Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

Senate Confirms Four Nominees to Privacy & Civil Liberties Board

Last night, the Senate advanced the cause of protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties by unanimously confirming four of the President’s five nominees to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB): Rachel Brand, Elisabeth Cook, Jim Dempsey, and Judge Patricia Wald.

While the Senate has yet to vote on the President’s highly qualified nominee David Medine to serve as the Board’s chair, yesterday’s confirmations give the Board a quorum and will allow it to begin performing its important work.

Skilled Volunteers and Mentors Helping Improve Student Performance

President Obama is committed to raising America’s game in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. As the President said at the launch of his Educate to Innovate campaign to improve STEM education, "I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it's science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things."

I recently spoke with Eric Schwarz, co-founder and CEO of Citizen Schools, and Leo Flanagan, principal of the Clarence Edwards Middle School in Charlestown, MA, a neighborhood of Boston. Since 2006, Citizen Schools has partnered with the Edwards Middle School as an expanded learning time partner to lengthen the school day by three hours a day and bring in a hundreds of volunteers to teach apprenticeships. Citizen Schools partners with over thirty schools in eight states across the country.  As part of thinking about new ways to engage young people in STEM education, I’m particularly interested in the role that skilled volunteers and mentors can play in improving student performance.

Can you tell me about the mission and model of Citizen Schools?

Eric Schwarz: Our mission is to close the opportunity and achievement gaps and our strategy for doing that is to give kids more time to learn and practice academic skills, but also get the chance to be successful with successful adults. Our “special sauce” is a modern form of apprenticeships where middle school kids – we focus on the middle school grades as we know it’s a critical turning point for most kids – get the chance to work with talented adults from the community to make cool things. So, architects may be teaching kids to redesign their school, engineers from Google are working with kids to build robots and design apps, and volunteers from Cognizant are teaching kids about LEDs, Parallel Circuits, and Conductive Threads.