Dear Commons Community,

The importance of parental involvement in all aspects of a child’s life was a sentiment repeated throughout a panel, which was held at the Fashion Industries High School in Chelsea. The discussion was the closing event of Eagle Week, a weeklong series of activities organized by the Eagle Academy Foundation to inspire and educate young men of color.  The New York Times reports:

“In front of a modest but engaged audience at a panel discussion about raising young men of color, Sheron Smith, mother of the actor and rapper Mos Def, delivered a message that received an enthusiastic response.

“When you have a child, it’s not about you anymore,” she said to applause.

A few minutes later, Brenda Greene, a professor of English at Medgar Evers College and the mother of the rapper Talib Kweli, agreed that parents play a crucial role in their child’s upbringing.

“We have to take that responsibility or no one else will,” she said.”

Other activities for students from the Eagle Academies for Young Men in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens included a day of community service, a breakfast at Yankee Stadium with speeches from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, and a “youth summit” featuring book discussions with authors and mentors.

David Banks, president and chief executive officer of the Eagle Academy Foundation, said the goal of the week was for students to “be inspired to know that they are special, that they can be all that they want to be.”

Congratulations to a fine organization that is making an incredibly important contribution to the education of minority youth.

Tony

Dear Commons Colleagues,

This was sent by colleague, Stuart Ewen, at Hunter College.  The Nation of Change is reporting that President Obama and the Department of Homeland Security have been heavily involved behind the scenes in the crackdown  of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Specifically:

“A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.

The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network including Fusion Centers, saturated with ‘anti-terrorism’ funding, that mobilizes thousands of local and federal officers and agents to investigate and monitor the social justice movement.”

Nonetheless, blacked-out and limited though they are, she says they offer clues to the extent of the government’s concern about and focus on the wave of occupations that spread across the country beginning with last September’s Occupy Wall Street action in New York City.

The latest documents reveal “intense involvement” by the DHS’s so-called National Operations Center (NOC). In its own literature, the DHS describes the NOC as “the primary national-level hub for domestic situational awareness, common operational picture, information fusion, information sharing, communications, and coordination pertaining to the prevention of terrorist attacks and domestic incident management.”

The DHS says that the NOC is “the primary conduit for the White House Situation Room” and that it also “facilitates information sharing and operational coordination with other federal, state, local, tribal, non-governmental operation centers and the private sector.”

This is troubling maybe even hypocritical given that President Obama and the Democrats in general have adopted the 99% percent theme of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in this election year.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Rebekah Brooks, the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper wing and a key figure in the phone hacking crisis, is to face criminal charges over the scandal, it was announced today.  The Huffington Post reported:

“The Crown Prosecution Service said that Brooks “conspired with her husband, Charles Brooks, and others to pervert the course of justice.”

Speaking at a press conference, Alison Levitt, the chief adviser to the Director of Public Prosecutions, said that Brooks and five others —her husband, her assistant, their chauffeur, their security and the head of security at News International — had all been charged. (A seventh person was arrested but is not being charged.)

She claimed that, between July 6 and 19th of 2011, Brooks and her assistant had illegally removed seven boxes of material from News International headquarters, and the group had tried to conceal information from the police about the phone hacking scandal. The charges all stem from actions allegedly taken at the very height of the phone hacking scandal which had suddenly engulfed the entire Murdoch empire.”

Tony

Go here for  a zoomable version.

Dear Commons Community,

The photo above was shot by Russian weather satellite Electro-L, and is derived from the highest resolution images ever taken of Earth.  The satellite, which is in orbit 36,000 kilometers above the equator, snaps a picture of the planet every 30 minutes, with resolution of up to 121 megapixels. The images are especially impressive for having been taken in a single snapshot. NASA images of the Earth are often an amalgam of several photos.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Several news and media outlets are reporting that President Barack Obama in referring to JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion loss on Monday, said the bank’s massive failure proves why Wall Street reform is necessary.

“JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is,” Obama said during an interview on ABC’s “The View”. “Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we got, and they still lost $2 billion and counting.”

Dimon, who appeared on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday, told host David Gregory he had been “dead wrong” to dismiss concerns about the banks questionable trades.

“We made a terrible, egregious mistake,” Dimon said. “There’s almost no excuse for it.”

Obama said the bank’s mistakes exemplified the reasoning behind his administration’s Wall Street policies.

“We don’t know all the details,” Obama said. “It’s going to be investigated, but this is why we passed Wall Street reform.”

The president’s comments came the day that Ina Drew, a top executive who worked for JPMorgan for three decades, announced her retirement. Drew supervised the trading desk responsible for the loss.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post is reporting that the United States has the best higher education system in the world, according to a new ranking released Friday by university network, Universitas 21.

The group said their researchers looked at the most recent data from 48 countries across 20 different measures, including investment by governments and private sector, research and the production of an educated workforce, international networks and diversity. Population size was accounted for in the calculations, a news release said.

This is the first time Universitas 21 has created these rankings.

The rankings did not factor in affordability or cost of attending college.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that China’s Internet censors have added “New York University” to their list of blocked search terms, according to China Digital Times. Last week, NYU’s law school offered the blind civil-rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng a visiting-scholar position. Previously, Mr. Chen had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing after escaping from house arrest. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused American officials of interfering in China’s domestic affairs. NYU’s offer helped solved the diplomatic impasse. On the popular Sina Weibo microblogging service, searches for “New York University” drew denial-of-service messages on May 10, reports China Digital Times. Other terms banned since the diplomatic row began, and still blocked, include Mr. Chen’s name, and more than a dozen nicknames for him such as “sunglasses brother,” and the name of the U.S. ambassador to China, Gary Locke.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times hasan extensive article on the racial segregation that exists in the New York City schools.  This is the second article in a series examining the changing racial distribution of students in New York City’s public schools and its impact on their opportunities and achievements. The previous article chronicled the experience of Rudi-Ann Miller, one of 40 black students at Stuyvesant High School, which has 3,295 students.

In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school system looms as one of the most segregated. While the city’s public-school population looks diverse — 40.3 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14.9 percent white and 13.7 percent Asian — many of its schools are nothing of the sort.

About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.   The article looks specifically at Explore Charter in Brooklyn as a case study.

“… of the school’s 502 students from kindergarten through eighth grade this school year, 92.7 percent are black, 5.7 percent are Hispanic, and a scattering are of mixed race. None are white or Asian. There is a good deal of cultural diversity, with students, for instance, of Haitian, Guyanese and Nigerian heritage. But not of class. Nearly 80 percent of the students qualify for subsidized lunch, a mark of poverty. The school’s makeup is in line with charter schools nationally, which are over all less integrated than traditional public schools.

At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.

The school’s enrollment is even more racially lopsided than its catchment area. Students are chosen by lottery, with preference given to District 17, its community school district, which encompasses neighborhoods like Flatbush, East Flatbush, Crown Heights and Farragut. Census data for District 17 put the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade population at 75 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent white and 1 percent Asian. But the white students go elsewhere — many to yeshivas or other private schools.

Tim Thomas, a fund-raiser who is white and lives in Flatbush, writes a blog called The Q at Parkside, about the neighborhood. He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”

One very telling exchange was as follows:

“Jean McCauley, 47, is a single mother with two sons by different fathers, both gone from her life. When her older son, now 26, began school, his father had a friend in TriBeCa, and they used his address to get him into Public School 234, a well-regarded, largely white school. “I feel so grateful for my son being in that environment,” she said. “Expectations were so high. That school had everything. It was a world apart.”

He graduated from college and works at a real estate agency.

For her younger son, Brandon Worrell, she didn’t have that option. He is in sixth grade at Explore. She considers it a good school, but fears he doesn’t learn racial tolerance. “At Explore he can’t compare to anything,” she said. “He won’t know how to communicate with other races. He won’t know there is a difference. I think color will always be the first thing he sees.”

She added, “I speak to Brandon about race. But he doesn’t get it. It’s abstract.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post is reporting that Mitt Romney in an interview with a local television network stated:

“the protesters rallying against Bank of America in Charlotte this week are too young “to really understand how the economy works.”

“Unfortunately, a lot of young folks haven’t had the opportunity to really understand how the economy works, and what it takes to put people to work in real jobs, and why we have banks, and what banks do,” Romney told WBTV in Charlotte, according to National Journal. “It’s a very understandable sentiment if you don’t find a job, and you can’t see rising incomes. You’re going to be angry and looking at someone to blame.”

Romney said the protesters’ blame should be targeted at “the president and the old school liberals that have not gotten this economy turned around.” He made a not-so-subtle 2012 push, insisting he’s the one who “understands how to get the economy going again.”

The protesters — which included Occupy Wall Street activists, environmentalists, pro-union advocates and victims of home foreclosures — held massive demonstrations outside of Bank of America’s shareholder meeting in Charlotte on Wednesday. Occupiers saw the event as a trial run ahead of September’s Democratic National Convention, which will have an increased police presence thanks to a City Council ordinance from earlier this year.

I am 64 years old and I love talking and discussing various issues about education, technology, and life in general with my students most of whom are in their twenties and thirties.  They are so smart and see and hear things in different ways.  I am proud to say that I learn from them. I would suggest that Mr. Romney take a chance and talk to some young people.  He may be surprised at what they know.

Tony