Adjunct Faculty Protesting in Buffalo

Dear Commons Community,

Adjunct instructors joined low-wage workers yesterday in a national protest to demand higher pay. The Fight for 15 campaign — in which fast-food, retail, and health-care employees demanded a $15 minimum wage and adjuncts demand $15,000 per course — was organized by the Service Employees International Union(SEIU), which represents many part-time instructors.

Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and Seattle were among the cities where adjuncts joined low-wage workers in other industries to protest for better wages as part of the SEIU’s “Fight for 15” campaign.

Recent data demonstrate that faculty across the country are unable to make ends meet. Despite ever-rising tuition, nearly a third of part-time faculty are living below or near poverty.

We wish the adjuncts and other low-wage workers well and support their efforts.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Heald College, the jewel of the for-profit colleges owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., misled students and accreditation agencies about graduates’ employment rates and showed a “blatant disregard” for the federal student loan program, the U.S. Department of Education alleged Tuesday.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The Education Department said it had found 946 false job placement rates dating back to at least 2010, and slapped Heald with a $29.7 million fine and a ban on enrolling new students. Heald must prepare plans for its thousands of students — enrolled in health care, business, technology and legal programs across its online school and 12 campuses in California, Hawaii and Oregon — to either graduate or transfer to a new school.

The finding, an effective death knell for Heald, bolsters claims by current and former students to get their federal student loans forgiven on the grounds that the false job placement rates led them to enroll. A spate of lawsuits last year by several state attorneys general and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleged that Corinthian’s schools systematically misrepresented their job placement and graduation rates.

“Current and prospective graduates of Heald could reasonably have been expected to rely to their detriment upon the information in Heald’s placement rate disclosures,” the Education Department said.

The Education Department’s move is perhaps the Obama administration’s toughest action against a large for-profit college alleged to have cheated students.

“Corinthian violated students’ and taxpayers’ trust,” said Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell. “Their substantial misrepresentations evidence a blatant disregard not just for professional standards, but for students’ futures. This is unacceptable, and we are holding them accountable.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan added, “This should be a wake-up call for consumers across the country about the abuses that can exist within the for-profit college sector.”

This is an appropriate and long-overdue action on the part of the U.S. DOE.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Atlanta School District educators who were convicted and found guilty of charges related to student test score cheating, were sentenced yesterday after a polarizing six-year ordeal.   In an unexpectedly harsh sentence, eight of the 10 educators convicted of racketeering in one of the nation’s largest public school cheating scandals were sentenced to prison terms of up to seven years after they refused to take sentencing deals that were predicated on their acceptance of responsibility and a waiver of their right to appeal.  As reported in the New York Times:

“As a result, the sentences, meted out after a raucous court hearing, offered a conflicted, inconclusive coda to a scandal that has brought shame and soul-searching to Atlanta and its 50,000-student public school system. Some were furious with the sentences, and some were pleased.

And as some of the defendants vowed to appeal, it ensured that this city would continue to grapple with two harrowing and interrelated questions: How much mercy should be due a roster of educators with otherwise spotless records? And what kind of justice is due the thousands of students, most of them poor minorities, whose falsely inflated standardized test scores obscured their academic shortcomings?

Many here, amid widespread calls for leniency before the sentencing, were shocked at the severity of the sentences handed down by Judge Jerry W. Baxter, who had seemed to indicate on Monday that he wanted to avoid prison terms. But after the deals fell through, and while declaring the cheating scandal “the sickest thing that’s ever happened in this town,” he imposed sentences that appeared to be more harsh than those in similar cheating scandals elsewhere and that exceeded what criminals sometimes receive for violent crimes.

The racketeering charges carried a 20-year maximum sentence, and some defendants were also found guilty of lesser crimes. Prosecutors said the teachers had participated in a wide-ranging conspiracy to artificially inflate students’ standardized test scores and give a false sense that struggling schools were improving, all within a system led by a superintendent, Beverly L. Hall, who demanded that administrators meet ambitious testing targets.

A 2013 grand jury indictment named 35 Atlanta Public Schools employees, including Dr. Hall. Prosecutors said the educators who engaged in the conspiracy did so to win bonuses, protect their jobs or please their superiors.

Most of the accused took plea deals and avoided trial, and two other defendants, including Dr. Hall, died before they could have a day in court.

Episodes of misconduct by educators elsewhere in the United States previously led to short terms of incarceration. In Ohio, for instance, a former administrator in Columbus’s public schools served 15 days in jail after pleading no contest to attempted tampering with records.

Erica O. Turner, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the Atlanta sentences “entirely unprecedented.”

“In other places, I haven’t seen quite the same resources and the same desire to prosecute educators for cheating,” she said.

Along with pleas for lenience here, there was acknowledgment that the real victims were the children whose education was tainted by falsified test scores that misrepresented what they had learned.

Fani T. Willis, a trial prosecutor, said the outcome showed that the poor African-American children who were the real victims “have dignity, and they matter.”

“That, I think,” she said, “is what Atlanta should be proud of.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article reporting on the latest developments at the school test cheating trial in Atlanta.

“For four hours in a downtown courtroom on Monday, friends and family rose to praise 10 public school educators for their faith, their character and their commitment to the city’s poorest and most vulnerable students.

The educators had all been convicted on April 1 for their roles in one of the nation’s largest school cheating scandals. Though Monday was the day they were expected to be sentenced — with each facing up to 20 years and some more — the task of arriving at an appropriate punishment proved complicated, and the day ended with prosecutors and defense lawyers trying to work out a deal.

Each educator was convicted of racketeering, a felony; some were also convicted of lesser crimes, all connected to their involvement in what prosecutors described as a conspiracy to artificially inflate test scores at struggling Atlanta schools.

The sentences must be approved by Judge Jerry W. Baxter of Fulton County Superior Court, who presided, sometimes testily, over the six-month trial.

In one of the most striking episodes, Andrew Young, the civil rights leader, former Atlanta mayor and former United Nations ambassador, was invited to speak on behalf of one defendant, Angela Williamson. Instead, he talked about the failures of the American educational system and the perils of its focus on testing at the expense of individual students.

“We have messed up school so much,” he said. “Well, tests and grades do not make you educated.”

Very true!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A $15 minimum wage will be in the foreground tomorrow, when fast-food and other low-wage workers plan a nationwide walkout that is expected to draw tens of thousands of people. The protest is the latest show of strength by the Fight for $15, a campaign that economists partly credit with the recent decisions by employers like Walmart and McDonald’s to raise the minimum wage they pay workers. This will put pressure on all the presidential candidates to show where they stand on the minimum wage issue.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The days of debating $9 or $10 an hour are over. The active debate is in the realm of $12 to $15,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a grass-roots organizing group with nearly one million members. “In 2016, the Murray $12-an-hour position will be the floor, not the ceiling.”

It is not just grass-roots activists and Hillary Clinton’s fellow Democratic politicians who have come out in favor of a substantial wage increase. Those who attended the semiannual meeting this week of the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy progressive donors created with help from the billionaire investor George Soros and the insurance mogul Peter Lewis, reported that the minimum-wage campaign had become a topic of discussion as the donors grappled with income inequality.

“Fast-food workers in the street for $15, that changes the conversation,” said Stephen M. Silberstein, a member of the Democracy Alliance, who also was executive producer of the recent documentary, Inequality for All. “You didn’t have that a couple years ago.”

With a recent accumulation of economic literature suggesting that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little to no cost when it comes to employment, opposition even among economists in the business world has begun to melt. Last Thursday, the economic research department of Goldman Sachs, which is widely followed by policy makers, released an analysis of minimum wage increases that made no allusion to possible job losses.

“It was remarkable to me,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There was no mention in the whole analysis of disemployment effects.”

Even Republicans, whose party has long been skeptical of the minimum wage, have begun to soften their opposition. “I’m not for repealing the minimum wage,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said at a candidate forum in January. “But I can tell you, I don’t want people to make $10.10 an hour. I want them to make $30 an hour.”

Power to the people!

Tony

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KalquJby0uU

Dear Commons Community,

Hillary Clinton made it official yesterday.  She is in the running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016.  Her announcement has been long awaited and now the presidential nomination politics for both parties will ratchet up their rhetoric as candidates begin to focus on potential rivals.  As reported in the Associated Press:

“Her message will focus on strengthening economic security for the middle class and expanding opportunities for working families. The campaign is portraying her as a “tenacious fighter” who can get results and work with Congress, business and world leaders.

“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times. But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion and I want to be that champion,” she said in the video.

“So you can do more than just get by. You can get ahead and stay ahead. Because when families are strong, America is strong.”

Clinton’s strategy, described ahead of the announcement by two senior advisers who requested anonymity to discuss her plans, has parallels to Obama’s approach in 2012. He framed his re-election as a choice between Democrats focused on the middle class and Republicans who sought to protect the wealthy and return to policies that led the country into recession.

Clinton will face pressure from the progressive wing of her party to adopt a more populist economic message focused on income inequality. Some liberals remain skeptical of Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street donors and the centrist economic policies of her husband’s administration. They have urged her to back tougher financial regulations and tax increases on the wealthy.

“It would do her well electorally to be firmly on the side of average working people who are working harder than ever and still not getting ahead,” said economist Robert Reich, a former labor secretary during the Clinton administration who has known Hillary Clinton for nearly five decades.

The GOP did not wait for her announcement to begin their campaign against her. The party’s chairman, Reince Priebus, has outlined plans for a broad effort to try to undermine her record as secretary of state while arguing that her election would be like giving Obama a “third term.”

Republicans have jumped on Clinton’s use of a personal email account and server while she was secretary of state, as well as her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in his own online video, said Sunday: “We must do better than the Obama-Clinton foreign policy that has damaged relationships with our allies and emboldened our enemies.”

The Republicans will have to do better than email accounts and Benghazi if they want to appeal to the voters beyond the Fox News crowd.  And Jeb Bush will have a terrible credibility problem attacking her  about foreign policy given his brother’s disastrous legacy.

Good luck, Hillary!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article examining the pay gap between CEOs and their typical workers.  A summary indicates that the three companies with the largest gaps are Disney, Microsoft, and Oracle.

“Clearly the big winners in the economy over the last three to four decades have been those at the top…

The company with the widest pay gap on the list was Walt Disney, whose chief executive, Robert Iger, received $43.7 million last year. Given Mr. Baker’s estimate that Disney’s median worker received $19,530 last year, that translates to a C.E.O. multiple of 2,238 to one.

A Disney spokesman said that 92 percent of Mr. Iger’s compensation was based on the company’s financial performance, which was outstanding in 2014.

Second on the list was Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief. His pay package of $84.3 million last year placed him at 2,012 times the estimate of $41,900 for the median employee’s earnings at Microsoft.

A Microsoft spokesman disputed the calculation, saying that a typical employee at the company earned “well north of $100,000,” and that much of Mr. Nadella’s pay would be realized only in coming years — if the company performed well. He contended that a better measure of Mr. Nadella’s pay for 2014 was $22.75 million.

Using Microsoft’s figures, Mr. Nadella’s pay ratio would still be at least 150 to one.

Oracle’s founder, Lawrence J. Ellison, ranks third on the pay gap list: 1,183 to one by Mr. Baker’s calculations. Oracle’s spokeswoman declined to comment.”

Workers of the world – UNITE!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Brookings Institution issued a report last week commenting on the marriage status of college-educated individuals.  It refers to  “assortative mating” or  people’s tendency to choose spouses with similar educational attainment. Rising numbers of college-educated women play a key role in this change. It is much easier for college graduates to find and marry each other when there are more equal numbers of each gender within an educational bracket.  The report opens by referring to a controversial commencement address at Princeton University in 2013:

“A media storm erupted in the Spring of 2013 when a Princeton alum, Susan A. Patton, president of the class of ‘77, offered the following advice to female students: “Here’s what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate.” Writing in The Daily Princetonian, Patton went on: “You will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you.”

Patton was dubbed a busybody, an elitist, and an anti-feminist. But while the idea of finding a spouse during college was outdated, her basic advice to marry a man “worthy of you” seems to be one most college graduate women were already heeding.”

The report then focuses on:

“…a growing “marriage gap” in the United States. Marriage rates among the non-college educated population have fallen sharply in the last few decades, and sharpest of all in the black population.

Black-white gaps in marriage rates reflect different levels of education by race, but there is an important gender gap too. Young white women — aged between 25 and 35 — are the most likely to have at least a BA (37%), followed by white men (29%), black women (23%) and black men (16%), according to our analysis of the ACS. We focus on the 25 to 35 year-old age cohort because these are the years during which most women, particularly college graduates, enter into their first marriage.”

The report goes on to compare marriage based on race, gender, and education attainment.  The most startling finding was:

“Marriage rates are lower among black women compared to white women, even among those with a college education. The proportion of black college graduates aged 25 to 35 who have never married is 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women (see graph above).  By definition, the black female college graduates who do not marry are not assortatively mating, since they are not mating — defined as marrying — at all. This helps to explain why white women with college degrees are more than twice as likely as their black counterparts (29% v 13%) to be married to someone of equal or greater educational status.”

The report presents a complex social issue for our society with serious implications for the black population both women and men.

Tony

Dear Commons Community

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awarded its inaugural prize ($1 million) to Vassar College — where one in every four students has a family income “low enough to qualify for federal Pell grants.”  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Low-income students can have an incredibly difficult time getting into college, even if they are top-achieving students with exceptional grades. The result is an enormous diversity problem on college campuses. That’s what the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is trying to change, with a $1 million prize that will be given each year to a college that has made an extraordinary effort to accept, enroll and graduate low-income students. This year’s inaugural prize went to Vassar College — where one in every four students has a family income “low enough to qualify for federal Pell grants,” according to The New York Times’ David Leonhardt.

“Among colleges with a four-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent, none has done more than Vassar to enroll low-income students and give them large scholarships, according to an Upshot analysis last year that Cooke Foundation officials said influenced their decision,” he wrote.

The prize is just one sign of positive change occurring in higher education to improve economic diversity. Leonhardt wrote that several other schools are now making significant efforts to improve diversity, including Pomona, Amherst and Harvard.”

Congratulations Vassar!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a blow to the growing telemedicine business, the Texas Medical Board voted yesterday to limit telemedicine practice in the state.  As reported by the New York Times:

“Taking a stand against the rapidly expanding use of telemedicine, the Texas Medical Board voted Friday to sharply restrict the practice in the state, siding with organizations representing doctors over the objections of industry representatives who said the new rules would reduce access to medical care at a time of increasing demand.

The vote was the latest salvo in a four-year battle between the state board, which licenses and regulates doctors, and Teladoc, a national company based in Dallas that provides telephone or video consultations with doctors on its staff, typically for routine problems like urinary tract infections, sore throats and rashes.

It also comes as companies like Teladoc, helped by enthusiastic investors and rapid advances in technology, are seeking to expand around the country, promoting their services as a convenient, inexpensive alternative to the emergency room, retail clinics or doctors who do not work nights or weekends. Many states are loosening restrictions on telemedicine, and requiring insurers to pay for it, citing doctor shortages and pressure to increase convenient access to medical care, partly because of the Affordable Care Act.

Texas, however, is moving in the opposite direction. The Texas board already required doctors to establish a relationship with patients before giving a diagnosis or prescribing drugs.

But on Friday, it changed its rules to state that “questions and answers exchanged through email, electronic text, or chat or telephonic evaluation of or consultation with a patient” are inadequate to establish a doctor-patient relationship. The move significantly tightens rules that already preclude video consultations except under a narrow set of circumstances.

The Texas Medical Association and other groups representing doctors in the state strongly supported the new restrictions, citing concerns about patient safety. In a letter to the board, the association said it “supports the use of telemedicine that can provide safe, high-quality, timely care,” but that safeguards must be in place “to protect patients and ensure telemedicine complements the efforts of local health care providers.”

But Jason Gorevic, the chief executive and founder of Teladoc, said in a statement that the new restrictions were “a huge step backward for Texas,” eliminating “a safe, affordable and convenient health care option that many have depended on for more than a decade.”

The new restrictions do not outright ban telemedicine, however. Doctors will still be able to treat patients by phone or video from another location under certain circumstances. For example, patients will have to be at a hospital or clinic, with a second health care provider there to “assist.” The new restrictions do not apply to mental health visits, most likely because of a continuing shortage of psychiatrists.”

It seems to me that by its actions, the Texas Medical Board is putting quality health care ahead of the business of health care.

Tony