Dear Commons Community,

This week we will be commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22nd, 1963.  The media coverage of the commemoration has begun with programs and articles commenting on various aspects of this  tragic day.  In today’s New York Times,  James McAuley, a Dallas native and a Marshall scholar studying history at the University of Oxford, examines his hometown’s role in the assassination.  His opening is provocative:

“For 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.”

He goes on to describe:

“Dallas — with no river, port or natural resources of its own — has always fashioned itself as a city with no reason for being, a city that triumphed against all odds, a city that validates the sheer power of individual will and the particular ideology that champions it above all else. “Dallas,” the journalist Holland McCombs observed in Fortune in 1949, “doesn’t owe a damn thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is … because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.”

Those “men of Dallas” — men like my grandfather, oil men and corporate executives, self-made but self-segregated in a white-collar enclave in a decidedly blue-collar state — often loathed the federal government at least as much as, if not more than, they did the Soviet Union or Communist China. The country musician Jimmy Dale Gilmore said it best in his song about the city: “Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye … a rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.”

For those men, Kennedy was a veritable enemy of the state, which is why a group of them would commission and circulate “Wanted for Treason” pamphlets before the president’s arrival and fund the presciently black-rimmed “Welcome Mr. Kennedy” advertisement that ran in The Dallas Morning News on the morning of Nov. 22. It’s no surprise that four separate confidants warned the president not to come to Dallas: an incident was well within the realm of imagination.

The wives of these men — socialites and homemakers, Junior Leaguers and ex-debutantes — were no different; in fact, they were possibly even more extreme.”

McAuley concludes:

“Dallas is not, of course, “the city that killed Kennedy.” Nor does the city in which the president arrived 50 years ago bear much resemblance to Dallas today, the heart of a vibrant metroplex of 6.7 million people, most of whom have moved from elsewhere and have little or no connection to 1963.

But without question, these memories — and the remnants of the environment of extreme hatred the city’s elite actively cultivated before the president’s visit — have left an indelible mark on Dallas, the kind of mark that would never be left on Memphis or Los Angeles, which were stages rather than actors in the 1968 assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

For the last 50 years, a collective culpability has quietly propelled the city to outshine its troubled past without ever actually engaging with it. …

…what the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald once called the “dark night of the soul,” on which the bright Texas sun has yet to rise. The far right of 1963 and the radicalism of my grandparents’ generation may have faded in recent years, they remain very much alive in Dallas. Look no further than the troop of gun-rights activists who appeared just days ago, armed and silent, outside a meeting of local mothers concerned about gun violence. If this is what counts as responsible civic dialogue, then Dallas has a long way still to go.”

I don’t have an insider’s knowledge of Dallas’s culture and mores to comment about its culpability in Kennedy’s assassination. My own remembrances from that day was a fanatic, Lee Harvey Oswald, was able to buy a $21.00 rifle and change the course of history by striking down our president in the prime of his life.  Oswald was a deeply troubled 24-year-old ex-Marine who was born in New Orleans, defected from the U.S., and lived in Russia for several years.  It is my sense that he could have chosen any number of places in which to commit his act.   Dallas did not kill Kennedy – a disturbed Lee Harvey Oswald did.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of parent groups calling for NYS Education Commissioner to resign last month, a meeting on Long Island resulted in the same demand on the part of parents and teachers.  As reported in Newsday:

“An emotional crowd of about 1,500 parents and educators packed Ward Melville High School’s auditorium and cafeteria last night for a forum with state Education Commissioner John B. King Jr., cheering speakers who assailed state testing and Common Core academic standards and at times shouting down King as he tried to speak.

Eric Gustafson, a teacher in Three Village school district, brought those in the 900-capacity auditorium to their feet, cheering and clapping, when he said that Common Core and a new system of teacher and principal evaluations are “draining us of time and resources.”

“Your approach has taken the joy out of teaching and the adventure out of learning,” Gustafson said, adding that parents and teachers are begging for delay in implementation of new curriculums and tougher tests, but “nothing is happening.”

“Your message is clear,” he said to King, who was accompanied to the East Setauket school by Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state Board of Regents. “You are staying with the governor and big business.”

Tisch at one point pleaded with the crowd, “I know you are passionate. We hear you. We get it.”

Commissioner King is taking the heat for the Race to the Top funding deal that Governor Mario Cuomo and Chancellor Tisch agreed to with Arne Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education.  Essentially the quid pro quo was $800 million in federal funding in exchange for New York implementing the Common Core curriculum, establishing teacher evaluation systems based on standardized test sores, and contributing to a national student database.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today’s New York Times reveals a bit of the personal side of Bill deBlasio referring specifically to the importance of his Italian roots during his early years.

“For Mr. de Blasio, Italy represents more than an ancestral lodestone. His connection to the country has been a singular force in shaping his life, an identity he claimed as his family was falling apart.

Born Warren Wilhelm Jr. to an Italian-American mother and a German-American father, the future mayor asserted his Italian heritage as an adolescent. His father struggled with alcoholism, left the family and ultimately killed himself. Mr. de Blasio’s Italian relatives became increasingly important sources of support. In high school, he tried to start an Italian club, and he began using his mother’s maiden name, de Blasio. …

In an interview, Mr. de Blasio said his Italian roots had grounded him at a difficult time. “There was a strength, a warmth, a coherence in my mother’s family that was sort of the obvious antidote to me to what I was experiencing in the foreground of my life,” he said.

He said the connection began with a trip to Sant’Agata [village from where his grandfather immigrated] in the mid-1970s, when he was a teenager.

“Suddenly this world opened up to me,” he said. “There’s this whole other part of life that I had not understood, and it just rushed into my brain, and it was very compelling, it was very reinforcing, it was very reassuring.”

Mr. de Blasio’s love of Italy grew stronger over the years. He chose Italian names for his children, Chiara and Dante, and to this day, he stocks his kitchen with fresh mozzarella and bottles of red wine from southern Italy. Hoping to refine his accent, he practices his Italian with his barber, who also shares Italian newspapers with him.

Sant’Agata, with about 11,000 residents, is northeast of Naples, in an agricultural region with high unemployment. Mr. de Blasio has visited Sant’Agata half a dozen times in his life; his last trip was in 2010, with his wife and two children.”

Buona fortuna, Mayor-elect de Blasio!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York City Department of Education issued grades on its schools yesterday.  However, unlike previous years when educators, parents, and the news media frenzied over them, there was a much more subdued tone mainly because Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has vowed to do away with the school grading system.  As reported in the New York Times:

“On Wednesday, the Bloomberg administration released its last batch of grades for more than 1,600 public schools. Across the city, 63 percent of schools received A’s and B’s, and there were signs that schools were better preparing students for college.

But the announcement came with a sense of acquiescence, as Mr. Bloomberg, who staked his legacy on taking control of education in the city, prepares to hand over the school system to Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, an ardent critic of the mayor’s policies who has pledged to do away with the letter grades.

Mr. Bloomberg on Wednesday emphasized the system’s value for parents. “Getting it down to something that they can use, I think, is not making it too simplistic but, quite the contrary, I think it’s making it useful,” he said at an unrelated news conference, according to WNYC.

Mr. de Blasio has denounced the letter grades, which were introduced in 2007, as blunt instruments that do not convey a nuanced portrait of a school’s strengths and weaknesses.

Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio, said on Wednesday that letter grades offered “little real insight to parents and are not a reliable indicator of how schools are actually performing.”

Mr. de Blasio has said he would continue to make available the detailed report cards that accompany the letter grades given to schools each year, though he would convene a panel of parents and educators to determine whether they should continue in the long run.”

The article summed up the view of many educators and parents as follows:

“The reaction to Mr. Bloomberg’s final report cards was mixed. Some educators welcomed what they saw as the end of an era, while others said they thought it was important that the city not lose its focus on measuring results.

Elizabeth Phillips, principal of Public School 321, an elementary school in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said the school had always earned a grade of A or B. But she said the grades were “completely meaningless.”

“They fluctuate dramatically, from year to year, even when there are no significant changes in the instruction, or the leadership or the teaching staff,” said Ms. Phillips, who has led the school for 15 years.

At Public School 3, an elementary school in the West Village, parents were optimistic about how Mr. de Blasio could change the grading system. The school received an A this year, after earning C’s the two years prior.

“It does not paint the entire picture of any school,” Dana Abraham, a co-president of the school’s PTA, said.”

Assessment when done well can be meaningful for improving schools and education.  There are some good elements in the present system but the way the grades were used as a pillorying of public education left a lot to be desired.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This brief announcement appeared in today’s online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“The board that oversees California’s 112 community colleges approved a contract on Tuesday to spend $16.9-million on a “one-stop statewide online-education portal” that will let students take online courses from any of the state’s participating two-year institutions. The Foothill-De Anza and Butte-Glenn community-college districts created a partnership to win the portal contract, money for which was included in Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2013-14 budget.

More than half of California’s community colleges now offer a degree or certificate online, Foothill-De Anza officials said in a news release, and more than a quarter of the state’s community-college students take online courses. The goal of creating a single statewide system is to reduce overlap and take advantage of economies of scale, said Joseph Moreau, Foothill-De Anza’s vice chancellor for technology.

This sounds like a wise investment of resources.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jessica Siegel, a colleague of ours at Brooklyn College, has an op-ed in today’s New York Daily  News suggesting that mayor-elect Bill de Blasio seriously consider Kathleen Cashin for New York City Schools Chancellor.  Siegel comments;

“Cashin, currently a New York State regent, is a 35-year veteran teacher, principal and district superintendent in the city schools. She has shown the ability to turn around struggling schools, a commitment to bucking the current test obsession — and a refreshing talent for engaging parents.

After an impressive educational career teaching and serving as a principal in middle-class areas of Brooklyn, in 1998 Cashin took charge of Community School District 23 in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Despite initial resistance from the local school board because she was white, she won over the community.

She dismissed incompetent principals, established a consistent, rigorous curriculum and got down into the classroom level, observing teachers. Test scores rose; failure factories showed hope.

“We were successful in Brownsville because it was the parents, the teachers and the principals who were all pushing the same agenda,” she told a CUNY Graduate Center forum that I attended earlier this year. “If we taught a writing program in the schools, the parents were taught it at a retreat.”

I would second Siegel’s recommendation.  While at Hunter College, colleagues and I worked with Dr. Cashin on several projects involving the professional development of aspiring principals.  She was the consummate partner in our work:  smart, passionate, and committed to the students and teachers in District 23.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Barack Obama’s approval rating is down to its “lowest point ever” according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday. 

Just 39 percent of American voters approve of Obama’s job performance, down from 45 percent at the beginning of October. Fifty-four percent now disapprove.

For the first time, a majority thinks Obama is not “honest and trustworthy” — just 44 percent say he is, while 52 percent say he is not. Voters are about evenly split as to whether he has strong leadership qualities, and as to whether he “cares about the needs and problems of people like you.”

Trust in the federal government as a whole is also tied for a record low, with just 15 percent saying they trust politicians in Washington to do what is right most of the time or almost all of the time.

The Republicans can take little comfort in these results since a Huffington Post polling average puts the GOP’s favorable rating at just 28 percent,

In October, I posted about the incompetence of President Obama’s administration.  The performances of a number of federal agencies (Department of Health and Human Services implementation of Affordable Care aka Obamacare Act, NSA surveillance, IRS scandal, US Dept. of Education rushing the Common Core Curriculum) have all been problematic and  have shaken the confidence of the people in the President.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elizabeth Warren dominated a lot of the news yesterday as a potential Democratic presidential nominee. A number of evening talk shows also speculated on her potential candidacy.  Today she gave a major speech calling attention to the vulnerability of the American banking system.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned in a speech Tuesday that the problem of banks considered “too big to fail” has only gotten worse since the 2008 financial crisis, potentially sowing the seeds of a future crisis.

“Today, the four biggest banks are 30 percent larger than they were five years ago. And the five largest banks now hold more than half of the total banking assets in the country,” Warren said in a keynote address at a conference on the future of financial reform put on by the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank. “Who would have thought five years ago, after we witnessed firsthand the dangers of an overly concentrated financial system, that the ‘too big to fail’ problem would only have gotten worse?”

Warren urged the passage of a new Glass-Steagall Act that would separate commercial and investment banking. The Depression-era legislation was repealed in 1999 with huge bipartisan majorities, allowing depository institutions to undertake riskier securities trading. Warren, along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) have called to revive the legislation, but it stands little chance of passing.

In her speech, Warren urged those who oversee bank rules to set a timeline to address the problem of bank concentration. She has previously shamed bank regulators for their poor performance, asking them in congressional hearings to recount the last time they took a Wall Street bank to trial.”

Although there are almost two years before the presidential nomination process starts, Sen. Warren presents an interesting challenge/alternative to Hilary Clinton.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of an article in the New Republic on the speculation of Elizabeth Warren challenging Hilary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, The Huffington Post had a headline today that there are three words that strike terror in the hearts of Wall Street bankers and corporate executives: “President Elizabeth Warren”.

The anxiety over Warren grew Monday after the New Republic article suggested the bank-bashing Democratic senator from Massachusetts could mount a presidential bid in 2016 and would not necessarily defer to Hillary Clinton — who is viewed as far more business-friendly — for the party’s nomination.  As reported in Politico:

“And the fear is not only that Warren, who channels an increasingly popular strain of Occupy Wall Street-style anti-corporatism, might win. That is viewed by many political analysts as a slim possibility. It is also that a Warren candidacy, and even the threat of one, would push Clinton to the left in the primaries and revive arguments about breaking up the nation’s largest banks, raising taxes on the wealthy and otherwise stoking populist anger that is likely to also play a big role in the Republican primaries.

A spokesperson for Warren declined to comment on whether she would consider a presidential bid against Clinton, though Warren has previously said she has no plans to run. People close to Warren note that she signed a letter from female Democratic senators urging Clinton to run in 2016. And Warren associates, mindful of any appearance of creating the narrative of a Warren-for-president campaign, have corresponded with Clinton associates to stress that they didn’t fuel the New Republic story by Noam Scheiber.”

Interesting stuff!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The cover of the next edition of the New Yorker has an image of a contemplative Michael Bloomberg sipping on one of the oversized sodas he sought to ban, while descending the steps at the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall subway stop.  It is a priceless caricature of the outgoing mayor.

Tony