Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that more than 150 people were arrested yesterday as demonstrators tried to block access to the New York Stock Exchange on the first anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Demonstrators had planned to converge from several directions and form what was called the People’s Wall around the stock exchange to protest what they said was an unfair economic system that benefited the rich and corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.

Last year, protesters took over Zuccotti Park, not far from Wall Street, setting up an encampment that became an inspiration for similar Occupy campaigns around the world. But after being evicted from the park in November, the protests lost much of their energy, though their message of economic inequality has resonated in Washington and in the presidential campaign.

On Monday, the police countered the blockade planned by protesters with one of their own, ringing the streets and sidewalks leading toward the exchange with metal barricades and asking for identification from workers seeking access.

Protesters marched though the streets, waving banners and banging drums while accompanied by bands playing “Happy Birthday.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial today comments on teacher evaluations particularly in light of the Chicago teachers strike.  Entitled, In Search of Excellent Teaching, it references several evaluation systems around the country that have successfully used student test scores.  There is great variation in how student test scores and other performance measures are used.  The editorial is balanced and provides both sides of the arguments for and against.  Its conclusion:

“Reasonable school officials understand that test scores, while important, do not reflect the sum total of what good teachers provide for their students. In Washington, D.C., where the evaluation system is now in its fourth year, school officials have decided to change the weighting of tests. Originally, value-added scores accounted for 50 percent of teacher evaluations; that has been reduced to 35 percent, with an additional 15 percent consisting of other goals (like the students’ mastery of certain skills) collaboratively arrived at by teacher and principal.

Officials there say they reduced the importance of value-added scores after some of the most successful teachers expressed anxiety about the measure and argued that it might not give some teachers full credit for their work because they teach subjects not covered by the state tests.

Many of these new programs are better than the slipshod evaluation systems they replaced. But they are far from perfect. States and cities, like Chicago, will need to keep working at them to ensure fairness, accuracy and transparency.”

I agree that school districts need to keep working on teacher evaluation systems that include some aspect of student performance.  Related to this is the need for school districts to be careful of putting so much emphasis on testing (i.e., teaching to the test) that real learning suffers.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A  number of news reports on Saturday indicated that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) leadership had accepted a framework for an agreement that would be subject to a ratification vote today Sunday.  Instead Chicago teachers decided to delay the vote at least until Tuesday effectively continuing the strike.

Union delegates declined to formally vote on a proposed contract settlement worked out over the weekend with officials from the nation’s third largest school district. Schools will remain closed Monday. Union president Karen Lewis said teachers want the opportunity to continue to discuss the offer that is on the table.

“Our members are not happy,” Lewis said. “They want to know if there is anything more they can get.”

She added: “They feel rushed.”

She said the union’s delegates will meet again Tuesday, and the soonest classes are likely to resume is Wednesday.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ross Douthat makes the case today in his New York Times column that the recent Arab protests are much more than a response to a film mocking fun at Islam and its founder.

“THE greatest mistake to be made right now, with our embassies under assault and crowds chanting anti-American slogans across North Africa and the Middle East, is to believe that what’s happening is a completely genuine popular backlash against a blasphemous anti-Islamic video made right here in the U.S.A.

There is a cringing way to make this mistake, embodied by the apologetic press release that issued from the American embassy in Cairo on Tuesday as the protests outside gathered steam, by the Obama White House’s decision tolean on YouTube to take the offending video down, and by the various voices (including, heaven help us, a tenured Ivy League professor) suggesting that the video’s promoters be arrested for abusing their First Amendment liberties.

But there’s also a condescending way to make the same error, which is to stand up boldly for free speech while treating the mob violence as an expression of foaming-at-the-mouth unreason, with no more connection to practical politics than a buffalo stampede or a summer storm.

There is certainly unreason at work in the streets of Cairo and Benghazi, but something much more calculated is happening as well. The mobs don’t exist because of an offensive movie, and an American ambassador isn’t dead because what appears to be a group of Coptic Christians in California decided to use their meager talents to disparage the Prophet Muhammad.

What we are witnessing, instead, is mostly an exercise in old-fashioned power politics, with a stone-dumb video as a pretext for violence that would have been unleashed on some other excuse…”

Today’s wave of violence, likewise, owes much more to a bloody-minded realpolitik than to the madness of crowds. As The Washington Post’s David Ignatius was among the first to point out, both the Egyptian and Libyanassaults look like premeditated challenges to those countries’ ruling parties by more extreme Islamist factions: Salafist parties in Egypt and pro-Qaeda groups in Libya. (The fact that both attacks were timed to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks should have been the first clue that this was something other than a spontaneous reaction to an offensive video.)

The choice of American targets wasn’t incidental, obviously. The embassy and consulate attacks were “about us” in the sense that anti-Americanism remains a potent rallying point for popular discontent in the Islamic world. But they weren’t about America’s tolerance for offensive, antireligious speech. Once again, that was the pretext, but not the actual cause.

Just as it was largely pointless, then, for the politicians of 1989 to behave as if an apology from Rushdie himself might make the protests subside (“It’s felt,” he recalls his handlers telling him, “that you should do something to lower the temperature”), it’s similarly pointless to behave as if a more restrictive YouTube policy or a more timely phone call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the anti-Islam film’s promoters might have saved us from an autumn of unrest.

What we’re watching unfold in the post-Arab Spring Mideast is the kind of struggle for power that frequently takes place in a revolution’s wake: between secular and fundamentalist forces in Benghazi, between the Muslim Brotherhood and its more-Islamist-than-thou rivals in Cairo, with similar forces contending for mastery from Tunisia to Yemen to the Muslim diaspora in Europe.

Navigating this landscape will require less naïveté than the Obama White House has displayed to date, and more finesse than a potential Romney administration seems to promise. But at the very least, it requires an accurate understanding of the crisis’s roots, and a recognition that policing speech won’t make our problems go away.”

Douthat has it right!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting on the protests that erupted in 20 Islamic nations yesterday in Africa, the Middle East and in East Asia.  The Anti-American protests  that began this week over a video insult to Islam were violent and in several instances deadly.

“The broadening of the protests appeared to reflect a pent-up resentment of Western powers in general, and defied pleas for restraint from world leaders, including the new Islamist president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, whose country was the instigator of the demonstrations that erupted three days earlier on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The anger stretched from North Africa to South Asia and Indonesia and in some cases was surprisingly destructive. In Tunis, an American-run school that was untouched during the revolution nearly two years ago was completely ransacked. In eastern Afghanistan, protesters burned an effigy of President Obama, who had made an outreach to Muslims a thematic pillar of his first year in office.

The State Department confirmed that protesters had penetrated the perimeters of the American Embassies in the Tunisian and Sudanese capitals, and said that 65 embassies or consulates around the world had issued emergency messages about threats of violence, and that those facilities in Islamic countries were curtailing diplomatic activity. The Pentagon said it sent Marines to protect embassies in Yemen and Sudan.

The wave of unrest not only increased concern in the West but raised new questions about political instability in Egypt, Tunisia and other Middle East countries where newfound freedoms, once suppressed by autocratic leaders, have given way to an absence of authority. The protests also seemed to highlight the unintended consequences of America’s support of movements to overthrow those autocrats, which have empowered Islamist groups that remain implacably hostile to the West.

“We have, throughout the Arab world, a young, unemployed, alienated and radicalized group of people, mainly men, who have found a vehicle to express themselves,” Rob Malley, the Middle East-North African program director for the International Crisis Group, a consulting firm, said in a telephone interview from Tripoli, Libya.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The news media are reporting that the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has agreed in principle to a framework on a settlement with representatives of the Chicago public school system. As of this writing, details were still being workout.  Subject to ratification this weekend, teachers could be back in the classroom on Monday.    

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Stanford University is continuing a high-profile push into online education with a new open-source platform called Class2Go, which will host two massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, during the fall quarter. Beginning in October, non-Stanford and Stanford students alike will be able to use the platform to take classes on computer networking and on “Solar Cells, Fuel Cells, and Batteries.”

The idea for the software started with a six-member “skunkworks” team in Stanford’s computer-science department, said Jane Manning, product manager for Class2Go. Over the summer, the team built Class2Go using code from Stanford’s existing course-hosting platform, called Courseware, and a similar platform from the nonprofit Khan Academy, along with software for integrated online classroom forums hosted by Piazza. Other colleges may add to the platform or adapt it for their own purposes, said Sef Kloninger, engineering manager for Class2Go.

Stanford already offers MOOC’s through Coursera, a start-up course provider, and through another homegrown platform, called Venture Lab, which attracted 40,000 students to a course on technology entrepreneurship last fall. Developing multiple platforms is a strategic move to study how Stanford can best deliver online education in the long run, Ms. Manning said.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chicago teachers strike is entering its fifth day.  Talks yesterday between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the city broke down without an agreement.  Reuters via the Huffington Post has an article today identifying wealthy supporters of Mayor Rahm Emanuel as part of the reason for the animosity between the two sides.  It identifies a number of prominent donors to Emanuel’s mayoral campaign who have been antagonistic to teachers and their unions.   Here is an excerpt:

“Emanuel has built a strong base of donors outside the labor movement, including corporate and cultural icons and even some prominent Republicans. He received a $50,000 donation from real estate magnate Donald Trump, who flirted with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, a disclosure to the elections board showed.

He also received a $50,000 donation from deceased Apple founder Steve Jobs, whose widow Laurene Powell Jobs has actively supported education reform.

Emanuel has enjoyed substantial support from wealthy backers of the national education reform movement, which aims to transform public schools — in part by weakening teacher unions.

The reform movement’s agenda includes rating educators in part by their students’ test scores and weakening job protections such as tenure and seniority. Those are the very issues that prompted the teacher strike in Chicago now in its fourth day.

Some of Emanuel’s major donors also gave generously to Stand for Children IL PAC, the statewide political action committee of the education reform group Stand for Children.

Stand for Children lobbied for an Illinois state law passed in 2011 that overhauled policies on teacher tenure, hiring, the length of the school day and year and teacher evaluations. Mayor Emanuel’s allies in the Chicago school district have cited that law in explaining why they feel they must stand their ground against the teachers’ union.

According to the regulatory filings, common donors to the Stand for Children PAC — which raised nearly $4 million in the last four months of 2010 — and to the Emanuel campaign include Kenneth Griffin, the founder and chief executive of hedge fund Citadel, and Paul Finnegan, a co-chief executive of private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners.

Other common donors include members of the Pritzker family, one of Chicago’s most prominent business families, and the well known Crown family of Chicago, who have a long history of philanthropy.

Some striking teachers have carried signs mocking Penny Pritzker, an executive of the family conglomerate and one of President Barack Obama’s biggest Democratic fundraisers.

Stand for Children Chicago director Juan Jose Gonzalez said many of its donors give generously to various groups and not too much should be read into the same names appearing on its PAC filings and those of Emanuel.

“I would say that Emanuel backs our position and is supportive of our agenda,” he said.

But the similarities between the donations to Emanuel and Stand for Children were not lost on the Chicago Teachers Union, which highlighted them during the 2011 election campaign and called the group an “out-of-state organization responsible for the latest legislative attacks” on the union.

Other education reform groups have made it their mission to provide financial cover for Democratic politicians willing to buck teachers unions and push big changes to public schools. They include Democrats for Education Reform, a coalition of wealthy financiers and entrepreneurs, and StudentsFirst, which is run by Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools. “

As I have indicated earlier this week, the Chicago Teachers strike is important symbolically for teachers around the country.  It is not just about Chicago but about educators in American public schools reclaiming  positions of influence that have been undermined by a school reform movement that has pandered to moneyed interests.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nicholas Kristof’s comments today’s in his New York Times column examines the Chicago teachers strike.  While sympathetic to teachers, he concludes that the students who need education the most to help lift them out of urban poverty are the victims in this strike. Here is an excerpt:

“Those students often don’t get a solid education, any more than blacks received in their separate schools before Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago’s high school graduation rates have been improving but are still about 60 percent. Just 3 percent of black boys in the ninth grade end up earning a degree from a four-year college, according to the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

America’s education system has become less a ladder of opportunity than a structure to transmit inequity from one generation to the next.

That’s why school reform is so critical. This is an issue of equality, opportunity and national conscience. It’s not just about education, but about poverty and justice — and while the Chicago teachers’ union claims to be striking on behalf of students, I don’t see it…

This isn’t a battle between garment workers and greedy corporate barons. The central figures in the Chicago schools strike are neither strikers nor managers but 350,000 children. Protecting elements of a broken and unaccountable school system — the union demand — sacrifices those students, in effect turning a blind eye to a “separate but equal” education system.”

His comments are fair and tempered but there is one aspect of this strike that he fails to mention and that is its symbolism as a response to a national agenda of teacher-bashing that has been promulgated by corporate, political and ideological interests.  The CTU is saying loudly and clearly that enough is enough and is fighting for “educators” to take back the education of children in this country.

Tony