Dear Commons Community,

Various media sources are reporting that the police near Texas A&M took a gunman into custody 15 minutes after issuing a “Code Maroon” alert at Texas A&M at 12:29 this afternoon. The Huffington Post is reporting that one policeman and one civilian were killed.

The Maroon alert distributed electronically to students, faculty and staff warned people to stay away from the intersection of Welborn Road and George Bush Drive and part of Fidelity Drive in College Station, Texas, according to CNN. The message also told residents in the area, which is near the school’s football stadium, to stay indoors.

The Atlantic Wire commented that the shooter appeared to be firing an automatic weapon from a home in the area.

The shooting  comes on the heels of the mass shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple on Aug. 5, and the massacre at a Colorado movie theater on July 20.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the past week, there have been several showdowns between two controversial school reform advocates, Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee. The New York Times reported on its Schoolbook blog that WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show

“…aired interviews with the Michelle Rhee, former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor and the founder of Students First, on the occasion of launching a New York chapter, studentsfirstNY.

The show also aired a taped interview with Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University and author. The discussion focuses on school performance and the frustration some teachers feel about standardized testing.

The Rhee versus Ravitch showdown also appeared on CNN this week. In an interview, Ms. Rhee decried the results of a study that ranked the U.S. 25th in education internationally and said one of the most important fixes to education is to improve teacher quality.

But, in an online rebuttal, Ms. Ravitch argued that the rankings do not take into account the most serious factor affecting performance.

Why are our international rankings low? Our test scores are dragged down by poverty. On the latest international test, called PISA, our schools with low poverty had scores higher than those of Japan, Finland, and other high-scoring nations. American schools in which as many as 25% of the students are poor had scores equivalent to the top-scoring nations. As the poverty level in the school rises, the scores fall.

Rhee ignores the one statistic where the United States is number one. We have the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation in the world. Nearly 25% of our children live in poverty.

This is a scandal. Family poverty is the most reliable predictor of low test scores. How can we compare ourselves to nations like Finland where less than 5% of the children live in poverty?”

Ravitch went on to comment that Rhee is wrong and misinformed.  Indeed she is.

Tony