David Leonhardt on Student Absences Plaguing Our Schools!

Dear Commons Community,

David Leonhardt of The New York Times, had a piece yesterday entitled, “Where Are the Children,” looking at the absentee crisis plaguing our schools. Here is an excerpt.

The long school closures during the Covid pandemic were the biggest disruption in the history of modern American education. And those closures changed the way many students and parents think about school. Attendance, in short, has come to feel more optional than it once did, and absenteeism has soared, remaining high even as Covid has stopped dominating everyday life.

On an average day last year — the 2022-23 school year — close to 10 percent of K-12 students were not there, preliminary state data suggests. About one quarter of U.S. students qualified as chronically absent, meaning that they missed at least 10 percent of school days (or about three and a half weeks). That’s a vastly higher share than before Covid.

This surge of absenteeism is one more problem confronting schools as they reopen for a new academic year. Students still have not made up the ground they lost during the pandemic, and it’s much harder for them to do so if they are missing from the classroom.

“I’m just stunned by the magnitude,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford economist who has conducted the most comprehensive study on the issue.

This surge of absenteeism is one more problem confronting schools as they reopen for a new academic year. Students still have not made up the ground they lost during the pandemic, and it’s much harder for them to do so if they are missing from the classroom.

In Dee’s study, he looked for explanations for the trend, and the obvious suspects didn’t explain it. Places with a greater Covid spread did not have higher lingering levels of absenteeism, for instance. The biggest reason for the rise seems to be simply that students have fallen out of the habit of going to school every day.

Consistent with this theory is the fact that absenteeism has risen more in states where schools remained closed for longer during the pandemic, like California and New Mexico (and in Washington, D.C.). The chart below shows the correlation between Dee’s state data on chronic absenteeism and data from Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist, on the share of students in each state who in 2020-21 were enrolled in districts where most students were remote.

“For almost two years, we told families that school can look different and that schoolwork could be accomplished in times outside of the traditional 8-to-3 day,” Elmer Roldan, who runs a dropout prevention group, told The Los Angeles Times. “Families got used to that.”

Lisa Damour, a psychologist and the author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” points out that parents think they are doing the right thing when they allow an anxious child to skip a day of school. She has deep empathy for these parents, she said. Doing so often makes the child feel better in the moment. But there are costs.

“The most fundamental thing for adults to understand is that avoidance feeds anxiety,” Damour told me. “When any of us are fearful, our instinct is to avoid. But the problem with giving in to that anxiety is that avoidance is highly reinforcing.” The more often students skip school, the harder it becomes to get back in the habit of going.

Tony

The Story of Our Universe is Starting to Unravel – Thanks to the Webb Telescope!

Virginia Gabrielli

Dear Commons Community,

Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, says that cosmology, the study of the universe, isn’t like other sciences.  He says  it’s a realm where science starts to get pretty close to philosophy — an inquiry into the nature of existence.

That’s something that he and Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College, have spent a lot of time talking about, especially in the months since the James Webb Space Telescope started beaming back information at the very end of last year. That information included images so extraordinary that Dennis Overbye called them “eye candy from heaven.” But it also included data that was not what cosmologists expected. Which got Frank and Gleiser thinking: How much of what’s known as the standard model — the basis for most cosmological research — is right, and how much is just a kind of elaborate patch?

Take dark matter and energy, for example, the catchall term scientists use for the vast majority of the universe we cannot currently measure or see. Gleiser thinks that 100 years from now, the concept will seem risible. “When 96 percent of the universe is something you’re calling dark, meaning you have no idea what it is,” he told me, “that may be an indication that there’s really something much deeper going on that you’re missing.”

That possibility is the subject of a somewhat mind-bending guest essay they wrote for Times Opinion. “Physicists and astronomers are starting to get the sense that something may be really wrong,” they explain. “It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change the way we think about some of the most basic features of our universe — a conceptual revolution that would have implications far beyond the world of science.”

“It’s wonderful,” Gleiser exclaimed, “because if it’s true, we’re going to be witnessing a revolution in thinking about how the universe works.”

Frank said, “It’s actually the most exciting thing ever when things don’t work, because that means you’re on the frontier of what you know and what you don’t know, and that’s the most exciting place for a scientist to be.”

Exciting indeed! It is not everyday that we may be witnessing a revolution in thinking about something the size of the universe!!

Tony

Nikki Haley Says Americans ‘Are Not Going to Vote for a Convicted Criminal’ for President!

Dear Commons Community,

While Nikki Haley has said she would support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, even if he is convicted of a crime prior to the 2024 election, she doesn’t expect the American people to follow suit.

Speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday,Haley said she doesn’t think Americans will vote for a convicted criminal.

“The American people are not going to vote for a convicted criminal. The American people are going to vote for someone who can win a general election,” Haley, 51, said. “I have faith in the American people. They know what they need to do.”

During last month’s GOP debate in Milwaukee — which Trump did not attend — Haley was among the candidates who said they would support the former president as the Republican nominee even if he were convicted of a crime prior to the election.

Speaking on Face the Nation, Haley defended that decision, saying, “What you saw were candidates on that stage said that they would do exactly what they signed and pledged to do which is support the Republican nominee.”

Now on the heels of his four historic indictments, there is the possibility that Trump could be convicted of a crime ahead of the election.

Still, his support has not waned among voters in his party, with polls showing the former president sitting about 40 points ahead of the next closest Republican candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Even as Trump is leading in GOP primary polls, he remains broadly unpopular with the national public.

Haley was one of the few Republican candidates at the first 2024 GOP debate to criticize Trump, calling him “the most disliked politician in America.”

“It is time for a new generational conservative leader,” Haley said during the debate, which aired on Fox News. “We have to look at the fact that three-quarters of Americans don’t want a rematch between Trump and Biden. And we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America. We can’t win a general election that way.”

Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump from January 2017 until her resignation in December 2018.

Since leaving his administration, she has both embraced and pushed back against Trump, at one point calling his rhetoric “so unnecessary” and at another saying he “tells the world what it needs to hear.”

Haley has it right.  It is time for more of the GOP presidential candidates to speak their mind about Trump.

Tony

 

Labor Day – 2023

Dear Commons Community,

Labor Day recognizes the contributions and achievements of working people. The holiday originated during a dark time for America’s labor movement; during the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s, American workers organized to fight for fair wages and humane working conditions. They were met by federal troops and violent repression. To make amends, Congress made Labor Day a national holiday in 1894.

Working people were key to our country’s development and labor unions gave those workers a voice. It was the power of organized labor that brought us the 40-hour work week, lunch breaks, safer working conditions, and a minimum wage. 

Today we can recommit to expanding workers’ rights and moving forward as a country that works for everyone.

Tony

Adam Kinzinger Rips ‘Outrageous’ Ron DeSantis for Not Meeting with President Biden in Florida!

President and Mrs. Biden meet with families victimized by Hurricane Idalia!

Dear Commons Community,

Former Representative  Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) called  out Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “absolutely outrageous” for not meeting meet with President Joe Biden in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia.

Kinzinger, in a CNN appearance on Friday, criticized the Florida governor after he expressed logistical concerns over Biden’s trip to survey hurricane damage, remarking that the visit could be “very disruptive.”

″There’s a one to two percent chance it’s logistics, there’s a 98 to 99 percent chance it’s the optics,” Kinzinger told CNN’s John Berman.

Biden, earlier in the week, indicated that he and DeSantis were communicating to a level that there should be a “direct dial” between the two, the Associated Press reported.

But after Biden said that he was set to meet DeSantis, the Florida governor’s office on Friday pointed to “security preparations alone” that would contribute to shutting down recovery efforts.

The GOP presidential candidate not meeting with Biden marks a change from past post-disaster visits as the president and DeSantis met following Hurricane Ian last year and the 2021 collapse of the Surfside Condo in Miami Beach.

Kinzinger told Berman that politics has “infected everything” at the moment whereas a decade ago he saw officials putting “politics aside.”

“And Ron DeSantis, at the cost of the benefit to Florida, has decided his political campaign cannot have him meet with Joe Biden, the President of the United States, who ultimately will be signing the checks that Florida is going to be begging for,” Kinzinger added.

″…I couldn’t imagine being governor of any state, having a tragedy like that and then turning around and thinking about how this could affect my election. It just – it’s where we’re at now, and people have to just reject that.”

Biden, when asked what message he had for DeSantis on Saturday, declared “we’re going to take care of Florida.”

The president heard from a number of Florida officials who praised him and first lady Jill Biden for offering support to the Sunshine State including Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who referred to the federal government’s efforts as a “big deal” for the state.

DeSantis  continually shows his ugly side!

Tony

Billionaires want to build a new city in Solana County, California!

Source:  Associated Press

Dear Commons Community,

Silicon Valley investors have spent roughly $800 million to buy nearly 80 square miles of land in rural California with plans to build a new eco-friendly city. But first they have to convince skeptical voters and politicians.

After years of ducking scrutiny, Jan Sramek, the former Goldman Sachs trader spearheading the effort, launched a website Thursday about “California Forever.” The site billed the project as “a chance for a new community, good paying local jobs, solar farms, and open space” in Solano, a rural county between San Francisco and Sacramento that is now home to 450,000 people.

He also began meeting with key politicians representing the area who have been trying unsuccessfully for years to find out who was behind Flannery Associates LLC as it bought up huge swaths of land, making it the largest single landholder in the county.

An all-star roster of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are backing the project, including philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.  The New York Times and the Associated Press reported on the group’s investors and plans.

California Forever, the parent company of Flannery, has purchased more than 78 square miles (202 square kilometers) of farmland in Solano County since 2018, largely in the southeastern portion of the county, with parcels stretching from Fairfield to Rio Vista. According to the website, Sramek fell in love with the area over fishing trips and he and his wife recently purchased a home in the county for their growing family.

The project issued a poll to residents last month to gauge support for “a new city with tens of thousands of new homes,” solar energy farm and new parks funded entirely by the private sector.

But to build anything resembling a city on what is now farmland, the group must first convince Solano County voters to approve a ballot initiative to allow for urban uses on that land, a protection that has been in place since 1984. Local and federal officials still have questions about the group’s intentions.

The investment group said secrecy was required until enough land was purchased, in order to avoid short-term speculation, but that it is now ready to hear from Solano households via a mailed survey and creation of a community advisory board. Past surveys showed parents were most concerned about their children’s future, the website said.

“Instead of watching our kids leave, we have the opportunity to build a new community that attracts new employers, creates good paying local jobs, builds homes in walkable neighborhoods, leads in environment stewardship, and fuels a growing tax base to serve the county at large,” it said.

California is in dire need of more housing, especially affordable homes for teachers, firefighters, service and hospitality workers. But cities and counties can’t figure out where to build as established neighborhoods argue against new homes that they say would congest their roads and spoil their quiet way of life.

In many ways, Solano County is ideal for development. It is 60 miles (96 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco and 35 miles (56 kilometers) southwest of California’s capital city of Sacramento. Solano County homes are among the most affordable in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a median sales price of $600,000 last month.

But Princess Washington, mayor pro tempore of Suisun City, said residents deliberately decided to protect open space and keep the area around Travis Air Force Base free of encroachment given its significance.

She’s suspicious that the group’s real purpose is “to create a city for the elite” under the guise of more housing.

“Economic blight is everywhere. So why do you need to spend upwards of a billion dollars to create a brand new city when you have all these other things that can be achieved throughout the Bay Area?” she said.

 It will be interesting to see how this evolves!

Tony

New Book: Drew Gilpin Faust’’s “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury”

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Drew Gilpin Faust’’s  Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury. Faust is the former president of Harvard University and this is her memoir of growing up a child of privilege in conservative Virginia and her transition to social thinker in the 1960s as our country went through the upheavals of the civil rights and Vietnam War eras.  An historian, she credits her love of learning, as well as her high school and Bryn Mawr college experiences for forging her path to social activism.

I was a child of the 1950s and 1960s born and raised in the South Bronx and much appreciate reading Faust’s journey and transition. In sum,  I found Necessary Trouble… an excellent read  and highly recommend it!

Below is a review that appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Tony

————————————————————————–

Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

By Drew Gilpin Faust

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Reviewed by Patricia Schultheis

August 21, 2023

Necessary Trouble is both an engaging memoir and an essential social history. Readers will find it a book well worth reading on both counts. Author Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, began her academic career as an historian, an area of interest that perhaps was inevitable. A sense of the past permeated every aspect of her childhood in Virginia horse country. “I knew I lived in history,” she writes. “Nearly a century after Appomattox, Virginia was still breathing the air of war and defeat.”

Her family belonged to an elite social strata that adhered to an implicit but ironclad set of mores and constraints — mores and constraints her mother wholly embraced but Gilpin Faust rebelled against, especially since they didn’t apply to any of the author’s three brothers. What ensued was a yearslong mother-daughter “argument that was what we had instead of a relationship.”

In December1966, Gilpin Faust, then a junior at Bryn Mawr, comes home to Lakeville, the family farm, expecting to resume and perhaps resolve the argument. But she never gets the opportunity. On Christmas Eve, her mother dies. Gilpin Faust’s descriptions of that day’s blizzard, of playing board games to distract her younger brother, and of her maternal grandmother, Isabella Tyson Gilpin, arriving from a dinner party “dressed in a floor-length green satin gown” are as moving and vivid as any skilled novelist’s.

But Gilpin Faust is an historian, and she situates her profoundly personal loss within the broader cultural context, focusing on how the generations immediately preceding hers were defined by war.

“They were impelled by the inevitability of conscription,” she writes of her family’s men, “but they were motivated more powerfully by deeply held convictions about who they must be as men and about the existential link between manhood and war.” Her father, McGhee Tyson Gilpin, was named for an uncle he never met. Charles McGhee Tyson died in the North Sea when his plane crashed exactly one month before the World War I armistice. He was 29 years old. At the time, young Charles’ father, General Lawrence Davis Tyson, was commander of the 59th Brigade, 30th Division.

Two decades later, General Tyson’s grandson, Gilpin Faust’s father, would be called to serve in World War II. Immediately after D-Day, he landed in France, served in Patton’s army, was wounded, received the purple heart, and on V-E Day marched down the Champs-Elysées. But he came home a spent man, unable to fulfill the brilliance he had evinced at Princeton, and attempted one misbegotten venture after another while he argued with Gilpin Faust’s spendthrift mother. The war, in effect, came home with him.

Three days before her 13th birthday, Catharine Drew Gilpin left Lakeview for boarding school in Massachusetts. The Concord Academy wasn’t “strict” in the sense that its students had to observe many rules — in fact, they were free to go to downtown Concord, take the bus to Cambridge, or spend weekends away from campus. But it was a “hard” school when it came to academic rigor. It was also a school with a strong sense of purpose, which proved essential to Gilpin Faust’s own moral underpinnings. “Concord would hold us to the highest standard, not of individual achievement, but of values and service. It was our job to make a better world,” she observes.

Even as a young child surrounded by Black cooks and caretakers, Gilpin Faust was aware of racial inequities, but she became truly inspired the night Concord Academy students were invited to Groton to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak. “In less than an hour, King not only explained the political, philosophical, and religious foundations of the civil rights movement but also charged us to join him,” she writes. By the time she entered Bryn Mawr, she was ready to take up King’s charge.

Throughout college, Gilpin Faust was an ardent civil rights and anti-war activist — her memoir’s title comes from an exhortation from John Lewis, the civil rights icon, “to get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” She spent one summer on a trip sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and traveled throughout the South engaging with people holding views vastly different than her own — an activity she now admits was “astonishingly naïve.”

She traveled to Prince Edward County in her home state to meet with white leaders in an effort to persuade them to reopen the public schools they’d closed in the face of integration. She skipped her midterm exams to travel to Selma, Alabama, and march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge with the second wave of protesters. But by then, the Civil Rights Movement was splintering; eventually, it would be overtaken by protests against the Vietnam War.

One of the great contributions that Necessary Trouble makes to history is that it is both a personal accounting and an analysis of how one movement morphed into another. Too frequently, historians study the Civil Rights and anti-war movements as distinct phenomena, but in actuality, they were successive waves on the same seething sea.

The huge marches and protests that had been effective in the Civil Rights Movement, however, had little impact on American foreign policy. “We fasted, we protested, we held Vietnam weeks filled with speakers and seminars, and we tried to spread anti-war sentiment with the community-organizing drive of 1967’s Vietnam Summer,” Gilpin Faust writes. The war dragged on, however, and activism grew increasingly violent, eventually devolving into a drug-addled demi-monde. By the time the author graduated in 1968, King had been assassinated, and movement organizers were growing as spent as Gilpin Faust’s father had been when he came home from WWII.

By the book’s final chapter, Gilpin Faust is working and living on her own. She returns home to do something she’d been too young to do throughout her years of activism in college: vote. While her reflections on the various dimensions of freedom are interesting, this reviewer would have welcomed a more personal, contemplative conclusion to the memoir that examined what she felt being back in Virginia — the place she had to leave in order to become the remarkable woman she eventually became.

Patricia Schultheis is the author of Baltimore’s Lexington Market, published by Arcadia Publishing in 2007, and of St. Bart’s Way, an award-winning story collection published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2015. Her latest book is A Balanced Life, published by All Things That Matter Press in 2018.

Proud Boys Insurrectionists Ethan Nordean, Dominc Pezzola, Zach Rehl, and Joseph Biggs Sentenced to Long Terms!

 

Dear Commons Community,

Federal judge, Timothy Kelly, sentenced two high-ranking Proud Boys to prison yesterday over the far-right street gang’s role in the planning and execution of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Dominic Pezzola, who breached the Capitol by smashing a window with a stolen police riot shield, was sentenced to 10 years behind bars in a D.C. District Court, four months after he was found guilty on obstruction and other charges related to the attack. Ethan Nordean, the gang’s most notorious bruiser was sentenced to 18 years in a second hearing Friday afternoon.

These follow the sentencing on Thursday of Joseph Biggs, former organizer of the Proud Boys  to 17 years in prison for his role in spearheading the attack on the US Capitol, and Zach Rehl, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the Proud Boys, to 15 years.

Pezzola was found not guilty on the most serious charge of the trial, seditious conspiracy, unlike Nordean and the  other Proud Boy co-defendants this past May. But he played a key role in the riot as the first person to smash through a Capitol window using a stolen police shield, and prosecutors argued he should spend 20 years behind bars.

Pezzola, who wore an orange prison-issued jumpsuit and sported a long beard, spoke before his sentencing and apologized for his actions the day of the Capitol attack.

“I messed up and I let the people who care and depend on me the most down,” Pezzola said, according to reporters in the courtroom.

Pezzola described his time in jail as an “emotional black hole,” and apologized to his eldest daughter, who was not in the courtroom.

“I pray for the court’s mercy to be there for you in the future,” he said before receiving his 10-year sentence.

He added that there was “no place in my future for groups or politics whatsoever.”

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly offered little sympathy for Pezzola.

“The reality is you … smashed that window and let people stream into that Capitol building and threaten the lives of our lawmakers,” Kelly said. “It’s not something I ever would have dreamed I would see in our country.”

Judge Kelly has it right!

Tony

Congressman Jamie Raskin Asks Republicans To Subpoena Jared Kushner’s Investment Firm!

kushner saudi crown prince
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Jared Kushne
Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

As Republicans search for evidence that Joe Biden abused his office to enrich his family, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) thinks maybe they should take a look at the Trumps.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

In a letter to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), Raskin suggested the committee subpoena Jared Kushner’s investment firm for records related to the “extraordinary funding it received from foreign governments” in recent years.

Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump, created the firm in 2021 immediately after leaving his job as a White House foreign policy adviser focused on the Middle East. Within six months, the company received a $2 billion investment from a fund overseen by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

The deal “raises the significant possibility that there was a large quid pro quo shaping Mr. Kushner’s official actions in the White House, where he helped dramatically recast U.S. foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia,” Raskin wrote Thursday.

Comer has been delving into bank records and witness testimony to resurrect Trump’s claim that Biden, when he was vice president, pushed for the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor in order to protect his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

State Department officials told lawmakers in 2019, when House Democrats were impeaching Trump for trying to make Ukraine’s president declare Biden corrupt, that firing the prosecutor was a priority for the entire U.S. government, not just the vice president.

But Hunter Biden’s role on the Burisma board created the appearance of a conflict of interest, officials said, and Comer has used his committee’s subpoena power to obtain bank records detailing some of the millions in payments the younger Biden received. This week, Comer highlighted Hunter Biden’s efforts to arrange business meetings while traveling with his father on Air Force Two. So far, however, none of Comer’s investigative work has implicated the president.

Raskin’s letter on Thursday is a not-so-subtle suggestion by the Maryland Democrat that his Republican colleagues have been selective in their outrage over political families enriching themselves through public service.

Just as Comer and others complain that Hunter Biden had no obvious expertise in the Ukrainian energy sector, a panel that screens potential investments for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund judged Kushner’s firm lacking experience and charging excessive fees. The board overseeing the fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Kushner defended after he directed the assassination of a journalist ― overruled the panel.

When Democrats still controlled the House last year, the Oversight Committee sought details from Kushner about his business deals, but Comer quietly discontinued that investigation.

Raskin asked Comer in February, in a letter that has not been previously made public, about launching a bipartisan inquiry into Kushner’s questionable business, but Comer declined to do so.

Anyone surprised that Comer declined?

Tony

Nikki Haley: The Senate is the ‘most privileged nursing home in the country’

                                                                                                                     Photo: Greg Nash

Dear Commons Community,

In response to a question about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) apparently freezing up on Wednesday while taking questions in Covington, Ky., Nikki Haley said on Fox News that the Kentucky senator has “done some great things, and he deserves credit,” but emphasized that “you have to know when to leave.”

““No one should feel good about seeing that any more than we should feel good about seeing Dianne Feinstein, any more than we should feel good about a lot of what’s happening or seeing Joe Biden’s decline,” Haley said. “What I will say is, right now, the Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country.”

Wednesday was the second time in a matter of weeks McConnell has frozen while talking to reporters, with his aides saying he was merely lightheaded. The episodes, along with Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif.) apparent bouts of confusion in the Capitol, have highlighted concerns about the advanced age of some of the Senate’s leaders.

Haley has called for mandatory “mental competency tests” for politicians older than 75 and term limits for Congress.

“I think that we do need mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75, I wouldn’t care if they did them over the age of 50,” Haley said. “But these are people making decisions on our national security. They’re making decisions on our economy, on the border. We need to know they’re at the top of their game.”

Haley has a point but where do you draw the line on the question of “competency.”  It is not just an “age” thing!

Tony