Dear Commons Community,

I have lost all interest in listening to the rants of Rudy Giuliani with regard to Donald Trump’s myriad legal problems.  Giuliani lies, plays with  the truth  and comes off as not knowing what he is talking about.

Yesterday, First Lady Melania Trump decided to clear up one of Giuliani’s claims about Trump’s involvement with adult film star Story Daniels when he said “she believes her husband and she doesn’t think it’s true” regarding the affair.

Melania Trump’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham told New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, “I don’t believe Mrs. Trump has ever discussed her thoughts on anything with Mr. Giuliani.”

Melania Trump has not commented on the alleged affair between her husband and Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. Clifford is suing the president to void a nondisclosure agreement she was paid $130,000 to sign in order to stay silent about the alleged sexual encounter.

Grisham’s denial is not the first time Giuliani’s claims have been shot down and represent another knock on his credibility.

Rudy Giuliani was at the pinnacle of his public career in the months after 9/11.  It has been all downhill since.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The June 18th Time magazine cover features an illustration of President Donald Trump gazing at a reflection of himself in which he’s dressed up as a monarch, complete with jeweled crown and fur cape. The picture is accompanied by the text: “KING ME.”

In a piece about the cover posted online Thursday, Time said that it’s meant to address “the political attacks launched by the White House on Robert Mueller.”

Mueller is the special counsel appointed to investigate potential meddling by Russia in the 2016 presidential election. It’s long been a sore spot for the president.

Trump has repeatedly called the probe a “witch hunt.” This week, Trump also referred to the investigation as “unconstitutional” and insisted that he can pardon himself.

“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” Trump wrote on Twitter Monday.

Time’s cover illustration is the work of Brooklyn artist Tim O’Brien. His work has appeared on more than two dozen issues of Time dating back to 1989, “with subjects ranging from Pope Benedict XVI to Osama Bin Laden,” the magazine said.

He told the publication that the latest cover image “gets to the heart of how he and his legal team have approached this past week and the past 500 days, actually.”

O’Brien told the magazine that his biggest decision with this illustration was “whether or not to have Trump looking at himself or looking at us,” O’Brien said. “His eye contact with each reader, each American fits the situation best.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On June 7, 1944, the Allied forces undertook the largest seaborne invasion in history. Codenamed Operation Neptune and generally referred to as D-Day, the operation began the liberation of German-occupied northwestern Europe from Nazi control, and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front.  Although actual numbers vary, on both sides, there were an estimated 425,000 killed, wounded or missing in action during the invasion.

When I was a child growing up in the 1950s, my uncles, both of whom were G.I.s would tell me and my brothers war stories.  Their eyes on more than one occasion swelled up when talking about D-Day.

We remember!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Those of us who try to keep up with technology are well aware that every so many years a company selling a product, a professional organization promoting an approach or an individual coining a phrase, comes up with a “new” name to depict something that has been around for a while.  In yesterday’s edition of Inside Education, Mark Lieberman has a fine article exploring the term “digital learning.”  A number of professionals (yours truly included) in the field of instructional technology were asked for their opinions about the definition, origin and future of “digital learning.”  Mark established that the term attempts to include the plethora of instructional technologies:

“Our definition of “digital learning” contains within it numerous similar phrases: Distance learning. Online learning. Blended learning. Hybrid learning. Multimodal learning. Mixed-mode learning. Distributed learning. Technology-enabled learning. Technology-enhanced learning.

The article indicates that the term’s origins are a bit hazy and references several individuals:

“Digital learning” entered mainstream discourse in higher education sometime in the last five to seven years, most observers agree.

Ken Hartman, former president of Drexel University Online, believes its roots stretch to the advent of personal computers in the 1980s, when software programs like Reader Rabbit purported to transform the learning experience for young children.

Anthony Picciano first recalls seeing the modern context for the term in the 2013 book The Idea of the Digital University: Ancient Traditions, Disruptive Technologies and the Battle for the Soul of Higher Education, by Frank McCluskey and Melanie Lynn Winter. Though most people interviewed for this article couldn’t pinpoint how “digital learning” grew prominent in the higher education discourse, several pointed to grants a few years ago from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that catalyzed numerous projects under the digital learning umbrella.

“It represents a broad set of possibilities in terms of approaches and methods and resources that enable innovative approaches to instruction and facilitate learning,” said Eric Fredericksen, associate vice president of online learning at the University of Rochester.

Most people interviewed for this article said they like the term “digital learning” to encompass the disparate areas of innovation happening over all in the higher education classroom. Those who take issue with the term haven’t identified an obvious successor, though they think eventually the reference to “digital” will be too narrow.

The article summarizes its future as:

I think over time, terms and how we look through things with a historical lens can evolve, but as long as we’re always focusing on learning, that’s probably most important.”  said Eric Fredericksen.

Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University, thinks the term “digital learning” is already on the verge of being outdated, given that most traditional classrooms use some form of digital technology.

“How are we using these tools to enhance the things that we care about? How are we reducing inequities? How are we improving success and outcomes?” Rascoff said. “We’ll figure out what the right tools are as a second-order question for how to solve those problems.”

Elizabeth Ciabocchi, vice provost for digital learning and executive director of online learning and services at St. John’s University, in New York, sees some room to grow before erasing “digital” from the vocabulary is feasible. More traditional institutions like hers are still adjusting to new and shifting paradigms, she said.

…

Picciano, meanwhile, wonders whether the term is simply too broad to last as anything more than a vague allusion to an abstract phenomenon. He thinks “online learning” and “blended learning” have attained a foothold in the discourse that “digital learning” hasn’t yet reached.

The term’s fate rests in part on its frequent users, like Ciabocchi, who sees explaining the meaning behind her job title as part of her duties in the years to come.”

Well-done article and worth a read for those of us involved with “learning.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It seems that Democrats and Republicans fundamentally disagree over updates to the higher education act especially with regard to the federal government’s role in holding colleges accountable and ensuring that a higher education is affordable and accessible to low-income and minority students. Democrats also distrust the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, over her willingness to protect students from unscrupulous colleges.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Last week Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, announced that he didn’t expect the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which he leads, to produce a reauthorization bill this year. He blamed the panel’s Democrats for inaction, saying they’ve been sitting on a complete proposal from Republicans for four months. “They want to wait until next year to see if they’re in better shape politically” before taking on higher-education reform, Alexander told an audience at a forum sponsored by The New York Times.

On Monday a spokeswoman for Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the committee, painted a different picture.

Alexander had earlier agreed to call Murray by the end of April to discuss plans to draft legislation through a bipartisan process, said the spokeswoman, Mairead Lynn, but “we never heard from him.” His comments last week blaming Democrats for failing to act “were the first time we heard him say that,” she said.

It’s not the Democrats who are refusing to act, Lynn said: “Senator Alexander has walked away from the table.” Murray believes the best way to come to agreement on a bill is for representatives of both parties to write the legislation together, said Lynn, “and not simply exchange partisan drafts and call it a day.”

A top aide to Alexander disputed that assessment on Tuesday, saying Murray’s office was “trying to rewrite history.”

Alexander’s office provided a “a good-faith draft” proposal that included topics that Democrats cared about and a schedule for further meetings, said the aide, who asked not to be named in order to speak candidly. Since then, the aide said, “for four months it’s been crickets.”

Alexander’s office declined to share the proposal it had presented privately to Murray, out of courtesy to her, the aide said. But the aide said the draft reflected the ideas Alexander has published as his five goals for reauthorization.

If Murray changes her mind, Alexander’s aide said, “we’d be there with a notebook and a pen.”

Most functions of higher education that depend on the federal government can continue whether or not the Higher Education Act is reauthorized. Nonetheless, some higher-ed advocates have been looking to the reauthorization process as a chance to modernize policies about accreditation and competency-based education, and even to expand the eligible uses of Pell Grants. The Senate stalemate effectively kills all chances of reauthorization this year.

..

With Congress unlikely to act, Secretary Betsy DeVos has said the Education Department will use the regulatory process to attain goals that are ordinarily pursued through reauthorization. “While a full rewrite of the law by Congress is the preferred method,” a DeVos spokeswoman told the Times, “the department must move forward with the law that we have. Students don’t have time to wait, and they, along with schools and taxpayers, deserve certainty and relief from the regulatory overreach by the previous administration.”

Among DeVos’s targets for reregulation or deregulation are rules aimed at protecting students from being defrauded by colleges, most of them for-profit institutions; rules that cracked down on colleges, also mostly for-profits, that saddled students with loan debts they could not pay off; rules that fostered state-level authorization of for-profit chains; and perhaps most controversial, the enforcement of Title IX, the part of the law that has been central to a crackdown on sexual harassment and assault on campuses.”

There is always next year!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Republican businessman John Cox placed first and second, respectively, in California’s gubernatorial primary yesterday.   As reported by The Huffington Post:

“Newsom and Cox competed in a crowded field to replace outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown (D) in the state’s “jungle” primary, in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. Other candidates included former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (D), state Treasurer John Chiang (D), former state public schools chief Delanie Eastin (D) and state Assemblyman Travis Allen (R).

As the results of the primary were called Tuesday evening, Villaraigosa was asking officials to keep some polling stations in Los Angeles County open through Friday due to a printing error that left more than 118,000 names off the voter rolls. “We’ve been told that a number of people were turned away and weren’t allowed to cast a provisional ballot,” he said at his election night event. “We’ve gotta figure that out.” 

Later in the evening, Villaraigosa conceded the race, and threw his support behind Newsom. 

Newsom announced his candidacy in February 2015 — more than three years before the primary — and has dominated the race in both the polls and fundraising ever since. He’s widely expected to defeat Cox in the general election: Republicans haven’t won a statewide race in California since 2006, and the GOP businessman is not nearly as well known statewide as the lieutenant governor. Cox is also a relatively recent California transplant, having lived in Chicago most of his life, and has never been elected to public office. 

Newsom pitched himself to voters as a bold advocate for California and offered support for progressive policies like Medicare for all and universal preschool while looking to convince more moderate voters he’d continue in Brown’s budget-conscious path. He’s also said he’d be a more pro-active governor than Brown, who largely does not comment on legislation until it’s time for him to sign or veto it. 

“I’m going to pull a lot more things into the governor’s office and not just see them fester in the Legislature,” Newsom told reporters last week.

Cox, meanwhile, has vowed to reform the state’s taxation system if elected, particularly taking issue with the state’s high income taxes. He’s also taken on the state’s gas tax — a favorite punching bag of California Republicans — as well as California’s newly implemented “sanctuary” state policy. He’s also pushed a plan to reduce the size of the state’s legislative districts, which he’s argued would reduce corruption by cutting down on the need for special interest money in campaigns. 

For most of the campaign, Villaraigosa was seen as the most viable threat to Newsom’s candidacy. He has strong ties to Southern California, having served as Los Angeles mayor for two terms, and serving on the Los Angeles City Council as well as in the California Assembly prior to that. Newsom, who was the mayor of San Francisco before assuming his current statewide post, is a Bay Area native with a deep support base in the northern part of the state. 

Villaraigosa, who is Mexican-American, also had strong support from Latino voters, who made up roughly 18 percent of likely voters. 

But in the last month of the campaign, Cox, a San Diego County resident who supported Libertarian Gary Johnson in the 2016 presidential race, earned the support of President Donald Trump, which pushed him over the edge to best Villaraigosa in the race for second place. 

Trump’s endorsement, however, may work against Cox in the general election: In a statewide UC Berkeley IGS Poll conducted in April, just 31 percent of voters said they approved of the president’s job performance.”

Mr. Newsom appears to be a fine candidate and should win the election in November unless there are some hidden issues that have not been made public yet. These days we never know!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fox News was caught misleading its viewers on Monday night while reporting on President Trump rescinding his invitation to the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles to visit the White House. Fox News showed an Eagle player kneeling supposedly during the national anthem.  The photograph was actually of Eagle Zach Ertz kneeling in prayer. It turns out that none of the Eagle players ever knelt in the regular season during the playing of the national anthem.  As reported by CNN:

“Fox News was forced to apologize after fumbling its coverage of President Trump’s cancellation of the Philadelphia Eagles White House visit.

The conservative news network said it was sorry Tuesday after airing pictures of Eagles players supposedly kneeling in protest during the national anthem — a form of demonstration against racial injustices that the President has condemned — when it became clear the photos were of footballers posed in prayer.

No one on the Eagles’ 2017-18 regular season roster knelt during the anthem at any point during the season.

Fox aired the photos Monday night after Trump linked the canceled invite to Eagles players taking a knee during the anthem, but the White House later said the team had planned to send too small a delegation.

“During our report about President Trump canceling the Philadelphia Eagles trip to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl win, we showed unrelated footage of players kneeling in prayer,” Fox producer Christopher Wallace said. “To clarify, no members of the team knelt in protest during the national anthem throughout regular or post-season last year. We apologize for the error.”

The fumble became apparent after Eagles tight end Zach Ertz called out the news outlet.

“This can’t be serious …” he tweeted. “Praying before games with my teammates, well before the anthem, is being used for your propaganda? Just sad.”

Trump scrapped the Eagles planned White House visit on Monday, with some aides saying he was furious when he found out that only a few Eagles planned to attend Tuesday’s event.

He instead ordered the event be turned into a “celebration of America.”

Trump has long fixated on the NFL national anthem controversy that began in 2016 with then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the sidelines during the song. Kaepernick said he was protesting to raise awareness about racism and the killing of black men by police.

Trump has accused players of being unpatriotic and has suggested they be fired for disrespecting the flag.”

Trump and Fox News are birds of a feather with the way they mislead and lie to the American people.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This year has seen teacher activism in a number of states such as West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina.  The New York Times has an analysis of school spending that demonstrates that cutbacks especially in Republican Party-controlled states has spurred this activism.  The chart above demonstrates that K-12 per pupil spending on public education has yet to recover its funding from the years prior to the Great Recession in 2008.  Here is an excerpt from the analysis:

”…the underlying conflict between public school employees and policymakers has roots in decisions made during the last recession, when states and local districts short of cash curtailed education spending for the first time in decades.

This had a pronounced effect on school staffing, with layoffs hitting many states. Districts cut support staff as well as regular classroom teachers. In North Carolina, the number of teachers is down 5 percent since peaking in 2009, while the number of teaching assistants is 28 percent lower. And teacher pay stagnated nonetheless.

Moreover, the recovery that has lifted the private economy has not quite restored school spending to pre-recession levels, especially in states run by fiscal conservatives determined to hold the line on government spending.

For a system that had experienced nothing but spending growth for a quarter century, the past few years have been a major shock. K-12 spending per pupil rose 26 out of 29 years before 2010, only to tumble three consecutive years at the beginning of this decade.

“Per-pupil spending went up forever,” says Matthew Chingos, director of the Urban Institute’s education policy program.

One reason for the consistent rise was a movement in education to reduce class sizes by adding teachers, and to provide more social services beyond basic instruction…

…Then came a one-two punch to the growth in education spending: The recession worsened financial problems already widespread in many states, and voters began electing conservative governors and legislatures that promised to rein in budget woes with spending cuts.

Almost every state reduced education spending during the recession. But as the national economy recovered, education spending did not return to the historical pattern of steady growth across all states. By 2016, more than half of states controlled by Democrats had restored education spending per pupil to 2009 levels, but the same was true in only 5 of 22 states controlled by Republicans…

… It now seems the pendulum is swinging toward spending growth in states that had been lagging.

Teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma protested and won a pay raise. Pressure from educators spurred the Kentucky legislature to block the governor from vetoing the budget. And in Georgia, political pressure forced leaders to fully fund the state aid formula for the first time in years.

Attention has turned to North Carolina, where thousands of teachers protested at the opening of the state legislative session. North Carolina teachers once ranked 19th in the nation in pay, but now rank 37th.”

It is likely that given the successes in states like West Virginia and Oklahoma, teacher unions will maintain pressure on those states that underspend for education.  We will see continued activism throughout the reminder of this year and into 2019.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Every spring in New York City there is a ritual of examing the admissions practices of selective high schools.  The issue centers on the low percentage of black and Latino students admitted to schools like the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School.  This spring was no different until Saturday when NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio made a proposal that would actually change the way students were admitted to these schools.  Here is a review of the issue courtesy of the New York Times:

“Black and Hispanic students, who make up 67 percent of the public school population, are grossly underrepresented at the specialized high schools, which include Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science.

Mr. de Blasio campaigned on the issue when he first ran for mayor in 2013, saying the specialized schools should “reflect the city better,” but he has yet to make a dent in the problem. This year, black and Latino students received just 10 percent of the offered seats at specialized high schools, a percentage that has held essentially flat for years.

“The Specialized High School Admissions Test isn’t just flawed — it’s a roadblock to justice, progress and academic excellence,” Mr. de Blasio wrote in an op-ed published Saturday on the education website Chalkbeat.

“Can anyone defend this?” he continued. “Can anyone look the parent of a Latino or black child in the eye and tell them their precious daughter or son has an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools? Can anyone say this is the America we signed up for?”

The most significant change Mr. de Blasio proposed was replacing the test, called the SHSAT, with a new method that would admit students based on their class rank at their middle school and their scores on statewide standardized tests. That change would require approval from the State Legislature, which has shown little appetite for such a move. A bill outlining those changes was introduced in the Assembly on Friday.

Mr. de Blasio announced another, smaller change on Saturday, one the city can do on its own. Beginning in the fall of 2019, the city would set aside 20 percent of seats in each specialized school for low-income students who score just below the cutoff; those students would be able to earn their spot by attending a summer session called the Discovery program. Five percent of seats for this year’s ninth graders were awarded this way, the city said.

A spokesman for the city’s Education Department said the way students were chosen for the Discovery program would also change. Currently, poor students with certain scores from all over the city qualify, but under the new plan, the city would target students from high-poverty schools instead. Those schools tend to have a higher proportion of black or Hispanic students.

Mr. de Blasio said that if both reforms were enacted, 45 percent of students at the eight specialized schools would be black or Latino.

The Discovery program on its own will have a much more modest impact. The city estimated that the percentage of black and Latino students receiving offers would increase to about 16 percent from 9 percent.

Certain alumni from the specialized schools have staunchly opposed making changes to the admissions test, which they see as a meritocratic standard. Larry Cary, president of the Brooklyn Tech Alumni Foundation board, said in a statement that his group supported the changes to the Discovery program, but not to the test itself. “We firmly oppose the amended bill that completely eliminates the test and substitutes unnamed subjective criteria,” he said. The bill, he continued, “was introduced a mere two hours before Friday midnight, and which is to be voted on this Wednesday, without a hearing. That is no way to make policy.”

Some education advocates who are pushing for admissions changes are unlikely to consider Mr. de Blasio’s proposal to be exhaustive. A 1971 state law says a single test must be used for admissions at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, but many legal experts have said the city could reclassify the other five schools, allowing them to change how students are admitted. Mr. de Blasio has long held that the city cannot make such changes on its own, though he recently said he would “revisit” the issue.”

We will see if Mayor de Blasio follows through on his proposal and whether or not the New York State Legislature approves it.

Tony