34justice

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • A Person Among Machines

    34justice’s first guest author is David Fischer, a student at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute medical research fellow.  In this piece, David discusses how physicians navigate “the gray zone between life and death” when they interact with patients on life support.  David studies the effects of…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • What Did I Just Pay For?

    One year down and the greater part of a decade to go. As a first year medical student, having finished class for a couple months has allowed for ample time to digest much of what happened to me over the last twelve months, I can’t help but ask the question:…

  • Paid Sick Leave and the Three Lenses of Policy Analysis

    Some political debates have two equally valid sides.  More often than not, however, the evidence is significantly more one-sided than journalists and pundits suggest.  AB 1522, a bill that the California Senate’s Committee on Appropriations just shunted into its Suspense File for consideration on August 14, is an example of…

  • StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I Debate Accountability Measures (Part 1)

    After my blog post on the problem with outcome-oriented teacher evaluations and school accountability measures, StudentsFirst Vice President Eric Lerum and I exchanged a few tweets about student outcomes and school inputs and decided to debate teacher and school accountability more thoroughly.  We had a lengthy email conversation we agreed…

  • Sustainable in the South Bay: Silicon Valley’s Top 10 Restaurants

    My fiancé (Kate) is attending Georgetown Med in the fall and we just hit the road for Washington, DC.  I’ve enjoyed eight awesome years in the Bay Area and feel fortunate to have gone to college, worked, and occasionally dominated adult league softball and basketball with so many amazing people.…

  • Vergara v. California Panel Discussion with Leadership for Educational Equity

    Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), Teach For America’s (TFA’s) partner organization that focuses on alumni leadership development, held an online panel for members interested in learning more about Vergara v. California on June 26.  I was excited to receive an invitation to speak on the panel – I enjoyed talking…