AlterNet.org: Education

Why Everyone's Signing a New Declaration Deeming Education a Public Good

Richard Eskow, Campaign for America's Future — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:57:00 -0700

As school closures disproportionately hurt Black and low-income students, a new ‘education declaration’ demands education, like clean air, should be available to all without exception.

It seems as if the same battle is being fought in every aspect of American society. On one side are the forces of egalitarianism, economic opportunity and self-determination. On the other is a well-funded and entrenched elite bent on hijacking our media, our political process and our institutions for their selfish ends.

Sadly, the classrooms of this country haven’t been spared.

Means and Ends

The Wall Street crowd wants us to think of education in terms of means – which usually means finding ways to spend less – rather than ends. But when it comes to education, the “ends” are our children. And the means we choose for them, either consciously or through indifference, reveal who we really are as a people.

Perhaps that’s why a new ‘education declaration’ has attracted signatories as diverse as author Dave Eggers; Prof. Robert Reich; education reformer Diane Ravitch; Larry Groce, host of NPR’s Mountain Stage; economist Lawrence Mishel; Prof. Theda Skocpol; and a number of other prominent political, academic, cultural, religious, and educational leaders. (You can sign it too.)

A quick disclaimer: I’m affiliated with the Institute for America’s Future, one of the sponsors of this initiative. I wasn’t involved with its preparation, but I’ve wanted to write about primary and secondary education for a long time. I’ve held off, partly because the moral truths have been restated so many times that they’ve become clichés.

You know the clichés I mean: Nothing’s more important than our children. Kids come first. It takes a village. “I believe the children are our future/teach them well and let them lead the way …”

The real deficit.

When ideas become clichés, we stop listening. As soon as the song’s over we go back to watching politicians boast about who’ll do a better job reducing the deficit – by which they mean the deficit in federal spending, not the deficit in educational resources for our children.

That’s the real deficit, the one that matters, the one that will shape our future. Kids need those resources – not just to learn their ABCs and their 123s, but to help them become fully realized human beings and full participants in society.

Did you know that, according to the most recent Census Bureau report, the amount we spend per child on education just dropped for the first time in nearly forty years?“Teach them well and let them lead the way,” indeed.

The playbook.

A conscience is a tricky thing. It’s tough to live with yourself when you’re shortchanging our kids and our future, no matter how many times you play that old song. What you need is an infusion of “free market” voodoo to convince you – and others – that depriving children of educational resources is for their own good.

Enter Michelle Rhee and Rahm Emanuel and the rest of their ilk, using the same playbook that’s been deployed against Social Security, Medicare and other vital government services. It goes like this:

Pretend that “budgets” are the real crisis – but never mention that corporations and the wealthy are paying less in taxes than ever before in modern history.
Make scapegoats of innocent people to draw attention away from yourselves. For Social Security they’ve attacked “greedy geezers,” but it’s hard to come up with a catchy equivalent for kids. (“Insatiable imps”? “Avaricious anklebiters”?) So they vilify teachers instead.
Sell a fantasy which says that the private sector can do more, with less money, than government can. (Never, never mention that private insurance provides far less healthcare than public insurance, at much higher cost. And don’t bring up the mess privatization’s made of prisons and other government services.)
Find a name that doesn’t use words like “money-making.” How about “charter schools”?
Describe yourselves as “reformers” – rather than, say, “demolishers.” That’s why “entitlement reform” is used as a euphemism for cutting Social Security and Medicare. (Michelle Rhee even called her autobiography “Radical.” Apparently “Shameless” was taken.)
Employ the political and media elite’s fascination with (and poor understanding of) numbers. Suggest that “standardized” and “data-driven” programs will solve everything – without ever mentioning that the truly ideological decisions are made when you decide what it is you’re measuring.
Co-opt the elite media into supporting your artificial description of the problem, as well as your entirely self-serving solution.
Use your money to co-opt politicians from both parties so you can present your agenda as “bipartisan” – a word which means you can “buy” a few “partisans” from both sides.

It shouldn’t be surprising that all these attacks share a common playbook. The money’s coming from the same pockets, and for the same reasons: so they can keep their own taxes low – and make money from the privatization schemes.

The Declaration

A lot of well-intentioned people get taken in by cynical agendas like this, especially when the other side isn’t being heard. That’s where the “Declaration” comes in. It says that “Education is a public good.” A public good is something that is, or should be, available to all without exception, like clean air, drinkable water, and the national defense.

The Declaration also says education funding should be “equitable and sufficient.” No child should be deprived of educational opportunity because of race or income. The map shown below reveals how badly we’re breaking that promise and targeting budget cuts toward minority schools. The Declaration points a finger at this shameful outcome and says that minority children, like all other children, deserve an opportunity to learn.

The Declaration also says that “National responsibilities should complement local control,” which I would interpret as follows: Every state or county manages its schools. But as the nation learned in Birmingham and Little Rock, our civil rights are universal.

And the opportunity to learn is a civil right.

Standards, not standardized.

The Declaration doesn’t reject the idea of standards per se. But it does say, rightly, that they should be “diagnostic assessments that go beyond test-driven mandates and help teachers strengthen the classroom experience for each student.”

Instead, for 30 years we’ve been moving our educational system toward a goal of absolute standardization, a production-line process in which graduating students are uniform and interchangeable “outputs” to be produced at the lowest possible cost – each equipped with the optimum utility value for the corporations that will employ increasingly few of them.

But that’s not what education is for. Not in a free and democratic society.

The Declaration also observes that “an education agenda that imposes top-down standards and punitive high-stakes testing while ignoring the supports students need to thrive and achieve … (is) turning public schools into uncreative, joyless institutions.”

Joyless lives are for kids in Dickens novels or systematized Orwellian dystopias. They shouldn’t be the fate of today’s American children.

Beating the System

The corporate System – and it is a system - doesn’t want to produce any more student “outputs” than it needs, or any who won’t be useful corporate tools. And it’s perfectly fine for the System if poor and minority kids don’t get a decent education. The System didn’t need their parents and it doesn’t need them either.

Music programs? The System doesn’t need violin-playing ghetto kids or schoolgirls who’d rather play the drums than twirl a baton. Arts programs? Our corporate walls are already lined with Kandinskys and Klees, thank you very much.

But our nation’s children aren’t “outputs.” They’re human beings. “Education is not the filling of a pail,” said William Butler Yeats, “but the lighting of a fire.”

We’re told that our children are citizens of a great, powerful, and democratic nation. Their education must be equal to those claims. They should be prepared to assume the full rights and duties of citizenship, prepared to determine their society’s fate. The System may not want that kind of education for our children. But we do. That’s why we have a democracy.

In the face of a heartless system, it’s time to reaffirm a basic human value: Education is every child’s birthright, and it should honor the humanity which every child possesses.

Human.

That includes arts programs. “Imagination is not a state,” said William Blake, “it is the human existence itself.”

The purpose of education is to help us fully realize and express our identities, and to enable us to exercise our freedoms wisely. Anything less means we are a society that is neither fully human nor fully free.

It’s time to declare our unequivocal support for education that draws on the best of us, in a humane and just way. It’s time to reject the cynical values that choose profits over people – especially the youngest people among us.

It’s time to declare that each and every one of our nation’s children possesses a rare and precious quality, whether their schools are in the Hamptons or Harlem, Northampton or the Navajo Nation, Arcadia or Appalachia.

It’s time to declare that each is, fully and profoundly and beautifully, human.

(You can sign the Declaration here.)

(Courtesy of the Opportunity to Learn Campaign.)

NYU’s Gilded Age: Students Struggle With Debt While Vacation Homes Are Lavished on the University’s Elite

Pam Martens, Russ Martens, AlterNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:41:00 -0700

The problems at NYU are emblematic of an insular institution whose Board is heavily dominated by the same Wall Street people who heaped disgrace upon their own institutions.

A review of deeds and mortgages in some of the toniest towns on the East Coast reveals that not only is New York University financing luxury Manhattan brownstones and high rise condos for its faculty and administrators out of its nonprofit coffers, it has also been secretly financing country homes for a select group. These extravagances have fallen directly on the shoulders of financially struggling students. NYU ranks fourth in Newsweek’s 2012 list of the least affordable colleges.

In September 2009, the New York Times published a remarkable exercise in inanity, profiling John Sexton, President of NYU, relaxing at his Fire Island beach house. Sexton calls his summer getaway a “rather large, wonderful house” in the interview. We learn what Sexton eats for breakfast (black coffee and yogurt), the name of his dog (Legs), how long it takes him to walk to church from the ferry (five minutes), how much weight he’s lost (30 pounds), and little else.

We don’t, for example, learn from the interview that his home on Fire Island has been financed since 1994 by several million dollars in loans from the NYU School of Law Foundation and NYU itself, according to the Suffolk County Clerk’s records.

This is not the only residence that NYU has made possible for its President. He has the use of two well appointed apartments owned by NYU in Manhattan. Sexton, who turned 70 in September, is also set to receive a length of service bonus of $2.5 million in 2015 and an annual pension of $800,000 when he retires. That pension is the equivalent of NYU taking $10 million of its assets and placing them in an immediate annuity for Sexton.

Sexton has plenty of company when it comes to getting out of the city in the summer through the generosity of NYU. Richard Tsien, Director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute, bought a house in East Fishkill, New York, 76 miles from the university, for $1,125,000 in February 2012 with $500,000 in financing from NYU. According to an online description, it’s a stone house on 7 park-like acres with a flowing stream and a functioning 12-foot water wheel.

Numerous other NYU professors have country homes financed by the NYU School of Law Foundation or NYU. Between primary residences and vacation homes, NYU and its affiliated nonprofits have an estimated $72 million to $96 million outstanding in loans to faculty and administrators. The university has acknowledged 168 loans.

These revelations come on top of other recent outrages at the university, such as the purchase of a $6.15 million condo on East 70th Street to house Robert Grossman, Dean of the NYU Medical Center. Grossman’s combined compensation at NYU as of the fiscal year ending August 31, 2011 was $3,488,960. Five other doctors at the Medical Center receive a combined total of $10.5 million in compensation.

The excesses at NYU under the presidency of John Sexton came partially to light during the Senate confirmation hearings of Jack Lew, President Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary. As NYU’s Chief Operating Officer, Lew had received a partially forgivable mortgage loan for $1.4 million to buy a luxury home in Riverdale and “severance pay” of $685,000 – even though he had voluntarily left to join Citigroup. In testimony to the Senate, Lew said NYU provided him with an annual payment equal to the interest paid on his mortgage.

Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary, was part of Lew’s confirmation hearings and was deeply disturbed by Lew’s opaque and grudging release of the materials requested. As a result of what he had heard in the hearing, Grassley sent a March 15, 2013 letter to NYU requesting “all loan documents for loans made to individuals from 2000 to the present,” along with a demand to know the details about whose loans were forgiven, interest reimbursed, and so forth.

It’s now three months later and according to a spokesperson for Grassley, his office still doesn’t have all the loan documents. NYU is refusing to turn over the documents, instead forcing Grassley’s aides to look at the documents in the presence of NYU lawyers and “take notes but not make copies of the documents.” The next session is scheduled for June 27, according to the spokesperson. Grassley is a Republican. Because the Democrats have majority control in the Senate, Grassley lacks subpoena power.

The NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors has asked the New York State Attorney General’s Charities Bureau, which oversees nonprofit organizations, to probe the mushrooming mortgage scandal and other matters. The faculty at a number of schools on the campus have delivered a no-confidence vote of Sexton, with particular ire arising from his NYU 2031 plan to broadly expand NYU’s real estate footprint in Greenwich Village with vast construction projects earmarked that would disrupt neighborhood life and cost the university billions of dollars. NYU is already the second largest real estate owner in New York City, with $3.3 billion in residential and commercial holdings according to its 2010 federal tax return.

I emailed one Law Professor, Geoffrey Miller, who had a home in New Rochelle financed by the NYU School of Law Foundation, and asked why he didn’t simply use the NYU Federal Credit Union, as many other faculty have done to finance their homes. The Credit Union’s web site indicates that it offers a “full range” of home mortgage loans in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont, up to a cap of $750,000. I also asked Miller if his loan was forgivable. Miller responded that he wouldn’t provide “personal financial information” over the internet. Of course, I wasn’t asking for sensitive things like account numbers or social security numbers or even dollar amounts. I was asking two very basic questions: why didn’t you use the Credit Union and was your loan forgivable.

I reached out to NYU to justify these loans under IRS rules for 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations, the structure under which both NYU and the School of Law Foundation are organized. One rule is quite specific, warning that 501(c)(3)s “must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests, and no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.”

NYU spokesman, John Beckman, responded: “NYU is located in the highest cost-of-living area in the country. NYU loan programs are one part of strategy that has transformed New York University over the last several decades from a regional, largely commuter, school to one of the top ranked research universities in the world. A core tenet of the transformation was to create a cohesive, residential academic community of faculty, students, and administrators committed to and interacting in university life, including academic and extracurricular activities (and, in the case of senior administrators, where they can be available around the clock).”

But that doesn’t explain Sexton’s home 57 miles from Manhattan or Tsien’s home an hour and a half away or any of the other country homes far outside of New York City. If anything, it’s an argument against the ability to have senior administrators “available around the clock.” (Not that this is an acceptable practice under any circumstance.)

Beckman continued on the matter of country homes: “NYU loan programs, while primarily targeted for the purchase of principal residences accessible to campus, also can assist in meeting other financial needs of the accomplished faculty and senior administrators that NYU seeks to recruit and retain in a highly competitive market for such talent. NYU’s peer institutions typically also have loan programs and other housing assistance programs for faculty and senior administrators. For these reasons, NYU's loans are directly related to NYU’s exempt purposes.”

One detail on NYU’s 2010 federal tax filing raises further red flags. A little footnote reads as follows: “One highest compensated employee received compensation over a base salary based on the surplus of revenues after expenses for the IVF Faculty Practice Group.” That would seem to be in direct conflict with the IRS ruling that “no part of a section 501(c)(3) organization’s net earnings may inure to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual.”

IVF refers to in vitro fertilization, available through the NYU Medical Center’s Fertility Center. Two individuals appearing on NYU’s highest compensated individuals’ listing on the 2010 tax filing for NYU are Dr. Jamie Grifo, listed as earning $2.9 million, and Dr. Nicole Noyes, listed at $1.8 million. Both are listed as employees of the Fertility Center on its web site.

One person who is not getting financing from NYU for a country home, a city home or a multi million dollar salary is Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights activist and lawyer who has been a fellow at NYU for the past year. Chen had escaped house arrest in China and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing before arriving at NYU.

Chen released a statement Sunday night, saying he was getting the boot at NYU because of pressure from the government in China. Since the New York Post ran an article to that effect last Thursday, NYU has vehemently denied the accusation. NYU plans to open a campus in Shanghai this fall, a plan that requires the goodwill of Chinese officials. The plan has caused great controversy at NYU because of ongoing human rights abuses by the totalitarian government there. NYU’s campus in autocratic Abu Dhabi is equally contentious, with faculty charging that NYU is simply selling its brand abroad in exchange for big donations.

The problems at NYU are emblematic of an insular institution whose Board is heavily dominated by the same Wall Street people who heaped disgrace upon their own institutions. The NYU Association of American University Professors has proposed a broad new blueprint for governance at NYU. It includes faculty and student representation on the Board of Trustees, participation in selecting new presidents and provosts, the ability of faculty to have a say in any domestic or global expansion plans, and a full knowledge of the university’s fiscal affairs. When John Sexton returns from Fire Island and meets with the Board, adopting the new management model should be the first order of business.

This Week in Poverty: Congress Turns Its Back on Rural America

Greg Kaufmann, The Nation — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:02:00 -0700

Kansas, and other rural states and communities, are experiencing a harsh blow to early childhood education due to recent sequester cuts.

The following article first appeared on the Nation.com. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here.

For fifteen years in Neodesha, Kansas (population 2,486) there were only two options for early childhood education services in town: a program for at-risk 4-year-olds operated by the school district, and a Head Start Center for children ages 0 through 5 run by the Southeast Kansas Community Action Program (SEK-CAP).

SEK-CAP offers a range of services to twelve counties, responding to the housing, utilities, transportation, employment, medical care, child care, education and nutrition needs of low-income people in Southeast Kansas. The counties have a combined population of approximately 192,000 people and the child poverty rate is nearly 26 percent—an increase of more than 13 percent in the past year. The past three years have also seen a rise in unemployment, food and housing insecurity, as well as agricultural and natural disasters.

Due to sequester cuts, SEK-CAP decided in May that it could no longer afford to operate the Head Start Center in Neodesha (pronounced “Nee-OH-duh-shay”), which served seventeen children and their families, and employed five staff members. The rental and maintenance costs of the building made this closure the obvious choice for the agency to find the savings forced upon it by Congress.

Gray said the affect of the cuts is far more significant than “it might appear on paper.”

“When you’re talking about people’s lives, and their ability to maintain gainful employment, or ensure that their children are receiving age-appropriate care and intellectual stimulation, then the cuts become incredibly deep and incredibly apparent,” said Gray.

In addition to instruction at the center, teachers made monthly home visits to work on family and education goals. Every child had an individualized education plan based on an assessment of his or her needs.

“My oldest son struggled with gross-motor skills for a while, so we focused on that and got him where he needs to be,” said Amanda Tompkins, chair of the SEK-CAP Policy Council and a Head Start parent who sent three children through the program. “My daughter was advanced in her speaking ability, so the teacher gave me tools so that I could [help] her grow that skill. The program has taught me how to be a mom and a teacher for my children.”

Linda Broyles, director of early childhood services for SEK-CAP, said that Tompkins’s experience is typical for a Head Start family.

“It’s more than just a preparation for the educational system, [it’s] comprehensive family services,” said Broyles. “That means working with the whole family to set and attain goals, increase positive behaviors, establish preventative health care and create a lifelong love of learning and education.”

“There are no other means of comprehensive family-centered services in the town,” said Kristie Groff, a teacher at the center for twelve years.

The sequestration cuts in Southeastern Kansas have had somewhat of a domino effect. SEK-CAP also offered home-based services to ten children and their families in the town of Parsons (pop. 10,454) in neighboring Labette County, where the child poverty rate for children under age 5 is over 31 percent. These home-based slots are now going to be moved to Neodesha—to partly compensate for the loss of the Head Start Center—because there are other early childhood education alternatives in Parsons.

“Some of those alternatives might be cost prohibitive for some families, but the fact is Neodesha needs the [home-based program] more now. It was just our best possible fix,” said Gray.

A teacher visited the ten families in Parsons once a week, for an hour and a half, to provide age-appropriate activities and referral services to address other family needs such as transportation difficulties or a desire to pursue continuing education. The program also offered “socialization opportunities” twice per month. These events usually included nutrition education and preparation of a healthy snack or meal, age-appropriate games and time for the adults to break off and hold a meeting.

“It’s an opportunity to train parents about the program, and they can share their questions or concerns, so it’s fantastic for communication and a sense of community,” said Tompkins. “And if you’re a stay-at-home mom and don’t have an outlet, these daytime play dates are pretty important so you don’t tear your hair out.”

Gray said the home-based services are especially important for parents struggling with transportation and employment, and sometimes education.

“The focus on health and nutrition leads to budgeting food dollars, which leads to budgeting your household resources,” she said. “These are the kinds of supports that help families move out of poverty.”

As early childhood education services are lost for low-income people with limited options in towns like Parsons and Neodesha, the concern is that too many parents are turning to “the house down the street” to watch their kids, said Gray.

“Often times that is more child care than early childhood development,” said Gray. It’s also more often than not an unlicensed facility, which is why it’s affordable. “In a licensed facility we know there is appropriate safety and hygiene, and there are age-appropriate, developmentally appropriate activities. We don’t necessarily know that those things are in place in an unlicensed facility.”

Gray said that the sequester cuts in some cases are more significant in rural areas—where families might have to travel “forty miles one way”—than in “a larger metropolitan city, where two or three blocks away there might be another option.”

“Rural America often gets overlooked. We know Kansas is referred to as a ‘Flyover State’,” said Gray. “But there are a lot of people here, and a lot of people in poverty. Sequestration is just one cut. It’s the impact of that steady erosion of financial resources that is much greater in rural communities—because there are far fewer resources.”

Tompkins believes the long-term costs of these sequester cuts are being overlooked by policymakers.

“I see all of the benefits of Head Start services—early education, early intervention, early detection for children ages 0 to 5,” she said. “The people who are making these decisions—they just see the numbers that cross their desk."

62-Year-Old Former Cop and School Security Guard Caught Having Sex With 16-Year-Old Student

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:52:00 -0700

62-year-old school security guard Dale Malesh has been charged with criminal sexual conduct after allegedly having sex with a 16-year-old student.

A retired police officer from Warren, Michigan is accused of having sex with a 16-year-old student who attends the high school where the officer works as a security guard. CBS News in Detroit reports that 62-year-old Dale Malesh is being held on $500,000 bond for criminal sexual conduct. The news comes at a time when politicians have called for more armed security guards in schools after the Newtown massacre.

Prosecutor Eric Smith said that the sex took place over the course of a few months. Malesh and the girl allegedly had sex at his home and in a park.

Smith said: “Here Warren puts a police officer in there that they think is going to do a nice job and they think is going to help protect a kid, and instead he uses as his own … dating site and finds a 16-year-old girlfriend.” The prosecutor added that the teenager has feelings for Malesh and said that the accusations were overblown.

Michigan law states that the age of consent is 16, though if the person is in a position of authority the consent age is 18.

“The defendant was in a position of authority over her,” said Smith. “He was a school liaison officer, a police officer, and then hired later on as a school security officer.”

Malesh is facing 15 years in prison for his alleged crimes.

School security guards and police officers have been a fact of the American school system for years, and accelerated after the Columbine shootings. While the sexual abuse Malesh is accused of is an extreme example, it does point to what some advocates say is a problem with putting security guards in schools: they abuse their power.

For instance, in May 2013, the Courthouse News Service reported that a student was arrested and then beaten by a school police officer for falling asleep in class. Other examples of abuse perpetrated by officers or security guards in schools are easy to find.

Christian College Expels Student Over Lesbian Relationship--And Then Demands $6,000 in Tuition

Alex Kane, AlterNet — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 07:02:00 -0700

Nebraska-based Grace University is billing Danielle Powell for tuition after Powell was expelled for being in a same-sex relationship.

At Grace University, a conservative Christian college in Nebraska, students are not allowed to even give prolonged hugs. So when 24-year-old Danielle Powell fell in love with a woman, it meant trouble for her.

Powell now says she was expelled because of the same-sex relationship. But that’s not all: she was also sent a $6,000 bill the school said she owed in federal loans and grants because she didn’t finish the semester, the Associated Press reports, and copies of her transcript weren’t given when initially requested. She is being asked to pay even after she went through counseling and mentoring over to the lesbian relationship she was in. The school says the payment is required by federal law, but the U.S. Department of Education contradicted that claim.

The school had initially re-admitted Powell after she was suspended because Powell went through the required counseling. But the school quickly went back on that, and she was kicked out permanently.

Powell is now battling Grace over the bill. She says her school costs were covered by a scholarship.

Powell’s wife has started a Change.org petition in protest of the tuition bill.

“I shouldn’t have this debt hanging over me from a school that clearly didn’t want me,” Powell told the AP.

A staffer at the gay rights organization Lamba Legal told the AP that Powell’s case was unique because the school wanted money back. Usually, Christian universities are just glad to be rid of students like Powell.

The U.S. Department of Education told the news outlet that the money issue is between Powell and her school, but not because of federal law. Some Christian schools like Grace are not required to adhere to all federal guidelines if it conflicts with their faith.

“Grace and other private colleges that accept federal student aid — sometimes called Title IV funding — must abide by the Civil Rights Act that forbids discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, sex, age or physical handicap. But sexual orientation is not included in that list,” the Associated Press notes.

Minors Who Commit Sex Crimes Shouldn't Be Branded for Life as Sex Offenders

Lindsey Bever, The Guardian — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:51:00 -0700

The punishment should fit the crime, certainly, but our system shouldn't brand teens 'sexting' each other as child pornographers.

Two high school football players will be labelled as sex offenders in an Ohio courtroom this week.

Seventeen-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma'Lik Richmond of Steubenville, Ohio – both convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl last year – will be classified as sex offenders during their hearing on 14 June. The judge who tried their case in juvenile court will place the teens at one of three sex offender levels. Unlike adult sex offenders, the teenagers' names will not be put on publicly accessible websites. Nevertheless, the teens will still become registered sex offenders.

Rulings like these often restore our faith in the American legal system – not only should we punish those who commit heinous crimes against children, but we should also make their crimes known as a way of protecting others who could unknowingly become their next victim. Then again, it's imperative to remember that – regardless of the crime they committed – these two are still minors themselves.

That's not to say these teenagers shouldn't be punished. They should. Rightly so, their cases were tried in a juvenile courtroom. But now, the two face a transfer from a state juvenile detention centre to a facility that works with sex offenders – setting up a dirty past that will likely follow them.

In 2006, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act was signed into law, forcing states to amp up registration systems to track those who commit crimes against children. It was a positive step toward cracking down on criminals who are often considered the worst of the worst.

But let's not forget: children who commit sex crimes almost always do so with or against other children. Human Rights Watch released a report last month that spells out the harm public registration laws – which apply for decades or even a lifetime – can cause for juvenile sex offenders. The classification restricts where kids can go to school, where they can work and even where they can build a life. Offenders are prohibited from living near parks, playgrounds, schools or areas where children gather.

Federal and state registration laws have their place and are needed; but too often, the punishment doesn't fit the offender – or the crime. Yes, many juveniles who have been forced to register as sex offenders were convicted of grave crimes such as rape. But some were convicted of consensual sex with other kids. Others were convicted of public nudity – an offence many children can claim. It's time to look at these laws and establish clear guidelines regarding their application.

In 2011, there were about 747,000 registered sex offenders in the US, according to Human Rights Watch. Depending on the state, that number could include a drunken frat boy who got caught urinating in public where children were present, or two teenagers who can't keep their hands off each other. Most shocking, in some states, kids who are caught "sexting" each other, or sending nude photos via text message, could be considered guilty of distributing child pornography, especially in states that have not addressed sexting in the laws. That means that teenagers who "sext" could potentially be labelled sex offenders.

For example, a 15-year-old Pennsylvania girl was charged with manufacturing and disseminating child pornography in 2004 for posting nude photos of herself on the internet. She was charged as an adult and now faces registration for life as of last year, according to Human Rights Watch.

Should instances like these be legal? Of course not. But let the punishment fit the crime. Holding youthful offenders to the same, or even a similar, standard as adults can cause irreversible harm – ranging from public humiliation to emotional and psychological damage. Secondarily, it often causes severe educational disadvantages since the presence of young sex offenders in a traditional school setting is typically forbidden.

Rehabilitation should always be the first consideration when trying children who commit sex crimes – whether with a willing or an unwilling participant. With minor offences such as public urination, give them community service. For sexting, send them to counselling. And for rape, charge and sentence them in a juvenile court. But do not mark them with a label that could last a lifetime.

Some state laws are more careful to classify the wide range of "sex crimes" appropriately, but there should be a nationwide system in place to protect children's privacy rights. If the purpose is truly to put these kids on a crime-free path in the future, then give them something to work toward today.

How Corporate Greed Is Starving Our Public School System

Paul Buchheit, AlterNet — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 19:32:00 -0700

The total cost of K-12 educational cutbacks in recent years is about equal to the amount of state taxes left unpaid by these companies.

We hear a lot about corporations avoiding federal taxes. Less well known is their non-payment of state taxes, which along with local taxes make up 90% of U.S. education funding.

Pay Up Now just completed a review of 2011–12 tax data from the SEC filings of 155 of the largest U.S. corporations. The results show that the total cost of K-12 educational cutbacks in recent years is approximately equal to the amount of state taxes left unpaid by these companies.

Corporations Neglect Their State Tax Responsibilities

For 2011 and 2012, the 155 companies paid just 1.8 percent of their total income in state taxes, and 3.6 percent of their declared U.S. income. The average required rate for the 50 states is 6.56 percent.

Similar results were found in a Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) report on 2008–10 state taxes. In their evaluation of 265 large companies, CTJ determined that an average of 3% was paid in state taxes, less than half the average state tax rate. The results are summarized at Pay Up Now.

How much money is this? The 2011–12 underpayment, for just 155 top-earning companies, is about $14 billion per year. In the 2008–10 study, CTJ noted that "these 265 companies avoided a total of $42.7 billion in state corporate income taxes over the three years." That's also about $14 billion per year.

Unpaid State Taxes Are More Than ALL the K-12 Cuts

A comparison of the above results with educational cutbacks shows the devastating impact of tax avoidance on our children. A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) report revealed that total K-12 education cuts for fiscal 2012 were about $12.7 billion. A separate analysis of CBPP data shows total 2008–12 cutbacks of about $20 billion. According to the Census Bureau, K-12 funding rose about 5% a year from 1998 to 2008, after which it leveled off and began to decline.

More stunningly, higher education experienced a nearly $17 billion state appropriations cut in 2012–13, in comparison to 2007–8. Much of the shortfall was made up by tuition increases. As noted by the CBPP, "The entire increase in tuition at public colleges and universities over the last 25 years has gone to make up for declining state and local revenue." Tuition has risen almost 600% over those 25 years.

Games Corporations Play to Take Our State Funds

Maddening as this is, a look at behind-the-scenes corporate subterfuge makes it even worse. A Good Jobs First report describes how companies play one state against another, holding their home states hostage for tax breaks under the threat of bolting to other states, with the whole process masked in inspirational language: "business recruitment" and "retention incentives" instead of the more accurate description of transferring jobs to the state that offers the most generous subsidies. The report notes that "This is a net loss game, with footloose companies shrinking the tax base necessary for the education and infrastructure investments that benefit all employers."

Good Jobs First also reported on the personal income tax (PIT) subsidy, through which employers simply take the state tax paid by their workers. States are pressured into such agreements to keep corporations from moving out. Employees, as a result, are effectively "paying taxes to their boss."

The Impact on All of Us

The end result of this hostage-taking is a breakdown in public services, most notably in education. Schools are deemed to be "not working," and a frantic rush toward privatization leads to even more tax cuts for the business interests charged with the responsibility of "fixing" the broken system. But rarely are we informed that it's our self-serving business and political leaders who broke the system.

How Predatory Reformers Are Destroying Education and Profiting at Our Children's Expense

Michael Gecan, Boston Review — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:46:00 -0700

Online courses can't replace the good old fashioned teaching methods we once pioneered but are now driving Finland's educational success.

Several months ago, on a damp gray afternoon, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Racine, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from the Lake Michigan shoreline. That weekend a colleague and I would be conducting a leadership training session with teachers, parents, and community leaders, and I thought I’d get a feel for Racine during my visit. I was the shop’s sole customer. Main Street was nearly deserted. Now and then, a single car or passerby would appear. The city has a busy and curious past: it was a destination for New England Unitarians and record numbers of Danes; residents were staunch opponents of slavery and set up safe stops along the Underground Railroad; reportedly one of the world’s first cars was built there in the early 1870s; malted milk and the garbage disposal were invented and produced there. But signs of that history were nowhere to be found. The city has lost 16,000 occupants since 1970, when 95,000 people lived there.

A few hours later, in a large hall in a Roman Catholic retreat center a few miles up the shore, more than 40 Racine residents were seated in groups of six around large round tables. As part of the session, I circulated a one-pager that we had created as the basis of a drill and asked the group to read it. It began:

The School District has announced that it has signed an agreement with a major online learning company—Future Success, Inc.—and MIT to produce a world-class math curriculum. Because of private capital raised by Future Success, the entire program—equipment, software, laptops for all district students, and even subsidies to support Internet services for families in need—will be provided at no cost to the District for the first two years. . . . Cost savings will be created due to a shift in staffing patterns. In the traditional approach, 116 teachers were needed to deliver math instruction to the district’s students. . . . Only 42 will be needed under the new arrangement.

As the group concentrated on the page, there was a stirring at one of the tables. A fellow in his 50s spoke up. “Hey, wait a minute. This isn’t a drill,” he said. “I teach at the local technical college, and this has already happened to us.” He described how his job as a teacher had changed. He once related to 20 or 30 students in a classroom several times a day to but now was a technician who sat in front of his computer responding to emails from 200 online students and grading online homework and tests.

Changes such as this are happening all over the Midwest. If you spend any time there, away from the Chicago lakefront and the few thriving smaller cities built around major universities, you can see and feel what happens to a region when its past glories have badly faded and no new ones have emerged: dying downtowns, abandoned mills, gardens and vegetable plots in the heart of depopulated inner cities, the most functional remaining factories now operating as modern corporate operations in once-rural areas. Mechanization and globalization have reconfigured agriculture and manufacturing in ways that are easy to discern. Less obvious, less visible, less dramatic is the transformation in education, the Midwest’s third great area of entrepreneurial energy and national leadership.

For about 150 years, the Midwest’s education philosophy—a philosophy that prevailed elsewhere in the United States as well, if less emphatically—was centered on a commitment to preparing students to do useful work. Local people, connected to their communities, built successful schools based in large part on this pragmatic principle. But today this principle is undercut by political demands for ever-shifting versions of reform, by market demands for efficiency, by smothering student debt loads, and by the mistaken priorities of colleges racing for prestige. The debate over improving education—in the Midwest and throughout the country—often seems hopeless, but it turns out that we have long known what to do and are now suffering from the abandonment of the good methods we once pioneered and practiced.

• • •

Between the 1820s and the 1970s, the Midwest was home to at least three waves of educational expansion and innovation. First was the establishment of scores of small colleges, then thousands of high schools, and finally hundreds of community and technical colleges. The founding of so many new educational institutions, over an extended period of time, scattered over a massive region today home to roughly 100 million people, created social change of such scale and longevity that it has become part of the fabric of the nation, so engrained it has largely escaped notice.

Beginning in the 1820s, the Midwest generated a critical mass of new colleges—Oberlin and Ohio Wesleyan in Ohio, Grinnell in Iowa, Knox and Wheaton in Illinois, Beloit and Lawrence in Wisconsin, Earlham and Butler (née North West Christian) in Indiana, Alfred in Western New York, and many more. Towns competed with one another to attract new colleges the way modern communities vie for a new casino, a state-of-the-art prison, or the next superstore. These were denominational schools, with strong religious ties. Theological and moral education and discussion were common. In their early years, many of the colleges included a commitment to manual labor as part of the curriculum. Far ahead of the Ivy League schools in the east, these embraced co-education. If they are remembered as a group at all, these schools are thought of, as Kenneth Wheeler has written in his fine book, Cultivating Regionalism (2011), as hotbeds of progressivism.

What’s forgotten, or minimized, and what Wheeler reminds us of, is that the region also “emphasized productivity and usefulness . . . and valued creativity and new ideas.” This culture “led naturally to a career choice of science, with . . . its emphasis on experimentation and receptivity to new possibilities, and its propensity toward usefulness.” One son of a Congregationalist minister, Grinnell graduate Robert Noyce, went on to found both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation and to launch a new business culture in a place we now call Silicon Valley. The impact of the Midwestern culture of usefulness was sustained well into the early and even middle part of the 20th Century and captured in a single sentence by Marilynne Robinson in her novel Gilead: “To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear.”

The second wave, the “high school movement,” gained strength while the first wave was still rolling forward. “The supply of educated Americans increased greatly and almost unceasingly from 1900 to around 1980,” Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz write in The Race Between Education and Technology(2008). “The towns of the Midwest, especially the tiny towns, were wellsprings of social capital and thus of schools and human capital.”

The enormous increase in educational attainment in the early part of the twentieth century came primarily from a grass-roots movement that propelled the building and staffing of public high schools. It was not due to a top-down mandate or pressure from the federal government, nor did it result from powerful local interest groups or arise because of legal compulsion.

In 1910, only 19 percent of Americans of high school age were enrolled in a school and not quite 9 percent graduated nationwide. By 1970, approximately 96 percent were enrolled and nearly 78 percent graduated. This was a national phenomenon, not just a Midwest trend, but it was very much a fact of Midwest life during this period. “In some parts—such as the Northeast, the West, and much of the central part of the nation—high schools spread like wildfire and youth flocked to them in droves.” While this expansion was deeply connected to local communities and local leaders, people understood that what they were doing was a massive and unique educational experiment, historic in both scope and scale.

When we think of a movement in modern times, we imagine something like Occupy Wall Street or a massive march. We see thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individuals gathered for an event or a campaign. We see slogans, banners, charismatic leaders, riveting speeches, sharp confrontations, and media attention. To imagine a movement of institutions is almost a contradiction in terms—or in preconceived notions. But the country experienced just that.

Like all meaningful movements, this one had roots. It grew out of the ground broken in the previous century by the small colleges that graced so many growing towns. It didn’t have one charismatic leader but emerged out of a culture of values and virtues that had formed slowly and fitfully during the previous century. Goldin and Katz describe three of this movement’s fundamental features: it was often flexible and forgiving when confronted with youthful transgressions; it welcomed girls and young women; and it was highly decentralized. “Schooling in 1900 was not only publicly funded, but it was also publicly provided by tens of thousands of fiscally independent school districts. . . . the vast majority of districts in 1900 were small . . . . Education in terms of its funding, staffing, and curriculum, therefore, was largely a local affair.”

A decision by a group of largely Lutheran civic leaders in a central Wisconsin town to tax themselves and their neighbors so that a high school could be built and sustained is not the stuff of a Steven Spielberg production. But across the Midwest and beyond, small-town leaders—émigrés from all parts of the world, black and white, followers of many denominations and faiths, farmers and fabricators and small business people—laid the foundation for what was then the largest and most inclusive educational expansion on the planet. None of this fits on a bumper sticker. It can’t be condensed into a sound byte. And it’s broader and deeper than any brand.

The high school movement crested in about 1975, but not before stimulating the third wave of educational expansion and innovation—the growth of community colleges. Wisconsin was a leader in this wave. It was the first state, in 1911, to provide enough aid to fund a system of vocational, technical, and adult educational schools. In fact, every community of 5,000 or more citizens was required to establish an industrial education board with the power to levy a property tax. Wisconsin also became the first state to set up apprenticeship agreements.

In 1917 two-year and vocational colleges represented just 5 percent of all of the higher education institutions in the nation. By 1935 they were 25 percent of the total. Today, these schools account for 40 percent of the colleges in the country. In 1,200 locations, they educate nearly six million students, both young and adult learners. Last year, I spent time on two of Wisconsin’s sixteen technical college campuses—at Northcentral Technical College in Wausau, about 150 miles north of Madison, and Waukesha Technical College, west of Milwaukee. These sixteen campuses educate 380,000 students each year. What struck me, on both campuses, was the remarkably high quality of just about everything visible to the naked eye. These were not afterthought institutions—the poorer third cousins of the four-year colleges in the state. They were well built, modern, carefully maintained, and rooted in their respective communities. On the wall of the main buildings, in both places, were the descriptions of the founders and supporters of each school—a combination of local business and civic and political figures. Donors included local farm and feed stores, manufacturers, and employers of many stripes. The promotional material, in the spirit of the Midwest’s earliest education reformers, emphasized pragmatic training that led to long-term employment.

These three waves of educational innovation shared some common characteristics. Again, they were highly decentralized. They were connected to local people in local places with local histories and cultures. They were all profoundly pragmatic, integrating work as a part of the curriculum in the case of the first wave of small colleges, responding in part to the region’s need for workers in the case of the high school movement, both reacting to the demand for qualified labor and increasing the capacity of young and adult learners in the cases of community and vocational schools. At the same time, two of the three waves, the small colleges and high schools, were also socially radical—embracing the goals of freedom for slaves, access to education, and equity for women long before the broader culture and other institutions followed suit. These waves of change were led and shaped by a mix of people who were, for the most part, the opposite of charismatic. And these institutions were, at the start and for many decades, financially sound—publicly funded, “owned” by a broad range of local taxpayers, not overly dependent on government subsidies or on market gimmicks.

• • •

Today, many of the qualities that informed the three successive waves of educational expansion and innovation have been turned on their heads, as school districts are increasingly affected by forces far removed from local communities and utterly disconnected from local interests, dynamics, and needs. These forces tend to militate against the pragmatic principles upon which the expansion was based.

One of these forces is financial. State support for public colleges and universities has dropped from a little over 38 percent in 1991–1992 to 24 percent in 2008–2009. Community colleges scramble for available funding that may or may not connect to the felt needs of their immediate communities. A case in point is the College of DuPage, just west of Chicago. The campus is a beehive of more than 26,000 attendees. Many of the young students seek a less expensive alternative to four-year schools and many of the older students look for skills to advance careers or to lead to new jobs. According to local business operators, in the office parks and light-manufacturing areas near the school, well-paying jobs go unfilled because applicants lack the skills and training to handle the higher-tech work. The funding to make this obvious connection between willing students and well-paying work is limited and hard to access. So the school largely ignored this enormous opportunity until pressured by DuPage United, a local affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, which I help to manage. Meanwhile, state funds were available for a new Homeland Security Education Center and for a facility that features a few hotel rooms and a wine cellar. While the security and hospitality industries do provide job opportunities, the wages and benefits offered by the manufacturing sector are significantly higher.

Another influence is the race to be “elite,” or more elite, particularly among the top ten percent of colleges and universities, whose operators apparently think lavish facilities and plentiful administrative staff attract the best students. Princeton, for instance, recently started work on a $330 million “arts neighborhood.” The rail spur off the Northeast Corridor Line of New Jersey Transit, called the Dinky, will be altered, and a new Princeton train station will be built. New housing and arts-related facilities will spring up. This massive project follows a math library designed by architect Frank Gehry and a science building that cost the earth.

In 2010 the editor of the alumni magazine of Yale, my alma mater, wrote an essay that began this way: “The 1,100 Yale managers who had filled Battell Chapel were utterly silent when President Richard Levin . . . told them . . . . ‘We have more people working’ in business and administrative staff at Yale ‘than best practices suggest we need.’” To call this an understatement is to say the very least. An institution with about 11,000 students and 9,000 staff somehow allowed its management corps to reach the almost incredible number of 1,100. The president said that the process of assessing the staffing level would be deliberate and that no one should panic.

These kinds of projects or extravagances—common at almost all major universities, public and private—are the institutional equivalent of bling. Instead of diamond studs and gaudy chains, universities build cute arts communities and hire hordes of staff—servants really, fetching books for students in an open library, renting cars for student volunteers for the ride to a nearby soup kitchen—to meet every student need.

Beyond buildings and bureaucrats, another sign of elite status is the race to provide the latest hot technology. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are the new thing. The creations of technology titans at prestigious universities, MOOCs are underwritten by cutting-edge investment firms in the same Silicon Valley founded by Robert Noyce. Columnists such as the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman wax lyrical about the possibilities. Words such as “transformational,” “disruptive,” “radical,” “irreversible,” and “inevitable” appear in every puff piece. New university presidents—such as Christopher Eisgruber, the Princeton provost recently tapped to succeed the retiring Shirley Tilghman—feel compelled to include the increasing use of online instruction as one of their core commitments. And existing university presidents, such as the University of Virginia’s Teresa Sullivan, risk immediate, public, and humiliating dismissal if they do not embrace this glittering technology quickly and passionately enough. President Sullivan was fired and then reinstated, but the message was clearly sent to all other university presidents and would-be presidents: sign on with MOOCs or face irrelevance. Faculty resistance to MOOCs is growing.

This is not to say that all claims made on behalf of online courses are ridiculous. If you are a good science student in rural Montana, and your high school does not offer AP Chemistry, an online option may be a very useful. Some fields of study—particularly those that depend on the transfer of technical information—lend themselves to online instruction more than others. But the MOOC movement is built on a set of very shaky assumptions. One is the notion that education is merely the transfer of information. Another is that information can be transferred more efficiently by an online presentation than by a teacher in a classroom. A third is that one celebrity professor performing for the online masses is more effective than one hundred capable professors in front of one hundred gatherings of students. All of these assumptions are untested.

If MOOCs were offered as an experiment, as an approach to be tested and evaluated and refined, that would be one thing. But MOOCs are being sold, hustled really, as the best and brightest breakthrough since the printing press. The MOOC sales staff all have what in religious circles is called a “witness story.” There’s always a poor lad or lass in some desperately poor place, as far away as possible, who takes a course that would never be available if not for MOOCs. I heard one recently about a boy in Mongolia who took a poetry course through an Ivy League online offering. Now, I’m glad that he had the chance to take that course. And I hope more have the opportunity. But, as scientists love to say, the plural of anecdote is not data. And it is reasonable to suggest that we need to see more data about the impact of MOOCs over time. The limited data already available are ambiguous. Yes, there seems to be enormous initial interest, with some courses attracting even hundreds of thousands of watchers. But the data also show that most of these watchers stop watching and that few finish. The dropout rate is far greater than the appalling rates in failing high schools that led the corporate and foundation elites to demand the restructuring and closing of these schools.

Combine this evangelical embrace of online alternatives with the willful naiveté regarding questions of power and profit—who controls and who benefits, who loses influence and who pays the price—and you have the two essential ingredients for another in a long line of costly and destructive sideshows.

This entire experience has the same feel and dynamic as our nation’s most recent infatuation with the complex, radical, transformative high-tech “advance” in housing finance that led to the financial collapse of 2009 and the slow-motion depression we still struggle to escape. I vividly recall a breakfast meeting with an intelligent and well-intentioned housing official at the highest level of New York City government in 2006. He had recently attended a meeting of the smartest people in housing finance, led by the whip-smart son of a billionaire philanthropist. They had been discussing securitization and other strategies to expand home lending. As with MOOCs, one of the rationales was that it would enable people, poor and urban, to enter the housing market. As with MOOCs, it was incredibly complex and technical. In fact, my breakfast partner, now a top-level federal official, said, “Only seven people in the world really understand how it all works.” I remember saying that this didn’t seem to me to be a good thing. Meanwhile, under the cover provided by academic economists and government agencies, rip-off artists were peddling sleazy subprime mortgages out of strip malls in Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles, to borrowers who would end up in foreclosure and bankruptcy a few years later.

Colleges strapped for cash are already cutting staff, introducing MOOCs, and hoping for the best. Once the instructors have been removed and the budgets have been trimmed, it will be difficult to return to what we could call a more relational approach to education. The new MOOC entrepreneurs know this. The college bureaucrats whose interest is to protect or even expand their fiefdoms while paring away at the instructional staff know this. Those who simply hate teachers associations or what they think of as the progressive tilt of colleges and universities relish this. And those who believe that all associations are now passé, that in this post-institutional world the online consumer should be free to find the perfect virtual product, are cheered as their fantasies of the future morph into new realities.

• • •

We are a long way from the local connections, the local relationships, and the local interaction of early denominational colleges, high schools, and community colleges. In these three waves of institutional development, the major dynamic moved mostly from the inside out—from the interests, needs, perspectives and cultures of local communities into and through the schools that they created and sustained. A critical mass of those locally based institutions sparked a chain reaction: the training of well-equipped and capable scientists, engineers, farmers, welders, teachers, secretaries, business managers and founders, and many others. This farm system produced talented players by the millions. And those players invented, built, and steered the social and economic engine of the nation for more than 150 years.

Today, that dynamic has reversed. Since about 1975, local institutions found themselves reacting more and more to external forces—budget cuts at the state level, mandates from the federal government, various market “solutions” that masked further losses of local identity and control, failed corporate models of supervision and management that added endless layers of supervisory staff. Work, pragmatism, usefulness—the values that formed the foundation of many of the most remarkable educational institutions in the nation—are now sniffed at by the distant governmental and academic elites making the decisions. Alongside a commitment to pragmatic and this-worldly usefulness, many of the institutions created during the three waves of expansion also have a clear sense of a social mission. Most modern schools have neither.

Why all of these disruptions? The greatest factor may be money. The once-stable financial foundation of the nation’s education system has collapsed. Several elite institutions, such as Yale and Carnegie Mellon, along with dozens of other American colleges, have disgraced themselves by rushing to open overseas campuses in totalitarian countries—a fad that already seems to be fading, in large part because the crass money grab that motivated in has raked it far less than was hoped for. But almost every modern college and university depends on a faculty that is largely made up of temporary workers—adjuncts. Two thirds of the more than one million faculty members in the nation are adjuncts. If you still believe that universities are hotbeds of socialist agitation, ask any tenured professor how he or she feels about this culture of serfdom that buoys a shrinking number of tenured staff.

Worker solidarity and class consciousness may remain as quaint concepts in a few classrooms, but they are not a reality in university life. Adjuncts make extremely low wages, often teach at several schools, and rarely have so much as a desk or a table to use if they happen to have a spare moment before or after class. Their numbers keep growing—both absolutely and as a percentage of all people teaching in higher education institutions.

And all that slicing away at the wages and benefits of instructors hasn’t slowed down the ever-increasing cost of college. American students now have nearly $900 billion in outstanding student loans, a third of which is held by subprime lenders. This is the next bubble that threatens to burst and smear the American economy. And it resembles the housing bubble in almost every way. In housing, two generations of development and ownership—based on the steady construction of millions of modest homes and the patient building of equity in small but consistently growing increments—were replaced by an orgy of oversized homes, manic swings in value, and a collapse that threw millions of families into underwater mortgages or outright foreclosure.

In education, every virtue of the three successful waves of educational expansion and innovation has given way to a culture detached from any deeper mission, disconnected from local communities and concerns, and founded on an unstable mixture of underpaid labor and accelerating debt. Education, once the key to the nation’s advances in science, manufacturing, economic opportunity, and social cohesion, is now increasingly extractive and predatory.

• • •

Twenty-five years ago, when the New York City public school system seemed permanently mired in mediocrity, a New York Times reporter asked me, “Alright, what’s the answer?”

I said, without thinking really, “One hundred nuns.”

I grew up in a Midwestern city, Chicago, where nuns and priests and ministers were very much a part of the fabric of our lives. It was a world of institutions—parishes, congregations, ward offices, ethnic societies, unions, local companies, workplaces we could see from a window in our homes and that our parents and their children, once of age, could walk to. I don’t mention this out of a sense of nostalgia or without a very clear sense of all the limitations of this world—its insularity, its hostility to the other, its cover-up of sins and abuses, its resistance to change.

And yet a hundred nuns was more than just a glib response. Those nuns embodied a sense of mission. They lived and worked in and among the communities they served. They had high expectations of themselves as instructors. And they set tough standards for their students, no matter how poor, no matter what the situation in the home, no matter how many weekend hours were spent in part-time jobs.

I thought of them last summer, when my wife and I visited Finland. While there, we wanted to see for ourselves if the “Finnish miracle”—that nation’s reputation as a center of educational excellence—was real. Our host was himself a retired instructor in his town’s teacher training institute. One day, he invited over another senior instructor, and they told us how they saw their work as teachers and trainers of teachers.

In a very quiet and restrained fashion, they described their professional context. For the 68 slots in their teacher training program—three years of undergraduate and two years of masters-level instruction—they received 2,400 applications. Teaching jobs are more sought-after than medicine, law, business, or high-tech careers. The training of teachers includes in-class observation, co-teaching, and then teaching, almost from the start. “When we are done with them,” they said, “they graduate as teachers.” The pay is average, not particularly high, but not American adjunct-level either. Nearly every teacher belongs to the union, as do administrators. There are almost no private or charter options. There is very little mandated testing, either of teachers or students. Each team of teachers in a school receives a set of overall goals and has the freedom to plan and organize how to reach those goals based on its own judgment. When my wife and I described the “drill and kill” culture in many American schools, the Finns just said, “That’s not teaching.”

Everything we heard from our hosts echoed what we had read in Pasi Sahlberg’s book, Finnish Lessons (2011), about the transformation of the Finnish school system. Thirty years ago, Finland’s schools were mediocre and struggling. A combination of teachers union, business, and government leaders hashed out a plan to turn the system around. At the heart of that plan was the goal of making all Finnish schools—no matter how remote the location or poor the village or town—top performers. Finns decided to improve the teaching force, limit student testing, and transfer leadership and decision-making to education professionals at the school and district level, enabling an effective hybrid of central-government influence and local control. Today Finland’s school system ranks regularly as either the highest performing in the world or somewhere in the top four.

The Finnish emphasis on the “supply side” of the education experience—the recruitment, training, and support of teachers—is striking. Our nation leaves teacher recruitment and training to a hit-and-miss hodgepodge of 1,400 different providers—public, private, online, for profit, many either mediocre or inept—which almost everyone acknowledges makes no sense. As a result, our educational culture has built-in gaps and deficiencies that generate and perpetuate disputes over teacher quality, teacher testing, tenure, and public versus private correctives. Capable people who long to teach endure teacher-training programs that are often dreadful wastes of time and money and that fail to prepare them for the needs and challenges of the students and communities they will serve. Generic preparation for a suburban-type school system that barely exists anymore only deepens the disconnects between teacher and student, school and community, education and employment.

The same is true when it comes to students. Our nation doesn’t come close to providing the health care, public safety, parental support, and pre-kindergarten opportunities that many other countries provide. We leave those issues to chance as well. We mock the Nordic countries for the high costs of their social services, while our school children fall further behind.

In Finnish public schools today, in the best of the new schools supported by reformers in several cities, in the most focused technical and community colleges of the Midwest, in many high-performing traditional public schools and districts, there is still the audible hum of meaningful mission, as there was in many urban Catholic schools of the 1950s and ’60s. Whether the mission is to build a congregation, or prove that minority children in the South Bronx or on the West Side of Chicago can thrive if relentlessly challenged and supported, or revitalize the nation, there are those carrying it out. Or perhaps the goal is to show that working-class kids from Waukegan or Waukesha can master the skills needed to staff modern manufacturing plants or to demonstrate that society is not fixed and final, but plastic and fluid. In every successful educational culture, something bigger and deeper than market efficiency or ideological assertions from government motivates those involved.

That something, if not explicitly religious, is, fundamentally, spiritual and forward-looking—qualities that are in short supply in the many hundreds of American communities like Racine, where teachers, parents, and students are surrounded by decline. That motivation is rooted in a belief that almost all children and young adults can grow and develop. It builds new institutions, or reorganizes existing ones, around those core values. It places a high value on the direct public relationship—the back and forth, the interaction—between teachers and learners. And the dynamic of teaching and learning that occurs in those schools, at their best, is a kind of secular liturgy.

We can’t buy this kind of motivation from the market. No tool or program can spark it. And the elites at the top of the current educational heap—who advanced their careers while the educational culture declined—have no clue.

What else is new? The next wave of educational change will be imagined, shaped, tested, and carried forward by the same kinds of pragmatic leaders who built scores of new colleges on the prairie and planted a generation of high schools and then a generation of community colleges in every corner of our country.

All nations need building—or rebuilding—including ours.

Why Elizabeth Warren’s Plan For Student Debt is an Economic Breakthrough

Ellen Brown, Web of Debt blog — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:53:00 -0700

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act” has been denounced as populist demogoguery. Here's why it isn't.

On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students – from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real relief – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act.” This bill has been dismissed out of hand as “shameless populist demagoguery” and “a cheap political gimmick,” but is it? Or could Warren’s outside-the-box bill represent the sort of game-changing thinking sorely needed to turn the economy around?

Warren and her co-sponsor John Tierney propose that students be allowed to borrow directly from the government at the same rate that banks get from the Federal Reserve — 0.75 percent. They argue:

Some people say that we can’t afford low interest rates for students. But the federal government offers far lower rates on loans every single day — they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of less than one percent. The same big banks that destroyed millions of jobs and broke our economy can borrow at about 0.75 percent, while our students will be paying nine times as much as of July 1.
This is not fair. And it’s not necessary, either. The federal government makes 36 cents on every dollar it lends to students. Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the government will make $51 billion on the student loans it issued this year — more than the annual profit of any Fortune 500 company, and about five times Google’s yearly earnings. We should not be profiting from students who are drowning in debt while we are giving great deals to big banks.

The archly critical Brookings Institute says the bill “confuses market interest rates on long-term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury rate) with the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to make short-term loans to banks), and does not reflect the administrative costs and default risk that increase the costs of the federal student loan program.”

Those criticisms would be valid if the provider of funds were either a private bank or the American taxpayer; but in this case, it is the U.S. Federal Reserve. Warren and Tierney assert, “For one year, the Federal Reserve would make funds available to the Department of Education to make these loans to our students.” For the Fed, completely different banking rules apply. As “lender of last resort,” it can expand its balance sheet by buying all the assets it likes. The Fed bought over $1 trillion in “toxic” mortgage-backed securities in QE 1, and reportedly turned a profit on them. It could just as easily buy $1 trillion in student debt and refinance it at 0.75%.

Which is a Better Investment, Banks or Students?

Students are considered risky investments because they don’t own valuable assets against which the debt can be collected. But this argument overlooks the fact that these young trainees are assets themselves. They represent an investment in “human capital” that can pay for itself many times over, if properly supported and developed. This was demonstrated in the 1940s with the G.I. Bill, which provided free technical training and educational support for nearly 16 million returning servicemen, along with government-subsidized loans and unemployment benefits. The outlay not only paid for itself but returned a substantial profit to the government and significant stimulus to the economy. It made higher education accessible to all and created a nation of homeowners, new technology, new products, and new companies, with the Veterans Administration guaranteeing an estimated 53,000 business loans. Economists have determined that for every 1944 dollar invested, the country received approximately $7 in return, through increased economic productivity, consumer spending, and tax revenues.

Similarly in the 1930s and 1940s, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation funded the New Deal and World War II and wound up turning a profit, without drawing on taxpayer funds. It’s an initial capitalization was only $500 million; yet the RFC eventually lent out $50 billion – the equivalent of about $500 billion today. It raised money by issuing debentures, a form of bond. It got all of this money back, made a profit for the government, and left a legacy of roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms, and much more that the country did not have before.

In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of Rights, in which higher education would be provided by the government for free; and in the progressive 1960s, tuition actually was free or nearly free at state universities. Some countries provide nearly-free higher education today. In Norway, Denmark, France and Sweden, the cost of college is less than 3% of median income, as compared to 51% in the U.S.

Other countries make loans available to their students interest-free. For more than twenty years, the Australian government has successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans. They are “contingent loans,” which are repaid only if and when the borrower’s income reaches a certain level. New Zealand also offers 0 percent interest loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their incomes after they graduate.

Banks Are Good Credit Risks Only Because They Are Backed by the Government

In a National Review article titled “Warren’s Student-loan Demagoguery,” Ian Tuttle argues that the discount window should not be available to students because the Fed defines that resource as “an instrument of monetary policy that allows eligible institutions to borrow money, usually on a short-term basis, to meet temporary shortages of liquidity caused by internal or external disruptions,” and because the discount window is “an emergency measure used to prevent runs on banks.”

It may be true that the Fed’s discount window is open only to banks, but the Federal Reserve Pact was passed by Congress and can be modified by Congress. The reasoning behind the policy needs to be re-examined.

The question is, why do banks routinely have “shortages of liquidity”? What does that mean? It means they have lent out depositor funds that don’t properly belong to them, gambling that they will be able to replace the money before the depositors demand it back. The banks have a binding commitment to return customer money “on demand.” They can make good on that commitment because, and only because, the Fed and the FDIC back them up in a massive shell game, in which they borrow from each other or the Fed overnight – just long enough to make their books appear to balance – and then give the money back the next day. Banks are good credit risks only because they have the backstop of the Fed and the government behind them. Without those guarantees, we would be back to the cycle of endless bank runs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Our students are just as important to our recovery,” says Warren, “as our banks.” What if students, too, were backed by the government’s guarantee? What if, as in Australia and New Zealand, students were not required to repay the investment in human capital represented by their educations until the economy provided them with jobs? What if the government made it a policy to provide them with jobs? This too has been done before, quite successfully. It was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As detailed by Prof. Randall Wray, citing N. Taylor’s The Enduring Legacy of the WPA:

The New Deal jobs programs employed 13 million people; the WPA was the biggest program, employing 8.5 million, lasting 8 years and spending about $10.5 billion. It took a broken country and in many important respects helped to not only revive it, but to bring it into the 20th century. The WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 civilian and military buildings, 700 miles of airport runways; it fed 900 million hot lunches to kids, operated 1500 nursery schools, gave concerts before audiences of 150 million, and created 475,000 works of art. It transformed and modernized America.

In the 1930s, the government was in a worse financial position to achieve all this than it is now; but the commitment and the will were there, and the means were found. In World War II, the means were found again. The government always seems to be able to find the means to fund a war. We can just as easily find the means to fund our economic recovery. And if the funding comes from the Federal Reserve, the government need not be propelled into a mounting debt owed at mounting interest. The funds can be provided interest-free; and because they represent an investment in productive capital, the debt itself can be repaid with the fruits of the investment – the jobs that create the salaries that generate taxes and consumer demand.

The default rate on student loans is close to 10% today because there are no jobs available to repay the loans, and because the interest rate is so high that the debt is doubled or tripled over the life of the loan. Give students loans and jobs, and the default problem will cure itself.

Investing in our young people has worked before and can work again; and if Congress orders the Fed to fund this investment in our collective futures by “quantitative easing,” it need cost the taxpayers nothing at all. The Japanese have finally seen the light and are using their QE tool as economic stimulus rather than just to keep their banks afloat, and we need to do the same.

How America's Bully Economy leads to a "Bully Society"

Jessie Klein, NYU Press — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:40:00 -0700

Jessie Klein's new book explains how school shootings, bullying and stressed-out kids stem in part from the U.S.'s cutthroat economy.

The following is an excerpt from Jessie Klein's new book "The Bully Society: School Shootings and the Crisis of Bullying in America's Schools," (New York University Press, 2013).

Schools are microcosms of American society where students are told that financial wealth and superficial gender markers are compulsory for social acceptance. They learn these lessons from each other but also from grown-ups—parents, teachers, and the wider culture they inhabit. As they prepare to enter the adult workforce and social life, children come to understand that being perceived as the richest or prettiest, or the most powerful or confident, could dramatically enhance their futures—and that without these marks of American success they may become lifelong outcasts. They also learn to see life as a zero-sum game, where they can win only if someone else loses, rise only by ensuring that someone else falls. These values are at the core of bullying behavior, and they are also the foundation upon which much of the economic, political, and social life of our nation is built.

Not all cultures are so obsessively focused on winning. In the Southwest, for instance, coaches say that teams of Hopi Indians want to win but that they often try not to win because they don’t want to embarrass their opponents. In some traditional cultures, the game isn’t over until the two sides are tied. They work hard to make sure no one loses. Even in Europe, as T. R. Reid writes in “The European Social Model,” some core human needs are seen as everyone’s birthright rather than as something to be “won” through competition with one’s compatriots. “To Americans,” Reid writes, “it is simply a matter of common sense that rich families get better medical care and education than the poor; the rich can afford the doctors at the fancy clinics and the tutors to get their kids into Harvard. But this piece of common sense does not apply in most of Europe. The corporate executive in the back seat of the limo, her chauffeur up front, and the guy who pumps the gas for them all go to the same doctor and the same hospitals and send their children to the same (largely free) universities.”

In the United States, however, hardcore competition and striving to be the best are generally considered vital to keeping people motivated and functioning at optimal levels. Harsh inequalities are considered, at best, an unfortunate consequence. Yet gender pressures—and especially the expectation to embrace hypermasculine values and behaviors—are seldom examined in the context of the larger socioeconomic forces that shape them.

In one of my criminal justice classes, I asked students to tell me what words they associated with capitalism. What qualities do you need to be successful in our society? The board filled up quickly: competitive, aggressive,and powerfulwere some of the first suggestions. At that point, we were discussing white-collar crime and the unprincipled behavior that had produced both the Enron scandal and the economic meltdown of recent years. Later in the course we discussed school shootings and their relationship to gender, and I asked my students to list some words they associated with masculinity. The same list emerged—competitive,aggressive,and powerful. Without intending to, my students had highlighted the link between the values of masculinity and capitalism.The school shooters, for the most part, grew up in the 1980s or later. The rise in school shootings roughly coincides with the Reagan administration’s restructuring of the American economic, political, and cultural landscape—a period that glorified unrestrained capitalism and reemphasized an “up by your own bootstraps” ethos. Following a landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan promised an America rich with freedom, individualism, and financial reward for those who skillfully met the standard, coupled with a lower degree of support for those who did not. Increasingly, success was defined in terms of power, economic attainment, and social status—the same barometers increasingly used, at the high school level, to assess masculinity.

Capitalism is hardly new to the United States, nor is the system’s relationship to core American values. But as former labor secretary Robert Reich observed in his book Supercapitalism, in recent decades the power of unregulated, unrestrained capital has increased to such an extent that it has outstripped democracy as a primary foundation of our society. According to Reich, Americans became identified more as investors and consumers and less as citizens and members of a community.

Further, in this same period, a slew of books documenting America’s increasing social problems hit the shelves. The titles alone explain why Americans are more stressed, broke, unhappy, and doing whatever they can to survive: The Overworked American (1993), The Overspent American(1998), The Cheating Culture(2000), and The Lonely American(2009). Another set of recent titles document the new plagues with which our children are grappling—increased anxiety, depression, materialism, and even narcissistic personality diagnosis: Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers(2004); The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and The Crisis of Adolescence(2004); The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids(2006); and Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before(2007). Couple these telling titles with the alarming statistics depicting the United States as scoring highest on almost all of the worst social problems in the industrialized world (including murder, rape, and infant mortality), and it becomes less surprising that school bullying is so common here, or that its vicious and fatal retaliations in the form of shootings are more prevalent in the United States than in the rest of the world combined.

What is a Compassionate Economy?

Competitive and punishment-oriented schools mirror the combative workforce. In the larger world, adults are given little support if they meet hard times and are unable at some point to work at their best, or work at all. Similarly, as adolescents struggle to find their identities and their place in the world, the emotional ups and downs of their journey can undermine academic performance. Even students who tend to do well risk failure, and their confrontations with widespread cliques and bullying only add to the stress. Children’s understanding of this antagonistic culture feeds their fury and fear as they find that their every move in school so profoundly affects their future prospects.

In his book Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond, Mark Ames writes:

“The kids are stressed out not only by their own pressure at school, but by the stress their parents endure in order to earn enough money to live in [a prestigious] school district. ... Everyone is terrified of not ‘making it’ in a country where the safety net has been torn to shreds.”

Children who might otherwise look forward to a life after high school see, in the model of their parents and the larger society around them, a similarly brutal environment.

While their safety nets are weakening as well, in most European countries the government still takes some responsibility for ensuring that everyone has basic health care, education, housing, food, child care, elder care, and even indefinite unemployment if necessary. There are real limitson work hours (in Finland, for instance, a six-hour workday), and mandatory paid vacation and holiday time is often four to six weeks.

In contrast, even before the start of the latest recession, workers in twentieth-century America were losing some of the gains they had fought for in the earlier part of that century. The eight-hour day (forty-hour week) that Americans finally won in 1938, under President Roosevelt’s New Deal Fair Labor Standards Act, is a dim memory for most Americans today, who tend to toil more often at fifty to seventy or more hours per week.

Americans once hoped to achieve the demands made by the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen for eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, and eight hours of sleep, but most now have little if any leisure and much less sleep. We are working much longer hours than our counterparts in other industrialized countries. John P. Walsh and Anne Zacharias-Walsh write in “Working Longer, Living Less” that the average American works seventy more hours per year than his or her Japanese counterpart and 350 hours or nine more weeks per year than Europeans. Americans tend to work more hours and then spend money paying others to do the services they don’t have time to do because of they are working.

Because we Americans work so much, it becomes more difficult to take care of our children and our homes. In many European countries, the government pays mothers as well as fathers to stay home with their young children so they can return to work when the children are older. In the United States, middle-and upper-class adults make money and often pay other people to do these tasks; many small children in the United States are under the care of nannies or some other form of child care worker. Rather than a system designed to meet human needs, our economy prioritizes profit. Instead of opportunities to nurture ourselves, and our friends and family, and larger community, our time is managed by someone else’s drive to make money. Walsh and Zacharias-Walsh write that “to argue that an expensive factory should be left idle because workers are tired or that production should be organized using a less efficient but more comfortable process—is considered absurd.” Yet the “overworked American,” to use Juliet Schor’s term, does not necessarily generate more profit. As Anders Hayden notes,

“Several shorter-hours innovators in Europe—Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Norway—are actually more productive per hourof labor than is the United States. Higher hourly productivity in these countries is almost certainly due, in part, to shorter work-time’s beneficial effects on employee morale, less fatigue and burnout, lower absenteeism, higher quality of work, and better health.”

European economies tend to prioritize family and community as a primary value. The notion of “time affluence,” not just “material affluence,” is important—a concept that is less common in the United States. Instead, Americans work longer and live with their family less. Walsh and Zacharias-Walsh write about one mother of two young children who summed up this collective quandary: “This is the only job I could get that paid enough for me to take care of them, but it never lets me be home when they need me. I can either feed them or be with them, never both.” The increased workday also prevents participation in community life—politi- cal organizations, social clubs, sports leagues, religious institutions—as well as family life, leading to what Robert Putnam called the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon; other research also notes a related plummeting of social connections and increased loneliness and isolation among Americans.

In recent decades, the U.S. government has taken less responsibility for people’s basic human needs. Life has become a struggle for many working parents, especially single working parents. In addition to lacking the government-supported universal health care that is available to citizens in virtually all European countries, the United States does less than any other industrialized country to support parents, who receive no legally mandated paid leave when a child is born or adopted. Among the168 nations surveyed in a 2004 Harvard University study, 163 have paid maternity leave, while the United States stands in a category with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

The lack of economic support for American citizens means adults are under more pressure and stress to keep their jobs and succeed in them in order to support themselves and their families. Driven to succeed, with dwindling access to community, adults end up forming similar social cliques to those that fester in children’s schools. Workplace massacres, then, tend to have causes that parallel those found in school shootings.

Texas Students Thrown in Jail for Days ... as Punishment for Missing School?

Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:39:00 -0700

Texas's solution to truancy appears to be making kids miss even more school as they sit in jail.

School tardiness and absences come at a high cost in Dallas, Texas. Gone are the days of detention and writing lines on the chalkboard; now students are fined, even jailed.

The enforcement of the state’s truancy laws, which were strengthened substantially in 2003, have led to a range of abuses, according to a complaint filed Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Justice:

Students have been taken out of school in handcuffs, held in jail for days at a time, and fines have totaled more than $1,000 for students who miss more than 10 days of school.
The students who are hauled into court to face truancy or lateness charges are not provided with legal counsel. The only lawyers in the courtroom are the judge and a member of the district attorney’s office, unless the student’s family can afford their own representation.
Defendants are charged court fees even if they prevail in fighting the accusations, discouraging people from exercising their right to a full hearing.

The complaint, filed by a coalition of advocacy groups for young people and the disabled, targets the Dallas, Garland, Mesquite, and Richardson school districts in Texas and urges the Justice Department to force reforms and “declare the practice of criminally prosecuting children as adults for truancy” a violation of their constitutional rights.

For their part, some school officials, lawmakers, and judges say that the rigid enforcement system has led to improved attendance.

In a statement, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins defended the program.

“The Dallas County system offers the best chance for truant students to get back in class and graduate,” said Jenkins, adding that the courts are staffed by attorneys who specialize in juvenile justice issues, and make use of agencies who work to solve the underlying issues behind the truancy of students.

Certainly, the volume of cases has been striking. Texas adult courts in one recent year handled 113,000 truancy cases. Dallas County truancy court alone collected nearly $3 million in fines. It sent 67 students age 17 and older to jail because of truancy violations, and 53 students younger than 17 to juvenile detention centers. (Statewide records were not available.)

The complaint asserts that the program unfairly targets minorities and underprivileged students, and routinely puts youngsters in jail rather than keeping them in school.

Texas, like many other states, has been struggling with truancy issues for years. To combat the problem, the state legislature has passed a series of laws to stiffen penalties for absent and tardy students. In the 1990s, the legislature designated “failure to attend school” as a Class C misdemeanor, which meant that children could be tried as adults for missing school.

Texas state law now requires schools to report students to truancy court when a student has 10 or more unexcused absences within a six-month period. The complaint says that when students appear in court, they are often pressured to plead guilty and accept fines of anywhere from $80 to $500 rather than go to trial, pay additional court fees, and risk jail time. If students fail to appear in court or pay their fines on time, they can be arrested and jailed. Wyoming is the only other state in the country with a similar law, the complaint says.

In 2003, Dallas County got even more aggressive. According to the complaint, county officials lobbied the legislature to allow it to create its own specialized court system that would handle only truancy cases. The request was granted and since then four public school districts in the county have agreed to send their truant cases to the specialized courts.

Michael Harris, a senior attorney with the California-based National Center for Youth Law, said each of those school districts are predominantly African American and Latino, but are overseen primarily by white superintendents, and that the specialized court system is overseen by a white judge.

Chris Moore, a spokesman for the Garland school district, said the district has taken several steps to ensure parents are informed of their children’s unexcused absences well in advance of any complaint to the truancy court system. Tim Clark, director of communications for the Richardson school district, said the district always acts within the law in its handling of truants, and said that district officials would cooperate with any federal inquiry. In a statement on its website, the Mesquite school district said it informs students and parents about state truancy laws in the beginning of each school year.

A call to the Dallas district superintendent was not immediately returned. (If the district responds, we will update this article.)

“It’s pretty obvious that this program is set in school districts that do not have a large percentage of middle class white students. For example, the Dallas independent school district has less than 10 percent white students,” said Harris. “These students are thought of in a different way by key decision-makers in the county than white students.”

A handful of parents and students interviewed by ProPublica say that the enforcement of the program has turned school grounds into something like a police state, with guards rounding up students during “tardy sweeps,” suspending them, then marking their absences as unexcused and reporting them to truancy court. According to the complaint, charges have been levied even when students have legitimate reasons for an absence, such as a family emergency or illness.

Ashley Brown, a 16-year-old high school sophomore and honors student at South Oak Cliff High School in Dallas, said she missed four straight days of school in December 2012. Her grandmother, who she cared for personally, died of cancer, and she stayed home to mourn her death. She was also suspended twice for three days, once because she got in a fight, and another time because she was late to class.

Brown was eventually charged with 10 unexcused absences, even though Brown’s mother sent the school the grandmother’s obituary, and suspensions are supposed to be counted as excused absences under state law.

When Brown received a letter ordering her to appear in court, her mother panicked and called the school to correct her daughter’s attendance record. Afterward she missed a day of work and pulled her daughter from school to appear in court and explain the confusion. Eventually she persuaded the judge to dismiss the charges.

Andrew Collins, the assistant principal at South Oak Cliff High School, told ProPublica that he believes in the tough truancy program.

“To an extent, I do believe if a student is continuously truant, sometimes fines help solve a lot of that,” Collins said.

Others haven’t been as successful as Brown in disputing their truancy charges.

Roddi Ann Schoneberg, a 40-year-old former pre-school teacher and mother of three, said she struggled mightily to get her children to school on time after her mother suffered a stroke late in the summer of 2011.

Her children, two of whom she says are autistic, were traumatized by the experience and often went into tantrums when they were supposed to get ready for school in the morning. Overwhelmed by her children’s behavioral problems and her responsibilities toward her ailing mother, Schoneberg said she brought her elementary-school-aged children to school five to 10 minutes late roughly 20 times in the first half of the 2011 school year.

She said her children’s elementary school in the Richardson school district reported each late arrival as unexcused, and in December 2011 she received a notice to appear in court. School administrators refused to help her, she said.

Schoneberg said she intended to contest the charges, but ultimately succumbed to pressure from court officers and a county prosecutor and pleaded guilty. She was told that if she wanted to contest the charges at trial, she’d be liable for court costs no matter the outcome. The complaint alleges that Schoneberg’s experience is not unique; it says the truancy court doesn’t provide legal counsel and frequently threatens children and their families with jail time in open court, thus encouraging people to plead guilty rather than go to trial.

The county prosecutor initially tried to fine her $2,600, but Schoneberg said the judge decided to reduce it to $609. She had to return to court on five separate occasions to make payments.

“It totally enveloped my life,” Schoneberg said.

The policy, according to the complaint, can be especially hard on special education students and the disabled, who often miss school because of their physical or psychological issues.

The complaint also describes the plight of a high school student who has asthma and chronic respiratory problems. It says the student sometimes needs to be out of school for days at a time to be closer to her medical equipment at home.

Over the course of the 2011 school year she had several multi-day absences caused by her health problems, and on two occasions she forgot to turn in a note from her mother explaining why she was away. She was ultimately convicted of failure to attend school and paid a $100 fine and $77 in court costs.

Her lawyer, Dustin Rynders, supervising attorney for a disability rights group in Texas, said the child ultimately missed as much school for the court appearances as she did for her illness.

But the complaint suggests these steps aren’t working: By the time parents are able to reason with school administrators and get them to understand why their child was absent, it’s too late— the absences have already been reported to the truancy courts through an automated electronic filing system.

“This is an actual school to prison pipeline in terms of how they send kids to adult criminal court for what’s really minor misbehavior,” said Michael Harris, an attorney for the National Center for Youth Law, who said he spent hours watching students get processed by the courts. “Research shows that once they go to criminal court the likelihood that they’ll be swept up in the justice system again increases greatly.”

Harris and his fellow attorneys hope that the Justice Department will use the complaint as a roadmap to investigate the truancy court system in Dallas and eventually force changes to it.

They make several recommendations, like giving children proper legal counsel and refraining from taking them out of class in handcuffs.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately return calls for comment.

Catholic School Fires Teacher for Being a Domestic Violence Survivor

Steven Hsieh, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 09:05:00 -0700

“I mean that’s why women of domestic violence don’t come forward."

A San Diego Catholic school fired a teacher and domestic violence survivor due to her ex-husband’s “threatening and menacing behavior,” KNSD-TV reports.

Second-grade teacher Carie Charlesworth said she received notice of her termination after an incident in which her abusive ex-husband followed her to Holy Trinity School, where she worked. Charlesworth had been teaching in the district for 14 years.

"They’ve taken away my ability to care for my kids,” she told KNSD. “It’s not like I can go out and find a teaching job anywhere.”

Charlesworth went on leave after in incident in January that forced her to call the police on her husband three separate times. As KNSD reports, she went to Holy Trinity the next day to warn the principle “to be on the lookout for her ex-husband,” who “has a trail of restraining orders and 911 calls.”

Sure enough, Charlesworth’s abuser showed up at the school’s parking lot, sending it into lockdown. The next day, she received a letter informing her that she and her children were put on “indefinite leave.” And three months later, the teacher received a letter from Holy Trinity informing her that the school “simply cannot allow”her to return to work.

It didn’t matter that Charlesworth’s ex-husband is currently behind bars for his crimes, as the school has “no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve.”

Sadly, Charlesworth’s story is part of a larger pattern of employees losing their jobs after incidents of domestic violence. As KNSD reports, a 2011 study shows that “Nearly 40 percent of survivors in California reported being fired or feared termination because of domestic violence.”

Charlesworth is telling her story to raise awareness of this problem, saying: “I mean that’s why women of domestic violence don’t come forward, because they’re afraid of the way people are going to see them, view them, perceive them, treat them.”

h/t Raw Story

Sacramento District Ignores Report Suggesting Closing Schools for Affluent White Kids, Instead Shutters Seven Schools Filled with Poor and Minority Kids

Steven Hsieh, AlterNet — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 07:29:00 -0700

"The district applied an arbitrary and illegitimate standard to target schools that are predominantly high in low-income and minority populations."

A Sacramento city school district is poised to close seven elementary schools, disproportionately hurting students in low-income and predominantly minority neighborhoods.

In response, twelve students and their parents filed a civil rights lawsuit, asking a federal court to block the closures. The suit claims that the Sacramento City Unified District’s decision “was motivated by an intent to discriminate against the minority populations” and will result in “a disastrous discriminatory effect on the poor, disadvantaged population which is served by these neighborhood schools slated for closure."

The complaint also notes that in choosing the schools it did for closure, Unified District ignored a report by a closure committee recommending the shuttering of four different schools in “older, affluent neighborhoods,” each with a 'white' student body in excess of 40 percent of the enrolled students.”

CBS Sacramento reports that dozens of parents and students rallied outside the courthouse Tuesday. Jonathan Tran of Hmong Innovating Politics, the group that organized the rally, told the station, “The district applied an arbitrary and illegitimate standard to target schools that are predominantly high in low-income and minority populations … At the end of the day, that is unacceptable.”

According to the Sacramento Bee, “about 93 percent of students attending the seven closure schools are minorities, compared with 81 percent districtwide.”

The lawsuit also puts the announced closures in the context of Sacramento’s history of, "intergenerational poverty and racial segregation, in which people of color have been segregated as a result of public and private policies over a period of decades."

Despite these concerns and the closure committee’s recommendations, district officials are waving off the lawsuit as a waste of time and money. In a statement, district superintendent Jonathan Raymond said:

“…it’s unfortunate that the District must now spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend an unsubstantiated and baseless lawsuit. The decision four months ago to close seven of our most under-enrolled schools was precipitated by the current and ongoing budgetary burden of operating and staffing these schools.”

h/t Courthouse News

Sick: Rhode Island Vocational School Pushed Disabled Students into Sweatshop Labor

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:30:00 -0700

A reflection of the sad state of America's education system.

A vocational school in Providence, Rhode Island is under scrutiny for singling out disabled students for labor in what pretty much sounds like a sweatshop. A Department of Justice investigation found that the Harold H. Birch Vocational School violated the Americans with Disabilities Act for years as it shoveled -- and segregated -- students with special needs into “sheltered workshops.” Things didn’t get better once they graduated. Rather, they school was a pipeline to push disabled students into a similarly exploitative program, Target 12 (WRPI) reports.

The Justice Department investigated the school and sent a letter detailing their findings this week, including that “Birch obtains contracts with private businesses to perform work, such as bagging, labeling, collating, and assembling jewelry,” and "One former student stated that she was required to spend a much greater portion of her school day in the workshop, including full days, when the workshop had important production deadlines."

Students received "subminimum or no wages" -- between 50 cents and $2 an hour for their labor (which even included weekend work) -- the report said. They DOJ's Civil Rights Division says students with disabilities performing tasks similar to peers who received “subminimum” wages received nothing at all, even though they “demonstrated very few differences in ability from the students who were paid subminimum wages.”

"Other than the in-school sheltered workshop, the nearest experience that some Birch students are offered to a transition work placement is assisting the Mt. Pleasant High School cafeteria staff with emptying the school's trash," the report said.

WPRI explained the school's role as a stepping stone to more unpaid labor:

The investigation also found Birch students - ages 14 to 21 - were given few choices if they wanted to work after leaving Birch. One of two options was to continue in a sheltered workshop at the Training Through Placement program (TTP) in North Providence, a state-monitored program for disabled adults. The TTP website says it can offer companies "light assembling, sorting, various piecework tasks" and other services.
The Justice Department investigation found the Birch school acted as a "feeder to TTP, [despite] some students' specific requests to work and receive services in more integrated settings."
"TTP is a segregated setting with many of the hallmarks of other segregated settings," the DOJ letter states, where "individuals are required to follow fixed, highly regimented schedules and routines; individuals with disabilities do not have private or personal space and are separated from spaces for managers and staff without disabilities; individuals exercise very limited choice over the activities that they engage in throughout the day."
Those working at TTP are paid "extremely low wages," according to the report.

The school board had been warned about issues in a 2011 report, and WPRI cites as another “red flag” conspiracy charges against the man who heads the non-profit TTP program.

Last Week in Poverty: Denying a Head Start in Washington State

Greg Kaufmann, The Nation — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:58:00 -0700

To get a sense of just how foolish and shortsighted the $85 billion across-the-board sequester cuts are, you don’t have to look any further than Washington's Head Start program.

The following article first appeared on the Nation.com. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for their email newsletters here.

To get a sense of just how foolish and shortsighted the $85 billion across-the-board sequester cuts are, you don’t have to look any further than Head Start. The federal government’s only pre-K program, Head Start provides comprehensive, high-quality early education and support services to children and their families living in poverty.

“The results speak for themselves,” said Joel Ryan, executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start & ECEAP (WSA). “The research shows that kids who go through Head Start are more likely to be ready for kindergarten, less likely to need special education services and more likely to graduate from high school.”

All of that adds up to saving money over the long haul. But even before the sequester Head Start was reaching less than half of eligible children in the United States—and only 38 percent in Washington. Now, even fewer children will benefit from the program.

Estimates put the number of slots lost this year alone at 70,000. According to a recent survey by WSA, 68 percent of Washington State’s Head Start providers will be forced to drop children from their classrooms over the next few months as a direct result of sequestration.

“These cuts are happening now,” said Ryan. “A lot of directors have issued lay-off notices to teaching staff and kids are already getting dropped from programs. That’s going to get worse come September. Most of the impact right now is that they are closing programs earlier in the day, or closing earlier in the school year altogether, so families are needing to scramble to find some other place for child care.”

One place that has sliced a half-hour from its four-hour Head Start program is Snohomish County, where Robert Wheeler’s 4-year-old daughter started attending class last October.

“When she started she could only identify the letters ‘i’ and ‘s’ but she couldn’t spell the word ‘is,’” said Wheeler. “Just over seven months later, she’s reading at the kindergarten-first grade cusp—reading books and sight words to me. Her whole vocabulary has changed.”

Wheeler emphasized that it’s not just about the classroom and “learning your ABCs.”

“It’s about understanding the whole emotional, mental and cognitive support needed—and helping families understand it too—because the parents are with the kids more than the teachers are,” he said.

Wheeler said that while he has family members he can lean on to provide childcare, he’s seeing how the shortened Head Start day is affecting the wellbeing of other parents and children.

“There are parents that work part-time who have had to cut their hours back,” he said. “And some full-time workers who were eligible for child care programs before and after school, and they’ve had to cut back to part-time. Some have even lost jobs and it’s just a downward spiral.”

Ryan also noted that you can’t isolate Head Start cuts from cuts in other programs—it all adds up to making life far more difficult for low-income families.

“It’s WIC programs, or fuel programs, or they are trying to go to school and their work-study is cut—the families we serve are being affected in a host of ways,” said Ryan.

But the biggest hit for Wheeler and his daughter might come in September when their Head Start program is closed for good. He said it’s a real loss for the entire community—the facility was built exclusively for Head Start in the 1970s.

“What lawmakers don’t understand is that it’s the way families and communities are working together as partners in Head Start that creates an even greater potential for children to succeed,” said Wheeler.

The closure of the center will directly affect thirty-eight children, two teachers, three or four paid employees and three salaried positions. Wheeler said he hopes three state-run early childhood education programs—called ECEAPs—will be able to absorb some of the children currently participating in Head Start.

“But there’s no guarantee,” said Wheeler. “ECEAP won’t take a Head Start kid if another kid has greater need.”

Ryan said that next school year not only will there be fewer Head Start classrooms and fewer students served, but most of the programs that survive the cuts will be opening later in the year, as late as October.

“That’s really putting these kids at a further disadvantage—they are already starting behind, Head Start’s job is to get those kids ready for kindergarten. They are going to be doing it in fewer hours, and with less staff to help them get ready,” said Ryan.

He adds that this is all happening as more kids are living in poverty, more are homeless and there is increased “adverse trauma and toxic stress” in struggling families.

“We see it in the rising number of child protective services cases,” said Ryan. “And as there is increased need for assistance, the federal government is cutting back and pulling services. It’s really a double hit to the gut of these kids and families.”

But Wheeler remains hopeful that media attention can make a difference in mobilizing citizens to demand a more sensible approach to the budget.

“If we reach out more to the public, I think we can make greater waves in the political realm,” he said.

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