Sometimes, the smartest people are those who’ve lived it. As a 22 year old aspiring to my first elected position, I had the good fortune of meeting Bob Crable, who at one point over his 50-year involvement in local and state politics was the youngest Democratic Committee Chairman and who, in 2007, became the oldest. There is something to be said for institutional knowledge. Through his guidance and that of his good friend, Jeanne Goldstein, I learned tips and tricks that helped immensely during the campaign, especially which people inside and outside the party to connect with as an upstart public servant. Crable’s contemporary, Rockland...

Outside of New York City, Orangetown lays claim to the largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, which attracted more than 80,000 marchers and spectators to downtown Pearl River. If you include the businesses that support the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which organizes the parade, you’re talking about over a hundred organizations that came together for a day of sport, family, and community (and partying). What is the net effect? There are objective measures and there are subjective measures. Some businesses can get as much as 20% of their revenue on this weekend, and certainly all would agree the member businesses of the...

Before climate change and, in this part of the country, global warming, the Hudson River would freeze over solid, from Rockland to Westchester. An eighty-year old friend told stories of walking across it, skating over it, and sledding into it. He also said “friends” of his would drive their cars right off of River Road onto the frozen river, to ostensibly hone their “winter driving” abilities. That was sixty years ago. There are no fun and games at this river crossing anymore. The Tappan Zee handles over 150,000 cars per day, deals with an average of three accidents per day, and is operating well over capacity, though the Thruway...

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...