Dear Commons Community,

Many schools nationwide are facing severe teacher and worker shortages. Some of these shortages can be traced to teachers leaving lower-pay school districts for higher-pay districts.  As an example,  when a staffing crisis at Eastpointe Middle School outside Detroit forced administrators to close the school last month for more than a week, moving classes online, it wasn’t because of a Covid-19 outbreak.

And it wasn’t because the district’s teachers had fled the profession after a year and a half of disruptions to instruction and tensions over Covid safety.

The problem, Eastpointe Community Schools Superintendent Ryan McLeod said, is that they could get better teaching jobs — and did.

Of the 10 teachers who resigned from his district since Aug. 9, at least seven landed in other districts, he said.  As reported by NBC News.

“We are one of the lower paying districts in the area,” said McLeod, who decided Sept. 16 to temporarily move middle school classes online after three teachers quit. “There’s been an increase in hiring, an increase in the number of positions in different districts and our staff used that as an opportunity to make a jump.”

Education and labor experts say McLeod is running into an unexpected side effect of the very thing that was supposed to help schools this year: the flood of federal Covid relief dollars.

The $122 billion relief package signed by President Joe Biden in the spring, along with two prior rounds of Covid funding, have enabled nearly every public school in the country to invest in equipment, facilities and programs designed to repair the deep social, emotional and instructional toll the pandemic has had on children.

But the decision by some districts to spend the money on hiring or bonuses has created problems for other districts — particularly those like Eastpointe, where McLeod says a long history of financial challenges has made it difficult to hold on to staff.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this,” said Marguerite Roza, whose Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University has been tracking school Covid relief spending. She has been hearing from districts in competitive labor markets about a “hiring bonanza” she described as “predatory.”

“There’s a lot of money flowing,” she said, and “higher and higher signing bonuses.”

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told NBC News he’s aware that the Covid relief funds are creating hiring challenges in some parts of the country, especially in places that have long struggled with shortages in areas such as math and special education. But he’s hopeful the issue can be resolved with creative measures like teacher training programs that put educators in classrooms faster.

“We’re going to have to be innovative at all levels in order to meet the needs of our students and the demands of the teaching profession,” he said…

… An Eastpointe High School teacher who left the district last year said she loved working for the district, but low pay and a series of leadership changes at her school made it tough to stay.

“When I left there, I was in tears,” said Julie Herchock, 49, a special education teacher who left Eastpointe in September 2020 and now makes $23,000 more a year teaching at a high school in Detroit where teachers have received a number of recent raises and bonuses. “When I did my exit interview, I just told them, ‘You know, I absolutely loved working there and if I got more money, I would definitely be there still.’”

Stocks had hoped the contract his union negotiated this year, which he said pays salaries ranging from $42,000 to $72,000, would make the district more competitive.

He didn’t realize, however, that billions of dollars in Covid relief funds would shift the goal posts of teacher pay in the Detroit area.

“It was competitive when we signed it, but a lot of people went back and renegotiated when their budgets were impacted by Covid relief money, and they were able to create economic offers that we couldn’t compete with,” he said, noting that one teacher got an $18,000 raise by taking a job in another district.

Eastpointe started the school year Aug. 30 with 40 vacancies across its seven buildings — nearly a quarter of the 163 teachers it needed to be fully staffed, McLeod said.

The district managed to keep its schools open for a few weeks by using administrators as substitutes and asking teachers to cover classes during prep periods. But by Sept. 16, the departures reached a breaking point.

“My job is to protect safety, health, the integrity of the instruction and the professionalism of my teachers,” Stephanie Fleming, the middle school principal, said, noting that she shifted classes online because the virus threat made it unwise to double students up in classrooms and because she didn’t want to fill vacancies with unqualified substitute teachers.

This issue will not resolve itself quickly and may get worse before it gets better.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The United States reached its latest heartbreaking pandemic milestone yesterday, eclipsing 700,000 deaths from COVID-19 just as the surge from the delta variant is starting to slow down and give overwhelmed hospitals some relief.

It took 3 ½ months for the U.S. to go from 600,000 to 700,000 deaths, driven by the variant’s rampant spread through unvaccinated Americans.  

This milestone is especially frustrating to public health leaders and medical professionals on the front lines because vaccines have been available to all eligible Americans for nearly six months and the shots overwhelmingly protect against hospitalizations and death. An estimated 70 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated, providing kindling for the variant.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“You lose patients from COVID and it should not happen,” said Debi Delapaz, a nurse manager at UF Health Jacksonville who recalled how the hospital was at one point losing eight patients a day to COVID-19 during the summer surge. “This is something that should not happen.”

Despite the rising death toll, there are signs of improvement.

Nationwide, the number of people now in the hospital with COVID-19 has fallen to somewhere around 75,000 from over 93,000 in early September. New cases are on the downswing at about 112,000 per day on average, a drop of about one-third over the past 2 1/2 weeks.

Deaths, too, appear to be declining, averaging about 1,900 a day versus more than 2,000 about a week ago.

The easing of the summer surge has been attributed to more mask wearing and more people getting vaccinated. The decrease in case numbers could also be due to the virus having burned through susceptible people and running out of fuel in some places.

In another development, Merck said yesterday its experimental pill for people sick with COVID-19 reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half. If it wins authorization from regulators, it will be the first pill for treating COVID-19 — and an important, easy-to-use new weapon in the arsenal against the pandemic.

All treatments now authorized in the U.S. against the coronavirus require an IV or injection.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist, warned on Friday that some may see the encouraging trends as a reason to remain unvaccinated.

“It’s good news we’re starting to see the curves” coming down, he said. “That is not an excuse to walk away from the issue of needing to get vaccinated.”

Unknowns include how flu season may strain already depleted hospital staffs and whether those who have refused to get vaccinated will change their minds.

“If you’re not vaccinated or have protection from natural infection, this virus will find you,” warned Mike Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, began seeing a surge of COVID-19 hospitalizations in mid-July, and by the first week of August, the place was beyond capacity. It stopped elective surgeries and brought in military doctors and nurses to help care for patients.

With cases now down, the military team is scheduled to leave at the end of October.

Still, the hospital’s chief medical officer, Dr. Catherine O’Neal, said the rate of hospitalizations isn’t decreasing as quickly as cases in the community because the delta variant is affecting more young people who are otherwise healthy and are living much longer in the intensive care unit on ventilators.

“It creates a lot of ICU patients that don’t move anywhere,” she said. And many of the patients aren’t going home at all. In the last few weeks, the hospital saw several days with more than five COVID-19 deaths daily, including one day when there were 10 deaths.

“We lost another dad in his 40s just a few days ago,” O’Neal said. “It’s continuing to happen. And that’s what the tragedy of COVID is.”

As for where the outbreak goes from here, “I have to tell you, my crystal ball has broken multiple times in the last two years,” she said. But she added that the hospital has to be prepared for another surge at the end of November, as flu season also ramps up.

Dr. Sandra Kemmerly, system medical director for hospital quality at Ochsner Health in Louisiana, said this fourth surge of the pandemic has been harder. “It’s just frustrating for people to die of vaccine-preventable illnesses,” she said.

At the peak of this most recent wave, Ochsner hospitals had 1,074 COVID-19 patients on Aug. 9. That had dropped to 208 as of Thursday.

Other hospitals are seeing decreases as well. The University of Mississippi Medical Center had 146 hospitalized COVID-19 patients at its mid-August peak. That was down to 39 on Friday. Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, South Carolina, had more than 190 in early September but just 49 on Friday.

But Kemmerly doesn’t expect the decrease to last. “I fully expect to see more hospitalizations due to COVID,” she said.

Like many other health professionals, Natalie Dean, a professor of biostatistics at Emory University, is taking a cautious view about the winter.

It is unclear if the coronavirus will take on the seasonal pattern of the flu, with predictable peaks in the winter as people gather indoors for the holidays. Simply because of the nation’s size and diversity, there will be places that have outbreaks and surges, she said.

What’s more, the uncertainties of human behavior complicate the picture. People react to risk by taking precautions, which slows viral transmission. Then, feeling safer, people mingle more freely, sparking a new wave of contagion.

“Infectious disease models are different from weather models,” Dean said. “A hurricane doesn’t change its course because of what the model said.”

One influential model, from the University of Washington, projects new cases will bump up again this fall, but vaccine protection and infection-induced immunity will prevent the virus from taking as many lives as it did last winter.

Still, the model predicts about 90,000 more Americans will die by Jan. 1 for an overall death toll of 788,000 by that date. The model calculates that about half of those deaths could be averted if almost everyone wore masks in public.

“Mask wearing is already heading in the wrong direction,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the university. “We need to make sure we are ready for winter because our hospitals are exhausted.”

This is an American tragedy!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. senators yesterday grilled Facebook Inc.  on its plans to better protect young users on its apps, drawing on leaked internal research that showed the social media giant was aware of how its Instagram app harmed the mental health of teens.  The video above is two hours and covers most of the proceedings.

The hearing in front of the Senate consumer protection subcommittee was called after the Wall Street Journal published several stories earlier this month about how Facebook knew Instagram caused some teen girls in particular to feel badly about their self-image. After growing opposition to the project, Facebook put plans for Instagram Kids, aimed at pre-teens, on hold this week.   As reported by Reuters and The New York Times.

Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, disputed the committee and the WSJ’s conclusions of the research documents throughout the hearing, and said the company was working to release additional internal studies in an effort to be more transparent about its findings.

“This research is a bombshell,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, during the hearing. “It is powerful, gripping, riveting evidence that Facebook knows of the harmful effects of its site on children, and that it has concealed those facts and findings.

“IG stands for Instagram, but it also stands for Insta-greed,” said Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

The senators pressed Davis on several major themes, including what identifiable data Facebook collects on users under the age of 13, to what extent the company views young users as a growth area and to confirm whether it knew that Instagram led some children to consider suicide.

Davis reiterated that kids under 13 were not allowed on Facebook, adding 0.5% of teens in the company’s research connected their “suicidal ideation” to Instagram, lower than the figures the Journal had reported.

“You’ve cherry-picked part of the research that you think helps your spin right now,” said Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, demanding Facebook commit to releasing its full research on the links between Instagram and youth suicide.

A second hearing is planned for Tuesday and will feature a Facebook whistleblower. The whistleblower is expected to reveal their identity on Sunday in a recorded interview for TV news program “60 Minutes,” which in a preview described the woman as a former Facebook employee who left with tens of thousands of pages of research.

This is a serious issue and is certainly hurting our teenagers.  More governmental scrutiny is needed!

Tony

Beverly Gage

Dear Commons Community,

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy is one of Yale University’s most celebrated and prestigious programs. Over the course of a year, it allows a select group of about two dozen students to immerse themselves in classic texts of history and statecraft, while also rubbing shoulders with guest instructors drawn from the worlds of government, politics, military affairs and the media.

But now, a program created to train future leaders how to steer through the turbulent waters of history is facing a crisis of its own.

Beverly Gage, a historian of 20th-century politics who has led the program since 2017, has resigned, saying the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts by its donors to influence its curriculum and faculty hiring.  As reported in The New York Times.

The donors, both prominent and deep-pocketed, are Nicholas F. Brady, a former U.S. Treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Charles B. Johnson, a mutual fund billionaire and leading Republican donor who in 2013 made a $250 million donation to Yale — the largest gift in its history.

Days after the 2020 presidential election, Professor Gage said, an opinion article in The New York Times by another instructor in the program calling Donald J. Trump a demagogue who threatened the Constitution prompted complaints from Mr. Brady.

Four months of wrangling over the program later, Professor Gage resigned after the university administration informed her that a new advisory board it was creating under previously ignored bylaws would be dominated by conservative figures of the donors’ choosing, including, against her strong objections, Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon.

Her resignation, which Yale has not yet made public, raises the question of where universities draw the line between honoring original agreements with donors and allowing them undue sway in academic affairs. It’s a question that can become turbocharged when colliding political visions, and the imperatives of fund-raising, are involved.

Congratulations to Professor Gage for sticking to her principles.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, I went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time since the pandemic started in early 2020 to see The Medici – Portraits and Politics 1512-1570.  This exhibit did not disappoint.  It was four galleries of original sculpture and paintings from the period, most of which depicted members of the Medici family.  The Wall Street Journal hailed it as:

“A spectacular exhibition… Organized around fabulous loans from far-flung lenders and a deeply intellectual premise, ‘Medici Portraits’ would be a feat in any climate. In a pandemic, it’s a triumph.”

Cosimo de’Medici, rightfully so, receives much of the attention. From the exhibit’s brochure:

“Some of the greatest portraits of Western art were painted in Florence during the tumultuous years from 1512 to 1570, when the city was transformed from a republic with elected officials into a duchy ruled by the Medici family. The key figure in this transformation was Cosimo I de’ Medici, who became Duke of Florence in 1537, following the assassination of his predecessor, Alessandro de’ Medici. Cosimo shrewdly employed culture as a political tool in order to convert the mercantile city into the capital of a dynastic Medicean state, enlisting the leading intellectuals and artists of his time and promoting grand architectural, engineering, and artistic projects. Through Giorgio Vasari’s famous written work Lives of the Artists, which was dedicated to the duke, Florence was promoted as the cradle of the Renaissance.”

While the entire exhibit is a treat, some of the sculptures (see video above), especially the bust of Cosimo de’Medici by Benvenuto Cellini, is a magnificent work of art.

The eyes, made of silver, are mesmerizing. 

If you are interested in the period, Florence, or the Western Canon, you will thoroughly enjoy,  The Medici – Portraits and Politics 1512-1570.

Bravo to The Met!

Tony