Author: Ben Spielberg
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It’s Not What Employers Are Doing, But What They Can Do, That Matters
A few days ago, Buzzfeed reported that Staples, the large office supply chain, had stepped up its enforcement of a cap on hours worked for part-time employees. Despite the company’s unconvincing claim* that the policy is longstanding, it appears that Staples implemented the 25-hour-per-week cap in January of 2014 “to…
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Everything You Need to Know About Inequality
Jared Bernstein and I just published a comprehensive PowerPoint presentation on inequality in the United States (available for download here). This presentation is first and foremost intended as a resource. Part 1 of the presentation documents the increase in inequality over the past 35 years; the trend is evident from…
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The FDA Modifies Gay Blood Ban But Continues to Disregard Facts
Just before Christmas, the FDA accepted the recommendation of a Department of Health and Human Services panel and announced its plan to modify its ban on gay blood donation. Instead of barring gay (and bisexual) men from donation for life, as the policy has up to this point, the FDA…
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Dear FDA: Let Gay Men Donate Blood
Gay men cannot donate blood in America. I was reminded of this discriminatory and illogical policy after a recent conversation about student advocacy on Twitter. In 2005, at the end of my junior year of high school, several friends and I mounted a campaign to change this rule. I wrote…
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The Political Lens: What Global Warming and Wright v. New York Have in Common
During the 2003-2004 school year, my chemistry teacher told my class that global warming wasn’t occurring. I believed her. When I attended New Jersey’s Governor’s School of International Studies in the summer of 2005, a professor told me the opposite – the evidence for global warming, and for the human…
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The 34justice Political Tool: Ethics, Truth, and a Case Study of Michael Brown and Ferguson
Seating arrangements during the French Revolution gave us the Left-Right political spectrum. During the first National Assembly in 1789, the king’s supporters sat on the right and proponents of revolution on the left. In contemporary American politics, we often consider liberals, who “believe in government action to achieve equal opportunity…
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On Education and Poverty, and How We Talk About Them (Part 3b)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I recently began a debate about approaches to teacher evaluation. During Part 2 of that debate, the conversation touched on the relationship between anti-poverty work and education reform. We resume that conversation below. Here were the relevant parts of our original exchange, in case…
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Cooks, Chefs, and Teachers: A Long-Form Debate on Evaluation (Part 3a)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I have been debating teacher evaluation approaches since my blog post about why evaluating teachers based on student test scores is misguided and counterproductive. Our conversation began to touch on the relationship between anti-poverty activism and education reform conversations, a topic we plan to…
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Eric Lerum and I Debate Teacher Evaluation and the Role of Anti-Poverty Work (Part 2)
StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I recently began debating the use of standardized test scores in high stakes decision-making. I argued in a recent blog post that we should instead evaluate teachers on what they directly control – their actions. Our conversation, which began to touch on additional interesting…
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