Dear Commons Community,

Two Republican governors, Mary Fallin of Oklahoma and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, have just signed laws pulling their states out of the Common Core State Standards initiative amid growing anti-Core sentiment around the country. As reported in The Washington Post:

 
“Fallin signed the law on Thursday, while Haley did it last week, joining Indiana in officially rejecting the Core. A few other states, including Florida, are considering whether to keep the standards or have already “rebranded” the standards by changing the name and deciding to create their own standardized tests for accountability purposes rather than use the Core tests now being designed by two multi-state consortia. Fallin, who had once supported the Core, said:

 
“We cannot ignore the widespread concern of citizens, parents, educators and legislators who have expressed fear that adopting Common Core gives up local control of Oklahoma’s public schools.”

 
What does this all mean for the future of the Core? The standards were adopted in 2010 and 2011, with the support of the Obama administration, by 45 states and the District of Columbia, and schools have been implementing them for a few years. Most of those states are keeping the standards, at least for now.”

 
It is unfortunate that the resistance is growing against the Common Core. The basic concept of the Common Core is good but the implementation in many states was rushed and poorly done.  The result has been a backlash among parents, teachers and conservative activists who see it as over-reach of the federal government’s involvement with education.  Arne Duncan and the U.S. Education Department share much of the blame for this.

 
Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Barack Obama indicated earlier this week that he will support a new proposal to dramatically revamp the federal student loan program. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“A bill proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would allow borrowers to potentially save thousands of dollars by giving them a chance to effectively pay off their high-rate existing loans in exchange for new loans that carry substantially lower interest rates.

 
The Obama administration initially was hesitant to fully embrace the bill because of disagreements over how to pay for it. But with mounting pressure from advocacy groups, and with a renewed political focus on issues confronting working families, the president has softened his opposition. Obama’s endorsement would be the latest recognition to date of the ascendance of Warren-style populism within the Democratic Party.
An administration official told The Huffington Post that Obama is expected to “call for passage of the refinancing bill” when it comes up for a vote, as it is scheduled to do next week.”

This is long overdue and a first step in reforming the federal student loan program.  However, it will need approval by the U.S. Congress.

Regardless, congratulations Senator Warren!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Maxine Greene, distinguished philosopher, scholar, and professor emerita at Teachers College, Columbia University, passed away on May 29, 2014 at the age of 96. She was the William F. Russell Professor Emerita in the Foundations of Education Department at Teachers College and was a philosopher-in-residence at the Lincoln Center Institute, the educational arm of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  As mentioned in her obituary, Maxine was:

“.. a self-proclaimed existentialist, and  served as an advocate for aesthetic education in American public schools for well more than half a century and remained committed to expanding creativity among children by encouraging them to imagine possibilities both within and beyond the classroom. Despite her unparalleled contributions to the field of education, Greene maintained that she was “always becoming.” Her tireless dedication as a teacher and mentor continues to inspire others who seek to improve education for all children.

Dr. Greene will be remembered as an exemplary scholar, inspirational educator, and visionary in educational research and practice.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

 
During World War II (1939-1945), the Battle of Normandy, which lasted from June 1944 to August 1944, resulted in the Allied liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany’s control. Codenamed Operation Overlord, the battle began on June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, when some 156,000 American, British and Canadian forces landed on five beaches along a 50-mile stretch of the heavily fortified coast of France’s Normandy region. The invasion was one of the largest amphibious military assaults in history and required extensive planning. Prior to D-Day, the Allies conducted a large-scale deception campaign designed to mislead the Germans about the intended invasion target. By late August 1944, all of northern France had been liberated, and by the following spring the Allies had defeated the Germans. The Normandy landings have been called the beginning of the end of war in Europe.

Commemorations of the 70th annniversary of D-Day are taking place all over Europe. The American stars-and-stripes will be raised at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach.  A full day of ceremonies  are planned across Normandy in honor of the troops, mainly US, British and Canadian, who risked or gave their lives in the liberation of German-occupied western Europe during World War II.

 
The History Channel has an excellent website devoted to D-Day with video, images, and other resources.

 
Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Seattle City Council voted earlier this week to put low-wage workers on a path over the next several years to earning a $15-per-hour minimum wage. This historic measure came after a five-month process that brought together business and civic leaders, unions and nonprofits in tough negotiations. But the real fuel for Seattle’s action came from a growing unease across the United States with income inequality. Other cities and states are looking at Seattle and thinking they need to something also.

Here in New York, City Council Speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan) said Tuesday that she is ready to convene hearings on the matter and would like to see the minimum wage bumped to $15 an hour in the city, nearly double the current statewide minimum of $8.

As reported in the New York Daily News, Mayor Bill de Blasio is supportive of this effort:

“De Blasio’s call for raising the minimum wage in the city is part of his “progressive” agenda to attack income inequality.  James Parrott of the Fiscal Policy Institute said New York is lagging behind other states in implementing a higher minimum wage, which he said could help stimulate the local economy. “Workers will stay on the job longer if they are better compensated,” he said. “They’re going to spend more in local stores.”

However, opponents say businesses would suffer.”

Increasing the minimum wage is long overdue.  Let”s do it New York!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

 
Today June 4th is the 25th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre when the Chinese government killed hundreds maybe thousands of students. After initially tolerating the student-led demonstrations in the spring of 1989, the Communist Party sent in troops to crush the display of public defiance. The government has never released a death toll from the violence, but estimates from human rights groups and witnesses range from several hundred to several thousand.

 
To many Chinese, the Tiananmen Square Massacre is a distant memory. The New York Times has an op-ed piece by Helen Gao, a young journalist in Beijing who comments:

 
“To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement.”

The Huffington Post has an article quoting the mother of one of the victims:

“Twenty-five years ago, Wang Nan took his camera and headed out to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where tens of thousands of people had gathered calling for democratic reforms. The 19-year-old told a friend he wanted to record history. Before he left his home late on June 3, 1989, he asked his mother “Do you think the troops would open fire?” She said she did not. Around three hours later, he was shot dead by soldiers.

As his 77-year-old mother, Zhang Xianling, prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of her son’s death, she is under around-the-clock surveillance by eight police and security officers.  Zhang said the level of scrutiny this year was unprecedented. As early as April, police officers barred foreign journalists, including Reuters reporters, from visiting her home.

“I find it ridiculous, I’m an old lady,” Zhang told Reuters by telephone. “What can I say (to reporters)? I don’t know any state secrets. All I can talk about is the matter concerning my son. What is there to be afraid of?”

 
Tony

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEYAS5U5Wuk[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and French economist Thomas Piketty sat down together with The Huffington Post for a nearly hour-long interview being broadcast on HuffPost Live for the first time Monday evening.

Warren, a Democrat, and Piketty each have authored books on inequality that have surged to the top of Amazon and The New York Times bestseller lists. Warren, a former professor whose work focused on bankruptcy, wrote A Fighting Chance, a memoir of her political rise and a plea for a playing field no longer tilted in favor of big banks, the wealthy and global corporations.

Piketty is the author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, a 700-page tome translated from French that has taken the publishing world by storm and turned the debate on inequality on its head. Piketty finds evidence that capitalism, absent aggressive tax policy, distributes income in a deeply unequal way, which compounds over time.

The wide-ranging discussion touched on  student debt, climate change, free trade, the role of labor unions and the link between inequality, political instability and war.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “de-identified” records of more than a million people who took part in the first year of massive open online courses offered by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been released to researchers, the two institutions said on Friday.

 
The institutions said the records had been “subjected to a careful process of de-identification: removing personally identifiable information, using best practices including aggregation, anonymization via random identifiers, and blurring to reduce individuality of sensitive data fields, among other techniques.”

 
“By sharing these de-identified data, we hope to show that we can protect information about individuals while still enabling replicable research about what works in online learning,” said Andrew Ho, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Mr. Ho and Isaac Chuang, a professor in MIT’s departments of electrical engineering and computer science and of physics, were the lead researchers in the effort to release data from the courses, offered through the two institutions’ edX platform.”

I have just downloaded the file and accompanying documentation and it appears realively easy to use. It is in EXCEL spreadsheet format and can easily be converted to SPSS. There are about twenty variables for each student record including country of origin, gender, course enrollment, etc.
This might be fertile ground for researchers interested in MOOC technology.

On the surface, this appears to be a good move on the part of Harvard and M.I.T.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Elizabeth Warren: A Fighting Chance. Warren is the senator from Massachusetts. A former Harvard Law School professor, she is the author of ten books, including All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, written with her daughter, Amelia Tyagi.  The New York Times Book Review commented that A Fighting Chance is:

 
“A potent mix of memoir and policy that makes politics seem like a necessary evil, and yet it’s impossible to read Warren’s story without thinking about her meteoric rise in the Democratic Party and those Warren groupies on Connecticut Avenue…The title of this book reminds us that this is about Warren’s fight. She is still the fiery advocate who called for a bureau to protect consumers or, as a second choice, ‘no agency at all and plenty of blood and teeth left on the floor.’”

 
I found the book very insightful both into Warren the person as well as Warren the advocate and senator. Her pasion for finance reform comes through in her writing. At times, she gets well into the weeds of the financial issues and Washington politics but not enough to want to stop reading.

 
It is June 1st and the summer reading period has officially begun.  If you like biography and politics, I recommend A Fighting Chance.

 
Tony