Dear Commons Community,

Yahoo News has a review of the effects of the COVID pandemic on learning loss among the country’s school children. When school districts went to remote learning in 2020, there was concern that there would be adverse consequences given the unplanned, poorly implemented switch from traditional in-person learning.  Teachers were unprepared and untrained while many students especially those in poverty areas lacked access to online technology.  Yahoo News reviews the remote learning rollout in an article in this morning’s edition. 

The entire piece is below and sheds light on the issue.

Tony

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Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, education experts predicted that children might experience learning setbacks after the health emergency upended their lives. Now, thanks to new reporting, we have a clearer picture of the extent to which schoolchildren have fallen behind academically. Experts say this isn’t just because of a lack of time inside a classroom — it’s only one of several factors that have affected children during the pandemic.

The first report to shed light on the impact the pandemic had on children’s learning is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “the nation’s report card.” This is a test overseen by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and has evaluated fourth and eighth graders across the country on various subjects since the 1960s. The assessments are given most frequently in mathematics and reading. The test had not been administered since 2019, due to COVID-19, so math and reading test scores from this year were compared to those from two years ago. The results, released in late October, revealed declines in proficiency in both subjects and for both age groups. This learning loss happened in most states and across almost all demographic groups.

Falling test scores

According to the NAEP’s results, the average reading scores for fourth and eighth graders had fallen three points since 2019 in more than half of the states. About 1 in 3 students met proficiency standards for that subject this year.

In math, scores for eighth grade students fell in nearly every state. Only 26% of children in this age group were proficient in the subject, down from 34% in 2019. Fourth graders did a little better, but the average math score for this group also fell five points. Just 36% of fourth graders were proficient in math, compared to 41% in 2019.

“The results show the profound toll on student learning during the pandemic, as the size and scope of the declines are the largest ever in mathematics,” NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr said in a statement.

Daniel J. McGrath, the acting NCES associate commissioner, noted that “Eighth grade is a pivotal moment in students’ mathematics education,” and stressed the importance of getting these students up to speed.

“If left unaddressed, this could alter the trajectories and life opportunities of a whole cohort of young people, potentially reducing their abilities to pursue rewarding and productive careers in mathematics, science and technology,” he said.

Students at high-poverty schools were the most affected

The NCES data, however, does not offer insight into how these learning losses played out at a local level. That is why researchers at Harvard and Stanford Universities joined forces to create the Education Recovery Scorecard, which breaks down these academic losses by district. Their project compared the results from the “nation’s report card” with local standardized test scores from 29 states and Washington, D.C.

“What we found was first, on average, test scores were about a half grade lower in math and about a third grade lower in reading in 2022 than they had been for the same age students in 2019. So that’s a big decline,” Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford University and one of the project’s lead researchers, told Yahoo News.

What surprised the researchers, he said, is that “the size of that decline varied enormously across school districts.”

“In some school districts, scores didn’t go down at all, or in some cases even went up a little, and in other districts, they went down by a grade level or more. So the ‘learning losses,’ as people call them, were very unevenly felt across the country,” Reardon said.

Kids in high-poverty districts, he explained, suffered much larger learning losses on average than those in more affluent and low-poverty districts. According to the Education Recovery Scorecard analysis, the quarter of schools with the highest number of students receiving federal lunch subsidies missed two-thirds of a year of math learning, while the quarter of schools with the fewest low-income students lost two-fifths of a year.

What this shows, Reardon said, is that the pandemic widened already existing inequalities in education.

“On average, poor kids score much lower on tests than rich kids, because of different opportunities they’ve had, ” Reardon said. “But that disparity got even wider during the pandemic, because the effects of the pandemic were most harmful in high-poverty neighborhoods.”

People in low-income communities were much more likely to work on the front lines or as essential workers at the height of the pandemic. These communities experienced not only the most severe rates of COVID-19 sickness and death, but also the highest rates of job loss, housing instability and food security. As a result, children in these communities saw the greatest declines in academic achievement.

Learning from home led to greater losses

The time spent in remote learning also impacted learning loss. Those districts that remained online longer suffered greater losses, according to Reardon’s analysis. However, he said it was a mistake to think that remote learning alone is to blame for the declines in reading and math scores.

“It’s a mistake to sort of think that the learning losses are wholly or even largely the result of whether or not kids were in or out of school during that period of time,” Reardon said, adding that so many other aspects of children’s lives, including the high levels of anxiety and stress some of them experienced, may have contributed to the declines in academic achievement.

Another reason why remote learning doesn’t appear to be the primary factor driving achievement losses is that, according to the analysis, these learning declines varied widely among districts that spent the same share of the 2020-21 school year learning online. Moreover, many districts in states with long school closures had lower losses than other districts in states where schools were not closed for as long.

The Education Recovery Scorecard researchers said that in the future, they plan to investigate how other factors, such as COVID death rates, broadband connectivity, the predominant industries of employment and parents’ occupation might be contributing to the disparate effects of the pandemic.

Students need help that goes beyond academic instruction

Reardon told Yahoo News “We have to do a lot to help kids” — particularly those in high-poverty districts that had the biggest learning losses.

“Some of the strategies should be focused on education, so tutoring and extra support for kids to learn, particularly those kids who really fell the furthest behind,” he said. But he added that support for kids and their families should go far beyond academic instruction. Providing mental health support for children, and helping their families find jobs and some economic stability, are also important, he said.

“The responses have to be not just about what happens in school,” he said, “but a kind of broader pattern of social responses that will address the many dimensions in many ways in which the pandemic affected kids, not just the kind of loss of instructional time.”

Last year, as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the federal government designated a historic $122 billion to address the crisis. The plan requires that school districts spend at least 20% of the money on academic recovery. However, the funds are set to expire in 2024, which researchers say does not leave enough time for students to recover adequately. Some experts have pointed out that despite the unprecedented level of federal funding allotted to help students catch up, it is not enough to offset COVID-induced learning loss.

Reardon said that one big challenge now is to help districts figure out how to use the substantial funds that they do have most effectively. The American Rescue Plan did not offer guidance on how schools should be using this money to address learning loss, nor did it “specify benchmarks for measuring student progress,” the Washington Post reported.

Jose Garza, a high school principal in California’s Central Valley who has worked for two different school districts during the pandemic, told Yahoo News the majority of his students are from economically depressed backgrounds and many of them have fallen behind academically.

He said that although he was aware of the federal funding, he had not been informed how it would be rolled out in his district.

“I’m sure they have a plan, but we haven’t heard about that yet,” he said, adding that in addition to the money, it would be beneficial for administrators like him for the state to provide guidance on how to spend the money to help students who need it the most.

“You have to look at the data,” Garza said. “We need to have programs that are going to be sustainable even without this money, so that’s what people should be looking at, rather than the short-term solutions. … But we have to go back to evidence-based practices. And administrators, you know, that’s not what we’re trained in.”

Chinese people raise their voices — and blank sheets of paper — to criticize their leaders’ policies.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times Editorial Board has an essay today praising the people’s protests in China against the government’s lockdown rules in what are the largest demonstrations since the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.  The protesters hold up blank sheets of paper to  mean “we are the voiceless, but we are also powerful” said Hazel Liu, a 29-year-old film producer who attended a vigil in Beijing on Sunday. Mourners also used blank white sheets  in Shanghai on Saturday evening to signal to the police that those gathered were going to mourn those lost while saying nothing.

Here is an excerpt.

“Many in China are exhausted by nearly three years of harsh lockdown rules and economic hardship, and the protesters are taking enormous risks to make themselves heard. Their bravery is a profound affirmation that freedom of expression, dissent and protest are values held by people all over the world. The United States and many other nations are watching to see if President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party’s leadership hear the protesters’ demands and find ways to implement an effective vaccination campaign that would make it possible to lift onerous Covid restrictions. The United States and other countries may have little ability to shape the course of events in China, but we have a moral obligation to offer expressions of support, dialogue and collaboration to its people.

Covid-19 has shattered the unspoken social contract between the Communist Party and its people: stability and prosperity, in exchange for a high degree of social control. Youth unemployment has approached 20 percent in China amid an economic slowdown linked, in large part, to the continuing lockdowns that sometimes require people to be literally locked into their apartment buildings. Stores, restaurants and movie theaters have shut down for months at a time. In much of China, daily life has become an ordeal that revolves around getting tested for Covid and waiting for an all-knowing smartphone app to give the green light to enter a store or ride a train. Travel abroad has become all but impossible.

Until now, most Chinese people have been exceedingly patient with these strict protocols; it was the sacrifice they made to avoid the high rates of sickness and death from Covid that devastated so many other countries. But over the last year, patience in China has worn thin. Gestures of appreciation for volunteers in hazmat suits have given way to barely concealed contempt for the neighborhood officials who come in the middle of the night to force residents into state-run quarantine centers while their neighbors are asleep and thus less likely to raise a fuss.

Part of the public anger stems from the fact that these measures no longer seem to work.”

The entire essay is below.  It is a timely read!

Tony

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It is too early to tell whether the remarkable protests across China against the government’s strict “dynamic zero Covid” policy are a milestone in the country’s long history that will have lasting impact; they may signal growing discontent with Chinese leadership or a more limited expression of popular frustration. But it’s momentous all the same that thousands of Chinese people have raised their voices — and some, blank sheets of paper — to criticize their leaders’ policies in open view of police officers and the security apparatus, in the largest mass demonstrations since the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square.

Many in China are exhausted by nearly three years of harsh lockdown rules and economic hardship, and the protesters are taking enormous risks to make themselves heard. Their bravery is a profound affirmation that freedom of expression, dissent and protest are values held by people all over the world. The United States and many other nations are watching to see if President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party’s leadership hear the protesters’ demands and find ways to implement an effective vaccination campaign that would make it possible to lift onerous Covid restrictions. The United States and other countries may have little ability to shape the course of events in China, but we have a moral obligation to offer expressions of support, dialogue and collaboration to its people.

Covid-19 has shattered the unspoken social contract between the Communist Party and its people: stability and prosperity, in exchange for a high degree of social control. Youth unemployment has approached 20 percent in China amid an economic slowdown linked, in large part, to the continuing lockdowns that sometimes require people to be literally locked into their apartment buildings. Stores, restaurants and movie theaters have shut down for months at a time. In much of China, daily life has become an ordeal that revolves around getting tested for Covid and waiting for an all-knowing smartphone app to give the green light to enter a store or ride a train. Travel abroad has become all but impossible.

Until now, most Chinese people have been exceedingly patient with these strict protocols; it was the sacrifice they made to avoid the high rates of sickness and death from Covid that devastated so many other countries. But over the last year, patience in China has worn thin. Gestures of appreciation for volunteers in hazmat suits have given way to barely concealed contempt for the neighborhood officials who come in the middle of the night to force residents into state-run quarantine centers while their neighbors are asleep and thus less likely to raise a fuss.

Part of the public anger stems from the fact that these measures no longer seem to work. The rise of the Omicron variant and other highly transmissible variants have made stamping out every case of the virus costly and futile. Locking down a city of over 200,000 because of a single case is no longer an effective way to fight Covid-19. Relatively low rates of vaccination among older people, paired with China’s insistence on using less effective, domestically manufactured vaccines, have left the country with little immunity.

The very policies that allowed China to roar back to life in 2020 and 2021, when most other countries remained largely closed, have now left China as the only major economy in the world that is still experiencing regular lockdowns. The zero Covid policy has become so intertwined with Mr. Xi’s rule that overzealous local officials have carried it out even when doing so makes little sense. A deadly apartment fire in a city that had been under lockdown for 100 days set off the current wave of protests, but frustration has been building for months. Viral posts about people who were prevented from leaving their homes despite an earthquake outraged the public. So did news of the death of a 3-year-old boy who had been poisoned by carbon monoxide during a lockdown but was initially prevented from being taken to the hospital because of Covid protocols.

The pandemic has laid bare the vulnerabilities of every society in the world, and China is no exception. Lynette Ong, the author of a new book on China’s communist system, “Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China,” says the protests may be hastening the demise of a system that the Chinese Communist Party has relied on for years, using local party volunteers to implement government policies in their own neighborhoods. These volunteers have been empowered to enforce lockdowns and quarantines and have “had to increasingly deploy unreasonable and extreme measures to extract compliance from citizens, which invited further backlash,” she wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.

The World Cup also seems to have played a role in the public’s frustration. Some Chinese people described seeing maskless soccer fans on television as the moment they realized that much of the rest of the world has moved beyond Covid while China remains mired in the battle against it.

Shanghai, China’s most populous city, endured an epic lockdown this past spring. Residents of the city were reportedly told to prepare for four days in their apartments. In the end, they were holed up for more than 60. Some went hungry as food stocks ran out and government aid arrived absurdly late. In the meantime, people sang and screamed out their apartment windows to protest their confinement, only to be met by flying drones blaring orders through their windows. “Control your soul’s desire for freedom,” one drone told them.

Many expected Mr. Xi to announce changes to the zero Covid policy at the party congress in October, which cemented his status as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. Instead, Mr. Xi doubled down. While acknowledging that there were some missteps in the policy, he promoted a loyal ally who was responsible for Shanghai’s poorly executed lockdown and removed a senior party leader who had warned about the economic consequences of the zero Covid policy.

With the party still publicly defending the policy, some Chinese people have taken immense risks to fight it. Days before the 20th party congress, a lone protester unfurled banners on a bridge in Beijing that read: “We want to eat, not do coronavirus tests; reform, not the Cultural Revolution. We want freedom, not lockdowns; elections, not rulers. We want dignity, not lies. Be citizens, not enslaved people.” Some of the bravest protesters in the recent demonstrations echoed these slogans.

As The Times reported on Thursday, the Chinese government may finally be stepping away from the harshest measures in some places, and that news was welcomed by protesters. “We were all very happy last night,” one protester from Shanghai told The Times. “We started to picture how life would be after the whole country’s restrictions are loosened.”

China’s prosperity depends on being connected to the rest of the world. Mr. Xi’s meeting with President Biden in Bali last month underscored that fact. The Biden administration is wise to continue its efforts to keep lines of communication with senior Chinese officials open. This dialogue could be key to addressing public health challenges when China finally does open up more fully, as it eventually must do. Collaborations between scientists and public health officials in China and the United States were crucial in the earliest stages of the pandemic, and they could prove vital once again.

For now, the protesters in China have made their voices heard under very difficult conditions. They demonstrated the value of protest and dissent — freedoms that many in the world hold dear. At a time of geopolitical hostility, they offer an opportunity to Americans and others to better understand the diversity of views that exists within China and to see the Chinese people anew.

Dear Commons Community,

President Biden recently received praise  from one of the figures least likely to offer a favorable assessment of a Democratic administration: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In a column published on his website on Wednesday, Gingrich offers his own party a blunt warning: “Republicans must learn to quit underestimating President Joe Biden.”

It is a remarkable concession for a man who practically invented modern-day partisan combat, which allows for little concession or compromise. Gingrich engineered the impeachment of President Bill Clinton; later, having left Congress amid ethical lapses, he assailed President Barack Obama as a supposed “socialist” in disguise.

Gingrich is no Biden supporter, to be sure, and he takes plenty of jabs at Biden’s allegedly “woke” agenda, meant to usher in what he calls “Big Government Socialism,” a seeming reference to the trillions of dollars the president has devoted, with congressional approval, for coronavirus relief, infrastructure projects and green energy initiatives.

Yet he also believes that GOP attacks on the president have been ineffective, citing Democrats’ surprisingly good showing in last month’s elections as evidence.

“The Biden team had one of the best first term off-year elections in history,” he writes, an assertion bolstered by recent trends in electoral politics. “They were not repudiated. They did not have to pay for their terrible mismanagement of the economy.”

Republican attacks have often focused on Biden’s age and his supposed senility. Some opponents of the current president made similar attacks — albeit much less harshly — during the 2020 primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. They did not work then; Gingrich does not seem to think they are working now.

“We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats,” Gingrich writes.

He even compares the current president to Republican predecessors Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, both of whom at times benefited from similarly low estimations.

As the legendary journalist Murray Kempton wrote of Eisenhower in Esquire, “He was the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat for eight years. We laughed at him; we talked wistfully about moving; and all the while we never knew the cunning beneath the shell.”

Much like Biden, Reagan was eternally hounded by questions about his age and mental competence. In a 1983 column for the New York Times, former Nixon speechwriter William Safire urged Reagan to retire. “I think President Reagan would better serve the country by passing the torch to somebody ready to make a fresh start on the course he originally set,” Safire offered, sounding very much like the Democrats who now want Biden to step aside.

A little more than a year later, Reagan would prevail in his reelection campaign, with a 49-state victory that remains unrivaled.

Although it is not yet clear if Biden will seek reelection, his success in helping the Democratic Party avert disaster in the midterms will almost surely serve as an argument in favor of his running again. Biden, his family and longtime advisers expect to make a final decision during the holiday season.

Republicans, meanwhile, are struggling to reconcile the return of Donald Trump, who is running for a third time, with a spate of younger candidates eager to challenge him. That eventual candidate will likely confront some of the same challenges that Republicans did in 2022, when many of them waged campaigns based on culture war issues like public safety and transgender rights.

That would be a mistake, Gingrich appears to say, despite having waged plenty of culture wars of his own. “Today there is not nearly enough understanding (or acknowledgement) among leading Republicans that our system and approach failed,” he writes.

For once, Gingrich is correct about something!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The US added 263,000 jobs in November, the labor department announced yesterday, another strong month of jobs growth. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7%, close to a 50-year low.

Employers hired 284,000 new positions in October and 269,000 in September and the latest figures show hiring has remained resilient despite rising interest rates and the announcement of a series of layoffs at technology and real estate companies.

The jobs market has remained strong even as the Federal Reserve has imposed the biggest series of rate rises in decades in its fight to tame inflation. This week, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, indicated that the continuing strength of the jobs market – and rising wages – were likely to trigger more rate rises in the coming months.

The US had been expected to add 200,000 jobs in November. The latest jobs numbers – the last before the Fed meets to decide its next move later this month – will strengthen the central bank’s resolve to keep raising rates.

“This phenomenal labor market is showing little sign of slowdown,” said Becky Frankiewicz, president and chief commercial officer of ManpowerGroup. “Despite recurring headlines of deep cutbacks – primarily in tech – other sectors have scaled up; and while we’ve been bracing for a downturn, the broader labor market has barely flinched.”

Economists expect rate hikes will eventually dampen hiring, potentially leading to a recession and job losses next year. But so far, the jobs market has shaken off the Fed’s interventions.

Regardless these data along with continued increases in consumer spending are indicators of a robust economy even as inflation stays high!

Tony

A bomb disposal robot. San Francisco police want to use similar robots with the potential to use lethal force. Photo: Damian Berg/US Navy

Dear Commons Community,

Supervisors in San Francisco voted Tuesday to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations — following an emotionally charged debate that reflected divisions on the politically liberal board over support for law enforcement.

The vote was 8-3, with the majority agreeing to grant police the option despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups. Opponents said the authority would lead to the further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with poor and minority communities. As reported by the Associated Press.

Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the full board, said she understood concerns over use of force but that “according to state law, we are required to approve the use of these equipments. So here we are, and it’s definitely not a easy discussion.”

The San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns. But the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.

“Robots equipped in this manner would only be used in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives,” she said.

Supervisors amended the proposal Tuesday to specify that officers could use robots only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. Only a limited number of high-ranking officers could authorize use of robots as a deadly force option.

San Francisco police currently have a dozen functioning ground robots used to assess bombs or provide eyes in low visibility situations, the department says. They were acquired between 2010 and 2017, and not once have they been used to deliver an explosive device, police officials said.

But explicit authorization was required after a new California law went into effect this year requiring police and sheriffs departments to inventory military-grade equipment and seek approval for their use.

The state law was authored last year by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu while he was an assembly member. It is aimed at giving the public a forum and voice in the acquisition and use of military-grade weapons that have a negative effect on communities, according to the legislation.

A federal program has long dispensed grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, bayonets, armored vehicles and other surplus military equipment to help local law enforcement.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an order reviving the Pentagon program after his predecessor, Barack Obama, curtailed it in 2015, triggered in part by outrage over the use of military gear during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

San Francisco police said late Tuesday that no robots were obtained from military surplus, but some were purchased with federal grant money.

Like many places around the U.S., San Francisco is trying to balance public safety with treasured civilian rights such as privacy and the ability to live free of excessive police oversight. In September, supervisors agreed to a trial run allowing police to access in real time private surveillance camera feeds in certain circumstances.

Debate on Tuesday ran more than two hours with members on both sides accusing the other of reckless fear mongering.

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who voted in favor of the policy authorization, said he was troubled by rhetoric painting the police department as untrustworthy and dangerous.

“I think there’s larger questions raised when progressives and progressive policies start looking to the public like they are anti-police,” he said. “I think that is bad for progressives. I think it’s bad for this Board of Supervisors. I think it’s bad for Democrats nationally.”

Board President Shamann Walton, who voted against the proposal, pushed back, saying it made him not anti-police, but “pro people of color.”

“We continuously are being asked to do things in the name of increasing weaponry and opportunities for negative interaction between the police department and people of color,” he said. “This is just one of those things.”

The San Francisco Public Defender’s office sent a letter Monday to the board saying that granting police “the ability to kill community members remotely” goes against the city’s progressive values. The office wanted the board to reinstate language barring police from using robots against any person in an act of force.

On the other side of the San Francisco Bay, the Oakland Police Department has dropped a similar proposal after public backlash.

The first time a robot was used to deliver explosives in the U.S. was in 2016, when Dallas police sent in an armed robot that killed a holed-up sniper who had killed five officers in an ambush.

Incredible decision!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

“Casablanca” has turned 80, and the most esteemed of all Hollywood classics enters its octogenarian years with an engaging new display of “Casablanca” artifacts at the  Neue Galerie in Manhattan.  Of all the joints in all the towns in all the world, the relics of this paragon of the Hollywood studio system have ended up in … a museum of German and Austrian modern art.  As described in The New York Times.

“The  Neue Galerie was conceived by the cosmetics baron Ronald S. Lauder and the art dealer Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996) and opened in 2001 in a former Vanderbilt mansion on a prime corner of Fifth Avenue. It’s celebrating its first 20 years with a showcase of its surviving founder’s own collection: not only jewels of modern Mitteleuropa, but ancient sculpture, medieval broadswords and reliquaries, and gleaming oddities from Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. Least expected are more than five dozen posters, lobby cards, props and press materials from the collector’s favorite movie, which he reports seeing “at least 25 to 30 times” — and whose memorabilia he has been buying up with foxhound-grade avidity.

The unexpected highlight is the “Casablanca” gallery, the show’s smallest and densest, which in its way fits right into an institution devoted to Central European genius and American inheritances. Its walls are covered with soft-focus images of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, and posters both printed and painted. (“They Have a Date With Fate in … CASABLANCA,” reads one hand-lettered display from 1942, the title sparkling gold.) Lobby cards — those black-and-white stills you’d once see by the popcorn stand — take us back to the louche purgatory of Rick’s Café Américain, where the dashing Resistance hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) is gathering intelligence, and the charmingly corrupt Captain Renault (Claude Rains) is sizing up the loveliest exiles.

You’ll also find memorabilia from the film’s postwar releases in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and, by 1952, Germany. Bergman appears in solo splendor on the German poster, beaming above a set piece of fez-topped musicians. There’s a brass lamp from Rick’s, fringed with imitation gemstones, and two rattan chairs where Europe’s desperate and displaced drank their cognacs and plotted their escapes. Looping in the background is “As Time Goes By,” performed by Dooley Wilson, a veteran of the Negro Theater Unit of the Federal Theater Project, in the role of the nightclub crooner Sam. Lauder apparently also owns the 1940 Buick Phaeton in which Rains drives our heroes to the Casablanca airport in the film’s final act. Lauder wanted to station the car outside the Neue Galerie for the run of the show, but no dice. Even with a net worth of $4.5 billion, nobody beats alternate-side parking regulations.

“Casablanca” premiered in New York on Nov. 26, 1942; Warner Bros. pushed up its release date to capitalize on the excitement around that month’s Allied invasion of North Africa. It opened nationally in January 1943, and its tale of refugees and people smugglers was not only topical; it was nearly autofiction. A stunning number of its performers were Jewish refugees or anti-Nazi exiles — among them Conrad Veidt, previously a star of the Berlin studio system, who played Major Strasser; S.Z. Sakall, a Hungarian Jewish actor, as the club’s affable headwaiter; and Peter Lorre in the small but crucial role of Ugarte, who sells exit visas to the rich and desperate. The French actress Madeleine Lebeau, in the small role of Rick’s jilted mistress, cries real tears during the film’s stirring performance of “La Marseillaise”; she too was a refugee, fleeing via Lisbon to Mexico, and then to Hollywood. She escaped with her husband, Marcel Dalio (born Israel Mosche Blauschild), who plays the croupier at Rick’s, and who left France after antisemitic critics denounced his appearance in “The Rules of the Game.”

When it plays in the revival houses on Valentine’s Day, when it surfaces as the late movie after “Nightline,” “Casablanca” still endures as a wartime love affair, with Bogie and Bergman letting each other go in the airport fog. But for me “Casablanca” has always been a movie of visas and exit stamps, embassies and expediters, bribed officials and underground operators. It paints the modern world as the province of emigrants and evacuees, and subordinates the most enthralling of all Hollywood romances to the welfare of the persecuted. Which is why I was so astonished to discover, in Lauder’s collection, an extraordinary relic: the original (prop) letter of transit that sets the plot in motion, made out to Victor Laszlo and “signed” by General de Gaulle. The prop passports are here too, with Bergman’s and Henreid’s photographs stamped with the seal of the Casablanca colonial administration.

I couldn’t believe I was seeing them, and seeing them here, in a museum of German and Austrian art. It was as if these fictional travel documents concentrated all the exiles and displacements that built midcentury American culture, of Mies van der Rohe and Marlene Dietrich, of “Doctor Faustus” and “Broadway Boogie-Woogie.” They burn, especially, with the shame of knowing that a contemporary “Casablanca” cast member could probably not procure one. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced an estimated five million to flee, the world has been shaken by the largest refugee crisis since everybody came to Rick’s. The United Nations now puts the number of displaced at 100 million — one in every 78 people on Earth — from Afghanistan and Venezuela, from Central America and Myanmar, and above all from Syria, whose civil war will soon enter its 12th year.”

I am going next week!

Tony

The Rosetta Stone on display in the British Museum

Dear Commons Community,

In September, 1822, the French philologist announced that he’d decrypted the key that would unlock Egypt’s ancient past. Two-hundred years ago, French scholar and polymath Jean-François Champollion announced he had deciphered the Rosetta Stone.  The British Museum which houses the Rosetta Stone is celebrating Champollion’s accomplishment. Egyptians are demanding its return to Egypt. The Associated Press has an article this morning reviewing this development as follows.

The debate over who owns ancient artifacts has been an increasing challenge to museums across Europe and America, and the spotlight has fallen on the most visited piece in the British Museum: The Rosetta stone.

The inscriptions on the dark grey granite slab became the seminal breakthrough in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics after it was taken from Egypt by forces of the British empire in 1801.

Now, as Britain’s largest museum marks the 200-year anniversary of the decipherment of hieroglyphics, thousands of Egyptians are demanding the stone’s return.

‘’The British Museum’s holding of the stone is a symbol of Western cultural violence against Egypt,” said Monica Hanna, dean at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport, and organizer of one of two petitions calling for the stone’s return.

The acquisition of the Rosetta Stone was tied up in the imperial battles between Britain and France. After Napoleon Bonaparte’s military occupation of Egypt, French scientists uncovered the stone in 1799 in the northern town of Rashid, known by the French as Rosetta. When British forces defeated the French in Egypt, the stone and over a dozen other antiquities were handed over to the British under the terms of an 1801 surrender deal between the generals of the two sides.

It has remained in the British Museum since.

Hanna’s petition, with 4,200 signatures, says the stone was seized illegally and constitutes a “spoil of war.” The claim is echoed in a near identical petition by Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s former minister for antiquities affairs, which has more than 100,000 signatures. Hawass argues that Egypt had no say in the 1801 agreement.

The British Museum refutes this. In a statement, the Museum said the 1801 treaty includes the signature of a representative of Egypt. It refers to an Ottoman admiral who fought alongside the British against the French. The Ottoman sultan in Istanbul was nominally the ruler of Egypt at the time of Napoleon’s invasion.

The Museum also said Egypt’s government has not submitted a request for its return. It added that there are 28 known copies of the same engraved decree and 21 of them remain in Egypt.

The contention over the original stone copy stems from its unrivaled significance to Egyptology. Carved in the 2nd century B.C., the slab contains three translations of a decree relating to a settlement between the then-ruling Ptolemies and a sect of Egyptian priests. The first inscription is in classic hieroglyphics, the next is in a simplified hieroglyphic script known as Demotic, and the third is in Ancient Greek.

Through knowledge of the latter, academics were able to decipher the hieroglyphic symbols, with French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion eventually cracking the language in 1822.

‘‘Scholars from the previous 18th century had been longing to find a bilingual text written in a known language,’’ said Ilona Regulski, the head of Egyptian Written Culture at the British Museum. Regulski is the lead curator of the museum’s winter exhibition, “Hieroglyphs Unlocking Ancient Egypt,” celebrating the 200th anniversary of Champollion’s breakthrough.

The stone is one of more than 100,000 Egyptian and Sudanese relics housed in the British Museum. A large percentage were obtained during Britain’s colonial rule over the region from 1883 to 1953.

It has grown increasingly common for museums and collectors to return artifacts to their country of origin, with new instances reported nearly monthly. Often, it’s the result of a court ruling, while some cases are voluntary, symbolizing an act of atonement for historical wrongs.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum returned 16 antiquities to Egypt in September after a U.S. investigation concluded they had been illegally trafficked. On Monday, London’s Horniman Museum signed over 72 objects, including 12 Benin Bronzes, to Nigeria following a request from its government.

Nicholas Donnell, a Boston-based attorney specializing in cases concerning art and artifacts, said no common international legal framework exists for such disputes. Unless there is clear evidence an artifact was acquired illegally, repatriation is largely at the discretion of the museum.

‘‘Given the treaty and the timeframe, the Rosetta stone is a hard legal battle to win,’’ said Donnell.

The British Museum has acknowledged that several repatriation requests have been made to it from various countries for artifacts, but it did not provide The Associated Press with any details on their status or number. It also did not confirm whether it has ever repatriated an artifact from its collection.

For Nigel Hetherington, an archaeologist and CEO of the online academic forum Past Preserves, the museum’s lack of transparency suggests other motives.

‘‘It’s about money, maintaining relevance and a fear that in returning certain items people will stop coming,’’ he said.

Western museums have long pointed to superior facilities and larger crowd draws to justify their holding of world treasures. Amid turmoil following the 2011 uprising that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak, Egypt saw an uptick in artifact smuggling, which cost the country an estimated $3 billion between 2011 and 2013, according to the U.S.-based Antiquities Coalition. In 2015, it was discovered that cleaners at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum had damaged the burial mask of Pharaoh Tutankhamun by attempting to re-attach the beard with super glue.

But President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi’s government has since invested heavily in its antiquities. Egypt has successfully reclaimed thousands of internationally smuggled artifacts and plans to open a newly built, state-of-the-art museum where tens of thousands of objects can be housed. The Grand Egyptian Museum has been under construction for well over a decade and there have been repeated delays to its opening.

Egypt’s plethora of ancient monuments, from the pyramids of Giza to the towering statues of Abu Simbel at the Sudanese border, are the magnet for a tourism industry that drew in $13 billion in 2021.

For Hanna, Egyptians’ right to access their own history should remain the priority. “How many Egyptians can travel to London or New York?” she said.

Egyptian authorities did not respond to a request for comment regarding Egypt’s policy toward the Rosetta stone or other Egyptian artifacts displayed abroad. Hawass and Hanna said they are not pinning hopes on the government to secure its return.

‘‘The Rosetta stone is the icon of Egyptian identity,’’ said Hawass. ‘‘I will use the media and the intellectuals to tell the (British) museum they have no right.’’

Good luck to the Egyptians in this matter!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Thomas B. Edsall has a column this morning in The New York Times entitled How a ‘Golden Era for Large Cities’ Might Be Turning Into an ‘Urban Doom Loop’.   It is a pessimistic view of where urban America may be heading as a result of COVID and  remote work which  “seemed like a transitory step to avoid infection that has become a major force driving the future direction of urban America.”  He cites the research of a number of scholars to support his view.  Here is an excerpt.

“The past 30 years “were a golden era for large cities,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at Columbia Business School, wrote in November 2022: “A virtuous cycle of improving amenities (educational and cultural institutions, entertainment, low crime) and job opportunities attracted employers, employees, young and old, to cities.”

New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco, Van Nieuwerburgh continued, “became magnets for the highest-skilled employees and the top employers, with particular concentrations in finance and technology.” In late February and early March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit New York and other population hubs. In Van Nieuwerburgh’s telling, the Covid-19 crisis “triggered a massive migration response. Many households fled urban centers. Most of these Covid migrants moved to the suburbs.”

As the pandemic endured and subsequent coronavirus variants prompted employers to postpone return-to-office plans, Van Nieuwerburgh noted, “Covid-induced migration patterns began to take on a more persistent character. Many households transitioned from temporarily renting a suburban home to purchasing a suburban home.”

In Van Nieuwerburgh’s view — and that of many of his colleagues — what seemed like a transitory step to avoid infection has become a major force driving the future direction of urban America.

Scholars are increasingly voicing concern that the shift to working from home, spurred by the Covid pandemic, will bring the three-decade renaissance of major cities to a halt, setting off an era of urban decay. They cite an exodus of the affluent, a surge in vacant offices and storefronts, and the prospect of declining property taxes and public transit revenues.

Insofar as fear of urban crime grows, as the number of homeless people increases and as the fiscal ability of government to address these problems shrinks, the amenities of city life are very likely to diminish.”

While I hope Edsall’s  analysis is wrong, I am afraid that there is some truth to what he says.  The entire column is worth a read. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Senate passed bipartisan legislation yesterday to protect same-sex marriages, an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married since the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide.

The bill, which would ensure that same-sex and interracial marriages are enshrined in federal law, was approved 61-36 yesterday, including support from 12 Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was “a long time coming” and part of America’s “difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality.”

Democrats are moving quickly, while the party still holds the majority in both chambers of Congress. The legislation now moves to the House for a final vote.  As reported by various media.

President Joe Biden praised the bipartisan vote and said he will sign the bill “promptly and proudly” if it is passed by the House. He said it will ensure that LGBTQ youth “will grow up knowing that they, too, can lead full, happy lives and build families of their own.”

The bill has gained steady momentum since the Supreme Court’s June decision that overturned the federal right to an abortion, a ruling that included a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas that suggested same-sex marriage could also come under threat. Bipartisan Senate negotiations got a kick-start this summer when 47 Republicans unexpectedly voted for a House bill and gave supporters new optimism.

The legislation would not force any state to allow same-sex couples to marry. But it would require states to recognize all marriages that were legal where they were performed, and protect current same-sex unions, if the court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision were to be overturned. It’s a stunning bipartisan endorsement, and evidence of societal change, after years of bitter divisiveness on the issue.

A new law protecting same-sex marriages would also be a major victory for Democrats as they relinquish their two years of consolidated power in Washington, and a massive win for advocates who have been pushing for decades for federal legislation. It comes as the LGBTQ community has faced violent attacks, such as the shooting last weekend at a gay nightclub in Colorado that killed five people and injured at least 17.

“Our community really needs a win, we have been through a lot,” said Kelley Robinson, the incoming president of the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates on LGBTQ issues. “As a queer person who is married, I feel a sense of relief right now. I know my family is safe.”

Robinson was in the Senate chamber for the vote with her wife, Becky, and toddler son. “It was more emotional than I expected,” she said.

The vote was personal for many senators, too. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who is the first openly gay senator and was the lead sponsor of the bill, tearfully hugged Schumer and others as the final vote was called. Baldwin, who has been working on gay rights issues for almost four decades, tweeted thanks to the same-sex and interracial couples who she said made the moment possible.

“By living as your true selves, you changed the hearts and minds of people around you,” she wrote.

Schumer said on Tuesday that he was wearing the tie he wore at his daughter’s wedding, “one of the happiest moments of my life.” He also recalled the “harrowing conversation” he had with his daughter and her wife in September 2020 when they heard that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away. “Could our right to marry be undone?” they asked at the time.

With conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett replacing Ginsburg, the court has now overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to an abortion, stoking fears about Obergefell and other rights protected by the court. But sentiment has shifted on same-sex marriage, with more than two-thirds of the public now in support.

Still, Schumer said it was notable that the Senate was even having the debate after years of Republican opposition. “A decade ago, it would have strained all of our imaginations to envision both sides talking about protecting the rights of same-sex married couples,” he said.

Passage came after the Senate rejected three Republican amendments to protect the rights of religious institutions and others to still oppose such marriages. Supporters of the legislation argued those amendments were unnecessary because the bill had already been amended to clarify that it does not affect rights of private individuals or businesses that are currently enshrined in law. The bill would also make clear that a marriage is between two people, an effort to ward off some far-right criticism that the legislation could endorse polygamy.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has been lobbying his fellow GOP senators to support the legislation for months, pointed to the number of religious groups supporting the bill, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Some of those groups were part of negotiations on the bipartisan amendment.

Congratulations to the U.S. Senate!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted yesterday of seditious conspiracy for a violent plot to overturn President Joe Biden’s election, handing the Justice Department a major victory in its massive prosecution of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

A Washington, D.C., jury found Rhodes guilty of sedition after three days of deliberations in the nearly two-month-long trial that showcased the far-right extremist group’s efforts to keep Republican Donald Trump in the White House at all costs.

A co-defendant — Kelly Meggs, who led the anti-government group’s Florida chapter — was also convicted of seditious conspiracy, while three other associates were cleared of that charge. Jurors found all five defendants guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding: Congress’ certification of Biden’s electoral victory.

The verdict marks a significant milestone for the Justice Department and is likely to clear the path for prosecutors to move ahead at full steam in upcoming trials of other extremists accused of sedition.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Rhodes and Meggs are the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty at trial of seditious conspiracy — a rarely used Civil War-era charge that can be difficult to prove. The offense calls for up to 20 years behind bars.

It could embolden investigators, whose work has expanded beyond those who attacked the Capitol to focus on others linked to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently named a veteran prosecutor, Jack Smith, to serve as special counsel to oversee key aspects of a probe into efforts to subvert the election as well as a separate investigation into the retention of classified documents at Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Garland said after the verdict that the Justice Department “is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on January 6, 2021.”

“Democracy depends on the peaceful transfer of power. By attempting to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, the defendants flouted and trampled the rule of law,” Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office, said in an emailed statement. “This case shows that force and violence are no match for our country’s justice system.”

Now the Justice Department has to go after Trump and other high-level enablers of the January 6th insurrection.

Tony