Dear Commons Community,

Just when we thought it could not get an crazier, FBI Director James Comey informed Congress yesterday that a review of new emails found in relation to the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server had not yielded any reason for charges against the Democratic presidential nominee.

As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Nine days after upending the 2016 presidential campaign, FBI Director James Comey announced Sunday that Hillary Clinton would not face charges over newly discovered emails found on a separate computer.

In a letter to Congress, Comey said he would not revisit his initial conclusion, announced in July, that Clinton acted carelessly, but not criminally, when she used a private email account as secretary of state.

Since my letter, the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation. During that process we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton. I am very grateful to the professionals at the FBI for doing an extraordinary amount of high-quality work in a short period of time.

Comey’s initial announcement came in the form of a vague letter to Congress on Oct. 28. It set off days of intense news coverage centered on the possibility that the Democratic presidential nominee could face indictment over emails discovered on a laptop belonging to former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), the estranged husband of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

Though Clinton’s lead in the polls had been shrinking prior to then, her aides and several pollsters said that the news dampened enthusiasm among Democratic voters and further hurt her standing.

The news certainly caused damage to the FBI’s reputation ― as well as Comey’s. Several Democrats accused the director and agents in the FBI of being partisan actors trying to interfere in the electoral process, while federal prosecutors were highly critical of Comey’s decision to make such a public pronouncement so close to the election.

Comey’s Oct. 28 announcement broke with tradition at the Justice Department, which has rules in place to prevent federal law enforcement from influencing the electoral process. While an aide to Comey blamed reporters for blowing Comey’s letter out of proportion, it was not difficult to imagine how the letter would be ― and was ― used by Clinton’s political opponents in the final days of the campaign.

President Barack Obama, who nominated Comey to head the bureau in 2013, took the unusual step of criticizing the FBI director, telling a reporter that the “norm” is not to “operate on innuendo” or “incomplete information.”

In his letter on Sunday, Comey gave scant explanation for what his bureau found in the newly discovered emails, which reportedly numbered roughly 650,000. But NBC’s Pete Williams, who has been one of the top reporters on the matter, said they found nothing particularly revelatory.

The effect of Sunday’s news on the election is hard to predict.”

Thank God tomorrow is Election Day!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, voters around the country will be fixated on following the outcome of the presidential election, however, in Massachusetts, a referendum on the expansion of charter schools is putting Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton on the back burner.  According to a New York Times article this morning:

“The television ads are relentless, fueled by a historic surge of campaign spending. Fliers are clogging mailboxes. Both sides are knocking on doors across the state. But in deep blue Massachusetts, the contentious campaigning is not for president but for a ballot question on whether to expand charter schools.

The pitched battle in this state, known as a bellwether on education policy, reflects the passions that charter schools arouse nationwide, particularly regarding a central part of the debate: If they offer children in lagging traditional public schools an alternative path to a quality education, do they also undermine those schools and the children in them?

Because Massachusetts’s charter schools rank among the nation’s best, advocates say a yes vote to allow more of them would send a strong signal that they have a crucial role to play in improving student learning and closing the achievement gap between white and black students.

But opponents say a no vote would show that even in a state where charter schools have been successful, most voters believe the schools — privately run but publicly financed — undermine traditional public schools, drain resources and perpetuate inequities, and should be curtailed.

“What happens in Massachusetts will send shock waves throughout the United States either way,” said Parag Pathak, a professor at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, who studies education.

“If the voters reject more urban charters here,” he said, “then it’s not clear what more the charter movement can do to convince opponents and skeptics.”

Question 2 on the ballot asks whether the state should be allowed to approve up to 12 new charter schools or larger enrollments at existing charters each year, not to exceed 1 percent of the statewide public school enrollment.

The measure would affect nine communities that have either reached their caps on charter enrollment or have room for only one more charter school: Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Fall River, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lowell, Springfield and Worcester. All have long waiting lists.

It would not affect 96 percent of the state’s school districts, yet strategists say voters in those districts — largely in suburbs with good public schools — could determine the outcome Tuesday…

Opponents also cast the ballot measure as a goal of “out-of-state billionaires,” including the brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch and members of the Walton family, which controls Walmart. Their real intent, Question 2 opponents say, is to bust teachers’ unions and privatize public schools.

“We can’t let people demonize our schools, particularly those who never have and never will set foot in any of our schools in the city of Boston,” Mayor Walsh declared Tuesday at a raucous rally.

But supporters of expanding charter schools say the argument that they drain money from public schools is alarmist and misleading. The yes side points to a study by the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation— the Boston Foundation, which supports charters, financed the study — which concluded that charters do not take more money than their fair share, since financing follows children when they switch schools. This year, the study reported, 3.9 percent of the state’s students attend charter schools, which are receiving 3.9 percent of education money.

Opponents counter that when students leave, public schools still have to pay overhead, teacher salaries and other costs, which can lead to closings.

Maurice T. Cunningham, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Boston, said he was shocked at how big this ballot fight had become. Mr. Cunningham, a member of a teachers’ union who said he had not taken a position on the ballot question or on charters, noted that the labor movement had turned the campaign into “a good old-fashioned union brawl,” which escalated the spending on both sides.

Because the unions had worked so hard to defeat this measure, he said, the outcome would show that “if you can’t stop the hidden billionaire money in Massachusetts, then you can’t stop it anywhere.”

Charter schools were and can still be a good idea if they can return to their roots as experimental public schools that free of bureaucratic interference would provide exemplary models for traditional public schools. They were to be partners and not competitors.  They also were not to be used as vehicles to bash traditional public schools or teachers unions but that is what they have become in some of our cities.

The Massachusetts referendum will be watched closely by education reformers.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Seeley who was our colleague here at the CUNY Graduate Center has passed away at the age of 85. The cause of death was myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease. David was recognized and highly regarded nationally. As described in his obituary:

“Dr. Seeley was recruited by Francis Keppel, his former professor and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s education commissioner, to help enforce the guidelines against school segregation in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was given the title of assistant commissioner for equal educational opportunities and held that post from 1965 to 1967.  The federal government had only incremental success at first — though a Georgia congressman, Phil M. Landrum, demanded Dr. Seeley’s removal on the grounds that he was going too fast on desegregation.

In 1967,  he became director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Education Liaison under John Lindsay. A year later, he switched to addressing education issues outside government, as a senior staff associate at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center under Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, the noted national civil rights leader, psychologist and educator.

He served as executive director of the Public Education Association from 1969 to 1980, continuing his work on school reform, and his book about the collaborative process in schools, “Education Through Partnership,” was published in 1981. He also wrote numerous articles for and served as a consultant to many educational enterprises.

“He was a moral compass, and his life touched and influenced many, many people in a positive way, myself included. He was always a great supporter, inspiration and the voice of reason,” said Staten Island Assemblyman Matt Titone. “I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to know him.”

I first met David in the early 1980s at the College of Staten Island where we both worked.  In the 1990s, we were members of the committee that designed our Ph.D. Program in Urban Education here at the Graduate Center.  Before he retired, David came to many of our events and offered constructive advice on how to move the program forward.

Our condolences to his family.  May he rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a trial that has dominated the news here in the northeast for six weeks, Bridget Kelly, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, and Bill Baroni, former deputy executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, were found guilty in Newark federal court on all counts of fraud, conspiracy and depriving the residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey, of their civil rights.  As reported by Reuters:

“Two former allies of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were convicted on Friday for their roles in the “Bridgegate” lane closure scandal, following a six-week trial that served to further tarnish the Republican’s damaged reputation.

Kelly and Baroni were convicted of fraud, conspiracy and depriving the residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey, of their civil rights.

Christie, who has repeatedly denied any advance knowledge of the scheme, is a top adviser for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“Let me be clear once again, I had no knowledge prior to or during these lane realignments, and had no role in authorizing them,” Christie said in a statement following the verdict.

“Anything said to the contrary over the past six weeks in court is simply untrue.”

The scandal has dogged Christie, once seen as a rising political star and a potential presidential nominee before his campaign for the White House failed this year.

The two officials were accused of shutting down access lanes at the George Washington Bridge in September 2013 in Fort Lee, New Jersey, creating a massive days-long traffic jam to punish the town’s mayor, Mark Sokolich, for declining to endorse Christie’s reelection campaign.

The bridge, which connects New Jersey to Manhattan, is one of the country’s busiest.

Lawyers for Kelly and Baroni vowed to appeal.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Frum, senior editor at The Atlantic, chairman of Policy Exchange and a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, penned an essay in The Atlantic entitled, The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton. He describes his own Republican Party/conservative leanings, severely criticizes Donald Trump, and concludes that for the good of the republic that he has to vote for Hillary Clinton.  Here is an excerpt:

“That Donald Trump has approached so near the White House is a bitter reproach to everybody who had the power to stop him. I include myself in this reproach. Early on, I welcomed Trump’s up-ending of some outdated Republican Party dogmas—taking it for granted that of course such a ridiculous and obnoxious fraud could never win a major party’s nomination. But Trump did win. Now, he stands within a percentage point or two or at most four of the presidency of the United States.

Having failed to act promptly at the outset, it’s all the more important to act decisively before it’s too late. The lesson Trump has taught is not only that certain Republican dogmas have passed out of date, but that American democracy itself is much more vulnerable than anyone would have believed only 24 months ago. Incredibly, a country that—through wars and depression—so magnificently resisted the authoritarian temptations of the mid-20th century has half-yielded to a more farcical version of that same threat without any of the same excuse. The hungry and houseless Americans of the Great Depression sustained a constitutional republic. How shameful that the Americans of today—so vastly better off in so many ways, despite their undoubted problems—have done so much less well.

This November, however, I am voting not to advance my wish-list on taxes, entitlements, regulation, and judicial appointments. I am voting to defend Americans’ profoundest shared commitment: a commitment to norms and rules that today protect my rights under a president I don’t favor, and that will tomorrow do the same service for you.

Vote the wrong way in November, and those norms and rules will shudder and shake in a way unequaled since the Union won the Civil War.

I appreciate that Donald Trump is too slovenly and incompetent to qualify as a true dictator. This country is not so broken as to allow a President Trump to arrest opponents or silence the media. Trump is a man without political ideas. Trump’s main interest has been and will continue to be self-enrichment by any means, no matter how crooked. His next interest after that is never to be criticized by anybody for any reason, no matter how justified—maybe most especially when justified. Yet Trump does not need to achieve a dictatorship to subvert democracy. This is the age of “illiberal democracy,” as Fareed Zakaria calls it, and across the world we’ve seen formally elected leaders corrode democratic systems from within. Surely the American system of government is more robust than the Turkish or Hungarian or Polish or Malaysian or Italian systems. But that is not automatically true. It is true because of the active vigilance of freedom-loving citizens who put country first, party second. Not in many decades has that vigilance been required as it is required now.

Your hand may hesitate to put a mark beside the name, Hillary Clinton. You’re not doing it for her. The vote you cast is for the republic and the Constitution.”

Amen and let’s hope others heed his advice!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a baseball game for the ages last night, the Chicago Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians 8-7 in ten innings and shattered their 108-year championship drought in epic fashion.   There were home-runs at critical moments, closers coming in to pitch in the fifth inning, a rain delay, and extra innings.  Here is a brief recap:

If you are going to endure years — no, generations — of futility and heartbreak, when you do finally win a World Series championship, it may as well be a memorable one.

When the Indians rallied with three runs in the eighth inning — including a two-out, two-strike, two-run thunderbolt of a home run by Rajai Davis off closer Aroldis Chapman — the Cubs found a way to beat back the ghosts of playoffs past.

After a brief rain delay following the ninth inning, they pushed two runs across in the 10th inning on a double by Ben Zobrist, the Series’s most valuable player, and a single by Miguel Montero.

The Cubs then had to hold their breath in the bottom of the inning when Davis hit a run-scoring single to pull the Indians to a run behind. But reliever Mike Montgomery replaced Carl Edwards and got Michael Martinez to hit a slow roller into the infield. Third baseman Kris Bryant scooped it up and threw across to first baseman Anthony Rizzo.

As the ball made its flight across the diamond, the stadium went silent for one of only a few times all night — and only until it settled into Rizzo’s glove. Then the huge contingent of Cubs fans erupted, and the players raced to the middle of the infield to celebrate.”

Congratulations Chicago – The Curse is over!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

EDUCAUSE provided a preview of its annual Top Ten IT issues report which will be published in January 2017.  Here is the preview as presented at its annual conference last week.

The Top 10 IT issues for 2017

1. Information security: Developing a holistic, agile approach to reducing institutional exposure to information security threats.
2. Student success and completion: Effectively applying data and predictive analytics to improve student success and completion.
3. Data-informed decision-making: Ensuring that business intelligence, reporting, and analytics are relevant, convenient, and used by administrators, faculty, and students.
4. Strategic leadership: Repositioning or reinforcing the role of IT leadership as a strategic partner with institutional leadership.
5. Sustainable funding: Developing IT funding models that sustain core services, support innovation, and facilitate growth
6. Data management and governance: Improving the management of institutional data through data standards, integration, protection, and governance.
7. Higher education affordability: Prioritizing IT investments and resources in the context of increasing demand and limited resources.
8. Sustainable staffing: Ensuring adequate staffing capacity and staff retention as budgets shrink or remain flat and as external competition grows.
9. Next-gen enterprise IT: Developing and implementing enterprise IT applications, architecture, and sourcing strategies to achieve agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness and effective analytics.
10. Digital transformation of learning: Collaborating with faculty and academic leadership to apply technology to teaching and learning in ways that reflect innovations in pedagogy and the institutional mission.

The list is on target with respect to IT trends although I found surprising that Digital Transformation of Learning (Item 10) was ranked so low

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Carnegie Mellon University plans to announce today that it will create a research center that focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The center to be named The K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies, is being established at a time of growing international concern about the impact of A.I. technologies.   As reported in the New York Times:

“A.I. has led to an array of academic, governmental and private efforts to explore a technology that until recently was largely the stuff of science fiction.  The last decade, faster computer chips, cheap sensors and large collections of data have helped researchers improve on computerized tasks like machine vision and speech recognition, as well as robotics.

Earlier this year, the White House held a series of workshops around the country to discuss the impact of A.I., and in October the Obama administration released a report on its possible consequences. And in September, five large technology firms — Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft — created a partnership to help establish ethical guidelines for the design and deployment of A.I. systems.

Subra Suresh, Carnegie Mellon’s president, said injecting ethical discussions into A.I. was necessary as the technology advanced. While the idea of “Terminator” robots still seems far-fetched, the United States military is studying autonomous weapons that could make killing decisions on their own — a development that war planners think would be unwise.

“We are at a unique point in time where the technology is far ahead of society’s ability to restrain it,” Mr. Suresh noted.”

A.I. is still more on research and development drawing boards than a reality but in a dozen or so years, we will see advances in this technology that will have real ramifications for how people work and participate in many sectors of our society.

Tony

Dear Commons Community, 

New York Times columnist and best-selling author, Tom Friedman, was on CNN yesterday morning with Chris Cuomo.  When asked about Donald Trump, he responded that what scares him most is that the country is facing major policy issues regarding the climate, economy, technology, and education and that Donald Trump is like “a fifth grader who gives a book report but who hasn’t read the book.” He then went on to criticize Trump for not putting in the effort to learn the complexity of these issues.

Very true and very obvious.  Unfortunately, Trump still has a chance to become president of the United States.

Tony