Thinking about the Torah

The Bible is an enduring source of inspiration for the human heart and mind, and readers of Thinking about the Torah will be rewarded with an enhanced understanding of this great work’s deeper meanings. Drawing on Western philosophy and particularly Jewish philosophy, Kenneth Seeskin delves into ten core biblical verses and the powerful ideas that emerge from them. He speaks to readers on every page and invites conversation about topics central to human existence: how finite beings can relate to the infinite, what love is, the role of ethics in religion, and the meaning of holiness. Seeskin raises questions we all ask and responds to them with curiosity and compassion, weaving into his own perceptive commentary insights from great Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, Spinoza, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, as well as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Kant, and Kierkegaard. The Bible is concerned with how we think as well as how we follow the commandments, rituals, and customs. Seeskin inspires us to read the Torah with an open mind and think about the lessons it teaches us

New perspectives on health and health care policy

Health care reform has been the primary focus of policymakers for much of the past year, culminating with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010. The vigorous national debate on the act has highlighted the importance of innovative, high-quality research on health and health care policy.Insurance, Health ; Medicare

Thinking about the Torah

The Bible is an enduring source of inspiration for the human heart and mind, and readers of Thinking about the Torah will be rewarded with an enhanced understanding of this great work’s deeper meanings. Drawing on Western philosophy and particularly Jewish philosophy, Kenneth Seeskin delves into ten core biblical verses and the powerful ideas that emerge from them. He speaks to readers on every page and invites conversation about topics central to human existence: how finite beings can relate to the infinite, what love is, the role of ethics in religion, and the meaning of holiness. Seeskin raises questions we all ask and responds to them with curiosity and compassion, weaving into his own perceptive commentary insights from great Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, Spinoza, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, as well as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Kant, and Kierkegaard. The Bible is concerned with how we think as well as how we follow the commandments, rituals, and customs. Seeskin inspires us to read the Torah with an open mind and think about the lessons it teaches us

Not on My Street: Evaluating Equity in the Application Process for Traffic Calming in San Francisco

The purpose of this paper is to determine if the application process for traffic calming in San Francisco is equitable. Housed under the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), the Residential Traffic Calming Program processes petition applications from neighborhoods on an annual basis. Considering the history of traffic calming along with different interpretations of equity, along with the specific context of the Residential Traffic Calming Program, this study evaluates equity through examining the distribution of traffic calming applications submitted over a period of three fiscal years. Pairing the geography of the petition applications with the demographic data of their respective census tracts, this study concludes that privileged communities are more likely to request traffic calming than disadvantaged communities. This finding carries considerable implications for equity in San Francisco’s residential traffic calming process. While the program praises itself for being initiated by residents, disparities in the participation of residents can prevent it from being socially equitable. Coupled with these findings, this paper also suggests further avenues for research.Master of City and Regional Plannin

Constructing a Toolkit to Evaluate Quality of State and Local Administrative Data

State and local agencies administering programs have in their administrative data a powerful resource for policy analysis to inform evaluation and guide improvement of their programs. Understanding different aspects of their administrative data quality is critical for agencies to conduct such analyses and to improve their data for future use. However, state and local agencies often lack the resources and training for staff to conduct rigorous evaluations of data quality. We describe our efforts developing tools that can be used to assess data quality as well as the challenges encountered in constructing these tools. The toolkit focuses on critical dimensions of quality for analyzing an administrative dataset, including checks on data accuracy, the completeness of the records, and the comparability of the data over time and among subgroups of interest. State and local administrative databases often include a longitudinal component which our toolkit also aims to exploit to help evaluate data quality. While we seek to develop general tools for common data quality analyses, most administrative datasets have particularities that can benefit from a customized analysis building on our toolkit. In addition, we incorporate data visualization to draw attention to sets of records or variables that contain outliers or for which quality may be a concern

Dialogue and Discovery

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Using Student and Teacher Survey Data to Improve Schools

Amid a growing debate over the use of standardized test scores, states and districts across the country have begun using alternative measures of school quality, including surveys of students and teachers. As a result, many schools now have access to troves of diagnostic data on student and teacher perception. However, with few established practices for analyzing or planning with survey data, there has been wide variation in how schools actually use their results. I completed my residency at UChicago Impact, a non-profit connected to the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute. UChicago Impact administers the 5Essentials Survey, based on the research in Organizing Schools for Improvement (Bryk et al, 2010), in nearly 5,000 schools nationwide. My strategic project was to design and pilot a series of workshops to help teams of teachers and administrators use their 5Essentials data to improve the organization of their schools and, ultimately, student outcomes. My research identified two core problems that often prevent practitioners from using survey data effectively: (1) the complex social problems rooted in survey data require brave conversations, unintuitive planning, and collective action, making the data hard to influence; (2) the infrequent administration and release of survey data make it difficult for schools to collect new data and adjust their actions accordingly. I found that as a result of attending the workshops, most teams were able to have productive conversations about their schools and coalesce around a plan for improvement. However, when it came time to implement their plans, the teams faced obstacles around accountability, coherence, and assessment of impact. Moreover, it is unclear that any of the actions that teams did implement will lead to improvements in student outcomes. Given the relatively limited nature of the this intervention – eight total hours of workshops – these findings suggest that the analysis of student and teacher survey data may be an effective way to help schools begin to build trust between stakeholders. However, in order for survey data to drive sustained, measurable improvement, the reporting infrastructure needs to become more nimble, and leaders have to balance support and accountability, while integrating survey data with other data sources and initiatives