Breathtaking school building bunk goes to show lies are lies, whether they're Trump's or Gahan's.

Note the use of the word "we" in this shameless whopper from Slick Jeffie.

SUPPORTING EDUCATION: With the help of school administrators and concerned parents, we succeeded on an initiative that rebuilt 2 brand new city schools, remodeled current facilities, invested in new equipment and technology, and created better spaces for learning for our children and families. Let’s keep moving New Albany forward!

Note to Abigail.

A simple rule for using numbers in writing is that small numbers ranging from one to ten (or one to nine, depending on the style guide) should generally be spelled out. Larger numbers (i.e., above ten) are written as numerals.

You'd think they'd teach this rule in school.

Rebuttals?

MC: "Wow. Talk about taking credit when none is due. The voters of Floyd County, through a referendum, approved all of this. What’s next? Taking credit for the sun coming up tomorrow? I mean, how desperate do you have to be to come up with actual accomplishments? How about telling us the total debt load of New Albany now versus when you came to office. I’ll even let you off the hook by excluding the sewer department, which has it’s own budget."

RC: "Exactly HOW did either the mayor or New Albany government make this happen?"

SW: "Let me get this straight -- so he supported education by taking property tax money away through TIF, forcing the school system to run a deceptive referendum campaign for a huge tax increase?"

KC: "Help me understand what the city had to do with this."

BM: "Heard Gahan was taking credit for the incredible full moon tonight as well."

Calling yourself a "progressive"?

Here's an idea:

Hold Jeff Gahan to the same standard of truthfulness that you maintain with Donald Trump. Think you can do that?

Has Gahan done anything "progressive" in eight years?

Running up debts for your children and grandchildren to pay isn't really "progressive," is it?

How can you "move forward" with an anchor as your official symbol?

#FireGahan2019

The education debate: "Sitting at the heart of it is an ever-present attack (stated or not) on the liberal arts and humanities."

At LEO Weekly, Dr. Ricky L. Jones' hammer finds the center of the nail with, "What Kentucky's education debates are really about."

This is really about the overarching philosophies of a few powerful and elected people in Kentucky and their views on how society should be constructed. Education is not the real core issue. The more cogent interrogation is how particular ideas on education bleed out of those paradigms and fit into a retrograde ideological machine. Let me try to explain by stepping away from one issue and collectively looking at them all from a higher altitude.

Even cursory historical knowledge proves Mr. Bevin has a view of education that is not new. It is a philosophy centering on trade and industrial skills popularized in 19th century America. Sitting at the heart of it is an ever-present attack (stated or not) on the liberal arts and humanities. Such thinkers see them as superfluous. Even though research proves the opposite, Mr. Bevin even argues that college is overrated. If higher education degrees are attained, they should only be in particular areas to elevate chances for life success. For example, he has argued the state really needs “more plumbers and electricians.” By extension, not more historians, philosophers, artists, political scientists or intellectuals. It is a strange approach, indeed, for a man whose college major was East Asian Studies… and became a governor.

Next, as a reminder:

ped·a·go·gy
ˈpedəˌɡäjē
noun
the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.

Public intellectuals (not to mention progressives) are about as rare hereabouts as engineering companies without direct deposit into the mayor's campaign finance account. But this is a fine, albeit long, article from a writer unafraid to question public intellectuals and progressives as to what they've been missing in the fight against neoliberalism.

Educated Hope in Dark Times: The Challenge of the Educator-Artist as a Public Intellectual, by Henry A. Giroux (Truth Out)

 ... Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility. If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity.

snip

The crisis of economics and politics in the Trump era has not been matched by a crisis of consciousness and agency. The failure to develop a crisis of consciousness is deeply rooted in a society in that suffers from a plague of atomization, loneliness, and despair. Neoliberalism has undermined any democratic understanding of freedom, limiting its meaning to the dictates of consumerism, hatred of government, and a politics in which the personal is the only emotional referent that matters. Freedom has collapsed into the dark abyss of a vapid and unchecked individualism and in doing so has cancelled out that capacious notion of freedom rooted in bonds of solidarity, compassion, social responsibility, and the bonds of social obligations. The toxic neoliberal combination of unchecked economic growth and its discourse of plundering the earth's resources, coupled with a rabid individualism marked largely by its pathological disdain for community and public values, has weakened democratic pressures, values, and social relations and opened the door for the election of Donald Trump to the American Presidency. This collapse of democratic politics points to an absence in progressive movements and among various types of public intellectuals about how to address the importance of emotional connections among the masses, take seriously how to connect with others through pedagogical tools that demand respect, empathy, a willingness to listen to other stories, and to think seriously about how to change consciousness as an educative task. The latter is particularly important because it speaks to the necessity politically address the challenge of awakening modes of identification coupled with the use of language not merely to demystify but to persuade people that the issues that matter have something to do with their lived realities and daily lives. Pressing the claim for economic and political justice means working hard to develop alternative modes of consciousness, promote the proliferation of democratic public spheres, create the conditions for modes of mass resistance, and make the development of sustainable social movements central to any viable struggle for economic, political, and social justice. No viable democracy can exist without citizens who value and are willing to work towards the common good. That is as much a pedagogical question as it is a political challenge.

Achtung Baby: "This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts."

I may not have any children, but Germany's always been good to me -- and as usual, you're entitled to my opinion.

Volk Heroes, by Rebecca Schuman (Slate)

This fun new book about how Germans raise their kids will break American parents’ hearts.

In a memorable scene of Sara Zaske’s guide to German-style parenting, Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, Zaske sends her 4-year-old daughter Sophia to her Berlin preschool with a bathing suit in her bag. It turns out, however, that the suit is unnecessary: All the tykes at Sophia’s Kita frolic in the water-play area naked. Later that year, Sophia and the rest of her Kita class take part in a gleefully parent-free sleepover. A sleepover! At school! For a 4-year-old! These two snapshots of life as a modern German child—uninhibited nudity; jaw-dropping independence—neatly encapsulate precisely why Zaske’s book is in equal turns exhilarating and devastating to an American parent.

Zaske argues that thanks in large part to the anti-authoritarian attitudes of the postwar generation (the so-called “68ers”), contemporary German parents give their children a great deal of freedom—to do dangerous stuff; to go places alone; to make their own mistakes, most of which involve nudity, fire, or both. This freedom makes those kids better, happier, and ultimately less prone to turn into miserable sociopaths. “The biggest lesson I learned in Germany,” she writes, “is that my children are not really mine. They belong first and foremost to themselves. I already knew this intellectually, but when I saw parents in Germany put this value into practice, I saw how differently I was acting.” Yes, Zaske notes, we here in the ostensible land of the free could learn a thing or zwei from our friends in Merkel-world. It’s breathtaking to rethink so many American parenting assumptions in light of another culture’s way of doing things. But it’s devastating to consider just how unlikely it is that we’ll ever adopt any of these delightful German habits on a societal level.

This is not just because Americans pride ourselves on eschewing the advice of outsiders, though that certainly doesn’t help. Our political and social institutions are so firmly entrenched that no amount of wise Germanic advice can help us. “We’ve created a culture of control,” Zaske laments. “In the name of safety and academic achievement, we have stripped kids of fundamental rights and freedoms: the freedom to move, to be alone for even a few minutes, to take risks, to play, to think for themselves” ...

This being America, of course auto-centrism plays its sad part once the family returns stateside.

For example, when Sophia starts first grade, school administrators remind parents that under no circumstances should they drop children off in an automobile. Could you imagine? I can’t. In the contemporary United States, even in larger cities (with New York being the only notable exception), school is so synonymous with the interminable “drop-off line” that its vicissitudes are the subject of bestselling mom-book rants.

In open defiance of this custom, I ride my daughter the 4½ miles to preschool on a bike—she gets pulled along the mean streets of St. Louis in a Burley trailer—only to get yelled at by moms in idling SUVs outside the school. A few weeks ago, all of us parents even got a sternly worded email from the director, chastising the few who do pick up their children on foot for blocking the valet-style “carpool line” with “pedestrian traffic.” This is unsurprising; most children in the U.S. do not walk to school, even if they live close enough to do so—to the detriment of their physical fitness, independence and joy, and of course also the environment. (Zaske experiences this culture shock in reverse when her family moves back to the U.S. and she makes the unheard-of suggestion of a solitary “walk to school day” at Sophia’s new San Francisco elementary.)

I really, really wish that stork would have been sober, and dropped me somewhere in Mitteleuropa as specified on the invoice.

It's less about the bridge you’re willing to cross than picking the right bridge in the first place.

Staight up: The assistant editor has a valid point about the river.

Local tourism boosters always point to the fact that those living elsewhere in America see Louisville as one big entity, situated south and north of the Ohio. They don't see a state line. Those of us who live here are very aware of the state line's significance. At times, perhaps it would be helpful to ignore it.

Bridge tolling makes this difficult, though it's never too late for show trials.

As many of you know, I'm a member of the Leadership Southern Indiana Discover Class of 2017, and continued thanks to Dr. Dan Eichenberger for his support in making it possible. It was a wonderful experience.

As such, given the impetus of the assistant editor's thoughts was Leadership SI's annual meeting, there's a point I'd like to make in response.

Leadership shouldn't imply a process of willful indoctrination. During the course of my leadership class experience, it occurred to me again and again that just because we were being told something by an authority figure, it didn't mean the authority figure was to be trusted -- without further and closer examination.

Especially as it pertains to economic development, we're constantly being told that it's One Southern Indiana's way or the highway (such irony in this formulation, but so be it). This seeped into the lesson plan again and again during my classes.

Conversely, over the years here at NAC, we've examined numerous other grassroots options for development, from small independent business principles and entrepreneurial development to Strong Towns, and including numerous ideas for grassroots empowerment as opposed to the top-down oligarchical model favored (unsurprisingly-- duh) by regional oligarchs.

Simply stated, the News and Tribune tends to uncritically swallow the bait offered by the "economic development as usual" stalwarts.

The newspaper is forever eager to take the side of the powerful. I think this is mistaken. Rather, the newspaper should be comforting the afflicted  and afflicting the comfortable -- asking follow-up questions, getting down to first causes, and upsetting a few apple carts on occasion.   

Leadership isn't stenography. It's a skill set, wherein you're constantly examining and re-examining premises to see if they're functional. The newspaper underachieves in this task.

Now go read what the assistant editor has to say.

THOMAS: A river runs through the mantle of leadership, by Jason Thomas

 ... How often does the Ohio River stop us?

The region stands on the edge of a new era. The River Ridge Commerce Center in Jeffersonville and Charlestown has awoken from its slumber as a decommissioned Army ammunition plant to a glistening sunrise of new infrastructure and endless possibilities. The Lewis and Clark Bridge now connects Louisville’s east end to Utica — with easy access to River Ridge — instantly making the region attractive to national and international companies eager to stake a claim on America’s crossroads.

A stone’s throw from the east-end connection is the Port of Indiana-Jeffersonville — the fastest growing port on the Inland Waterway System, according to River Ridge. The nine-month tonnage for 2017 at the port was 9 percent higher than the previous five-year average, and the port continues to track toward a fourth-consecutive year of handling in excess of 2 million tons of cargo, according to the port’s website.

Add to the mix a dual renaissance at the region’s most important downtowns in Jeffersonville and New Albany and all the ingredients are in place for Southern Indiana to soar to new heights.

But we can’t do it alone.

We’re part of a bigger picture. No longer can we look at Louisville as a rival. There is no river.

How did Estonia become a leader in technology? "By ditching legacy technology and betting on education."

It's been a year. Can we go back?

It's one of the few instances where being so very far behind turns out to be an advantage.

The Economist explains: How did Estonia become a leader in technology?

By ditching legacy technology and betting on education

WHEN Estonia regained its independence in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, less than half its population had a telephone line and its only independent link to the outside world was a Finnish mobile phone concealed in the foreign minister's garden. Two decades later, it is a world leader in technology. Estonian geeks developed the code behind Skype and Kazaa (an early file-sharing network). In 2007 it became the first country to allow online voting in a general election. It has among the world’s zippiest broadband speeds and holds the record for start-ups per person. Its 1.3m citizens pay for parking spaces with their mobile phones and have their health records stored in the digital cloud. Filing an annual tax return online, as 95% of Estonians do, takes about five minutes. How did the smallest Baltic state develop such a strong tech culture?

New England 2017: On a rainy day, a walk around the Mt. Holyoke College campus.

The Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley had Ivan Klima's memoir in hardback at a very low price. I couldn't resist.

As is my usual custom, I'll be posting photos, commentary and links about our trip; the daily accounts will be back-dated to coincide with their occurrence. It won't be the most thrilling reading, but in addition to whatever else NAC may or may not have become over the years, it's still a personal blog, and you're fully entitled to views of our holiday.

Mt. Holyoke College is a women's liberal arts college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, just up the road from where Diana's niece lives.

Chemist and educator Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke College (then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in 1837, nearly a century before women gained the right to vote. Today, her famous words—"Go where no one else will go, do what no one else will do"—continue to inspire Mount Holyoke students.

As the first of the Seven Sisters—the female equivalent of the once predominantly male Ivy League—Mount Holyoke has led the way in women's education.

Mt. Holyoke College is part of the Five College Consortium.

Five Colleges, Incorporated is a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1965 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions, which include four private, liberal arts colleges and the Amherst campus of the state university. The consortium is an outgrowth of a highly successful collaboration in the 1950s among Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which resulted in the founding of a fifth institution, Hampshire College, in 1970.

Broaden the search, and education in the Pioneer Valley looks like this:

Five Colleges consortium
Amherst College - Amherst
Hampshire College - Amherst
Mount Holyoke College - South Hadley
Smith College - Northampton
University of Massachusetts Amherst - Amherst

Metro Springfield Universities
American International College - Springfield
Bay Path University - Longmeadow
Cambridge College - Springfield
Elms College - Chicopee
Springfield College - Springfield
Western New England University -Springfield
Westfield State University - Westfield

Graduate Schools
Conway School of Landscape Design - Conway, Easthampton

Community colleges
Greenfield Community College - Greenfield
Holyoke Community College - Holyoke
Springfield Technical Community College -Springfield

Perhaps the huge number of schools helps to explain the equally large number of bookstores.

It rained most of the morning on Friday. We'd already amassed steaks, vegetables and wine for an evening grilling, and when skies cleared, I went for a walk through the Mt. Holyoke College campus.

Later that evening, after the wine was all gone, Ben honored me with a final New England IPA. It might have been the best of all. These past few years, I've found big IPAs and like-minded hop bombs almost painful to drink. Invariably, they set my sinuses to shutdown mode.

However, on this most recent trip, I didn't experience this reaction. Maybe the Pioneer Valley is better for my head than the Ohio Valley.

Friday was our final evening with Jen, Ben and Ruby. We said our goodbyes (for now), returned to the Airbnb, packed and made ready for the flight back from Hartford on Saturday.

"Dufrene said low pay is tied to lower rates of educational attainment."

Lower wages are tied to lower rates of educational attainment, and yet in general terms, one needs money to be educated. A bit of a conundrum, though $87 million in bricks and mortar should ... help?

I really need to attend one of these, some day. How much of the forecasting deal with grassroots indie business development, as opposed to the boilerplate public subsidy erotica that lulls One Southern Indiana to a restful sleep each night?

IUS Economic Outlook 2017 panel talks uncertainties of Trump ... regionally, economy expected to grow, by Elizabeth DePompei (News and Tribune)

... The labor force is expected to grow too. But anecdotal evidence shows employers are having a hard time finding skilled, educated workers, which (Uric) Dufrene tied to the region’s lower pay averages.

Southern Indiana ranks toward the bottom for weekly pay averages compared to other metro areas in the state, Dufrene said. Average weekly pay in Southern Indiana is $709, as opposed to the $853 national average.

Dufrene said low pay is tied to lower rates of educational attainment. According to 2010-2014 U.S. Census data, less than 20 percent of people 25 years and older had a bachelor’s degree or higher in Clark County. That number comes in at just over 24 percent for Floyd County.

“We will not be able to attract and grow higher paying jobs if we don’t grow or attract a more skilled and educated work force,” Dufrene said. “It has to be a key piece to the long-term economic development strategy of the region” ...

Democracy? You know, the "lies, fearmongering and fables."

That's about the size of it.

Lies, fearmongering and fables: that’s our democracy, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

People power can challenge the status quo, but only if we understand our political system has inherent flaws

... Democracy for Realists, published earlier this year by the social science professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, argues that the “folk theory of democracy” – the idea that citizens make coherent and intelligible policy decisions, on which governments then act – bears no relationship to how it really works. Or could ever work ...

And this:

... In reality, the research summarised by Achen and Bartels suggests, most people possess almost no useful information about policies and their implications, have little desire to improve their state of knowledge, and have a deep aversion to political disagreement. We base our political decisions on who we are rather than what we think. In other words, we act politically – not as individual, rational beings but as members of social groups, expressing a social identity. We seek out the political parties that seem to correspond best to our culture, with little regard to whether their policies support our interests. We remain loyal to political parties long after they have ceased to serve us.

Letter to the editor: "I've spent a lot of time thinking about the school referendum."

Submitted.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the school referendum - years, now -- and I could never come up with any reasonable justification. The "reasons" never made sense. I've been in those buildings and they are certainly fine and have the requisite amenities.

For a 10-year period, tech could have been a reason, since building out fiber-optic and/or ethernet would have required new builds. But we are well past that interregnum. Tech is such now that we are more likely to let everyone stay home and be tele-taught.

It finally dawned on me that to assume good faith on the part of the promoters was my mistake. The default mode for the promoters is to tell a pretty lie and rely on the fact that the children their system educated will be too stoopid to see through it.

They are lying. They have a REAL reason, but as is so very often seen in these environs, they refuse to state it. Call it Gahanism.

Here's the skinny, in my estimation: Now that public tax money follows the student, NA-FCCSC has to be consumer-driven. Like Northside Church, which offers exercise classes and a gym to draw lapsed Catholics into their fold, the school system feels they have to build amusement parks to draw students. The artificial-turf football fields are but one example. Trust me, that is not common where football is actually a serious sport. Yet, our schools people complained that every 5A school but ours had one.

If they would just say "We don't like it, but your education tax dollars are being sucked away by religious and partisan charter schools with entirely different agendas and methods from ours. Practically NONE of your local tax dollars are being spent on education. Those tax dollars are spent on buses, administrators, and buildings. But with tax caps and a city that TIFs everything under the sun, including wasteful things like a lazy river and wading pool, we can't compete.

"Yes, charter schools can't tax you for their buildings. But unless we close and rapidly sell off our neighborhood schools, the law requires us to sell them to our competition for nothing. That's why we sold Silver Street School. If we hadn't, a charter school could have just taken it and started - wait for it - a public neighborhood school. That's why we sold it for $100,000 instead of the millions it would have earned if marketed. A charter school could have come in and taken it, so we pre-sold it to a church incapable of starting a school.

"So to compete in this new marketplace, we simply must build palaces."

If they had come right out and said that, I might have been inclined to accept the tax increase to help public schools compete against "public" schools. I still might have supported them if they had been honest.

We old fuckers are still stuck in the pre-privatization days where there was a ban on paying private tuitions. The Daniels-Pence putsch has still not sunken into our atrophied brains. The GOP, if only to kill unions, is committed to "school choice" but what it really means is the end of public education as we knew it.

So, to compete in a rigged game, we're supposed to indebt ourselves to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. In fact, maybe the corporation should just disband and let the Republicans have their way. Then the revolution will come that much sooner.

But with golden parachutes for all!

A simple PDF from Lynchburg VA shows how Jeff Gahan might have chosen to educate NA about two-way streets, but didn't. And won't.

I'm not sure I've seen a better succinct presentation of the facts.

Granted, the likes of Irv Stumler would use this sheet as metaphorical toilet paper, but shouldn't Irv stick to his flowers ... and shouldn't Jeff Gahan have spent the past two years disseminating information like this, as a leader, rather than cowering in his campaign finance bunker?

Shattered 2011 Gahan campaign promises, Part 2: The "good education" mayor!

Part 1: Jobs!
Part 3: Unity!

I can't seem to recall the discussion about education ever taking place, unless it was held behind closed doors -- and closed doors are the biggest problem of all, aren't they?

To repeat: Can ANYONE offer evidence to substantiate ANY action during the past four years applicable to these forgotten campaign promises?

If so, pass it along.

A book about Newark's attempt to rebuild its schools.

The reviewer calls it "one of the most important books on education to come along in years. It serves as a kind of corrective to the dominant narrative of school reformers across the country."

I'll ask two serious questions, because I don't know the answers.

When was the last time a City Hall team in New Albany got genuinely involved in matters of public education?

Conversely, when did school administration last take a serious interest in the city's management?

Yes, the mayor's wife is a principal, so I don't doubt there is interest. School administration cultivates an aura of lofty distance, but I'm equally confident that someone probably there cares how the city is run.

However, the public appearance is one of non-cooperation on the part of both "sides."

Is this accurate? Let me know what you think.

‘The Prize,’ by Dale Russakoff, a book review by Alex Kotlowitz (New York Times)

In America, education was long seen as the great equalizer, but that has become mostly myth. So, over the past decade, there has been a vigorous effort to fortify and rebuild our schools, and in this there is a recognition that we have failed our children, especially those living in poverty, those for whom education could — and should — be transformational. From Chicago to New Orleans, school reform has been engineered by the well heeled and well connected — from hedge fund managers to corporate heads to directors of foundations — who believe that with the right kind of teachers and pedagogy, and with a ­business-like administration, schooling can trump the daily burdens and indignities of growing up poor. “No excuses” has become the rallying cry of the reformers.

Along comes Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize,” a brilliantly reported behind-the-scenes account of one city’s attempt to right its failing public schools. When Russakoff began reporting this book in 2010, fewer than 40 percent of the students in the third through eighth grades in Newark, N.J., were reading or doing math at grade level — and nearly half of the system’s students dropped out before graduating. The schools were so broken that the state had taken them over. Something needed to be done. From this rubble emerged an exciting if not unusual partnership between three individuals who couldn’t have been more different from one another. The city’s black Democratic mayor, the charismatic and ambitious Cory Booker, joined hands with the state’s blustery and ambitious white Republican governor, Chris Christie, to reimagine Newark’s schools. Together, they enlisted Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who pledged a whopping $100 million — to be matched by another $100 million, which the city raised, mostly from foundations and private individuals. It was such an extraordinary gift that Zuckerberg, with Booker and Christie by his side, announced it on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” As Russakoff writes: “Their stated goal was not to repair education in Newark but to develop a model for saving it in all of urban America.” This is what makes “The Prize” essential reading. Newark was to be our compass for school reform.

Please, let's start "educating community leaders about placemaking."

I consider this a must-read. It's what we're saying. They're ideas that matter.

Hmm -- wonder if David Duggins has finished reading Jeff Speck's book after a year and a half?

The last time I asked him, he had not. Sad, isn't it?

Top 10 techniques for educating community leaders about placemaking, by Nathan Norris (Better! Cities & Towns)

Extraordinary strides have been made in the advancement of placemaking over the past twenty-five years.

Think about it. In the years prior, the term “placemaking” wasn’t even in common use by developers, designers and planners. Nor were terms such as form-based code, new urbanism, smart growth, transect, charrette, visual preference survey, traditional neighborhood development, transit-oriented development, sprawl repair/suburban retrofit, return on infrastructure investment analysis, tactical urbanism, WalkScore, complete streets, context sensitive thoroughfare design, LEED-ND, light imprint infrastructure, WalkUP, the original green, lean urbanism, the high cost of free parking, etc.

What has not changed over the last 25 years is that decisions regarding the growth and development of our communities are still being made by community leaders who might be experts in politics, but do not have an adequate understanding of placemaking principles.

Uninformed decisions can lead to bad results. You are familiar with the types of poor policy decisions that spring from this uninformed position— all road widenings are “improvements,” all density is bad, the public works department should treat an urban area exactly the same as a suburban area, etc. For those of us who are focused on improving our communities through competent urban design, this is a source of great frustration.

So here are my Top 10 Techniques for Educating Community Leaders about Placemaking. If you find yourself similarly frustrated, consider the following tools for those you believe are open to enhancing their knowledge (not everyone is).

More Sunday reading: "What role will the arts and humanities play in this brave new world?"

Accompany with black coffee.

Matt Burriesci: The Arts and Humanities Aren’t Worth a Dime, by Matt Burriesci (Guernica)

“The object of the education system, taken as whole, is not to produce hands for industry or to teach the young how to make a living. It is to produce responsible citizens.”
-Robert Maynard Hutchins, The University of Utopia

As one of the editors of the Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins believed that Westerners were all participants in a Great Conversation that began in antiquity. Over the course of several thousand years of that conversation, Western civilization experimented with many different modes of political and economic organization. We have been a polis and we have been an empire; we have lived in feudal monarchies and free republics; we have been capitalist, mercantile, and socialist; we have been democratic and tyrannical. None of these systems has been permanent. Each model has given way to a new one.

The Western World once believed, as Aristotle did, that the political unit preceded the economic one. We changed our minds in the 17th century. John Locke argued that in order to have a government at all, one first had to embrace the concept of private property, and so political freedoms were dependent upon economic liberty. Governments existed for limited purposes, with the consent of the governed, and primarily to defend the property of free citizens. This economic freedom is also what Adam Smith meant when he wrote of the “Invisible Hand.” Smith argued that if individuals were free to choose their own labor, they would choose the most profitable labor possible. By doing so, each individual, guided by a force he or she did not understand (“an Invisible Hand”) would maximize the wealth of the nation.

Today we have come to understand economic metrics as the only units of measurement. We talk about “the marketplace of ideas,” as we “vote with our dollars.”

NA's Purdue campus has a new name: Purdue Polytechnic Institute.

Now, if we can just begin thinking about harnessing PPI and IUS into a unified effort to incubate economic activity in New Albany ... viewing both as the capstones of geographical transport corridors to be transformed into multi-modal use for all residents ... minimizing our perennial anti-intellectualism and maximizing possibilities ...

We may need to find an economic development director capable of crawling out from inside self-imposed boxes.

Ah, and a boy can dream -- and sometimes, even run for office.

Note the website: Purdue Polytechnic.

Polytechnic for short: New Albany Purdue campus gets new name, by Jerod Clapp (Grudgingly New Albany)

NEW ALBANY — They’ve condensed the name, but expanded what they hope to offer to students in the region.

The Purdue Polytechnic Institute — formerly Purdue University College of Technology at New Albany — will share its name with all the regional campuses across the state.

Andrew Takami, director of the New Albany campus, said the name reflects the mission of those campuses, which stems from a concept that originated in New Albany.

The Economist: Blue collar (and badly educated) men in rich countries are not adapting well.

I highly recommend these two articles. The leader offers a broad summery, with the essay going into greater detail. As you're reading, bear in mind that New Albany's traditional response to social and economic change has been to eagerly shift downmarket. 

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The weaker sex: Blue-collar men in rich countries are in trouble. They must learn to adapt

... One group in particular is suffering (see article). Poorly educated men in rich countries have had difficulty coping with the enormous changes in the labour market and the home over the past half-century. As technology and trade have devalued brawn, less-educated men have struggled to find a role in the workplace. Women, on the other hand, are surging into expanding sectors such as health care and education, helped by their superior skills. As education has become more important, boys have also fallen behind girls in school (except at the very top). Men who lose jobs in manufacturing often never work again. And men without work find it hard to attract a permanent mate. The result, for low-skilled men, is a poisonous combination of no job, no family and no prospects ...

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The point is expanded and corroborated here, in longer form.

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Men adrift: Badly educated men in rich countries have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism

KIMBERLEY, a receptionist in Tallulah, thinks the local men are lazy. “They don’t do nothin’,” she complains. This is not strictly true. Until recently, some of them organised dog fights in a disused school building.

Tallulah, in the Mississippi Delta, is picturesque but not prosperous. Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars, obviously, do not have jobs. Nor do many of the young men who hang around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze. In Madison Parish, the local county, only 47% of men of prime working age (25-54) are working.

The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high school’s results are poor even by Louisiana’s standards. That would have mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has closed, and on nearby farms “jobs that used to take 100 men now take ten,” observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no longer enough ...

What they're saying: A potpourri of McCourt, Collins and Keeler.

As the weeks go past in route to May's primary election, I'm providing periodic candidate statements of substance, mostly unretouched, as lifted from social media and news reports. Familiar gems such as "yard signs win elections, not people" and "donate to my campaign first, and maybe I'll have something of merit to say much, much later" will be omitted. That's because it is my aim to determine whether our declared candidates have anything to say at all, and I'll quote all candidates, from any and all parties, whether or not they're in a contested race. Just promising change and new ideas without divulging them won't cut the mustard, aspirants.


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First up: Apologies for thus far omitting mention of Vicki Glotzbach, who is seeking re-election to the office of city clerk. She has a Facebook campaign page.

Republican council candidate (6th district) Noah McCourt has had much to say of late, and you are invited to read his posts at Facebook.

I had the opportunity to speak with my fellow candidates Dr. Al Knable and local historian Dave Barksdale. We talked about our approach to campaigning and how we as potential city officials need to be straight forward with the community. I agree with Dr. Knable "I'm not going to simply tell people what they want to hear to get elected." The simple truth of the matter is this city is struggling financially. We as a community can not take four more years of reactionary spending, unsustainable development and irresponsible TIF practices. The shopping spree needs to end. I respect the many members of the community for willing to be honest about the issues, Now let's get the government on the same level. Vote Knable, Barksdale and McCourt and Put some honesty back in city hall

Over in the 5th district, Democratic challenger Dustin Collins mentions a facet of economic development that should be discussed more often.

The next generation of jobs will be technology: whether energy, internet, or another technology that is only an idea today. We need to invest in technological infrastructure like fiber optic internet. These jobs won't wait for us; we owe it to the future of our city, and her workers, to start exploring ways to invest in tomorrow's jobs. I am committed to making New Albany a place where the jobs of the future can locate today.

See also: No, Mayor Gahan, Indatus is not one of the "indie" bands playing at Bicentennial Park this summer.

At-large council hopeful Adam Keeler, a Democrat, shares a link and provides commentary: Bill to remove Ritz as education chair passes Senate committee (WTHR).

This is absurd. My heart goes out to Glenda Ritz. When we start removing elected officials from office we are no longer a democracy. Mike Pence has given the state of Indiana another black eye. Education is extremely important in today's world. Please get out and vote this year!

Voting information is compiled at the Floyd County Clerk's web site. Know where and when you can vote.

Actually, MOST movies are "too dumb to criticize." Time for some book-readin'.

It's a preachin' kind of Sunday.

I tend to avoid American mainstream movies, as they tend to be depressingly stupid. Two hours expended to glare in pained annoyance, while books await reading, strikes me as a poor bargain even when drunk.

Lately I've been avoiding social media expressions of polarized dumbassery, whether emanating from knee-jerking parties to the right or left. It is increasingly evident that social media was developed to be abused by the 99%, go the glee of the 1%, as the ones who should be marching together to take back what is theirs instead attack each other.

It's called divide and conquer, folks, and you buy into it every single day. Rather than emulating 19th-century peasants prostrate on their knees, praying to the Tsar (or the Koch Brothers, or "fill in the blank: with the name of any multinational corporation) for some measure of hope, perhaps we might commence a shift aimed at taking some of it back.

Without knowing or caring why the sniper was sent to Iraq in the first place -- why soldiers are sent anywhere throughout history -- it's all diversion and fluff. Metaphorically, we cannot all work "for" ourselves, but we needn't work for the Man, either. Ideas and words matter, and it's never too late to invest in the time required to grasp their meaning.

Sermon concluded.

'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

Almost.

 ... Filmmakers like Eastwood, who could have cleared things up, only muddy the waters more. Sometimes there's no such thing as "just a human story." Sometimes a story is meaningless or worse without real context, and this is one of them.

Speck in Carmel; meanwhile, in New Albany, we wait for ANY Democrat to "get all New Urban" about ANYTHING.

Jeff Speck tweeted this link (below).

By the way, the city of New Albany is spending $194,000 on a "toilet room" at Binford Park. Living and dead trees fall while too few are replanted. We flaunt strange suburban pride in housing demolition without plan one to replace the structures. Heavy trucks keep speeding through downtown residential areas on streets where they should not be. Parking rules are enforced only variously.

Is this the most tone-deaf mayoral term in the city's history?

Better stated, how many "leading" Democrats overall exist in Floyd County even capable of fathoming the following passage in terms of basic reading comprehension, much less actively working to implement the principles enunciated within it?

ROGUE ELEPHANT: What happened when the Republican mayor of Carmel, Indiana, bucked his party and embraced sustainability? He got reelected—four times, by Kim Larsen (One Earth)

 ... Since first assuming office in 1995, Brainard has been steadily transforming his city into a model for how other small cities of the 21st century can use sustainable urban policy to court economic growth, increase populations, beautify public spaces, and greatly improve local quality of life—all while reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

On this last point Brainard long ago established his bona fides. Since 2005, he has been cochairing the Energy Independence and Climate Protection Task Force for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which has been instrumental in convincing American cities to adopt goals toward lowering their carbon emissions. A year ago President Obama selected him to sit on the president’s State, Local, and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness and Resilience. After four White House meetings, the 26-person panel is now winnowing a slew of recommendations to present to Obama in November.

Meanwhile, back in Carmel, the Brainard administration continues to find new ways of folding sustainability into the workaday business of city management. Municipal workers, for example, now drive hybrid and biofuel vehicles down roads newly planted with hundreds of trees as part of a citywide goal to achieve 50 percent tree-canopy coverage on all of Carmel’s streets. A new, interconnected system of pathways and sidewalks encourages cycling and walking. And when it came time to update the local wastewater treatment plant, the city opted for a technology that kills bacteria with ultraviolet light rather than chlorine. (Even trace amounts of residual chlorine in treated and discharged wastewater can be harmful to aquatic life.)

It’s significant that Brainard is doing all this as a Republican (one of only four on Obama’s Local Leaders team). He shrugs off any suggestion that his sustainability ethic somehow represents a break with Republican tradition, citing such conservation-minded GOP forerunners as Teddy Roosevelt, who vastly expanded the National Parks system; Dwight D. Eisenhower, who created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; and Richard Nixon, who signed the papers to establish the Environmental Protection Agency. But more to the point, he maintains, no daylight exists between the Brainard administration’s approach to city management and the Republican Party mandate to generate and maintain stable, prosperous communities unburdened by high taxes.

Brainard, loyal Republican that he is, is doing all that. But he’s also doing a lot more—which is apparent to anyone who spends a day or two, as I did, walking around the city he leads. Carmel is being reconfigured according to planning principles that, for many centuries, organically guided the way cities developed—but that, in the era of the automobile, required a renaissance. This renaissance began to take shape in the 1980s in the form of New Urbanism ...

Best guess: You can count 'em on the fingers of one hand, all the while sadly and safely assuming that the absurdly low number is twice or three times that of the total of Republicans hereabouts who've so much as heard of Theodore Roosevelt.

And that, dear readers, is why we're going to screw up this opportunity. In Geico horror movies and New Albany, we make bad decisions.

That's what we do.

Indiana as Deep South wannabe.

Before Hoosiers like me prematurely crow at the expected nearby state appearing therein, we need to take a look at the list. Let's hear it, Mike Pence ... and St. Daniels.

Drum roll please: With a few stray exceptions, we're looking at stupidity, poverty and Republican Party hegemony in this bottom ten.

Yep.

The 10 Dumbest States in America, by Tony Owusu (The Street)

Here is a list of the 10 "dumbest" states based on percentage of the population with Bachelor's degrees.