Courtesy of The New York Times.

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague David Bloomfieled alerted me to this story.

The number of New York City children missing school on a regular basis remains high, years after students returned to in-person learning following COVID-era lockdowns,  according to new figures released Monday.

Close to 35% of public school students were considered “chronically absent” during 2023-24, missing at least 10% of the school year, according to data from the Mayor’s Management Report. That’s roughly the same level as the year before, when 36% of students were chronically absent.  The absenteeism in New York City is higher than figures nationally (see graph above).

Before the pandemic, chronic absenteeism rates typically hovered around a quarter of students each year.

“These numbers should have started to come back to normal,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of education law and policy at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “Persistent absenteeism has become routine for too many students and families. School attendance stopped being habitual; it stopped being routine.”

Chronic absenteeism soared during the pandemic, spiking at 41% during the 2021-22 school year — when many students were first returning to classrooms, and still spreading COVID-19 and following quarantine protocols. But even as vaccines became available and the health crisis faded from public view, student attendance was still spotty.

Sarah Part, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Children, said she’s continued to see students missing school because of issues with school transportation — exacerbated by a local policy that forces some migrant families with children to move shelters every 60 days — and a spike in mental health problems that has young adults avoiding their schools.

“There really needs to be a concerted effort to focus on this issue,” said Part. “Because it’s kind of self-evident — students who are absent have fewer opportunities to learn. So anything else this administration is trying to do, students have to be in school to benefit from those initiatives, to have the kind of impact we want.”

Education officials are trying to lower the chronic absenteeism rate to a goal of 29%, according to the report — widely viewed as the Adams administration’s yearly report card.

“Schools conducted extensive outreach, collaborated with community partners, and followed up daily with students and families to increase attendance,” it read.

The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but has said it has a variety of programs aimed at targeting kids who are chronically absent.

During a press conference Monday, Mayor Adams focused on numbers that show more families signed up for childcare and more young people living in NYCHA buildings were connected with jobs.

“This is just a small sample of what we have done,” Adams said of the findings. “We have more to do, we know that, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

You can’t learn if you are not there.

Tony

MSNBC/Youtube Gints Ivuskans/Shutterstock

Dear Commons Community,

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday shared her reaction to the latest apparent attempt on Donald Trump’s life over the weekend, denouncing the former president’s decision to blame Democrats for the potential attack.

A 58-year-old suspect has been charged with federal gun crimes over his effort to try to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee while he was playing golf at his West Palm Beach club on Sunday. Trump was unharmed.

In an interview with Katie Couric in Washington, D.C., as part of her book tour for the release of her new memoir, Clinton said she was horrified to learn of the news.

“This is such a terrible thing to happen twice in our country in a relative short period of time and it’s frightening to see violence being threatened and used in a political campaign,” Clinton said.

Just nine weeks ago, the former president was shot at during an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Trump  pinned the blame for the latest attempt on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his main rival in the presidential race, saying they are responsible for motivating the suspect to target him.

“The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

“Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” he added.

Clinton said it was “regrettable” that Trump turned his assassination attempt, which she described as a “genuinely terrible event,” into a political attack against his Democratic rival.

“Everything that he talks about is about himself,” she said. “He doesn’t in any way try to reach out to people. He’s not interested in representing all of America and all of Americans and this is just another really regrettable incident of that.”

Clinton said Trump should have used the opportunity to call for calm and peace.

“If he were really a leader, he should be doing what he can to calm the waters, not try to just continue to throw red meat out there to get people riled up,” she said.

He is not a real leader. In fact, he is no leader at all!

Tony

Lunar eclipse on May 15, 2022. (Courtesy: Paul Nolte FugaFoto Low Altitude Imaging)

Dear Commons Community,

Tonight there will be  a partial lunar eclipse and supermoon.  

The spectacle will be visible in clear skies across North America and South America tonight and in Africa and Europe Wednesday morning.   According to NASA, the moon will enter Earth’s partial shadow at 8:41 PM EDT, but its  peak will occur at 10:44 p.m.

No special eye protection is needed to view a lunar eclipse. Viewers can stare at the moon with the naked eye or opt for binoculars and telescopes to get a closer look.

A partial lunar eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the sun and moon, casting a shadow that darkens a sliver of the moon and appears to take a bite out of it.

The supermoon will inch closer to Earth than usual and will appear a bit larger in the sky.

Here’s hoping for a clear sky!

Tony

Image:  Frederic Legrand – COMEO/ShutterStock Yin/Adobe Stock.

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Secret Service said yesterday it was aware of a post by billionaire Elon Musk on the X social media platform musing about an absence of assassination attempts on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Musk, who owns the platform, formerly known as Twitter, put up the post after a man suspected of planning to assassinate Republican former President Donald Trump at his golf course in West Palm Beach was arrested on Sunday.

A Trump supporter and the CEO of Tesla, Musk wrote on Sunday: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” a post he ended with an emoji of a face with a raised eyebrow. As reported by Reuters.

He was quickly criticized by X users from the left and right, who said they were concerned his words to nearly 200 million followers could incite violence against Biden and Harris.

Musk deleted the post but the Secret Service, tasked with protecting current and former presidents, vice presidents and other notable officials, took notice.

“The Secret Service is aware of the social media post made by Elon Musk and as a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence,” a spokesperson told Reuters in an email. “We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees.”

The spokesperson declined to specify whether the agency had reached out to Musk, who seemed to suggest in follow-up posts that he had been making a joke.

“Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X,” he wrote. “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Harris, a Democrat running against Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election, issued a statement on Sunday night as did Biden expressing relief and gratitude that Trump had not been harmed and condemning political violence.

The White House criticized Musk for his post.

“Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about. This rhetoric is irresponsible,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said on Monday.

Musk is such an accomplished individual.  Amazing he made such a stupid comment and on social media.

Tony

Buyout by Campus at Penn State System

Dear Commons Community,

At Pennsylvania State University at New Kensington, forty percent of the staff and 10 percent of the faculty there have taken voluntary buyouts that were offered across the system’s regional campuses earlier this year. Among those leaving the campus, where enrollment has dropped by about a third over the past 10 years, were the registrar, the director of student affairs, all three employees in the business and finance office, and the chancellor.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Buyouts are intended to be a humane way to cut costs while avoiding layoffs and allowing employees a measure of agency in deciding when to leave a job. But they can hurt morale and have unintended consequences, like when more people — or different ones than expected — raise their hands to go. That’s what many faculty and staff think happened at New Kensington.

While buyouts are fairly common in higher education as a way to reduce costs, according to Robert Kelchen, a professor in educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, they are typically aimed at employees closer to retirement. “It’s not exactly the most strategic option, but it’s an option,” Kelchen said. “If the goal is to try to free up money or turn over the work force, it’s probably the best way to do it, but you have an issue of the people you really want to take the buyout may not take the buyout, or you have too many people take the buyout and a unit is effectively demolished.” In addition, he said, laws and union contracts mean colleges may have limited options for how they implement buyouts.

Across Penn State’s regional campuses (see chart above), about one in five eligible employees took the buyout, although the numbers varied significantly across the 20 institutions. Many left in June; the rest, who were asked to stay on to help ease the transition, will leave by the end of December.

This may also be a sign that unemployment is at an all-time low and that there are many opportunities to find new positions. It is a worker’s market.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Amazon is reverting to its pre-pandemic policy and will require corporate employees to be in the office five days a week starting next year, CEO Andy Jassy said yesterday.

Jassy said in a message shared with employees that the company’s leadership had been thinking in recent months about how to better “invent, collaborate and be connected enough to each other” to deliver the best results for customers and the business.

The company decided that bringing employees back into Amazon offices five days a week instead of the three currently required was a way to address that issue, the CEO said.

“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote in the memo, which Amazon also shared on its website. The policy takes effect on January 2, 2025.

Like many other companies, Amazon’s corporate employees worked remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the company saw massive gains from a boost in online shopping. In 2021, the tech giant implemented a policy that allowed leaders to determine how their teams worked.

In February 2023, Amazon asked all employees to come back to the office for three mandatory days, resulting in some protests from workers.

A few months later, Jassy said employees who were not happy about the change should learn to “disagree and commit.” He also issued somewhat of a subtle threat, saying it was “probably not going to work out” for those who refused to do so.

In his note yesterday, Jassy said the company has observed that it is easier for employees to “learn, model, practice and strengthen” Amazon’s culture and brainstorm when they’re together in person.

“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits,” he said.

Most interesting change in policy that will be followed by other businesses and organizations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The vast majority of people in this country  have not had time nor the inclination to read the 30-chapter, 920-page Project 2025 conservative manifesto published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.  Stever Rattner, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, had a piece yesterday explaining eight ways that Project 2025 would change our country.  Here is a summary of Rattner’s essay.

1. Project 2025’s tax system would greatly benefit the wealthy

The 2025 plan would condense seven tax brackets into just two, leading to higher tax rates for lower-income Americans and lower rates for the rich.

2. Millions of people would be at risk of losing health care coverage if there are lifetime Medicaid caps

Almost 95 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid in 2021. If lifetime caps are implemented, over 19 million people, or 5% of the country’s population, would be at risk of losing their health care coverage.

3. Eliminate Headstart

4. Phase Out Title I

Project 2025 would phase out the $18 billion currently allocated to Title I, a key source of education aid, and return funding responsibility to the states.

5. End Student Loan Forgiveness

President Joe Biden’s effort to reduce the burden of student debt on young Americans would be ended and existing borrowers would have to repay the loans per their existing terms.

6. Repeal the Inflation Reduction Act

The conservative manifesto seeks to repeal large parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is principally aimed at facilitating a shift toward renewable energy.

7. Ban the Abortion Pill

8. Bolster Presidential Power

Project 2025 would reclassify policy-related positions, remove civil service protections and make federal employees easier to fire.

Trump has disavowed any connection to Project 2025 but the fingerprints of his associates are all over it.

Tony

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine. PHOTO: ABC News.

Dear Commons Community,

Ohio Republican Governor  Mike DeWine offered one of the most vociferous defenses of Haitian immigrants in Springfield as their presence in the city becomes a chief point of criticism from former President Donald Trump.

Speaking to ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz, DeWine repeatedly noted that the immigrants are in Ohio legally and praised their work ethic, stridently debunking claims that they are eating neighbors’ pets — unsubstantiated conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his allies.

“I think it’s unfortunate that this came up. Let me tell you what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. These Haitians came in to work for these companies,” DeWine said.

“What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They’re very happy to have them there, and frankly, that’s helped the economy. Now, are there problems connected? Well, sure. When you go from a population of 58,000 and add 15,000 people onto that, you’re going to have some challenges and some problems. And we’re addressing those,” he added.

Conspiracy theories about the immigrants spread online have made their way to national politics, breaking through when Trump claimed in his debate with Democratic opponent Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday that Haitians in Springfield were eating neighbors’ dogs and cats.

“Look, there’s a lot of garbage on the internet and, you know, this is a piece of garbage that was simply not true. There’s no evidence of this at all,” DeWine said on “This Week.”

The fallout spread beyond politics over the past week as bomb threats and other threats of violence were reported in Springfield — prompting a strong rebuke from DeWine.

“There are hate groups coming into Springfield. We don’t need these hate groups. I saw a piece of literature yesterday that the mayor told me about from purportedly the KKK. Look, Springfield is a good city. They are good people. They are welcoming people. We have challenges every day. We are working on those challenges,” DeWine said.

“This idea that we have hate groups coming in, this discussion just has to stop. We need to focus on moving forward and not dogs and cats being eaten. It’s just ridiculous,” he added.

DeWine last week announced the state would send more resources to Springfield. His office said local primary caregivers have been impacted due to an increased number of patients and lack of translation services. DeWine has authorized $2.5 million to go toward expanding primary care access for the city of Springfield, while calling for more federal help.

When pressed by Raddatz on how to square his defense of immigrants in Springfield with Trump’s comments about them, on top of recent incorrect claims at the debate that he in fact won the 2020 election, the Ohio governor said Americans trust Trump on the economy and other issues.

“I’ve said before we knew who the nominee was going to be, I would support the Republican nominee for president. I am a Republican. I think if you look at the economy, these are issues that I think the American people are most concerned about. I think that Donald Trump is the best choice,” he said.

“Look, there’s these are legitimate problems that we have on the border. I’m not minimizing that at all. And those are legitimate arguments where the vast majority the American people agree with Donald Trump, and not the vice president, [Kamala Harris],” he added. “But what’s going on in Springfield is just fundamentally different. These people are here legally. They came to work.

Amen!

Tony

Robert Caro, the author of  The Power Broker. Credit…Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

About twenty years ago, a new dean was appointed at the City University of New York.  He had spent his entire life and career on the West Coast.  He and I had lunch and I commented to him that if he wanted to understand New York, he should read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. He immediately said to me, “Tony that is exactly what Chancellor [Matt] Goldstein said to me.”  Earlier this week, The New York Times had an article written by  Emma G. Fitzsimmons celebrating the 50th anniversary of Caro’s book.  Here is an extended excerpt.

Once you’ve read The Power Broker, it’s hard not to see the legacy of Robert Moses everywhere you look.

I read the book in 2016 when I reported on the Second Avenue subway, which opened then in Manhattan nearly a century after it was first proposed. I wanted to know why New York City stopped expanding the subway in the 1960s and learned about the car-loving reign of Moses, painstakingly detailed by Robert Caro over 1,246 pages.

As the book hits its 50th anniversary this month, it is still beloved in political circles and serves as a Rorschach test for diagnosing what ails the city and how to fix it.

Brad Lander, the city comptroller who is running for mayor against Eric Adams next year, read it in 1993 with a group of young planners and immediately took a daylong driving tour of places mentioned in the book “touching all five boroughs, and ending on Randall’s Island, where Moses collected the tolls that were the coin of his realm.”

His main takeaway? City planners must balance getting projects done with a “vision for the growth of our city that is built with its residents, not by paving over them.”

Another mayoral candidate, Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn, said that what stuck with him is that “local government can either be an immeasurable force for long-lasting good, or, with shortsightedness, lack of inclusion and arrogance, a tool for permanent harm.”

Janno Lieber, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said that his lesson was that “anybody who shares Moses’s view that mass transit is the past and not the future will be proven wrong.”

Adams was less effusive, telling reporters recently that he read the book, but did not have “any feedback” on what it meant to him.

Scott Stringer, another mayoral challenger, said the book showed how “land use and zoning, without proper checks and balances, can have long-term, dire consequences for urban planning.”

Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who is considering running for mayor, said she read the book from “the perspective of someone who grew up in the segregated city Moses designed.” She said she wondered sometimes why candidates put the book in the frame on video calls: “Is it there because you admire Caro or because you admire Moses?”

And who is the Robert Moses of today?

Andrew M. Cuomo, the former governor, was similarly ambitious and ruthless.

Lander named Dan Doctoroff, a top official under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as the leader who came the closest to Moses in his impact on the city: “But I’m pleased to say he evolved over the course of his career to focus far more on making it inclusive and sustainable.”

Justin Brannan, the powerful chair of the City Council’s finance committee, named Jacques Jiha, the director of the city’s Budget and Management Office under Adams, as a modern-day Moses. Jiha has overseen budget cuts to libraries and free preschool and reshaped city government.

Brannan said he read the book after growing up in Brooklyn in the shadow of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, a major Moses project, and he’s still holding out hope for a movie version directed by Oliver Stone, which was announced by HBO in 2011.

For now, there is a special exhibit at the New-York Historical Society and a podcast dissecting the book.

Some Caro fans are more fanatic than others, and we tend to find each other. Monica Klein, a Democratic political consultant, is part of a group chat dedicated to analyzing the book. They even have matching black baseball caps with red letters that say: “The Power Broker Book Club.”

This summer, when Gov. Kathy Hochul abruptly canceled congestion pricing — a plan that would have tolled cars entering Manhattan to pay for subway upgrades — Klein texted me: “Robert Moses is definitely cackling with glee right now.”

I grew up in the South Bronx in the 1950s and I saw first hand how Moses’ projects such as the Cross-Bronx Expressway completely destroyed stable, multi-generation neighborhoods one after another.  The Bronx has never recovered.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,