Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Department of Education has labeled 40 schools in New York City “persistently dangerous.”

The state released its latest list of unsafe schools on Tuesday. Of the 47 schools on the 2013 to 2014 list, 40 of them are located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx or Staten Island.

The state labeled 33 schools persistently dangerous on the 2012 to 2013 list, and just 25 were located in New York City. Nine of the schools on last year’s list were on this year’s as well.

In order to compile the list, the state uses a formula that compares the number of violent incidents that took place at a school with the total number of students, according to the New York Post.

A state education spokesman said that the increase in the number of schools deemed persistently dangerous is due to better reporting by schools, not more violence. “We do not believe that schools are more dangerous now,” said the spokesman, Tom Dunn.

Marge Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education, told the New York Daily News that school safety has actually improved, noting that the number of arrests and suspensions made in city schools has decreased.

“The safety of our students comes first,” Feinberg said. “Crime in New York City’s schools has decreased significantly in recent years.”

Safety indeed needs to come first!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A New York Times editorial today calls on President Obama to take executive action against corporations that avoid paying taxes by moving capital to foreign countries. It also takes issue with the banks that are the enablers of these companies. The editorial specifically mentions several of the most flagrant companies:

“Shortly before Congress recessed last week for a month-long break, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report and held hearings on “basket options,” financial products created by Barclays and Deutsche Bank and used by prominent hedge funds to dodge billions of dollars in taxes, according to the subcommittee. The inquiry follows earlier subcommittee investigations into rampant tax-avoidance tactics at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Caterpillar. The hit to the United States Treasury is severe: According to a study cited at an Apple hearing last year by the subcommittee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, 30 of the largest American multinationals, with more than $160 billion in profits, “paid nothing in federal income taxes over a recent three-year period. Zero.”

The full editorial is posted below.

The greatest hypocrisy is that several of these companies such as Microsoft then set up foundations that provide grants that are but a small fraction of the taxes that they have not paid.

Tony

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

New York Times Editorial

August 7, 2014

Evidence of excessive corporate tax avoidance keeps piling up. And so do Congress’s excuses, mainly from Republicans, for not doing anything to curb it.

Shortly before Congress recessed last week for a month-long break, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report and held hearings on “basket options,” financial products created by Barclays and Deutsche Bank and used by prominent hedge funds to dodge billions of dollars in taxes, according to the subcommittee. The inquiry follows earlier subcommittee investigations into rampant tax-avoidance tactics at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Caterpillar. The hit to the United States Treasury is severe: According to a study cited at an Apple hearing last year by the subcommittee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, 30 of the largest American multinationals, with more than $160 billion in profits, “paid nothing in federal income taxes over a recent three-year period. Zero.”

The congressional summer recess also came before lawmakers took action on either of two Democratic bills to stop a rising wave of “inversions.” That’s the process whereby an American corporation acquires a company in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands or elsewhere in order to reincorporate abroad and cut its American taxes — even as its headquarters, officers, most of its shareholders and much of its business remain in the United States.

Inversions completed to date are expected to sap the Treasury of nearly $20 billion in taxes in the next decade. And that’s just the beginning. At a recent hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, the Democratic chairman, Ron Wyden, said that up to 25 companies, encouraged by big banks that earn lucrative fees on the deals, are currently considering relocating overseas to cut their tax bills.

An ideal solution would be for American and European leaders to forswear competition based on relative tax advantages as bad for everyone. Unfortunately, that would require a level of cooperation and leadership that is nowhere to be found. In the meantime, Congress could stop today’s most egregious tax avoidance tactics if a majority of members wanted to.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) has an article that examines the fragile financial situation of three major for-profit higher education providers – ITT, Education Management Corporation, and Corinthian. The major causes for this fragility are enrollment declines and increased scrutiny from federal agencies or  state attorney generals or both. The article details the specific issues at each of the three above mentioned providers.

“At Corinthian, the issue was cash flow. The company was so pressed that when the department in June took the unusual step of delaying disbursements of federal student aid for 21 days, Corinthian revealed that, without the federal money, it wouldn’t be able to pay its bills and its creditors weren’t willing to lend it any more money. The announcement set in motion the series of events that led to the deal to effectively shut the company down.

Education Management has a debt problem—about $1.3-billion worth. And the payments it owes on that debt, particularly the balloon payments coming due in the next couple of years, are too big for the amount of revenue it now generates. (It took on most of the debt back in 2006, when Goldman Sachs Capital Partners led a buyout of the company with lots of borrowed money.) Now Goldman Sachs, which still owns a sizable share of EDMC, finds itself negotiating with another Wall Street titan, KKR, over the debt terms. You can read about some of the juicy machinations of this Goldman Sachs-KKR conflict in a New York Post article from July.

Then there is ITT, whose chief executive, Kevin M. Modany, just announced plans to resign. The company has a cash-flow problem too, but unlike Corinthian, it has nothing to do with anything the department has done. ITT’s injuries are more self-inflicted.  For years the company had been the guarantor of a private loan program for its students. That required it to make payments to a trust to make up for amounts that student borrowers didn’t pay when they defaulted on their loans. (The high-cost loan program is also the focus of a lawsuit that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has filed against ITT.) And the rates of those defaults were high. ITT had been setting aside money to make those payments, which will amount to about $200-million for the rest of 2014 and 2015.

But it hadn’t formally accounted for those payments on its balance sheet. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission cried foul on the practice and ordered the company to treat the loans as part of its core business. But ITT has yet to issue updated financial reports showing the impact of that change on its books. (In fact, it hasn’t filed any quarterly or annual reports since September 30, 2013.) The company also failed to produce an audited financial statement by a June 30 deadline, which put it in violation of department regulations. That alone could allow the department to require ITT to post a letter of credit, which the company has said would cost it $98-million.”

At the start of this century, for-profit colleges and universities emerged with great promise for providing higher education to many students who would have difficulty in being admitted into traditional colleges. Now they are the focus of student loan abuse, enrollment declines, and financial collapse.  They brought these situations upon themselves.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Below is a call to action from leaders of the AFT, NYSUT,  and UFT regarding Campbell Brown and the lawsuit, Wright v. New York that challenges teacher tenure.

Tony

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

Dear Colleagues,

Teachers are under attack again. And we need your help to fight back. Last Monday, former journalist Campbell Brown announced a lawsuit in New York that is going after teachers’ job protections.   That lawsuit, Wright v. New York, is a copycat of Vergara v. California. Campbell Brown’s organization—ironically named the Partnership for Educational Justice—has hired some of the fanciest PR firms in the country to sell their snake oil, including the firm that ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 online campaign. We need to make sure our friends, neighbors and allies understand who Campbell Brown is, and who she really represents.

Campbell Brown and her friends want to sell you the same “blame teachers” line we’ve seen from Michelle Rhee and right-wing politicians for years. They’ll tell you tenure means a job for life and that due process makes it impossible to dismiss ineffective teachers. Now, emboldened by a radical ruling in California, they’re spreading this misinformation across the country, starting in New York. Their claims couldn’t be further from the truth. In New York, teachers are granted tenure—and due process protections—after three years of success in the classroom. Once your boss grants you tenure, due process simply means he or she must produce just cause to discipline or terminate you. Due process gives teachers the protections to speak up for their students, stop cronyism and innovate in the classroom.   At our convention, delegates said enough is enough. We passed a special order of business to fight back so we could move our country forward. We need to stand together now.   It may seem like a small act, but sharing this story is important. Campbell Brown and her friends will spend millions of dollars on slick PR to confuse people and put the blame on teachers and our unions. She’ll say she’s fighting to represent students and parents. We need to make sure our friends hear the truth about who she represents.

We’re going to fight this with everything we’ve got. In New York, the New York State United Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers are already mobilized. We’ll fight alongside them in the courts, on the ground and in the media. But we have to start by making sure people know what’s really going on. You can make a difference, just by sharing this story and telling your friends what’s happening.

In unity,

Randi Weingarten AFT President

Karen Magee NYSUT President

Michael Mulgrew UFT President

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a travel day for me and arrived in Boston last evening. I am here for a visit at UMass, Boston, to evaluate an Ed.D/Ph.D program focusing on Leadership in Urban Schools.

I have not been to Boston in about 7-8 years and am happy to say that one of America’s great northeastern cities is looking good. I took my first cab ride in The Big Dig officially known as the Central Artery/Tunnel Project (CA/T) and it is a tremendous improvement over my recollections of traveling from Logan Airport to Boston’s central city. The Big Dig was quite controversial during its construction mainly because of cost overruns but it is a far better alternative than an above ground or elevated highway. For those of us who live in New York, think about what the Cross-Bronx Expressway would look like on Broadway or 42^nd Street.

I am looking forward to my visit at UMass and meeting with students, faculty, and administrators..

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Wall Street Journal editorial page blasted Republicans yesterday for positioning themselves as “the party of maximum deportations”.

House Republicans late Friday night had succeeded in passing two immigration bills — one measure that would strip protections from the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers and a funding bill meant to address the influx of 57,500 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Republican leaders pulled a previous funding bill on Thursday, the last scheduled day before the House’s August recess, due to objections from conservatives that it didn’t go far enough. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The Journal’s sharply worded op-ed (subscription required) scolded the GOP “Deportation Caucus” for putting on a “screaming match on the floor in full view of the national media” and lamented the party’s message to minorities ahead of the midterm elections.

“House Republicans may have scrambled enough on Friday to save themselves from a total meltdown. But this latest immigration debacle won’t help the party’s image, which is still recovering from the government shutdown debacle of 2011. A party whose preoccupation is deporting children is going to alienate many conservatives, never mind minority voters,” the op-ed read.

The Journal’s editorial page pointed out that the last-minute drama on the House floor drew attention away from the Senate, which was unable to marshal enough votes to move its own bill addressing the border crisis.

“This Democratic use of border children as midterm-election pawns should be the story, but instead the Deportation Republicans played into Mr. Obama’s hands,” the op-ed said. “Right on cue, the President held a press event on Friday at the White House that tattooed the GOP for refusing to solve the problem they claim is a crisis. The truth is that Mr. Obama doesn’t even care if the border bill passes. What he really wants is the immigration issue to bash Republicans and drive Hispanic and other minority turnout in states like Colorado that could determine Senate control.”

The op-ed also noted that House Republicans had finally come full circle — by endorsing the message that failed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney delivered in 2012″

The Republicans once again prove themselves to be “the party of NO”.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Warren Bennis, one of the leading scholars on leadership and organizations, died yesterday in Los Angeles. Anyone who ever studied leadership regardless of the discipline or perspective would have probably come across one or more of his books or articles. Here is an excerpt from his New York Times obituary:

“Warren Bennis was born in the Bronx on March 8, 1925. He grew up in Westwood, N.J., during the Great Depression. In 1933, his father, a shipping clerk, was fired “with no appeal and no justification,” Professor Bennis recalled in an interview for this obituary in February.

“I was struck at how he was left in a situation where you are helpless, where the next morning you are out of work,” he added. “For the next three or four months, he was loading illegal booze on the Mafia’s trucks to keep food on the table.”

The experience taught him about the power of organizations and their impact on lives. “That will never happen to me,” he recalled thinking. “I will never lose my power to affect my own life.”

…

In his influential book “On Becoming a Leader,” published in 1989, Professor Bennis wrote that a successful leader must first have a guiding vision of the task or mission to be accomplished and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failure. Another requirement, he said, is “a very particular passion for a vocation, a profession, a course of action.”

“The leader who communicates passion gives hope and inspiration to other people,” he wrote.

Integrity, he said, is imperative: “The leader never lies to himself, especially about himself, knows his flaws as well as his assets, and deals with them directly.”

So, too, are curiosity and daring: “The leader wonders about everything, wants to learn as much as he can, is willing to take risks, experiment, try new things. He does not worry about failure but embraces errors, knowing he will learn from them.”

But Professor Bennis said he found such leadership largely missing in the late 20th century in all quarters of society — in business, politics, academia and the military. In “On Becoming a Leader,” he took aim at corporate leadership, finding it particularly ineffectual and tracing its failings in part to corporate corruption, extravagant executive compensation and an undue emphasis on quarterly earnings over long-term benefits, both for the business itself and society at large.

He worried until recently about what he called a “leadership vacuum” in America, a problem he said was caused to a great extent by a lack of high-quality leadership training at the nation’s business schools.

A dearth of visionary business leaders, he said, meant that companies were being led more by managers of the bottom line than by passionate, independent thinkers who could steer an organization effectively.

“We are at least halfway through the looking glass, on our way to utter chaos,” he wrote in “On Becoming a Leader.” “When the very model of a modern manager becomes C.E.O., he does not become a leader, he becomes a boss, and it is the bosses who have gotten America into its current fix.”

Wise words from a wise leader.  May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Eight for-profit-college companies received nearly a quarter of all the money spent on Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits in 2012-13, says a report released earlier this week by Sen. Tom Harkin and the Senate education committee’s Democratic majority. And even as the for-profit colleges’ overall enrollments fell from 2009 to 2013, the document asserts, their enrollments of veterans “dramatically increased.” As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The top recipient was the Apollo Education Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, which received $272-million in Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits in 2012-13, more than triple the $77-million it received in 2009-10. The Education Management Corporation was second with $163-million in 2012-13, and ITT Educational Services, with $161-million, was third. The other companies, in order of the value of benefits received, were the DeVry Education Group, the Career Education Corporation, Corinthian Colleges Inc., Strayer Education, and Universal Technical Institute Inc.

Of the top 10 recipients of Post-9/11 GI Bill funds, the University of Maryland system was the only public institution; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University was the only private, nonprofit institution.”

The Executive Summary of the Harkin Report is available below.

Tony

Executive Summary

Almost three years ago the HELP Committee determined that eight of the top 10 recipients of veterans’ educational benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits were large, publicly traded companies that operate for-profit colleges. A new analysis shows that in the program’s fourth year, enrollment of veterans in for-profit colleges has again increased sharply, in tandem with a steep decline in the share of veterans’ enrolling in public institutions, even though overall student enrollment in for-profit colleges has declined. Taxpayers continue to spend twice as much on average to send a veteran to a for-profit college although HELP Committee analysis shows that up to 66 percent of the overall students who enrolled at these for-profit colleges in 2008-09 withdrew without a degree or diploma. Additionally, some companies operating for-profit colleges appear to be increasingly dependent on Post-9/11 GI Bill funds to comply with federal requirements intended to ensure that these companies do not become overly reliant on federal education resources.

•For-profit colleges received $1.7 billion in Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits during the 2012-13 academic year –almost as much as the total cost of the program just four years earlier.

•Eight of the top 10 recipients of Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits are large, publicly-traded companies that operate for-profit colleges. These eight companies have received $2.9 billion in taxpayer dollars to enroll veterans in their for-profit colleges over the past four years, including 23 percent of all Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits ($975million) in 2012-13.

•Amongst the top recipients of Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits is Corinthian Colleges, Inc. Corinthian received $186 million in Post-9/11 GI Bill funds from 2009 to 2013, yet recently announced it was in such severe financial distress that it would close or sell all campuses. In all, seven of the eight companies are currently under investigation by state attorneys general or federal agencies for deceptive and misleading recruiting or other possible violations of federal law.

•While the total number of veterans attending all colleges on the Post-9/11 GI Bill grew rapidly between 2009-10 and 2012-13, both the number of veterans attending for-profit colleges and the amount of benefits these colleges received increased more than in other sectors of higher education.

•The percentage of veterans attending a public college has declined precipitously, from 62 percent in 2009 to just 50 percent in 2013. During the same period, the percentage of veterans enrolling in for-profit colleges increased from 23 to 31percent of total enrollees.

•Although overall student enrollment has decreased at each of the eight top for-profit GI Bill beneficiaries, their enrollment of veterans has dramatically increased during the same period.

•Taxpayers are paying twice as much on average to send a veteran to a for-profit college for a year compared to the cost at a public college or university ($7,972 versus $3,914).

•The federal government does not currently track how veterans are performing at different types of colleges. However, overall student outcomes provided by the companies to the HELP Committee for students enrolling between 2008 and 2009 give ample reason for concern. At the for-profit colleges currently receiving the most benefits, up to 66 percent of students withdrew without a degree or diploma.

•Between 39 and 57 percent of the programs offered by four of the companies receiving the most Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits would fail to meet the proposed gainful employment rule, suggesting that the students who attend these institutions do not earn enough to pay back the debt they take

•Some large companies that operate for-profit colleges appear to be taking advantage of a loophole to use Post-9/11 GI Bill funds to comply with the federal requirement that no more than 90 percent of revenues come from federal student aid.

Dear Commons Community,

New York students with disabilities will be held to the same academic standards and take the same standardized tests as other kids their age next school year, the U.S. Education Department said Thursday, spurning the state’s efforts to change the policy.

Some special education advocates hailed the Education Department decision, saying it will enable students with disabilities to continue receiving the same opportunities as peers. “We think it’s a victory for the potential of every child,” said Denise Marshall, executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates Inc. “We thank the department for sticking to their guns.”

The Education Department said Thursday that New York, as well as Minnesota, South Carolina, Delaware and Georgia, could hold onto waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act for another year. A federal official told New York schools chief John King in a letter that the state “may continue to implement” flexibility of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act though the 2014-15 school year, keeping state standards for students with disabilities the same as they had been.

As reported in The Huffington Post:

“King had proposed allowing up to 2 percent of New York students with severe disabilities to be tested at their instructional ability — not their chronological grade year — up to two full grade levels below current grade level. The change would, for example, allow a 5th grader with autism to be tested on exams written for third graders.

King made the proposal after taking heat for months over the state’s implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a set of learning benchmarks being adopted by most states. State officials had said the outcry from special education teachers was especially loud.

The schools chief’s idea for testing students with disabilities was part of his bid to renew the loophole that allowed the state to evade some sanctions of the No Child Left Behind Act, the 2001 law that mandated regular standardized testing. The law expired in 2007. After Congress failed to rewrite it, President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told states in 2011 they could escape some of its components by agreeing to policies preferred by the Education Department.

New York’s initial waiver from the law was approved in 2012. In an October 2013 letter preparing his request for an extension, King outlined “smarter testing options” that proposed new testing for students with disabilities.

The controversial proposal revived a concept known as out-of-level testing. Some civil rights and special education advocates opposed the proposal, saying it would shortchange vulnerable students, who they said should be tested alongside peers their own age so they don’t slip behind. Proponents, including some teachers, argued that testing students with disabilities at levels out of their reach dooms their academic progress. King’s idea sparked a letter-writing campaign by some advocates, and many met with federal officials this summer.”

This is a difficult issue with both sides (those for and against out-of-level testing) approaching it in a manner that they think is best for these children.

Tony