Dear Commons Community,

New York City voters across racial lines disapprove of recent protests in which police officers turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at the funeral of two police officers slain in the line of duty, a new Quinnipiac poll says.

Black, white and Hispanic voters disapprove of the decision by police officers to turn their backs 69 percent to 27 percent, the poll says.

New York voters of all races also disapprove of comments by police union leaders who said de Blasio had “blood on his hands” after two officers were shot and killed in Brooklyn while sitting in their patrol car in December.

As reported in the New York Times:

“By overwhelming margins, New York City voters objected to the back-turning protests and work slowdown that have roiled the Police Department, an auspicious turn for Mayor Bill de Blasio as he seeks to end weeks of open tensions between officers and City Hall.

A poll released on Thursday revealed deep dismay — across racial, gender and geographic lines — over the tactics and incendiary statements of protesting officers, and a desire to discipline those who deliberately made fewer arrests.

For Mr. de Blasio, who had initially appeared beleaguered as he confronted a rebellion within law enforcement, the poll offers vindication of his strategy of waiting out police protests and refusing to apologize for his efforts at reform.

In their zeal to show the mayor he had neglected them, leaders of police unions appear to have overplayed their hand, giving Mr. de Blasio a key advantage by alienating a public accustomed to years without such explosive tensions in the ranks.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University, comes as Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, faces growing challenges from members who believe he has gone too far in his attacks on City Hall.

And it comes as Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, has sought to address deep-seated tensions with the Police Department, using his strongest language to date in acknowledging rank-and-file concerns and denouncing as “quite sick” the words of protesters who called for antipolice violence.

Administration officials are hopeful the worst of the uproar is over, although Mr. de Blasio has significant hurdles ahead. A majority of city voters disapprove of the way he is handling the Police Department. Seventy-seven percent of voters said relations between the mayor and the police were generally bad.

And the city is split on who is more to blame for the conflict, the mayor or the police — with stark divides along racial lines. Among white people, 61 percent blame Mr. de Blasio; among black people, only 16 percent do.

“The mayor isn’t out of the woods on this,” said David S. Birdsell, dean of the Baruch College School of Public Affairs. But he said the behavior of protesting police officers had been seen as offensive by the public they are expected to serve.”

This poll is timely and an important counterbalance to the daily campaigns by two New York City tabloids – The Daily News and the New York Post – that have been trying to sway public opinion against Mayor de Blasio on this issue.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that the New York City Education Department plans to expand dual-language programs offered in public schools. Carmen Fariña, the city’s schools chancellor, announced the plan yesterday, saying that citywide, 40 dual-language programs for elementary, middle and high school levels would be created or expanded for the 2015-16 school year. As reported in the article:

“In each of the programs, which aim to teach students to read, write and speak in two languages, half the students will be English speakers and half will already speak the other language of the classroom. A vast majority of the programs will be in Spanish, but there will also be some in Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, French and Haitian-Creole.

In remarks made at a professional development session at the United Federation of Teachers offices in Brooklyn, an enthusiastic Ms. Fariña described her own experience as a child who started school in New York City without speaking English, and as an adult who is bilingual in English and Spanish. She also emphasized the global advantages of speaking more than one language.

“It’s one thing to go out with Japanese businessmen who all speak English; it’s another thing to be able to have some dinner conversation in their language,” Ms. Fariña said. “That means you’re coming to the table with a different form of respect, a different form of acknowledgment, and people accept and honor that.”

Dual-language programs have been growing around the country as school districts try to prepare children to compete for jobs in a globalized, polyglot world. Methods vary: Some schools teach half the day in English and the other in Chinese, for example. In other programs, the languages alternate by day or by subject.”

This is a great move by Ms. Farina and a plus for NY public schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks wrote in the New York Times yesterday if it were not for a free community college education, he would never have become the person that he is. In an op-ed piece entitled, I Owe It All to Community College, he described how he applied to some prestigious schools knowing full-well they wouldn’t accept a student like him with low SAT scores. He decided to go to Chabot College, a community college that accepted everyone and was free. Here is an excerpt:

“In 1974, I graduated from Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores. Allowed to send my results to three colleges, I chose M.I.T. and Villanova, knowing such fine schools would never accept a student like me but hoping they’d toss some car stickers my way for taking a shot. I couldn’t afford tuition for college anyway. I sent my final set of stats to Chabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, Calif., which, because it accepted everyone and was free, would be my alma mater.

For thousands of commuting students, Chabot was our Columbia, Annapolis, even our Sorbonne, offering courses in physics, stenography, auto mechanics, certified public accounting, foreign languages, journalism — name the art or science, the subject or trade, and it was probably in the catalog. The college had a nursing program that churned out graduates, sports teams that funneled athletes to big-time programs, and parking for a few thousand cars — all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks.

Classmates included veterans back from Vietnam, women of every marital and maternal status returning to school, middle-aged men wanting to improve their employment prospects and paychecks. We could get our general education requirements out of the way at Chabot — credits we could transfer to a university — which made those two years an invaluable head start. I was able to go on to the State University in Sacramento (at $95 a semester, just barely affordable) and study no other subject but my major, theater arts. (After a year there I moved on, enrolling in a little thing called the School of Hard Knocks, a.k.a. Life.)”

The op-ed concludes with an endorsement of President Barack Obama’s plan to offer free community college nationwide.

There are millions of people who have been served in the same way as Tom Hanks by our community college system. It deserves our praise and respect and should be free.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It appears that with the new Congress, there is interest among Republicans, Democrats, and President Obama’s Department of Education to rewrite the deeply-flawed No Child Left Behind Law that has governed K-12 education for the past decade. It is likely that the onerous standardized testing imposed by NCLB will be tempered if not eliminated, there will be more appropriate funding, and the states will have more leeway in setting standards. The Huffington Post provides a good recap on some of the thinking that is presently going on in Washington, D.C.

“Congress is currently revving up yet another attempt to rewrite the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act, and Sen. Patty Murray’s (D-Wash.) said Tuesday that she sees putting her stamp on the sweeping education legislation as “another big step forward, putting the ideals of our nation into action.”

Murray addressed President Barack Obama in her speech, telling him that the law “is badly broken.”

No Child Left Behind, George W. Bush’s rebranding of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, required that students in America’s public schools be tested in math and reading in certain grades, and punished schools based on those scores. Since then, it has earned a reputation from nearly everyone for being too crude in its metrics, because it relies on raw test scores as opposed to student growth.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that after years of working around Congress to get states out of the law by issuing waivers, the Obama administration is ready to go back to the legislative drawing board.

Some Republicans, including Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. secretary of education who now chairs the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee, have floated the idea of doing away with standardized testing entirely. Duncan said Monday that an overhaul would place limits on testing and test preparation but still require it, because “parents and teachers and students have both the right and the absolute need to know how much progress all students are making each year.”

Murray articulated a similar position on testing in an interview earlier this week. “We have to fix the redundant and unnecessary testing within the system broadly,” she told The Huffington Post.

But, she said in her speech, “That doesn’t mean we should roll back standards or accountability.” She further defended the need for some degree of standardized testing by invoking a reason more often used on the right: taxpayer money.

“It would be irresponsible to ask taxpayers to spend billions of dollars on education without knowing if it’s making a difference in our students’ lives,” she said.

Alexander also addressed NCLB on the Senate floor Tuesday. “The law has become unworkable. States are struggling. As a result, we need to act,” he said. “That will be the first thing we need to do. My hope would be that we would finish our working in the first few months of this year.”

Alexander said he has already distributed a “chairman’s working draft” of new NCLB legislation to committee members, “because you have to have some place to start.” He said he plans to meet every day with committee members for this week and the next, solicit feedback and move from there.

“The plan that I am suggesting here is to set realistic goals, keep the best portions of No Child Left Behind, and restore to states and communities the responsibility to decide whether schools or teachers are succeeding or failing,” Alexander said of his draft.

Murray said that she wants to rewrite the NCLB to provide more resources for the neediest schools and expand access to early childhood education. Duncan has expressed similar goals.

Part of the problem with the law is that it “required states to set high standards for schools — but it didn’t give them the resources they needed to meet those achievement goals,” she said. “In effect, this law set up our schools for failure.”

It would be a miracle for public education to get out from under the misguided burden of NCLB.  Standardized testing should be curtailed and assessments developed at the state and local levels to make sure that standards are being met.  Further funding for public education particularly in our poorer school districts is also a must.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Atlantic has an article examining the student body at CUNY’s “elite” colleges, Baruch, Brooklyn, CCNY, Hunter and Queens.  It specifically considers the changes in the University’s policy from one of open admissions to one of selective admissions. The results have been that these five colleges have become majority white and Asian in the past decade while the other colleges especially the community colleges have increasingly become the schools for black and Latino students.

The article quotes Georgetown University research director Anthony Carnevale who found that CUNY’s story is being mirrored nationwide, in both public and private institutions. “The higher education system is colorblind—in theory,” he said, referring to his 2013 college enrollment study, “Separate and Unequal.” “But in fact it operates, at least in part, as a systematic barrier to opportunity for many African Americans and Hispanics. Larger numbers are qualified but tracked into overcrowded and underfunded colleges, where they are less likely to develop fully or to graduate.” One key reason, Carnevale said, is financial survival. “Every college president knows you either climb or you die,” he said. As college costs are rising, public funding is declining. “Higher education doesn’t make a profit, so the way it competes is on the basis of prestige,” said Carnevale.”

This article is well-investigated and raises serious issues of the demographic changes that have occurred at CUNY and elsewhere in American higher education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night I attended a talk at the New York Society Library on a recently published book,  “The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty” given by the authors Robert P. Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber. Crease is a professor of philosophy and Goldhaber, a professor of physics, at SUNY Stonybrook.

Crease’s presentation focused on how quantum theory has found its way into our culture and language even though most people do not understand what it is.  He used several examples such as the term “quantum leap”.   He explained that the term comes from the nature of electrons to change automatically where they are and to move from one place to another.

Goldhaber focused more on the physics of quantum theory discussing the differences of particles and waves, uncertainty of the subatomic positioning of electrons, and the difficulty of observing quantum mechanics at work because of the distortion caused by light.

For me a highlight was Goldhaber’s speculation as to whether Einstein ever really accepted quantum theory in lieu of classical (deterministic) theory.  Einstein was very unhappy about the apparent randomness in nature as posited by quantum theory. His views were summed up in his famous phrase, ‘God does not play dice’. He seemed to have felt that the uncertainty was only provisional: but that there was an underlying reality, in which particles would have well defined positions and speeds, and would evolve according to deterministic laws.  Goldhaber concluded that no one really knows whether Einstein ever accepted quantum theory.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Author J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, took to Twitter yesterday to slam Rupert Murdoch for saying all Muslims “must be held responsible” for extremist violence such as last week’s deadly attack on the headquarters of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

On Friday, Murdoch said via Twitter:  “Maybe most Moslems are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.”

Rowling’s response:

“I was born Christian. If that makes Rupert Murdoch my responsibility, I’ll auto-excommunicate.”

She didn’t stop there. She also pointed out that the faith of her birth had a few flaws of its own and (sarcastically) took responsibility:

“The Spanish Inquisition was my fault, as is all Christian fundamentalist violence. Oh, and Jim Bakker.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Obama as part of his State of the Union speech, will propose a Student Data Privacy Act, which would prohibit technology firms from profiting from information collected in schools as teachers adopt tablets, online services and Internet-connected software.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The administration’s student privacy effort comes as schools across the country are adopting digital education products — including math textbooks and online homework portals — that can collect information about a student’s every keystroke. The premise behind the data collection is to customize lessons to the academic needs and learning preferences of each child.

But these data-mining practices have begun to trouble some parents, who say they are concerned that education technology companies could potentially collect — and later share — sensitive details about, for example, a child’s disciplinary record or a family’s financial status.

To alleviate those kinds of concerns, California last summer enacted a comprehensive education privacy law that largely prohibits companies from collecting student information for advertising and marketing. Children’s advocates applauded Mr. Obama’s plans for a similar law.

“You can’t have all this potentially positive use of technology in schools without privacy protection for students, their families and teachers,” said James P. Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy and media ratings group in San Francisco that has worked with Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies that distribute the group’s educational materials.”

The Student Privacy Act is most definitely needed.  However, it must also be stated that it was U.S. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan who pushed state departments of education hard to establish student databases that would be controlled by private companies without any regard for privacy issues.  In addition, we have had examples of unscrupulous companies (i.e., Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) that provide student database services and software which have also been accused of hacking into phone and voice mail.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

One of the more persistent problems in the public schools has been the large turnover rate of new teachers.  Richard Ingersoll, one of the leading researchers on teacher retention, has consistently estimated that beginning-teacher retention rates are between 50 percent and 60 percent over the first five years of a teaching career.  However, a new analysis by the Center for American Progress concludes that approximately 70 percent of beginning teachers are staying with the profession for at least five years.  Furthermore, according to the researchers Robert Hanna and Kaitlin Pennington,  the increased retention is occurring in both high-poverty and low-poverty schools.

Hanna and Pennington used data from the U.S. Department of Education’s the Schools and Staffing Survey from 2007 and 2008, and a follow-up survey called the Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study, as well as the Schools and Staffing Survey from 2011 and 2012 and its recent follow-up. The researchers replicated the statistical method used by Richard Ingersoll.

This is good news for the teaching profession and more importantly for public education.  It remains to be seen if these percentages hold as the economy continues to improve.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As posted yesterday in this blog, President Obama proposed a program that would insure free tuition for most community college students.  While the program faces significant hurdles in the Congress, symbolically it is an important first step. As a follow-up to the President’s proposal, CUNY’s ASAP program was prominently mentioned in the White House fact sheet as follows:

“Colleges must also adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms to improve student outcomes, such as the effective Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) programs at the City University of New York which waive tuition, help students pay for books and transit costs, and provide academic advising and supportive scheduling programs to better meet the needs of participating students, resulting in greater gains in college persistence and degree completion.”

Tony