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Dear Commons Community,

On this Palm Sunday, it might be an appropriate time to consider whether  Jesus Christ was married.   Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King says she has found an ancient papyrus fragment from the fourth century that, when translated, appears to indicate that Jesus was married.  The text is being dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” The part of it that’s drawing attention says, “Jesus said to them, ‘my wife'” in the Coptic language. The text, which is printed on papyrus the size of a business card, has not been scientifically tested to verify its dating, but King and other scholars have said they are confident it is a genuine artifact.

As quoted in The Huffington Post:

“Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,” King said at a conference in Rome on Tuesday. “This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus’s death before they began appealing to Jesus’ marital status to support their positions.”

King, who focuses on Coptic literature, Gnosticism and women in the Bible, has published on the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary of Magdala. She presented her research Tuesday evening in Rome, where scholars are gathered for the International Congress of Coptic Studies.

The idea that Jesus was unmarried and chaste is largely accepted by Christian denominations and a reason for the practice of celibacy among Roman Catholic priests.

“Beyond internal Catholic Church politics, a married Jesus invites a reconsideration of orthodox teachings about gender and sex,” said journalist and author Michael D’Antonio, who writes about the Catholic Church, in a blog on The Huffington Post. “If Jesus had a wife, then there is nothing extra Christian about male privilege, nothing spiritually dangerous about the sexuality of women, and no reason for anyone to deny himself or herself a sexual identity.”

The DaVinci Code anyone!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Students, teachers and at least 37 principals in Manhattan protested the state’s controversial Common Core tests Friday, saying the exams were full of poorly constructed questions.

“We are disappointed by the design and quality of this test, as well as the lack of transparency surrounding this process,” said Adele Schroeter, principal of Public School 59.

Advocates said all the schools in District 2, which covers most of the east side south of E. 97th St. and the west side south of 59th St., protested the exams administered last week.

The New York State Education Department has a major problem on its hands and seems to be in denial that there is a growing movement against the Common Core exams.  Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, had  an excellent op-ed piece in the New York Times highly critical of the tests administered last week in grades 3 through 8.  This should not be mistaken as a protest against the Common Core curriculum but against the tests designed by Pearson Education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Three hundred university leaders from around the world (mainly from the United States and Europe) are meeting in Paris to speculate on the future of higher education.  Organized by Princeton University and France’s Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, topics included enrollment growth, research, interdisciplinary study, and technology.  Here is a summary of the discussions  provided by The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required).

The number of higher-education students worldwide is expected to grow from 97 million in 2000 to 262 million in 2025, a demand that can’t be met under current models of higher education with the greatest growth in non-Western areas such as India and Africa.

Funding for higher education especially in the United States and Europe is being trimmed requiring students to bear larger portions of the costs.

Student goals and interests are shifting to a “return on investment” mentality that is leading many policy makers and others to question the value of a broad-based, liberal education.

Research needs to become more interdisciplinary and across institutions.

And what would a meeting of the future of higher education be without a discussion of MOOCs.   As in the United States, MOOCs experienced a period of breathless excitement in Europe and now face pushback.

In Britain, MOOCs went through a “cycle of hype,” said William Lawton, director of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a London-based research group…He said he hoped that now a more sober—and enlightened—conversation could start about how online courses, especially ones that include a portion of in-person teaching, can improve higher education.

“The future is basically blended,” he said.

Most definitely!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elizabeth Phillips, the principal of Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for 15 years, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times highly critical of the tests administered last week in grades 3 through 8 across New York State.  She states:

“In general terms, the tests were confusing, developmentally inappropriate and not well aligned with the Common Core standards. The questions were focused on small details in the passages, rather than on overall comprehension, and many were ambiguous. Children as young as 8 were asked several questions that required rereading four different paragraphs and then deciding which one of those paragraphs best connected to a fifth paragraph. There was a strong emphasis on questions addressing the structure rather than the meaning of the texts. There was also a striking lack of passages with an urban setting. And the tests were too long; none of us can figure out why we need to test for three days to determine how well a child reads and writes.”

Furthermore, she comments that educators across the state are prohibited from discussing details about the tests because:

“Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them. So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were…

We do not want to become cynics, but until these flawed exams are released to the public and there is true transparency, it will be difficult for teachers and principals to maintain the optimism that is such an essential element of educating children.”

Ms. Phillips makes fine points regarding testing in New York.  She joins many other educators across the state who are calling out and pleading with policy makers to examine the testing insanity that has been perpetuated on children and teachers in our schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Foreign profits held overseas by U.S. corporations to avoid taxes at home nearly doubled between 2008 to 2013.  to over $2.1 trillion.  GE tops the list, followed by Microsoft, Pfizer, Merck, Apple.  As reported by Reuters:

“Foreign profits held overseas by U.S. corporations … doubled from 2008 to 2013 to top $2.1 trillion, said a private research firm’s report, prompting a call for reform by the Senate’s top tax law writer.  The new numbers certainly highlight what is one of the key challenges for tax reform. I do think there need to be  some reforms in this area,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden told reporters on Tuesday on Capitol Hill.

Under U.S. law, corporations do not have to pay income tax on most of their overseas profits until they are brought into the United States. These earnings can be held offshore for years if they are classified as indefinitely invested abroad.

The research firm, Audit Analytics, said in a report issued last week that the total of such earnings was up 93 percent from 2008 to 2013, citing federal financial filings for companies listed in the Russell 1000 index of U.S. corporations.

Conglomerate General Electric Co had the biggest pile of earnings stored abroad, at $110 billion, the firm said.

Next were software maker Microsoft Corp, with $76.4 billion; drugmakers Pfizer Inc, with $69 billion, and Merck & Co Inc, with $57.1 billion; and high-tech group Apple Inc, with $54.4 billion, it said.

In response, GE said in a statement: “GE operates in more than 170 countries, and most of these overseas earnings have been reinvested in active business operations like manufacturing facilities and loans to non-U.S. customers.”

A Merck spokesman said the company files its tax returns in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.

A Microsoft spokesman referred questions to 2012 congressional testimony, in which company officials said it abides by foreign and U.S. tax laws.

In testimony in 2013 before Congress, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company is a large taxpayer and does not use tax gimmicks. Apple declined to comment on the new report.”

All of these companies operate within the law but  it is how they stretch the law that is the problem. Tax loopholes indeed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Republicans are not going to like the New Yorker’s latest cover.

In reference to  Obamacare’s recent victory of having achieved over 7 million subscribers, it shows President Obama feeding medicine to a little boy which in this case is Mitch McConnell.  Waiting on line for their medicine are Ted Cruz, John Boehner, and Michele Bachman.

Ouch!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This was sent to me by my colleague, Peter Shea, at SUNY Albany.  As reported in The Gainseville Sun:

“The University of Florida (UF) will pay Pearson Embanet an estimated $186 million over the life of its 11-year contract — a combination of direct payments and a share of tuition revenue — to help launch and manage the state’s first fully online, four-year degree program.

How UF evaluates how well Pearson does its job is unknown — the standards by which the contractor is measured are still being withheld from the public, such as minimum enrollment figures and total tuition levels.

UF officials maintained that those criteria are “trade secrets” exempt from state public records law.

“Per the General Counsel’s Office, the redacted information is confidential as a trade secret of Pearson, deriving independent economic value from not being generally known to, or readily ascertainable by, other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use,” Janine Sikes, the UF assistant vice president for media relations, said in an email to The Sun.

The Gainesville Sun pieced together what UF could wind up paying Pearson based on a business plan presented to the Florida Board of Governors in September, two months before UF Provost Joe Glover and Chief Financial Officer Matt Fajack signed a contract with Pearson Embanet CEO and President David Daniels.”

…Pearson Learning is part of an international publishing and media conglomerate that includes The Financial Times and Penguin Publishing. It entered the e-learning support field for public universities in 2010, starting with Arizona State University and the California State University System, according to Inside Higher Education.

It bought Embanet Compass in 2012 for $650 million — leapfrogging from fifth to first in providing online learning support for public colleges and universities, according to Inside Higher Education. UF had a prior relationship with Embanet supporting eight online graduate programs.

Under its new contract with UF, Pearson is responsible for creating “proprietary digital content,” providing admission and enrollment support, generating leads and signing new students, tracking retention rates, engaging in joint research and development, and providing on-demand student support.”

UF’s relationship with Pearson Embanet will be watched closely by the higher education community.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Education Department acknowledged earlier this week that it will reverse plans to store student data on a controversial cloud-based service called inBloom.

“As required by statute, we will not store any student data with inBloom and we have directed inBloom to securely delete the non-identifiable data that has been stored,” department spokesman Tom Dunn said.

The statement is an acknowledgement of recently passed state legislation that prohibits the state from giving student data to inBloom or other vendors to store and manage.

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 is stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.

Dunn said the department will continue to explore “alternative paths” to help schools access “secure and cost-effective educational technology tools that empower and support our teachers, students, and their families.”

The plan to use inBloom to manage extensive data on all students was widely criticized by parents and educators who were concerned about the security of the data and possible use of it by third-party vendors like inBloom. The Education Department maintained that the data was secure and that vendors were barred from selling or sharing it. 

Thank God that there are some sane officials in Albany that forced the NYS Education Department to take this action.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The entire faculty at P.S. 167 in New York City took a stand against standardized testing in an op-ed published by The Hechinger Report.  The piece decried standardized testing’s impact on their school. The teachers wrote that the tests have made students incredibly stressed and have detracted from students’ educational experiences.  Here is an excerpt:

“When they enter our school each fall, our sixth-graders write about their hopes and fears for middle school. This year, 35 percent said their greatest fear was failing the state tests. At one of the most socially difficult times of their lives, over a third of our children have more anxiety about standardized tests than any other issue.

…This year in our school, as in schools across the country, we have seen the number of standardized tests we are required to administer grow sharply, from 25 to more than 50 (in grades 6-10). In the next six weeks alone, each of our sixth-graders will be required to participate in 18 days of testing. The testing includes “3 days of state English tests, 3 days of state math tests, 4 days of new city English and math benchmark tests, and 8 days of new English, math, social studies and science city tests to evaluate teacher performance”

The faculty members wrote that they don’t oppose testing on principle.  However, they recommended that officials allocate resources toward developing other ways of assessing educational quality.   Furthermore,  they question an assessment system in which 70 percent of students are labeled “failing.”  “This is not a function of low performance, but a deliberate decision by the state to increase the number of students labeled “failing” in order to create more pressure on teachers and schools, and to gain public support for new—untested—reform initiatives. We question the collateral consequences of such a mechanism for educational change.”

Collateral damage indeed!

Tony

At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.  The night before his death, Dr. King spoke prophetically of his own death, noting the threats he was receiving.

“I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter to with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind,” he said. “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life–longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”