Hasta La Gadget!

Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.
Design, pilot, and evaluate fishing education programs and take effective
ones to sustainable scale and you might help an entire country to thrive.

Everyone knows the saying about “give a man a fish” versus “teach a man to fish.” They don’t know the part about designing, piloting, and evaluating fishing education programs, because I just made it up. All three of these fish-related functions are necessary. Someone needs to establish soup kitchens, for example, to help people who need immediate help, even though it does not create a lasting solution to world hunger. Philanthropies throughout the world exist to help people fill their basic needs. Others focus on education and development to build the capacity of individuals and groups to solve their own problems more permanently.

At the top of the “teach a man to fish” pyramid, at least in my mind, are the very few philanthropies that use their resources to support rigorous research evaluating various solutions to societal needs, and even more rare, to support the very idea that evidence should be the basis for decisions that affect people in need. In education, just a few foundations work in this space. Annie E. Casey, Edna McConnell Clark, Spencer, and W. T. Grant come to mind among others.

This space is small enough that when a major foundation greatly increases its commitment to supporting evidence in education, that is reason for celebration.

Well get ready to celebrate. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) of Houston has announced that it is setting up a new Evidence-Based Policy and Innovation division in Washington. Its purpose will be to encourage policy makers to utilize evidence and data in their decision making. But not just encourage. According to the Arnold Foundation’s press release, it wants evidence and data to be “the primary factor” in policy makers’ decisions. That idea alone is revolutionary!

The Arnold Foundation was able to attract two very big fish to run their new division. Kathy Stack has spent a long career at the U. S. Department of Education and then at the White House Office of Management and Budget, where she most recently led the Office of Evidence and Innovation, infusing evidence and evaluation into the work of numerous agencies. Jon Baron has been the most effective advocate for the use of evidence in policy-making outside of government. His Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has been a major force behind the evidence movement in all issue areas, including quietly building support for tiered evidence in education. Jon’s entire coalition is moving with him into the Arnold Foundation.

Philanthropy works best when it works just ahead of government, taking risks and demonstrating ways for government to do its work more effectively. The resources and clout of the Arnold Foundation combined with the experience and capability of Kathy and Jon represent a new force in Washington ready to promote sensible and much-needed policies that insist on evidence of effectiveness in government.

Watch out, fish. There’s a new fleet in town!

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Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey won’t need her telekinetic powers to circulate this first-look photo from the set of “X-Men: Apocalypse.”

It’s quickly making the rounds after director Bryan Singer posted the picture Thursday showing Turner, the “Game of Thrones” star, with newcomer Lana Condor as Jubilee.

Looks like big hair might have to save the day in the 1980s-set film.

Fun second day with @sophie_789 @lanacondor #JeanGrey #Jubilee #XMEN #XMenApocalypse

A photo posted by Bryan Singer (@bryanjaysinger) on Apr 30, 2015 at 9:10am PDT

“X-Men: Apocalypse” is slated to open May 27, 2016.

H/T Vanity Fair

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Complex scientific studies are often misleadingly cited to bolster long-held political beliefs, and a recent study measuring the brains of children and adolescents is the latest.

The study, which appeared in Nature Neuroscience, found a relationship between family income and brain size as measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs). Children from what the authors called the “most disadvantaged” families were found to have brains with a smaller surface area than children from families with higher incomes.

The reflexive rhetoric of political scientist Charles Murray and others claim that it supports their view that there’s not much you can do to educate poor kids.

But that’s not what the science says.

Brain science, of course, is very complex and in some ways still in its infancy. The study in Nature Neuroscience looked at the surface area of 1,099 children from the ages of 3 to 20 and found that the income-brain size relationship was not consistent across the income scale — that is, small differences in income among low-income families were associated with differences in surface area while similar differences in income at the higher end of the income scale did not result in such differences. The areas of the brain affected at the low end of the income scale are those associated with language, reading, and executive functioning. The researchers also found some support that brain size partially accounts for the relationship between socioeconomic factors and certain cognitive abilities, particularly cognitive control and working memory.

So what should educators make of this new brain research?

Well, the main thing is that none of this means that kids who live in poverty have shriveled up brains incapable of being taught.

Or, as the study’s authors say: “Our results should in no way imply that a child’s socioeconomic circumstances lead to an immutable trajectory of cognitive or brain development.”

Another brain scientist put it this way: “The brain is resilient and capable of adaptive plasticity.”

All of this is to say, we actually don’t have a complete understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic factors like income and parental education, brain size and cognition or intelligence.

But of course this study lines up with a few other lines of work that have been established in brain science. For example, we know that malnutrition during a valuable period of brain development leads to a reduction in brain cells, myelin production, and number of synapses in animals. There is also pretty good evidence that long-term, chronic stress produces structural as well as functional changes in the brain.

And it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that both malnutrition and long-term chronic stress are experienced more often by children living in extreme poverty than those who aren’t — which is why many scientists argue for policies to reduce family poverty as a way to improve cognitive outcomes.

To see whether that will actually help, a follow-up study is being done by two of the brain study’s authors to supplement the family incomes of some of the children living in poverty by $333 a month and some by $20 a month to see if it impacts the cognitive development of the children, according to the Washington Post. We’ll have the results in about five years.

In the meantime, Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist who has taken on the task of translating cognitive science to educators, offered this thought in an American Educator article on how to think about educating students living in poverty:

The difficult balance is to recognize the challenges each individual child faces, but not use them as a reason to lower expectations for achievement or appropriate behavior. High expectations need not be an additional source of stress–students thrive when high expectations are coupled with high levels of support.

Many low-SES (socio-economic status) kids are not getting the cognitive challenge they need from their homes and neighborhoods, but neither are they getting the support they need. To compensate, teachers should offer in the classroom what these children are missing at home. Much of this is what we’ve called human capital–academic knowledge and skills–which is the teacher’s bread and butter. It’s also well to remember that some of this knowledge, though important for long-term success, is not academic knowledge. It’s knowledge of how to interact with peers and adults, how to interact with large institutions like a school or a government agency, how to interact with authority figures, how to schedule one’s time, strategies to regulate one’s emotions, and so on. Some of this information is taught implicitly, by example, but much of it can be taught explicitly.

In other words: All kids can learn. It’s up to educators to figure out how to teach.

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The white of Sonny Miller’s right eye was red. Fire engine red. He cocked his head to the side all the time, in fact, his shoulders leaned also to the right, I think. Maybe it was from carrying that box around. That box that made my movie.

Six years ago, I called him. “I’ve written a movie, it takes place in the water. I hear you’re the guy. Can I send it to you?” He called me a few weeks later. “Yeah, I like it, I like it. It really captures what it’s like, right?” I told him I didn’t have any money, but I was working on it, and that if I ever got the money the question I have is: How do you make an indie in the ocean?

“Yeah, yeah, we can do it.” He talked about formats and boogie boards and Go Pros and jet skis. “At the end of the day, though, nature dictates.”

He repeated that phrase again and again last summer: “Nature dictates.” I’d say, “I know Sonny, I know, but I’ve got to get this. If I don’t get her saying the line over her right shoulder before the wave comes, I don’t have the scene.” “Yeah. Yeah. Right shoulder. It’ll be good. Let’s go.”

And out we’d walk. Out there. Once a day, he’d say: “You can talk about it so much, and then you gotta just get out there.” He carried this box, this box that paid for his house, and his motorcycles and his dying mom’s care, and his food and his way of life. I don’t know what that was, his way of life, but I heard rumors it included putting up friends and their babies who found themselves between places to live, five dogs, that sort of thing. All paid for by this box he made to make movies in the water. That thing never left his side. I took him to breakfast once, and he brought it to the table.

He’d show up early every day, driving all the way up from San Diego. We’d wrap at seven at night. I’d say, “Sleep in my guest house. We have to be back here at 7 a.m. ” “No, I’m good. I’m good.” I found out later that he had to get home to check on his mom.

When Sonny arrived at work, he didn’t park as much as make a park where his van ended up. He pulled out two bamboo rods and a rattan awning, some aloha fabric, a video monitor, some chairs. Everyone who went in there took a deep breath and smiled. He was pretty much always smiling.

After we made the movie, that is after I got him and everyone to work for half of what they should be paid, after that, we worked some more. The movie was done, but there was so much more to shoot. And, except for one guy on Oahu who never came here and hadn’t grabbed onto the movie like Sonny had, Sonny was the only one who knew how to do it.

So, he came, paid even less now for these after-wrap days, he and these beautiful watermen and women whose job it was to keep me from drowning. We shot and we shot. He’d get on the back of a jet ski and point that box at me while I surfed, or fell. While I surfed and screamed during the hardest year of my life. Sonny helped me put this thing on film: A story about a 50-year-old woman who’s been through a really, really bad thing and loves the world anyway. He was the perfect person to do it.

We’d go out afterwards, nine hours in the water of afterwards, and they’d drink. So much. People drink so much. But not Sonny. Not on those days, anyway. Not a sober guy. He’d order some Hawaiian cocktail, but like me, he’d drink it slow, or he drank not so I noticed. And he’d talk. About a director he worked with. How the director, on the first day of shooting said, “I’ll trade in all these trucks and people for six weeks of Sonny and that box in the water. That’s how the movie will get made.”

“Yeah,” Sonny said, thinking about that director, “He’s a good guy, but always picking up women. He had a beautiful wife. I don’t get that.” I wept inside.

He went out there and out there with me. I’d say, “I need details, of the first time she stands up, hands feet.” “Yeah, we’ll get it.” Sonny would say. “Let’s get out there.” Out we’d go, water logged, Sonny walking backward, fins flapping, me with my giant yellow board held out of harms way by one of my stuntmen/surf valets necessary to keep me from killing myself.

All these talented people had worked so hard to design it, set it up, but at the end of the day, it was him and me. You don’t use lights in the ocean or hair or make up. There’s no sound out there. At the last minute even the stunt guys have to duck out of the way. So, in the end, it was Sonny and me.

Sonny died weeks after we finished. Out of nowhere, far as I can tell. His mother died a week before. Thank God, I have to think. But I wonder about his dogs and about why my heart feels so broken. It’s him, not me. I’ve heard people say this, I’ve even said it, but now I want to go back in time and unsay it, so it can apply only to Sonny. They made exactly one like him.

“Nature dictates.”

I’m going to be like that. In the water, smile on my face, loving the world anyway. I am like that, just not quite as much as him.

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“Erin Burnett is an example of white privilege and white supremacy, as is CNN,” declared Peniel E. Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts University and the author of book Waiting ‘til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America , in a conversation with HuffPost Live on Thursday.

The activist was speaking in reference to Burnett’s Tuesday interview with Baltimore city councilman Carl Stokes in which the CNN anchor dubbed rioters “thugs.” Enraged, Stokes fired back that she might as well “just call them n—–s.”

While Obama was met with scrutiny for also using the word “thug,” Burnett’s carried more tangible bigotry, argues Joseph.

“Erin Burnett was particularly damaging because … of the fact that she has a bully pulpit to basically call all of us n—–s on national television,” he said. “And I love that Carl Stokes is a strong enough race man to call her out on it, because this is disgusting.”

For this, Joseph feels adamant that the OutFront host should be fired.

“She should not be on television. If you said this about any other ethnic or racial group in America, you would not have a job the next day,” he concluded.

Watch more from HuffPost Live’s conversation about the national media’s coverage of Baltimore.

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