Dear Commons Community,

The original P-Tech was launched in 2011 and earned a good deal of attention for its six-year program in which students start in ninth grade and stay until they’ve earned associate’s degrees in a partnership with IBM and the City University of New York. Since its founding, 110 more P-Techs have opened across the United States and several other countries. Yesterday’s New York Times had a piece revisiting the original P-Tech and includes interviews with several recent graduates.  See below.

Tony

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Chigozie Okorie likes to say that he’s the “high school student who never left high school.” He’s kidding, sort of: Not only did Mr. Okorie graduate from high school, he also collected an associate degree and a full-time job at IBM within four years. And he’s now studying communications at Baruch College and expects to graduate next year.

Not bad for someone who’s not even 20.

No one is more surprised than he. “When you say things out loud it becomes so much more shocking,” said Mr. Okorie, who grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. “I say it in my head, but it doesn’t impact me unless I say it around other people: ‘Wow, I’m going to graduate within a year with a bachelor’s and it only took me how many years?’”

Mr. Okorie’s job as a program associate in education at IBM requires him to spend much of his day at his alma mater, Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-Tech, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. P-Tech was started in 2011 as a partnership between the New York City Department of Education, the New York City College of Technology and IBM. It is a six-year program that gives students from lower-income backgrounds the chance to earn a high school diploma along with a cost-free associate degree in a STEM field. Some, like Mr. Okorie, do it in even less time.

“The question was, how do you better connect students with the future of work and create a seamless pathway for them to enroll in college?” said Rashid Davis, the founding principal of Brooklyn P-Tech. “When we started, more than 70 percent of students entering the City University of New York were graduates from the New York City Department of Education. However, more than 70 percent of those students needed remediation — meaning, they’re not completing a two-year degree in real two-year time. So the thought was, if you have this public-private partnership, could an early start lead to better outcomes?”

P-Tech’s mission is to do just that. During their time at P-Tech, students are paired with a professional mentor and are eligible for a paid internship at IBM. (Mr. Okorie helps run the mentorship program). On graduation, many go on to four-year colleges; others take full-time jobs at IBM, although they’re not required to.

“We’re not preparing kids for jobs necessarily at IBM, we’re preparing them for jobs in the IT industry,” said Grace Suh, vice president for IBM Education. “We’d love them to come work at IBM, but the idea is that we’re giving them the skills they require to do whatever kind of job and work in whatever place — whether it’s IBM or a start-up.””

So far, 110 schools in eight states and Australia, Morocco, and Taiwan fall under the P-Tech umbrella; California, Colombia and Singapore are set to open schools soon. More than 500 industry partners and 77 community colleges also participate.

P-Tech is filling a necessary void. According to June 2018 data from the Federal Reserve, American students and their families carry more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. A Brookings study found that nearly 40 percent of student borrowers may default on their student loans by 2023.

P-Tech students graduate with no debt.

What’s more, college graduation rates among low-income students haven’t changed very much in 40 years. A 2016 report by the Pell Institute and the University of Pennsylvania’s Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy noted that the percentage of students from the poorest families who had gotten college degrees was 6 percent in 1970. By 2013, that number had increased only to 9 percent. And only 6 percent of college graduates from low-income, minority urban schools completed a STEM degree within six years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.

Yet dual-enrollment programs like P-Tech, in which high school students take college or university courses, have been found to help students complete college.

“It’s not enough just to say ‘free college,’” Mr. Davis said. “There’s free high school across the country, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is finishing with the skills they need to be prepared to move on. So it really is the industry involved that actually can say ‘We know that students need more research skills, we know that students really need to know how to present projects, make an argument.’ That makes a difference when they’re trying to get a job.”

To the students at P-Tech, Mr. Davis is somewhat of a rock star. Mr. Okorie chose P-Tech — there are no required entrance exams — after attending a high school fair with a friend. After the friend met Mr. Davis, he excitedly told Mr. Okorie about him. “He said, ‘There’s this guy with crazy long dreads and he’s wearing these super cool yellow sneakers and he’s telling me I can get a job at IBM and an associate degree at the same time,’” Mr. Okorie recalled with a laugh. “Once he told me that and I spoke to Mr. Davis, they sold me.”

But beyond learning what they do want to do, P-Tech students learn what they don’t want to do.

Morsaline Mozahid, 17, will graduate from P-Tech in December with his associate degree. He thought he wanted to have a career as a video game designer, but after taking a computer and coding class at P-Tech he realized that he “kind of hated it.”

“It was boring for me,” he said.

He’s grateful to P-Tech for giving him the chance to discover this sooner rather than later and hopes to study medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Otherwise, he said, “I would have spent a year in college trying to figure it out.”

Dear Commons Community,

Election Day is this Tuesday and the stakes have never been higher. This will be the first nationwide test of what the country thinks about the Trump presidency and the current Republican control of both houses of Congress.  Trump has been campaigning at a furious pace in support of his and his party’s candidates.  The Associated Press has an article this morning  analyzing what is at stake:

“President Donald Trump has been acting like a candidate on the ballot this week, staging daily double-header rallies and blasting out ads for Republicans up for election on Tuesday. Given the stakes for his presidency, he might as well be.

A knot of investigations. Partisan gridlock. A warning shot for his re-election bid. Trump faces potentially debilitating fallout should Republicans lose control of one or both chambers in Congress, ending two years of GOP hegemony in Washington. A White House that has struggled to stay on course under favorable circumstances would be tested in dramatic ways. A president who often battles his own party, would face a far less forgiving opposition.

On the flip side, if Republicans maintain control of the House and Senate, that’s note only a victory for the GOP, but a validation of Trump’s brand of politics and his unconventional presidency. That result, considered less likely even within the White House, would embolden the president as he launches his own re-election bid.

White House aides insist the president doesn’t spend much time contemplating defeat, but he has begun to try to calibrate expectations. He has focused on the competitive Senate races the final days of his scorched-earth campaign blitz, and has distanced himself from blame should Republicans lose the House. If that happens, he intends to claim victory, arguing his efforts on the campaign trail narrowed GOP losses and helped them hold the Senate, according to a person familiar with Trump’s thinking who asked for anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss White House conversations by name.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has been testing out other explanations — pointing to historical headwinds for the party of an incumbent president and complaining about a rash of GOP retirements this year. He told the AP last month that he won’t bear any responsibility should Democrats take over.

At a rally in West Virginia Friday a defiant Trump brushed off the prospect of a Democratic House takeover. “It could happen,” he said, adding “don’t worry about it. I’ll just figure it out.“

Meanwhile his staff has begun preparations to deal with a flood of subpoenas that could arrive next year from Democrat-controlled committees and the White House counsel’s office has been trying to attract seasoned lawyers to field oversight inquiries.

Should they take the House, Democrats are already plotting to reopen the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Other committees are plotting aggressive oversight of Trump’s administration and his web of business interests. Some Democrats are looking at using the House Ways and Means Committee to obtain copies of the president’s tax returns after he broke with decades of tradition and withheld them from public scrutiny during his campaign for the White House.

A slim Republican majority in the House would also present challenges, likely inflaming simmering intraparty disputes. First among them would be a potentially bitter leadership fight in the House to replace retiring Speaker Paul Ryan. But a narrowed majority would also exacerbate divisions over policy — and continued unified control could leave the GOP facing the blame for gridlock.

“Clearly there’s an awful lot on the line in terms of the legislative agenda,” said Republican consultant Josh Holmes. “The prospect of a Democratic controlled House or Senate puts a serious wrinkle in getting anything through Congress.“

Some in the White House think losing to Democrats might actually be preferable. They view Democrats’ eagerness to investigate the president as a blessing in disguise in the run-up to 2020. They view House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a potent foil for Trump, and believe they can tag the party responsibility for Washington dysfunction.

Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary, said Democratic control of the House “has both peril and promise for the president.”

“The peril is subpoenas, investigations, legal bills and headaches,” he said. “The promise is Trump will have an easy foil to run against: Pelosi and Democratic leadership.“

White House aides have discussed floating popular legislative issues, like infrastructure, to tempt Democrats and test the unity of the Democratic opposition.

While keeping the House remained an uphill battle for the GOP, in the closing days of the campaign, Trump and Republicans have tried to sell voters on the possibilities of another two years of GOP control. They promised hardline immigration policies and more tax cuts, arguing that Democrats would erase two years of progress.

In the closing weeks of the midterms, Trump has unleashed a no-holds-barred effort to boost Republicans as he dipped into the same undercurrents of unease that defined his 2016 campaign. From stoking fears about illegal immigration to warning of economic collapse if Democrats are victorious.

But a House loss will prompt GOP hand-wringing about the divides in the party and the struggles for moderate Republicans to run in the Trump, as well as raise questions about whether the Democratic gains point to a path for presidential hopefuls in 2020.

Democratic consultant Jim Manley said Tuesday may reveal if Democrats are having any success recapturing white working class voters in the Midwest who backed Trump in 2016.

“Trump is helping. He’s becoming more and more radioactive,” Manley said. “There’s a chance to try and win them back over.“

But while the results may reveal weaknesses in the Republican coalition, midterm elections are very different than presidential years. Republicans were quick to point out that the party in power typically suffers defeats in midterms. Former President Barack Obama was in his words “shellacked” in 2010 and went on to win re-election in 2012.

“In the aftermath people will exaggerate its meaning and in 2 years’ time everything will have changed,“ Fleischer said.”

The bottom line is that Tuesday is important.  Make sure you VOTE!

Tony

Wallace D. Loh, left, the University of Maryland president, and James T. Brady, chairman of the governing board.

Dear Commons Community,

It has been a tough week at the University of Maryland during which the president announced his retirement, the football coach was fired and the chairman of the university’s governing board resigned.  The cause of these departures stem from the death of 19-year-old football player Jordan McNair, who collapsed from heatstroke after practice in the sweltering heat in May and died two weeks later. The resulting controversy became a power struggle among various internal and external pressures over who at the University of Maryland would be held responsible for the McNair tragedy.  As reported by the New York Times, the Associated Press, and Reuters:

 “…the week’s turbulence brought to the fore tensions among those trying to protect a big-time college athletic program and those who feared that the handling of Mr. McNair’s death was severely damaging the university’s image and a $1.5 billion fund-raising campaign aimed at elevating the school’s academic standing.

“We have got politicians involved, students upset and the public wondering what’s going on,” said Mike Freiman, a former president of the Terrapin Club, an athletic donors’ organization.

A three-way battle was waged among the university president, Wallace D. Loh; the football coach, D.J. Durkin; and the politically connected chairman of the Board of Regents, James T. Brady. By the end of the week, Mr. Durkin and Mr. Brady were out, and Mr. Loh was headed into retirement at the end of the academic year.

The governor, Larry Hogan, a Republican seeking re-election in a blue state, also entered the fray. As public pressure mounted, with university donors growing upset and his Democratic challenger denouncing his inaction, Governor Hogan voiced his displeasure about how the board was handling the crisis.

The trouble grew on Tuesday after the board announced, as Mr. Loh looked on visibly upset, that Mr. Durkin would remain as the school’s coach, despite a report highly critical of the football program’s culture.

Mr. Loh, who had pushed for the 2014 move to the football-oriented Big Ten Conference, wanted to dismiss Mr. Durkin but was overruled by the Brady-led board.

The resulting public furor emboldened Mr. Loh to buck the board’s wishes and fire Mr. Durkin on Wednesday. Mr. Brady stepped down the next day, having lost the support of Governor Hogan, whose campaign he ran in 2014.

This account of the last week of maneuvering is based on interviews with more than a dozen people close to the process, most of whom declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations. Through representatives, Mr. Loh and Mr. Durkin declined to comment.

Late last week, the 17-member board met at the University System of Maryland headquarters in Baltimore. It received Mr. Loh, Damon Evans, the athletic director, and Mr. Durkin one by one.

The meeting was intended to resolve a crisis that started with Mr. McNair’s death and snowballed after an ESPN article in August portrayed the program as one in which staff members humiliated and bullied players in a way that has fallen out of favor in big-time college football.

After that ESPN report, the university suspended two athletic trainers and reached an agreement for the resignation of the strength coach, Rick Court — who was depicted in the article as the ringleader of a “toxic culture.”

Mr. Durkin was hired after the university left the basketball-oriented Atlantic Coast Conference for the Big Ten, which could eventually net tens of millions of dollars more in revenue for Maryland. The ESPN report noted that some players had taken issue with Mr. Durkin’s intense style and the fact that Mr. Court was one of his first hires.

The university’s inquiry into the football program was formally released this week. But the board had it in hand last week as it met Mr. Loh, Mr. Durkin and Mr. Evans.

The report partly blamed Mr. Durkin, but it also partly absolved him, characterizing the first-time head coach — who was hired after the 2015 season, when he was just 37 — as overmatched in his new job. It also said he had not received sufficient support from the athletic department or the university, given Maryland’s lofty ambitions in its new conference.

“Mr. Durkin was hired under high-pressure circumstances and tasked with turning a struggling football program into a Big Ten contender, with less funding and fan support than other conference programs,” the report said.

After reading the report, the majority of the board advocated ending Mr. Loh’s tenure as president. Word of the board’s plans got back to Mr. Loh, who requested a chance to make his case.

When he spoke to the board last week, Mr. Loh cautioned that abruptly changing leadership would destabilize the university. He also argued that he could help carry out changes recommended in the report. Finally, he warned that retaining Mr. Durkin would send the campus into turmoil.

Mr. Durkin spoke later, and by several accounts was persuasive. He is an acolyte of two of college football’s premier coaches, Urban Meyer of Ohio State and Jim Harbaugh of Michigan. After he spoke to the board, it decided not to fire him.

By Monday, the board had decided that both Mr. Durkin and Mr. Evans would stay. But the board does not have the authority to hire or fire university personnel other than the president. So Mr. Loh, whom a majority still wanted to terminate, had to be the one to retain Mr. Durkin and Mr. Evans. Instead of immediately being dismissed, Mr. Loh was permitted to retire in June, at the end of the academic year.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, remembering the 11 people killed in last week’s synagogue shooting, topped today’s front page with opening words from the traditional kaddish mourner’s prayer in Hebrew.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s campaign strategy has been reduced to bashing immigrants and blaming the Democrats for letting them into our country.  It reminds me of the panic scenes in the 1966 movie, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, about a Russian submarine that accidentally runs aground in New England.  The townsfolk panic and start developing all types of nutty schemes to ward off the “invasion.”   Donald Trump has reduced this year’s Republican campaign to the craziness in the movie.   As reported this morning in the New York Times:

“President Trump’s closing argument is now clear: Build tent cities for migrants. End birthright citizenship. Fear the caravan. Send active-duty troops to the border. Refuse asylum.

Immigration has been the animating issue of the Trump presidency, and now — with the possibility that Republicans could face significant losses in the midterm elections on Tuesday — the president has fully embraced a dark, anti-immigrant message in the hope that stoking fear will motivate voters to reject Democrats.

In a rambling speech on Thursday afternoon that was riddled with falsehoods and vague promises to confront a “crisis” at the border, Mr. Trump used the official backdrop of the White House to step up his efforts to demonize a caravan of Central Americans that has been making its way through Mexico, assail Democrats, and promote a vision of a United States that would be better off with fewer immigrants.

The president said he had ordered troops to respond to any migrants in the caravan who throw rocks as if they were brandishing firearms, saying, “I told them: Consider it a rifle.” He said his government had already begun to construct “massive cities of tents” to imprison legal and illegal immigrants who try to enter the United States.

 “This is a defense of our country,” Mr. Trump declared from a lectern in the Roosevelt Room before leaving the White House to attend a campaign rally in Missouri. “We have no choice. We will defend our borders. We will defend our country.”

The president also played fast and loose with the truth. At one point, he said that 97 percent of immigrants apprehended at the border and released into the United States do not show up for their trials; the number is closer to 28 percent. He also said the government is no longer releasing immigrants while they await trial. Meanwhile, migrants are being caught and released at the border regularly, as has happened for decades.

He repeated his oft-stated, misleading description of the situation south of the border, saying that “large, organized caravans” are heading toward the United States, filled with “tough people, in many cases.”

“A lot of young men, strong men,” he continued, “and a lot of men we maybe don’t want in our country.”

 “They have injured; they have attacked,” he added.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has promised a number of actions to demonstrate a renewed crackdown on immigrants. While he has followed through on one of them — ordering an increase in military units on the border — there was no mention in the speech of the presidential proclamation on asylum and the new policy on family separation that he has promised.

Mostly what the president offered was a repeat of the angry rhetoric that has been a central theme of his campaign rallies and in Fox News interviews for the past two weeks.

Raising fears about immigrants has been a central theme for Mr. Trump since he first announced he was running for president. On Thursday night, in a chilly airplane hangar in Columbia, Mo., with Air Force One as his backdrop, Mr. Trump whipped thousands of supporters into a chorus of boos over the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, dismissing a core tenet of the 14th Amendment as a “crazy, lunatic policy that we can end.”

He warned that the Constitution’s grant of citizenship to any person born on United States soil could benefit the offspring of “an enemy of our country” or “a dictator with war on your mind.”

 “Democrats want to spend your money and give away your resources for the benefit of anyone but American citizens,” he charged falsely, crystallizing his fear-mongering closing message: “If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal immigrants and massive caravans, you better vote Republican.”

In the past week, as a series of pipe bombs sent to prominent opponents of the president and then the killing of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue dominated the news, the president’s political team has urged him to put renewed emphasis on immigration and use his bully pulpit to ratchet up the nation’s sense of alarm about the dangers of migrants heading for the border.

A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

The president did not need much convincing. On Wednesday afternoon, he tweeted out a 53-second, expletive-filled video that features immigrants charged with violent crimes and images of a throng of brown-skinned men breaching a barrier and running forward. The president’s message was clear: Immigrants will kill you, and the Democrats are to blame.

“It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country,” Mr. Trump wrote in the tweet, part of a grim warning about the dangers of immigrants that has left some Republicans — including the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan — uneasy heading into Tuesday’s voting.”

It makes me wonder what this cowardly, bullying president would do if we faced a real foreign threat.  Panic, anyone?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This year’s Greenwich Village Halloween Parade was filled with political themes and color.  Here are some photos from last night.

Tony