher F. Schuetze

TJ and Dave in New York

"At their finest, the two men examine the minutiae of everyday life with the precision of a keenly observational stand-up set; that they are doing so on the fly makes it all the more exhilarating to watch."--Elise Czajkowski, "Creating a universe in under an hour," NYTimes, March 10, 2017

Robots and inequality and politics

"The earnings from automation have been shared unequally, with business owners getting a much larger share than workers....'How to make the forces of technology and globalization work for people and not against them is the biggest public policy challenge in America. The rise of populism, both on the left and the right, is because middle-income voters feel that their elected leaders don't have the answer to this question.'"

--"How to help humans when the robots come to take our jobs," by Claire Cain Miller, NYTimes, March 8, 2017. Quote from Jim Kessler, senior vp for policy at Third Way

Obamacare becomes "Republicare"

"Republicans gave the Affordable Care Act a name--Obamacare--in a calculated strategy to undermine the law. Their scorched-earth effort to 'repeal and replace' needs a moniker, too, one that holds them accountable. If the Democrats call it 'Republicare,' voters will get the message loud and clear."--Jonathan Gibson, Shrewsbury, Vermont

Letter to the editor, NYTimes, March 9, 2017

"You say to brick" says architect Louis Kahn

"You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?' Brick says to you, 'I like an arch.'"

Other "Lou-language": "Need is so many bananas. Need is a ham sandwich. But desire is insatiable and you can never know what it is."

--from Dwight Garner's review of You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser, NYTimes, March 8, 2017