Dear Commons Community,

As states and school districts grapple with the issue of providing universal pre-K education, Oklahoma is emerging as a model for the rest of the country.  Every 4-year-old in Oklahoma gets free access to a year of high-quality prekindergarten. Even younger children from disadvantaged homes often get access to full-day, year-round nursery school, and some families get home visits to coach parents on reading and talking more to their children.

The research suggests that high-poverty parents, some of them stressed-out kids themselves, don’t always “attach” to their children or read or speak to them frequently. One well-known study found that a child of professionals hears 30 million more words by the age of 4 than a child on welfare.

So the idea is that even the poorest child in Oklahoma should have access to the kind of nurturing that is routine in middle-class homes. That way, impoverished children don’t begin elementary school far behind the starting line — and then give up.

President Obama called in his State of the Union address this year for a nationwide early education program like this, for mountains of research suggests that early childhood initiatives are the best way to chip away at inequality and reduce the toll of crime, drugs and educational failure. Repeated studies suggest that these programs pay for themselves: build preschools now, or prisons later.

Nicholas Kristoph reviewed many of these issues in his New York Times column yesterday and commented on Oklahoma:

“It’s promising that in Oklahoma, early education isn’t seen as a Republican or Democratic initiative. It is simply considered an experiment that works. After all, why should we squander human capacity and perpetuate social problems as happens when we don’t reach these kids in time?

“This isn’t a liberal issue,” said Skip Steele, a Republican who is a Tulsa City Council member and strong supporter of early education. “This is investing in our kids, in our future. It’s a no-brainer.”

Teachers, administrators and outside evaluators agree that students who go through the preschool program end up about half a year ahead of where they would be otherwise.

“We’ve seen a huge change in terms of not only academically the preparation they have walking into kindergarten, but also socially,” said Kirt Hartzler, the superintendent of Union Public Schools in Tulsa. “It’s a huge jump-start for kids.”

Oklahoma began a pilot prekindergarten program in 1980, and, in 1998, it passed a law providing for free access to prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds. Families don’t have to send their children, but three-quarters of them attend.

…The Oklahoma initiative is partly a reflection of the influence of George B. Kaiser, a Tulsa billionaire who searched for charitable causes with the same rigor as if he were looking at financial investments. He decided on early education as having the highest return, partly because neuroscience shows the impact of early interventions on the developing brain and partly because careful studies have documented enormous gains from early education.

So Kaiser began investing in early interventions in Oklahoma and advocating for them, and, because of his prominence and business credentials, people listened to the evidence he cited. He also argues, as a moral issue, that all children should gain fairer access to the starting line.

“Maybe the reason that rich, smart parents had rich, smart children wasn’t genetics,” Kaiser told me, “but that those rich, smart parents also held their kids, read to them, spent a lot of time with them.”

Congratulations to Oklahoma for its foresight and to the Kaisers of the world who use their wealth for the good of our children.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of one school district on Long Island,  more than 20 districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have pulled out of New York’s participation in the federal Race to the Top initiative, hoping that doing so will allow them to withhold certain data. As reported in The Journal News:

“Since the state has said that this strategy will not work, districts are now writing to inBloom directly and requesting that their student records be deleted.  Local superintendents adopted a document Friday outlining their concerns, including a model letter to inBloom stating that the company’s contract with New York state allows districts to request that their data be erased. If inBloom is unwilling to do so, the letter says, “you should immediately notify us so that we can consider next steps.”

inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data will be stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.”

The New York State Department of Education appears to be in deep trouble trying to stem a growing rebellion by parents and school districts against its reform policies.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A recent million-dollar settlement in California has stripped back the curtain on how “dark money” is secretly moved in and around electoral politics. Documents and interviews revealed how networks of nonprofits passed dark money — that is, money whose source is not disclosed to the public — from one to another to another to further obscure the original sources. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Examples of similar financial transfers uncovered by The Huffington Post, in addition to a host of examples reported by the Center for Responsive Politics and NPR, demonstrate that the California case is no isolated incident.

Networks of nonprofits are being created across the country, at the national and state levels, to secretly fund candidate and ballot initiative campaigns, according to tax documents and campaign records accessed through Guidestar, CitizenAudit.org and the National Institute for Money in State Politics. Their tactics are similar to the schemes adopted by the global rich to hide their wealth — except instead of avoiding tax collecting authorities, they’re trying to skirt disclosure laws.

The best known of these networks are those tied to the billionaire Koch brothers. Linking the groups together are two dark money hubs: the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which doled out as much as $182.2 million to other dark money groups from 2010 through 2012, and Freedom Partners, which gave $236 million to other dark money groups, including $115 million to the Center to Protect Patient Rights.”

But dark money networks have also grown at the state level. They played a notable role in the clashes over labor rights in Wisconsin and Ohio in 2011. One of the more troubling examples provided in the article related to Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysura (R) who forced Education Voters of Idaho to reveal the funders behind its efforts to pass a ballot initiative gutting collective bargaining rights for teachers. A court required the group to disclose its donors, which included New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Wyoming investor Foster Friess. The Republican Governors Public Policy Committee also contributed $50,000.

Big money, big influence, dark results for the American people.   Democracy at its worst!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Morgan Library & Museum is presenting an exhibit called “Leonardo da Vinci: Treasures From the Biblioteca Reale, Turin.” It is a one-room show that focuses on two sides of his life:  the scientist and the artist.   As described in  a New York Times review:

“From the Biblioteca Reale come studies of equine anatomy and human musculature. Scrupulously observed, these drawings could all easily qualify as textbook illustrations; at the same time, they served as raw material for Leonardo’s painting, early and late.

He brought his interests in nature and technology together in the extraordinary illustrated treatise called “Codex on the Flight of Birds,” which dates from around 1505 and is making its New York debut at the Morgan. Written in his lefty’s mirror script, it exhaustively describes the aerodynamics of avian flight, and simultaneously lays out a virtual how-to for giving humans wings.

The images of birds with which Leonardo peppers the text are at once exacting and charming: he draws whoosh lines around them to indicate the movement of air. But this record of observed fact is also a futuristic vision. After pages dense with data, it concludes with a prediction that one day “a great bird” will lift off from a mountaintop, “filling the universe with wonder, filling all literature with its fame, and with eternal glory the nest in which it was born.” The bird was a dreamed-of flying machine; its nest was his mind.

Nor was Leonardo’s interest in airborne phenomena restricted to science. The prize entry in the Morgan show is a portrait of an angel( see above). More precisely, it’s the metal-point drawing called “Head of a Young Woman,” which was probably done from life, as a study for the painting “The Virgin of the Rocks.”

…The face in the study is spacey… slightly androgynous, age uncertain (what would “young” mean here?), with the faintest hint of a smile (knowing and withholding, in that Mona Lisa way), and a sleepy, almost narcotic gaze. (The pupil of the left eye seems about to slide onto her face.)

Connoisseurs have been crazy about this image. Bernard Berenson declared it “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship.” Kenneth Clark called it one of the most beautiful drawings in the world. It is certainly beautiful, though with a complicated, slippery beauty, very different from that of, say, Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” with which the study shares features: a bust-length format, an over-the-shoulder pose and a viewer-engaging glance.”

I saw the exhibit yesterday and highly recommend it to admirers of da Vinci.  While there you might also want to take in the exhibit on Edgar Allen Poe.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Erik Bennett, a student in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, sent this piece to me that appeared on the Network for Public Education website. 

“David Gamberg, the enlightened and thoughtful superintendent of the Southold school district in Long Island, New York, wrote a letter to the president of inBloom and asked that the corporation remove any data pertaining to the students of his district.

For his willingness to say “no, not with our students,” David Gamberg is hereby added to the honor roll as a champion of American education. He has done the honorable thing. He has defended his students against commercial exploitation and defended their right to privacy and their right to be left alone by a government and a private sector that believes that privacy is dead. Not in Southold!

New York is one of the few states in the nation that has agreed to hand over all personal, confidential student information to inBloom.

inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data will be stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.”

Every school superintendent in New York and elsewhere would be wise to consider taking the same action as Mr. Gamberg.  For more information on inBloom, I posted about it in early October. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Charmaine Givens-Thomas, a 60-year-old Walmart worker in Evergreen Park, Ill., has started an online petition asking President Obama to meet with employees of the company.

“We would like for you to hear first-hand why [workers] are appealing for respect and calling on Walmart to pay them more to feed and support their families,” she wrote to the President in the petition. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Givens-Thomas announced the petition Thursday on a conference call organized by OUR Walmart, an advocacy organization with ties to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. The petition will be distributed by MoveOn, Credo, Sum of Us, Firedog Lake and other organizations in the coming days, according to Lynsey Kryzwick, a spokeswoman for OUR Walmart.

Givens-Thomas, who has worked at Walmart for almost eight years and makes $11 an hour, said she still relies on a food pantry and struggles to pay her bills.

“I’ve had my gas turned off because I have to make hard choices,” she said on the conference call. “Either you’re going to keep something like your lights on, or you’re going to keep the gas on. You shouldn’t have to make choices like that in America in 2013.”

Born and raised in Chicago, Givens-Thomas said that, at 15 years old, she marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Five years ago, when President Obama was elected, she was overjoyed. “I felt like we were closer to realizing King’s dream of good jobs and freedom,” she wrote in the petition.

However, “Walmart, the country’s largest employer, is helping to hold America back from this dream,” she wrote. “Like too many Americans, I cannot promise my grandchildren that they will have a brighter future than I had.”

This is a good cause.  Please take a minute to sign this petition and support Ms. Givens-Thomas and her co-workers at Walmart.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A review of election results on education issues nationwide  reveal a mixed bag of voter sentiment.  In Colorado, a referendum to levy new taxes to fund a major infusion of programs in public education was defeated even though it was promoted heavily by the teachers unions, the Gates Foundation .Michael Bloomberg, and others.  New York City the election of Bill de Blasio was  seen as a rebuke of the policies of Michael Bloomberg and “corporate school reform” policies that emphasized charter schools, testing, and teacher evaluations.  Two articles in the New York Times and the Huffington Post analyzed these issues.

An excerpt of the New York Times piece indicated little voter support for the Colorado referendum.

“They had $10 million in contributions, a barrage of advertising and support from the usually warring factions of the educational establishment. But Democratic leaders in this swing state were dealt a stinging defeat on Tuesday as voters resoundingly rejected an effort to raise taxes by $1 billion a year to pay for a sweeping school overhaul.

The outcome, a warning to Democrats nationally, was a drubbing for teachers unions as well as wealthy philanthropists like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Bill and Melinda Gates, who pumped millions of dollars into the measure, and it offered a sharp rebuke to Gov. John W. Hickenlooper and the Democratically led legislature, …The Obama administration also lent its support.

Had the referendum passed, the current flat state income tax rate of 4.6 percent would have been replaced with a two-tier system. Residents with taxable incomes below $75,000 would have paid 5 percent; taxable incomes above $75,000 would have been taxed at 5.9 percent. The measure would have poured money into poor, rural school districts, expanded preschool, bought new technology and encouraged local innovations like longer school days and school years, supporters said.

But the promise of higher teacher salaries and full-day kindergarten failed to resonate with voters, even in many reliably blue corners of the state and areas where the money would have had the greatest benefit. The state voted 65 percent to 35 percent against the overhaul, known as Amendment 66.”

In the Huffington Post article, besides the election of Bill de Blasio, several education issues were reviewed but perhaps the most provocative was a city school board election in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

“In Bridgeport, a hotbed of recent political fights over education, Democrats Dave Hennessey and Andre Baker, who oppose the leadership of superintendent Paul Vallas and Mayor Bill Finch, won.

Vallas has been called a “superstar” of the [corporate school] reform world, having overseen school systems in New Orleans, Chicago and Philadelphia. But this year, critics accused Vallas of ratcheting up standardized testing and cutting school services. The NEA worked to support the new candidates’ fight against Vallas, posting blogs with titles like, “Five signs that your superintendent stinks.”

All in all, no clear direction of a national mood on education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last Sunday, the New York Times had a special Education Life Section which featured several articles promoting the disruption of higher education.  I read the brief articles pertaining to the disruptions and thought that they were mildly provocative and considered posting about them on my blog  but then thought otherwise.  However, I received a number of emails from colleagues over the past two days asking if I had seen the articles and have now decided that maybe a brief response/posting would be in order.

First, the “new” higher education models in this special section which referred to competency-based education, degrees that are virtually free, and the Minerva School experiment (a blended low-cost degree for students who cannot afford the top-tier Ivy League colleges) are interesting experiments but not really earth shaking.  These colleges will attract some students but for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of college students will be educated at traditional colleges albeit with a lot more online technology.

Second, the article by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn, starts with the deficit premise that American higher education has a problem and needs to change despite the fact that several international rankings of higher education have place American colleges and universities at the top of their lists.  Christensen and Horn promote online learning technology as the vehicle for disruption.  There is no question that online learning is and will continue to change higher education but fortunately it has been an evolutionary change not a disruption.  Online learning has been evolving for several decades to the point where presently one-third of all college students (6  million plus) are now enroll in fully online courses.  Several million more are enrolled in blended courses.  The MOOC phenomenon of the past few years has added still several million more students, although the vast majority of these student are not taking their courses for credit.  There is nothing desirable about disruption. Nor is it necessary. It is a catchy descriptor promoted by some usually the technology industries and their agents who are basically profit-driven.  I suggest that if disruption is something desirable to the for-profit sector, leave it there and let American higher education continue on its evolutionary path.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

To no one’s surprise, Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City by a wide margin yesterday signaling the end of twenty years of Republican rule.  The outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg has had significant accomplishments during his tenure but it was time for a change.  The polls going into yesterday predicted de Blasio winning over Joe Lhota by a 40 percent margin and as of late last night, those polls proved correct.  With 97% of the precincts reporting, de Blasio held a commanding lead of 74% to 24% — the largest margin of victory by a nonincumbent in any mayor’s race in city history.

We wish Mayor-Elect de Blasio well and look forward to a new “progressive era” in New York City.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Voters in New York City will elect their first new mayor in twelve years.  While the polls heavily favor Democrat Bill de Blasio over Republican Joe Lhota, election outcomes should never be taken for-granted.  Today’s Daily News has a good summary of the final day of the campaign:

“The yearlong race for City Hall ended Monday with dueling visions for the future and a final volley of attacks as voters prepared to select the first new mayor in 12 years.

Unlike the breakneck final day of mayoral races past, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio had just three campaign events, the final at 3 p.m., reflecting confidence in polls that show him with an overwhelming lead.

The Democrat renewed his call for a dramatic break with Mayor Bloomberg’s policies, sticking with the themes that catapulted him from fourth place in the Democratic primary in July to the brink of history Tuesday.

“Together we will make this a city for everyone again,” he told a senior center in the Bronx. “The way that Mayor Bloomberg did things is not the only way to do things, I assure you.”

He added, “Joe Lhota has offered no vision of change, and that’s part of why I think the voters have been so cool to him.”

Lhota ended his campaign alongside his one-time boss, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, greeting evening commuters at two ferry terminals in lower Manhattan.

“A lot of people come up to me and (say), ‘I’m a Democrat, but I’m voting for you Joe,’” Lhota said. “It’s generally because they think (de Blasio’s) too far left in most of his opinions. They don’t like it.”

Giuliani offered his own testimonial.

“There is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. There’s no Republican or Democratic way to reduce crime. There’s only the right way to do it or the wrong way to do it,” Giuliani said. “And from the time I came into office, with Joe’s help, we literally turned the city around.”

VOTE!!!

Tony