Dear Commons Community,

Those of us who read Maureen Dowd’s column have been waiting for her to come out swinging at Donald Trump especially after his blast of Fox News Megyn Kelly for her questions at the Republlican debate on Thursday night.   Here are parts of her surprising take on “The Donald” as published in her column today.

“So when Fox News’s Megyn Kelly grilled Trump during the Republican debate, asking him about his sometimes vicious Twitter account and noting, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs’ and ‘disgusting animals,’ ” I knew what the glamorous former litigator [Kelly] was up to.

It was Tom Cruise taunting Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men.” Kelly was trying to get Trump to lash out in a misogynist way. But he restrained himself in the hall, staying away from the slob-to-supermodel rating system he likes to use. He showed his irritation later, tweeting that the anchor “bombed” and was “totally overrated” and “angry,” and he retweeted a post calling her a “bimbo.”

There was something amusing about Fox News, which is a daily Miss Universe pageant, chockablock with glossy beauties as anchors, reporters and even “experts,” giving The Donald a hard time about focusing on women’s looks.

I came away from the debate thinking three things: Roger Ailes is a television genius. It’s no coincidence that he presided over the ninth-most-viewed show ever on cable, after college football, with the extra kick of eclipsing his nemesis Jon Stewart’s big finale.

Kelly has a lot of Tim Russert in her: She knows how to set up mesmerizing Gunfights at the O.K. Corral, loaded for a follow-up after every salvo.

And Trump is, as always, the gleefully offensive and immensely entertaining high-chair king in the Great American Food Fight. He is, as Kurt Andersen wrote in 2006, “our 21st-century reincarnation of P. T. Barnum and Diamond Jim Brady, John Gotti minus the criminal organization, the only white New Yorker who lives as large as the blingiest, dissiest rapper — de trop personified.”

The novelist Walter Kirn tweeted post-debate: “Trump is simply channeling the bruised petty enraged narcissism that is the natural condition of Selfie Nation.”

After all, as James Gleick has tweeted, “Running for president is the new selfie.”

….

I enjoy Trump’s hyperbolic, un-P.C. flights because there are too few operatic characters in the world. I think of him as a Toon. He’s just drawn that way…

After covering nine presidential races, I have concluded that it is really hard to know who you’re electing — even after attenuated campaigns with an absurd amount of exposure for candidates.

That’s because you can’t foresee what crises will crop up, or what gremlins of insecurity and perversity the White House will inevitably elicit in presidential psyches.

You can have a candidate like W., after sincerely telling us he will have a “humble” foreign policy, proceed to stumble jejunely into decades-long wars in the Middle East. You can have a charming newcomer like Barack Obama, ascending like a political Pegasus, who loses altitude because it turns out he disdains politics.

It’s always a pig in a poke. So why not a pig who pokes?

It will cause winces and grimaces at times and Trump can go badly astray, as he did with the president’s birth certificate. His jibes at women may hurt the Republican Party with some women.

His policy ideas are ripped from the gut instead of the head. Still, he can be a catalyst, challenging his rivals where they need to be challenged and smoking them out, ripping off the facades they’ve constructed with their larcenous image makers. Trump can pierce the trompe l’oeil illusions, starting with Jeb’s defense of his brother’s smashing the family station wagon into the globe.

Consider how Trump yanked back the curtain Thursday night explaining how financial quid pro quos warp the political system.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding and she came to my wedding,” he said. “You know why? She had no choice because I gave. I gave to a foundation that, frankly, that foundation is supposed to do good. I didn’t know her money would be used on private jets going all over the world.”

Sometimes you need a showman in the show.”

A show indeed. Thanks to Trump that is what the Republican presidential nomination process has become and the media just love it.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a posting on his blog today that refers to a provocative paper entitled, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing” – Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party , written by Jackie Calmes (Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government). Mann raises the following questions:

“Two questions loom large in the aftermath of the first Republican debate of the 2016 election season. Will the Republican Party nominate a presidential candidate who by next November is viewed by a majority of Americans as a plausible choice for the White House–one whose character, political leadership skills, temperament, and views about America and its role in the world meet a threshold of acceptability? And just as importantly, will the Republican Party itself be trusted with control of all three branches of government given its sharp rightward turn ideologically and its high-risk, scorched-earth, no-compromise oppositional tactics during the Obama years?

Most of the press coverage has understandably focused on the first of these questions. Many of us wonder if Republican Party elites will once again succeed in nominating a candidate who by virtue of his or her personal traits and policy views can fully exploit their party’s opportunities in the coming general election. But it is not too early to begin asking whether what unites the seventeen aspirants for the Republican presidential nomination and shapes the party brand and agenda will limit its chances of regaining the White House or, if they nonetheless win the election, of governing successfully.

An excellent place to begin addressing the second question is a new paper by Jackie Calmes, national correspondent for The New York Times who was Joan Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School this past spring. Its title, “They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing,” is a direct quote from one of her Republican sources. The subtitle, “Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party,” describes the focus of her impressive research, reporting, and analysis.

Calmes goes well beyond the familiar Fox News and talk-radio celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham to chart an expanding world of web-based “news” sites and social media outlets closely aligned with far-right groups such as Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. What began as a conservative insurgency nurtured and welcomed by the Republican establishment as a route to majority control of Congress has become a dominant force setting the party’s agenda and forcing repeated brinksmanship. This in turn impedes the Republicans’ ability to govern effectively and to win presidential elections.

She traces the evolution of conservative media from the end of World War II to the present, documenting a generational change enabled by new technology and business models. Her paper contains fascinating narrative on lesser-known personalities who have put themselves at the center of linkages between Republican activists and officeholders as well as case studies of why the Republican majority in Congress after the 2014 election has fallen well short of its stated objectives of restoring regular order and governing effectively.

Calmes searches for an equivalent liberal media but comes up mostly empty-handed. Her analysis of this striking difference between the ideological left and right sheds additional light on the broader asymmetric polarization between the parties.

As Mann indicates, this is a very well-done and well-research paper. It rightfully deserves a careful reading especially by Republicans as we move forward in this presidential election cycle.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Judge Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan, on Friday, ruled that the new Academic Literacy Skills Test (ALST) for teachers given by New York State did not discriminate against minorities, saying that even though they tended to score poorly, the test evaluated skills necessary to do the job. The ruling is a departure from earlier decisions by the same judge, in which she threw out past certification exams. It also symbolizes a significant moment in a long-running tug of war between two policy goals in education: making tests for new teachers more rigorous, and increasing the diversity of the nation’s teaching force. As reported in the New York Times:

“… the ALST, was first given in the 2013-14 school year, and is meant to assess a potential teacher’s reading and evidence-based writing skills, and ability to master the Common Core standards for English.

In New York, the exam is one of four tests new teachers must take to become certified.

Ken Wagner, a former New York State deputy commissioner of education who is now Rhode Island’s education commissioner, said in a court brief last month that the new tests were developed “with the need to address the achievement gap in mind and in recognition of the state’s responsibility to ensure that each newly certified teacher entered the classroom with certain minimum knowledge, skills and abilities.”

But some schools of education in New York complained that the literacy skills test was not a true measure of what makes a good teacher, and that many of their black and Hispanic students were failing it. An analysis last year found that 46 percent of Hispanic candidates and 41 percent of black candidates passed the test on the first try, while 64 percent of white candidates did so. Students may retake the exams.

More than 80 percent of the country’s public schoolteachers are white, according to the federal Education Department, and there has been a longstanding push to try to increase diversity among teachers, as minorities now account for more than half of the public school student population.

If an employment test has a disparate racial impact, courts have ruled that officials must prove that it measures skills crucial to the job at hand. Judge Wood had ruled that two earlier exams, both called the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, had not met that standard. About 4,000 people who at some point were denied full teaching jobs in New York City because they had not passed those tests have filed claims seeking compensation as a result of those rulings.

But this time, Judge Wood ruled that the state and Pearson, the testing company that helped devise the exam, had done a proper job of making sure that the “content of the ALST is representative of the content of a New York State public-school teacher’s job.”

In a statement, Dennis Tompkins, a spokesman for the State Education Department, said: “Judge Wood’s decision reflects the efforts made by the department to demonstrate the validity of the ALST. Our students need and deserve the best qualified teachers possible, and the ALST helps make sure they get those teachers.”

Even so, following complaints from schools of education, the state granted teacher candidates a reprieve, saying that until June 30, 2016, they could get their licenses without passing the exam if they could demonstrate literacy skills through course work.”

This is an unfortunate ruling by a judge who has been very sympathetic in the past to the issue of racial discrimination and teacher licensing.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The long-awaited, first Republican presidential candidates’ debate last night was telling. It is obvious that rather than having a lot of good candidates, the Republican Party has a problem. The ten candidates invited to the debate (there were also another seven candidates not invited) did not stir the audience nor will they stir the American people come election. At this point, the election is Hillary Clinton’s (assuming she is the Democratic Party nominee) to lose. Don’t assume that the Democrats are not capable of doing so. Remember Al Gore in 2000.  As for the debate.

Donald Trump by virtue of his media personality and lead in the polls drew much of the attention away from the other candidates. I thought the crowd was hostile to Trump which is understandable given his bombastic personality and glib answers.

Jeb Bush was okay but is still seen as too moderate.

Scott Walker held his own which will appeal to diehard conservatives.

Marco Rubio did well

John Kasich did well.

Chris Christie and Rand Paul had a heated exchange about hugging President Obama.

And the list goes on. 

I believe Paul Krugman summarized the Republican dilemma best.

“…if he [Trump]  is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.”

For further analysis about the debate, check out Nate Cohn on The Upshot.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

George Siemens, professor at the University of Texas and a major innovator in the use of instructional technology, shared his impressions of a recent visit to a White House conference on innovation and higher education. Though he isn’t able to divulge details of what transpired, he wrote about the meeting on his blog, in a post filled with strong feelings about what transpired. He heard a lot of the need to disrupt and transform higher education narrative from other attendees. To which he responded:

“This is one of the most inaccurate pieces of @#%$ floating around in the ‘disrupt and transform’ learning crowd…Universities are exceptional at innovating and changing,” he argued. “Explore any campus today. It’s a new world on most campuses, never mind the online, competency, and related systems.” Below is a summary of this blog posting as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Siemens is so correct in his statement about disrupt and transform. First, most of the communications and digital technologies that we use today had their genesis in higher education. Second, the quick dollar for-profit education companies, Gates and other venture foundations, and the entire neoliberal establishment have used the word “disruption” as a way to put higher education on the defensive. Third, the disruptors are winning battles especially in Arne Duncan’s U.S. Department of Education but they will lose the war. For the foreseeable future (next fifteen or so years), American higher education will evolve on its own terms and will continue to integrate instructional technology that is beneficial to teaching and learning in a careful and planned manner.   This is not what the neoliberal crowd wants to hear.

Tony

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

Pioneer of Ed-Tech Innovation Says He’s Frustrated by Disruptors’ Narrative

August 6, 2015 by Jeffrey R. Young

George Siemens is a key innovator in higher education, having coined the term “MOOC” and worked to study the effectiveness of online learning. So it’s no surprise that he was invited to a recent closed-door gathering at the White House to discuss “innovation and quality in higher education.”

Though he isn’t able to divulge details of what transpired, he wrote about the meeting on his blog, in a post filled with strong feelings about some of what he heard there. The post uses such words as “stunned,” “exceptionally irritated,” and “disappointed.”

His frustrations ran in all directions. Some leaders in higher education, he wrote, remain uninformed about “what’s brewing in the marketplace as a whole” — such as shifts in demand for education and the emergence of “code academies” — which will change higher education “dramatically.” And some for-profit players are unnecessarily “antagonistic” to higher education, he argued, failing to recognize that colleges serve other missions beyond operating efficiently, like educating well-rounded citizens and broadening access to education in underserved communities.

One of his biggest complaints is a narrative popular among leaders of education start-ups: that colleges are no different today than they were hundreds of years ago. You might have seen an image of a lecture from the 14th century that is used in slide presentations by many ed-tech disruptors, who then note that college courses are still taught in the same way.

“This is one of the most inaccurate pieces of @#%$ floating around in the ‘disrupt and transform’ learning crowd,” Mr. Siemens wrote. “Universities are exceptional at innovating and changing,” he argued. “Explore any campus today. It’s a new world on most campuses, never mind the online, competency, and related systems.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Siemens made a point of praising the Education Department for bringing together people from a range of areas, and he said he saw the White House meeting as a sign that big changes were coming to higher education.

But he argued that he had come away wanting to push back against the idea that colleges are stagnant.

“When I hear this, I’m like, Have you been to a campus lately, or talked to a college CIO, or have you seen the predictive models for identifying a struggling student?” he said.

“Admittedly colleges have been slower to respond than corporations have” to changes in technology, Mr. Siemens added. But that’s how it should be, he argued. “When a university takes a big pedagogical risk and fails, that’s impacting someone’s life.” He admitted that colleges could be moving faster, but he felt that it is disingenuous to ignore the changes that are happening.

Mr. Siemens said that what’s missing from many discussions of reform is the recognition of the many roles that colleges play — and the many metrics by which they are judged beyond dollars and cents.

“The rest of the world desperately would like to have the higher-ed success the U.S. has,” he said. “It has given us Facebook and Silicon Valley and the drivers of U.S. productivity in today’s age.”

Dear Commons Community,

Cornell Tech is moving forward with its academic programs. The new institution now operates out of the Google building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and will eventually be housed in a complex on Roosevelt Island, in the East River, construction for which started in June. The institution offers graduate-level studies focused on the media, health technology, and the built environment. However, what is most intriguing about Cornell Tech is its partner, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“A certain mystique surrounds the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. The university has helped make Israel the “Start-Up Nation” celebrated in books and venture-capital circles, has spun off dozens of companies, and has taught entrepreneurship since long before it became popular.

Its worldwide prestige is why Cornell University chose the Technion four years ago as its partner to build a new technology-focused campus in New York City.

Yet for all its vaunted reputation, there’s actually little in the Technion policies or formal practices that’s all that different from the approach at dozens of other successful institutions around the world. On paper, at least, it doesn’t stand out.

Instead, it’s a certain hard-to-pinpoint ethos in the institute, located on a hilly campus in this city on the Mediterranean Sea, that sets the Technion apart.

Ziv Lautman, a recent graduate and co-founder of a two-year-old company called BreezoMeter, calls it “an atmosphere of excellence.”

It’s a place where many faculty members work comfortably and eagerly with industry on research partnerships, and students aspire to make similar connections or even to forge their own paths. “We’re attractive to students who think they know what company they’re going to start,” says Ehud Behar, a professor of physics.

It’s that ethos that Cornell officials are working to channel for the new Cornell Tech applied-sciences campus 5,600 miles away.

Cornell Tech aims to be a different kind of higher-education institution, infused with some of the Technion’s DNA, even as officials here in Israel and in New York acknowledge that a lot of the Technion’s culture — what Mr. Lautman calls its “spirit” — is intimately tied to its role in Israel’s early Zionist past and in its current high-tech boom. The challenge, says Daniel Huttenlocher, founding dean and vice provost at Cornell Tech, is “how can we abstract it and bring it to New York City.”

We wish Cornell Tech well!  We also thank former Mayor Michael Bloomberg for taking the initiative in bringing this partnership to New York City.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges released a new set of guidelines for university trustees. The guidelines stress three major duties: care, loyality, and obedience. Here is the announcement as reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Saying that governance is “at a crossroads,” the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges on Tuesday released new guidance stressing that university trustees be loyal to their institution, among other things. The document, a “statement on the fiduciary duties of governing-board members,” outlines three main duties for board members: care, loyalty, and obedience.

The 11-page statement is “designed as a tool,” it reads, “to orient board members to the elements of fiduciary duty and to recommend proven practices for translating those duties into effective board conduct.”

The document comes amid a heated conversation about the bounds of the trustee in higher education. That discussion has been loudest in the University of Texas system, where the regent Wallace L. Hall Jr. has led a prolonged and expensive crusade to shed light on spending and admissions practices at the Austin flagship.”

The other infamous example was at the University of Virginia in 2012, when board leaders grew so frustrated with Teresa A. Sullivan’s performance as president that they forced her out without so much as a meeting of the full governing body. They provided little public explanation for their action but privately expressed misgivings about the pace at which the university was exploring online education. (Amid a public outcry, Ms. Sullivan was rehired a little more than two weeks after her ouster.)

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, desperate to gain attention in the crowded 2016 GOP presidential field, said Sunday that the American Federation of Teachers deserves a “punch in the face” and called it the “single most destructive force in public education.” Christie said the union cares only about higher wages and benefits and not about children.   As reported in The Washington Post:

“Christie, who has long made teachers unions a favorite foil, made the comments on CNN’s “State of the Union” in response to host Jake Tapper, who noted that Christie has said that he confronts bullies by punching them in the face. “At the national level, who deserves a punch in the face?” Tapper asked.

Without missing a beat, Christie said: “Oh the national teachers union, who has already endorsed Hillary Clinton 16, 17 months before the election.”

Christie was referring to the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union, which became the first national labor union to make an endorsement in the 2016 race when it gave its backing to Clinton on July 11. The largest union, the National Education Association, has not yet made an endorsement.”

Christie has become a pathetic, laughable politician since the George Washington “bridge-gate” scandal. He should give his party a break and dropped out of the presidential race now.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump skewered five Republican presidential candidates (Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz,and Carly Fiorina) as “puppets” of the Koch brothers. The occasion was the semi-annual meeting of Charles and David Koch and invited guests who discuss Republican politics and election strategy. As reported in the New York Times:

“As five of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates descended on an exclusive donor conference hosted by the oil-billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, Donald J. Trump had a message for his rivals.

“I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers,” Mr. Trump, who leads in many national polls, wrote in a Sunday morning Twitter post. “Puppets?”

The candidates who made the pilgrimage to Dana Point, Calif., this weekend to address the gathering of wealthy donors were either pandering to the brothers at one of their twice-yearly seminars (beg-a-thons, in Trump parlance) or simply hoping to woo an influential network of Republicans who could help finance their campaigns through what is shaping up to be a grueling nominating process.

Rich donors have emerged as more crucial than ever this election cycle, with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing a tsunami of big money into politics, especially through “super PACs” — political organizations that are outside the campaigns but often act as de facto extensions of them.

A New York Times analysis found that fewer than 400 families had contributed nearly half the money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign so far, with roughly 130 families and their businesses providing more than half the money that Republican candidates and their super PACs had raised through June.

And so, as Mr. Trump assailed his rivals for behaving like “puppets” of the Koch brothers, many of the leading Republican candidates — including former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida; Senator Ted Cruz of Texas; Senator Marco Rubio of Florida; and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin — found themselves trying to walk the fine line between courting the brothers’ vast wealth and not coming across as their marionettes.

(Mr. Trump, who is heavily financing his own campaign, was not invited to the conference, where the coveted speaking slots were assigned by members of the Koch network. And a political data company set up by the Koch brothers has reportedly declined to do business with Mr. Trump’s campaign.)”

Mr. Trump for once is right. Many Republican candidates in national and local elections have become “puppets” of big money and corporate sponsors. The Koch brothers in particular have become the epitome of what is wrong with this trend and in the way elections are run in this country.

Tony

Earning Much Less, Despite More Education

Dear Commons Community,

Steven Rattner, financier, author and MSNBC commentator, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times analyzing the lives of millennials (those born in the early 1980s to the early 2000s). He describes them as follows:

“To some, millennials — those urban-dwelling, ride-sharing indefatigable social networkers — are engaged, upbeat and open to change. To others, they are narcissistic, lazy and self-centered.

I’m in the first camp, but regardless of your opinion, be fretful over their economic well-being and fearful — oh so fearful — for their prospects. The most educated generation in history is on track to becoming less prosperous, at least financially, than its predecessors.

They are faced with a slow economy, high unemployment, stagnant wages and student loans that constrict their ability both to maintain a reasonable lifestyle and to save for the future.

Longer term, rising federal debt payments and increased spending on Social Security and Medicare will inflict a tremendous financial burden on them, threatening their own prospect of receiving promised retirement benefits.”

He concludes that their plight is the fault of baby boomers (his and my generation).

“To a considerable extent, that’s the fault of my generation, the baby boomers. We were the children of the Greatest Generation, but we may also be the most irresponsible generation” mainly because we will have saddle the millennials with crushing debt that will increase as we get older and rely on federal programs such as social security and Medicare.

Rattner provides a number of charts and tables to support his position.

It is a sobering picture and he may be right that we baby boomers are not leaving this place in better shape than we came into it.

Tony