Laws and regs

Opinion of the Day

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After yesterday’s high-tension SCOTUS ruling in Hobby Lobby, some lighthearted yet with serious consequence opinion from the District Court for the District of Columbia, 1989. Clarke v. United States addresses the question of whether a legislator’s vote is protected speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Believe it or not, the defendants, with a presumably straight face, argued that it is not. The District Court disagreed, and Congress now knows that it must amend our laws directly rather than conditioning the use of our own funds on the Council amending its laws in ways directed by Congress.

Some highlights:

The United States suggests that this condition does no more than force the Council members to “hold their noses” and adopt the law. First amendment protection, however, encompasses both the right to speak and the right not to speak, and even the olfactory burden to which the United States refers is constitutionally suspect.

 

Finally, Congress has no clearly defined interest, compelling or otherwise, in so burdening plaintiffs’ speech. (emphasis added)

 

The keystone of the United States’ argument is that plaintiffs’ voting is not protected speech, and it gives three reasons for this conclusion. First, it argues, the act of voting possesses no intrinsic communicative quality. Second, it contends that official acts by public officials are not protected speech. Finally, the United States asserts that, even if legislators in general have a first amendment right to vote as they please, D.C. Council members do not…

Mundanities

#yesallwomen

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Dear advice columnist,

I am writing today so that I can show your response to the offender in this situation. I am too chicken to speak to him directly. I should start by saying that I am very fortunate never to have been actually sexually assaulted or raped. The one time I was with a guy who wanted to go further than I was ready to, I told him I was uncomfortable and left. I never saw him again, but he also didn’t try to force me to stay. I’ve never felt the lack of safety that many women feel.

That doesn’t mean that I’ve never been faced with the many “micro-agressions” that women face.

I have a colleague who called me, on our first meeting, “Sweetie.” “Sweetie” is what I call infants when I first meet them. It’s not what a man in a professional context should be calling a woman 20 years his junior.

He also brings flowers to us every Monday. What a sweet gesture, right? That’s what he thinks. And it was encouraged by other women. He told me the story of how this tradition came about: he wanted to let “the ladies” in his office know that their work was appreciated, so he started bringing them flowers. Then other women joked “why don’t you bring ME flowers?” and it grew from there. It didn’t bother me at first. Then I realized he wasn’t bringing flowers to everyone in the office; he was bringing flowers to the women in the office.

This week I asked him about it. “Do you bring flowers to everybody, or just the women?”

Earlier today we passed each other in the hall. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I was too tongue-tied to respond appropriately. I gave a shrug. At which point he patted me on the back.

He’s not a bad guy. How do I get him to understand that calling women “Sweetie,” giving us flowers, and patting us on the back devalue our professional qualifications and experience?

Signed,

#yesallwomen

Libraries and information

On ranking LIS programs

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School rankings are very important. Because I went to Harvard Law School which is ranked really high.

Great, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about how school rankings are not at all a useful way of judging an academic program and should be used for nothing.

This post began as rage-tweeting about an opinion piece in Library Journal that was published on Friday. I wasn’t the only one. It didn’t take long before I realized that I needed more than 140 characters to express my frustrations with the article (and more time than I could justify given that I was at work at the time…and my job is not to read Library Journal and complain about its contents).

Let me just discuss what I think are the three most egregious flaws in this article*: the notion that GRE scores are “an important and impartial indicator of student aptitude,” the belief (unsupported by the authors) that admissions standards are important to a program’s quality, and the idea that accreditation standards can be used to rank the performance of a school.

On the GRE

Okay folks. How many times do we need to say this: standardized tests are a measure of a student’s skill at taking standardized tests.** Standardized tests are not a measure of aptitude. Standardized tests are biased. Let me say that one more time. Standardized tests are biased. Standardized tests are not an impartial indicator of student aptitude. Got it? Good.

On admissions standards

Mulvaney and O’Connor write the following:

 

With today’s programs being funded on the basis of student credit hours and with most having no substantive admissions criteria, many schools are no longer acting as gatekeepers for the profession.

 Further complicating the situation, those entering the profession today include fewer humanities and more business and education majors, raising questions as to whether the educational programs of today have adapted to the changing student demographics and whether they are properly serving this new breed of student.

Admissions standards for LIS programs in general need to be significantly strengthened to guarantee those programs are bringing the best and brightest into the industry and rigorously preparing them for their professional futures. Different skills, and not those in the various competency statements, need to be taught. This may result in fewer, and smaller, programs but ones that are better preparing students for the complex and changing world of modern librarianship.

 So–library schools are letting in everyone who applies because they need the tuition dollars. And you thought that I was cynical.

(I wish there were a written equivalent of sputtering with rage, as that is what I’m doing at the moment, in response to this idea of admissions standards being the way to bring “the best and brightest into the industry.”)

Business and education majors aren’t what we’re looking for in the information field? What do they think librarians do?? Last I checked, librarians educate, and librarians run the business of libraries.

Admissions standards don’t govern the rigor of a program. The professors and the curriculum govern the rigor of a program. More students means more discussion, more points of view, and more diversity.

On accreditation standards

On this point, I feel like the authors display a glaring disregard for the purpose of accreditation. Accreditation is supposed to be a threshold, not a ranking. Are the current ALA accreditation standards ideal? I don’t know. But let’s look at what Mulvaney and O’Connor want included: “the number of students enrolled in various courses within programs, how many students take courses online versus in person, …how many full-time versus part-time faculty members are engaged in instruction.” 

To these I ask: who cares? Does more students per class mean that the class is better, or that there aren’t sufficient class options? Does online vs in person matter, or does the quality of online vs in person instruction matter? (I suggest it’s the latter.) Are full-time faculty who are engaged in research better professors, or are part-time faculty who are engaged in actual librarianship better professors? Is it better for students to finish in a year, or to take classes while working and gaining professional experience?

Let’s let accreditation standards remain a threshold, and let students decide what matters to them in their education.

Data

Finally, I agree with the authors on the need for data. Usable data. But I disagree with the authors in their belief that data collection is the end-all and be-all for judging program quality. After all, the authors suggest that performance-based budgeting, which by definition is data-dependent, is a cause of relaxed admission standards. Numbers don’t always provide a complete picture.*** And if the authors of an article touting the need for data can’t state with certainty the number of accredited programs there are, I don’t know that the problem is a lack of data.

 

*There are problems other than these. I’ll let you rage about them yourselves.

**My row-mate on a flight once was studying for the NCLEX, the standardized nursing exam. I have a hard time keeping my eyes to myself, so I followed along with the sample questions. I’ve never studied nursing, but of the questions I saw, I got a fair number correct. One of them that I got correct, my row-mate did not. Because standardized tests are a game, and I’m good at them. That I’m good at standardized tests means nothing when it comes to my knowledge of anything medical!

***I minored in math in college. I love numbers. LOVE them. That doesn’t mean I think they can answer all of life’s questions. (42 notwithstanding.)

Foster care

Identity and Diet

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One of the things that is SO important to consider when you are adopting or fostering a child is the child’s identity. Identity is more than just name. It’s all of the things that a person thinks make her who she is. Culture can play a role, appearance can play a role (me without red hair? that would just be weird), race, community, values. All of these can be a part of a person’s identity.

As can diet. Keeping kosher, or halal, can be part of a person’s identity. Being vegetarian, or vegan, or a stereotypical meat-eating Texan, can be part of a person’s identity.

When I was first being licensed to be a foster parent, one of the women in my training class mentioned that she is a vegetarian, and she wouldn’t cook meat for any kids placed in her care. The firestorm that this caused. It was unbelievable. You would have thought that refusing to feed a foster kid meat was worse than beating the kid with a belt. BUT WHEN A CHILD IS USED TO EATING MEAT, HOW CAN YOU TAKE THAT AWAY FROM HIM???

A child’s identity is important. And when a child enters foster care, he’s losing EVERYTHING. The foster parent’s obligation is to help maintain the child’s identity…and connections. The exercise we do in training the week that identity and culture are discussed is about connections. Family. School. Church. Neighborhood. Summer camp. Pets. Hobbies. It isn’t about the TV shows that we watch or our favorite restaurants or our shoes. (I guess it could be, if someone had very different priorities than me, or if we were asked to identify 15 connections, instead of just 5.)

Now, let’s agree, for the sake of argument, that what a child is used to eating is part of the child’s identity and important to support. A three year old enters care and is used to drinking soda. A seven year old is used to eating fast food three nights a week. The only vegetables a nine year old is used to eating is raw carrot and iceberg lettuce.

We’re going to take those things away from the kids. And yes, these examples are because the food items the kids are used to are unhealthy, and no, meat is not unhealthy (usually). But this does demonstrate that there are legitimate reasons to adjust a child’s diet when she comes into care.

Six years ago when this came up in training, I came to the defense of my vegetarian classmate, mentioning that I keep kosher and no, sorry, no way no how would there be bacon in my house. (This did not quell the firestorm.)

I am taking the training again in order to get relicensed. This week, our trainer was the same worker who I had six years ago. We weren’t talking about identity and connections this week. So I wasn’t expecting this:

Trainer: Once I had in my class a vegetarian who insisted that she wouldn’t cook meat for kids in her care! THIS IS TERRIBLE AND YOU NEED TO MAINTAIN YOUR KIDS’ IDENTITY.

I could only shake my hea as it created a firestorm.

DC (dot) nerd

Best practices

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There are 2 training curricula for prospective foster parents that are used across the nation. One is called PRIDE, the other MAPP. (Actually PS-MAPP; the PS got added in the mid ’90s.) That parenthetical is a symptom of what I’m about to ramble about.

These training curricula were developed based on research. They are widely recognized as being good training programs. DC started using MAPP as a condition of a consent decree in the LaShawn A. vs. [Mayor] class action case.

I took MAPP 6 and a half years ago. The videos that were part of the training seemed old, so it was pretty clear that the curriculum was not-how shall I put it?-recent. Still. I’m taking MAPP again. Some of the handouts have had the footer updated to say 2013. None of the content has changed. The videos haven’t changed. And for the last three weeks it has bothered me.

Last night I looked at the article we’re supposed to read for “Road Work” (get it? follow the map?). “Over the past 50 years and particularly within the last ten…”. WAS WRITTEN IN 1983. I’d like to point out that was 31 years ago. This is not to say that there wasn’t good research 31 years ago. But reading about trauma and foster parenting from 30 years ago is a little like reading about libraries from 30 years ago. It may have been the best research at the time, but things have evolved.

But what really inspired me to throw up these word on your computer screen now? This. This is the story that we should be reading in our foster parent training. We should be reading how moves from home to home have harmed this young lady. We should be reading about transgender and gender-nonconforming kids (and not just hearing about how there’s a high need for foster homes for the GTLBQ population–abbreviation bungled on purpose as a direct quote from Thursday). We do not need to be reading about 8 year old Beau  who is HIV symptomatic and worried his mom is going to die, wants to be an airplane pilot and is sad he can’t have a cat. (Beau, along with Lily, Jerryce, and another cast of characters, have been the prototypical foster kids for the last God-knows-how-many years.)

We should be reading about Relisha Rudd and the complexities of the system, and how hard decision-making can be, and what it’s really like to work in partnership with families.

We should be reading about current research about the long-term effects of removal on kids.

And we should be reading about the effects of maternal substance use on newborns. (Or not.)

Is MAPP still considered best practices? Let’s look for something new.

Mundanities

Navel Gazing

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1. I definitely need to get myself back in the blogging habit.

2. I have a lot of things in my head about issues of race. Was going to blog about them, realized it might be just a lot of navel gazing.

3. Thought about the phrase “navel gazing” and realized that literal navel gazing would involve pondering one of the scars from my kidney donation surgery, which would remind me that I’m not a terrible person even though I’m not always conscious of the position of privilege from which I speak (especially on really important issues).

4. You should read and comment on my post at Hack Library School about rigor in education.