Dear Commons Community,

Ruth Y. Goldway, a retired chairwoman and commissioner of the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission, has an op-ed in today’s New York Times urging readers not “to panic” over the the Trump Administration’s threat to withhold funding of the U.S. Postal Service to hinder mail-in voting.  It is her opinion that the U.S. Postal Service is perfectly capable of handing the increased demand of mail-in ballots. Here is her entire op-ed.

“President Trump has threatened to withhold funds from the United States Postal Service. The new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has embarked on cost-cutting measures to eliminate overtime and remove sorting machines. These actions have created worries that Americans, reluctant to walk into voting booths because of Covid-19, will be unable to vote by mail this year.

I served as a regulator of the Postal Service for nearly 18 years under three presidents and I urge everyone to be calm. Don’t fall prey to the alarmists on both sides of this debate. The Postal Service is not incapacitated. It is still fully capable of delivering the mail. The focus of our collective concerns should be on how the Postal Service can improve the speed of delivery for election mail.

First, the president is wrong about the Postal Service’s finances. While the agency indeed has financial problems, as a result of a huge increase in packages being sent through the system and a credit line through the CARES Act, it has access to about $25 billion in cash. Its own forecasts predict that it will have enough money to operate into 2021.

The Postal Service’s shaky financial situation has to do in large part with the drop in first-class mail (typically used for letters), about 30 percent less than a decade ago. But the service’s expensive, overbuilt infrastructure can absorb the addition of more mail in 2020 — including election mail that is mailed to and sent back by every voter in every state.

The new postmaster general’s management team still includes many knowledgeable and seasoned executives. And the Postal Service has over 500,000 employees who are remarkably honest, dedicated and used to working through emergencies: hurricanes, snow storms, social unrest and pandemics.

While the Postal Service has contemplated many different approaches to modernizing and improving efficiency, there has not been a consensus on how much the service should reduce costs. It is not at all surprising that Mr. DeJoy’s choice of particularly visible cuts has raised alarms.

The Office of the Inspector General of the Postal Service has agreed to a review of the changes. And Congress has been called back to conduct its own review next week, restore trust in the institution and ensure that voting by mail proceeds smoothly.

Given that there is enough money and perhaps more if the president agrees to additional bailout funds; that there is plenty of capacity in the system; and that voting by mail can alleviate a health threat to the nation, the Postal Service should be made to handle all election mail as if it were first-class mail. This is where the policy discussions surrounding the Postal Service should settle.

Most election-related mail is sent at nonprofit rates. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act requires the Postal Service to charge state and local election offices the same price for postage as nonprofit mailers. The Postal Service has a history of providing extra care and attention to election-related mail, on the level of first-class mail: usually two to four days for delivery. A special logo and bar code identifiers were created so that mail sorters were able to pull election mail out from the routine mail stream to be sure it was delivered as soon as possible.

But a recent letter sent by Thomas J. Marshall, the general counsel for the Postal Service, to election officials around the country seems to suggest that election mail will now be treated like regular nonprofit mail (typically three to 10 days for delivery) and may take as long as 15 days. This is not acceptable.

The Postal Service has the capacity to ensure that ballots sent to voters arrive on time and that ballots dropped into the system by voters are postmarked and delivered in times that accord with state and local guidelines. In their meeting with Congress next week, the leaders of the Postal Service should guarantee that election mail will continue to be treated as first-class mail. The Congress should agree that there will be no additional financial support for the Postal Service without this promise.

But state and local election officials must also recognize the possibilities of delays and plan for earlier mailings so there will be more days for ballots to be returned. Voters must be reminded to send in requests for ballots, change of address, voter registration forms and especially filled-out ballots as early as possible.

The Postal Service does indeed need a bailout from Congress so that it can be counted on to deliver the mail, medicines and other vital products for years to come. It needs funds to rebuild its more than 30,000 post offices and aging vehicle fleet to reduce its reliance on temporary workers and to broaden the range of services it provides. But these problems do not affect this year’s election.

Americans must continue to support the Postal Service, whose existence is enshrined in our Constitution, by using its vote-by-mail services to save lives now and to protect our democracy in the future.”

I hope Ms. Goldway is right!

Tony

Excerpt of Graphic Showing Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russia

Dear Commons Community,

A bipartisan Senate panel examining ties between the 2016 Trump Campaign and Russia released a nearly 1,000-page report confirming the special counsel’s findings that there were many connections between Trump campaign advisers and the Kremlin.  The sprawling report released yesterday by the Republican-controlled Senate committee spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russia.  As reported by the New York Times.

“The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional investigations in recent memory and could be the last word from an official government inquiry about the expansive Russian campaign to sabotage the 2016 election.

It provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr. Trump become president, Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for the help from an American adversary.

The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was stocked with businessmen with no government experience, advisers working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment and other friends and associates Mr. Trump had accumulated over the years. Campaign figures, the report said, “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

Like the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report was the first time the government has identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer — Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence. Most of the details about his intelligence background were blacked out in the Senate report.

Mr. Manafort’s willingness to share information with Mr. Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services “represented a grave counterintelligence threat,” the report said.

It also included a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations, conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

Democrats highlighted Mr. Kilimnik’s potential ties to the interference operations in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with the Russian and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

“This is what collusion looks like,” Democrats wrote.

This report will provide fodder for the last couple of months of the presidential election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The virtual Democratic National Convention (DNC) opened last night with a good deal of messaging on the present plight of our country with Donald Trump as the president. 

The opening and sprinkled throughout the evening saw young people giving their comments about our country and its future.  The singing of the national anthem by a diverse group of high school students representing each state in a collage of images was well-done.  The opening prayer asked God to bless all of us including “Republicans, Independents, and Democrats”.  I thought that Eva Longoria as the convention moderator was a distraction but indicative that the evening was part show. The many speakers were on message and to the point.  No one droned on.  I thought the cadre of Republicans supporting Joe Biden including Christie Todd Whitman, Susan Molinari, and John Kasich was a good touch. 

The highlight was the keynote address (see video above) delivered by Michelle Obama, the former first lady.  Her eighteen-minute speech was authentic, powerful, and spoken with emotion and passion.   

“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is,” she said.

I thought her best line was:  “…whenever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos, division, and a total and utter lack of empathy.”

Her conclusion:

“This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.

So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.

And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.

Thank you all. God bless.”

Michelle aced it and will be remembered for her address.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Students at the University of Northern Georgia held a huge outdoor party in Dahlonega over the weekend to celebrate the beginning of the fall semester. The video above shows that most students did not have face masks.   They are playing with their health and the health of anyone with whom they come in contact.  The administration at Northern Georgia will likely have a horrific problem on its hands in the weeks to come.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As New Yorkers leave the city to ride out the coronavirus pandemic elsewhere, over 13,000 apartments are now up for rent in Manhattan — a record setting number.

“In the beginning of March and April, we saw a tremendous outbound migration. About over 400,000 people left Manhattan, 40% of the occupants, essentially,” Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers & Consultants, which prepared a report for New York City residential brokerage Douglas Elliman, told Yahoo Finance. Renters in Manhattan “became first-time buyers, they lived with relatives, they rented — they did anything but come into the city,” he said. 

As landlords scrambled to recover losses, empty apartment listings poured on real estate sites like Zillow. In July, there were 21.6% more apartments on the market from only a month prior in June — and 121% more compared to July 2019. 

“Right now, we have the highest amount of vacancy in at least the 14 years of history I have on this metric in the city,” said Miller, who said that though more renters signed leases in July compared to June, there were 57% fewer leases signed than in July 2019.

Low demand has driven rent prices down 7.6%, compared to last year in July, according to the report. The median apartment price was $3,320, compared to $3,595 last year at the same time. 

“What we’re seeing is lots of softness in the rental market and one of the big reasons for the softness is unemployment has skewed heavily to lower-wage earners, which tend to be more renters than purchasers,” said Miller.

To entice prospective renters, landlords have upped incentives like waiving fees or throwing in a free month’s rent.  Incentives are up more than 50%, according to the report. Landlords are offering an equivalent of 1.7 months of free rent, compared to 1.1 months free last year.

“[Manhattan has] a significant vacancy rate which is driving the need to offer incentives… there is clearly a problem with filling the apartments,” said Miller. 

Historical trends show that the New York City rental market typically rebounds within three years of a recession or catastrophic event. But because the COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift to remote work, fewer employees need to be near New York City offices — so they may not need to live in New York City. 

“I’m very much a believer in a reversal at some point. The thing that’s a little different is less about the pandemic — and more about technology and Zoom. Because I do think that the tether between work and home just got a lot longer, that people have more flexibility about where they can live in relationship to where they work,” said Miller. 

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next several weeks as families with children decide what to do about school and whether they opt for some form of face-to-face instruction.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) will begin tonight and last through Thursday, August 20th. The convention was originally planned for the week of July 13th, but was delayed due to the pandemic.  

The convention was set to be held at the 17,000-seat Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee but has since been moved to the city’s Wisconsin Center.  It will be the convention’s virtual production center.

The main events will be aired from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. EDT on each of the four nights, although there will also be daytime events starting at 9 a.m. The convention will be broadcast on the DNC’s website as well as on most major television networks, social media platforms and streaming services like Apple TV and Roku.

Below is the schedule of speakers that includes all of the major figures in the Democratic Party and at least one Republican, John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio.

Let the convention begin!

Tony

———————————–

Here is the tentative schedule of speakers.

Monday

• Former first lady Michelle Obama
• Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
• Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.)
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D)
• Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D)
• Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.)
• Convention Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)
• Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.)
• Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R)
• Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.)
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)

Tuesday

• Former acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates
• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)
• Former Secretary of State John Kerry (D)
• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)
• Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.)
• Former President Bill Clinton (D)
• Dr. Jill Biden

Wednesday

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
• Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), vice presidential nominee
• Former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (D)
• Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
• Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D)
• New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D)
• Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.)
• Former President Barack Obama (D)

Thursday

• Former Vice President Joe Biden, presidential candidate
• Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.)
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D)
• Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D)
• Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.)
• Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.)
• Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.)
• The Biden family

The empty campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. The school plans to hold all or most of their classes online this fall.

Dear Commons Community,

A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic. Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly online, students and their parents are demanding tuition rebates, increased financial aid, reduced fees and leaves of absences to compensate for what they feel will be a diminished college experience.

As Will Andersen, an 18-year-old incoming freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put it “Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?”

The New York Times has a featured article (see below) this morning reporting on the issue as more colleges get ready to “open” somehow.

The problem is serious but what are the options.  Colleges could open for in-person classes and risk the health of students, faculty and staff.  They could shut down completely and students can wait until the pandemic is eradicated to resume their studies.  Or they can try to offer an online or blended educational experience at a reasonable cost.  The argument is over the “reasonableness” of the cost.

Tony

————————————————————————————————————-

New York Times

As Colleges Move Classes Online, Families Rebel Against the Cost!

By Shawn Hubler

Aug. 15, 2020

After Southern California’s soaring coronavirus caseload forced Chapman University this month to abruptly abandon plans to reopen its campus and shift to an autumn of all-remote instruction, the school promised that students would still get a “robust Chapman experience.”

“What about a robust refund?” retorted Christopher Moore, a spring graduate, on Facebook.

A parent chimed in. “We are paying a lot of money for tuition, and our students are not getting what we paid for,” wrote Shannon Carducci, whose youngest child, Ally, is a sophomore at Chapman, in Orange County, where the cost of attendance averages $65,000 a year. Back when they believed Ally would be attending classes in person, her parents leased her a $1,200-a-month apartment. Now, Ms. Carducci said, she plans to ask for a tuition discount.

A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic. Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly online, students and their parents are demanding tuition rebates, increased financial aid, reduced fees and leaves of absences to compensate for what they feel will be a diminished college experience.

At Rutgers University, more than 30,000 people have signed a petition started in July calling for an elimination of fees and a 20 percent tuition cut. More than 40,000 have signed a plea for the University of North Carolina system to refund housing charges to students in the event of another Covid-19-related campus shutdown. The California State University system’s early decision to go online-only this fall has incited calls for price cuts at campuses from Fullerton to San Jose.

At Ithaca College — student population, 5,500 — the financial services team reports more than 2,000 queries in the past month about financial aid and tuition adjustments. Some 340 Harvard freshmen — roughly a fifth of the first-year class — deferred admission rather than possibly spending part of the year online, and a parents’ lobbying group, formed on Facebook last month, has asked the administration to reduce tuition and relax rules for leaves of absence.

Universities have been divided in their response, with some offering discounts but most resisting, arguing that remote learning and other virus measures are making their operations more, not less, costly at a time when higher education is already struggling.

“These are unprecedented times, and more and more families are needing more and more financial assistance to enroll in college,” said Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president for the American Council on Education, a higher education trade group. “But colleges also need to survive.”

The roster of colleges that have rescinded plans to reopen their classrooms has been growing by the day. In the past two weeks, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, Princeton and a host of other colleges announced plans to hold all or most of their classes online, citing concerns about the coronavirus. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, less than a quarter of the nation’s 5,000 colleges are committed to providing instruction primarily or completely in person.

At Illinois State University, an 11th-hour shift infuriated Joseph Herff, a 22-year-old business major. He had locked into an off-campus lease and taken out $10,000 more in student loan debt by the time the school announced that its fall would be mostly online — the result of public health guidance and a shortage of coronavirus tests, according to the university’s president, Larry Dietz.

“I don’t have an issue with moving classes to online. I do have an issue though that classes are charged the same price,” Mr. Herff tweeted on an account that, until this month, he said in an interview, he had largely reserved for sports talk. “Why is this fair?”

Many colleges were facing financial dark clouds even before the coronavirus arrived. Population declines in some parts of the country have dampened enrollment, and soaring tuition has led many families to question the price of a college diploma. Moody’s Investors Service, which in March downgraded the higher education sector to negative from stable, wrote that even before the pandemic, roughly 30 percent of universities “were already running operating deficits.”

Since then, emptied dorms, canceled sports, shuttered bookstores and paused study-abroad programs have dried up key revenue streams just as student needs have exploded for everything from financial aid and food stamps to home office equipment and loaner laptops.

Public health requirements for masks, barriers, cleaning and other health protections also have added new costs, as have investments in training and technology to improve remote instruction and online courses.

“Starting up an online education program is incredibly expensive,” said Dominique Baker, an assistant professor of education policy at Southern Methodist University. “You have to have training, people with expertise, licensing for a lot of different kinds of software. All those pieces cost money, and then if you want the best quality, you have to have smaller classes.”

Chapman’s president, Daniele Struppa, said the university spent $20 million on technology and public health retrofits for the fall semester, and he estimates that the switch to an online fall will cost the school $110 million in revenue. He has cut spending “brutally” from the $400 million annual budget, he said, freezing hires, slashing expenses, canceling construction of a new gym, ending the retirement match to employees and giving up 20 percent of his own $720,000 base salary.

Only students who can demonstrate financial need will get help, he is telling families. “Tuition really reflects our cost of operation, and that cost has not only not diminished but has greatly increased.”

A survey by the American Council on Education estimated that reopening this fall would add 10 percent to a college’s regular operating expenses, costing the country’s 5,000 some colleges and universities a total of $70 billion.

“For institutions,” said Mr. Hartle, who lobbies for the council, “this is a perfect storm.”

Students are feeling tempest tossed, too.

Temple sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab, founder of the university’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice, said the organization has been “bombarded” with pleas for help from students who can’t cover their rent and don’t know how to apply for food stamps. At least a third of students had lost jobs because of the pandemic by May, according to the center.

Such situations, Ms. Goldrick-Rab said, are particularly risky because they often prompt students to take on second or third jobs or to become distracted, which in turn imperils financial aid that can be revoked if their grades fall.

Laurie Koehler, vice president for enrollment strategy at Ithaca College, said about one in six students reported in a just-completed survey that the pandemic had significantly hurt their ability to continue their studies. At Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., the school’s president, Alison Byerly, said she expects requests for additional financial aid to grow by up to 15 percent this year.

But the shift online also has accelerated fundamental questions about the future of higher education, said the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, Marguerite Roza.

“This is a moment that is basically forcing students and parents to say, ‘What is the value? If I can’t set foot on campus, is that the same value?’”

Will Andersen, an 18-year-old incoming freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put it this way: “Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?”

“Education isn’t just information,” agreed Yolanda Brown-Spidell, a Detroit-area teacher and divorced mother of five whose lament last month about remote learning in a private Facebook group for Harvard parents burgeoned into a lobbying push to ease school policies on tuition and fall housing.

“Being able to meet up with friends, have those highly intellectual conversations, walking over to CVS and getting ice cream at 1 in the morning,” she said, ticking off the parts of education her daughter, a rising junior, has missed while working at home on her computer. “And let’s not forget just not being home with your mama, with her eyes on you.”

Some families have sued. Roy Willey, a class-action attorney in South Carolina, said his firm alone has filed at least 30 lawsuits — including against the University of California system, Columbia University and the University of Colorado — charging universities with breach of contract for switching in-person instruction to online classes, and is closely monitoring the fall semester.

Most suits are in their early stages, though several universities have moved for dismissal. “If you and I go down to the steakhouse and order a prime rib, and prepay for it and sit at our table, and a while later the server comes by and says, ‘Here’s two hamburgers, we’re out of prime rib’ — well, we may eat the hamburgers, but they’re not entitled to the money we would have paid for prime rib,” Mr. Willey said.

“This is a moment that is basically forcing students and parents to say, ‘What is the value? If I can’t set foot on campus, is that the same value’,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

A handful of universities have announced substantial price cuts. Franciscan University of Steubenville, a private Catholic university in Ohio with about 3,000 students, announced in April that it will cover 100 percent of tuition costs, after financial aid and scholarships, for incoming undergraduates. Williams College in Massachusetts took 15 percent off in June when it announced it would combine online and in-person instruction this fall.

More typical is the 10 percent cut at Catholic University in Washington, which plans to start the semester online and dramatically scale back the number of students allowed back onto campus. Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Georgetown University, Spelman University and other institutions are offering similar reductions. Lafayette College is limiting its 10 percent to students who study from home for the semester. The University of Southern California has offered a $4,000-per-semester “Living at Home Scholarship.”

Some schools are extending freebies. Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., has offered to tack on a tuition-free year of instruction for currently enrolled students, noting on its website that the current situation is not “the college experience they imagined.” St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., is offering a free semester.

But most colleges have kept prices flat, and a few have even increased them. They can’t afford to do otherwise without mass faculty layoffs, said Robert Kelchen, a Seton Hall University associate professor of higher education, even though the isolated, monitored experience campuses are selling this fall “is going to feel like some combination of a monastery and a minimum-security prison.”

“This crisis is demonstrating that there is real value in face-to-face instruction,” agreed David Feldman, an economist at William & Mary in Virginia and author, with Robert B. Archibald, of “The Road Ahead for America’s Colleges and Universities.” That recognition, he said, will generally protect better-endowed schools and those with state support.

Even so, he said, a culling is at hand for higher education. His prediction: a consolidation of public university branch campuses and a reckoning for some small, private liberal arts colleges that are already operating on thin margins.

Robert and Donald Trump

Dear Commons Community,

Robert S. Trump, the younger brother of President Trump, died on Saturday night in Manhattan. He was 71.

The White House, which announced his death, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, did not give a cause.  As reported in the New York Times.

“He was not just my brother, he was my best friend,” the president said in a statement. “He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again.”

Robert Trump, who took blood thinners, had experienced brain bleeds, which began after a recent fall, according to a family friend. President Trump went to Manhattan on Friday to see his brother at the hospital.

On Saturday, when Robert Trump was not expected to live much longer, the president called into the hospital from his Bedminster, N.J., golf club. He shortly held a news conference but did not mention his brother’s health. Friends who spoke to him said he was downcast.

“I have a wonderful brother,” the president said on Friday at a White House news conference before departing to visit him. “We’ve had a great relationship for a long time, from Day 1.” The two had in fact been estranged for years before Mr. Trump’s run for the White House.

Robert Trump had no children, but he helped raise Christopher Hollister Trump-Retchin, the son of his first wife, Blaine Trump, even giving him his last name. Besides the president, he is survived by his second wife, Ann Marie Pallan, and his sisters, Maryanne Trump Barry and Elizabeth Trump Grau. His brother Fred Jr. died in 1981.

As the youngest of five children growing up in the strict Queens household of Fred C. Trump, Robert Trump was shielded from some of the pressure exerted by his disciplinarian father over his older brothers. He was never groomed to take over the family real estate company and was considered by those who knew him to be the inverse of the brash, self-promotional brother who eventually did. After graduating from Boston University, he first went to work on Wall Street, instead of joining the family business. But he eventually went to work for his brother as a senior executive at the Trump Organization.

“You could consider him the quietest of Trumps,” Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, said. “He was glad to stay out of the spotlight.”

Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump Organization executive who worked closely with the Trump family, recalled the younger Mr. Trump as someone with a natural ease and good humor that his older brother lacked.

“He was dignified, he was quiet, he listened, he was good to work with,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He had zero sense of entitlement. Robert was very comfortable being Donald Trump’s brother and not being like him.”

That was not always an easy role to play, and simply being a close family member did not shield him from his brother’s rages when Donald Trump needed someone to blame. Family friends said that as Donald’s star grew, Robert struggled with working for his brother and cast himself as his brother’s polar opposite.

Donald faulted Robert, for instance, for the problems with slot machines that plagued the opening of the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in 1990, costing him tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Donald Trump had put his brother in charge of the property after a helicopter accident in 1989 killed three Trump Organization executives who had been overseeing it.

Gaming regulators did not allow the casino to open because of a lack of financial control of the slot machines. On opening night, only a small section of the casino floor was open, and it was months before the slot machines were fully activated.

In one meeting, Mr. O’Donnell recalled, Donald Trump screamed at his brother, putting the blame for the slot machine debacle entirely on him. “Robert calmly got up, walked out of the room, and that’s the last time I ever saw him,” Mr. O’Donnell said.

After the blowup, Robert Trump stopped reporting directly to his brother and removed himself from the core of the business, working out of its Brooklyn office and dealing with real estate projects in boroughs outside Manhattan. But people who knew him said that he had been devastated by the fight with Donald Trump and that the rift had taken years to heal.

In Brooklyn, Robert would take his father, Fred Trump Sr., who had Alzheimer’s disease, out for lunch every day at an Italian restaurant, a friend recalled.

He reconciled with his brother when Donald Trump decided to run for president, according to a person close to the family. Robert had in recent years been a loyal family spokesman since his older brother entered politics. “I support Donald 1,000 percent,” he told The New York Post in 2016. “If he were to need me in any way, I’d be there.”

He followed through with that promise. In recent months, he led the family in its unsuccessful bid to block the publication of a memoir by their niece Mary L. Trump — the daughter of their deceased older brother, Fred Trump Jr. — that described decades of family dysfunction and brutality that she claimed turned Donald Trump into a reckless leader. It was the president’s younger brother who requested the restraining order in a filing in Queens County Surrogate’s Court.

Before that, Robert Trump spearheaded the family response in 1999 when Mary Trump and her brother, Fred Trump III, sued for their father’s share of the family estate.

Robert, who for 25 years was married to Blaine Trump, was more accepted in society circles and on the charity circuit than Donald ever was, Mr. D’Antonio said.

But after a painful divorce in 2009, involving tabloid coverage documenting his decision to leave his marriage for an employee of the Trump Organization, Ann Marie Pallan, Robert Trump sought a quiet retired life on Long Island. He and Ms. Pallan married this year.

The relationship between the brothers — the older one dominating the younger one — was illustrated by Donald Trump in his book “The Art of the Deal.” In it, he recalled stealing his younger brother’s blocks when they were children and gluing them together so that Robert couldn’t reclaim them.

The president’s decision to visit his brother in the hospital was different from how he handled news in 1981 that his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., was in poor health. According to Mary Trump’s account, Donald Trump went to the movies the night Fred Jr. died. Fred Sr. also did not visit him.

But Gwenda Blair, a biographer of the Trump family, said that in light of Mary Trump’s memoir, the president would have had no choice.

“It’s very much part of the Trump family legend that they are a tight-knit, loyal group,” she said. “That is the family modus operandi. Mary Trump has recently suggested otherwise, but I think, as part of the response to that, Donald Trump would have no choice but to go.”

May Robert rest in peace!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Whatever one calls them — learning pods, pandemic pods or microschools — the hiring of teachers to supplement or even replace the virtual instruction offered by public schools has become an obsession among many parents of means. Practically overnight, a virtual cottage industry of companies and consultants has emerged to help families organize pods and pair them with instructors, many of whom are marketing themselves on Facebook pages and neighborhood listservs.

But the cost — often from $30 an hour per child to $100 or more — has put them out of reach for most families, generating concerns that the trend could make public education even more segregated and unequal.

“Hiring a tutor is expensive, even if it’s divvied up between a couple of families,” said Charese Paulson, 40, of Wilmington, Del., who lost her job as an accounts payable clerk during the pandemic. “Upper middle-class families can afford that, but most inner-city, lower-income families can’t afford an extra $200 to $300 a week. You’re talking anywhere between $800 and $1,200 a month — that’s some people’s rent.”

The New York Times has a featured article (see below) this morning examining the issue for those families who cannot afford to pay to have their children in learning pods.  As the pandemic continues, this issue surely exacerbates the gulf in public education for families of means versus those that struggle financially.

Tony

New York Times

Families Priced Out of ‘Learning Pods’ Seek Alternatives

By Abby Goodnough

Aug. 14,  2020

WASHINGTON — When Shy Rodriguez heard about one of the hottest trends in education during the pandemic — “learning pods,” where parents hire teachers for small-group, in-home instruction — she knew immediately it was something she could never afford for her sons.

Like many parents, Ms. Rodriguez, a single mother and nursing assistant in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., was deeply dissatisfied with the online instruction her school district provided last spring. Facing more of the same this fall — her district is offering an in-person option for now, but she isn’t comfortable sending her boys — she set out to create a more basic, and affordable, type of pod: one where parents take turns with child-care duties so they can go to work most days while their children attend online school together at home.

“I feel like it can be extremely discouraging,” Ms. Rodriguez, 33, said of the widening educational gulf between wealthier children and her sons, 8 and 11. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck, she said, feel “like we’re directly failing our children because we can’t offer or afford the same level of opportunities.”

Whatever one calls them — learning pods, pandemic pods or microschools — the hiring of teachers to supplement or even replace the virtual instruction offered by public schools has become an obsession among many parents of means. Practically overnight, a virtual cottage industry of companies and consultants has emerged to help families organize pods and pair them with instructors, many of whom are marketing themselves on Facebook pages and neighborhood listservs.

But the cost — often from $30 an hour per child to $100 or more — has put them out of reach for most families, generating concerns that the trend could make public education even more segregated and unequal.

“Hiring a tutor is expensive, even if it’s divvied up between a couple of families,” said Charese Paulson, 40, of Wilmington, Del., who lost her job as an accounts payable clerk during the pandemic. “Upper middle-class families can afford that, but most inner-city, lower-income families can’t afford an extra $200 to $300 a week. You’re talking anywhere between $800 and $1,200 a month — that’s some people’s rent.”

Ms. Paulson is counting on her 14-year-old daughter’s charter school to deliver a capable online experience. “I don’t have that disposable income where I’m able to hire a tutor,” she said.

Debates over nascent pods — some of which will be taught by parents who don’t need to work full time, instead of paid teachers or tutors — have consumed Facebook parents’ groups and online forums. They have created rifts among friends, sparked accusations of “opportunity hoarding” by affluent whites, and compelled some parents to ponder whether and how to include lower-income children in their pods.

The backdrop of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and renewed calls for racial justice has made the conversation all the more trenchant.

“Is it inequitable? A hundred thousand percent,” said Melissa Cohen, a pharmaceutical sales representative in Los Angeles who hired an experienced tutor to oversee distance learning for her two children, with nanny duties thrown in, at a salary of $600 a week plus benefits. “But here’s the thing: What am I supposed to do?”

Some parents, rattled by the unfairness of instructional pods, are exploring how to make them more inclusive. When Myra Margolin, a psychologist and mother of two in Washington, started a Facebook group in June to connect with other parents interested in home-schooling, the page quickly attracted more than 1,000 members, many of whom were eager to form pods.

“I found myself in the middle of this, and it became apparent that it was not a positive trend,” she said. “So I asked, ‘Who wants to help me think through the equity piece of this? It’s totally clear nobody has any idea how to.”

Ms. Margolin recently started a GoFundMe page to subsidize learning pods for lower-income students in Washington. “I had so many people be like, ‘Yes, this is so important, I love this’ — and one $50 donation.”

Education experts say fund-raising efforts and “pod scholarships,” however well-meaning, are no solution for millions of low-income parents juggling the educational, child care and economic challenges of the pandemic.

More useful, they say, would be if school districts or city governments created their own version of learning pods, especially for at-risk students or children of essential workers.

Some districts in Massachusetts are hoping to provide in-person instruction for their most vulnerable students, while in Marin County, Calif., the school system will do so with small groups of special education students. A district near Denver that is starting the year fully remotely is allowing small groups of eligible elementary and middle school students to receive instruction in classrooms staffed by district employees and equipped with good internet access.

San Francisco, aiming for a broader reach, is planning to transform recreation facilities, libraries and community centers into “learning hubs,” where as many as 6,000 students out of a total 54,000 can go daily to complete their online schoolwork. Indianapolis will provide similar “hubs” for its homeless students, with school workers who can help them with assignments. New York last month announced a plan to offer free child care, saying it was looking for space for up to 50,000 students a day — about 5 percent of its total public school population.

“What we need is a kind of quilt of different sources of care in support of learning, between other parents, community-based based organizations, churches and child care centers themselves,” said Elliot Haspel, the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It.” “But it’s not sustainable without Congress passing another significant funding bill.”

He added: “What terrifies me is the idea of the 10-year-olds who are going to be home all day watching the 6-year-olds.”

Ms. Rodriguez has so far recruited two other families for the babysitting co-op she is creating, called Child Poolers of Northeast Pennsylvania. She made a Facebook page for it and posted a video explaining her vision: “tag teams” of two to four host parents who would each take on at least six hours a week of child care during school days.

Instead of going back to her job in a nursing home, which she quit in the spring out of fear for her health and that of her children, Ms. Rodriguez is thinking of delivering food for DoorDash. She also has hopes of incorporating her “child pooling” group as a nonprofit and opening a community center one day.“I need to leave them with someone I trust,” she said of 8-year-old and 11-year-old sons, whom she enrolled in an online charter school after the pandemic began because the public school’s online program seemed so unstructured. “Someone who can just make sure my kids sign in and get their work done.”

Some families will get at least limited help from organizations they relied on before the pandemic for after-school care or academic support. Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America, the YMCA and Boys and Girls Clubs of America all are shifting to provide learning spaces for the upcoming school year, where children can participate in distance learning while being supervised by staff members, often with meals provided. But with social distancing concerns, the programs will not be able to accommodate nearly as many children as usual.

“There are some people that just have to go to work and can’t worry about their 8-year-old being home alone,” said Gabrielle Webster, president and chief executive of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington.

While affluent families were primarily frustrated by the lack of direct interaction with teachers and classmates last spring, many lower-income families had a more pressing concern: just being able to log in, because they lacked good internet connections or even computers. Many districts have vowed to fix those problems, but it is far from clear they will succeed.

In Los Angeles, Rochelle Moreno, a single mother who was laid off from her job at an accounting firm in May, struggled even to afford to replace the ink cartridge in her printer when her 11-year-old son was learning from home last spring.

On top of that, she said, “Our computer wasn’t working. It was too old, we had to upgrade the browser, lost the login, by that point the audio wasn’t working on Zoom. The biggest process was trying to motivate a child already having full issues around mental health, keeping him on task, expecting him to get the work.”

“A tutor would be amazing,” said Ms. Moreno, a cancer survivor who suffers nerve pain in her foot from chemotherapy. “But I have no financial option for that, as I’m already on food stamps and waiting for my social security disability to be approved.”

It’s not only poor children being excluded from pod plans, but also those with learning disabilities or behavioral issues who, regardless of their family income, may not be welcome.

“No one will let in the kid with learning differences or challenges,” one mother posted on DC Urban Moms, a listserv for parents in Washington and its suburbs.

Janille Thompson, whose 8-year-old son attends a charter school in one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods, has not heard about the pod craze or bidding wars for in-home tutors. She can work from home two or three days a week for now, and on the other days will depend on her mother, who is in her late 60s, and her aunt, who is 70, to make sure her son follows his online lessons. He has trouble reading and writing, and while he has a volunteer tutor through a nonprofit group, it is only for two hours a week. And now it is online.

“I hadn’t heard of teachers actually coming to your house and doing tutoring,” said Ms. Thompson, 38. “If I could afford for someone to do that with him — which I’m quite sure I could not — I surely would take advantage of it.”

Dear Commons Community,

As parents nationwide prepare to help their children with more remote learning, a small but growing number are deciding to take matters entirely into their own hands and begin homeschooling. Homeschooling applications are surging in some states including Nebraska, where they are up 21%, and Vermont, where they are up 75%. In North Carolina, a rush of parents filing notices that they planned to homeschool overwhelmed a government website last month, leaving it temporarily unable to accept applications. As reported by the Associated Press.

“There were about 2.5 million homeschool students last year in grades K-12 in the U.S., making up about 3% to 4% of school-age children, according to the National Home Educators Research Institute. Brian Ray, the group’s president, is anticipating that their numbers will increase by at least 10%.

“One day the school district says X and four days later they say Y,” Ray said. “And then the governor says another thing and then that changes what the school district can do. And parents and teachers are tired of what appear to be arbitrary and capricious decisions. They are tired of it and saying we are out of here.”

Interest in homeschooling materials also has been surging, driven in part by parents who are keeping their children enrolled in schools but looking for ways to supplement distance learning.

The National Home School Association received more than 3,400 requests for information on a single day last month, up from between five and 20 inquiries per day before the coronavirus. The group had to increase the size of its email inbox to keep up.

“Clearly the interest we have been getting has exploded,” said J. Allen Weston, the executive director of the suburban Denver-based group. “That is really the only way to describe it.”

Some parents in rural parts of Nebraska are turning to homeschooling because staffing and limited access to home internet leave districts unable to offer a virtual learning option, said Kathryn Dillow, president and executive director of Nebraska Home Schools, a support and advocacy group.

Homeschooling applications continue arriving in Nebraska, where the number of homeschoolers already had risen to 3,400 as of July 14, up from 2,800 at the same time a year ago, said David Jespersen, a spokesman for the Nebraska Department of Education.

Jespersen said there is “a lot of confusion” and that “parents are delayed in making their decision” because so much is changing.

Regardless of the final number, Jespersen doesn’t expect that the increase will bust districts’ budgets because homeschoolers will still remain a small fraction of about 326,000 students spread over the state’s 244 school systems.

Most other states don’t have homeschooling numbers, either because they aren’t collected at the state level or it’s too early. But all indications point to increases across the country.

“Now is when the reality sets in,” said John Edelson, president of Time4Learning, an online curriculum provider, which has seen business explode. “People have postponed the decision, but we are at this great inflection point. And it is hard to see what the angle is going to be, but it is definitely up.”

In Missouri, calls and emails pour into the homeschool advocacy group Families For Home Education each time a district releases its reopening plan, said Charyti Jackson, the group’s executive director. She said families are in a “panic” about virtual starts to the year and hybrid plans in which students attend classes parttime and study at home the rest.

“They are asking, ’What am I supposed to be doing with my children when I am working full time?’” she said.

For the families who only plan to homeschool for a semester or two, some in small groups or pods, her advice is focused on how to make sure students can transition back to public schooling smoothly when the pandemic ends. That’s trickier for students who receive special education services and high schoolers who need to meet their district’s graduation requirements.

…

“It is such a big mess,” said Outschool CEO Amir Nathoo. “A lot of schools spent all summer preparing for a social distanced reopening and now it looks like that isn’t going to happen because of the virus.”

He said the demand for classes has been particularly strong in states that moved aggressively to reopen, including Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona.

Chris Perrin, the CEO of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania-based Classical Academic Press, said curriculum sales to homeschoolers are up by 50% and that enrollment in its online Scholé Academy has increased by 100% amid the pandemic. He said some there was “understandably a lot of bad online learning” in the spring and that some parents were “appalled” as they oversaw it.

“They are saying I can’t stand by and do nothing,” Perrin said. “So they are becoming homeschoolers.”

Tony