Zócalo Public Square

Teachers are among the biggest influences on a student’s education. Most parents and educators would say teacher performance should be evaluated. Yet no one agrees on how to do it. From a teacher’s method in the classroom to his or her willingness to spend extra hours with individual students, attaching a number to teacher performance isn’t easy. Some favor a “value-added” teacher ranking system, which measures instructors by whether or not their students beat expectations, while others argue the system is unfair. Does it work, and can a teacher’s effectiveness truly be measured? Zócalo and the California Community Foundation invited a panel of education specialists including education reporter Louis Freedberg, Los Angeles Unified School District Deputy Superintendent John Deasy, UCLA Center X Director of Research Karen Hunter Quartz and Families in Schools Vice President Oscar E. Cruz to ask whether teacher rankings work, how we should create them, and whether they make for better schools.

California’s rate of births to teenage mothers has hit a historic low. For years, rates were on the decline around the country, throughout the sex-obsessed 1990s — when parents rallied around the V-chip, fretted about Internet obscenity, and shielded impressionable eyes from strutting pop starlets. Credit went to many factors, from increased access to contraceptives and improved sex education to teens simply waiting longer to have sex. But in recent years, as the pregnancies of political daughters and TV stars have brought broad attention to the subject once more, teen pregnancy rates have started rising everywhere except California, which has pursued robust state-supported teen pregnancy prevention efforts. What changed around the country, and what is California doing right? Zócalo invited a panel including moderator Emily Bazar, sociologist Mark Regnerus, author of the forthcoming Premarital Sex in America, Connie Kruzan, director of Adolescent Services at North Hollywood's Valley Community Clinic, and Francisca Angulo-Olaiz, a research scientist at the Center for Research on Adolescent Health and Development, to discuss what the country can learn from California’s progress on teen pregnancy.

British writer Christopher Isherwood arrived in Los Angeles after a long, slow bus ride from New York, where he had emigrated with his friend W.H. Auden. After unforgettably chronicling the underworld of interwar Berlin, Isherwood settled into L.A. and its circle of European émigrés, writers, painters, and spiritual seekers — Aldous Huxley, Truman Capote, David Hockney, and Don Bachardy, who would become Isherwood’s longtime partner after a chance meeting on Valentine’s Day on the beach. Isherwood wrote for Hollywood — and unlike so many novelists, enjoyed it — translated Hindu scripture, hung out at Musso and Frank’s, and captured L.A. in some of his most acclaimed works, like A Single Man. To celebrate the release of Christopher Isherwood’s The Sixties: Diaries:1960-1969, Zócalo hosted a panel with Don Bachardy, artist Peter Alexander, and Huntington Library curator of manuscripts Sara Hodson to consider the life, work, and legacy of Christopher Isherwood in Los Angeles.

Humans have long struggled to explain the trait that makes us human: self awareness. Ancient Greeks and Christian theologians posited a soul separate from a body. A long line of philosophers have argued that we’re defined by our thinking human minds, distinct and higher than our physical selves. Scientists today see evidence of something like minds and cultures in social animals, but they still seek to explain why human consciousness rises to become knowledge of a self, why we have been able to create such complex identities and cultures. How did we come to be our selves? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of the USC Brain and Creativity Institute and author of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, visited Zócalo to argue against the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting compelling new scientific evidence that consciousness is in fact a biological process created by living organisms.

The latest innovations in medicine seem like the stuff of science fiction: edible pills that can sense, monitor, and report on vital signs from within the body; a stick-on heart monitor that communicates wirelessly with patient and doctor; robotic surgical tools that reduce or eliminate invasive procedures. Medical advances past — from the discovery of antibiotics to the development of organ transplant procedures — certainly transformed the practice of medicine, but today’s technologies could revolutionize care, taking it out of hospitals and doctors’ offices. How will new technologies change the way we manage, receive and conceptualize healthcare, and are doctors ready for the change? Zócalo invited a panel including moderator Sarah Varney, Proteus Biomedical’s Greg Moon, USC bioethicist Michael Shapiro, and Leslie Saxon of the USC Center for Body Computing to explore the vanguard of medical technology, and how it will transform our health. This event was made possible by a generous grant from the California HealthCare Foundation.

In the last 20 years, the Internet has transformed the way we live, easing communication, speeding connections, spreading information, and spurring activism. But its power has prompted governments and corporations to seek to control its uses and limit access. If they succeed, it wouldn’t be the first time a new technology has revolutionized the world before being clamped down. From telephones to radio to television, information mediums have long been consolidated and regulated, often in ways that limit how we communicate and connect. Could the Internet be next, and what would it mean for our lives, our jobs, and our economy? Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, visited Zócalo to trace the century-long struggle between flowing information and corporate control, and to ask whether the Internet will stay free.

Many of us turn to Google at the first sign of sickness, and over the past few years, more and more doctors have started to meet us there. Boutique practices promise easy e-mail correspondence with doctors — along with unlimited in-person access — for a flat fee of a few grand. Kaiser guarantees 24-hour response times for any inquiries made to doctors online. And countless websites, from WebMD to ailment-specific chat rooms, offer easy medical advice, sometimes over webcams. But for all the ease of access — and the improved care it could bring to rural or poor patients — most doctors don’t get paid for online consultations, and medical advice sites aren’t clearly regulated. What are the opportunities and dangers of online care? Zócalo invited a panel including Health 2.0 co-founder Indu Subaiya, co-chair of the Society for Participatory Medicine and e-Patients.net blogger Dave de Bronkart, One Medical Group Founder and CEO Thomas Lee, and MedSimple founder Francis Kong to consider how the Internet is changing the way we care for ourselves. This event was made possible by a generous grant from the California HealthCare Foundation.

Only eight days after German tanks rolled into Paris, silent and deserted in the summer of 1940, France accepted defeat and foreign occupation. But even though a swastika flew over the city, cultural life survived and even flourished. Maurice Chevalier and Edith Piaf sang for French and German audiences. Pablo Picasso painted in his Left Bank apartment, even though his work was officially banned. Over 200 French films were produced, including the classic “Les Enfants du Paradis”, and thousands of books were published by authors as politically divergent as the anti-Semite Céline and the anti-Nazi Jean-Paul Sartre. But as Jews, including artists, fled or were deported to concentration camps, many French intellectuals began to join the resistance and debate the role of artists in war. Were artists saving or betraying their country by continuing to work? Journalist Alan Riding, author of And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris, visited Zócalo to explore the life, work, and moral responsibility of artists in times of war.

American maps of the modern world centrally and prominently locate the global powers of the 20th century, and the arenas of their wars: the U.S. and Western Europe, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But the 21st century has already begun to see a shift in geopolitical focus to an area generally relegated to the edges of our maps: the Indian Ocean. From the Horn of Africa to the Indonesian archipelago, the Indian Ocean region is home to a striving new middle class, young populations tempted by extremism, weak governments and infrastructures, not to mention nuclear weapons. The struggles for world power, democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be won or lost there. Atlantic national correspondent Robert Kaplan, author of Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, visited Zócalo to ask whether the U.S. is ready for the rising challenges of the next century.

Over the next 20 years, hundreds of millions of people will move to cities, demanding the economic opportunities and material comforts of urban life: air conditioning, personal computers, rich diets, cars, cell phones. In 1950, only 30 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas; by 2030, that figure will rise to 60 percent. While cities have long propelled economic growth and brought prosperity to their residents, how will they fare as populations increase, temperatures rise, natural disasters threaten, and resources grow scarce? In an event co-presented with the UCLA School of Public Affairs Luskin Center for Innovation, UCLA Luskin Scholar and professor at the School of Public Affairs Matthew Kahn, author of Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future, visited Zócalo to explain what Los Angeles will look like in a few decades and how we can best prepare for the urban future.