Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 141

“Rise”: NBC’s spring awakening

Rosie Perez and Josh Radnor in "Rise" (Credit: NBC/Peter Kramer)

One somewhat underemphasized detail about the student activists stepping onto the national scene in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., is that a number of them are theater kids. This factor received some mention in response to the ridiculous theory spreading on the right to explain their eloquence, asserting that they were actually crisis actors.

As a recent New Yorker article explains, that’s only half true: The charismatic Emma Gonzalez and #NeverAgainMSD co-founder Cameron Kasky are actors, but until now the only stage they’ve been featured on was the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. In an even more interesting coincidence, Kasky revealed on last week’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” that he has a part in a production of “Spring Awakening,” taking place at Parkland Performing Arts Center.

“Spring Awakening” seems to be a popular play these days. It’s an inciting force in NBC’s new drama “Rise,” debuting Tuesday at 10 p.m., and as a number of reporters have observed, it is a cultural piece that speaks to our times in a number of ways. The subject matter covered in the piece pushes the boundaries of what parents would consider to be age appropriate, with characters experiencing sexual awakenings, and contending with abuse, suicide and abortion, among other subjects mothers and fathers would rather not discuss with their kids.

But this is expressly the point Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater are making through the work: When adults aren’t honest with their children about the way the world works, that leaves their children to muddle and stumble their way through life on their own. Some of them fall down and fail spectacularly.

According to that New Yorker article, Sheik and Sater began writing the 2006 musical in response to the Columbine mass shooting, making its coincidental connection to Parkland all the more interesting.

“Rise” went into production long before the events of Parkland, but its degrees of separation from Marjory Stoneman Douglas may be fewer than one imagines. Series creator Jason Katims, the executive producer known for the critically acclaimed dramas “Parenthood” and “Friday Night Lights,” drew inspiration from Michael Sokolove’s book “Drama High,” which tells the story of high school drama teacher Lou Volpe and his tumultuous experience with mounting a 2011 student production of “Spring Awakening.”

NBC’s drama drew its own fire a couple of months ago when it was revealed that the main character, Lou Mazzuchelli (Josh Radnor), is a heterosexual man with a wife and two kids. Volpe is a gay man, and that led critics to accuse NBC of “straight-washing” the character.

Katims explained that although Volpe’s story inspires “Rise,” his goal was to make the story his own, a statement that was quickly misinterpreted but, with distance, isn’t any more unusual than the reasoning behind other adaptations.

Anyway, the final product viewers will see next week fulfills most of the obligations placed on it by a broadcast television audience and, moreover, by the “This Is Us” audience, which will be left without a weekly cry fix after Tuesday.

“Rise” may not scratch that itch initially, although Katims’ signature emotional heft is present in every moment. Partnered with “Hamilton” producer Jeffrey Seller, Katims creates an underdog story about a teacher in a working-class town where the sports department rules the local high school.

Radnor’s Lou Mazzuchelli is a passionate English teacher who decides to take over the school’s drama program, even though his colleague Tracey Wolfe (Rosie Perez) has been fighting that good fight for years. Mazzuchelli sees an opportunity to kindle the spark of curiosity for learning in his students by connecting their passion for the written word with an appreciation for the arts, and in his view mounting the millionth production of “Grease” isn’t doing that.

So he proposes “Spring Awakening,” a move that horrifies parents and ticks off Wolfe, who discovers without warning that the job she’s slaved away to get has been handed to a white guy with zero experience in making production magic out of a nonexistent budget and using equipment that’s always on the verge of failure.

“Rise” has a warmth and soulfulness augmented by the themes surfaced in “Spring Awakening,” which, handily enough, parallels a number of the struggles his students are facing. Some of the conflicts are quintessential teen drama material that could have been ripped straight out of the John Hughes playbook: The star jock has eyes for the misfit girl from the wrong side of the tracks, the strait-laced drama club hero is stifling a truth about himself. Even Mazzuchelli himself has family issues that he can’t keep locked in his house.

What “Rise” has going for it is an honesty that prevents it from falling into the traps in which “Glee” frequently became stuck. None of its musical interludes come off as flippant, contrived or even all that corny, and the social conflicts the kids become embroiled in have a realism to them.

A subplot involving a transgender character testing the waters of his identity is introduced with subtlety and care, and the writers mindfully refrain from making his evolution into a device to introduce tension. That’s served by the conflict between the football team, which commands six figures in funding from the local school board, and the arts department, which has to beg and plead for a few dollars to buy production supplies.

Perez turns in a sure-footed performance as a long-suffering teacher, and in fact, she’s so easy to connect with that it makes Mazzuchelli even more irritating than he is, just in being his well-meaning but entitled self. Helpfully, Radnor is a charming actor, but this means he also has the dubious distinction of being the most annoying character in a promising series — again. His Lou only wants to do the right thing for his kids, striving to make the world better even as he stomps his earnest do-gooder passion all over everyone in his orbit.

This may sound familiar to any “How I Met Your Mother” viewers who found the character he played in that series, Ted, lovable and irritating in equal measure.  It’s a look he’s worn before, and ultimately it works, even if you want to slap him around every now and again.

The missed opportunities of “Rise” have little to do with the characters, actually. Rather, what it fails to do with clarity is make an unassailable argument in favor of the necessity of art and cultural education in schools. The students representing Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ survivors are the products of a flourishing artistic education, one that’s granted them the confidence and quick thinking to stand on the national stage and remain even-keeled when adults with powerful public platforms, such as Bill Maher, say things to them like, “I honestly thought kids were a lot stupider.”

Of course, the writers hadn’t seen that argument in action — only the pattern offered by the book and the fluffy conviction, as Wolfe puts it, that the arts are what separate us from the apes. And that’s true, but it does little to sway an audience that would rather be entertained by sport.

Higher ed has 99 problems — and the New York Times is one

(Credit: Getty/vm)

Over the past few years, a certain class of nominally centrist white op-ed writers have poured forth vast gouts of ink attacking anti-racist progressive college students. As I’ve argued repeatedly, this vast array of coverage sends the message that sometimes un-nuanced critiques from left-wing students soars among the greatest problems facing American academe today.

But as the song goes, it ain’t necessarily so.

One of the latest examples came this week from New York Times op-ed writer and commissioning editor Bari Weiss. The piece is bizarre and sloppy. She uses a fake Antifa troll account as an example of “PC-run-amok” from students, which prompted a Times editor’s note and update to the story. She suggests that University of Chicago students should have protested Rick Santorum over complaining to Dan Savage about his use of anti-transgender slurs (as if she wouldn’t have then complained about snowflake students protesting Santorum). She ignores the complex history of author Christina Hoff Sommers, including her appearance on a white supremacist podcast and her support for Gamergate, and simply calls her a “self-identified feminist and registered Democrat.” Weiss then attacks students at Lewis & Clark for calling her a fascist. You’d never know from Weiss that Sommers in fact was not de-platformed but gave her talk and answered questions.

And then David Brooks struck again, deploying his “not-mad-just-disappointed” dad voice to gently chide “kids these days” for valuing perspective (and identity) over reason and caring about structural inequality. Bizarrely, he dates this shift from rational Enlightenment values to identity politics to the failure of Barack Obama to end racism. Clearly, in this era of global chaos, nothing deserves two op-eds at the paper of record more than students at an elite university being rude to Christina Hoff Sommers.

Here’s the worst part. The focus on “PC-run-amok” is working. As a former professor and current academic advisor, I encounter people outside academe who constantly bring up left-wing protests as their major concern. They’ve read about it, after all, in The New York Times! To be sure, sometimes college students conflate the merely bad (i.e. Charles Murray, the phrenologist) with the truly terrible (i.e. Nazis). Students can be uncivil. Protesters can, it turns out, protest. Alas, either by intention or by accident, the centrist focus on these protesters fuels the broader right-wing assault on the very ideas of the university, academic freedom and the need to educate future citizens.

So before we see yet another high profile column on snowflake students or campus political correctness, I have assembled a list of some other problems facing higher education, to which very serious centrist pundits might consider drawing the attention of their readers. Because academia has at least 99 problems.

99 Problems Facing Higher Education more significant than left-wing students being a little rude sometimes (not wholly in order of importance):

Tuition
Student Loan Debt
Housing Costs
Hunger
Exploitation of Adjuncts
End of Tenure
Homelessness
Alcohol Abuse
Rape
Rape Culture
Sexual Abuse of Students
Sexual Abuse of Faculty
Domestic Violence on Campus
Soaring Administrative Costs
Racism
Sexism
Ableism
Nazis on Campus with Guns
Nazi Recruitment on Campus
Prejudice in Academic Hiring
Textbooks
Especially Math and Science Textbooks
Predatory Lenders
Department of Education Defense of Predatory Lenders
Predatory For-Profit Colleges
Department of Education Defense of Predatory Colleges
Betsy DeVos
Scott Walker
Defunding the Humanities
Legislators Censoring Professors
Legislators Firing Professors
Social Media Censorship
Social Media Harassment
Specifically Racist and Misogynistic Intersecting Harassment
ICE
Lack of Support for Dreamers
Undergraduate Business Degrees
Accessibility
Especially in Housing
Lack of Mental Health Supports
Laptop Bans
EdTech Companies
Surveillance Pedagogy
Racist Professors
Racist Mascots
Corrupt Sports
Brain-Damaging Sports
Rape and College Sports
Graduation Rates in College Sports
Joe Paterno Fans
Larry Nassar Enablers
NCAA Comparing Athletes to Prison Labor
University of Chicago’s Economics Department
Charlie Kirk
Tucker Carlson
Campus Shootings
Conceal Carry on Campus
Attacks on Affirmative Action
Metrics
Assessment
Student Evaluations (When Used for Tenure)
Accreditation
Elsevier
Predatory Journals
Open Access Fees
Academia.edu
The REF
The TEF
Library Budget Cuts
Cuts to Basic Science
Brilliant Academics Leaving
The Postdoc Crisis
Big Data
Service Loads for Associate Professors (Especially Women)
Bad Advising
Police Brutality
Outside Offers
Closing Colleges
Right-Wing Indoctrination
First-Generation Students Struggling
Rural Students Struggling
Bad Donors
Especially the Koch Brothers
Collapse of Public Funding
Deferred Maintenance
Hazing
Staff Excluded from Academic Freedom
No Child Left Behind
Overly litigious students
Censoring Environmental Research
Censoring Gun Research
Attacks on the NEH, NEA, NIH
In-Class Tests
Plagiarism and Online Essay Sales
Legacy Admissions
The Prestige Economy
Academics Who Over-Use Reply-All
Meetings that Should Be Emails
New York Times Op-Ed columnists who write a lot about left-wing students but rarely about the other 98 items on this list.

Rep. Keith Ellison: We must convince Dems to push Medicare for All

FILE - In this June 16, 2016 file photo, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke, File) (Credit: AP)

It’s no secret the Democratic Party wasn’t a united front during the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, it appeared that there were two parties within the left: labor-allied Democrats who embraced progressive and/or democratic socialist ideals, and Democrats who weren’t ready to part with the big business wing of the party. This divide manifested most visibly in the split between Bernie Sanders supporters and die-hard Hillary Clinton supporters.

These fissures haven’t disappeared in the intervening  years  — which is perhaps why the appointment of Joe Kennedy to give the party’s State of the Union response address in January gave some within the party hope, while frustrating others. One of the so-called progressive pillars that has been most divisive among Democrats is Medicare For All, a universal healthcare policy initiative that Senator Bernie Sanders, I.-Vt, campaigned for during the 2016 election.

Now, another progressive-wing stalwart, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., said that his party is slowly uniting around the issue.

“Our movement [for Medicare for All] is ascending, but the truth is that, for many years, people weren’t there,” Ellison said in an interview with Yahoo News on Sirius XM’s politics channel, called POTUS. “So more and more people are coming on every day, but not everyone is on. We have to convince them, we have to talk to them, we need to engage in a respectful, fact-based debate about which systems are the best.”

Ellison is in charge of leading the bill known as “The Expanded & Improved Medicare for All Act” (H.R. 676), which would give free health care to all Americans. The coverage would include primary care and prevention, dietary and nutritional therapies, prescription drugs, emergency care, long-term care, mental health services, dental services, and vision care, according to the bill.

“Everybody would get a card, and you can get the care that you need, not unlike what they have in Canada right now. And truth be told, every major industrial country has a universal system; many of them have single-payer systems,” Ellison said on the podcast.

“I’ve never met a Canadian that wants to switch their system for ours,” he continued. “They like their system. Do they complain about it? Yes. Because, guess what? People complain about stuff no matter where they live. … But I can tell you that people who live in Canada and benefit from that health care system, they like it.”

Hillary Clinton wasn’t a progressive in this regard: her biggest concession to the left on the health care issue was a suggestion that citizens could buy into Medicare. At its heart, private health insurance does not serve people, but for-profit corporations. The entire concept of a privatized or semi-privatized healthcare system suggests that health insurance is a commodity, not a right.

If Ellison is right, and the party is slowly inching towards supporting universal health care, that could be indicative of a greater shift within the Democratic Party. It could mean that those who once pegged themselves as centrists are inching left — in some ways, mimicking the right’s co-optation of left-populist rhetoric. While this sounds positive for Democrats — at least the genuinely progressive ones — it only widens an apparently irreparable divide. Yet, it could give Democrats a real shot at winning the next election — after all, polls suggest the more populist and genuinely left candidate, Bernie Sanders, would have soundly defeated Trump.

Former U.S. ambassador to Panama explains why he ditched Trump administration

John D. Feeley (Credit: AP/Arnulfo Franco)

John D. Feeley, who this week left his diplomatic career as President Donald Trump’s “personal representative and ambassador to Panama,” has opened up about why he refuses to continue working for this White House.

“Shortly after the Charlottesville riots last August, I made the private decision to step down as President Trump’s personal representative and ambassador to the government of Panama,” Feeley wrote in The Washington Post. “The president’s failure to condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who provoked the violence made me realize that my values were not his values. I never meant for my decision to resign to be a public political statement. Sadly, it became one.”

After blasting the Trump administration for leaking his resignation letter, Feeley explained that he resigned because “the traditional core values of the United States, as manifested in the president’s National Security Strategy and his foreign policies, have been warped and betrayed.” He cited the “amateurish” Muslim travel ban, the proposed US-Mexico border wall, the reversal of DACA, the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and Trump’s trade policies regarding the TPP and NAFTA as examples of policies he opposed. He also brought up Trump’s new tariffs on aluminum and steel, although those had not yet been announced when Feeley decided to resign in August.

Overall, Feeley condemned Trump’s foreign policy as one that would alienate other nations. He also drew on his own background as the descendant of immigrants in criticizing Trump’s policies.

“As the grandson of migrant stock from New York City, an Eagle Scout, a Marine Corps veteran and someone who has spent his diplomatic career in Latin America, I am convinced that the president’s policies regarding migration are not only foolish and delusional but also anti-American,” Feeley wrote.

Feeley’s decision to leave the Trump administration follows a larger trend of foreign policy personnel growing alienated with Trump’s approach to international affairs — what Foreign Policy magazine deemed an “Exodus from the State Department.” In December, Elizabeth Shackelford — who worked for the State Department in Kenya, Poland and South Sudan, and most recently served as the Nairobi-based political officer for the America’s mission in Somalia — stepped down because she felt Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had “ceded to the Pentagon our authority to drive US foreign policy at the behest of the White House, but to our detriment as a nation,” according to CNN.

Another high profile diplomat to step down was Joseph Yun, who served in the US foreign service for 30 years and worked as America’s special representative for North Korean policy, according to The Guardian. He left earlier this month after working with the State Department to maintain contact with North Korea by way of a back channel at the United Nations.

Fake news spreads faster than real news on Twitter: study

(Credit: Getty/Drew Angerer/Salon)

Our current political climate has led to a frightening increase in anti-media sentiment, generally driven by the right wing. Since the 2016 election, Donald Trump has driven the charge against the free press, lambasting all news that criticizes him as “fake news.” 2017 was the worst year on the record for journalists imprisoned for their work worldwide, and the president celebrated the seeming takedown of the press by holding a “Fake News Awards” on January 17.

While the president’s anti-media project has alarmed advocates of press freedom and ignited his political base, little is known about how fake information actually spreads — and questions remain about what constitutes “news,” “fake news,” “false information,” “rumors” and/or related terms.

Three researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) delved into the fake news debate, and their findings are stunning. In a study published Thursday in  Science magazine, the trio concluded that fake news circulated farther, deeper and at a faster rate on Twitter than accurate information.

The massive analysis, which CNN said took about two years to complete, discovered that about 126,000 stories tweeted by about 3 million people over 10 years were false.

To analyze the penetration of fake news online, the researchers first had to define what constitutes fake news, noting that doing so has become increasingly more complicated in the modern political sphere, as “politicians have implemented a political strategy of labeling news sources that do not support their positions as unreliable or fake news, whereas sources that support their positions are labeled as reliable or not fake.” In other words, the term “fake news” has seemingly lost all value in relation to the information that is presented, as citizens routinely label true and false information as “fake” and seemingly do not know how to decipher between the two.

The findings revealed that fake political news, “traveled deeper and more broadly, reached more people, and was more viral than any other category of false information.” Fake news also circulated Twitter more quickly and reached users more than three times faster than all other types of false news.

The researchers discovered that users who spread false news online had fewer followers, followed few people, were significantly less active on Twitter, were verified less often, and had been on Twitter for considerably less time than users who did not spread misinformation.

While bots have been suspected of the mass propagation of misinformation online — especially in regards to the special investigation into Russia’s involvement in spreading misinformation during and after the 2016 presidential election —  the study found that humans, not robots, were more likely to disseminate falsehoods.

The study claims that the spread of falsehoods online has serious consequences beyond the First Amendment, indicating that misinformation can influence “our responses to everything from natural disasters to terrorist attacks,” as well as “misalignment of business investments and misinformed elections.”

As an example, the trio explain, “false rumors have affected stock prices and the motivation for large-scale investments, for example, wiping out $130 billion in stock value after a false tweet claimed that Barack Obama was injured in an explosion.”

For the past two years, major social media platforms have struggled to combat the penetration of fake news and misinformation.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced changes to its news feed in an effort to combat the platform’s fake news problem. In the past year, the social media giant has attempted several measures to tackle the dissemination of fake news on its platform — including employing a third party face-checking initiative — but its results have been mixed.

The MIT study comes as Americans’ confidence and trust in the media has sunk to an all-time low, with just 32 percent of older Americans saying they trust the media, according to the most recent Gallup survey published in 2016. The data says that 2016 marked the first time that trust in the media among older Americans has dipped below 40 percent since 2001.

The divisive presidential election and Republicans’ anti-journalist rhetoric largely contributed to the decline in trust.

It’s unclear whether Twitter will announce new initiatives to deal with its own fake news problem. Until then, users can count on the fake news fight to continue, as long as the president and other members of the GOP deem any and all unfavorable coverage as “fake news.”

 

UN official says Philippine president needs psychiatric review. Why not Trump too?

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte (Credit: Getty/Nicolas Datiche)

His magisterial demeanor and imperious rhetoric have made Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte one to be feared among the international community. Indeed, Duterte is often counted among the authoritarian leaders who have risen to power in the last couple years, and who epitomize a global political trend towards nationalism. Similar to U.S. president Donald Trump, Duterte is oft-impulsive in his choice of words; in particular, Duterte’s attitude towards crime and criminality mirrors Trump to some degree, and as a result of Duterte’s renewed “war on drugs,” thousands of drug dealers and users have been murdered, often extrajudiciously. “That’s good,” Duterte infamously remarked of one raid in which dozens were killed. 

The United Nations has recently expressed heightened concern over Duterte’s demeanor. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said that Duterte’s slurs must be taken seriously, and publicly suggested that he needs to see a psychiatrist.

“These attacks cannot go unanswered, the U.N. Human Rights Council must take a position,” Zeid told reporters last Friday. “He needs to submit himself to some sort of psychiatric examination. This kind of comment is unacceptable, unacceptable.”

Zeid was specifically referring to a recent instance where Duterte attempted to get a group of U.N. humans rights activists declared as terrorists. The group reportedly included a U.N. investigator, a former Philippine lawmaker and four former Catholic priests.

Duterte has also regularly been slinging slurs at the Maoists, and other Communist-affiliated parties, considering them a security threat. Last month, Duterte’s justice ministry created a petition — viewed by Reuters — to declare the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA) terrorists. One expert told Reuters that the petition was a “virtual hit list.”

In February, Reuters reported that Duterte was “recalling an order he said he had given to troops when he was mayor of Davao City.”

“Tell the soldiers. ‘There’s a new order coming from mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina,'” he reportedly said.

A spokesperson for Duterte reportedly said, “I have been saying again and again, do not take the president literally but take him seriously.”

An erratic and impulsive president not thinking before he speaks? Sounds familiar. “Just shoot [their] vagina,” or “grab them by the pussy”– there’s a certain similarity there. Duterte is quick to call dissenters “terrorists”; Trump is quick to call Muslims “terrorists.”

It’s a bold move for a UN official to suggest a psychiatric review on an unhinged international leader, but leads to another question: why hasn’t the UN called out Trump, a leader who has threatened nuclear war on Twitter?

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This gorgeous bamboo table charges your devices wirelessly

You usually set your phone on top of your nightstand or coffee table to charge anyway — what if you could eliminate the charger entirely, and use a Qi-enabled table to wirelessly charge your device without a cumbersome cord to trip over? This FurniQi Bamboo Wireless Charging Side Table is the ideal aesthetic fit for any space and uses the most up-to-date technology to feed your phone.

This sleek table works in either your bedroom or living room and features a wireless charging spot marked with a subtle laser engraving that can charge Qi-enabled devices, which now include the iPhone 8 and X, too. That spot indicates the space you can leave your phone, clearly marking it even at night — and helps you avoid damaging spills of liquid.

It’s affordable, sustainable and easy to assemble, and even comes with a standard caramel-colored USB cable that matches the look of the table. That way, your pals who don’t have a QI-enabled device can still get a charge.

This table serves two functions: it makes your life easier, and it looks good, too. Usually, this FurniQi Bamboo Wireless Charging Side Table is $199, but you can get it now for $149.99.

New York Times op-ed page punches down at college kids: But why?

(Credit: AP/Richard Drew)

In 2018 America, college kids seem to have gotten too big for their britches. They need to be taken down a peg or two. At least that’s what the New York Times’ editorial lineup seems to be focused on.

On Friday morning, Times columnist David Brooks weighed in on the debate over students being students, complaining that college kids were protesting speakers. His points were laughable and extremely played out (in my opinion, his article works best if you play “What’s the Matter With Kids Today” from “Bye Bye Birdie” while you’re reading). But he inadvertently raises a valid question that speaks to the overall theme of the Times’ op-ed page: What is going on over there?

Brooks’ column came one day after opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss also took a swing at college kids, by, of course, comparing them to fascists. (The op-ed page had to eat crow Thursday, pushing out a correction because Weiss took a satirical Twitter post at face value.)

It’s not a great look. While the Times newsroom has been at the forefront of producing good journalism — truth-to-power scoops led by Maggie Haberman, for starters — the op-ed page has been a reactionary mess:

Times reporters have grown increasingly frustrated with the paper’s op-ed section and fear it may be undermining their work. As one anonymous senior staffer put it, “Until yesterday, people felt like [Opinion] was a shakeup. Now people are worried. The newsroom feels embarrassed.”

At the center of the controversy is editorial-page editor James Bennet, who earlier this month sent a 1,500-word memo to staff outlining how he interprets former Times publisher Adolph Ochs’ original mission for the section. The memo was a response to an earlier HuffPost story containing internal chat transcripts of Times employees expressing their disgust with the op-ed section, specifically the contributions of recent addition Bari Weiss.

Discerning readers might disagree. Over the past year, the Times has not only published a Bret Stephens column questioning widely established climate science but found itself the subject of a defamation suit from Sarah Palin after suggesting that inflammatory remarks made by the former Alaska governor helped incite the shooting that nearly killed Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. (The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed after a judge determined the Times had not acted with malice.) Several weeks ago, the paper ran a column titled “Background Checks Are Not the Answer” from John Lott, a gun rights advocate whose research has been repeatedly debunked. Days after its publication, a 19-year-old gunman opened fire on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17.

It’s honestly baffling why the Times’ op-ed page is punching downward so hard and so consistently, and why going after college students has (it seems) been a successful strategy for the Gray Lady. The paper is doing well these days after a number of notably iffy years; it’s attracting more and more digital subscribers, and the Times podcast “The Daily” has become a can’t-miss ingredient.

It looks from here as if the Times’ recent success is happening in spite of the opinion page, not because of it.

Why do dog walkers need more permits than childcare providers?

Rebekah Webb, left, shares a family-style meal with Zoe Turner during lunch with other five-year-olds at the Olathe Family YMCA in Olathe, Kan., Wednesday, June 24, 2015. As early childhood teachers lament toddlers too large to fit in playground swings, officials are mulling changes designed to make meals served to millions of kids in day care healthier. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner) (Credit: AP)

It may be tomorrow, it may be next week, or perhaps next month but it will happen — another child will die in an unlicensed child-care setting.

Deaths in child care occur with such alarming frequency in the United States and Canada that they tend to resonate in the news for only a short period of time.

A disproportionate number of these deaths occur in unlicensed home child care, where a woman will care for a number of children in her home for a fee. Many countries, including the U.S., Canada and Ireland, allow for these businesses to operate legally but without any real government oversight.

Because of this lack of oversight, we have no idea how many children are cared for or by how many unlicensed providers. We know virtually nothing about what is going on in these homes.

Our research at the University of Toronto aims to understand why governments continue to let these businesses — which care for one of our most vulnerable populations — operate without any real oversight.

In some parts of Canada, dog walkers and hot dog vendors require more permits than some child care providers.

The safety of dogs, and of the food we eat from street vendors, is of course important. And so is the safety of our babies and children.

Prioritizing ‘parent choice’ over quality

Given the risks unlicensed care poses to children, it is puzzling that governments continue to allow these businesses to operate without any review or assessment of quality and safety.

Research that we have just published in the Journal of Risk Research examines this question in the case of Ontario, which reviewed its legislation shortly after four young children (all under the age of two) died in unlicensed home child care within a seven month period in 2013 and 2014.

There was significant media attention and subsequent public outcry at these deaths.

Yet when the government developed the new Ontario Child Care and Early Years Act (CCEYA), which came into effect on August 31, 2015, it chose to allow a portion of the home child care sector to remain unlicensed.

Our research suggests a unique set of circumstances have resulted in a serious lack of oversight to ensure that our youngest citizens are in safe and nurturing environments.

Despite the recent deaths in care, we found that the policy debate — in legislative and subcommittee discussions — prioritized concerns of “access” and “parent choice” over evaluation of “quality” and “risk.”

A flawed logic

In worrying about access, policymakers and the attentive public expressed concern that if government increased oversight of unlicensed providers, some of them would fail to meet basic standards and would have to close.

Access to child care is, of course, a major concern for many parents. But shying away from licensing because it might force unsafe or poorly functioning providers to close seems very misguided, to say the least.

When it comes to “parent choice,” the logic runs something like this: Parents know what’s best for their families and should have the option to choose from a full range of options, including unlicensed care.

This logic is flawed in a number of ways.

For starters, it’s a very different logic to that which the government applies to pretty much all other services. Parents don’t have the choice (at least legally) to take their child to an unlicensed dentist or pediatrician, or out to dinner at a restaurant that hasn’t passed health and safety inspections.

There are a couple of factors specific to this sector that need to be attended to. One is that — due to the high cost and frequent shortages of child care — parents across North America often have no choice at all but to take whatever space they can find, regardless of quality concerns. Lower income parents who work irregular hours are really in this bind and use unlicensed care more often.

The other is that “quality” in child care is very difficult to see and assess.

Parents misjudge quality

Experts agree that one of the most important aspects of care is the way that caregivers interact with children.

But identifying quality in interactions is very difficult and generally requires training. Research studies show that parents tend to assess the quality of their child care much more favourably than do trained observers.

In the U.S. a large-scale policy effort has been made to measure quality and make those quality ratings available to parents. While this does put parents in a better position to make informed choices, it does not replace the need for regulations and oversight to ensure that basic quality standards are met.

Within the content of the hearings and debates we analyzed in Ontario, we did find some discussion of quality and risk.

But these were less frequent than discussions of choice and access to begin with and they decreased as more time passed after the deaths of the four children.

Government oversight will reduce risks

The other part of the problem for policymakers is that it’s hard to quantify just how risky unlicensed care is.

For example, in Ontario we don’t have accurate numbers of child care deaths as coroners do not note the context when deaths in unlicensed child care occur.

What we do know is that while unlicensed care can be of good quality, licensed providers are generally rated as providing higher quality care on standardized measures.

Licensed providers are also required to undergo criminal record checks, fire safety inspections and have up-to-date first aid certifications.

Parents going the unlicensed child care route must do the research, inspect their potential or current care providers, and ask all the right questions. This places a big burden on parents and, arguably, it’s not a task that most parents are well-equipped to take on.

Bringing unlicensed home child care providers out of the cold and into the light of government oversight will go a long way to addressing these gaps in parent information and reducing the risks for children in care.

This policy action is doable. And it will only bring this sector up to the standard of any other sector that matters.

Linda A. White, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Toronto; Adrienne Davidson, Doctoral Candidate in Political Science, University of Toronto, and Michal Perlman, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto