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Stevens Institute of Technology research reveals Americans fears and concerns about artificial intelligence while embracing a larger role for AI in everyday life

Hoboken, New Jersey, Nov. 15, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

Americans are deeply conflicted about the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. While they have numerous concerns about the harm the technology is doing now and could do in the future to individuals and society, many still believe there is more of an upside than a downside to the growing use of AI.

Thats according to Stevens TechPulse Report: A Perspective on Americans' Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence, a new national poll of 2,200 adults conducted on behalf of Stevens Institute of Technology by Morning Consult examining Americans views on a wide range of AI-related issues.

Almost half (48%) of Americans feel the positives of greater AI adoption in everyday life outweigh the negatives, while 29% believe the opposite. A majority also holds the opinion that in the future, AI should play a greater role in a variety of industries including technology (66%), manufacturing (61%), logistics (58%), and retail (52%).

Despite that enthusiasm, people are far more comfortable with humans, rather than AI, being in charge of performing most jobs and, in general, express a good deal of apprehension and mistrust of the technology.

As the world and our lives grow increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence, its essential to assess its perceived impact, as well as identify gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed, said Jason Corso, Brinning Professor of Computer Science and director of Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence at Stevens Institute of Technology. Its clear from this research that, while people recognize the positives of AI, they also see much to be wary of based, to some extent, on misunderstandings of the technology and what could help protect against those negative consequences.

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Fears of greater AI adoption include:

- Loss of Privacy: Tops the list of concerns about the negative consequences of AI, with three in four adults voicing that concern. However, age affects those opinions: among generations, GenZers are least concerned (62%), while Baby Boomers are most concerned (80%).

- Abuse of the technology: Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents are concerned that countries or businesses will use the technology irresponsibly and 71% believe AI will likely be misused by individuals.

- Job Losses: Seven-in-10 Americans (71%) are concerned that greater adoption of AI will lead to reduced employment opportunities. However, more than half (53%) also think it has the potential to create better working conditions and reduce the risk of dangerous jobs (70%).

Threats to Fairness and Democracy

The research shows that Americans believe AI has played a part in eroding the foundations of democracy. Most Americans think AI has had a role in Americans loss of trust in elections (57%), in threats to democracy (52%), and in loss of trust in institutions (56%). Additionally, 58% of respondents say it has contributed to the spread of misinformation. Almost two-thirds (64%) are concerned that greater adoption of AI in the future could lead to more of this problem and six in 10 people express concern that it could further increase political polarization.

There are also significant misgivings about its impact on the issue of fairness and equity. Nearly half (47%) think it is likely that greater AI adoption will result in racial/ethnic bias and contribute to human rights abuses. Fewer believe that greater adoption of AI will lead to gender bias (37%); surprisingly, women (36%) think that is less likely to happen than men (43%).

Additionally, the research finds that there are qualms regarding AIs effect on relationships. About seven-in-10 adults worry that greater adoption of AI will result in less personal interactions and reduced human connectedness.

Out of Control AI

Many Americans surveyed also express a number of dystopian views about artificial intelligence. Over half of those polled believe AI will likely become smarter than humans (52%), are concerned AI could gain consciousness (57%) and believe that people will be unable to control the technology (51%); nearly three-quarters (72%) of Millennials and over two-thirds (69%) of Baby Boomers are worried AI could become uncontrollable. Additionally, 63% of adults say its likely AI will control too much of our lives.

Facial Recognition and Deepfakes

In contrast to futuristic fears of AI, people are by and large comfortable employing facial recognition technology for a wide range of uses an AI application that has spawned a good deal of controversy. Almost two-thirds (62%) of those polled think it is a responsible use of artificial intelligence. Sizable majorities are comfortable with facial recognition being used to find missing persons (71%) and lost pets (68%), and for various law enforcement purposes including identifying and monitoring criminals (68%), identifying fraudulent behavior in retail (64%) and aiding in police investigations (62%). There is also substantial comfort with the use of facial recognition to monitor people at rallies and marches (48%), with fewer people (37%) expressing discomfort with doing so. More Democrats (56%) than Republicans (42%) are comfortable with this use of the technology.

Americans are almost evenly divided on the issue of using AI to create deepfakes, highly convincing digitally altered sound and images that are made to appear real: 38% believe its a responsible use of the technology, while 36% think it is not. Millennials are most supportive, with more than half (51%) saying that creating deepfakes is a responsible use of artificial intelligence.

This survey indicates that there is a significant need for education, well-informed and holistic policy development and ethical leadership in the deployment of rapidly advancing technology throughout industry and society, said Nariman Farvardin, president of Stevens Institute of Technology. I am delighted that Stevens is playing a leadership role in this space through the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

This survey is the first in the Stevens TechPulse Report series conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Stevens Institute of Technology to elucidate public understanding, acceptance and concerns about emerging technology, and its impact on humanity and society.

For more information, visit https://www.stevens.edu/ai-survey.

Methodology

This poll was conducted between Sept. 8 and Sept. 10, 2021, among a sample of 2,200 adults. The interviews were conducted online and the data were weighted to approximate a target sample of adults based on gender, educational attainment, age, race and region. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 2.0 percentage points.

Stevens

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Stevens Institute of Technology is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, New Jersey. Since our founding in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark of Stevens education and research. Within the universitys three schools and one college, 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate closely with faculty in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment. Academic and research programs spanning business, computing, engineering, the arts and other disciplines actively advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront our most pressing global challenges. The university continues to be consistently ranked among the nations leaders in career services, post-graduation salaries of alumni, and return on tuition investment.

Stevens media contacts:

Thania Benios, Director of Public Relations, tbenios@stevens.edu, 917-930-5988

Robin Deehan, Media Relations Manager, rdeehan@stevens.edu, 973-216-8402

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Americans Think AI is a Threat to Democracy, Will Become Smarter than Humans and Overtake Jobs, Yet Believe its Benefits Outweigh its Risks - Yahoo...

By AGGREY MUTAMBO

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Nairobi Tuesday night to push for what he called shared global priorities with African nations.

But it may also signal the return of President Joe Bidens actual policy for Africathe routine calls for human rights and democracy.

Although the official itinerary for his trip to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal talks of investments in clean energy, climate change, Covid-19, regional security and stability, his trip also includes the old issue of democracy.

The secretary will look to advance US-African partnerships and underscore the common values we share with Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal and use those as platforms to really talk to the entirety of the continent but certainly the publics and leaders in those three countries, said Mr Ervin Massinga, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of African Affairs, at a virtual media briefing on Friday.

Concerning human rights overall, absolutely, this issue is front and centre for our engagement across the continent, and certainly in this trip, in each one of the stops. And there will be a human rights component inbuilt into everything were doing.

In Kenya, the US wants to collaborate on Nairobis full transition to renewable energy by 2030, and wants Nairobi to play a bigger role in helping ends the regional chaos in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. Mr Blinken is also visiting at a time Africa is lagging behind in Covid-19 vaccinations amid raging conflict in the continent.

Last week, Mr Blinken announced Johnson & Johnson had reached a deal to supply more doses through the Covax facility for supply to people in conflict zones.

His itinerary says he will also meet with civil society leaders essential to Kenyas vibrant democracy and participate in events related to climate and environmental protection.

Previously muted during the Donald Trump era as Washington pursued business policy to rival the Chinese in Africa, his successor seems to have re-attached it on his view of the continent.

In Nigeria, as in Senegal, which will be 2022s chair of the African Union, Mr Blinken is likely to speak on religious freedoms as well as police brutality, especially in Abuja where there have been public protests seeking resignation of police chiefs.

In Kenya, where elections are due next year, Mr Blinken will hear from civil society groups what their fears are. President Biden has delayed finalising a trade deal with Kenya, whose negotiations began under President Trump.

Next month, Mr Biden will host a summit of democracies, according to an earlier announcement.

Blinken arrives in Nairobi on Tuesday night and will spend a day in Nairobi before heading to Nigeria and later Senegal.

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Antony Blinken visit to revive calls for democracy and human rights - The East African

Common sense suggests that America ought to reform its ancient constitution. The country, after all, is vastly different from what it was when founded in the 1780s and 1790s. The electoral college may have made sense at the dawn of the democratic age, but now it is an embarrassment, violating the core principle that every vote in presidential contests ought to count the same as any other.

Having had no experience with the mass democracy they called into being, the framers of the constitution gave little thought as to how best to keep monied interests from corrupting electoral outcomes. And they had no clue about how questions of sex and sexuality would one day convulse their republic. Constitutional amendments passed today could abolish the electoral college, curtail the influence of private (and especially dark) money on politics, and establish a right to an abortion or a broader right to privacy in matters sexual and otherwise.

When we ask, however, whether any of these amendments have a reasonable chance of becoming law, the answer is no. The explanation is as mind-boggling as it is straightforward: For all intents and purposes, the constitution cannot be changed. The framers set an impossibly high bar for revision: two-thirds approval for a proposed amendment from each House of Congress, followed by majority approval from three-quarters of the state legislatures. Imagine a vote for Brexit crossing that double threshold. It never would.

The US constitution has been amended a mere 27 times across its 230-year history. The meaningful total is actually far less. The first 10 Bill of Rights amendments should not be regarded as amendments, since they were part of the original debate and ratification of the constitution in the years from 1789 to 1792. The three civil war amendments (1865-1870) were passed in unique circumstances of internal war, secession, and reconstruction. Two Prohibition amendments that canceled each other out (the first authorized a ban on alcohol and the second repealed it 14 years later) inflate the official count. A few other amendments addressed matters too minor to discuss. The total number of significant amendments passed in non-civil war circumstances, then, rapidly shrinks to single digits: about one every 25 to 30 years. Only during the Progressive era (1900-1920) did Americans find a way to make amendments a useful tool of politics: the direct election of senators, womens suffrage and Congresss right to levy income taxes were all written into the constitution at this time. No prior or subsequent generation has figured out how to duplicate the Progressives success. Even Antonin Scalia, the great believer in the genius of the constitution as it was originally written, admitted that a constitution written in stone was not serving anyone well.

The unchangeability of the constitution is not a new problem, of course. Liberal and conservative jurists across the generations have creatively refashioned the constitution into new shapes to address new realities. Consider Louis Brandeis, who insisted that the constitution be treated as a living document whose principles needed to address matters of which our fathers could not have dreamed. Twentieth-century judges, Brandeis believed, were obligated to adapt 18th-century principles to novel circumstances and, occasionally, to discern in those principles as yet unenumerated rights. To think otherwise, Brandeis declared, would be to turn the constitution into a series of impotent and lifeless formulas.

If the supreme court sometimes sought and achieved moments of Brandeis-style brilliance, it also suffered through periods of hubris or brittleness when justices, in pursuit of a political agenda or a misguided sense of principle, forgot where the ultimate source of their authority lay: not with the statutes themselves, or with framers of the constitution, but with the American people.

Between 1789 and 1791, large assemblies of citizens in nine of the 13 states voted both to ratify and modify the document that the framers had handed them. This ratification process gave meaning to the critical preamble to the constitution: We the people of the United States do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America. The supreme court must sometimes rule against majority opinion, which can be ill-considered, even tyrannical. But if the court repeatedly ignores or, worse, displays contempt for deep-seated and enduring popular convictions, it risks not just its own authority but that of the entire governing system of which it is part.

Two historical examples illustrate this point. The first was the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857, when Chief Justice Roger Taney and a large majority of justices declared on specious grounds that African Americans, enslaved or free, were not and would never be entitled to US citizenship and thus to constitutional rights and privileges. The outrage generated in the north by this decision hastened Americas descent into civil war.

The second moment occurred in the 1930s, when four conservative justices were preparing opinions to strike down two pillars of Roosevelts New Deal, the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act. These Four Horsemen, as they were known, were opposed by a progressive bloc consisting of Brandeis and two other justices wishing to uphold the New Deal. In the middle sat two moderates, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Owen Roberts. Had one or both joined the horsemen, they might have plunged America into a second civil war, this one between capital and labor.

The scenario of war was not far-fetched. Americans had declared their support for the New Deal by giving Roosevelt a resounding election victory in the 1936; they would not have tolerated the supreme court frustrating the will of the people by striking down the New Deal.

To save his legislative program, Roosevelt was threatening to push through Congress a law that would allow him to pack the court with his own appointees. Meanwhile, members of the United Auto Workers had occupied several General Motors factories in Michigan, forcing one of the worlds most powerful corporations to shut down production. Staying for six weeks, the sit-down strikers dared mayors, a governor, judges, and a president to call in the police, national guard, or US military to evict them.

At this moment of industrial confrontation and looming political crisis, both Hughes and Roberts signed on to two critical decisions that secured FDRs New Deal. Roberts insisted in subsequent years that jurisprudential evolution, not political pressure, had shaped his decision. Hughes struck a different pose. He seemed to understand that the judiciary, though independent, was part of a political system established to make the people sovereign. And that at certain crucial moments, the will of the people had to be honored. If this could not be done by constitutional amendment, it would have to occur through some other means.

The supreme court today faces another critical test of its legitimacy, as it prepares to deliver pivotal rulings this year on abortion, gun rights, and government funding for religious schools. It is likely that important right to vote cases will soon come before the court as well. The court must render its rulings in circumstances that have already seriously damaged its reputation. I am referring, of course, to the true steal in American politics: not the presidential election of 2020 but Mitch McConnells hijacking of two supreme court appointments to achieve the GOPs 40-year quest for an impregnable conservative majority. The beneficiaries of that steal associate justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett have given conservatives their largest majority on the court in 90 years.

Will this court, and its swollen Republican majority, succumb to the Taney temptation in Dred Scott, and attempt to settle divisive matters once and for all in ways that suit the wishes of their most fervent supporters? Or will the court follow the Hughes path and recognize that this is a moment when considerations of the American peoples general welfare must enter judicial deliberations?

Chief Justice John Roberts has shown himself to be a Hughes man, able to put country before party (as he did in his critical vote upholding the Affordable Care Act). But McConnells machinations have removed control of the court from Robertss hands. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch seem implacable in their conservatism. The progressive caucus of Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan is too small to accomplish anything on its own, even with Roberts as a sometime ally. That leaves the future of this court in the hands of Barrett and Trumps third appointee, Brett Kavanaugh. Does either have the integrity or vision to move the court and the country to a better place? We shall see.

Gary Gerstle is Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge. His new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, will be published in April. He is a Guardian US columnist

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America is at a crossroads. The supreme court may decide which way it goes - The Guardian

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. Purdue Universitys Voter Engagement Action Plan aimed at promoting student registration and turnout during the 2020 election was selected as the best among its Big Ten peers in the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.

The award for the Big Tens Best Action Plan, resulting in a 20-percentage point jump in student voter turnout to 67% in the 2020 election, was announced and presented to Purdue this week as part of several virtual ceremonies. Twelve of the 14 Big Ten universities submitted action plans designed to spur student registration and voting in 2020.

Purdue also received a silver rating for Excellence in Student Voter Engagement in achieving an overall voting rate of 60%-69% during the 2020 presidential election.

I enrolled us in the All IN Challenge with high hopes, but I should have known that Boilermakers would find a way to surpass them, said Purdue President Mitch Daniels, a national ALL IN Challenge spokesperson who was convinced Purdue could play a major role in promoting student voter registration and turnout in the 2020 election through this initiative. We like winning Big Ten championships around here, and this is one to be very proud of.

In its 12-page action plan, a document drafted in March 2020, the PurdueVotes Coalition outlined strategies and goals to boost registration for the campus based on the 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections, according to Melissa Gruver, associate director in the Civic Engagement & Leadership Development office, who co-led Purdues ALL IN Challenge efforts.

The 10-member core team met during the summer of 2020. Additional campus team members were added in the fall to form the 40-member PurdueVotes Coalition, which met virtually because of the pandemic to begin executing the action plans goals. Gruver said those goals centered on increasing the student voter registration and overall voting rate from the 2016 election, particularly among Purdues underrepresented minority student population.

I am proud of our entire Purdue team, along with the value that our students placed on voting in the general election andjumping 20 percentage points from the last presidential election, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.

Gruver said results of her teams persistent and strategic efforts in promoting student voter turnout are just as meaningful as the recognition from the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.

We worked hard, but we also worked smart. We placed a special emphasis on educating our students about how voting works, especially for those who were registered in their home county or state but are here on campus on Election Day. The process can be confusing, Gruver said.

Its exciting to see Purdues student voter registration strategy acknowledged by the ALL IN committee as the best in the Big Ten.

Purdues overall student voting rate at 67% in 2020, vs. 47% just four years earlier also was slightly higher than the 66% rate for participating ALL IN institutions, a significant accomplishment, Gruver said. Additionally, Purdues 2020 action plan sparked an increase in the:

Detailed statistics are available in Purdues 2020 National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement report known as the NSLVE campus report as part of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.

The action plan was created by members of the PurdueVotes Coalition, a joint effort of student leaders, student organizations and staff from Civic Engagement & Leadership Development; University Residences; Student Activities and Organizations; Student Success; Fraternity, Sorority and Cooperative Life; and several academic departments.

Daniels announced in July 2020 that Purdue and 160 other college presidents and chancellors, including seven in the Big Ten, were committing to full student voter registration and participation in the 2020 election cycle through the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.

By signing the ALL IN pledge, Purdue also committed to ensuring that all eligible students are able to register to vote and cast informed ballots in the 2020 election and beyond. Further, Purdue pledged to foster a campus culture that supported nonpartisan student civic learning, political engagement and student voter participation.

TheALL IN Campus Democracy Challengeis a nonpartisan, national initiative recognizing and supporting campuses as they work to increase nonpartisan democratic engagement and full student voter participation. The effort encourages higher education institutions to help students form the habits of active and informed citizenship and make democratic participation a core value on their campus. More than 830 universities and colleges across the nation, enrolling over 9 million students, participated in the challenge during the 2020 election cycle.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to todays toughest challenges. Ranked in each of the last four years as one of the 10 Most Innovative universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap athttps://purdue.edu/.

Writer, Media contact: Phillip Fiorini, 765-430-6189, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Source: Melissa Gruver, 765-494-6823, mgruver@purdue.edu

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Purdue's 2020 voter registration action plan selected best in the Big Ten for ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge - Purdue News Service

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For years, a number of researchers and analysts myself included have been sounding the alarm that American democracy is facing a foundational crisis. If this warning seemed overanxious in 2016 (or 2011, or 2000), its now ubiquitous.

From top to bottom, our governing institutions have been significantly eroded by conservative assaults on the legitimacy of our elections, the growing influence of shadowy political front groups in electoral politics, conservative attacks on voting rights, opportunistic partisan abandonment of governing norms, sclerotic legislative processes, polarization fed by the culture wars and a bevy of other worrying trends.

The depth and breadth of the problem are most visible at the elemental level, where the American democratic spirit is ostensibly most fervent: our thousands of school boards. These little local legislatures have been revered as cornerstones of American democracy since at least the early 19th century. In theory, they provide local schools with democratically elected leadership that is maximally responsive to local needs and the public interest.

And yet, the pandemic has brought months of news cycles where local school board debates have escalated into screaming matches complete with threats of violence over issues both imaginary (e.g. the supposed rise of critical race theory in U.S. classrooms) and/or conspiratorial (e.g. fights over mask or vaccine mandates). Things have gotten so bad that the National School Boards Association recently sounded the alarm, asking for the federal government to do more to protect elected local leaders from threats of violence. Rather than calming the waters, this just prompted further outrage particularly from conservative politicians in Washington, D.C. who cast it as an assault on parents free speech and eventual backpedaling from the NSBA.

Problems like these are why, in recent decades, some major cities places like Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, and New York City moved away from elected school boards. The idea had a three-part theory of action: 1) it makes school governance more coherent by unifying control of city schools under mayoral leadership, 2) it insulates education decision-makers from political pressure and 3) it gives mayors a reason to prioritize school funding and improvement.

The returns from this experiment have been largely encouraging. According to Stanford University researcher Sean Reardon, Chicago schools are dramatically outperforming not just the other big poor districts, but almost every district in the country, at scale. Research on public schools in D.C. including a recent Mathematica study has also found significant improvements.

And yet, recently, the mayoral control model in these cities has faced criticism from a cacophony of voices claiming that returning public education to school board control would restore an elemental part of U.S. democracy representative government at its most profoundly local level.

As the country wrestles with a national crisis of democracy, it seems odd to focus outrage and energy towards shifting local school governance from the control of elected mayors to elected school boards precisely at a moment when school boards across the country are providing daily proof of their weaknesses as institutions.

Aside from the novelty of conservative groups converting local protests into a coordinated national effort to inflame board meetings, there is nothing particularly exceptional about this latest spate of outrage. Remember the furor a few years ago over how the Common Core State Standards were ostensibly going to push schools to conduct mass retinal scans, promote student promiscuity and advance the cause of global communism? Sure, school board meetings are often sleepy for months even years but whether its school boundary changes or sex ed or school closures or school diversity or hiring and firing, periodic eruptions of dysfunction are pretty much a given.

And those are just recent examples. School boards institutional failures have deep historical roots. School boards have long been complicit, for instance, at designing and maintaining racist, inequitable structures in public education including decades of segregated schooling. Who did Oliver Brown and his fellow plaintiffs have to sue to begin the long, slow, difficult, haphazard work of integrating American schools? Topekas Board of Education. It was the same in Washington, D.C., where Spottswood Thomas Bolling sued the president of the local school board over segregation in the Districts schools. Indeed, over and over again, the fight for integration required (and still regularly requires) confronting and appealing to a higher authority over local school boards.

Its a reliable rule of education politics: elected school boards are almost always most responsive to vested and/or privileged interests in their communities. Consider, for instance, the Los Angeles Unified School District. For most of the last decade, their school board has faced criticism from experts, lawsuits from community groups, and pressure from the state to focus more resources on historically marginalized communities. And yet, nonetheless, the board has defaulted to allocating resources away from those communities. School boards simply arent designed to prioritize the less powerful, organized and noisy.

So why, in light of significant educational progress in places that have experimented with other forms of school governance, is it suddenly so important to shift more power to local school boards? Notably, pushes in this direction in Chicago and Washington, D.C. have sparked as these cities black residents are increasingly being displaced. In D.C., at least, a move away from mayoral control would almost assuredly strengthen the voices of white, privileged voters who would have a better chance of swaying the outcomes of a handful of low-turnout, ward-by-ward school board elections than the citywide mayoral race.

Indeed, what constitutes a democracy? Can it really be reduced to whether the public elects a mayor or a board to run the schools? Of course not. Institutionally speaking, modern democratic governance requires choosing leaders through regular, free, and fair elections but it also requires the expertise of civil servants and other experts chosen by those leaders. Thats why, for instance, we dont hold a national referendum every time the Mine Safety and Health Administration wants to adjust its regulations, nor do we establish elected panels to determine how much radium is safe to drink in our water supply.

So: you should absolutely be concerned about the state of U.S. democracy. It cannot long sustain when voting rights are selectively narrowed to grant partisan advantage, or when bills with majority support in both houses of Congress are regularly filibustered dead, or when sitting lawmakers resist efforts to fully investigate a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

But if youre looking for a way to ensure that our schools have elected leadership thats fair, equitable and democratically accountable, school boards pretty obviously arent the way to go.

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Williams: Replacing Mayoral Control With Elected School Boards is Not the Best Way to Shore Up Our Fragile Democracy Or Run Schools - The 74