Dear Commons Community,

Three Confederate monuments set to come down in New Orleans were still standing yesterday (May 8), a day after demonstrators in support and against the statues’ removal clashed briefly at Lee Circle. It’s unclear when the monuments will be removed.

The statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard remain. The obelisk marking the Battle of Liberty Place was taken down early in the morning April 24.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the three remaining monuments wouldn’t be removed during Jazz Fest, but now that the festival is over, it’s unclear how quickly the city will act. Officials haven’t released any timelines, citing concerns about the safety of workers and officers involved.

The New York Times editorial (below) this morning justly addresses the issue.  

Tony

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

Monuments of White Supremacy

New York Times Editorial Board

May 9, 2017

Dear Commons Community,

Emmanuel Macron handily won France’s presidential election yesterday, defeating the right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen. As reported by the New York Times:

“Mr. Macron, 39, who has never held elected office, will be the youngest president in the 59-year history of France’s Fifth Republic after leading an improbable campaign that swept aside France’s establishment political parties.

The election was watched around the world for magnifying many of the broader tensions rippling through Western democracies, including the United States: populist anger at the political mainstream, economic insecurity among middle-class voters and rising resentment toward immigrants.

Mr. Macron’s victory offered significant relief to the European Union, which Ms. Le Pen had threatened to leave. His platform to loosen labor rules, make France more competitive globally and deepen ties with the European Union is also likely to reassure a global financial market that was jittery at the prospect of a Le Pen victory.

Her loss provided further signs that the populist wave that swept Britain out of the European Union and Donald J. Trump into the White House may have crested in Europe, for now.

“I understand the divisions of our country that have led some to vote for extremists,” Mr. Macron said after the vote. “I understand the anger, the anxiety, the doubts that a great part among us have also expressed.”

Mr. Macron pledged to do all he could in his five-year term to bring France together. “I will do everything I can in the coming five years to make sure you never have a reason to vote for extremism again,” he said later Sunday evening, standing before the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre, once the main residence of France’s kings, as thousands of flag-waving supporters gathered in the courtyard to celebrate.

But the election results showed that many people chose not to vote for either candidate, signaling skepticism about his project. And Mr. Macron quickly made clear that he understood the magnitude of the task before him after an often angry campaign.

“It is my responsibility to hear and protect the most fragile,” he said.

With nearly 100 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Macron had 66 percent, compared with 34 percent for Ms. Le Pen, according to the official count from the Interior Ministry.”

We will be hearing a lot about President-elect Macron!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Airforce completed a two-year secret mission yesterday of its X-37B space plane, a small space shuttle-style vehicle. As reported by Reuters:

“The U.S. military’s experimental X-37B space plane landed on Sunday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, completing a classified mission that lasted nearly two years, the Air Force said.

The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, touched down at 7:47 a.m. EDT (1147 GMT) on a runway formerly used for landings of the now-mothballed space shuttles, the Air Force said in an email.

The Boeing-built space plane blasted off in May 2015 from nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station aboard an Atlas 5 rocket built by United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

The X-37B, one of two in the Air Force fleet, conducted unspecified experiments for more than 700 days while in orbit. It was the fourth and lengthiest mission so far for the secretive program, managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.

The orbiters “perform risk reduction, experimentation and concept-of-operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies,” the Air Force has said without providing details. The cost of the program is also classified.

The Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit group promoting the peaceful exploration of space, says the secrecy surrounding the X-37B suggests the presence of intelligence-related hardware being tested or evaluated aboard the craft.

The vehicles are 29 feet (9 meters) long and have a wingspan of 15 feet, making them about one quarter of the size of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s now-retired space shuttles.

The X-37B, also known as Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, first flew in April 2010 and returned after eight months. A second mission launched in March 2011 and lasted 15 months, while a third took flight in December 2012 and returned after 22 months.

Two years in space, landing like a plane, and no mishaps.  Impressive!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column this morning, takes down Donald Trump for his role in the recently passed House-healthcare bill.  Here is an excerpt:

“In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump said that playing to people’s fantasies and promising the greatest product was “an innocent form of exaggeration.”  But it’s one thing when you do that for condos and cologne and mattresses and steaks. It’s another for life-or-death health care policy.

Trump has twice pushed to pass disgraceful health care bills without even trying to grasp what’s in them — or more important, what’s not in them. He couldn’t care less that the dog’s breakfast served up by the House on Thursday wounds the struggling Americans he had promised to lift up.

It is “something terrific,” as he vowed, but only for the superrich who are getting a Marie Antoinette wealth transfer at the expense of health care for the poor.

The president feted his fake-news “win” in the Rose Garden, sprinkling flimflam dust to deflect from his ludicrous legislation. Paul Ryan slobbered over Trump’s leadership even as the Senate made plans to shred the House bill and start over.

“Hey, I’m president,” Trump told his sycophants, or in this case, sickophants. “Can you believe it, right?”

No, I can’t.

In a moment of clueless cynicism, hours after the ego festival in the Rose Garden, Trump sat in a tuxedo with the Australian prime minister on the Intrepid and said Australians have better health care than Americans — harking back to his old statements in support of universal health care.

Presidents have to be good salesmen. Barack Obama faltered because he hated selling and simply lectured. He even outsourced the job of selling his re-election bid at the 2012 convention to a former antagonist, Bill Clinton.

Hillary was not good at salesmanship either. The new book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” reports that at one point, her 2016 team got so flummoxed at her inability to explain why she wanted to be president that they actually considered the slogan “Because It’s Her Turn.”

Trump did care about his product when he built Trump Tower. He obsessed over every detail of a building that was the flashy emblem of New York bursting out of the dark ’70s and into the booming ’80s.

“But the success of that went to his head and he never cared again,” his biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “He’s fundamentally lazy. He free-rides so many processes he doesn’t know anything about. He used to do it in the business world, and now he does it in the political world.

“He’s not a student of anything other than protecting his image. What he cares about is how he’s perceived, not the nuts and bolts of things. He is essentially a performance artist.”

When Trump talked to John Dickerson for “Face the Nation” last Sunday, he said the big difference between business and politics was that in Washington, “you really need heart, because you’re talking about a lot of people. Whereas in business, you don’t need so much heart. You want to make a good deal.”

But with health care, Trump wanted to make a deal so badly he was heartless. One Republican senator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, said that he would not vote for a health care bill that does not pass “the Jimmy Kimmel test”: “Would the child born with a congenital heart disease be able to get everything he or she would need in that first year of life?”

The House Republicans just wanted Trump off their backs. They had never pulled a real bill together because they thought Hillary would win and they could just snipe at her. The Irish undertaker and his crew were so desperate to prove they had not totally forgotten how to pass anything that they were willing to go with garbage.”

Dowd goes on to comment that the passage of this bill will have significant fallout for Republicans in the 2018 election and will provide an opening for Democrats to win back the House of Representatives.  I would like to think that this is true but I am not so sure. The Democrats have to get their act together and while many are blaming Hillary Clinton for a poorly managed campaign, the entire party has to shoulder the responsibility.  There were plenty of blunders that went beyond her campaign handlers.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On the eve of the French presidential election, the staff of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron said yesterday that the campaign had been targeted by a “massive and coordinated” hacking operation, one with the potential to destabilize the nation’s democracy before voters go to the polls tomorrow.  French presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team said it had been the victim of a massive and coordinated hacking operation which led to the leaking of hundreds of its internal documents just hours before the end of the official campaign.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The digital attack, which involved a dump of campaign documents including emails and accounting records, emerged hours before a legal prohibition on campaign communications went into effect. While the leak may be of little consequence, the timing makes it extremely difficult for Mr. Macron to mitigate any damaging fallout before the runoff election, in which he faces the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who has pledged to pull France out of the euro and hold a referendum to leave the European Union.

The hacking immediately evoked comparisons to last year’s presidential election in the United States, during which American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, ordered an “influence campaign” to benefit the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Groups linked to Russia, that are also believed to have been involved in the hacking related to the 2016 United States presidential campaign, have previously been accused of trying to breach the Macron organization. Security experts tracking the activity of suspected Russian hackers say they believe those same groups were involved in this latest attack.

In a statement, the Macron campaign said the hackers had mixed fake documents along with authentic ones, “to sow doubt and misinformation.”

“Intervening in the final hour of the official campaign, this operation is clearly a matter of democratic destabilization, as was seen in the United States during the last presidential campaign,” the statement said.”

The results of tomorrow’s French presidential election will be the major international news story of the day.  Most analysts had Macron easily defeating Marine Le Pen.  It will be interesting to see if the hacking attack has any effect on the election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Since he became president, yesterday was arguably the best day for Donald Trump and the Republican Party with the approval of a House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The GOP has been trying to do this for about seven years but congressmen within the Party could never agree.  Yesterday’s vote of  217 to 213, held on President Trump’s 105th day in office, was a significant step on what could be a long legislative road for the party’s dream of unwinding President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement.  Twenty Republican Congressmen voted against the bill which now goes to the U.S. Senate where it will surely be modified.

Here in New York, Trump on his first visit  since becoming President was booed wherever he went.  As reported by Reuters.

“The presidential motorcade passed hundreds of demonstrators as it arrived at the decommissioned aircraft carrier Intrepid in the early evening for a meeting with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull hours after it was originally scheduled.

…Trump’s role in efforts to scrap the signature domestic achievement of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, further incensed the protesters.

Among those on the street were members of the New York State Nurses Association, who chanted: “What do we want? Health care! When do we want it? Now!”

Demonstrators from the Working Families Party spent much of the afternoon rallying and marching near the Intrepid, now a floating museum on Manhattan’s West Side, banging pans, chanting: “Not my president” and carrying signs including one that read: “This village doesn’t want its idiot back!”

The demonstrations, which included other groups throughout Manhattan, were reminiscent of the weeks after Trump’s Nov. 8 election when frequent protests took place outside his home in the Fifth Avenue tower that bears his name.

The first 100 days since the Jan. 20 inauguration of the businessman-turned-politician brought rollbacks of environmental regulations and crackdowns on immigrants, none of which play well in the liberal Northeast city.

Fewer than one in five residents in the United States’ most populous city voted for Trump, even though he comes from its Queens borough, built a real estate brand and other ventures associated with New York, and has been fodder for its tabloid newspapers for decades.”

In sum, New York said to Donald “Don’t Come Home!”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Education Department on Tuesday unveiled the basics of its plan to revamp the State’s Common Core curriculum.  The changes follow a two-year-long process involving both educators and the public.  

“The new learning standards are the result of a thoughtful and deliberative process to reimagine our educational framework for English language arts and mathematics,” Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa said in a release. “The result will be improved teaching and learning in New York’s classrooms, with a greater emphasis on supporting English language learners, students with disabilities and other special populations. These standards are rigorous and will help equip children to lead successful lives in the 21st century.”

The state’s version of the Common Core — and more particularly the state tests that came with it — have been highly unpopular in New York. Parents have been opting their children out of the tests since they were first implemented. 

The new plan proposes changes for both the English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics curricula for pre-kindergarten students through 12th grade. Among the changes to the ELA curriculum are:

• Merge the Reading for Information and Reading for Literature standards to reduce repetitive standards, streamline classroom instruction and curriculum development, and ensure a healthy balance of both types of reading across all grades. The standards also encourage the use of a variety of texts to balance literary and informational reading and to ensure students read both full-length texts and shorter pieces, as well as to encourage reading for pleasure. Specific reading selections remain local decisions to be chosen by local educators.
• Revise every grade’s reading expectations for text complexity to clarify expectations over multiple grades.
• Revise the writing standards so they are more user-friendly for educators to use for curriculum and instruction.

Changes proposed to the mathematics curriculum include:

• Move standards to different grade levels to improve the focus of major content and skills for each grade-level and course; providing more time for students to develop deep levels of understanding of grade-level appropriate content. Based on public and expert comments, major grade movements occurred in statistics and probability at the middle level and in Algebra at the high school level.
• Provide for students to explore standards to ensure standards are grade-level appropriate. Exploring a standard allows students to be introduced to and learn a concept without the expectation of mastering the concept at that grade level.

The revised standards will be discussed by the Board of Regents at a meeting on May 9, and public comment will be accepted through June 2. The board will likely vote on the standards at its June meeting. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning on how the big tech companies namely Microsoft, Google, and Apple are developing products to capture the lucrative K-12 technology market that is expected to reach $21 billion by 2020. The article focuses mainly on Microsoft’s strategy to develop low cost/high tech experiments that teachers can use in classrooms.  Here is an excerpt:

“Last week, Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, slipped on a glove made of cardboard and clenched his hand into a fist, causing a robotic hand with fingers made of drinking straws to mimic his movements.

The glove was one of several engineering projects built in a makeshift laboratory on Microsoft’s campus. The company spent the last year talking to thousands of teachers and designing high-tech experiments that require mostly low-cost parts. It will give the designs to schools for free so teachers can use them in their lesson plans.

The projects are part of a major push the company announced Tuesday at an event in New York to make its products more attractive to school administrators, students and teachers. The push includes a new version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system for classrooms, tweaks to its Office applications and a new Surface laptop for students in a collection of bold colors.

While the dollars available in the education market are compelling enough for big technology companies like Microsoft, classrooms also offer an opportunity to make a first impression on young people who could eventually buy their products.

“The second-order effects of education, of being relevant in education, are going to be very, very key for us,” Mr. Nadella said in an interview last week. He added, “The devices the kids take to their school, or to their college, is going to be influenced by what they were familiar with.”

Microsoft remains a force in classrooms around the globe. But the company’s relevance in schools in the United States is in jeopardy after years of progress by Google, whose software dominates sales of new devices in schools.

Google has gained ground in public schools by offering a tightly connected system of free classroom apps, lower-cost laptops called Chromebooks and a web-based console that allows schools to remotely manage thousands of student devices.

Industry analysts said Microsoft’s initiative was the company’s first credible response to Google’s recent encroachment into education.

“I am not going to predict that they are going to take back the entire market or anything like that, but this is the best move that I could have seen them making against Chromebooks,” said J. P. Gownder, a technology analyst at Forrester Research, a market research company, where Microsoft is one of his clients.

Some of Microsoft’s moves are intended to make its products more appealing to educators by simplifying them and, in some ways, restricting them. The new version of its operating system, Windows 10 S, will run only applications that have been vetted by Microsoft and placed in its online app store, to prevent students from downloading software that could slow the performance of their computers.

Microsoft has also devised a way for schools to get new computers running on a network quickly, without manually configuring each one, by plugging in a USB memory stick. A Microsoft management system called Intune for Education allows schools to set further limits on classroom computers, like locking them down so students cannot cheat by surfing the web during tests.

The tools are designed to be easy enough for teachers to use, since many schools do not have dedicated technology administrators. “Sometimes school districts aren’t managing the devices,” said Terry Myerson, a Microsoft executive vice president. “Teachers are on the front lines of managing the devices.”

The company is also making full versions of its Office applications, rather than more limited web versions, available to schools for free. It has modified a version of its Microsoft Teams group-chat tool so teachers can collaborate with students. It is also waiving the cost of an educational version of Minecraft, a popular video game it owns, for the first year schools use it.

While much of Microsoft’s focus is on software that makes using inexpensive devices — often in the $200 to $300 range — more palatable, the company will also release a $999 device called the Surface Laptop, a twist on its Surface tablets. The device will run Windows 10 S.

Tech companies are fiercely competing for business in primary and secondary schools in the United States, a technology market expected to reach $21 billion by 2020, according to estimates from Ibis Capital, a technology investment firm, and EdtechXGlobal, a conference company.

It is a matter of some urgency for Microsoft.

Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of the 12.6 million mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States last year, compared with less than 1 percent in 2012, according to Futuresource Consulting, a research company. By contrast, Windows laptops and tablets made up 21.6 percent of the mobile-device shipments to schools in the United States last year, down from about 43 percent in 2012.

Outside the United States, Microsoft Windows devices accounted for about 64 percent of mobile-device shipments to schools last year, Futuresource said.

Apple has similarly experienced a steep Chromebook-related decline in shipments of iPads and Mac laptops to schools. Its mobile shipments to schools fell to 19 percent in the United States last year, from 52 percent in 2012.

Like Microsoft, Apple is not taking the Chromebook phenomenon lying down. Apple recently introduced an iPad management app called Classroom, which enables teachers to assign shared iPads to students and create virtual classrooms to guide students through lessons. Apple also introduced lower pricing for educational institutions on its newest iPad model. The iPad starts at $329 for consumers and at $299 for schools.

Google began to take off in schools in the United States in 2013, when school districts started making bulk purchases of Chromebooks, which are now made by Acer, Asus, Lenovo, HP and other computer makers. Because the laptops run on Google’s Chrome operating system and revolve around web-based apps, they are often cheaper, easier to manage and faster to boot up than traditional laptops.

By contrast, Mr. Gownder of Forrester Research said that Microsoft software is so feature-rich that technology experts in many school districts have had to devote their summers to preparing Windows laptops for students one device at a time.

And some of Microsoft’s initial attempts to contend with Google’s rise in schools stumbled. In 2014, Microsoft announced it would be going head-to-head with Chromebooks by working with device manufacturers to introduce cheaper Windows laptops. But some schools found the lower-priced Windows devices too cheaply made to withstand student use and too low-powered to efficiently run Microsoft software.

“The cheapest of them would not work,” said Hal Friedlander, a former chief information officer of the New York City Department of Education.

Google began to win the classroom software wars as well. In 2014, the company introduced Google Classroom, an app that teachers could use to digitize daily tasks, like assigning homework or taking attendance. It quickly became a hub where teachers could hold class discussions, communicate with individual students and keep parents updated on classroom news.

While Microsoft had successfully developed a loyal following among teachers for certain tools — like Skype and its OneNote notebook organizer program — the company had no answer for the classroom management system, which Google had developed specifically for teachers.

“The challenge for Microsoft is that it did not seem to have a coherent strategy,” said Mr. Friedlander, who is now chief executive of the Technology for Education Consortium, a nonprofit group that promotes transparent pricing for technology sales to schools.

Officials at Omaha Public Schools, which spends about $570,000 annually on Microsoft software and is investing $8 million to buy students Windows devices, welcomed the company’s more comprehensive approach to the classroom.

About 200 teachers in the district have completed professional development activities called the Microsoft Innovative Educator program. Some of those teachers are already using the Microsoft Teams chat service with their students.

“Now it’s not four or five different experiences based on which app you are using,” said Rob Dickson, the executive director of information management services for Omaha Public Schools.

“It’s a single app with all those experiences within it.”

For those interested in instructional technology, the article contains good insight into corporate strategies in cornering the K-12 education market.  I especially thought the analysis of Google and its success with its Chromebooks product was well done.

Tony

May Day Parade – Portland, Oregon

Dear Commons Community,

In honor of May Day yesterday, protesters marched in major cities, towns and smaller communities for workers, for immigrants, for women and for others. Normally May Day is reserved for organized labor but this year it has morphed into a broader theme.  Here is a brief recap of some of the protests and parades around the country courtesy of the New York Times.

“Many surrendered a shift’s pay. Labor and immigrants’ rights activists, criticizing Mr. Trump’s detention and deportation agenda, had called for a general strike on May 1, also known as May Day, to emphasize the overlap between the concerns of unauthorized immigrants — on whom farms, restaurants, construction projects and other industries depend — and those of workers.

“Trump has pitted the U.S. working class against migrant workers and refugees, and so we must strive to create bridges, not bans or walls, to connect our struggles together,” representatives of the International Migrants Alliance wrote in its call to assemble.

One of the marches, in Portland, Ore., was ended by the police after some protesters threw rocks, lead balls, smoke bombs and full cans of Pepsi at officers. The police blamed anarchist groups — which have disrupted other protests since the election — for destroying a police car, attacking officers, damaging windows and starting fires. More than two dozen people were arrested.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., more than 4,000 people — twice the number of people who sat out jobs and school days in Grand Rapids on February’s nationwide “Day Without Immigrants” — had turned out in the rain by midafternoon, closing large sections of the city’s Latino community. Bakeries, markets, restaurants and clothing stores had shuttered for the day out of solidarity or for lack of workers.

In Homestead, Fla., where immigrant farmworkers keep fields of zucchini, beans, cherry tomatoes and okra growing, over 1,000 people marched from a park to City Hall. Many were not sure how employers would react when they returned to work on Tuesday. Local activists had planned to accompany farmworkers back to their jobs to offer support.

About 300 people gathered outside a Home Depot near Minneapolis to protest what they said were the anti-labor practices of some janitorial companies that clean stores for Home Depot, Sears and other retailers.

“We have no benefits. No vacation. We don’t have anything,” said Antonia Sanchez, a Mexican immigrant who has worked for one such contractor for nine years, cleaning a Sears. “It doesn’t matter if we are black, white or brown. What matters is that we stay united and fight for what we deserve.”

In Austin, Tex., some immigrants’ rights advocates staged a sit-in at the office of Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over legislation that would punish local officials and cities for refusing to help the federal government with deportations. Outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco, protesters blocked an intersection and a driveway.

In New York, protesters in Union Square and Washington Square Park waved signs with slogans in Spanish, like “Workers united will never be defeated.” There were more than 30 arrests, mostly for disorderly conduct.  Marchers moved to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, where Mayor Bill de Blasio shouted to the crowd, just as a double-decker tour bus rolled up, “Everything Donald Trump wants to do, I have a simple message: No, you can’t! No se puede!”

In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of people holding signs declaring “No human is illegal” and “Sanctuary now!” marched about two miles from MacArthur Park to City Hall downtown.

Unfortunately there were also some incidents of violence but all in all a May Day of peaceful protests.

Tony