Dear Commons Community,

In a direct appeal for help from the public, the F.B.I. on Thursday released pictures and video of two young men who officials believe may be responsible for the explosions that killed three people and wounded more than 170 during the Boston Marathon.

Officials said they have images of one of the men putting a black backpack on the ground just minutes before two near-simultaneous blasts went off near the finish line of the marathon at 2:50 p.m. on Monday. One video, which officials said they did not release, shows the two men walking slowly away after a bomb exploded while the crowd fled.

At a news briefing here, Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office, initiated the unprecedented crowd-sourcing manhunt by urging the public to look at the pictures and video on the F.B.I.’s Web site, fbi.gov. The two men appear to be in their 20s, but Mr. DesLauriers did not characterize their appearance or offer an opinion as to their possible ethnicity or national origin.

“Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family members of the suspects,” Mr. DesLauriers said firmly and grimly into the cameras. “Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us.”

Almost immediately, calls started flooding the bureau’s office complex in Clarksburg, W. Va. Traffic to the F.B.I.’s Web site spiked to the highest levels ever, an official said. For a brief time, the site was offline.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords had a stingy critique of the U.S. Senate on its failure to vote for gun control earlier this week.  Writing with passion in a New York Times op-ed piece, she commented:

“SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday the U.S. Senate knuckled under the influence of the National Rifle Association and in a vote of 54 to 46, decided to do nothing with an amendment that would have required background checks on gun purchasers.    President Barack Obama commented:

“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” Obama said.

The president said the failure of the background check bill “came down to politics.”  The president pinned the blame for the measures’ failure on Republicans, though five Democrats also opposed the plan.

“There are no coherent arguments for why we didn’t do this,” Obama said.

Obama’s anger was apparent during his remarks, which were given as families of Newtown shooting victims and former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) — a shooting survivor — stood behind him.

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” Obama said.

Shameful indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

We remember the three victims killed at the Boston Marathon.  Our hearts and sympathies are with their families.

Tony

Martin Richard, 8, was killed and his sister and mother were both seriously injured.

Krystle Campbell, 29, of Medford, Mass. was a restaurant manager.

Lu Lingzi, a Chinese national and graduate student at Boston Unvieristy.

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks devoted his column today on a discussion of the limits of big data and analytics.  He had a similar column in February of this year.   He discusses big data’s reliance on correlations and cautions that correlation is not causality.  More specifically:

“In my columns, I’m trying to appreciate the big data revolution, but also probe its limits. One limit is that correlations are actually not all that clear. A zillion things can correlate with each other, depending on how you structure the data and what you compare. To discern meaningful correlations from meaningless ones, you often have to rely on some causal hypothesis about what is leading to what. You wind up back in the land of human theorizing.

Another obvious problem is that unlike physical objects and even animals, people are discontinuous. We have multiple selves. We are ambiguous and ambivalent. We get bored, and we self-deceive. We learn and mislearn from experience. Thus, the passing of time can produce gigantic and unpredictable changes in taste and behavior, changes that are poorly anticipated by looking at patterns of data on what just happened.

Another limit is that the world is error-prone and dynamic. I recently interviewed George Soros about his financial decision-making. While big data looks for patterns of preferences, Soros often looks for patterns of error. People will misinterpret reality, and those misinterpretations will sometimes create a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Housing prices skyrocket to unsustainable levels.

If you are relying just on data, you will have a tendency to trust preferences and anticipate a continuation of what is happening right now. Soros makes money by exploiting other people’s misinterpretations and anticipating when they will become unsustainable.”

Brooks concludes:

“One of my take-aways is that big data is really good at telling you what to pay attention to. It can tell you what sort of student is likely to fall behind. But then to actually intervene to help that student, you have to get back in the world of causality, back into the world of responsibility, back in the world of advising someone to do x because it will cause y.

Big data is like the offensive coordinator up in the booth at a football game who, with altitude, can see patterns others miss. But the head coach and players still need to be on the field of subjectivity.

Most of the advocates understand data is a tool, not a worldview. My worries mostly concentrate on the cultural impact of the big data vogue.”

As someone who has been following the big data and learning analytics evolution, I am glad to see that Brooks is bringing some of the discussion to the popular press.  I know that my colleagues here at the Graduate Center and other colleges and universities likewise are struggling with understanding the potential of big data analysis.

Tony

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AniXaMPzl_k[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

Most of us by now have seen video of the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon yesterday.   We have seen the images of the injured being attended to by first responders.  We listen to the media reports that seek information from police on possible perpetrators.  We listen to President Barack Obama’s comforting words.  Here in New York we remember 9/11 and our hearts are with the families of the dead.     We all stand with a “tough and resilient” Boston that will surely recover from this cowardly act.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Students all over New York State have been prepping for the past week for new standardized tests that they will be taking starting tomorrow.  As described in a New York Times article:

“At Public School 10 on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, parents begged the principal to postpone the lower school science fair, insisting it was going to add too much pressure while they were preparing their children for the coming state tests.

On Staten Island, a community meeting devolved into a series of student stress stories, with one parent recounting how his son had woken up from a bad dream, mumbling that he had forgotten to fill in a bubble answer.

And at Public School 24 in the Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx, a fifth-grade teacher, Walter Rendon, has found himself soothing tense 10- and 11-year-olds as they pore over test prep exercises. “Sometimes, I say: ‘Just breathe.’ ”

New York public school students and parents are, by now, accustomed to standardized tests. But a pall has settled over classrooms across the state because this year’s tests, which begin Tuesday, are unlike any exams the students have seen. They have been redesigned and are tougher. And they are likely to cover at least some material that has yet to make its way into the curriculum.

The new tests, given to third through eighth graders, are intended to align with Common Core standards, a set of unified academic guidelines adopted by almost every state and goaded by grant money offered by the Obama administration. They set more rigorous classroom goals for American students, with a focus on critical thinking skills, abstract reasoning in math and reading comprehension.

New York is one of only a few states that have developed new tests to match the Common Core. Last year, Kentucky became the first to administer Common Core aligned tests and scores there plummeted, adding to the concern in New York.

When students sharpen their No. 2 pencils on Tuesday, they will find English tests that include more writing and more challenging reading excerpts, many of them culled from classical literature, or nonfiction sources. They will be asked to “marshal evidence” for thoughtful, sometimes lengthy answers, and analyze paired excerpts. In math, though there will be fewer topics, the test will include more complex equations, multistep word problems, and written responses.”

Test! Test! Test!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This animation was forwarded to me by Tom Lynch, an assistant professor at Pace University.  It is a well-done parody touching on a most serious subject:  the influence of corporate America on public education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This month is the 30^th Anniversary of the release of A Nation at Risk:  The Imperative for Educational Reform, that severely criticized the state of K-12 education in this country and began the dialogue for various education reform initiatives.    Jal Mehta, an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the author of the book, The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling,  has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, commenting that with all of the attention paid to public education and with major federal programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top, very little has changed.   With the exception of pockets of innovation here and there, there is little widespread, long lasting improvements:

“The debate over school reform has become a false polarization between figures like Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor, who emphasizes testing and teacher evaluation, and the education historian Diane Ravitch, who decries the long-run effort to privatize public education and emphasizes structural impediments to student achievement, like poverty.

The labels don’t matter. Charter-school networks like the Knowledge Is Power Program and Achievement First have shown impressive results, but so have reforms in traditional school districts in Montgomery County, Md., Long Beach, Calif., and, most recently, Union City, N.J., the focus of a new book by the public policy scholar David L. Kirp.

Sorry, “Waiting for Superman”: charter schools are not a panacea and have not performed, on average, better than regular public schools. Successful schools — whether charter or traditional — have features in common: a clear mission, talented teachers, time for teachers to work together, longer school days or after-school programs, feedback cycles that lead to continuing improvements. It’s not either-or.

Another false debate: alternative-certification programs like Teach for America versus traditional certification programs. The research is mixed, but the overall differences in quality between graduates of both sets of programs have been found to be negligible, and by international standards, our teachers are underperforming, regardless of how they were trained.”

Mehta’s conclusion calls for raising the bar for teacher certification programs, extending the school day, allow more time for teachers to collaborate, and expanding our investment in research and development.  He calls specifically for the need to create  new institutions such as  an educational equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, the main funder of biomedical research in America — if we are to make serious headway.   

His recommendations are fine but the one area that Mehta did not touch upon was the need to address the crippling effects of the politics of education.  The dysfunction that exists especially at the national level, the lurching back and forth in “new” programs as political parties change power, and the  political corruption that breeds at all levels, have hindered (and will continue to hinder) long-term sustained education reform.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a letter to our community, Matt Goldstein, CUNY’s Chancellor since 1999,  announced that he intends to step down  this summer.

We wish him well and thank him for his years of dedicated service to our students, faculty, and staff.

Tony