It seems backwards, since political liberals are often seen as pushing the government to help combat social ills like poverty, lack of health insurance, etc. Yet the data can’t lie, can it?

Political commentaries aside, the article piqued my interest and I thought others might find some fodder in this.

Statistics and Scientific Inquiry

About halfway through the column, Kristof quotes an author who researched this topic (Arthur Brooks, Who Really Cares)

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

This tiny little narrative is a great summary of statistical and scientific inquiry.

Brooks started with a hypothesis – that political liberals gave more to charities than political conservatives. He designed an experiment that he thought would support his hypothesis.

When the data didn’t jive with his expectations, he redesigned his experiment and repeated it. Same results.

Only after repeated surprises (cognitive dissonance?) did he finally alter his views and come to a new conclusion.

When I learned about the scientific method in school (no, I don’t teach science, so this is not coming from a science educator’s perspective), it always seemed like the experiments were self-serving. You conducted them to prove a result you already knew – or at least that you thought you knew.

Brooks’ experience is, I think, more in line with the real work of science and statistics. Yes, a lot of experiments are designed to prove pre-developed hypotheses. But the real discoveries – the meaty, world-altering discoveries – are often unexpected.

At this point, the scientific method proved its true usefulness in clarifying and supporting this unexpected conclusion.

Think Outside the Box

Something else that jumped out at me throughout the column was that this is a great opportunity to think outside the box. Simple data that leads to unexpected conclusions calls for some novel, creative thought to answer the simple question: Why?

The researcher Brooks (and the columnist Kristoff) both seem to think that since political liberals are concerned about social issues, they’ll donate money to solve them. Likewise, political conservatives don’t seem concerned, so they’ll keep their money in their pockets.

It’s certainly a plausible solution. But, since the data proves it wrong, it’s time to come up with an alternative explanation.

Instead of looking at the difference in concern over social problems, consider the difference liberals and conservatives have about the role of government.

Liberals think that one of the jobs of government is to build safety nets, solve social ills, and help give everyone a semblance of economic equality – or, at least, equality of opportunity. Conservatives, by contrast, want the government to be as hands off as possible, allowing the market and the mechanisms of competition to sort out who should be rich and poor, insured and uninsured, etc.

Couldn’t this lead back to the data? If liberals think that the government should be spending tax money on solving social problems, why would they be donating their personal income? They are, in a way, donating money by proxy – by voting to raise taxes so that the government can deal with these issues.

If indeed conservatives donate a lot of money to charities, then this could be explained by the fact that conservatives do care about people, but they feel philanthropy should handle social ills – not the government.

While I’m not suggesting this is the correct or only conclusion to draw, it is an example of thinking outside the box and explaining a phenomena in an alternative way. This is a skill that many adults lack, and it’s something our students should definitely develop.

For more in that vein, check out the Freakonomics blog at NYTimes. The blog, and the book by the same name, are great examples of coming up with explanations to phenomena that aren’t already adequately explained.

Something We Should All Give: Blood

Towards the end, Kristoff mentions something else: blood donations. Let’s sidestep the political conversation over whether liberals or conservatives give more blood.

I’ll put it simply: we should all give blood. There is constantly a need, and there is simply no other way to get human blood to save people’s lives.

Last year, I organized a blood drive at my school with the help of some students. Throughout the day, students and staff donated a little over 50 pints of blood for the local blood center. I wished it would have been bigger, but it was a great first effort – and we’re planning on hosting our second annual blood drive this May.

If you don’t give blood, think about it. You can usually make an appointment at a local blood center and be done in about an hour. I go on a Saturday morning every few months.

If you do give blood, does your school host a blood drive? I first donated when I was a senior in high school, and they are a great way to introduce your students to the need for blood donations. If people don’t know that blood is so vital, why would they go out of their way to donate some?

You’ll have to do some legwork promoting the blood drive and jumping through administrative hoops, but the blood center handles most of the work. In my case, they brought the beds, the staff, and even the snacks. All we had to do was show up.

Check out the list of local blood centers and find one near you. Somebody, somewhere is counting on it.

In actuality, it’s fairly simple if you take a moment to look at how it works. Yet, it never fails to prompt students to throw out comments like, “That’s not fair!” “Our votes don’t count!” and “They just cheat anyway!”

Analyzing Proposed Election Reforms

While teaching the Constitution – and election politics – I like to throw in a little investigation of the Electoral College. Another day, I’ll write up the entire lesson, but it basically asks the students to look at the 2000 Presidential Election and to determine if there was a more fair way to distribute the electoral votes.

The problem at the core of the issue is that electoral votes are distributed winner-take-all, so there’s really no guarantee that the person who won the electoral vote also won the electoral college. In fact, if you browse through past electoral maps, you’ll see a lot of cases in which the proportion of the electoral vote is nowhere near the proportion of the popular vote.

A couple years ago, some California Republicans concocted a plan to split its massive amount of electoral votes along Congressional districts. As long as California was the only state to adopt such a measure, it would effectively hamstring any future Democratic candidates.

The Republican candidate could count on getting easy votes from all the Red states, and he could also steal a few of California’s 55 votes from the Democratic candidate. Based on the current layout of California’s Congressional districts, those “few” votes would probably amount to about 19 votes.

This gave me the idea for the lesson – to have the students do a kind of experiment. Split the electoral votes in some states, but not all. What happens if all the Democratic states split their votes? What happens if all the Republican states split their vote?

The result, in either case, is a lopsided victory for the opposition.

Wrapping It Up: Creative Solutions

Now, I’ve got a nifty little article to have the students read at the end. There was an Op Ed in today’s NY Times about the Electoral College.

Originally, I thought the author was going to support that same California plan – which alone is a pretty shoddy  idea. It turns out that Randall Lane has a pretty creative idea though: states from opposite sides of the political aisle pair up and enact this legislation together.

For example, New York and Texas have roughly the same number of electoral votes. If both of them passed a law that split their electoral votes according to Congressional districts, it wouldn’t give (much of) an advantage to either Republicans or Democratics. It would, however, greatly increase the value of campaigning in those two states.

The point of my original lesson was to open students ideas to the fact that some ideas may sound good and fair – like the California plan – but they are designed to break the system. The Lane article provides a nice wrap up. It validates the students’ findings in the activity, while also providing a creative alternative.

Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of gerrymandering… so maybe we’re just trading one abusive system for another.

I never quite thought about it before, but I guess I’d have to agree with Steven in general – not much. How much power does the President really have in the face of 535 federal legislators? Or, more importantly, how much power does he have in the face of lobbyists, special interest groups, the military-industrial complex, or the murky depths of the Capitalist market system?

The current economic crisis is a great example. How much could the President – even one better than Bush – really impact the economy? In the short term, I’d say it’s kind of hopeless – I don’t think we need any more bailouts to figure that one out.

In the long term, he could potentially patch things together through legislation and policy shifts. Yet legislation isn’t the purvue of the President, and even with a friendly Congress it can be difficult to get stuff passed. If legislation solves the problem, the claim to fame would necessarily be shared with others.

Then there’s the notion that economies move slowly, so how do we know who’s really behind the change? It took the country a decade under FDR to claw its way out of the Great Depression. Not quite the instant gratification that most people desire.

This Matters for Education?

This question seems extremely relevant to me for two reasons.

First, people (my students included) expect the world to change when Obama becomes President. His appointment of a security team is just one example that you can’t expect too much change – especially in the type of crisis the country is in.

Shortly before the election, the Iraq War briefly came up as a topic in class. One my students said that if Obama was elected, the war would be over and all the troops would come home. I delicately tried to explain that that just wasn’t the case. For starters, he never said anything like that (timetable != immediate withdrawal in January). It would also be a logistical nightmare to pick up and leave in the blink of an eye.

This question – Does the President really matter? – is a great talking point to get students thinking about the real possibilities for change. How much power will Obama really have? How much is he hemmed in by the war, by the financial crisis, by the need to appease party rivals?  We can keep hoping for change, but he’s no genie in a bottle.

Second, it’s a good general view into the world of federal politics. We all know what the government does, but what power do the parts really have? That executive branch always seemed a bit fuzzy to me. He signs a bill, eh? That sounds important. Not so different from Queen Elizabeth II.

Obama is one example, but I do think we tend to over-estimate the impact of the President. Even he is a driving force in the action of the government, he is arguably less important than the courts and the legislature. He just provides a single name, a single face for us to fixate on. In some ways, it is a ceremonial, figurehead position like the British monarch.

The question could also be turned on other parts.  The Supreme Court, for example, is seeminglingly all-powerful.  But it couldn’t force Jackson to respect the Cherokee Nation.  It’s landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, was only a start to the desegregation of schools.

I think the question is terribly thought-provoking, and I’d love to use it as the basis of a lesson/project/unit. Just got to figure out how to address it…

I think it’s extremely relevant for them for a number of reasons. The anti-war mood jives with the current sentiment about Iraq. The death of civilians resonates with recent (and not-so-recent) killings of civilians by police (especially the NYPD).

It also opens up opportunities for students to explore related issues: What happened at Jackson State? Why were we in Vietnam? Why did people disapprove of Vietnam? Why were the students protesting?

Those are just a few of the questions that were raised, and hopefully it sparked some curiosity in the students so that they can continue to investigate this moment in American history. [Note: I engineered the Jackson State question, but the others were genuinely student-driven.]

In prepping for the topic this year, I spent some time looking for useful resources on the web… in part because I’ve got access to a project and desktop computer that I didn’t last year.

Here are a few useful resources that I found.

YouTube Videos

I find there’s nothing better to grab students attention in the beginning or end of a lesson than a short, musical, move.

YouTube is full of photo montages set to the song “Ohio,” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.  A search for Kent State should bring up dozens, but here are two that I found pretty good. I played both of them in class (one each day) while we were exploring the topic.

These are great attention grabbers, and they’re also an interesting point of study themselves (What perspective do the artists and the creators of the videos take? Are they biased?), but they don’t do a lot to explain the events. I found another video that uses explains it pretty well, using some funny paint animation.

Pictures Are Worth a Thousand Words

Oh, so true. The “Ohio” videos contain some nice pictures, but I was looking for some other images that I could use in a Power Point overview of the events at Kent State (May 1-4).

Searching on Google Images brought up a few useful pictures, but for the most part it was just copy after copy of the Mary Vecchio picture (the girl kneeling over her friend’s body).

I eventually found a collection on Google Images, uploaded by one Howard Ruffner. It includes dozens of photos from the tumultous days at Kent State. It’s a great resource for anyone trying to match realistic visuals to an account of May 1 to May 4.

Information and Research

The ‘net is full of information and research about Kent State.

The wikipedia page provides a good overview and seems to be more or less accurate. It also includes citations you can use for further information.

Members of the Kent State Sociology department published a short paper about the Kent State shootings. This provides an extensive bibliography, and it deals directly with misinformation and misconceptions about the shootings. A must-read for anyone researching the topic online.

The Kent State May 4 Center is also a good starting point. It contains links to a lot of other resources, as well as an ongoing collection of news related to Kent State and the shootings. It certainly seems slanted in favor of the student demonstrators, though, so be sure to read some more objective sources to balance it out.

Why?

From the paper by Kent Sociologists Jerry Lewis and Thomas Hensley…

First, the shootings have come to symbolize a great American tragedy which occurred at the height of the Vietnam War era, a period in which the nation found itself deeply divided both politically and culturally. The poignant picture of Mary Vecchio kneeling in agony over Jeffrey Miller’s body, for example, will remain forever as a reminder of the day when the Vietnam War came home to America. If the Kent State shootings will continue to be such a powerful symbol, then it is certainly important that Americans have a realistic view of the facts associated with this event.

[...]

Third, and most importantly, May 4th at Kent State should be remembered in order that we can learn from the mistakes of the past. The Guardsmen in their signed statement at the end of the civil trials recognized that better ways have to be found to deal with these types of confrontations. This has probably already occurred in numerous situations where law enforcement officials have issued a caution to their troops to be careful because “we don’t want another Kent State.” Insofar as this has happened, lessons have been learned, and the deaths of four young Kent State students have not been in vain.

While I was sitting there, I thought about the first time I donated blood – when my high school hosted a blood drive my senior year. Why don’t more high schools do this?

Here a few interesting facts from the NJ Blood Center:

• 4.5 million people annually have their lives saved by blood transfusions
• One pint of blood can help as many as three people
• Blood must be used within 42 days of being collected
• 60% of the US population is eligible to donate blood. Only 5% do so annually.
• 17% of people who don’t donate say they “Never thought about it.”

Blood is in high demand, and that demand will never go away. The only way to keep a full supply of blood in American hospitals is to have a population that is willing to regularly donate blood.

And one of the biggest reasons people don’t donate is because they never thought about it.

Organize a Blood Drive

High schools can help stop this trend by holding blood drives in the spring, when many upper-classmen have turned 17. If people are introduced to blood donation while they’re young, they’re more likely to continue to donate when they’re older.

Chances are there is a blood center in your state or in a local community near you that can do the physical blood collection. The school’s job is simply to encourage people to come and donate – teachers, students, and community members.

Organizing a blood drive is a great way for students to get involved in community service and gain experience planning and managing a project. The website mybloodyourblood.org has information to help you organize a blood drive in your school, including this list of jobs that teachers and students would need to do.

If you need help finding your local blood center, head over to America’s Blood Center. They host a list of local blood centers in the United States and Canada.

Although you could do all of the work yourself, it’s a great opportunity to involve student organizations. This would be a good job for the student council, peer leaders, or other “leadership” group in your school.

I’m an adviser for the Peer Leadership program in our school, and I’m planning on trying to get them involved in planning a blood drive for April or May.

People need blood, and if you’re eligible to donate… why not? Better yet, get other people – young people – involved and host a blood drive at your school. I don’t see why there isn’t already at least one blood drive in every school across the country.