Alabama Governor Kay Ivey

Dear Commons Community,

Alabama school systems and colleges will receive supplements totaling $280 million this year under a bill signed into law yesterday by Governor Kay Ivey.

The governor’s office announced that Ivey signed the bill making the appropriations from the state’s Advancement and Technology Fund.

A law called the Rolling Reserve Act that passed a decade ago set up the Advancement and Technology Fund to save a portion of education revenue every year. The Legislature can then appropriate the money to K-12 and higher education for certain non-recurring expenses.

This year’s bill will provide $206 million for K-12 and $76 million for colleges and universities, including the Alabama Community College System.

The money can be used for repairs and deferred maintenance, classroom instruction support, insuring facilities, transportation, school security, and education technology and equipment. About $1.9 million of this year’s share to K-12 will go to teacher professional development.

“Investing in Alabama’s students in a productive way is investing in our future,” Ivey said in a press release. “It is critical, now more than ever, to find ways to improve our students’ learning journeys, and I am proud to officially put pen to paper on Senate Bill 193 to put funds into much-needed projects in our schools. As long as I am your governor, putting a greater emphasis on our schools will be a top priority.”

The money is for this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2021. Funds not used will be carried forward for the same purpose to next fiscal year.

Congratulations to Governor Ivey and policy-makers in Alabama!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Hoping to provide an alternative to expensive for-profit career-training programs, in 2019, California invested more than $100 million into an online-only community college known as Calbright.

But at the end of its first year of operation (2020), only 12 students had graduated. Nearly 400 dropped out, according to a report released by the California State Auditor lat week.

Calbright still has a significant potential value to California, but several missteps by the college’s former leaders have hampered the school’s ability to help its students get good jobs, State Auditor Elaine Howle said in her report.

The audit comes just days after the California Assembly voted 71-0 to abolish the school by 2023. Even as officials have defended Calbright as a “flexible, accessible pathway into high-quality jobs that pay a living wage,” legislators say the school has simply duplicated existing programs in other community colleges.

“The college must now make significant progress in enrolling, graduating, and helping to secure jobs for its students,” Howle said. “If Calbright does not demonstrate meaningful implementation of our recommendations by the end of 2022, we recommend that the Legislature eliminate the college as an independent entity and explore other options for providing self-paced educational programs to California adults.”

Former Gov. Jerry Brown, a longtime proponent for online education, signed a law in 2018 to establish Calbright. The school was meant to help working Californians get access to better, higher-paying jobs by securing certificates in industries in demand.

About 2.5 million Californians between 25 and 34 worked but didn’t have a degree beyond high school, Brown said at his State of the State address in 2018. The school would be much cheaper than for-profit institutions those workers often turn to, Brown said.

By October 2020, a year after its launch, Calbright had enrolled more than 900 students. But the school fell far short of its goal of placing 300 to 400 graduates into paid apprenticeships or jobs in its first year, according to the report. Only 12 graduated — and Calbright doesn’t know whether they are employed, the report said.

Calbright has also failed to build relationships with employers to ensure its graduates can get good jobs, the report said. The school started offering career services such as one-on-one coaching in November, but the report said they are insufficient substitutes for strong relationships with employers.

The report also pointed out students at some of Calbright’s programs, such as cybersecurity, may not be able to access good jobs because those often require bachelor’s degrees or significant industry experience. “Calbright’s decisions regarding the programs it offers have not adequately reflected an awareness of the needs of its target population.”

Finally, the report said Calbright’s former executive team, while earning substantially higher salaries than other community college leaders, did not have a detailed strategy for how it planned to spend more than $175 million in state funding.

With the new leadership in place by 2020, Calbright has made “positive steps,” the report said. Calbright plans to create a detailed spending plan by November. The school also recently hired a chief financial and administrative officer, the report said.

Calbright has also developed two new programs by March, in training for health care workers and on customer relationship management software. Calbright has established a partnership with a technology company for the latter program, the report said.

The report also noted that among 95 students who responded to its survey, they largely expressed satisfaction with their experience.

In its response to the audit, Calbright leaders vowed to make “continued progress” to address the concerns laid out. The leaders noted it has laid out a strategic vision to enroll 5,000 students by 2023, with 1,200 completing the school’s programs.

“More than 90 percent of Calbright’s initial cohort of students were students over the age of 25 and more than 50 percent were students of color — exactly the working adults that Calbright was designed to serve,” Calbright President Ajita Talwalker Menon and Board President Pamela Haynes said in their response. “Calbright is planning to do outreach to additional populations who may also benefit from these flexible programs.”

But those changes and remarks so far have not been enough to assuage the concerns of state legislators, as well as a major teacher’s union.

“The State Auditor’s report clearly shows that it is time to shut down the failed experiment of Calbright College,” said Jeff Freitas, president of the California Federation of Teachers which represents many community college faculty members in the state, in a statement.

Calbright appears to have been a good idea that was poorly implemented.

Tony

Robert Slavin

Dear Commons Community,

Robert Slavin, a sociologist whose research into how children learn helped shift the emphasis in classrooms across the country toward teaching reading through phonics, mixing students of different aptitudes rather than educating them on separate tracks, and testing them for vision and other factors that could affect their education, died on April 24 in Baltimore. He was 70.

I used his material on education research over the years in courses I have taught at Hunter College. His work on cooperative learning was especially important and ahead of its time.  I also liked the fact that he was very much a pragmatist who promoted approaches that focused on improving teaching and learning.

His complete obituary is below.

May he rest in peace.

Tony

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New York Times

Robert Slavin, Who Studied How Children Learn, Dies at 70!

By Sam Roberts

May 18, 2021

Robert E. Slavin, a sociologist whose research into how children learn helped shift the emphasis in classrooms across the country toward teaching reading through phonics, mixing students of different aptitudes rather than educating them on separate tracks, and testing them for vision and other factors that could affect their education, died on April 24 in Baltimore. He was 70.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his longtime assistant, Susan Davis, who said the cause was a heart attack.

Dr. Slavin was an early proponent of cooperative learning, an approach through which small teams of students with different academic abilities work together. He documented that if the teams were rewarded as a group while grades were earned individually, disadvantaged students who had fallen behind would learn faster without inhibiting the progress of their classmates who were getting better grades.

If all slower learners and those who trailed their classmates on standardized tests were segregated in classes and lumped together grade by grade, he said, they would be virtually guaranteed to struggle.

“What most studies show is that mixed-ability grouping doesn’t hurt high-achieving students and in fact helps those of lower achievement levels,” Dr. Slavin told The New York Times in 1990. When students are grouped by performance, he said, “the low-ability groups get slower instruction, lower expectations, behavior problems increase and low achievement becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

In 1987, when Dr. Slavin was director of the elementary school program at the Center for Research on Effective Schooling for Disadvantaged Students at Johns Hopkins University, he and his wife and research partner, Nancy Madden, introduced a program into the Baltimore schools called Success for All.

The program encompasses cooperative learning in the classroom, academic tutoring and family support that engages parents in improving their children’s health and nutrition. It was replicated in thousands of classrooms in nearly every state for prekindergarten through eighth grade

In 2014, as a result of his research into why children were struggling to read, Dr. Slavin began a program in Baltimore in which 60,000 children were screened for vision problems, 11,000 received full eye exams and 8,000 were given free eyeglasses.

At his death, he was initiating another program, ProvenTutoring, a collaboration among a dozen coaching programs designed to help disadvantaged students who were lagging behind on reading tests and other measures and had fallen even further behind because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Not everyone applauded Dr. Slavin’s approach. Some teachers objected to his highly scripted curriculums, which they said did not allow enough time for more spontaneous approaches. Others disagreed with his emphasis on phonics, which introduces slower readers to the science of language — the sounds that words make, the letters that represent those sounds and the way that those sounds make words — rather than first teaching them a love of literature.

Robert Edward Slavin was born on Sept. 17, 1950, in Bethesda, Md., to Joseph and Miriam (Crohn) Slavin. His father was a clinical psychologist who led the Washington School of Psychiatry; his mother was a homemaker and the mother of five.

Mr. Slavin graduated from Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. At Reed he met Ms. Madden, a fellow undergraduate. They worked at Portland elementary schools, and he taught children with disabilities. They married in 1973.

He received a doctorate from the Department of Social Relations at Johns Hopkins University in 1975.

He is survived by his wife, now a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education; their three children, Jacob, Benjamin and Rebecca Slavin; his siblings, Thomas, Daniel, Paul and Julia Slavin; three grandchildren; and his mother.

Dr. Slavin was the author of two dozen books, most of which elaborated on his commitment to “evidence-based” research that substantiated the most effective teaching methods.

“Bob had a unique ability to translate the science of learning into effective educational practices,” said Steven M. Ross, evaluation director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins, where Dr. Slavin’s purview extended to classroom organization and school desegregation.

“Being a skilled reader is fundamental to success in all subjects,” Professor Ross said by email. “Effective learning is active, collaborative, and adaptive to each child. One-on-one tutoring by caring human teachers is the most powerful form of teaching for those reasons.”

Dr. Slavin, who in 2020 was named the Johns Hopkins School of Education’s first distinguished professor, told The Guardian in 2007: “The issue of evidence-based reform is the only really fundamental way forward in education. It transformed medicine, it transformed agriculture, it transformed technology. I don’t know why that shouldn’t be the case in education.”

In the last entry on his blog, Dr. Slavin wrote: “All of us go into education to solve real problems in real classrooms. That’s the structure we are all building together over many years. None of us will live to see our structure completed, because education keeps growing in techniques and capability. But it’s useful to stop from time to time and remember why we do what we do, and for whom.”

Dear Commons Community,

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is “TRUMP’S LI’L MITCH” is on today’s cover of the New York Daily News.

The newspaper depicted McConnell as a dog on Donald Trump’s lap in response to the lawmaker’s opposition to a commission to investigate the deadly U.S. Capitol riot, which was incited by the ex-president.

The House voted Wednesday to set up a commission on the violence. Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, oppose the investigation.

“Lapdog pol protects Don from riot probe,” read the sub-headline:

It’s not the first time the New York tabloid has transformed McConnell into an animal on its front page.

In January 2020, it turned the then-Senate majority leader into a chicken following his refusal to allow witnesses to testify in Trump’s Senate impeachment trial over the Ukraine scandal.

Funny but sad!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Thirty-five House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to create a 10 member bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol, risking the wrath of former President Donald Trump and flouting GOP leaders who condemned the proposal as unfairly partisan and unneeded.

The Republican mavericks were led Wednesday by New York Rep. John Katko, who wrote the measure with Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. Katko, that panel’s top Republican, was battling two tides that have overwhelmed Congress in recent years: the nearly overwhelming potency Trump still has among Republicans and a jagged-edged partisanship that often confounds even mundane legislation.   As reported by the Associated Press.

“I encourage all members, Republicans and Democrats alike, to put down their swords for once, just for once, and support this bill,” Katko said before the House approved the measure.

The 35 defectors represented a relatively modest but significant slice of House Republicans, of whom 175 opposed the legislation. Their defiance underscored the party’s rift as some lawmakers supported an investigation of the shocking and violent Capitol attack while leaders tried to avoid enraging the former president, whose support they believe they’ll need to win House control in the 2022 elections.

All 10 Republicans who voted in January to impeach Trump for encouraging his supporters to storm the Capitol supported the commission. Most of the 35 Republicans backing the commission were moderates.

The 10 who backed impeachment included Katko and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Trump’s most prominent House GOP critic. She did not speak during Wednesday’s debate, but after the vote she tweeted a message urging the Senate to approve the commission, saying, “Some things must be above politics.” The vote came a week after her colleagues dumped her from a Republican leadership position for repeatedly criticizing Trump for his role in the attack and his false claims that he lost the election because of widespread voting fraud.

Opposing the commission was Rep. Greg Pence, R-Ind. His brother, former Vice President Mike Pence, was in the Capitol during the attack and was hustled to safety by security officers even as some in the pro-Trump mob were heard shouting “Hang Mike Pence.” Trump had turned on his vice president for not derailing Congress’ counting of the votes, which Pence did not have the constitutional power to do.

A moderate and former prosecutor, Katko defended the proposed commission as a fair and needed step toward understanding the riot, how it happened and what security improvements the Capitol needs to prevent a future assault.

“This is about fact. It is not partisan politics,” he said pointedly.

Two other Republicans spoke in favor of the legislation: Fred Upton and Peter Meijer of Michigan. The two had also voted to impeach Trump.

“January 6 is going to haunt this institution for a long, long time,” said Upton. He said that if not for resistance by the Capitol Police, “Who knows how many of our heads would have been swinging on those gallows” that members of the mob erected outside the building.

Meijer, a freshman, took what seemed veiled shots at Trump, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and some of his GOP colleagues.

Without mentioning names, Meijer said the attack occurred “with the encouragement of prominent elected officials.” He said some who initially criticized the attack “have walked back their words or softened their speech.”

Meijer added, “More troubling, there has been an active effort to whitewash and rewrite the shameful events of that day to avoid accountability.”

Days after the Capitol attack, McCarthy said Trump “bears responsibility” for the rioters’ assault. But he opposed impeachment, eased his criticisms of Trump and opposed creation of the commission. Other Republicans have downplayed the attack, with one comparing the rioters to tourists, and Trump has opposed the commission, calling it a “Democrat trap.”

McCarthy did not speak during debate on the bill.

Other Republicans backing the commission included Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an impeachment supporter and longtime Trump critic, and Stephanie Bice, president of the House GOP freshman class, who represents a competitive district that includes Oklahoma City.

Also voting for the commission were nine of the nearly two dozen Republicans whom Democrats consider prime targets to oust in next year’s elections. Their numbers included a pair of freshmen from South Florida and Katko, a fourth-term Syracuse-area lawmaker who has survived close races before.

The Democratic-run House approved the measure 252-175 and sent it to the Senate, where Democrats face an uphill fight to garner at least 10 Republican “yes” votes they will need to prevail.”

God bless those Republicans who put their conscience above their party.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ten months after revealing plans to eliminate eleven of its varsity athletic programs, Stanford University announced yesterday that they would not be discontinued after all, ending a battle between the university and the supporters of those sports.

University leaders, in announcing the reversal, cited improvements in the school’s investments and also said supporters of the programs had helped reveal a new path toward funding the sports — 10 of which are featured at the Olympics.

Celebrations rippled through campus when teams heard their programs would be saved just weeks before they were set to lose their varsity status. Players on the men’s volleyball team shouted and hugged and shoved each other in a giant celebratory mosh pit in their dormitory. Some rowers on the men’s crew team high-fived and whooped outside of their boathouse post-practice, while others fell to the ground in tears of relief.

Women on the fencing team came together in a group chat to share their joy, thrilled that their beloved program would survive, yet still disappointed that the university had initially not seen enough value in their sport to keep it.

“It’s hard to say exactly why Stanford changed their mind, but cutting the sports was a huge P.R. problem and huge bad look for them,” Kyler Presho, a senior on the men’s volleyball team, said. “We were relentless in giving them every reason to reconsider and we just didn’t go away. In the end, hey, it worked.”

Jeremy Jacobs, a former Stanford volleyball player who helped lead the 36 Sports Strong advocacy group that worked to keep the 11 sports, broke the news to the volleyball team Tuesday in a videoconference. As he told the team, “We’re back,” players began to cheer and he began to cry.

“This past year was a nightmare and we’re going to make sure this never happens again,” he told them before regrouping.

He added, “I know that there have been a lot of hard feelings and anger toward Stanford because of this, but we’re pretty lucky in some respects because they did listen and we did feel heard.”

Last July, Stanford said the cuts were a last resort and blamed “the harsh new financial realities imposed by Covid-19,” blindsiding both the coaches and the athletes who were affected. This season would be the last for those sports, the university said.

This is a welcome reversal of Stanford’s earlier decision!

Tony

NY Attorney General Letitia James Conducting Criminal Investigation into Donald Trump’s Business Dealings

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Attorney General’s Office said yesterday that it is conducting a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business empire, expanding what had previously been a civil probe.  As reported by The New York Times.

“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the company is no longer purely civil in nature,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for Attorney General Letitia James, said in a statement.

“We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA,” Levy said.

James’ investigators are working with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which has been conducting a criminal investigation into Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, for two years. James and District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. are both Democrats.

James’ office offered no explanation for what prompted the change in its approach to the investigation or why it chose to announce it publicly.

Levy declined further comment. A spokesperson for Vance declined comment. A message seeking comment was left with a lawyer for Trump and spokespeople for the former president and his company.

James’ disclosure of a widening investigation is not necessarily an indication that she is planning to bring criminal charges. In New York, if that were to happen, the state attorney general can do so through a county district attorney, like Vance, or with a referral from Gov. Andrew Cuomo or a state agency.

James’ civil investigation and Vance’s criminal probe had overlapped in some areas, including examining whether Trump or his businesses manipulated the value of assets — inflating them in some cases and minimizing them in others — to gain favorable loan terms and tax benefits.

Vance’s investigation also included a look at hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf and the propriety of tax write-offs the Trump Organization claimed on millions of dollars in consulting fees it paid, including money that went to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.

Vance’s office hasn’t publicly said what it is investigating, citing grand jury secrecy rules, but some details have come out during a legal battle to get access to Trump’s tax records, which it finally obtained in February.

As part of her civil investigation, James’ office issued subpoenas to local governments in November 2019 for records pertaining to Trump’s estate north of Manhattan, Seven Springs and a tax benefit Trump received for placing land there into a conservation trust.

James was also looking at similar issues relating to a Trump office building in New York City, a hotel in Chicago and a golf course near Los Angeles. Her office also won a series of court rulings forcing Trump’s company and a law firm it hired to turn over troves of records.

Vance’s investigation has also appeared to focus in recent weeks on the Trump Organization’s longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg.

His former daughter-in-law, Jen Weisselberg, has given investigators reams of documents as they look into how some Trump employees were compensated with apartments or school tuition.

Weisselberg was subpoenaed in James’ civil investigation and testified twice in 2020. His lawyer didn’t immediately respond to an email last night.

Tony

Jared  Kushner’s Touts His Peace Plan

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in her column this morning exposes the folly of Jared Kushner’s absurd Middle East peace plan that he bragged about in the final days of the Trump presidency.   Here is her introduction which says its all.  Her entire column is below.

“We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jared Kushner crowed in The Wall Street Journal two months ago.

He was surveying the results of the Abraham Accords, the ersatz Middle East peace plan he helped negotiate under Donald Trump. At the heart of his supreme self-assurance, and of the accords themselves, was the deadly fiction that the Palestinians were so abject and defeated that Israel could simply ignore their demands.

“One of the reasons the Arab-Israeli conflict persisted for so long was the myth that it could be solved only after Israel and the Palestinians resolved their differences,” wrote Kushner. “That was never true. The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s relations with the broader Arab world.”

To circumvent that dispute, the United States set about bribing other Arab and Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel. The United Arab Emirates got an enormous arms deal. Morocco got Trump to support its annexation of the Western Sahara. Sudan got taken off America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

But the explosion of fighting in Israel and Palestine in recent days makes clear something that never should have been in doubt: justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace. And one reason there has been so little justice for the Palestinians is because of the foreign policy of the United States.”

Tony

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The New York Times

Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed

May 17, 2021

By Michelle Goldberg

“We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Jared Kushner crowed in The Wall Street Journal two months ago.

He was surveying the results of the Abraham Accords, the ersatz Middle East peace plan he helped negotiate under Donald Trump. At the heart of his supreme self-assurance, and of the accords themselves, was the deadly fiction that the Palestinians were so abject and defeated that Israel could simply ignore their demands.

“One of the reasons the Arab-Israeli conflict persisted for so long was the myth that it could be solved only after Israel and the Palestinians resolved their differences,” wrote Kushner. “That was never true. The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s relations with the broader Arab world.”

To circumvent that dispute, the United States set about bribing other Arab and Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel. The United Arab Emirates got an enormous arms deal. Morocco got Trump to support its annexation of the Western Sahara. Sudan got taken off America’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

But the explosion of fighting in Israel and Palestine in recent days makes clear something that never should have been in doubt: justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace. And one reason there has been so little justice for the Palestinians is because of the foreign policy of the United States.

“I don’t think that there’s any way that this occupation and creeping annexation process could have gotten where it is today if the United States had said no,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J-Street.

One can condemn Hamas and its rockets and still recognize that this current conflagration began with Israeli overreach born of a sense of impunity. A major flash point was the campaign led by Israeli settlers to evict Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. There was also an Israeli police raid on the Al Aqsa Mosque on the first night of Ramadan, not to prevent violence, but to cut off its loudspeakers lest prayers drown out a speech by Israel’s president.

Palestinians fear, not without reason, that Israel is trying to push them out of Jerusalem altogether. That, in turn, has let Hamas position itself as Jerusalem’s protector. And Israel seems to consider its right to defend itself from Hamas justification for causing obscene numbers of civilian casualties. So much horror has been born of the delusion, on both the Israeli and American right, that when it comes to the Palestinians, the status quo is sustainable.

To be fair, this is not something that began with Trump: America has been enabling Israel’s occupation and settlement project for decades. Tareq Baconi, a Ramallah-based senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, argued that in some ways the Trump administration was simply more honest than its predecessors about its disregard for the Palestinians. All the same, he said, Trump’s foreign policy allowed “the Israeli right-wing to understand that they can get away with their most extreme policies.”

Before Trump, it was common to say that the occupation would eventually force Israel to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic one. During the Trump years, Israel’s choice became undeniable.

Israel’s 2018 “nation-state law” enshrined “Jewish settlement as a national value” and undermined the legal equality of Israel’s Arab citizens. As settlements expanded, a two-state solution turned from a distant dream into a fantasy.

The death of a two-state framework, Baconi said, has strengthened a sense of common destiny between Palestinians in the occupied territories and Arab-Israelis, or, as many refer to themselves, Palestinian citizens of Israel. “The more that we see Israel-Palestine as a one-state reality, where Jews have full rights and Palestinians have different tiers of rights,” the more Palestinians will “understand their struggle as a shared struggle,” he said.

A unique and harrowing aspect of the violence now shaking the region has been the intercommunal clashes between Jews and Palestinians within Israel proper. In Lod, at least four synagogues and a religious school were burned. “Jewish mobs were seen roaming the streets of Tiberias and Haifa looking for Arabs to assault,” reported The Times of Israel.

“I’ve lived here for a long time; I’ve never seen it this bad,” Diana Buttu, a former lawyer for the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me by phone from Haifa.

All this mayhem is overdetermined; nearly every iniquity in the region has an impossibly complicated prehistory. But the United States has underwritten both Palestinian subjugation and the growing power of Jewish ethnonationalism. It’s not enough for Joe Biden to be a little bit better than Trump or to try to restart a spectral “peace process.” If Israel can no longer afford to ignore the demands of the Palestinians, neither can we.

Dr. Anthony Fauci

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that “the undeniable effects of racism” have led to unacceptable health disparities that especially hurt African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans during the pandemic.

“COVID-19 has shone a bright light on our own society’s failings,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said during a graduation ceremony for Emory University.

Speaking by webcast (see video below) from Washington, Fauci told the graduates in Atlanta that many members of minority groups work in essential jobs where they might be exposed to the coronavirus. He also said they are more likely to become infected if exposed because of medical conditions such as hypertension, chronic lung disease, diabetes or obesity.

“Now, very few of these comorbidities have racial determinants,” Fauci said. “Almost all relate to the social determinants of health dating back to disadvantageous conditions that some people of color find themselves in from birth regarding the availability of an adequate diet, access to

Fauci said correcting societal wrongs will take a commitment of decades, and he urged the graduates to be part of the solution.

Fauci said that once society returns to “some form of normality,” people should not forget that infectious disease has disproportionally hospitalized and killed people of color.

Fauci on Sunday was awarded the Emory University president’s medal. Previous recipients include former President Jimmy Carter, the Dalai Lama and the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon. In accepting the award, Fauci denounced the destruction of division.

“Societal divisiveness is counterproductive in a pandemic,” Fauci said. “We must not be at odds with each other since the virus is the enemy, not each other.”

He praised the graduates for handling the profound disruption of the pandemic.

“Not since the influenza pandemic of 1918 has humanity faced a public health crisis of this magnitude,” he said. “Each of you deserves enormous respect for your extraordinary adaptability, resilience and dedication to learning, completing your studies and graduating despite immense difficulties and uncertainties.”

Dr. Fauci surely deserves his medal and has been a beacon of truth throughout the pandemic.

Tony

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Panelists: