Managing $3.8 trillion in expenses ($3,800,000,000,000) are 2 million Federal employees across 1,900 departments. Believers in small government -gasp- at numbers like that. But read another way, that’s 2 million people who could steer the world’s largest government budget in a better direction from the inside, giving new credence to “working with the system to change the system.” In 2003, seeing a need and opportunity for serving the people better, a vibrant community of Federal employees created Young Government Leaders, acknowledging the importance of being young and the opportunity for government employees to be leaders in their...

In my post on putting students first again alluded to the failure of top-down test-driven K12 education to create workers for the modern digital age. A new distraction has entered the fray, and it started as an experiment to see if you can boil down a person’s performance to a single number (hint: you can’t). The Department of Education just released the results of former education chancellor Joel Klein’s teacher rating experiment. The UFT went on the defensive for a few reasons, not the least of which is that the results of this experiment were always intended to be private because they are, obviously, experimental. Unfortunately for...

There are three main variables in any election: the candidate, his team, and the circumstances surrounding the election, and you only have control over two of them. By early 2007, after forming the Sparkill Civic Association as a way to protect the neighborhood I grew up in from federal control, I was committed to running and had been fortunate to gain an experienced team with a long-standing interest in politics. We won a committee primary, we fought two incumbents to win the election, and yet two years later, there were still people in my own party calling me “a damned kid.” They may still be calling me that. I recount this very brief...

The Obama administration issued guidelines via the Federal Health and Human Services department (which was nearly impossible to find verbatim: http://1.usa.gov/ynRWno) that require private health plans to cover women’s contraception without requiring a co-pay, as well as provide other “preventive services,” including domestic violence screening and woman-specific doctor visits. The Catholic church successfully argued that to require Catholic institutions to provide contraception violates their religious expression, winning an exemption for non-profit religious organizations specifically. The debate devolved into a secular vs. religious...

Over 100 years ago, one of America’s earliest education reformers, John Dewey, published “My Pedagogic Creed,” succinctly and wisely declaring that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.” (http://bit.ly/Ac8Svd). No doubt our social consciousness changed faster in the past 20 years than in the past 200 with the advent of personal computing power. The question is not whether old world educators relent, it’s when. The digital world took me quickly and at age 11 I began publishing a monthly newsletter, The Tappan Times, inspired by my father’s childhood newsletter,...