Dear Commons Community,

The Hufffington Post is reporting that The Daily Texan, a student newspaper at the University of Texas in Austin, pulled a controversial cartoon about the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case on Tuesday.

The cartoon critiques the media coverage of Martin’s death, which has become a national episode. A woman reading to a child from a book labeled “Trayvon Martin and the Case of Yellow Journalism” says in a speech bubble “And then, the BIG BAD WHITE man killed the handsome, sweet, innocent colored boy.” It ran in the March 27, 2012 edition of the DT.

The cartoon was done by Stephanie Eisner. Gawker noted the student paper pulled the cartoon from their website on Tuesday afternoon.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The number of elementary school students in classes of 30 or more has tripled in the last three years because of teacher attrition and budget cuts to public schools, according to a report released on Monday by a city councilman.  According to an article  in the online edition of the New York Times:

“Using data from the city’s Department of Education, the report found that 31,079 students in first through fifth grade were now in large classes, compared with 9,756 in the 2008-9 school year…Fourth graders and fifth graders are most likely to be in large classes, according to the report, released by Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn.  Of current fourth graders, about 14 percent are in classes of 30 or more students, compared with 5.5 percent during the 2008-9 school year. Of fifth graders, about 17 percent were in large classes, compared with 6.5 percent three years ago. The class-size limit for both grades, set by the city and the teachers’ union, is 32 students…

Despite a 2007 commitment the city made to reduce class size across all grades, in exchange for more state funding, class sizes have increased in recent years, erasing early gains made during the Bloomberg administration.

Over the last three years, the city has lost 5,300 teachers to attrition and five consecutive rounds of cuts to schools’ budgets, a result of the national recession and decreases in state funding — though the overall budget for city schools has grown.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Frank Bruni weighs in on the Newt  Gingrich presidential candidacy death watch in his column today in the New York Times. 

“He has no nutritional value, certainly not at this point, as he peddles his ludicrous guarantee of $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, a promise that would be made only by someone with his own bottomless strategic reserve of crude. Doubly oily entendre intended.

There were calls for him to desist two weeks ago, after he lost Alabama, which abuts his home state of Georgia. But they fell on a deaf Newt.

There were fresh appeals last week, when he failed to wring even one measly delegate from Illinois on Tuesday and then Louisiana on Saturday. But Newt doesn’t need anything as prosaic as delegates, so long as there’s still pocket lint from Sheldon Adelson and the warmth of Callista’s frozen smile.

If he refuses to quit, we in the news media must quit him. Starve him of his very sustenance: attention. Exert a kind of willpower that we’ve lacked in this primary, which we turned into too much of a circus by encouraging too many clowns.”

Too many clowns indeed!

Tony