Hasta La Gadget!

Students who engaged in violent behavior this week in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death will be held accountable for their actions, the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools Gregory Thornton said in a statement Tuesday night.

Thornton closed schools Tuesday amid citywide riots and violent unrest. Violence broke out in the city on Monday afternoon, following Gray’s funeral, and according to reports, some local students helped initiate clashes with the police.

Thornton made it clear in his statement that students who participated in violent behavior on Monday would not get off the hook for their actions. “First, I want first to acknowledge and thank the thousands and thousands of students who made good decisions yesterday and avoided the violence and law-breaking,” he wrote. “Many faced challenges, including difficult journeys home, and they did so with maturity and responsibility. We’re proud of you.”

It continues that a “small minority” of students “did not make responsible decisions.” Thornton said he was “deeply angered” by those actions and that he’s working to identify the particular students involved in violent acts. Representatives from the district did not immediately respond to The Huffington Post’s requests for comment regarding how they might be held accountable.

Freddie Gray died April 19, after suffering severe spinal injuries while in police custody.

Students who initiated the violent behavior Monday attend Frederick Douglass High School , located across the street from where the riots broke out in the northwest part of the city, according to The Baltimore Sun. When speaking with the outlet, Thornton called the students’ behavior “inexcusable.”

Still, he noted that these inner-city students also face a dearth of resources and opportunities compared to their more affluent peers. “These are things kids have all across America, but when they look at their communities, it’s not afforded to them,” Thornton told the Sun. “Many of our kids feel that as a community we have not served them well.”

The statement released by Thornton Tuesday said that teachers and mental health professionals would be working with students on Wednesday to help them process the past few days.

“Principals and teachers are planning activities that will help students learn from the past days’ events,” it reads. “Counselors, social workers, and psychologists will be on hand to support students’ emotional needs.”

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Michelle Miller

I loved playing Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? when I was a kid. That was back when games came on disks that were carefully slotted into a desktop computer, and the process of connecting to the Internet gave you enough time to make a sandwich.

Did playing that game contribute to my love of travel? Or, to my future interest in making educational games? It’s hard to say. I do know that following Carmen all over Europe and playing Super Mario with my younger brother were as much a part of my childhood as riding a bike or chasing lightning bugs.

Despite that experience, I’m wary about the role that technology plays for my young daughter. Digital media is more available, more personalized and more integrated into daily life than ever before. Research tells us that it has the power to help kids learn, but also suggests that we should limit when and how often young children are exposed.

At the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, we explore the ways that families use media together, the potential of games for learning and solutions for digital equity. We recently published a free guide called Family Time with Apps with tips for helping busy parents decide how to introduce digital media:

Talk with your child about which decisions you can make together. The more involved she is in the process, the more likely she will make her own good decisions in the future.
Use apps and other mobile tools to help support your parenting goals. For example, e-books can make it easier to squeeze in 15 minutes of reading together time every day.
Research shows that children learn more from all kinds of media when families participate too. So even if it’s just for a few minutes, jump in and play together!

Deciding What to Download

No matter how many amazing things an app or game does, some of the most important learning happens beyond the screen. Here are a few questions to consider before downloading an activity for your child:

1) Does it allow your child to learn and grow? Playing games can place your child in the driver’s seat and offer fun ways to foster her curiosity. The best activities build on your child’s interests in unique ways like walking with dinosaurs, building a skyscraper or playing every instrument in a (virtual) band. Playing games together is also a great chance for your child to be the expert and lead family time, helping her learn how to follow directions, take turns and stay focused.

2) Does it encourage communication? Some activities offer ways to create something together, like a video or a photo album. It’s hard for young children to pay attention during phone calls, but video-conferencing apps can allow them to read a book or share show-and-tell with distant relatives. Even if you don’t play a game together, your child benefits when you talk with her about it afterwards.

3) Does it connect different experiences? Apps, games and other mobile learning tools can be used to help address everyday challenges anytime, anywhere. Playing a game related to a new experience like the first day of school, first plane trip or first haircut can help children prepare for what will happen. Resources like Common Sense Media provide lists of activities organized by themes, such as connecting to outdoor activities and making stressful situations like road trips more fun.

Setting a Predictable Routine

Choosing what digital media to download may be easier while my daughter is very young, but controlling the “when” and the “where” can be a challenge. As much as we try to avoid it, she sees her parents using smartphones and tablets and wants to be part of the action. Just like with sleeping and eating, it’s important to set a predictable routine and be consistent about where, when and for how long your child is allowed to play. Here are a few tips that may help:

• Choose situations or times that you feel are appropriate for using apps (maybe while waiting for an appointment) and limit the rest (for example, during meals).
• Provide a countdown to warn your child before it’s time to stop playing (“We’re leaving in 5 minutes so please stop at the end of that round”).
• Set a regular time for family play at least once a week.
• Try to avoid using devices close to bedtime.

Of course, there are exceptions. Every now and then we all need that 15 minute break a game provides, and we can’t always play together. (And on a long car ride all bets are off.) As with so many other parenting decisions, it’s easy to feel guilty or worried about our choices. I take heart by watching my daughter, following her cues and trusting my instincts. When she relates something in an app to what we saw at the zoo or jumps up to dance to a song she has created, I see the clear benefits. Really, all it takes is for her to look at me after we’ve played a game together and say, “We did it!” And maybe someday I’ll introduce her to Carmen Sandiego.

This blog is part of our Smart Parents Series in partnership with the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. We would love to have your voice in the Smart Parents conversations. For more information about the project, see:

• Growth Mindset Parenting
• Is Your Child’s School Student-Centered? A Checklist for School Visits
• Everything is Different Now: Parenting for Powerful Learning

Michelle Miller is Managing Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and mom to a toddler growing up in New York City. Follow her on Twitter @writetommm.

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The buzz about Etsy’s IPO runs something like this…the company that connects artisans and home-based craft makers to a new kind of consumer hungry for unique products — has met its nemesis: the public equity markets. If you think about corporations that have been successful public companies, words like “artisanal” give way to another set of modifiers and images: mass market, industrial scale, efficient, and command and control protocols and decision rules.

Is there room for Etsy to control its future as a publicly traded company? Or will the company values and mission give way to the demands of pesky shareholders willing to subordinate culture to short-term profit maximization?

My bet is with Etsy. The decision back in 2012 to certify as a B Corp signals the CEO Chad Dickerson’s intention, “to use the power of business to create a social good.” But much more important than good intentions is the following: the company’s business model and culture are intertwined.

Last year, Etsy was reported to connect 1.4 million seller-members to almost 20 million buyers. $200 million changed hands, adding greater economic stability and lifestyle choices to home-based producers of all kinds. And the demand for “maker” goods is growing — from craft beer and self-publishing to companies that let you customize your own look — take Vans shoes for example. Etsy is less vulnerable to mission drift because of the close alignment between their vision and their revenue model.

But whether “B Corp” or C Corp, the devil’s in the details. The purpose of the enterprise is a choice — but it needs to be backed up by practices that reinforce the ideals and hoped-for social utility of the business.

What else can Etsy’s management team do to assure the vision conforms to reality? Here are three ideas:

1. Declare your purpose repeatedly (and tell the same story to your employees, business partners and investors). Staying vigilant to the long-term strategy in company communications is one signal that you live your vision. Southwest Airlines CEO, Gary Kelly, makes a habit of thanking the employees of Southwest at the start of his investor calls and reiterates the company’s commitment to serving customers better than their competitors. Mark Zuckerberg states Facebook’s purpose and big picture aspirations early in investor calls and frames his major points in long-term language. Mark Bertolini started Aetna’s last investor call with “The Aetna Way” — rather than just jumping into the financials.
2. Align the metrics with the strategy — not the stock price. What are the best indicators of Etsy’s success over the long haul? The stock market is affected by many things outside the control of management. And as we all learned in business school, short-term share prices are largely random. Financial targets like Return on Equity that put the stock price at the center of the bull’s-eye lead to an excess of what we see in the market now — using cash to buy back shares and bump the stock price rather than invest in the company’s future — the focus of Larry Fink of BlackRock’s recent letter to Fortune 500 CEOs.
3. Pay your executives accordingly. “Pay for performance” is still the rage, but to align management with the values and vision requires a different approach. Delaying payouts under stock-centric pay schemes to emphasize long-term value creation seems like a good idea — but it doesn’t really work. Rather than correct for short-termism, to load up executives with stock assures that the market dominates the internal conversation — and in ways that negatively affect culture and values. Jillian Popadak, researcher at Duke University, found that “results-orientation” leads to less customer-focus, integrity, and collaboration. We need fresh thinking to restore common sense to executive pay, and Etsy will need to innovate to align its management team with its core purpose and long-term strategy.

“…shareholders initially realize financial gains: increases in sales, profitability, and payout occur. However, over time, I find intangible assets associated with customer satisfaction and employee integrity deteriorate, which partly reverses the gains from greater results-orientation.” – Popadak

Think old line firms like 3M and P&G, as well as newer entrants like Tesla. These companies keep the focus on creating high quality goods and services that deliver real value for customers while respecting mission-critical inputs and constituents — employees, natural resources, host communities.

For Etsy, listening to their customers cannot be just a slogan. The sellers who pay to use the Etsy platform have their own livelihoods at risk. Etsy members think this is THEIR company — just ask them. Keeping the focus on their customer’s welfare will be Etsy’s North Star.

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The budget conference agreement, if adopted by Congress, will represent one of the most radical budget plans that lawmakers have adopted since they created the modern budget process in 1974.

That’s no exaggeration. If they follow this plan, lawmakers would eviscerate substantial parts of the federal government — including parts that have previously enjoyed bipartisan support — and they also would violate the clear intent of the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA).

Consider:

• More than doubling the sequestration cuts: Not content with the damaging cuts under sequestration, which is slated to return in full force in 2016, the plan would more than double the cuts in non-defense discretionary programs over the coming decade. These programs include education, job training, infrastructure, scientific research, medical research, veterans’ health care, child care, and many other important areas. Starting in 2016, sequestration will cut them by an average of 37 billion a year, on top of the cuts that the BCA’s tight funding caps already impose. The new agreement adds another496 billion in cuts over the coming decade — an average of another 50 billion a year.

• Radically shrinking much of government: Sequestration already will reduce non-defense discretionary spending in 2017, and each year thereafter, to the lowest level on record, as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), with data back to 1962. Yet the new agreement would slash it well below that, leaving total federal spending outside Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt at 7.2 percent of GDP by 2025 — about 40 percent below the average of the last 40 years, which was 12.2 percent.

• Using a blatant gimmick to increase defense spending: While slashing non-defense discretionary programs below sequestration, the plan effectively cancels most of sequestration on defense through a blatant budget gimmick that House Republican leaders like former House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan said just a year ago would undercut the integrity of the budget process. For 2016, the plan provides 38 billion more than the Pentagon says it needs for overseas military operations, with the express intent to channel the money into the base defense budget and thereby evade the BCA’s caps on defense.

• Magic asterisk: To make the plan appear to balance the budget in ten years, the agreement magically assumes that revenues will remain at current-law levels, even as it assumes that Congress will repeal the roughly1 trillion in revenue-raising measures in the Affordable Care Act.

• Robin Hood in reverse: The agreement imposes the large majority of its budget cuts on programs for low- and modest-income Americans, even though such programs constitute less than one-fourth of federal spending. The plan would cause tens of millions of people to become uninsured or underinsured, cut support for working-poor families, and make it harder for millions of modest-income students to afford college.

The plan would likely weaken long-term economic growth by slashing funding for areas like education, research, and infrastructure that help promote growth. It would reduce opportunity by making college less affordable for students of modest means. It would increase poverty due to its deep cuts in health, nutrition, and other supports for the least fortunate Americans. And it would widen inequality that’s already at or near its highest levels in nearly a century.

Fortunately, most of this agreement will not readily become law. But the agreement shows how far Congress has strayed from a positive, productive path. The nation needs to chart a very different one.

—
This post originally appeared on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

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Jennifer Lopez got a little more “oomph” than she bargained for while filming her “The Boy Next Door” sex scene, co-star Ryan Guzman recently revealed.

While promoting the thriller’s release on DVD and Blu-Ray, the 27-year-old actor told People magazine that he accidentally caused J.Lo to hit her head on the ceiling while the two were filming their intimate scene.

“It was right before we get into the very, very steamy part of the film,” Guzman told People. “My character has to pick up Jennifer — and me being stupid — I put a little bit too much oomph into it.”

“Let’s just say that the next couple takes, I was very, very gentle,” he added. “She was a trooper. She hit her head, she came right back down, and she said, ‘Hey, I’m light. Just take it easy. You don’t need to muscle up.’ “

In “The Boy Next Door,” Lopez stars as single mom Claire. The recent divorcee ends up having a passionate one-night stand with her younger neighbor Noah (Guzman) that she immediately regrets. But Noah’s obsession with Claire ultimately takes a turn for the worse and puts her and her family danger.

Even before the film’s release, Guzman wasn’t afraid to talk about how awkward filming the sex scene with Lopez was.

“That was the time in the film when I was the most uncomfortable,” Guzman told Latina last December. “We had to choreograph every piece… It was the most unsexy-really-sexy scene that you’ll see on screen.”

Before “The Boy Next Door” DVD and Blu-Ray release on Tuesday, Guzman also told Variety Latino that the film prompted intense reactions from J.Lo fans.

“Jennifer’s fans have threatened me for treating her like that [in the movie] or for kissing her … I’d like to respond and tell them: “Like, you know it’s not real life and it’s just a movie?,” Guzman said.

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