By Joan Cook/The Conversation

Since allegations of former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s abhorrent treatment of women have come to public light, we once again have an opportunity to talk about sexual harassment. These negative experiences are prevalent, pervasive and problematic for women in the workplace. And such ill treatment not only has a toxic impact on the female recipient, but has reverberating dysfunctional effects for employment settings as well.
The past year we’ve also seen an increase in prominent women, including Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, coming forward to publicly speak about their experiences of harassment in the workplace. We’ve witnessed the fall from grace of big names, including Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Bill Cosby, and companies, including Uber. Rather than showing isolated incidents, these examples reflect workplace abuses that affect the everyday woman.
In a summary of workplace bullying, using 66 independent samples totaling together nearly 80,000 male and female employees, the effects were extensive and potentially long-lasting and included depression, anxiety and substance misuse. But workplace mistreatment of women is not just a woman problem. It’s an institutional and societal one.

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Posted on October 27, 2017

By James E. Rosenbaum/The Hechinger Report

American society is obsessed with a single route to success.
We tell our children they must get high SAT scores, attend selective colleges, get bachelor’s degrees and get high paying jobs to have a successful life. They go through 12 years of incessant testing, test-prep lessons and test mania, as if tests were the key to success.
The nation’s education system has become an SAT rat race in which youth are judged on where they fall on the bell curve of test scores.
This message drives kids crazy. Even high-achieving students worry about their rankings and strive to improve them in hopes of college admissions. Since low test scores can hurt a school’s reputation and funding, high schools sometimes find ways to exclude low achieving students on test days, presaging future societal exclusion.
In our recent book, Bridging the Gaps, Caitlin Ahearn, Janet Rosenbaum and I find that although academic skills and high test scores are worthwhile goals, the narrow focus on one-dimensional attainments is a mistaken view that ignores many good options and creates unnecessary discouragement for students who feel they cannot meet college test-score requirements.

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Posted on October 24, 2017

By The Chicago History Museum

The Chicago History Museum is making its small manuscript collection, which includes personal accounts of early life in Chicago, discoverable online thanks to a generous Museums for America grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“Scholars have relied on visiting the Museum’s paper card catalog for the better part of a century,” said Russell Lewis, executive vice president and chief historian of the Chicago History Museum. “This grant will allow the Museum’s entire small manuscript collections to become discoverable online to researchers and scholars around the world.”

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Posted on October 23, 2017

chicago magzine anecdote …

Posted on October 1, 2017