Dear Commons Community,

A new report released  yesterday by the UCLA Civil Rights Project concluded that black students are four times as likely to be suspended from charter schools as white students and students with disabilities  are suspended two to three times the rate of nondisabled students.  Based on data from the 2011-12 school year, the report found that charter schools at the elementary, middle and high school levels suspended 7.8 percent of students, compared with 6.7 percent of students in noncharter schools. Among students with disabilities, charter schools suspended 15.5 percent of students, compared with 13.7 percent at noncharters. At the extreme end, there were 235 charter schools that suspended more than half of their students with disabilities.  As reported in the New York Times:

“…the report is likely to fuel an often fierce debate about disciplinary practices in charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run. Some charter networks have come under fire for “no excuses” behavioral codes, under which students can be suspended for offenses like clothing violations.

Daniel J. Losen, the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies, said the report should not be used to generalize about all charter school discipline, because there were also schools that did not suspend students at high rates. “There are other ways to address school discipline that hold kids accountable,” he said.

Advocates for the disabled were particularly concerned about the higher rates of suspension at charters, given that charter schools enroll a lower proportion of students with disabilities than traditional public schools.

Suspensions can have a devastating impact on students. Previous research has found that suspensions contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, which pushes students out of school and makes them more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. Students who get suspended from school are more likely to drop out of high school later on. 

As states around the country gear up to implemented the Every Student Succeeds Act, the major federal law replacing the George W. Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, Losen called on states to pay attention to these numbers. Under the new law, states are required to lower the number of schools overusing harsh discipline. Charter schools are also beholden to these requirements, unless a state specifically passes a law exempting them.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Another series of primary elections came and went yesterday.  Hillary Clinton did very well on the Democratic side and has pretty much the nomination in hand over Bernie Sanders.  Donald Trump also did well trouncing the other candidates with the exception of John Kasich who managed to win his own state of Ohio.  Gail Collins, in her New York Times column, comments on Kasich’s victory.

“In the Republican debates, Kasich was a sort of fuzzy presence, the guy on the end who kept talking about the House budget committee in 1997. Or being positive. At times it was like a bunch of gladiators smashing into one another at the coliseum while one chipper combatant wandered around shaking his head and urging everybody to get along.

Can Kasich go all the way? Doesn’t seem likely. But then Ohio does like to call itself the Mother of Presidents. Eight came from Ohio in one way or another. True, that included Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who lasted for only a month. But on the plus side there’s … William McKinley.

Right now he certainly seems like the only non-appalling option the Republicans have, even though there are a lot of people in Ohio right now who are shaking their heads in stupefaction at the sight of their governor as the nation’s poster boy for moderation. He’s signed an absolute mountain of anti-abortion bills — nearly half of the clinics in the state have shut down during his tenure. His enthusiasm for giving public funding to private, for-profit schools has been scandalous. And on the economic front he has the usual conservative contempt for taxing residents according to their ability to pay.

But he doesn’t think we should ban Muslims or deport millions of immigrants. And there’s always that thing about the downtrodden. This year, it’s as good as the Republicans can hope for. And the other options [Donald Trump and Ted Cruz]  are so really, really bad.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Hanan Al Hroub is the second person to win the Global Teacher Prize, an annual award from the nonprofit Varkey Foundation, which describes it as the “Nobel Prize for Teaching.” More than 8,000 teachers in 140 countries applied for this year’s prize.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Teacher Hanan Al Hroub is trying to rid Palestine of violence, one classroom at a time. Al Hroub is dedicated to steering her primary school students away from lives of violence. She has a deep personal understanding of how violence can have a traumatizing effect, according to a press release from the Varkey Foundation. Growing up in a refugee camp, Al Hroub witnessed fighting at a young age. Then, many years later, her children witnessed a shooting that deeply disturbed them. In her book We Play and Learn, Al Hroub describes her method of promoting peace through developing trusting relationships with students and encouraging literacy, according to the press release. 

“I tell the teachers, whether they are Palestinian or around the world: Our job is humane, its goals are noble,” Al Hroub says in a video about her work. “We must teach our children that our only weapon is knowledge and education.”

Pope Francis presented Al Hroub with her prize by videocast. Last year, Nancie Atwell, an English teacher from Maine, took home the prize. Al Hroub was one of 10 finalists in contention for the award.

Congratulations!  Al Hroub brings great pride to the teaching profession!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John Hayes unveiled his Pure Storage Box yesterday which ushered in a new era of digital data storage capacity.  Big as a slim refrigerator, it holds 16 petabytes of data, roughly equal to 16 billion thick books. Currently, most data storage is measured in terms of gigabytes and terabytes (see table below)   As reported in the New York Times:

“People are going to have to think about things to put into this,” he [John Hayes] said, surrounded by the clutter of his office at a Silicon Valley company called Pure Storage. “But that won’t take long — there’s a demand for data that nobody was ready for.”

Each month, the world’s one billion cellphones throw out 18 exabytes of data, equal to 1,100 of Mr. Hayes’s boxes. There are also millions of sensors in things ranging from cars and appliances to personal fitness trackers and cameras.

IBM estimates that by 2020 we will have 44 zettabytes — the thousand-fold number next up from exabytes — generated by all those devices. It is so much information that Big Blue is staking its future on so-called machine learning and artificial intelligence, two kinds of pattern-finding software built to cope with all that information.

Making storage products has long been a major part of the tech industry. It has also been one of the dullest, with little in the way of innovation. Now the surge in data is leading both start-ups and some of tech’s biggest companies to rethink how they approach the problem.

Pure, co-founded by Mr. Hayes, a 38-year-old former video karaoke engineer, is one of several companies trying new approaches.

Mr. Hayes’s box, which was unveiled on Monday, holds five times as much data as a conventional storage device, thanks to a combination of so-called flash storage technology and clever engineering. Sometime in 2017, he said, it will hold twice that much, as Pure tweaks the product. Power consumption, the company says, is 4 percent of the current standard.”

Advances in data storage capacity has been one of the major drivers of digital technology over the past seventy years.  The Pure Storage Box is major leap forward and sets the stage for even greater development over the next ten years.  The article rightfully points out that this type of storage capacity portends very advanced applications such as artificial intelligence.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a sign of the seriousness of the budget problems in Illinois, Eastern Illinois University announced on Friday that it was laying off 177 employees, a cut in the size of its civil-service work force of roughly 30 percent. The standoff, between the Republican governor, Bruce V. Rauner, and the Democratic-led legislature has left public colleges without state money for nearly nine months.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The civil-service group includes housing and dining workers as well as members of the student-life and academic-support staffs, among others, said Vicki S. Woodard, a university spokeswoman. “It really affects offices throughout campus,” she said. Some professional administrative staff members have been forced to take one furlough day per week through the end of June, she added.

David M. Glassman, president of the university, said in a written statement that Eastern Illinois faculty, staff, and students were “victims of the lack of any bipartisanship and compromise by our state leaders.” Ms. Woodard said the university hoped the layoffs would be temporary. “The intent is to bring them all back” once the state enacts a budget, she said. “Until we get actual numbers and know what we’re dealing with, we can’t say for certain.”

Rumors circulated last fall that the university could close this semester due to the budget impasse, though officials have assured students that the institution will remain open. Eastern Illinois’s financial health has been affected by the lack of state money, however, with Moody’s Investors Service downgrading the university’s credit rating to junk-bond status last month.

Faculty members escaped this round of cutbacks. But unionized professors and academic-support staff members face a major vote next week. They will decide whether to accept a 5.6-percent pay cut through the end of the fiscal year, on June 30.

Eastern Illinois says it’s $2 million short of making payroll, and it developed a proposal jointly with union leaders to deal with the gap. The institution would pay back the reductions for union members making less than $50,000 per year after receiving $5 million from the state for this fiscal year, and then, after receiving another $5 million, half of the cut for those making more than $50,000. If there’s no state appropriation for this year, though, the university wouldn’t have to reimburse the professors.”

Not a good situation for the students, staff, and faculty of Eastern Illinois.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Over this past weekend, artificial intelligence took a big step forward when a computer program, AlphaGo, beat the world champion Go player, Lee Sedol.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The Google-owned computer program that beat Mr. Sedol, AlphaGo, is a cutting-edge example of programs that mirror humanlike brain structures, and its success against Mr. Sedol in Seoul is now indisputable. The computer won the first three games in the match before Mr. Sedol finally captured one, on Sunday. The fifth and final game will be played on Tuesday.

The game of Go, in which Mr. Sedol is an 18-time world champion, dates back more than 2,500 years to China, where it was considered an essential spiritual art. It involves alternating placements of black and white stones on a square grid, aimed at capturing territory. The full-sized version of the game has 19 lines on each side, meaning hourslong contests with hundreds of possible moves each turn.

Even for a computer, that’s too much complexity for a “brute force” calculation of the outcomes of all possible moves over several player turns. Human experts such as Mr. Sedol typically describe their play as involving large amounts of intuition.

AlphaGo works largely by combining versions of two established computer processing techniques. One is known as an artificial neural network, which is a vast array of data-processing points that make individual contributions toward the goal of identifying a complex overall pattern. The other is known as Monte-Carlo tree search, which involves logical chains of what action leads to another, driven by feedback on outcomes and the quick elimination of nonviable pathways.

Like past instances of computers that beat top human competitors — such as Deep Blue against the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997, and Watson against the Jeopardy!champ Ken Jennings in 2011 — AlphaGo was specifically trained for its game.

But experts credit AlphaGo with much higher expectations for wider applicability, given the need in Go to make decisions from an array of choices far more numerous than it can actually calculate. “This is much closer to the way animals do it, including us,” said Mr. Koch, a former professor at the California Institute of Technology. “It’s a big deal.”

Others are somewhat less certain. The software that beat Mr. Sedol is impressive, said Miles Brundage, a doctoral student at Arizona State University who has been studying AlphaGo. But Google also “threw a lot of hardware at it,” Mr. Brundage said.

That suspicion is shared by Mark O. Riedl, an associate professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The AlphaGo victory may reflect improvements in computer processing speeds as much as software innovation, Mr. Riedl said, and once-rapid advances in the operating speed of computer chips have slowed over the past decade.

And while a Go playing board presents a forbidding number of choices, it’s still a constrained world, not a full replication of the number of options faced in many real-world environments, said Bart Selman, a professor of computer science at Cornell University.

But even with all of those uncertainties about the importance of AlphaGo, the current rapid progress in artificial intelligence “is absolutely genuine,” said Edward M. Geist, a research fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.”

The potential of artificial intelligence has been promoted for several decades now.  However, the speed of digital technology is finally getting to the point where breakthroughs such as AlphaGo are beginning to appear.  The next generation of digital design based on quantum computing will dwarf the speeds and capacities of current technology and will usher in a plethora of artificial intelligence applications probably in the next 20 years or so.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Kate Murphy has an op-ed piece in the New York Times today focusing on a question of great importance to the academic community, namely:  Should all research be free?  She specifically comments on the mission of Alexandra Elbakyan,  a graduate student from Kazakhstan, who illegally leaked millions of documents of scientific and research articles.

“While Elbakyan didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology.

Her protest against scholarly journals’ paywalls has earned her rock-star status among advocates for open access, and has shined a light on how scientific findings that could inform personal and public policy decisions on matters as consequential as health care, economics and the environment are often prohibitively expensive to read and impossible to aggregate and datamine.

“Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research,” said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access.

“The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis” that is possible when articles aren’t “sitting on various siloed databases.”

Journal publishers collectively earned $10 billion last year, much of it from research libraries, which pay annual subscription fees ranging from $2,000 to $35,000 per title if they don’t buy subscriptions of bundled titles, which cost millions. The largest companies, like Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication.

Moreover, they orchestrate the vetting, editing and archiving of articles.

That is the argument Elsevier made, supported by a raft of industry amicus briefs, when it filed suit against Ms. Elbakyan, resulting in an injunction last fall against her file-sharing website, Sci-Hub. “It’s as if somehow stealing content is justifiable if it’s seen as expensive, and I find that surprising,” said Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier. “It’s not as if you’d walk into a grocery store and feel vindicated about stealing an organic chocolate bar as long as you left the Kit Kat bar on the shelf.”

Ms. Murphy goes on to explore both sides of the argument.  

The issue gets complicated because while many academics support open access to their work, they still need publication vehicles whether electronic and/or paper to bring their work to the education and research communities. In my own case, I have been an associate editor of an open-access journal (Online Learning Journal originally the Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN)) since its inception in 1996.  My colleagues and I are proud of the scholarly articles and resources we have provided over the past twenty years.  However, we had the Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Consortium, and now the Online Learning Consortium financially supporting our efforts. Without this support, the journal might not have continued to be in existence at least not in its present form. The article by Ms. Murphy covers a number of these issues well and is worth a read for those of us in academia who publish and rely on scholarly journals (free or for-profit) to disseminate our work.

Tony

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr08FcNiRCM[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this evening, Donald Trump canceled a rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago after thousands of demonstrators protested outside and inside the venue.  The protesters carried signs representing students from the University of Illinois, Bernie Sanders supporters, Black Lives Matter, and MoveOn.  As reported by Reuters and other media;

The rally was called off about a half-hour after the scheduled 6 p.m. start time, after thousands of Trump fans and anti-Trump protesters packed into the free event, which required online registration. Thousands more gathered outside, surrounded by a police perimeter, and people became more vocal as the starting time approached. 

The rally quickly devolved into chaos and fighting after the cancelation was announced.

“Tonight’s rally will be postponed,” a Trump campaign staffer announced, as a sea of protesters celebrated and tore apart Trump signs inside the university pavilion.

“Mr. Trump just arrived in Chicago and after meeting with law enforcement has determined that for the safety of all the tens of thousands of people that have gathered in and around the arena, tonight’s rally will be postponed for another date,” a statement from the campaign said. “Thank you very much for your attendance, and please go in peace.” 

“I have never seen anything like it. It’s amazing,” CNN’s Jim Acosta said. The network said approximately 8,500 people were at the rally.

Trump’s events in recent days have featured numerous instances of violence. Trump has encouraged supporters to attack protesters, saying they should “hit back” more often.

“You can’t even have a rally anymore in this country,” Trump complained on MSNBC shortly after the cancelation. “I just don’t want to see people get hurt.

Ted Cruz in responding to news of the protest, commented that Donald Trump is running “a campaign of violence” and he is not surprised by what has occurred in Chicago.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Anyone viewing last night’s presidential nominee debate would think that sanity had returned to the Republican Party’s primaries.  This afternoon Reuters is reporting that “U.S. Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s campaign urged a tactical vote against party front-runner Donald Trump on Friday, saying Rubio supporters in Ohio should vote for the state’s governor, John Kasich, next week.

Ohio is one of five states holding Republican primary contests on March 15.

“If you’re a Republican primary voter in Ohio, and you don’t want Donald Trump to be the nominee, John Kasich is your best bet,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant told CNN in an interview.

“If you’re a Republican primary voter here in Florida and you don’t want Donald Trump to be your nominee, Marco Rubio is your best bet. That is indisputable,” he added, referring to the U.S. senator’s home state.

Rubio, Kasich and Ted Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas, are battling to stop Trump from winning the nomination to represent the party in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Some Republicans, most notably 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, have urged conservatives who oppose Trump to vote for which ever alternative candidate is most likely to win certain states in the upcoming primary contests.”

Stay tuned.  The show is not over!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Merryl Tisch, the outgoing Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, gave an interview to the New York Times, reflecting on her tenure as the State’s chief education policy maker.  Dr. Tisch was appointed to the Board of Regents in 1996 and was elected chancellor, an unpaid position, in 2009. The Regents are appointed by the Legislature, and they in turn appoint the state education commissioner. She summed up her work on the Regents as having “tried too much too fast”. She specifically reviewed the Common Core implementation, teacher evaluations, and the Opt-Out Movement.

“Dr. Tisch, pushed for the creation of new, harder tests based on the Common Core standards and for teacher evaluations tied to students’ performance on the exams.

That set off a backlash in which a fifth of the eligible students sat out the state’s third- through eighth-grade reading and math tests last spring. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once her ally on using test scores in teacher evaluations, did an about-face.

Now the Regents are expected to elect a chancellor endorsed by leaders of the opt-out revolt. Already, the board has put in place a four-year moratorium on the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. Following a critical report from a task force convened by the governor, the State Education Department is gathering comment from teachers and parents on how the standards should be changed.

If she could take one thing back, Dr. Tisch said, it would be having rolled out the standards and the teacher evaluation system at the same time, “because I think the debate over how to evaluate a teacher contaminated the more important work.”

The article also commented on her likely replacement, Betty A. Rosa, a former, school superintendent in the Bronx;

“The State Assembly on Tuesday elected three new Regents to replace the departing board members. One of them, Luis O. Reyes, a research associate at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, was endorsed by the opt-out leaders.

When the Regents meet on March 21 and 22, they are likely to elect Betty A. Rosa, a former superintendent in the Bronx, as the next chancellor. In a phone interview, Dr. Rosa, 64, said she believed there was too much emphasis on standardized tests as measures of students’ and schools’ performance. She said she wanted to see teacher evaluations permanently unlinked from test scores, because she was skeptical of the methodology used to calculate a teacher’s impact on a student’s scores.  She also expressed concern about the new, more difficult licensing exams the state introduced under Dr. Tisch, in an effort to raise the bar for new teachers.

“What we’ve been doing to children, we’re doing it now to teachers,” Dr. Rosa said.

Dr. Tisch said she was worried that backtracking on teacher certification requirements would “allow the least prepared teachers to continue to populate the highest-needs school districts.”

In my opinion,  Dr. Tisch and her commissioners never understood the importance of including parents and educators at the local levels in designing and implementing education reforms.  As a result rather than reform, they brought chaos and disruption.  Now the new chancellor has to start over.  Good luck, Dr. Rosa. 

Tony