Dear Commons Community,

Sarah Morgano commented on my blog yesterday regarding the public shaming of teachers in New York City public schools.  Her brother, Alex Messer, who works at P.S. 321, has created a petition on change.org that seeks to establish a fair and just evaluation system for teachers.  Please consider visiting this site and signing this petition.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Manfred Phillip (Chemistry) has sent along the following email asking for our support in signing a petition started by the PSC to repeal CUNY’s  Pathways proposal.

Tony

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Dear Fellow Members of CUNY’s Doctoral Faculties,

Below is a message from PSC President Barbara Bowen about a petition drive against Pathways. I strongly urge you to look at the petition and, if you agree with it, sign it. I signed it this afternoon. It is an important way to deal with the Pathways issue. Click on the link to the on-line petition. Over 1000 have signed so far. After you sign, please, if you have no conflicting classes to teach, come to the Town Hall meeting on Pathways. That is at 6:00-8:30 pm on Thursday, March 8, at the Community Church of New York, 40 East 35th Street (Between Park and Madison Avenues).

This is a critical time for the university. Please show your support for CUNY in this tangible way.

All the best,

Manfred Philipp

(Biochemistry and Chemistry Doctoral Programs)

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Dear Colleague,

I invite you to sign the PSC petition to repeal Pathways. Sign by Thursday night to increase our strength for the Town Hall Meeting. The petition calls on the CUNY Trustees to repeal the Pathways resolution at their next meeting and replace it with a new planning process on student transfer—a process that upholds shared governance and academic freedom, and that produces a curriculum with academic integrity. Add your voice by signing the petition today.

Pathways is not inevitable. The other PSC officers and I have spent the last three weeks visiting the different CUNY campuses, and everywhere the story is the same: faculty are putting enormous effort into salvaging some intellectual integrity for Pathways even though they are convinced that the structure is wrong. There is an alternative. We do not have to be disempowered: if we act together we have the power to demand what’s right for CUNY.

How can we create that power? The clearest way to dispel 80^th Street’s myth of near-universal faculty support for Pathways is to come to the Town Hall Meeting on Thursday night and add your name to the petition. The text of the petition draws on the scores of resolutions against Pathways already passed; all faculty and professional staff represented by the PSC are invited to sign

(I have been asked about petitions for students and petitions that could be signed by scholars outside CUNY; both are possible in the future, but the current petition is designed just for faculty and professional staff.)

Sign now, and then confirm that you will come to the Town Hall Meeting by signing up here. We need to listen and speak to each other on Thursday night; we need to show by our numbers how serious we are about an alternative to Pathways. This may be our best chance to organize on Pathways; don’t miss it:

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that Charles Koch, a Cato Institute founder, is threatening the Institute’s  reputation for independent research.

“A rift with one of its founding members — the billionaire conservative Charles Koch — is threatening the institute’s identity and independence, its leaders say, and is exposing fault lines over Mr. Koch’s aggressive and well-financed brand of Republican politics.

The rift has its roots, Cato officials said, in a long-simmering feud over efforts by Mr. Koch and his brother David Koch to install their own people on the institute’s 16-member board and to establish a more direct pipeline between Cato and the family’s Republican political outlets, including groups that Democrats complain have mounted a multimillion-dollar assault on President Obama. Tensions reached a new level with a lawsuit filed last week by the Kochs against Cato over its governing structure.”

This is sad but typical of the Koch Brothers.  It is unfortunate for the Cato Institute but if you play in the mud, you get dirty.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New data to be released later this week from the United States Department of Education (USDOE) indicate that black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students.   Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.  One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

The New York Times reported that:

“The USDOE began gathering data on civil rights and education in 1968, but the project was suspended by the Bush administration in 2006. It has been reinstated and expanded to examine a broader range of information, including, for the first time, referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color…

The data also showed that schools with a lot of black and Hispanic students were likely to have relatively inexperienced, and low-paid, teachers. On average, teachers in high-minority schools were paid $2,251 less per year than their colleagues elsewhere. In New York high schools, though, the discrepancy was more than $8,000, and in Philadelphia, more than $14,000.”

Arne Duncan will announce the results at Howard University today after which the data will become publicly available  at ocrdata.ed.gov

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a human interest piece today based on interviews with teachers in New York who have been victimized by the policies of the New York City Department of Education.  Specifically  a little more than a week ago, the NYC DOE made public teacher evaluations much to the dismay of educators  throughout the country.  Here is an excerpt from the NY Times article:

“For 15 years, Anna Allanbrook has been the principal of Public School 146 in Brooklyn, one of the highest-achieving elementary schools in the city. In that time, she has never had a more talented and hard-working bunch than the current team of fifth-grade teachers. The five have lunch together daily, using the time to plan. They stay until 7 p.m. on Fridays to prepare for the following week. On Thursday night, most of them helped at the science invention fair until it was past 8 p.m.

Their credentials would be impressive for college professors. Antoinette Byam, who received a grant to spend a month in Ghana in 2006, won a Fulbright scholarship in 2008 to do research in Mexico and Peru. She then wrote fifth-grade curriculums on the Mayans.

Before becoming a teacher, Nancy Salomon had her own theater company and ran a drama program in the schools that won an arts award from the Guggenheim Museum.

Cora Sangree has trained teachers at Bank Street College of Education and Teachers College at Columbia University. Laurie Matthews worked as an archaeologist in Brazil and France before she started teaching.

In 2009, 96 percent of their fifth graders were proficient in English, 89 percent in math. When the New York City Education Department released its numerical ratings recently, it seemed a sure bet that the P.S. 146 teachers would be at the very top.

Actually, they were near the very bottom.

Ms. Byam and Ms. Salomon each scored 7 out of 100 in math. Ms. Sangree got a 1 in math and an 11 in English. Ms. Matthews’s scores got mixed up with the results for another fifth-grade teacher, Penina Hirshman, so nobody could say for certain what her real numbers might be.

A teacher’s rating depends on how much progress her students make on state tests in a year’s time, and is known as the value-added score. Ms. Allanbrook, the principal, has another name for what’s going on. She calls the scores the “invalid value-addeds.”

If city officials were trying to demoralize and humiliate the workforce, they’ve done a terrific job. News organizations get an assist for publishing the scores, and former Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein deserves a special nod for enthusiastically supporting the release.”

The entire article is excellent reading on how not to run a school system.  In addition to Joel Klein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and a host of other enablers deserve special recognition for what they have created.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article on a new phenomenon called MOOCs or  “massive open online courses”  that are seen by some as a threat to traditional higher education.   On the one hand, there is a  credibility to these courses when hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to brick and mortar colleges and universities.  On the other hand, some see MOOCs only as something supplemental to traditional higher education.

The article describes the experience of a prominent computer scientist, Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford research professor .

“Last fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence course taught by Mr. Thrun and Peter Norvig, a Google colleague. An additional 200 registered for the course on campus, but a few weeks into the semester, attendance at Stanford dwindled to about 30, as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems.

Mr. Thrun was enraptured by the scale of the course, and how it spawned its own culture, including a Facebook group, online discussions and an army of volunteer translators who made it available in 44 languages.

“Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said at a digital conference in Germany in January. “I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

Before all the professors at CUNY and other institutions around the country start jumping out of their windows at the prospect that we are seeing the end of the profession as we know it, there will be some settling in time before the country and world moves entirely to the MOOC format.   There needs to be an accepted mechanism for awarding MOOC credit.  It is here that we come to the problem of cost, academic honesty and an acceptable accrediting body.  A MOOC  here and a MOOC there surely can provide the need to brush up or become familiar with  a new technique similar to the way continuing education units are administered and awarded but this is not the same as a fully accredited diploma.

In a companion article, the issue of credentialing and the problem of cheating in particular is discussed.

“Mozilla, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and others are working to devise a system of online educational “badges” certifying exactly which skills had been learned. Some companies, like Microsoft, already offer their own certificates for trained computer technicians.

Some educators doubt that such credentials will ever command as much respect as a diploma from a well-known college. And of course, to be trustworthy, alternative credentials would have to be at least as cheat-proof as traditional ones. And that is not so simple.

At Stanford University, where Jennifer Widom, the chairwoman of the computer science department, taught an online database course last semester to more than 90,000 people, some found a covert route to high scores.

“There were definitely people getting multiple accounts and using some to practice and the other to get a perfect score,” said Dr. Widom, who still has hundreds of assignments trickling in every day for grading. “There were some who completed the exam with a perfect score in three minutes and the only way they could have done that was if they had already done the problems in another account. My philosophy was not to be concerned in the least about people who cheat. But if there’s going to be actual certification that people depend on, those problems will have to be addressed.”

I must say teaching a MOOC sounds like great fun.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Mitt Romney won the Washington state straw poll yesterday receiving 37.6% of the votes and easily defeating his rivals for the Republican presidential candidacy. Ron Paul had 24.4%, Rick Santorum 23.8% and Newt Gingrich 10.3%.  This poll was seen as a lock for Romney and provides momentum for him as he enters the “Big Tuesday” primaries that are slated for this week.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Rush Limbaugh issued an apology on Saturday for calling student Sandra Fluke a “slut” on his radio show this week.   Fluke, a law student at Georgetown University who was advocating for health insurance plans to cover the cost of contraception, became the target of a series of attacks by Limbaugh. Besides calling her a “slut,” he also called her a “prostitute,” said that he wanted her to make sex tapes and post them online, and speculated that she only had a problem paying for contraception because she was having “so much sex.”

Below is Limbaugh’s full statement of apology.  I am sorry but this is as tepid an apology as I have ever seen.  The only reason Limbaugh apologized” was because several of his sponsors and advertisers began to flee from his show.  There is little sincerity in his comments.  The Huffington Post reported that:

“Rush’s apology wasn’t actually an apology,” said Shaunna Thomas, a co-founder of UltraViolet, an online advocacy organization that does grassroots work on women’s issues. “He did little more than continue to expose himself as the anti-woman and offensive media personality that he is. Our campaign to pressure advertisers to drop their sponsorship of his show will continue next week. No radio show that attacks women should be rewarded with advertising dollars. And more than 84,000 of our members who signed a petition in the last day agree.”

As I have concluded on my other posts on this matter, for shame to WABC-AM in New York and the other radio stations around the country that give this vile individual air time to spout his venom and vitriol.

Tony

Full Statement of Rush Limbaugh

“For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke.

I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone’s bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level.

My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

Dear Commons Community,

Citing two recent studies the New York Times editorial today questions the methods used for placement of incoming students into remedial courses in community colleges across the country.    Specifically the editorial recommends:

“The Obama administration is rightly pushing colleges to raise graduation rates and to make sure that more students graduate on time. To help achieve those goals, the community college systems that enroll about 11 million students need to end the practice of shunting students who are prepared for college into non-credit remedial classes that chew up financial aid while making it far less likely that they will ever graduate.”

The editorial comments that the problem is underscored in two new studies from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College that examine remedial education policies at two unnamed systems: one large urban community college system and one statewide community college system. The studies, which look at tens of thousands of students over several years, found that more than a quarter of those assigned to remedial classes based solely on standardized test scores could have passed college-level classes with a grade of B or better.

This issue will surely become more pronounced in the next couple of years.   On one side will be community college faculty and administrators who administer and teach remedial courses who will defend the current system and any change as an attempt to water down requirements and standards;  and on the other side will be those who want to accelerate/improve college completion rates.   However, there is also a twist to this on the part of the US Department of Education whose policies call for unbridled testing of students in the K-12 schools to insure standards so how does it now frame a call for relaxing testing and standards at the community college level.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Sporting News is reporting that New Orleans Saints players and at least one assistant coach maintained a bounty pool of up to $50,000 the last three seasons to reward game-ending injuries inflicted on opposing players, including Brett Favre and Kurt Warner, the NFL said Friday. “Knockouts” were worth $1,500 and “cart-offs” $1,000, with payments doubled or tripled for the playoffs.

The NFL said Friday the pool amounts reached their height in 2009, the year the Saints won the Super Bowl.

The league said between 22 and 27 defensive players were involved in the program and that it was administered by defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, with the knowledge of coach Sean Payton.

The Sporting News quotes Williams as apologizing for his role: “It was a terrible mistake, and we knew it was wrong while we were doing it,” he said.

No punishments have been handed out, but they could include suspension, fines and loss of draft picks. The NFL said the findings were corroborated by multiple, independent sources, during an investigation by the league’s security department.

The article further comments:

“Players contributed cash to the pool, at times large amounts, and in some cases the money pledged was directed against a specific person, the NFL said.

“The payments here are particularly troubling because they involved not just payments for ‘performance,’ but also for injuring opposing players,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement. “The bounty rule promotes two key elements of NFL football: player safety and competitive integrity.”

Payoffs included $1,500 for a “knockout” and $1,000 for a “cart-off,” with payouts doubling or tripling during the playoffs. All payouts for specific performances in a game, including interceptions or causing fumbles, are against NFL rules. The NFL also warns teams against such practices before each season.”

I guess winning is everything – even if it means maiming an opposing player!

Tony