Dear Commons Community,

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed this morning on CBS’s Face the Nation by host Charlie Rose.  During the interview, the major questions directed at Mr. Cheney had to do with Russia’s “occupation” of the Crimea.  Cheney had a lot of tough talk but saved some of his barbs for President Obama as being weak and without credibility with our allies to do anything significant to stop the Russian aggression.

The hypocrisy of Mr. Cheney is on two issues.  First, as the architect of the lie that the war in Iraq was necessitated by the presence of weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Cheney effectively crippled American credibility for years to come with much of the rest of the world.  Tens of thousands of Iraqis, Americans, and American allies died during this war under the pretense of the need to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.

Second, in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, Vice President Dick Cheney decried Putin’s action, declaring that:

“Russian aggression must not go unanswered, and that its continuation would have serious consequences for its relations with the United States, as well as the broader international community.”

The irony is that Putin’s actions in Georgia did go unanswered. Russian intervention in Georgia was quick, decisive and brief — and he got away with it. For all the bellicose inclinations of the George W. Bush administration, there was no U.S. or European response of any substance. The international community quickly turned its attention to other matters, and Russia continues to occupy Georgian sovereign soil to this day.

So please Mr. Cheney, recognize that you and George W. Bush are the ones with the serious credibility problems when it comes to American foreign policy.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Each year, UNICEF Germany and GEO Germany grant the “UNICEF Photo of the Year Award” to photos and photo series that best depict the personality and living conditions of children worldwide in an outstanding manner.

Swedish Photographer Niclas Hammarström is the winner for 2013. He is honored for his photo series on the life of children in the war-torn Syrian town of Aleppo.

UNICEF chose a haunting image of an injured and bleeding Syrian child named Dania (above), to underscore just how desperate the situation is for the youngest of refugees.

It has been nearly three years since the conflict started in Syria, but the grave crises children face there are no less severe today. The image depicts Dania, then 11 years old, being cradled in her brother’s hands after she was hit by shrapnel while playing in the street in Aleppo.   As described in a Huffington Post article:

“Dania’s expression is oddly serene despite the smatterings of blood strewn all over her face and clothing. It’s a stark reminder of how common such violence and suffering has become.

“[It’s] the face of an injured and severely traumatized child,” Daniela Schadt, patroness of UNICEF Germany, said in a statement. “The look on the child’s face is an appeal to the international community to strengthen its diplomatic and humanitarian efforts in order to prevent the loss of an entire generation of children.”

According to UNICEF, almost half of children in Syria live in an acute state of emergency, and few children have not faced violence or lost a family member.

In addition to enduring tumultuous violence, Syrian children are in danger of becoming a “lost generation,” since so many are being deprived of education and other basic necessities.

Before the crisis began in March 2011, an estimated 97 percent of elementary school-age children were enrolled in school and literacy rates surpassed the regional average, according to a UNICEF report released last December.

As of that month, there were 4.8 million Syrian children of school age. In Syria, 2.2 million of them were not in school, while more than half a million refugee children were not in school outside of Syria.”

This photo is sad reminder of a situation where violence knows no age.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democrats have this predilection to shoot themselves in the foot whenever they have the upper hand in American political arenas.  Here in New York, for the first time in twenty years, there is a Democratic mayor (Bill de Blasio) and a Democratic governor (Andrew Cuomo) and the two cannot get along. It actually appears that Governor Cuomo is doing everything possible to stymie de Blasio’s initatives.  This issue is the subject of a New York Times article today which describes the relationship as follows:

“In his first two months in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio has found himself repeatedly at odds with New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo. And at every turn, Governor Cuomo has not only stymied the mayor, but also seized the moment for his own gain.

As the mayor has pushed for a tax increase on New York City’s wealthiest residents, the governor has turned the tables and talked up his desire to cut taxes. When the mayor proposed raising the minimum wage in the city, the governor derided the idea as illogical.

Even the mundane municipal matter of snow removal became fodder for a Cuomo tweak; at one point, the governor seemed to imply that Mr. de Blasio had not stocked up on enough salt to respond to a recent blizzard.

Mr. Cuomo took advantage again this week, styling himself as a champion of charter schools just as Mr. de Blasio took steps to curb their expansion. On Tuesday, he displayed an unusual verve in whipping up a crowd of thousands of charter school parents and students who gathered for a rally outside the Capitol.”

We are a little more than two months into de Blasio’s term as mayor.  Governor Cuomo should be supporting his Democratic colleague not looking to undercut his initiatives.  They both need to compromise and find common ground to benefit the people of New York.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Coleman’s announced changes to the College Board’s SATs earlier this week reverberated throughout the country yesterday.  Besides describing the changes to the tests:  Coleman was quoted as saying that:

“It is time to admit that the SAT and ACT have become disconnected from the work of our high schools,” he said. “Too many feel that the prevalence of test prep and expensive coaching reinforces privilege rather than merit.

“It is time for the College Board to say in a clear voice that the culture and practice of costly test preparation … drives the perception of inequality and injustice in our country,” Coleman said. “It may not be our fault but it is our problem.”

The Huffington Post in an article this morning provides a graph derived from a 2013 College Board report which illustrates the high correlation of SAT scores to family income.  For example, the data show 130 points difference in the mean scores in critical reading; 124 points in mathematics; and 144 points in writing between students at the lowest income levels versus those in the highest income levels.  The article comments:

“It’s no wonder the College Board felt a need to do so [change the SAT]. According to data provided last year by the College Board itself, the real secret to higher SAT scores is richer parents.

That stark correlation between family income level and SAT score underscores one of the major criticisms of the test: that as previously constructed, it gave wealthy parents the ability to pay for expensive test preparation courses in order to better prepare their children for the test, an advantage unavailable to many low-income youths.’

While this is a step in the right direction for the College Board, it is naïve to think that parents of means will not figure out a way to give their children an advantage with the newly designed test.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Rutgers University New Brunswick Faculty Council approved a resolution yesterday urging the university’s Board of Governors to rescind its invitation to Condoleeza Rice to speak at commencement.  The Board of Governors voted earlier this month to award an honorary Doctor of Laws degree to Rice, who served as Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. She will be paid $35,000 for her commencement address.  According to the Star-Ledger/New Jersey News:

“…the faculty council cited her war record and her misleading of the public about the Iraq war as reasons for their opposition.

“Condoleezza Rice … played a prominent role in (the Bush) administration’s effort to mislead the American people about the presence of weapons of mass destruction,” according to the resolution. And she “at the very least condoned the Bush administration’s policy of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ such as waterboarding,” it said.

“A Commencement speaker… should embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship,” it continued, and “an honorary Doctor of Laws degree should not honor someone who participated in a political effort to circumvent the law.”

Though a largely symbolic measure, the resolution is intended to voice the opposition on campus. Several petitions are circulating, one with at least 100 faculty signatures, some faculty said.”

This isn’t the first time that Dr. Rice created a controversy at a commencement.   In 2006,  while giving the commencement address at Boston College, students and faculty stood and turned their backs to her.

Congratulations are in order for the stance that the Rutger’s faculty have taken in their opposition to Dr.  Rice.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Coleman, in announcing the redesign of the College Board’s SAT, made several provocative comments regarding the problems with his “big test”.  Among the changes to be instituted will be a return to the 1600-point scoring system, a test based more on the Common Core Curriculum, fee waivers for low-income students, and an effort to negate unfair test-preparation. Here are excerpts of the announcement as reported in a Huffington Post article:

“The changes are meant to mitigate the unfair test-prep culture the SAT has engendered, to foster more meaningful learning in school, and to make the testing process more open, Coleman said in the prepared text of his speech.

Coleman condemned the old SAT and its competitor, the ACT, calling them out of touch, and sometimes inadvertent culprits in creating educational inequity.

“We plan to make an exam that is clearer and more open than any in our history,” Coleman said in the speech. “We need to get rid of the sense of mystery and dismantle the advantages that people perceive in using costly test preparation…”

“It is time to admit that the SAT and ACT have become disconnected from the work of our high schools,” he said. “Too many feel that the prevalence of test prep and expensive coaching reinforces privilege rather than merit.

“It is time for the College Board to say in a clear voice that the culture and practice of costly test preparation … drives the perception of inequality and injustice in our country,” Coleman said. “It may not be our fault but it is our problem.”

We thank Mr. Coleman for his candid comments.  I don’t know that the new revamped SAT will solve the problems he has rightfully identified.  It would be good if our education policymakers in the US Department of Education and our state education departments came to the same realization that most standardized testing does not assess learning but perpetuates the inequalities that exist in our education systems.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As predicted for the past week, Albany was the stage for demonstrations pitting Bill de Blasio signature education initiative to establish universal pre-K against Eva Moskwitz’s charter school advocates.   Never was their battle more clear than yesterday, where each took part in simultaneous rallies.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The rallies, which took place on a Lobby Day, one of the days when unions, businesses and other groups descend on Albany to push their agenda for the year, highlighted not only the rivalry between the mayor and Ms. Moskowitz, but also his deepening disagreements with the governor on education.

Mr. Cuomo was aligned with [former mayor] Mr. Bloomberg on most school issues and in his budget has offered to help charter schools win more state money. While Mayor de Blasio wants a tax on high-earning city residents to pay for expanded preschool and after-school programs, the focus of his rally on Tuesday, the governor has proposed to pay for preschool without a tax, a plan the mayor calls unreliable and inadequate.

The mayor and governor talked privately after the rallies, a meeting Mr. de Blasio later described as cordial but achieving no breakthroughs. He also said he did not think the governor’s appearance at the charter rally was tantamount to a protest of the mayor.

“We had a big strong rally here of folks who believe in our pre-K and after-school plan who then went out and lobbied legislators for the rest of the day,” he said, referring to his own event. “I’m very comfortable that we took another step forward.”

While she did not speak at the charter rally, the star was clearly Ms. Moskowitz, well-financed and voluble, who once compared a space fight in a Harlem school to a “Middle East war.”

In the crowd, Ms. Moskowitz, …mingled with thousands of people from over 100 charters around the state. Many were from her own 22 schools, which she let out for the day so the pupils and their parents could be bused to the capital. The advocacy group that organized the rally, Families for Excellent Schools, recently started a multimillion-dollar television ad campaign praising charter schools and calling on the mayor not to hold them back.”

Without a doubt, Ms. Moskowitz has become the face of the charter school movement in New York.  However, she carries some baggage with her.  As described in the Times article:

“She [Moskowitz] has also attracted notice for her salary, $475,000, partly paid by donors, and roughly double what the chancellor earns. “The irony of what is going on is, here is a woman who makes quite a substantial living on the ability to create schools by pushing thousands of children out of their school buildings, and now she is upset that someone is pushing back on her,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the city teachers’ union.

The mayor’s office noted that while it canceled plans for three Success charter schools last week, it allowed five more to open as planned. It said that it withdrew space from the three not out of animus toward Ms. Moskowitz, but because those schools would have placed elementary school students with high school students or cut programs for students with disabilities.”

Mayor de Blasio is right on this issue and has shown balance and moderation in his school building space proposals.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article this morning reporting on a workshop titled, Big Data Privacy, sponsored by M.I.T. and the White House.  M.I.T. is hosting the event because it finds itself sitting on a wealth of student data that researchers might use to compare the efficacy of virtual teaching methods, and perhaps advance the field of Web-based instruction.  As reported:

“Since its inception several years ago, for instance, MITx (M.I.T.’s open learning platform) has attracted more than 760,000 unique registered users from about 190 countries, university officials said. Those users have generated 700 million interactions with the school’s learning system and have contributed around 423,000 forum entries, many of them quite personal.

As researchers contemplate mining the students’ details, however, the university is grappling with ethical issues raised by the collection and analysis of these huge data sets, known familiarly as Big Data, said L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T.

For instance, he said, serious privacy breaches could hypothetically occur if someone were to correlate the personal forum postings of online students with institutional records that the university had de-identified for research purposes.

“How do we set the boundaries, and balance the competing interests?” Dr. Reif asked in a public talk on Monday morning. “If you believe in the potential of digital learning, you have to care about the larger question: How can we harness this flood of data to generate positive change — without destroying the very idea of privacy? Parallel questions hover over our work in field after field.”

The issues being raised at this workshop are indeed important.  First, Internet-based online learning has been evolving for almost twenty years. There is already a good deal of research on the efficacy of online and blended learning environments including student and faculty interactions.  The introduction of massive open online courses, however, has generated a whole other level of scale that should be studied.  Second, the issue of privacy in the “online classroom” has had much less study and ethical issues rightfully should be examined.  Faculty and students need to have some say as to whether their course interactions are to be subjected to study either internally by administration or externally by researchers. On the latter issue, I would erred on the side of caution given the problems of privacy in commerce, social media, and government that have exploded in the past several years.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In an interview published in The Washington Post, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai expressed anger at the U.S. government for a war that is “not ours”.

“To the American people, give them my best wishes and my gratitude. To the U.S. government, give them my anger, my extreme anger” Karzai said.

When asked whether the war has been worth the costs, Karzai told the paper:

“I am of two hearts here. When I see good, I am in approval. When I see the losses of Afghan people, our children, maimed and killed, I’m in disapproval,” he said, speaking in English. “Maybe I can give you an answer of yes or no two, three or five years from now, when my emotions have subsided. Right now, I’m full of emotions.’’

Karzai has long expressed anger over civilian casualties caused by American attacks, and he has delayed signing a security agreement that would allow some U.S. forces to remain in Afghanistan after 2014. President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to prepare for a full troop withdrawal at the end of 2014 should an agreement remain unsigned.

The war in Afghanistan will go down in history as another failed intervention by the United States.   As of February 28, 2014, in addition to the tens of thousands of Afghanistan soldiers, police and civilians killed, the United States Department of Defense  lists 2,175 service members as having died. What a sad waste of life.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In its editorial today, the New York Daily News referred to CUNY as “the biggest and best pubic university system in America” and congratulated it “for catching one of America’s biggest academic fish: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman”.   The full text of the editorial is below.

Tony

============================

New York Daily News Editorial

March 3, 2014

Kudos to CUNY, the biggest and best urban public university system in America, for catching one of America’s biggest academic fish: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman of Princeton is joining the faculty next year.

You need not be an enthusiast of Krugman’s politics or a devoted reader of his oft-polarizing New York Times column to welcome his arrival. As an economist, the man is a giant. For his work on the mechanics of trade, he has racked up just about every imaginable honor.

So why leave the green, private pastures of Princeton to pound the humbler public pavement of CUNY? Krugman leapt at the chance to work with other great scholars, including the satellite office of what’s called the Luxembourg Income Study Center — a tremendous, sophisticated repository of what people in nations all over the world earn, what taxes they pay, and the economic decisions they make.

Plus, at age 61, “I realized that it’s time to take a hard look at where I really want to be at this point,” and “I truly do love New York.” See, the guy is smart.