And Another Republican Candidates Debate!

Dear Commons Community,

I watched the entire Republican presidential candidates’ debate on CCN last night.   I thought I would catch the first hour or so but was drawn into the heat, passion and humor of the candidates and so watched the entire two hours.  The New York Times and the Huffington Post have excellent recaps if you are interested.  Here are a couple of highlights.

Mitt Romney was particularly aggressive while Newt Gingrich seemed rather passive.  In past debates, their give and take was the opposite.

There was lots of heated discussion between Romney and Gingrich over immigration which I believe Romney won.

Gingrich proposed establishing that the United States establish the first base on the moon.  Romney’s reply was that if one of my staff proposed spending hundreds of billions of dollars for a moon base “ I would fire him’.  Gingrich had no reply.

Rick Santorum was okay but nothing special.

Ron Paul had me and the audience laughing over several remarks.  The most humorous was when Wolf Blitzer asked him because of his age would he disclose his medical records. After chiding Blitzer for age discrimination, Paul challenged his three opponents to a “25 mile bike race in the Texas heat”.

Tony

 

President Obama – New Financial Aid Proposal – Make College More Affordable!

Dear Commons Community,

President Obama is proposing a financial aid overhaul that for the first time would tie colleges’ eligibility for campus-based aid programs — Perkins loans, work-study jobs and supplemental grants for low-income students — to the institutions’ success in improving affordability and value for students, administration officials said.  The New York Times is reporting:

“Under the plan, which the president is expected to outline today at the University of Michigan, the amount available for Perkins loans would grow to $8 billion, from the current $1 billion. The president also wants to create a $1 billion grant competition, along the lines of the Race for the Top program for elementary and secondary education, to reward states that take action to keep college costs down, and a separate $55 million competition for individual colleges to increase their value and efficiency.

The administration also wants to give families clearer information about costs and quality, by requiring colleges and universities to offer a “shopping sheet” that makes it easier to compare financial aid packages and — for the first time — compiling post-graduate earning and employment information to give students a better sense of what awaits them. “

The major caveat is that most of these changes would all require Congressional approval.  Not sure that is possible in this presidential election year.

Tony

 

Small Schools Graduation Rates Up – New Study!

Dear Commons Community,

The Hechinger Report’s HechingerEd blog has a posting on a recent study comparing the graduation rates of students in small schools in New York City.  Below is a brief recap.  The posting accurately mentions student self-selection as possibly effecting the positive results.

Tony

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Hechinger Report Blog Posting

“You might have forgotten about the small schools movement amid all the recent hubbub about overhauling teacher evaluations. But a study released on January 25th reminds us that only a few years ago, reducing the number of total students in a school was seen as a key weapon in the arsenal of urban school reform, and suggests that perhaps small schools shouldn’t have been so quickly abandoned as a reform strategy.

In 2010, MDRC, a nonpartisan, New York-based research group, found that New York City students who attended small high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts who applied to but didn’t ultimately attend small schools. A new study confirms the previous findings. A second group of students who cycled through the city’s small schools also had a greater likelihood of graduating than students at other, comparable schools.

New York City’s small schools aren’t selective, but they do have lotteries because of space constraints. The latest MDRC study followed cohorts of students who either won or lost the lottery to ensure the two groups were comparable.

There are more than 100 small schools in the city, many of which opened in the last decade under the Bloomberg administration. And other cities also embraced downsized schools as a way to improve student achievement. But the concept seems to have fallen out of favor, in part because the billions of U.S. dollars that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was giving to the movement dried up due to “disappointing” results. (Disclosure: The Gates Foundation is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

Also, there was–and continues to be–quite a lot of conflict over the other side of the small schools movement: the closure of big schools. One report about New York City’s small schools said they had a domino effect on larger schools: As big schools were shut down to make way for smaller ones, many students–often those with lower test-scores and less wherewithal to find their way to small schools–were funneled into the remaining large schools, which struggled and were then also slated for closure and replacement by new small schools.

And while small schools, on average, appear to be doing better with the students they receive, quite a few have done badly enough to meet the same fate as many of their bigger counterparts.

Nevertheless, the study’s authors say their evidence suggests that small schools remain a good idea: The graduation rate for students in the study’s small schools was nearly 69 percent, compared to 62 percent of students in the study’s other schools. The overall graduation rate in New York City’s public high schools is 70 percent.”

 

 

Bill Gates Makes $750 Million Donation to the Global Fund!!

Dear Commons Community,

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged a donation of $750 million  to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.    The donation was made as a promissory note intended to tide the fund over regular cash shortages.

The New York Times reports that

“Mr. Gates, who made the announcement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said tough economic times were “no excuse for cutting aid to the world’s poorest…”

The Global Fund, which pays for AIDS drugs for more than 3 million poor people, has distributed more than 200 million mosquito nets and says it has prevented more than 4 million tuberculosis deaths. Now observing its 10th anniversary, it has been struggling to raise money. Its last fund-raising drive fell more than $1 billion short of the $13 billion the fund said it needed to continue existing grants. It recently said it could not make new ones.

Some government donors have backed away, either because of their own budget crises or because of thefts of the fund’s money in different countries. While not large, the thefts have made persistent headlines and been seized on by opponents of foreign aid.”

A most generous contribution to a worthy cause!

Tony