Dear Commons Community,

President Jennifer Raab sent out this exciting news to the Hunter College community earlier this evening.

Tony

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Dear Members of the Hunter College Community:

I am delighted to inform you that on Monday, September 10, Mayor Michael Bloomberg will hold a press conference to announce our joint project with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) to build a new science and health professions building for Hunter College along with a new facility for MSKCC. Both buildings will be located on a site at 73rd Street and the FDR Drive. This joint venture represents more than a real estate transaction, but a deep and growing partnership among our two great Upper East Side institutions. It also represents Hunter’s enduring commitment to excellence in research and teaching in the sciences and health. In a few years’ time, Hunter scientists and health professionals will be conducting research and training students in world-class facilities, alongside colleagues from some of the world’s finest academic medical centers.

We wanted to share this exciting news with you as soon as possible. We will be providing you with more details as they become available, and consulting with you extensively as we move forward in our planning. We will provide a link to the news conference on our website as soon as we can.

I want to thank you all for your support of this project, and for the many collaborations and partnerships that inspired it and will animate it.

Best wishes,

Jennifer J. Raab
President

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Daily News had an opinion piece on charter schools yesterday by Adam Schaeffer, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.   The Cato Institute is a libertarian think-tank that receives funding from the likes of the Koch, Schaife, and Olin Foundations.  Schaeffer references a report that examines enrollment figures and concludes that a large percentage of students in charter schools is made up of students who previously would have or were enrolled in private schools.  Here is an excerpt:

“The Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom commissioned Richard Buddin, a former senior economist with the Rand Corp., to look at the enrollment effects of charter schools.

Buddin found that charters serving primary school students in highly urban districts take almost a third of their students from private schools, on average. Urban charters draw nearly a quarter of their middle school students and more than 15% of their high school students from the private sector. Even in nonurban districts, charters pull between 7% and 11% of all their students from private schools.

All this translates into about 190,000 students a year who otherwise would have been in private schools now attending public charter schools.

Charter students who migrated from private schools cost taxpayers about $1.8 billion a year, based on Buddin’s numbers — as well as figures from a Ball State University study on charter school funding. Since the most recent data available for the analysis are from 2008, that figure is likely much higher today…

And while charter schools may marginally improve the public education system on average, they are wreaking havoc on private education. Because charter schools take a significant portion of their students from private schools and cause a drop in private enrollment, they drive some schools entirely out of business.”

While Schaeffer does not mention parochial schools per se, many of them have had to close in the past decade precisely because of the growth in charter schools.

Schaeffer’s solution to this is to expand school choice to include tax credits for parents sending their children to private schools.  I don’t agree with his conclusion.  It seems we need to figure out how to concentrate resources to improve the public schools in our poorer urban areas first.

Tony
 

Dear Commons Community,

The Democratic National Convention came to a close last night with a number of its luminaries doing their thing.

John Kerry, senator from Massachusetts, referring  to the Republican election refrain, “Are you better off now than four years ago?” had a zinger of a response:

“Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago.”

Jill Biden introduced her husband and referred several times to her life as a teacher at a community college in northern Virginia.

“For me, being a teacher isn’t just what I do—it’s who I am.”

Joe Biden gave possibly the best speech of the evening.  His comment:

“Osama bin laden is dead and General Motors is alive”  put the audience in a frenzy.

Lastly, the man  of the evening was President Barack Obama.  He was very good but I did not see the spark that there was four years ago.  David Brooks summed it up:

“The next president has to do three big things, which are in tension with one another: increase growth, reduce debt and increase social equity. President Obama has the intelligence, the dexterity and the sense of balance to navigate these crosscutting challenges. But he apparently lacks the creativity to break out of the partisan categories, the trench warfare gridlock.

Thursday night’s speech showed the character and his potential. It didn’t show audacity and the fulfillment of that potential.”

Tony