A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by he National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “The education landscape in the United States has been changing rapidly in recent decades: student populations have become more diverse; there has been an explosion of data sources; there is an intensified focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility; educators and policy makers at all levels want more and better data for evidence-based decision making; and the role of technology in education has increased dramatically. With awareness of this changed landscape the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to provide a vision for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)—the nation’s premier statistical agency for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating statistics at all levels of education.

A Vision and Roadmap for Education Statistics (2022) reviews developments in using alternative data sources, considers recent trends and future priorities, and suggests changes to NCES’s programs and operations, with a focus on NCES’s statistical programs. The report reimagines NCES as a leader in the 21st century education data ecosystem, where it can meet the growing demands for policy-relevant statistical analyses and data to more effectively and efficiently achieve its mission, especially in light of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 and the 2021 Presidential Executive Order on advancing racial equity. The report provides strategic advice for NCES in all aspects of the agency’s work including modernization, stakeholder engagement, and the resources necessary to complete its mission and meet the current and future challenges in education…(More)”.

The Food Aid Delivery App

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Trish Bendix: “Between 30 and 40 percent of the US food supply goes to waste each year. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that nearly 80 billion pounds of food end up in landfills annually. This figure takes on a greater significance in the context of another food crisis: food insecurity. More than 10 percent of US households are food insecure, and the nonprofit Feeding America reports that this number will increase due to the economic and unemployment consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The food waste crisis is not new. Wasted, a 2012 report from the Natural Resources Defense Council, recorded Americans’ annual food waste at 40 percent. Horrified by the report’s findings, Leah Lizarondo, a food and health advocate who began her career working in consumer-packaged goods and technology, was inspired to find a solution.

“I tried to figure out why this inefficiency was happening—where the failing was in the supply chain,” Lizarondo says. She knew that consumer-facing businesses such as grocery stores and restaurants were the second-biggest culprits of food waste—behind American households. And even though these businesses didn’t intend to waste food, they lacked the logistics, structures, or incentives to redirect the food surplus to people experiencing food insecurity. Furthermore, because most wasted food is perishable, traditional waste methods didn’t work within the food-banking structure.

“It was so cheap to just throw food in a landfill,” Lizarondo comments. “There’s no legislation [in the United States] that prevents us from doing that, unlike other countries.” For example, France banned food waste in 2016, while Norway has stores that sell food past their sell-by dates, and Asian countries like Japan and South Korea have adopted their own regulations, including the latter charging a fee to citizens for each pound of food waste. Currently, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont are the only US states with legislation enforcing organic waste bans.

In 2016, Lizarondo launched the nonprofit Food Rescue Hero, a technology platform that redirects food waste to the food insecure in cities across America.

Since its launch, Food Rescue Hero has given more than 68 million pounds of food to people in need. Currently, it operates in 12 cities in the United States and Canada, with more than 22,000 drivers volunteering their time….(More)”.

How Cities Are Using Digital Twins Like a SimCity for Policymakers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Linda Poon: “The entire 40-square-mile metro region of Orlando, Florida, may soon live virtually inside the offices of the Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP). The group has partnered with the gaming company Unity to develop a 3-D model of the area — from its downtown core all the way out to Space Coast on the eastern edge of central Florida — that the city can show off to potential investors in its bid to grow as a tech hub.

“It’ll be a circular room with LED screens kind of 180 degrees,” says OEP President and Chief Executive Officer Tim Giuliani.“Then in the middle, we’re planning the holographic image, where the digital twin of the region will come to life.” 

Orlando’s planned showcase is one of the flashier uses of a new technology that’s being lauded as a potential game changer for urban planning. Like a SimCity for policymakers, digital twins allow cities not just to create virtual models, but to run simulations of new policies or infrastructure projects and preview their potential impacts before making a decision in the real world. 

They may be also one of the more tangible opportunities for cities in the race for the so-called metaverse, an immersive network of virtual worlds that some leaders believe to be the future of urban living. Using 3-D mapping and analysis of static and real-time data, municipalities and businesses are increasingly adopting digital twin technology — although many of its potential uses remain aspirational thus far. 

Orlando expects to use its digital twin technology for more than virtual tours. It also hopes to preview how different investments, like a transit system upgrade, might affect the built environment and its residents. Several other U.S. cities are building replicas to model traffic congestion strategies and drive net-zero climate goals. Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Phoenix are all building out digital twins to lower building emissions as part of the Clean Cities Clean Future campaign from the software company Cityzenith. Globally, cities from Singapore to Helsinki and Dubai are also investing in the technology, with goals ranging from driving sustainability to promoting virtual tourism. 

The technology could help officials cut operating costs and carbon emissions of new construction, and avoid costly modifications after a project is completed. Amid an ever-looming climate crisis facing urban areas, it could enable cities to test the effectiveness of various measures against rising sea levels and urban heat. By one estimate, digital twins could save cities some $280 billion by 2030….(More)”

Trust the Science But Do Your Research: A Comment on the Unfortunate Revival of the Progressive Case for the Administrative State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mark Tushnet: “…offers a critique of one Progressive argument for the administrative state, that it would base policies on what disinterested scientific inquiries showed would best advance the public good and flexibly respond to rapidly changing technological, economic, and social conditions. The critique draws on recent scholarship in the field of Science and Technology Studies, which argues that what counts as a scientific fact is the product of complex social, political, and other processes. The critique is deployed in an analysis of the responses of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Food and Drug Administration to some important aspects of the COVD crisis in 2020.

A summary of the overall argument is this: The COVID virus had characteristics that made it exceptionally difficult to develop policies that would significantly limit its spread until a vaccine was available, and some of those characteristics went directly to the claim that the administrative state could respond flexibly to rapidly changing conditions. But, and here is where the developing critique of claims about scientific expertise enters, the relevant administrative agencies were bureaucracies with scientific staff members, and what those bureaucracies regard as “the science” was shaped in part by bureaucratic and political considerations, and the parts that were so shaped were important components of the overall policy response.

Part II describes policy-relevant characteristics of knowledge about the COVID virus and explains why those characteristics made it quite difficult for more than a handful of democratic nations to adopt policies that would effectively limit its penetration of their populations. Part III begins with a short presentation of the aspects of the STS critique of claims about disinterested science that have some bearing on policy responses to the pandemic. It then provides an examination shaped by that critique of the structures of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, showing how those structural features contributed to policy failures. Part IV concludes by sketching how the STS critique might inform efforts to reconstruct rather than deconstruct the administrative state, proposing the creation of Citizen Advisory Panels in science-based agencies…(More)”.

Public Meetings Thwart Housing Reform Where It Is Needed Most

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Katherine Levine Einstein by Jake Blumgart: “Public engagement can have downsides. Neighborhood participation in the housing permitting process makes existing political inequalities worse, limits housing supply and contributes to the affordability crisis….

In 2019, Katherine Levine Einstein and her co-authors at Boston University produced the first in-depth study of this dynamic, Neighborhood Defenders, providing a unique insight into how hyper-local democracy can produce warped land-use outcomes. Governing talked with her about the politics of delay, what kind of regulations hamper growth and when community meetings can still be an effective means of public feedback.

Governing: What could be wrong with a neighborhood meeting? Isn’t this democracy in its purest form? 

Katherine Levine Einstein: In this book, rather than look at things in their ideal form, we actually evaluated how they are working on the ground. We bring data to the question of whether neighborhood meetings are really providing community voice. One of the reasons that we think of them as this important cornerstone of American democracy is because they are supposedly providing us perspectives that are not widely heard, really amplifying the voices of neighborhood residents.

What we’re able to do in the book is to really bring home the idea that the people who are showing up are not actually representative of their broader communities and they are unrepresentative in really important ways. They’re much more likely to be opposed to new housing, and they’re demographically privileged on a number of dimensions….

What we find happens in practice is that even in less privileged places, these neighborhood meetings are actually amplifying more privileged voices. We study a variety of more disadvantaged places and what the dynamics of these meetings look like. The principles that hold in more affluent communities still play out in these less privileged places. You still hear from voices that are overwhelmingly opposed to new housing. The voices that are heard are much more likely to be homeowners, white and older…(More)”.

Evidence is a policymaker’s biggest weapon

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jacquelyn Zhang: “Fundamentally, public policy is supposed to address serious social problems. However, poorly designed policies exist. Often this happens when a well-intentioned policy generates unexpected and unintended consequences, and sometimes, these consequences leave policymakers farther away from their goal than when they started.

Consider just a few examples.

The first is the impact of an immigration law that was used in the United States ostensibly to control the flow of undocumented immigrants into the country. The controversial bill imposes extreme restrictions on undocumented immigrants in the state of Alabama and limits every aspect of immigrants’ lives.

By employing a synthetic control methodology, the bill proved to have a substantial and negative unintended effect – an increase in violent crimes. This could be linked back to the bill because while violent crime increased, property crime did not.

This may be because the passage of one of the country’s strictest anti-immigration laws signalled to the community that the system had more tolerance for discrimination against undocumented immigrants in Alabama, fuelling distrust and eventually violent conflict.

This is not a freak event either. Policymakers know that enacting laws doesn’t just change the wording of legislation. It shapes social norms, prescribes attitudes, and affects community behaviour. Of course, this is also why good policy-making can be so productive…(More)”.

Humans in the Loop

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rebecca Crootof, Margot E. Kaminski and W. Nicholson Price II: “From lethal drones to cancer diagnostics, complex and artificially intelligent algorithms are increasingly integrated into decisionmaking that affects human lives, raising challenging questions about the proper allocation of decisional authority between humans and machines. Regulators commonly respond to these concerns by putting a “human in the loop”: using law to require or encourage including an individual within an algorithmic decisionmaking process.

Drawing on our distinctive areas of expertise with algorithmic systems, we take a bird’s eye view to make three generalizable contributions to the discourse. First, contrary to the popular narrative, the law is already profoundly (and problematically) involved in governing algorithmic systems. Law may explicitly require or prohibit human involvement and law may indirectly encourage or discourage human involvement, all without regard to what we know about the strengths and weaknesses of human and algorithmic decisionmakers and the particular quirks of hybrid human-machine systems. Second, we identify “the MABA-MABA trap,” wherein regulators are tempted to address a panoply of concerns by “slapping a human in it” based on presumptions about what humans and algorithms are respectively better at doing, often without realizing that the new hybrid system needs its own distinct regulatory interventions. Instead, we suggest that regulators should focus on what they want the human to do—what role the human is meant to play—and design regulations to allow humans to play these roles successfully. Third, borrowing concepts from systems engineering and existing law regulating railroads, nuclear reactors, and medical devices, we highlight lessons for regulating humans in the loop as well as alternative means of regulating human-machine systems going forward….(More)”.

Policy Building Blocks, And How We Talk About The Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cathy Gellis: “One of the fundamental difficulties in doing policy advocacy, including, and perhaps especially tech policy advocacy, is that we are not only speaking of technology, which can often seem inscrutable and scary to non-experts, but law, which itself is an intricate and often opaque system. This complicated nature of our legal system can present challenges, because policy involves an application of law to technology, and we can’t apply it well when we don’t understand how the law works. (It’s also hard to do well when we don’t understand how the technology works, either, but this post is about the law part so we’ll leave the issues with understanding technology aside for now.)

Even among lawyers, who should have some expertise in understanding the law, people can find themselves at different points along the learning curve in terms of understanding the intricacies and basic mechanics of our legal system. As explained before, law is often so complex that, even as practitioners, lawyers tend to become very specialized and may lose touch with some basic concepts if they do not often encounter them in the course of their careers.

Meanwhile it shouldn’t just be lawyers who understand law anyway. Certainly policymakers, charged with making the law, should have a solid understanding what they are working with. But regular people should too. After all, the point of a democracy is that the people get to decide what their laws should be (or at least be able to charge their representatives to make good ones on their behalf). And people can’t make good choices when they don’t understand how the choices they make fit into the system they are being made for.

Remember that none of these choices are being made in a vacuum; we do not find ourselves today with a completely blank canvas. Instead, we’ve all inherited a legal system that has chugged along for two centuries. We can, of course, choose to change any of it should we so require, but such an exercise would be best served by having a solid grasp on just what it is that we would be changing. Only with that insight can we be sure that any changes we might make would be needed, appropriate, and not themselves likely to cause even more problems than whatever we were trying to fix…(More)”.

Data Types, Data Doubts & Data Trusts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by João Marinotti: “Data is not monolithic. Nonetheless, the word is frequently used indiscriminately, referring to a large number of different concepts. It may refer to information writ large, or specifically to personally identifiable information, discrete digital files, trade secrets, and even to sets of AI-generated content. Yet each of these types of “data” require different governance regimes in commerce, in life, and in law. Despite this diversity, the singular concept of data trusts is promulgated as a solution to our collective data governance problems. Data trusts—meant to cover all of these types of data—are said to promote personal privacy, increase corporate transparency, facilitate the sharing of data, and even pave the way for the next generation of artificial intelligence. These anticipated benefits, however, require the body and flexibility of equitable trust law and its inherent fiduciary relationships. Unfortunately, American trust law does not allow for the existence of such general data trusts. If anything, the judicial, academic, and legislative confusion regarding data rights—or its status as property—demonstrates that discussions of data trusts may be ignoring a key element. Without first determining whether (or what kind of) data can be recognized as a trust res (i.e., as trust property) under existing law, it may be premature to accept data trusts as the private law solution to our data governance ills. If, on the other hand, the implementation of data trusts requires legislative intervention, its purported benefits must be analyzed in contrast to the myriad other new and evolving data governance frameworks that would similarly require legislation. By analyzing existing trust law and the difficulties of defining data rights, this essay highlights the urgent need to pursue doctrinally, legislatively, and technologically viable data governance strategies….(More)”.

Data Literacy for the Public Sector: Lessons from Early Pioneers in the U.S.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nick Hart, Adita Karkera, and Valerie Logan: “Advances in the access, collection, management, analysis, and use of data across public sector organizations substantially contributed to steady improvements in services, efficiency of operations, and effectiveness of government programs. The experience of citizens, beneficiaries, managers, and data experts is also evolving as data becomes pervasive and more seamlessly integrated within decision-making processes. In order for agencies to effectively engage in the ever-changing data landscape, organizational data literacy capacity and program models can help ensure individuals across the workforce can read, write, and communicate with data in the context of their role.

Data and analytics are no longer “just” for specialists, such as data engineers and data scientists; rather, data literacy is now increasingly recognized as a core workforce competency. Fortunately, in the United States several pioneers have emerged in strategically advancing data literacy programs and activities at the organizational level, providing benefits to individuals in the public sector workforce. Pioneering programs are those that recognize data literacy as more than training. They view data literacy as a holistic set of activities program to engage employees at all levels with data, develop employees with relevant skills, and enable scale of data literacy by augmenting employees’ skills with guided learning support and resources.

Agencies should begin by crafting the case for change. As is common with any emerging field, varying definitions and interpretations of “data literacy” are prevalent, which can affect program design. Being explicit in what problems are being solved for, as well as the needs and drivers to be addressed with a data literacy program or capacity, are vital to mitigate false starts…(More)”.