David Leonhardt on What the Democratic Party Needs to Do to Win Back the Working Class

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, David Leonhardt, examines what the Democratic Party needs to do to win back working class voters.  Here is an excerpt:

“Americans without a college degree are today’s swing voters. White non- graduates shifted sharply to Donald Trump last year, relative to 2012, and black non-graduates affected the result by staying home in larger numbers. Both decisions — voting for Trump or not voting at all — stemmed in part from alienation.

In an alternate universe, Trump would devote his presidency to a conservative agenda that improved the lives of the people who elected him. Remember when he proclaimed, “I love the poorly educated”? In this universe, he sure has a funny way of showing his love. He is trying to take health insurance away from millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on the affluent.

Democrats have to find a way to win more working-class votes. (I’m using “working class” as a rough synonym for the two-thirds of adults without bachelor’s degrees.) It’s not just Trump. Republicans control the House, the Senate, 33 governor’s offices and the legislature in 32 states.

Democrats need a comeback strategy, and the American working class needs an ally. The solution to both problems can be the same: a muscular agenda to lift up people without four-year college degrees.

It would have two main pillars. The first would be improving the lives of those who will never have those degrees — ensuring they can find meaningful, well-paying work and afford health care, child care and retirement. A stable middle-class life should be possible without a bachelor’s degree.

The second would be helping more people earn degrees and enjoy their benefits. There is something about college — the actual learning, as well as the required discipline and initiative — that seems to prepare people for adult success. Although two-year degrees bring benefits too, four-year degrees bring much larger ones.

On Tuesday, the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal group, is taking a first step toward creating a working-class agenda. It’s calling for a “Marshall Plan for America,” echoing the program that rebuilt postwar Europe. “Progressives have not done enough about job conditions and the dignity of work for people who don’t go to college,” says Neera Tanden, the center’s president, who previously worked for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The effort is in only its conceptual stages. But it’s worth attention, both because of the center’s history of influence on Democrats (including on much of the Obama agenda) and because this particular idea gets a few big things right.

It avoids some elitist strains in today’s liberal politics. One of those strains dismisses the white working class as irredeemably racist. In truth, many of these voters backed progressive ideas before and are open to doing so again. Anyway, Democrats don’t have much of a choice. “You can’t construct a solid majority coalition for Democrats unless you reach more of those voters,” the political scientist Ruy Teixeira says.

…This new plan is unabashedly left-leaning in its call for the government to help create millions of good-paying jobs. It uses the phrase “jobs guarantee” and would meet the guarantee by taking on many problems the private sector isn’t solving: Crumbling roads and public transit. Patchy digital infrastructure. A shortage of good schools, child care, home health care workers and E.M.T.s. All of this would cost billions — but also far less than Trump’s reverse Robin Hood agenda.

The fact is, the electorate has shown some surprising support lately for an activist, populist government. Minimum-wage increases keep passing, in blue states and red ones, and Trump won the Republican nomination while spouting big-government promises (which he’s now violating).

Americans of all races who have been left behind in today’s globalized, high-technology, high-inequality economy are angry, and they have reason to be. They deserve better. They want tangible solutions. Finding those solutions is the right thing to do, and it’s the path back to power for Democrats.”

I like what Leonhardt is saying but I am not sure that the Democrats can pull this off.  I found it curious that at no time did he mention labor unions, long the bastions of mostly high school graduates. They  also were not overly enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.  I think they have to be part of the plan.

Tony

Purdue Faculty Ask President to Rescind Offer to Acquire Kaplan University!

Dear Commons Community,

In what is becoming a conflict at Purdue University, the University Senate passed a resolution calling for President Mitch Daniel to rescind the University’s agreement to acquire the for-profit Kaplan University.  As reported by Inside Education:

“Faculty members at Purdue University took a strong stance Thursday against last week’s unorthodox acquisition of Kaplan University, passing a University Senate resolution calling the deal a violation of common-sense educational practice and respect for Purdue faculty.

The resolution calls on Purdue President Mitch Daniels and the university’s Board of Trustees to rescind any decisions possible about the online-heavy university Purdue is acquiring from Kaplan. It also calls on Purdue leaders to include faculty members in all decisions made going forward about the soon-to-be-acquired university.

That wording could catch the attention of Purdue’s accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission. HLC has to sign off on the acquisition before it can close, as do state and federal regulators. Accreditors generally expect a prominent faculty role in academic-related decisions.

“It’s not final until it’s got all the approvals it needs to receive,” David Sanders, an associate professor in Purdue’s department of biological sciences who is the chair of the University Senate, said in an interview after the Senate met Thursday. “There could be components to the agreement that could be changed.”

Sanders did not write the resolution. But he made several colorful comments about the Kaplan acquisition during Thursday’s meeting, joking at the beginning that Kaplan has a highly ranked online football program and suggesting at the end that the university Purdue is acquiring from Kaplan be renamed Daniels U.

The University Senate resolution’s passage represents a sharp rebuke of an unprecedented acquisition that stunned higher education circles when it was announced last week. Purdue is acquiring almost all of the credential-issuing operations of the for-profit Kaplan’s higher education business. The public research university in Indiana plans to take seven schools and colleges from Kaplan University and fold them into a new legal entity, a nonprofit university that has yet to be named but will carry the Purdue brand. It will add an estimated 32,000 students and 3,000 employees in the process.

Faculty members have said they were not informed that the deal was taking place until an hour before it was announced. Being left out of such a major decision involving academic programs was the key point in the resolution the University Senate took up Thursday, which said the Kaplan acquisition violates the central tenets of faculty governance and control over curriculum.

No faculty input was sought before the acquisition decision was made, and no assessment of its impact on Purdue’s academic quality was completed, according to the resolution. The resolution proceeded to fault a lack of transparency and a lack of an impact study on how the acquisition will affect faculty, curriculum, students and staff at Purdue. The resolution also wondered what will happen to faculty governance and academic freedom at Purdue’s newly acquired university. And it said previously Purdue’s administration has gone through University Senate structures — which include faculty input — when pursuing program restructuring or creation.

Daniels, the Republican former governor of Indiana, is known as an unorthodox thinker in higher ed circles. When he was governor, he brought Western Governors University into the state to boost online education. At Purdue, he has pushed for income-sharing agreements and competency-based education.

He has said that the negotiations to acquire the university from Kaplan required confidentiality. But a presentation he gave to Purdue’s University Senate Thursday did not please all faculty members.”

The Purdue acquisition of Kaplan is becoming the higher education story of the year.  It will be closely watched.

Tony

 

Great Charter School War of 2017: Los Angeles School Board Election Tomorrow!

Dear Commons Community,

In perhaps the most-watched school board election of the year, Los Angeles tomorrow will be electing two new board members.  At stake will be whether the teachers union or charter school advocates will win these seats.   As reported by the Los Angeles Times:

“The four people vying for two pivotal seats on the Los Angeles Board of Education agree on at least two things: The campaign has been brutal, and there’s a lot at stake.

The nastiness leading up to the May 16 runoff election has been generated by independent campaigns set up on behalf of the candidates because of the election’s importance.

Charter school partisans and unions had spent about $13 million combined through Friday. The candidates themselves had spent another $1.5 million.

If the charter-backed candidates prevail, charter advocates will win their first governing majority on the seven-member body. If the election goes entirely the other way, unions will strengthen their influence on a board that leans pro-labor. In that scenario, the board would be more likely to limit the growth of charters in the nation’s second-largest school system, which has more charters and more charter students than any other school district.

 “Think of this as the great Charter War of 2017,” said Dan Schnur, former director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “The stakes are unusually high, substantively but even more symbolically. The outcome of these races will determine control of the largest school district in the western United States.”

Union-backed school board President Steve Zimmer and charter supporter Nick Melvoin are vying for the seat in District 4, which stretches from the Westside to the west San Fernando Valley. Kelly Gonez, with charter support, and Imelda Padilla, with union backing, are competing in District 6, in the East Valley.

Zimmer, the lone incumbent, has borne the brunt of the pummeling. And although holding him responsible for the state of the school system is fair game after eight years in office, most of the attacks in a flood of mailers are exaggerated or false.

So too with Zimmer’s opponent, Melvoin. Though negative mailers have correctly noted that both Melvoin and the Trump administration support the rapid expansion of charter schools, Melvoin is neither a Republican nor a Trump supporter….

At a recent candidate forum in Sylmar, Kelly Gonez and Imelda Padilla agreed that some charter schools are great and some are not. Both pledged to support strong charters and teachers. They both said that L.A. Unified needs to bolster parent involvement and decried the influence of “outside interests.”

It’s difficult to say whether, if elected, they would prove as independent as they claim or fall back on the positions of their financial backers.

Gonez, 28, has about five years of teaching experience, most of it prior to a two-year stint in Washington, first as an assistant and then as a policy adviser to an assistant education secretary in the Obama administration. Last fall, she began teaching middle school science at a charter.

Gonez attended Catholic schools before graduating from UC Berkeley and talks about nearly dropping out from the stress of working three jobs while in college. She often speaks of her classroom experiences and her family background.

“Growing up in this community, I saw the struggles my mom went through because she was an immigrant, because English wasn’t her first language, because of her skin color,” Gonez said of her Peruvian mother at a recent forum. “That’s what motivates me; it’s the experience of my family.”

Padilla at the same forum responded to questions almost entirely in Spanish. She said later her goal was to address Spanish-language attack ads against her.

Padilla, 29, who also went to UC Berkeley, noted that she went to public schools in her district throughout her childhood, during which she overcame rickets — with surgery to straighten her legs — and gang influences. (Her brother, she said, was not so fortunate and is currently in prison.)

She said her passion is “keeping youth out of jail.”

She has been an organizer for Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which promotes economic equality and strong communities, and a coordinator for Pacoima Beautiful, which focuses on neighborhood improvement.”

Important race that will be closely watched!

Tony

Engineers at Stanford Test Biosensor to Monitor Drug Levels in Bloodstream!

Dear Commons Community,

A team of engineers, led by H. Tom Soh and Peter Mage at Stanford University, have  developed a biosensor-based monitoring tool to insure that people receive proper dosages of prescribed drugs.  In a paper published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the group showed that the technology could continuously regulate the level of a chemotherapy drug in living animals.  As reported by the Stanford News Service:

“This is the first time anyone has been able to continuously control the drug levels in the body in real time,” Soh said. “This is a novel concept with big implications because we believe we can adapt our technology to control the levels of a wide range of drugs.”

The new technology has three basic components: a real-time biosensor to continuously monitor drug levels in the bloodstream, a control system to calculate the right dose and a programmable pump that delivers just enough medicine to maintain a desired dose.

The sensor contains molecules called aptamers that are specially designed to bind a drug of interest. (These aptamers are a focus of Soh’s lab.) When the drug is present in the bloodstream, the aptamer changes shape, which an electric sensor detects. The more drug, the more aptamers change shape.

That information, captured every few seconds, is routed through software that controls the pump to deliver additional drugs as needed. Researchers call this a closed-loop system, one that monitors and adjusts continuously.

The group tested the technology by administering the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin in animals. Despite physiological and metabolic differences among individual animals, they were able to keep a constant dosage among all the animals in the study group, something not possible with current drug delivery methods. The researchers also tested for acute drug-drug interactions, deliberately introducing a second drug that is known to cause wide swings in chemotherapy drug levels. Again they found that their system could stabilize drug levels to moderate what might otherwise be a dangerous spike or dip.

If the technology works as well in people as in their animal studies, it could have big implications, Soh said. “For example, what if we could detect and control the levels not only of glucose but also of insulin and glucagon that regulate glucose levels?” he said. That could allow researchers to create an electronic system to replicate the function of the dysfunctional pancreas for patients with type 1 diabetes…

…The team plans to miniaturize the system so that it can be implanted or worn by the patient. At present the technology is an external apparatus, like a smart IV drip. The biosensor is a device about the size of a microscope slide.”

Congratulations to Professor Soh and his team.  Their work portends many more breakthroughs that we will see in the coming years in biosensor technology. 

Tony

Mika Brzezinski to CNN: “You’ve got to stop putting Kellyanne [Conway] on the air.”

Dear Commons Community,

Mika Brzezinski on her MSNBC morning show blasted CNN and other media for booking Trump spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway,  calling it “politics porn.” As reported by various media, Brzezinski said:

“Note to CNN: Sorry, I love CNN, but you’ve got to stop putting Kellyanne on the air,” she said.

“It’s politics porn. You’re just getting your little ratings crack, but it’s disgusting. There’s nothing that she brings to the table that’s honest. Your hosts know it. Your hosts look pained when they interview her because they know they’re just doing politics porn. They’re not doing news. We need to stick to the news.”

This isn’t the first time Brzezinski has gone after both Conway and media outlets for booking the controversial Trump advisor. “I feel even more so that everyone should ban her,” Brzezinski told Variety magazine in March.

“I’m surprised that these little acrobatic games are played with her on live national television. I think it denigrates what we do. It’s clear she doesn’t bring anything to the table. It’s clear she doesn’t know exactly what she’s talking about. It’s clear she’s making it up as she goes along.”

Conway last appeared on CNN Tuesday night, defending President Trump’s firing of James Comey as FBI director, stressing that the president acted after receiving a recommendation from his advisers.

“He makes complete sense because he has lost confidence in the FBI director and he took the recommendation of Rob Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general,” Conway said.

However, the president later revealed that he was planning on firing Comey prior to receiving a letter of recommendation.

“I was going to fire regardless of the recommendation,” he said during an interview with NBC News on Thursday. “Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”

I agree with Brzezinski.  Conway twists the truth and provides alternative facts on news topics with the aim of confusing viewers on issues.

Tony

14-Year-old Carson Huey-You to Graduate from TCU!

Dear Commons Community,

A big news item yesterday out of Texas was that 14-year-old Carson Huey-You, who is the youngest student ever to attend TCU, will graduate this Saturday and receive his physics diploma. 

Since enrolling in 2013 at Texas Christian University, 14-year-old Carson also double minored in math and Chinese, Noelle Walker of KXAS-TV (NBC5) reports

“It didn’t come easily. It really didn’t,” he told the station. “I knew I wanted to do physics when I was in high school, but then quantum physics was the one that stood out to me, because it was abstract. You can’t actually see what’s going on, so you have to sort of rely on the mathematics to work everything out.”

Carson will begin graduate school at TCU in the fall. 

Physics professor Magnus Rittby told The Dallas Morning News last year that sometimes he forgets Carson’s so young because he’s so advanced. 

Carson’s mother, Claretta Kimp, told NBC5 that math first caught his attention at 3 years old. His mother said he has been interested in math since he was 3 years old and that she realized her son had an eighth-grade comprehension of the subject when he was just a toddler. He went on to skip several grades and graduated high school at the age of 10. 

People are also interested in Carson’s younger brother, Cannan, who starts his undergraduate studies at TCU in the fall and plans to major in astrophysics and engineering. 

Congratulations to Carson and his entire family!

Tony

Video: Students at Bethune-Cookman University Graduation Boo and Turn their Backs on U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos!

 

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos gave the commencement address at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black university in Daytona Beach, Florida. She was soundly greeted by rounds of boos as students turned their backs to her during the graduation ceremony.

DeVos was selected to speak at Bethune-Cookman University despite strong opposition by many students and community members to her presence.   As reported in Black Voices in The Huffington Post:

“DeVos’ speech ignited immediate controversy when it was announced earlier this month, and students criticized the school for selecting her after she downplayed the role of racism in the creation of historically black colleges and universities.

Protesters on Tuesday delivered petitions to the school’s leaders, calling on them to cancel DeVos’ speech due to her ignorance of HBCUs and lack of support for student loan borrowers. Organizers said they had collected 50,000 signatures.

DeVos praised HBCUs as “real pioneers when it comes to school choice” after meeting with school leaders in February.

“They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution,” she said in a statement.

The comment sparked immediate backlash for “whitewashing” the history of the institutions, formed in response to systemic discrimination that denied black students access to existing schools. DeVos later said that HBCUs were born “out of necessity, in the face of racism.” On Sunday, she issued a statement saying she was looking forward to the commencement, while reiterating her “support for HBCUs.”

“For someone to come and speak at my commencement that cannot relate to me or know what I have been through is kind of like a slap in the face,” graduating student Jasmine Johnson told the Washington Post.

The anti-DeVos petition described her invitation as an “insult” to the legacy of school founder and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, and the NAACP Florida State Conference called on Bethune-Cookman President Edison Jackson to resign.”

This was a win for the students and a nightmare for President Jackson and his administration.

Tony

 

Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey – Shades of Watergate!

Dear Commons Community,

For those of us old enough to remember President Richard Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down, there were shades of recollections yesterday when Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey who was investigating Trump’s ties to Russia during last year’s election.  Here is the New York Times editorial board take on Trump’s action.

“The American people — not to mention the credibility of the world’s oldest democracy — require a thorough, impartial investigation into the extent of Russia’s meddling with the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump and, crucially, whether high-ranking members of Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded in that effort.

By firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be one of the biggest political scandals in the country’s history.

The explanation for this shocking move — that Mr. Comey’s bungling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server violated longstanding Justice Department policy and profoundly damaged public trust in the agency — is impossible to take at face value. Certainly Mr. Comey deserves all the criticism heaped upon him for his repeated misstepsin that case, but just as certainly, that’s not the reason Mr. Trump fired him.

Mr. Trump had nothing but praise for Mr. Comey when, in the final days of the presidential campaign, he informed Congress that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. “He brought back his reputation,” Mr. Trump said at the time. “It took a lot of guts.”

Of course, if Mr. Trump truly believed, as he said in his letter of dismissal, that Mr. Comey had undermined “public trust and confidence” in the agency, he could just as well have fired him on his first day in office.

Mr. Comey was fired because he was leading an active investigation that could bring down a president. Though compromised by his own poor judgment, Mr. Comey’s agency has been pursuing ties between the Russian government and Mr. Trump and his associates, with potentially ruinous consequences for the administration.

With congressional Republicans continuing to resist any serious investigation, Mr. Comey’s inquiry was the only aggressive effort to get to the bottom of Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign. So far, the scandal has engulfed Paul Manafort, one of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers; Roger Stone, a longtime confidant; Carter Page, one of the campaign’s early foreign-policy advisers; Michael Flynn, who was forced out as national security adviser; and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself in March from the Russia inquiry after failing to disclose during his confirmation hearings that he had met twice during the campaign with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

We have said that Mr. Comey’s atrocious handling of the Clinton email investigation, which arguably tipped the election to Mr. Trump, proved that he could not be trusted to be neutral, and that the only credible course of action would be the appointment of a special prosecutor. Given all that has happened — the firing of the F.B.I. director, on top of Mr. Trump’s firing of the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, and his dismissal of nearly all United States attorneys — the need for such a prosecutor is plainer than ever. Because Mr. Sessions is recused, the decision to name a special prosecutor falls to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whose memo, along with a separate one by Mr. Sessions, provided Mr. Trump with the pretense to fire Mr. Comey.

This is a tense and uncertain time in the nation’s history. The president of the United States, who is no more above the law than any other citizen, has now decisively crippled the F.B.I.’s ability to carry out an investigation of him and his associates. There is no guarantee that Mr. Comey’s replacement, who will be chosen by Mr. Trump, will continue that investigation; in fact, there are already hints to the contrary.

The obvious historical parallel to Mr. Trump’s action was the so-called Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, prompting the principled resignations of the attorney general and his deputy. But now, there is no special prosecutor in place to determine whether the public trust has been violated, and whether the presidency was effectively stolen by a hostile foreign power. For that reason, the country has reached an even more perilous moment.”

A special investigation can only happen if Republicans break party ranks and join Democrats in insisting on a special prosecutor.  I would be surprised if enough Republicans are willing to do this.

Tony

Purdue’s President Mitch Daniels Explains Acquisition of Kaplan University!

Dear Commons Community,

A little more than a week ago, Purdue Univeristy rocked higher education with its announcement that it was acquiring the for-profit Kaplan University.  In a letter (see below) to the Purdue community, President Mitch Daniels explains the rationale for this decision.

Tony

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

Welcome to the World’s Next Public University

In 1862 Abraham Lincoln signed legislation that would enable states to create a new kind of university. These so-called land-grant colleges would, for the first time in history, expand higher education beyond the wealthy and the elites of society. In 1869, Indiana proudly founded its first and only land-grant, Purdue University.

Today, we are no longer a single campus. Purdue now extends from regional campuses in northern Indiana to a flagship university that is among the most prestigious research universities in the world. Each of our campuses has distinct purposes and serves a range of students, but we are all united by our belief that high-quality, higher education should be accessible for all.

That’s even more essential in 2017 than it was in 1862. Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 36 million Americans over the age of 25 started college but were unable to finish. Another 56 million have had no post-secondary education whatsoever.

Our modern, complex economy is stacked against these men and women. If they are to advance professionally, they must largely balance the demands of school with the obligations of careers, family, and other burdens of adult life. Increasingly, these Americans are finding hope in high-quality, online programs tailored to their unique needs.

Purdue cannot honor our land-grant mission in the 21st century without reaching out to these men and women who have often been overlooked by traditional universities. Over the past few years Purdue has studiously examined how we could better offer access to such potential students. The conclusion we reached was that even if we invested years and millions of dollars into advancing our digital offerings, there would be no guarantee of success.

And then in late 2016 we had another idea: Acquire an institution with a strong reputation, an advanced online infrastructure and a shared commitment to the land-grant mission – and then make it our own by extending its reach and leading it towards even greater excellence.

We will operate this new university with the same care and commitment to student success as we do the other campuses in the Purdue system. We will shape it with the best of Purdue’s academic excellence and the flexibility and online infrastructure that has been associated with Kaplan. As we do, we will carry the land-grant vision into the 21st century.

Sincerely,

David Reingold

Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.

President