Digital Commons Network^™

A Transformative Approach To Incorporating Adaptive Courseware: Strategic Implementation, Backward Design And Research-Based Teaching Practices, Tonya A. Buchan, Stanley Kruse, Jennifer Todd, Lee Tyson

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning

In July 2016, Colorado State University (CSU) joined seven other land-grant institutions in the Accelerating Adoption of Adaptive Courseware grant sponsored by the Personalized Learning Consortium (PLC) of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). A primary objective of the grant was to scale the adoption of adaptive courseware in general education courses at each of the grant institutions. CSU targeted high-enrollment, general education courses and took a three-pronged, transformative approach to the integration of adaptive courseware. Specifically, CSU divided the courseware integration into three components: 1) strategic implementation of courseware, 2) backward course design, and 3) incorporation of …

Belief Rigidity As A Viable Target In The Peaceful Resolution Of Enduring Conflict, Bianca Slocombe, Colin Wastell

New England Journal of Public Policy

Strategies for conflict resolution typically rest on an assumption that disputing parties consist of rational actors motivated by instrumental concerns. But the theoretical framework of the devoted actor explains that adherence to sacred values, fusion with a group, and the perception of threat interact to predict costly actions detached from the rational calculation of gain and loss. This article discusses an ongoing research program that aims to inform potential interventions in costly sacrifice at the level of belief adherence—the capacity to decrease an actor’s perceived understanding of a rigid belief may prevent or reduce his or her willingness to act …

Turkey’S Map Of Emotions And Its Political Reflections, Gokben Hizli Sayar, Huseyin Unubol, Deniz Ulke Aribogan, Nevzat Tarhan

New England Journal of Public Policy

Political psychology is an interdisciplinary scientific field that that combines politics and psychology to explore the effect of emotions in politics. It examines the backgrounds of political decisions at the individual and community levels. This study analyzes the political decisions of voters in Turkey, focusing on positive and negative reactions, such as trust and fear. Using conclusions drawn from the Addiction Map of Turkey Study (TURBAHAR), which involved interviews with approximately twenty-five thousand participants during five months in 2018, this study analyzed the results of local elections held in thirty metropolitan districts and fifty-one provinces in Turkey on March 31, …

Editor’S Note, Padraig O’Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

Other than “The Troubled Backstory of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” articles in this issue of the journal have their origins in presentations at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflicts conference at Oxford University, September 2019, which addressed themes arising from dual anniversaries—the 150th birthday anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and the 140th birthday anniversary of Albert Einstein. The presentations covered a wide and disparate geographical spread—with authors from Singapore, Australia, Turkey, the United States, Syria, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, and articles covering Myanmar, Japan, Australia, Turkey and Syria and Europe.

The Long-Term Effects Of Japan’S Traumatic Experience In The Second World War And Its Implications For Peace In Northeast Asia, Eugen Koh, Tadashi Takeshima

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is an introductory report on the work of a Japanese study group whose primary aim is peacemaking, which it seeks by promoting a greater understanding of the long-term effects of their country’s traumatic experience of the Second World War. The group does not adopt a position of victimhood but seeks to understand the full picture of Japan’s role in the war, including its role as perpetrator. We came together with the shared assumption that the country’s inability to take responsibility for its role of the war is inextricably tied to its own traumatization. If this assumption is true, …

Understanding Myanmar’S Buddhist Extremists: Some Preliminary Musings, Kumar Ramakrishna

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article examines Buddhist extremism in Myanmar. It argues that Buddhist extremism—like other types of religious extremism—is an acute form of fundamentalism. The article begins with a survey of how extremism is usually understood in the theoretical literature, showing that its religious variant is best conceived of as an acute form of fundamentalism. It then fine tunes this understanding, arguing that religious extremism is a fundamentalist belief system that justifies structural violence against relevant out-groups. The article outlines seven core characteristics of the religious extremist culled from the various theoretical approaches to extremism. It employs these seven characteristics to examine …

Damnatio Memoriae: On Deleting The East From Western History, Koert Debeuf

New England Journal of Public Policy

The story we read in books about the Renaissance tells us that Petrarch and Poggio rediscovered the books of antiquity that had been copied for centuries in medieval abbeys. The re-introduction of Greek science and philosophy, however, began in the twelfth century but occurred mainly in the thirteenth century. These works were first translated into Syriac and Arabic in the eighth and ninth centuries and stored in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. There they were read, used, and commented on by Arab philosophers, of whom the most famous was Averroes (1126–1198), who lived in Cordoba. The translation of his …

Seventeen Pieces: Displacement, Misplacement, And Conservation, Yasmin Merali, Kevork Mourad, Manas Ghanem

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article explores the systemic importance of art in the conservation of images, historical reference, and cultural meaning as displaced victims of humanitarian crises make the transition from the land of their birth to a new country with a different history and cultural landscape. In presenting the work of Kevork Mourad, an artist of Armenian descent displaced from Syria, we show the essential, layered interplay of visceral, lived individual experiences and the historic collective memory of real and imagined pasts that survive the destruction of physical artifacts.

The Troubled Backstory Of The Twenty-Fifth Amendment: The Photo, The Feud, And The Secret Service, Garrison Nelson, Brenna M. Rosen

New England Journal of Public Policy

The 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy led to a reconsideration of the 1947 Presidential Succession Act, which mandated that the Speaker of the US House of Representatives was next in line to the vice president and the Senate president pro tempore was next in line to the Speaker. The new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was only fifty-five when he took the oath of office on November 22, 1963, but he had a well-known heart condition that would end his life nine years later. Seated behind Johnson when he met with Congress was the soon-to-be seventy-two-year old House Speaker …

Special Issue Editor’S Introduction: Practical Wisdom And Institutional Transformation In An Urban Disaster, Michael A. Cowan

New England Journal of Public Policy

As I complete the editor’s introduction to these articles on institutional disruption and transformation in New Orleans triggered by Hurricane Katrina, Corona splashes her colors over maps of the earth. The hurricane pales in comparison with the pandemic, but one contrast between the two occurs to this participant/observer in both.

Prior to Katrina most institutions necessary to proper city functioning—including city administration, police department, and courts—were broken or stretched to the breaking point. As you will see in these articles, following the storm, business and civil society leaders, cooperating with government officials when possible, challenging them as necessary, led dramatic …

Reconnecting The Broken Post-Katrina New Orleans Criminal Justice System, Graymond Martin

New England Journal of Public Policy

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the levees protecting the city gave way in August 2005, an already struggling and weakened criminal justice system collapsed in spectacular fashion.

Damage within New Orleans extended far beyond the loss of physical infrastructure. The city’s population was depleted by more than half. For those who remained or returned within the first year, spirits were crushed, uncertainty abounded, and the hard work of restoration was riddled by anxiety, conflict, opportunism, and battles for precious resources.

Longtime judge Leon Cannizzaro Jr., appalled at the near-complete dysfunction of the local criminal justice system, entered and …

Beacons Of Hope: How Neighborhood Organizing Led Disaster Recovery, Denise Thornton

New England Journal of Public Policy

The goal of this article is to broaden the scope of your knowledge about New Orleans neighborhoods by describing our revitalization strategies and our common goals, which may be of value to civil society, business, and government leaders in other cities facing social and economic decay. Many have studied us, many have tried to blend into the colorful fabric of our society, but most fall short in truly understanding our rich and diverse culture and our remarkable social structure. This lack of understanding was detrimental to our recovery and is explained in the coming paragraphs.

The Strange Case Of The Seven Assessors, Janet Howard, Shaun Rafferty

New England Journal of Public Policy

New Orleans was, before Katrina, the only parish (county) in Louisiana to have multiple assessors. There were seven. Each of them had his or her own district, and collectively they formed the Board of Assessors. The strange structure was the vestige of times past, with no rhyme or reason in modern times.

Special Editor’S Closing Comments, Michael A. Cowan

New England Journal of Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Editor’S Note, Padraig O’Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

The lessons of Katrina are the subject of this special issue. The eighteen articles were assembled and overseen by Michael Cowan, the guest editor. Michael founded Common Good, a civil society action network, after Hurricane Katrina. He is Senior Fellow in the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict and Research Affiliate in the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion, both in the University of Oxford. He is also a Visiting Research Associate in the Irish School of Ecumenics in Trinity College Dublin.

Social Traps And Social Trust In A Devastated Urban Community, Michael A. Cowan

New England Journal of Public Policy

The last national survey of adult literacy prior to Hurricane Katrina found 40 percent of New Orleans adults reading at or below the sixth-grade level and another 30 percent at or below the eighth-grade level. During the three years before the hurricane, New Orleanians watched as public meetings of its elected school board became models of incivility, where the politically connected struggled for control of contracts and patronage and self-appointed activists ridiculed school officials, board members, and fellow citizens who were attempting to raise the performance of the city’s public schools out of the ranks of the nation’s worst. During …

Legal Origins And Evolution Of Local Ethics Reform In New Orleans, David A. Marcello

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Office of Inspector General came first, and like many another reform in city government, it was born as a campaign commitment. When I met with state senator Marc H. Morial in September 1993 to discuss the issues component of his campaign for mayor, ideas poured out of him for an hour and a half, and I took copious notes. “We need an Inspector General,” he said, “and we need Charter Revision”—the two ideas linked from this first campaign convening. When he was elected mayor six months later and inaugurated in May 1994, charter reform became an early and important …

The New Orleans Criminal Legal System: A Flowing River, William C. Snowden

New England Journal of Public Policy

Ask anyone from New Orleans and they will tell you the city has not been the same since the storm. Although the city has persevered through many storms and hurricanes in its three-hundred-year history, this particular storm—Hurricane Katrina—is notorious for the transformation it brought to New Orleans in the years that followed.

The makeup, culture, and rhythm of New Orleans have changed, but so too have the various systems that give the city its tempo—particularly the criminal legal system. Hurricane Katrina was a disaster that revealed deficiencies, abnormalities, and injustices in the New Orleans criminal legal system. Some responses to …

Reinventing The New Orleans Public Education System, David Osborne

New England Journal of Public Policy

If we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third years? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day? Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?

Few …

Slaying Two Sacred Cows: One Group’S Part In Helping New Orleans Reform, Rebuild, And Renew, Ruthie Frierson

New England Journal of Public Policy

Citizens for One Greater New Orleans was a volunteer group of women that exemplified the surge of citizen activism that flourished in New Orleans after Katrina. Alarmed by their realization that local government was too dysfunctional to direct a successful comeback, citizens mobilized and charged at two seemingly untouchable local institutions they deemed ripe for reform, the ineffectual levee board and the notoriously biased board of tax assessors. Using skills honed through years of volunteer work, they mobilized public opinion, lobbied reluctant state lawmakers, and finally achieved success through the passage of constitutional amendments in two separate statewide referendum elections. …

The New New Orleans, Gregory Rusovich

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region was formed in 1985 by the iconic chairman and CEO of Freeport McMoRan, Jim Bob Moffett. The core mission of the Business Council during its thirty-four years has been to improve the region’s business climate, enhancing the quality of life for the community, working to effect principled reform, and simply striving to make New Orleans a safer and better place to live, work, and raise a family. It consists of CEOs and owners of primarily the largest businesses and employers in the city and has ranged in total membership from …

Community Demand For Change And Accountability: A History Of Court Watch Nola, New Orleans’ Community Courtwatching Program, Simone Levine

New England Journal of Public Policy

The criminal justice system, like any other system, is run by insiders: prosecutors, judges, deputy sheriffs, police, clerks, private defense, and public defenders. But system outsiders—victims, witnesses, criminal defendants, and the community in general—have the power to demand respect from that same system and to demand that the system work for them. System insiders have no monopoly on the knowledge and the power to shape the criminal justice system.

Katrina And The Philanthropic Landscape In New Orleans, Ludovico Feoli

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article explores the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the philanthropic landscape in New Orleans, drawing on the perspective of participants in the field—staff and board members of community, local, and national foundations and key nonprofits—who were surveyed or interviewed for this purpose. It does not offer a definitive statement about the disaster as it pertains to philanthropy; nor does it consider the crucial leadership role of the many individuals involved in the recovery process, even though that role often intercepted with the philanthropic sector. Instead, it seeks to identify general trends that emerge from a qualitative assessment of the …

Across Racial Lines: Three Accounts Of Transforming Urban Institutions After A Natural Disaster, James Carter, Nolan Rollins, Gregory Rusovich

New England Journal of Public Policy

At 1:30 p.m. on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina grazed the mostly evacuated city of New Orleans, reserving its most devastating force for coastal Mississippi, just to the east. During the next two days, the federal levees protecting the city failed in multiple places. Sixteen hundred people died in the metropolitan area. Residences and businesses in 80 percent of the city went underwater. Public officials warned residents and business owners that they might not be able to return for two to three months. The scope of devastation in certain parts of the city made ever returning questionable for many residents. …

How Data Became Part Of New Orleans’ Dna During The Katrina Recovery, Lamar Gardere, Allison Plyer, Denice Ross

New England Journal of Public Policy

Data intermediaries have a symbiotic relationship with government as the source of most of their information. The open-data movement in government and development of software-as-a-service technologies shaped the data landscape after Katrina. Through relationships and talent transfers with The Data Center, the City of New Orleans went from having its chief technology officer in federal prison and its data systems in shambles to being a nationally recognized leader in open and accountable government. To be effective during disasters, an intermediary should be (1) in place and widely respected before the event, (2) ready to respond immediately after the event and …

The Nutria That Roared: How Building Coalitions Can Empower The Small To Drive Great Change, Michael Hecht

New England Journal of Public Policy

Hurricane Katrina saved the New Orleans economy. To be clear, Hurricane Katrina was not “good”—it was a devastating event, the most destructive storm in American history, costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars in damage. But when the books are written, and the story is told, the conclusion will be inescapable: Hurricane Katrina marked a profoundly positive inflection point in the New Orleans economy.

Preventing Bankruptcy And Transforming City Finances After Hurricane Katrina, Andy Kopplin

New England Journal of Public Policy

In 2010, when the Landrieu administration took office in New Orleans, we inherited a financial situation that the mayor compared to the massive oil spill occurring at that very time in the Gulf, the worst in US history. The city was nearly bankrupt. Much of what we faced was the result of factors—Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the subsequent failure of the federal levees, the great recession—that were far from the prior administration of Mayor Ray Nagin’s control. Much was the result of a culture of ineffectiveness and inefficiency that predated his administration. But much was the result of gross mismanagement …

Transparency And Efficiency In Government Operations: New Orleans Civil Service Reform, Kevin Wm. Wildes S.J.

New England Journal of Public Policy

It may strike some students of history as ironic, if not contradictory, to talk about civil service reform. The civil service movement was the reform. Some of that skepticism was apparent in the response we received from many city employees when we began exploring the idea of reforming the city’s civil service in post-Katrina New Orleans, and it was understandable. The city employees we talked with expressed fear that we would be returning to the colorful days of Governor Huey Long, when political patronage was based on who you knew and not what you knew. They assumed there were only …

Recreation Reform: Leveling The Playing Field In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Arnie Fielkow, Mithun B. Kamath

New England Journal of Public Policy

Between 2000 and 2005, I was in charge of every aspect of the New Orleans Saints’ non-football operations, from ticket sales to corporate sponsorships to lease negotiations for the Superdome. By spring 2007, though, by some combination of fate, determination, and maybe a little naiveté, I found myself in charge of legislatively repairing the City of New Orleans’ entire system of recreation. I quickly discovered that this was no small task.

Rising From Katrina’S Ashes But Still In Crisis: Public Defense In New Orleans, Derwyn Bunton

New England Journal of Public Policy

New Orleans’ nickname “Big Easy” was based on the “anything goes” perception of the city. Feeding this perception was a sense of lawlessness, that New Orleans was a place where the rules changed depending on who you were and who you knew. So when Hurricane Katrina hit the city in August 2005 and tossed everything around—flooding mansions and missions, damaging the Superdome and supermarkets—the storm challenged old perceptions and presented unique challenges. Katrina made at least one thing clear: New Orleans could no longer wait for change, pretend nothing happened, or look back. The city’s survival depended on its ability …