Dear Commons Community,

A federal judge yesterday blocked a Louisiana law that was to require a display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state, ruling that it is likely unconstitutional and is similar to another state’s law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980.  As reported in Education Week.

The Louisiana law, H.B. 71, “is impermissible under Stone v. Graham,” said U.S. District Judge John W. deGravelles of Baton Rouge, referring to the high court decision that struck down a similar Kentucky law that required displays of the Ten Commandments.

The judge noted that both laws required such displays on the wall of every public school classroom, contained a “context statement” purporting to explain the historical tradition for such displays, dictated the size of the document, and allowed for private funds to pay the costs.

“Subsequent [Supreme Court] cases do not undermine the application of Stone to this case; they strengthen it, particularly in their emphasis of the heightened First Amendment concerns in the public-school setting given the impressionability of young students and the fact that they are captive audiences,” deGravelles said in his 177-page opinion on Nov. 12 in Roake v. Brumley.

The decision was a victory for Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union, which represent plaintiffs suing to overturn the measure signed into law June 19 by Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican. The law also requires that a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments from the King James Bible be used in the classroom displays.

“This ruling should serve as a reality check for Louisiana lawmakers who want to use public schools to convert children to their preferred brand of Christianity,” said Heather L. Weaver, a senior staff lawyer with the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United, said, “This ruling will ensure that Louisiana families—not politicians or public school officials—get to decide if, when, and how their children engage with religion.”

Louisiana Attorney General Elizabeth Murrill, a Republican, said on the social media platform X that “we strongly disagree with court’s decision & will immediately appeal.”

While the state has numerous arguments about why the law should be upheld under existing precedents, there is a view that the ultimate goal is to get to the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority that has been more open to government accommodation of religion might be willing to overrule the Stone decision and uphold the Louisiana law.

The Louisiana law was set to require the displays by Jan. 1, 2025. State officials defended the requirement as being consistent with history and tradition in this country, and they offered numerous sample displays that showed the Commandments alongside founding U.S. documents or even playfully next to “classroom rules” or the “duel commandments” from the musical “Hamilton.”

DeGravelles, an appointee of President Barack Obama, included the samples in his opinion, but he rejected the state’s arguments that the many possible ways of displaying the Ten Commandments made it impossible for the plaintiffs to succeed on their broad challenge to the law on its face.

The defendants “would have aggrieved parents and children play an endless game of whack-a-mole, constantly having to bring new lawsuits to invalidate any conceivable poster that happens to have the Decalogue on it,” the judge said, noting that the statute still requires the Ten Commandments to be the “central focus” of any display.

DeGravelles rejected the state’s arguments that the 1980 Stone v. Graham decision was no longer good law because the Supreme Court had since rejected a key precedent used in the decision. In Stone, the court ruled 6-3 (in an unsigned opinion issued without oral argument) that the posting of the Ten Commandments on classroom walls served no educational function as they might if they were properly integrated into the curriculum.

Only the Supreme Court may overrule Stone, deGravelles said, which it has not done.

The judge cited a fundraising letter sent by Landry after the lawsuit was filed urging supporters to help him “ADVANCE the Judeo-Christian values that this nation was built upon.”

DeGravelles said such statements and the legislative history behind the statute support a conclusion that “any purported secular purpose was not sincere but rather a sham.”

The judge also rejected the state’s arguments that the historical record showed a longstanding, widespread tradition of displaying the Ten Commandments permanently in public elementary and secondary school classrooms. The state cited such early American schoolbooks as the New England Primer and McGuffey Readers.

DeGravelles credited a report and testimony from the plaintiffs’ expert, Steven Green, a professor of history and religious studies at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., who concluded that history does not support the Louisiana statute’s claim that “the Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”

The judge said the plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged that the Louisiana law violates the First Amendment’s prohibition against government establishment of religion “because it does not fit within and is not consistent with a broader tradition in place at the time of the Founding or incorporation [of the amendment to the states].”

“Moreover, even if there were a broader tradition in play, the practice mandated by the act would be inconsistent with that tradition because it is discriminatory and coercive,” deGravelles said.

I am sure this ruling will be appealed to a higher court.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As a follow-up to my posting last month on chronic absenteeism in New York City schools, I just came across a report issued a couple of weeks ago entitled, Missing School New York’s Stubbornly High Rates of Chronic Absenteeism.  Issued by New York State Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, this report broadens the scope of the issue to New York State and beyond.  Below is an executive summary.  If you are at all interested in the topic, this report is important reading.

Tony

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Executive Summary

Chronic absenteeism is defined by the U.S. Department of Education as the share of students who miss at least 10 percent of days (typically 18) in a school year. Chronic  absenteeism increased during the pandemic and peaked in the 2021-2022 school year. In the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent for which data are available, approximately 1 in  3 New York students were chronically absent from school. Important findings include:

• The chronic absenteeism rates were higher for high school students—34.1 percent, 7.6 percentage points higher than elementary and middle schools. A deep dive into the data for high school students in the 2022-2033 indicates large City (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers) and Charter Schools had the highest chronic absenteeism rates: 64.2 percent and 52.1 percent,  respectively.
• High schools in these designations also had the greatest increase in chronic absenteeism between 2018-2019 and 2022-2023. New York City schools had a 43.1 percent chronic absenteeism rate in the 2022-2023 school year, an increase of 9.3 points.
• Chronic absenteeism rates are higher in high-need school districts than in low-need districts. High need rural districts had a chronic absenteeism rate of 33 percent, a 10.1 percentage point increase from 2018-2019, and high need urban-suburban districts had a rate of 40.9 percent, an 8.6 point increase from 2018-2019. Low-need districts had a chronic absenteeism rate of 13.4 percent.
• There are racial disparities in chronic absenteeism rates. Asian or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander (21.3 percent) and White (24.7 percent) high school students have much lower chronic absenteeism rates than Hispanic or Latino students (43.7 percent) and Black or African American students (46.4 percent).
• Rates are also higher among Economically Disadvantaged students, English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities. In the Large City high schools,the 2022-2023 absenteeism rate for Students with Disabilities was an alarming 71.2 percent.

Reduction of chronic absenteeism has been a point of emphasis at federal, State, and local levels. NYSED has also engaged as a partner with the Council on Children and Families, who launched the Every Student Present initiative, a public awareness  campaign to help parents, school staff and communities understand the impact of chronic absence. The State Education Department should commit to  continuing to report chronic absenteeism for schools and school districts as it currently does, to allow parents, policy makers, and concerned members of the public to understand the issue and track the State’s and district’s progress towards reducing chronic absenteeism rates.

Dear Commons Community,

Chris Wallace, the Emmy-winning broadcast journalist, will be leaving CNN and is looking to establish an independent podcasting or streaming service. Wallace previously worked at NBC News, Fox News and ABC News.  As reported by The Daily Beast.

“Not knowing is part of the challenge. I‘m waiting to see what comes over the transom. It might be something that I haven’t thought of at all,” Wallace told the news outlet. “I have nothing but positive things to say. CNN has been very good to me.”

Notably, Wallace, 77, left Fox News to join CNN in 2021 with the aim of joining CNN+, a subscription streaming service that launched in 2022 and was shuttered a month later. Since then, Wallace has led “The Chris Wallace Show” on CNN, which will wrap up next month, and “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” on Max, which started on CNN+ and will end Friday.

“Chris Wallace is one of the most respected political journalists in the news business with a unique track record across radio, print, broadcast television, cable television and streaming,” CNN Chief Executive Mark Thompson said in a statement, according to CNN. “We want to thank him for the dedication and wisdom he’s brought to all his work at CNN and to wish him the very best for the future.”

Prior to moving to CNN, Wallace appeared on ABC’s “PrimeTime Live,” Fox News Channel’s “Fox News Sunday” and NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and “Today.”

Wallace is the son of legendary “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace, who died in 2012.

Chris Wallace’s departure comes as the news and media landscape continues to evolve, as captured by the rise of successful podcasters and influencers.

I always thought Wallace was one of the best journalists we have on cable news.  I don’t believe CNN ever used him properly.

Tony

Dawn Marie Picciano Divano

Dear Commons Community,

Today we honor and thank all the men and women who served in our armed forces. They gave unselfishly to protect us and secure our way of life.

We are such a better nation because of them!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Technology and loneliness are interlinked, researchers have found, stoked by the ways we interact with social media, text messaging and binge-watching.

Brian X. Chen, the author of Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use, has a featured article in today’s New York Times entitled, How Tech Created a “Recipe for Loneliness.”  He documents three behaviors that are correlate social media use and loneliness as follows:

• On social media apps like Instagram, many fell into the trap of comparing themselves with others and feeling that they were lagging behind their peers.
• Text messaging, by far the most popular form of digital communication, could be creating a barrier to authentic connection.
• And, perhaps unsurprisingly, some people who felt lonely also exhibited addictive personalities — in this case, to streaming videos — that kept them indoors.

Here is an excerpt:

“Over the summer, Laura Marciano, a researcher at Harvard, interviewed 500 teenagers for a continuing study investigating the link between technology and loneliness. The results were striking.

For several weeks, the teenagers, who were recruited with the help of Instagram influencers, answered a questionnaire three times a day about their social interactions. Each time, more than 50 percent said they had not spoken to anyone in the last hour, either in person or online.

To put it another way, even though the teenagers were on break from school and spending plenty of time on social media apps, most of them were not socializing at all.

Americans now spend more time alone, have fewer close friendships and feel more socially detached from their communities than they did 20 years ago. One in two adults reports experiencing loneliness, the physiological distress that people endure from social isolation. The nation’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness an epidemic late last year.

Ever since, scholars and psychologists have accelerated research into whether technology is contributing. The rise of smartphones and social networking apps has forever changed social norms around how we communicate. More personable interactions like phone calls have been superseded by text messages. When people broadcast their lives on TikTok and Instagram, they may not be representing themselves in a genuine way.

“It’s hard to know who’s being real online, and it’s hard for people to be themselves online, and that is a recipe for loneliness,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview. He concluded that loneliness had become an epidemic after reviewing scientific studies and speaking with college students last year, he said.

I went down a rabbit hole for the last few months reading research papers and interviewing academics about tech and loneliness. (Many studies focused on how younger people used technology, but their conclusions were still relevant to older adults who used the same tech.)

The consensus among scholars was clear: While there was little proof that tech directly made people lonely (plenty of socially connected, healthy people use lots of tech), there was a strong correlation between the two, meaning that those who reported feeling lonely might be using tech in unhealthy ways.

Chen goes on to describe further what we should know and what to do with your tech if you’re feeling lonely.

The entire article is worth a read!

Tony

A two-acre brush fire ignited in Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Park on Friday.

Dear Commons Community,

During the Fall dry season we are used to hearing about devastating fires in California and other parts of the American West but not in Brooklyn.  However, a serious brush fire broke out in Brooklyn’s historic Prospect Park on Friday night amid a drought across the northeast.

 A passerby reported the fire at about 6:40 p.m., and firefighters battled the blaze for more than three hours.

“Approximately two acres of extremely dry vegetation in the park ignited among heavy wind gusts,” the FDNY said in a statement.

The FDNY added that it’s been a “historically dry time for New York City” with more than 100 brush fires occurring in the area this month alone.

The fire was in an “extremely dense” part of the park, Tucker said during his news conference. No one was hurt in the fire, and no structures were nearby.

“Firefighters operated overnight to extinguish the blaze and remain on scene with a watch line as a precaution,” the FDNY added in its statement.

On Saturday, New York City and New Jersey were placed under red flag warnings and air quality alerts as nearly a half-dozen wildfires have continued to burn across New Jersey. A wildfire in the Pompton Lakes has grown to more than 160 acres, threatened 55 structures, and was 50% contained as of late Saturday afternoon.

This fall has also been the driest on record for New York City, with just 1.59 inches of rain in Central Park since Sept. 1.

Tony

New Jersey Wild Fire.  Courtesy of ABC News.

Dear Commons Community,.

On Friday night, I saw the movie Conclave which is based on Robert Harris’s best seller of the same name.  I was not disappointed.  The plot and story line are intriguing and keeps the viewer wanting to know what is going to happen next.  There is also a completely unpredictable plot twist that I never saw coming.  Perhaps the best part of the movie is the acting of Ralph Fines, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, and Sergio Castellitto, who is wonderful as a cardinal who yearns for the days of Latin Masses.  Some Catholics may have a problem with the political and financial machinations of the College of Cardinals  but I found it most interesting and intriguing. 

I highly recommend it!

Below is an excerpt of a review published in The New York Times on October 24^th and written by Manohla Dargis.

Tony

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Conclave based on Robert Harris’s 2016 Vatican intrigue of the same title, centers on a British cardinal, Lawrence (a sensational Ralph Fiennes). A cleric of uncertain faith if unwavering convictions about everything else, Lawrence has droopingly sad eyes and refined sensitivities, and serves as the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group charged with selecting the pope, who’s just died. Lawrence is on the move when the story opens, hurrying through dark streets and into a brisk drama filled with whispering, scurrying men, one of whom who will be anointed as the new earthly head of the Catholic Church. There are women, too, though mostly there’s Isabella Rossellini, giving great side-eye as Sister Agnes.

The cardinals keep whispering and scurrying as the story quickly revs up. Lawrence has been enduring a personal crisis — Harris calls it “some kind of spiritual insomnia” — and had asked the pope (Bruno Novelli) if he could leave Rome for a religious retreat. The pope denied him, telling Lawrence that while some are chosen to be shepherds, others need to manage the farm. With the pope dead, the reluctant Lawrence steps up and begins managing, a duty that involves herding scores of cardinals through the intricacies of the conclave, Latin for a room that can be locked. First, everyone needs to be sequestered until the announcement of “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”), but until then, it’s every cardinal for himself.

The story coalesces around the lead candidates, a nicely balanced group of sincere, stealthy and smooth operators who soon circle Lawrence, their silver tongues wagging and hands wringing as they make their moves. The director Edward Berger and his team (the casting directors very much included) have stuffed the movie with a Daumier-esque collection of smooth and bearded, guarded and open faces. The juicy main cast includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and a wonderful Sergio Castellitto, who plays a wolfish smiler who fulminates about the church’s liberal faction and yearns for the days of Latin Masses. The story could have used more of him and much more of his ominous rage.

Several of Harris’s novels have been turned into movies (“The Ghost”), and he’s well-served here both by Berger and by the screenwriter Peter Straughan, who cowrote the superb 2011 version of le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” There’s a great deal of talking in “Conclave,” not just dark-corner murmuring, yet the dialogue remains largely naturalistic throughout. Even when the characters are righteously thumping their red chests or squaring off, the dialogue rarely edges into exposition. That said, at one point, a character delivers the kind of sanctimonious sermon that’s required in mainstream movies that criticize institutions, if not too much, so that they can finally uphold those very same institutions.

Berger, as he exhaustively demonstrated in his last movie, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” likes to keep things — characters, cameras — moving. Here, he finds a more harmonious balance between stasis and action. When the cardinals are tidily assembled in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, facing one another at long tables that flank the room, you can feel the momentum in the men’s ricocheting glances and rigid stillness. Although he doesn’t overdo it, Berger also likes to place the characters, though particularly Lawrence, right in the middle of the frame, which may be a sly nod at Renaissance perspective but also dovetails both with the ceremonial orderliness of this world and with the lugubrious rituals of the conclave.

Lawrence’s crisis of faith continues, waxing and waning even as the voting comes down to the wire. Fiennes, an actor of extraordinary expressive nuance, makes the character’s struggle palpable; you can see his sorrow, and not just for the dead pope, weighing and almost tugging him down like a millstone. At one point, while seated among the other cardinals in the Sistine Chapel, he looks up at Michelangelo’s monumental “The Last Judgment” and fixes on the figure of a damned man, a hunched, visibly distraught soul who’s being dragged to hell by devils. It’s a moment that suggests Lawrence’s spiritual turmoil, a struggle that, in turn, expresses the larger, deeper questions — theological, organizational — facing the church.

A number of such questions emerge in different plot threads. One involves old-school election rigging; another concerns an abuse of power. In the main, partly because the performances pleasurably dominate the movie, these crises register as fairly scattershot and more like personal matters rather than institutional failings. That remains true even as the outside world starts to violently press in on the cloistered clerics and bombs, literal and metaphoric, start going off. One is meant to put all those questions and plot turns into perspective, but because the biggest bombshell arrives so late, so inelegantly and unbelievably, it only blows a yawning hole in the movie. The wreckage is substantial, but its depths are shallowly rendered.

Dear Commons Community,

One of the most famous visages in Egyptian archaeological history, that of King Tutankhamun, might not actually be the young king at all.

After a re-examination of the original 1920s discovery, experts now believe even more strongly that King Tut’s golden burial mask wasn’t originally intended for him at all and was likely designed for a high-status female. It all comes down to the earring holes. As reported by Express and other media.

“This mask was not made for an adult male pharaoh,” said Joann Fletcher, Egyptologist and honorary visiting professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, according to a History Hit documentary reported by Express. “When the gold was compared, [they found] the face is made of completely different gold to the rest.

“Evidence of soldering is clearly visible on the mask,” she said. “It now seems as if Tutankhamun’s own face was effectively grafted onto the mask of the previous ruler. They may have had pierced ears, they may have been a woman, it may well have been [Queen] Nefertiti.”

King Tut’s iconic mask is 21 inches tall, inlaid with precious stones, and features a 5.5-pound golden beard as part of the larger 22.5-pound gold mask. That beard may have been an afterthought when the young ruler died unexpectedly at roughly 19 years of age in 1323.

Originally discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, the records of Carter’s discovery have been kept at the University of Oxford’s Griffith Institute. Fletcher said that not only is there different gold used on the face of the mask than the remainder, but the perforated ears designed around earrings would only have been done for a high-status female or a child, since children often wore earrings in that culture.

Known as the boy king, King Tut the throne in 1332 BC around the age of 9, an appropriate age to wear earrings, but as he grew older during his reign, he would have stopped wearing them well before he died around the age of 19, experts believe.

As theories continue to mount over who the gold mask was really intended for, the latest earring episode only leads further credence to the claim that his stepmother, Queen Nefertiti, whose burial location has never been found (though there are theories), was the original user of the mask.

Tutankhamun reigned until 1323. Scientists believe he died from malaria and had a broken leg, possibly from a chariot crash. His cleft palate, curved spine, and club foot showed he likely struggled with health his entire short life. Those ailments could have resulted from inbreeding, as experts believe his father may have married his own sister, based on DNA from mummified bones.

A somewhat sudden death could have left officials scrambling to get King Tut’s burial chamber in order. A power struggle could have also hurried the process. Additional details show that experts believe the paint in the tomb was still wet when it was sealed. If those in charge of burying the young man needed a mask in a hurry, they may have grabbed one already used, potentially borrowing from one of the most famous queens in all of Egypt.

I saw King Tut’s Tomb in 2009 in the Valley of the Kings, one of the most impressive places I have ever visited!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Governor Kathy Hochul sent out a letter yesterday announcing the Empire State Freedom Initiative that establishes:

“A task force focused on key areas where New York State and New Yorkers are most likely to face threats from a Trump Administration, including reproductive rights, civil rights, immigration, gun safety, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the environment.”

She concluded:

“New York is the birthplace of the women’s rights movement, the environmental justice movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the American labor movement. I’ll work with those who want to be a partner in achieving these goals, but I will not accept an agenda from Washington that rips New Yorkers’ rights away. 

New York saw another significant victory in the long fight for freedom on Tuesday, when New Yorkers overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition One. With the passage of that Proposition, fundamental rights, including the right to an abortion, are now enshrined in our state’s constitution.”

Below is her entire letter.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Teachers’ unions are now putting their own spin on an often-criticized component: teacher preparation.

The Washington Education Association is in its first year of overseeing a teacher residency program, in which aspiring teachers receive on-the-job training (and a paycheck) while they earn their teaching license. It’s the first—and so far, only—preparation program in which a union is taking the lead role in credentialing teachers, although other state unions are interested in following suit. As reported in Education Week .

Teacher residencies have become increasingly popular at colleges and universities, school districts, and nonprofits, and have been supported by federal grants. Some of those efforts have partnered with teachers’ unions, but the unions had not taken a lead role until now.

But the conditions are ripe for more to follow in WEA’s footsteps: Teacher shortages in certain fields are continuing to plague schools; new sources of federal funding are available; and teachers’ unions are looking for ways to bolster their own membership.

“Unions have been trying to find ways to engage members, and to innovate, and I think this is a natural avenue to pursue,” said Bradley Marianno, an associate professor of educational policy and leadership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He expects to see more state teachers’ unions adapt the residency model, either by themselves or with a university partner.

After all, this can double as an organizing strategy at a time when teachers’ unions have been hit with legal and legislative challenges to how they recruit and retain members, he said.

“They are in front of these new teachers and can pitch the benefits of the union,” Marianno said.

In the WEA’s residency program, the residents are union members and are covered by a collective bargaining agreement as they earn their teaching certificates.

“Being able to bargain for them, being able to make sure they get all of that bargaining power as a member when they are a resident, I think, is significant,” said Annie Lamberto, the special populations coordinator for WEA who supervises the program.

Also significant: A union-led residency program is designed for and by teachers, she said.

“Everyone that is involved in our program are current members of WEA, and they’re in the classroom,” Lamberto said. “It doesn’t have that disconnect that you can sometimes find in other teacher-prep programs. … Every single thing we do in our coursework has a direct thread to classroom activities—we don’t make them do anything in our [coursework] that they don’t actually have to perform.”

How Washington’s union-led residency got started

A couple years ago, Washington state schools began relying on record-breaking numbers of emergency substitutes, who aren’t required to have a background in education or a bachelor’s degree.

That pattern was “one of the health indicators that our system is struggling in terms of educator shortages,” said Jim Meadows, the dean of educator career pathways at the WEA.

Chris Reykdal, the state superintendent of public instruction, asked WEA to develop training and support for the emergency substitutes—and create a pathway for teacher certification, Meadows said.

Trade unions in other fields have long run programs to train future workers and supply a pipeline of dues-paying members. And teachers’ unions have long offered professional development, including the clock hours teachers need to maintain their licenses.

“As an organization, we had a strong track record for providing high-quality, relevant, practitioner-led professional learning,” Meadows said.

The WEA received $10.7 million in federal pandemic-relief money from the state, with $6.6 million of it allocated for the union to build and launch a teacher residency program. The first cohort of residents started last year and will graduate in August with their teaching certificate with a special education endorsement.

There are 16 residents in the first cohort who are working in three school districts. The WEA expects to grow to about 30 residents and nine school districts for its second cohort, which will start in June.

The residents are primarily former paraeducators and substitute teachers. They already have bachelor’s degrees, which gives WEA more flexibility: “We do not see our space as being degree-conferring,” Meadows said.

While designing the program, the WEA participated in the National Center for Teacher Residencies’ Residency Design Academy, a consulting service that included a facilitated site visit to another residency to see the work in action.

It was the first time the NCTR worked closely with a union-led teacher residency, said Kathlene Holmes Campbell, the center’s chief executive officer. There’s a lot of opportunity in this space, she said, adding that teachers’ unions are “well positioned” to run such programs, given their experience offering professional learning opportunities to their members.

But in general, it might be beneficial if unions work with an institution of higher education to offer participants a chance to earn a bachelor’s or master’s degree, Campbell said. Creating a pathway to a degree can help attract more diverse candidates.

This sounds like a good idea!

Tony