AlterNet.org: Education

Cops Go Undercover at High School to Bust Special-Needs Kid for Pot: Why Are Police So Desperate to Throw Kids in Jail?

Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

The school-to-prison pipeline strikes again.

Californians Doug and Catherine Snodgrass are suing their son’s high school for allowing undercover police officers to set up the 17-year-old special-needs student for a drug arrest.

In a video segment on ABC News, they say they were "thrilled" when their son -- who has Asperger's and other disabilities and struggled to make friends -- appeared to have instantly made a friend named Daniel.

“He suddenly had this friend who was texting him around the clock,” Doug Snodgrass told ABC News. His son had just recently enrolled at Chaparral High School.

"Daniel," however, was an undercover cop with the Riverside County Sheriff's Department who "hounded" the teenager to sell him his prescription medication. When he refused, the undercover cop gave him $20 to buy him weed, and he complied -- not realizing the guy he wanted to befriend wanted him behind bars.

In December, the unnamed senior was arrested along with 21 other students from three schools, all charged with crimes related to the two officers' undercover drug operation at two public schools in Temecula, California (Chaparral and Temecula Valley High School). This March, Judge Marian H. Tully ruled that Temecula Valley Unified School District could not expel the student, and had in fact failed to provide him with proper services.

“Within three days of the officer’s requests, [the] student burned himself due to his anxiety,” Tully said. “Ultimately, the student was persuaded to buy marijuana for someone he thought was a friend who desperately needed this drug and brought it to school for him.”

In January, a juvenile court judge decided that extenuating circumstances applied to the student's case, and ruled that he serve informal probation and 20 hours of community service, which would translate into “no finding of guilt.”

Since being allowed back to school, Snodgrass says his son has been "bullied" via suspensions and threat of expulsion. “Our son was cleared of the criminal charge, but the school continued to try and expel him,” Snodgrass said.

The Snodgrasses are now suing the school for unspecified damages. District administrators, they told ABC, should have protected their son, but instead “participated with local authorities in an undercover drug sting that intentionally targeted and discriminated against [him]."

“Sending police and informants to entrap high-school students is sick,” says Tony Newman, director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance. “We see cops seducing 18-year-olds to fall in love with them or befriending lonely kids and then tricking them into getting them small amounts of marijuana so they can stick them with felonies. We often hear that we need to fight the drug war to protect the kids. As these despicable examples show, more often the drug war is ruining young people's lives and doing way more harm than good.”

Stephen Downing, a retired law enforcement veteran and former captain of detectives in the LAPD, said the behavior of the police in this case points to troubling trends in policy. "It is evidence of just how far we have gone, and how callous we have become, in treating our children with the care and dignity they should be entitled.”

“The fact that the police officer chose to prey upon the most vulnerable" is “egregious” but not surprising, he said. He pointed toward policing tactics and policies -- like quotas, the increasing criminalization of America's schools, and the war on drugs -- that put pressure on police to treat normal teen behavior as criminal.

Downing, who is a member of the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, also pointed out, “The less fortunate are always targeted."

“Do we ever hear of an undercover operation like this conducted in an exclusive private school, or on a university campus, or on the stages of a movie studio in Hollywood? No, we don't. Why? Because those people would complain, get lawyers and make life miserable for the status quo."

"The parents of this child are right to bring a lawsuit, to take that needed step that will, hopefully, bring about the kind of change that will stop this kind of tyrannical corruption and harm to our children," he said.

Drug crimes are not the only charges unfairly leveled against students. Marginalized youths are regularly the targets of the school-to-prison pipeline, as in the case of Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old girl who was arrested less than a month ago for accidentally causing a small explosion during a science experiment.

Signs of the Coming Revolution in America's Education System

Jeff Bryant, Campaign for America's Future — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:48:00 -0700

The recent revolt against standardized tests as well as legislative concern over testing corruption are just some of the of the signs of an approaching education "revolution."

“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny inThe Atlantic recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.”

Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:”

Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
Voucher and other “choice” proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.

Tierney linked to a blog post by yours truly, “The Inconvenient Truth of Education Reform,” explaining how the movement known as “education reform” has committed severe harm to the populations it professes to serve while spreading corruption and enriching businesses and political figures.

Echoing Tierney, on the pages of Slate, The Nation, and elsewhere, David Kirp, education professor and author of a popular new book casting doubt on competitive driven, market-based school reform, declared that cheating scandals and parent rebellions over high stakes standardized testing were proof that much ballyhooed reform policies championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are not “a proven – or even a promising – way to make schools better.”

Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals “it’s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy – which makes teachers’ careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers – has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.”

In a legislative view, the Progressive State Network, which supports left-leaning state legislators and monitors legislative policy in state houses, noticed “a backlash is brewing in many states as more and more parents and legislators alike start asking questions about corporate education reform.” The post on PSN’s website referenced Tierney’s article and highlighted a Minnesota bill that eliminates testing requirements for graduation and several states that are embroiled in battles to defeat measures known as the “parent trigger,” which enables private takeovers of public schools.

These observations are not alarmist chatter but well-reasoned, valid conclusions that anti-government collectivist actions related to public school policy are scaling up from isolated protests to a nationwide movement of unified resistance.

The movement is widespread among teachers, students, and parents. It is grassroots driven and way out in front of most journalists and political leaders. And it’s scaling up in intensity.

A Teacher-Student-Parent Movement

For quite some time now, education historian and reform opponent Diane Ravitch has written about the ever expanding discontent among teachers over the emphasis on standardized testing and test-based teacher evaluation and school rating systems.

As proof of this discontent, Ravitch has closely followed and commented on a boycott against standardized testing among teachers in Seattle, an ongoing protest amongprincipals in New York state against new teacher evaluations, and objections to the “testing beast” among educators and parents in Texas.

In ever-greater numbers, however, students are also leading the resistance. A recent article in The Nation reported on the growing student resistance movement driven by grievances over austerity budgets and systemic racism.

From all corners of the country – North Carolina to Philadelphia to Louisiana to Chicago –students as young as eight years old are organizing and taking part in a variety of actions including zombie protests, school walkouts and sit-ins, and acts of defiance like the recent rant by a high school student in Texas that went viral over the Internet when he castigated a seemingly indifferent teacher for dispensing education in “packets” rather than engaging the class in meaningful, relevant learning.

In Chicago, youth voice is forming in grassroots groups like CSOSOS (Chicago Students Organizing To Save Our Schools) and VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) that have led prominent, headline-earning protests to school closures, teacher firings, and over emphasis on high-stakes testing.

In Philadelphia, a handful of students used their social media and organizing skills to whip up student resentment and send hundreds of students into the streets to protest budget cuts to their favorite education programs.

In Denver, high schoolers have formed Students4OurSchools and staged walkouts protesting the over-emphasis on standardized testing.

Students in Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere have formed student unions that have developed attention-getting tactics, which have spread to a national scale. These student organizations’ Facebook pages speak in unison against school closures and cutbacks, widespread teacher firings, and top-down implementations of mandated standards and high-stakes testing.

In many places, teachers and parents are supporting rebellious students and evenjoining in the protests. Grassroots parent groups, in fact, have been the driving force behind efforts to beat back school voucher proposals in Tennessee and parent trigger legislation in Florida.

Resistance is particularly vehement in low-income communities of color in large urban school districts where reform measures have lead to widespread teacher firings and school closings. In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, vocal protestors have been organizing in their own communities but also uniting in national campaigns, such as this year’s Journey for Justice effort that brought hundreds of activists in allied grassroots organizations to the White House to protest school closings.

Unlike school reform proponents who benefit from massive donations from rich foundations and politically connected funders, grassroots groups leading the resistance – like the Alliance for Educational Justice and Alliance for Quality Education – have far humbler means and few connections to the political class and deep pocketed philanthropists like Bill Gates.

Nevertheless, these groups have generated strong outpourings of popular dissent and produced important analyses of the duplicity of the reform agenda.

A Movement Getting More Recognition

Mostly, grassroots-led protests against education mandates have gotten little attention from even the few media outlets and reporters focused on education.

That changed, however, when the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called for a moratorium on the consequences of high-stakes testing related to the Common Core.

All of a sudden, when there was a crack in the conventional wisdom that education policy was a centrist agreement between teachers’ unions and conservative belief tanks, many education bloggers and journalists decided the school accountability movement had reached a surprising new level of intensity.

Long-time education journalist Dana Goldstein speculated on her blog that Weingarten’s moratorium call is proof that education matters that were once considered products of a “coalition” of centrist-minded – although mostly conservative – wonks and Beltway operatives are now points of strong contention.

Her conclusion was that these differences represent a “deep divide” among the political class about whether it’s a good idea to “scare us into meaningful school reform.”

Another experienced education journalist, Sam Chaltain also reflected on his blog on calls for a testing moratorium. He recalled that after Barak Obama was elected, Obama proceeded with “a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.”

Critics of those policies “vented,” Chaltain explained, but “policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.” But with this more recent backlash to education mandates, Chaltain observed, “policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance.”

Chaltain concluded that conflicts over school policy had “reached a tipping point.”

Similarly, veteran education reporter at Education Week Michelle McNeil observed, “Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized.”

McNeil sourced the polarity to the conventional wisdom that public education is “an institution that historically is slow to change,” and now it’s being “forced to deal with so much change at once.” And she asserts that the controversy over change is mostly “about centralization or decentralization” of specific “reform” efforts.

But what Goldstein, McNeil, and others on the sidelines fail to grasp is that the pushback against the nation’s education policy is not new. The “polarization” is not “obscuring” the issues – as McNeil contends – it’s clarifying them. And the “debate” over education has broken free from being an issue confined to “fringes” and “policy elites” to take its rightful place at the center of “a growing, broader backlash.”

Indeed, just like the fight to integrate public schools was connected to the larger struggle for civil rights, fights to preserve and strengthen public schools – whether they take the form of students walking out of class to protest education cuts, parents fighting against deceptively named “empowerment” policies, or teachers boycotting standardized tests – are connected to much larger struggles over what kind of nation America is becoming.

A Leadership Out Of Touch

The growing rebellion to education mandates has been driven mostly by grassroots groups formed first among low-income communities of color, but now the movement is extending to people of greater means and social-political capacity like parent groups that worked an inside game with state legislators to thwart implementation of the Common Core standards in Indiana, block parent trigger bills in Florida, and curb the emphasis on high stakes testing in Texas.

This unification of the grassroots with the “grass tops” in education is not well understood in the media or among policy elites.

In fact, people in charge of education governance appear to be more clueless than ever about what they are intent on accomplishing and legislating.

Witness the recent confession from one of the movement’s most influential leaders, Bridgeport, Conn., school chief Paul Vallas. As Valerie Struass reported at her blog onThe Washington Post, Vallas has led reform efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans that have become blueprints for education policy ideas across the country. Yet he admitted that the policies he has championed are resulting in a “nightmare” of complexity.

Reportedly, he characterized his efforts to enact test-based teacher evaluations as a feature of a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”

Vallas’ newfound doubts over what he has created reflected other confusing comments from education policy leaders. Most notable was the commentary by Bill Gates, widely acknowledged as a leader in the movement to base teacher evaluations and school ratings on student test scores, warning against the “rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems” based on test scores.

Even more perplexing was Secretary Duncan’s recent inability to deliver a straight answer about parent trigger bills. As Beltway gadfly Alexander Russo recently reported, “Duncan described the trigger as ‘an important tool’ for parent involvement -– but not the only or even the most important one” – whatever that means.

Compared to authentic grassroots outpourings for resources, equity, and real democracy, these equivocations from education policy leaders are puny and venal to say the least.

Intensity Is Building

“Scared” or not, recalling Goldstein’s comment, activists driving protests against the nation’s prevailing education policies are ratcheting the fight to unprecedented intensity that will likely become even more forceful in future efforts.

Later this month, for instance, teachers in Chicago are planning a citywide three-day march to protest impending school closures. Education related bills in state legislatures in California, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and elsewhere will be highly visible points of contention. And actions to protest the imminent doubling of college loan debt interest rates – certainly an issue related to public education – are generating a unified response from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Clearly, the resistance to top-down education mandates is building. The movement is propelled by forces far greater than what education journalists and policy leaders understand – widespread grievances about inequity, unfairness, and public disempowerment.

The revolt is happening. The revolt is now.

Seattle Teachers, Students Win Historic Victory Over Standardized Testing

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:43:00 -0700

After months of protest, teachers, students and parents in Seattle have won their campaign to reject standardized tests in reading and math.

The following is a transcript originally published on Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show looking at the victory for teachers and students in Seattle, Washington, where, following months of protest, high schools there will no longer have to conduct standardized tests in reading and math. Superintendent José Banda says the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, test is now optional for high schools, but those refusing the test must find another way to gauge student performance. In January, teachers at Garfield High School began a boycott of the test, saying it was wasteful and being used unfairly to assess their performance. The boycott spread to other schools, with hundreds of teachers, students, parents participating.

For more, we go to Seattle, where we’re joined by Jesse Hagopian, a high school history teacher and union rep at Garfield High. He also served as the Black Student Union’s faculty adviser and is a founding member of Social Equality Educators.

Jesse, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about this victory.

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Well, thanks again for having me on the program today.

And this is really a stunning victory for us here in Seattle at Garfield High School and across the city of the high schools boycotting the test. You know, a week ago today, an announcement went out saying that the test would be optional at the high school level, and it led to an eruption of celebration at Garfield, with fist bumps and high fives of teachers and students. And we were celebrating this long struggle. You know, we were threatened with a 10-day suspension without pay, and other consequences. And this was a real vindication.

We were celebrating the fact that our students will no longer have to sit in front of the dull glow of a computer screen, looking at questions that they were never prepared for because the test was not aligned to the state-mandated curriculum. And we were celebrating because our English-language learners will no longer have to be humiliated by a test that is linguistically and culturally inappropriate for them. Our special ed students will no longer have to take a test where their IEPs, or individual education plans, will no—are not respected.

And, you know, we were celebrating, I think, too, because Washington state ranks number one in the nation in high-stakes testing. And we spend over $100 million a year on these tests. And Garfield High School teachers and teachers around Seattle who have joined the boycott of the MAP test have said that we would rather spend that $100 million on reading coaches and on tutoring programs, things that can actually help elevate our students and get them where we know they need to be.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse Hagopian, Garfield High School didn’t start this boycott. Explain the origins of it and how it links in with other protests against high-stake testing around the country.

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Well, we’ve seen movements against high-stakes testing all over the nation, you know, from parents opting their students out of these tests across the country to the principals’ associations in New York state saying we’ve had enough of these high-stakes tests.

But I think, in a way, you’re right: Garfield didn’t start the boycott. In my view, the boycott of the MAP test really began with the elite private schools, who never give these tests. They want their students to have access to critical thinking skills and creativity. They want their students to be prepared to be leaders in the world today, and so they don’t inundate their students with these high-stakes tests like they expect to be done in the public schools. So, in that way, you could say this boycott really began of the elite schools. But, in actuality, you know, Garfield, I think, was the first school to unanimously vote, of all the faculty, "we refuse to give this test."

And it’s a real crisis, I think, for these corporate education reformers, people like Michelle Rhee, who wrote an editorial in The Seattle Times against our boycott. And I think it’s a crisis for them, because their whole system of ed reform rests on these data points, on reducing teaching and learning to a single score that they can use to close schools, like you’re seeing being proposed in Chicago and Philadelphia, that they can use these data points really to degrade education and profit from it and privatize our schools, turning them into charters. And this boycott represents a threat to their ability to reduce teaching and learning to a single score. And I think that’s why you see Michelle Rhee and these corporate education reformers so upset that we stood up to their tests and refused to give them. And I think that’s why so many teachers and parents and students across the nation are celebrating this victory, including the Garfield High School PTSA that voted unanimously to support us.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse, can you explain what you’re coming up with in its stead?

JESSE HAGOPIAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s important to know that we are not against assessment or testing at Garfield High School or any of the boycotting schools across Seattle. What we are against is assessments that are not culturally relevant, assessments that are not aligned to our curriculum, and assessments that don’t promote the type of skills we believe are necessary in the world today.

So we actually formed a teacher work group on assessment, and we had some very dedicated teachers who took time out of their week, every week for the last couple months, to do research, to collaborate and to come up with what we would replace the MAP test with. And it’s an incredible document. People should go to scrapthemap.wordpress.com and take a look at what we would replace the MAP with, and this is assessments that are related to our curriculum, assessments that actually measure many different skills rather than just your ability to fill in a bubble A, B, C or D, assessments like performance-based assessments, what you do when you get a Ph.D. You do research; you defend that research in front of a panel of experts. And I think that can be adapted for all grade levels and all subjects. And you get at a lot of different skills that you don’t get at with the simple standardized testing. And I’m really—

AMY GOODMAN: Jesse Hagopian, we’re going to have to leave it there, but I want to thank you so much for being with us, high school history teacher, union rep at Garfield High School.

80-Year-Old North Carolina Educator: Why I Got Arrested Protesting Right-Wing Agenda for Schools

Barbara Parramore, AlterNet — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:06:00 -0700

A lifelong educator joins the Moral Mondays protests in Raleigh to fight the GOP education agenda.

Update: Barbara Parramore was taken into police custody Monday evening. She was part of a crowd of hundreds of peaceable citizens (the highest count yet) gathered at the North Carolina Legislature buidling to protest right-wing policies pushed by GOP lawmakers. The Moral Monday protests, launched by the NC chapter of the NAACP, is now in its fourth week. The number of protesters arrested for May 20th is estimated at 60, bringing the total count of citizens taken in by police over the last several weeks to nearly 160.

Today I am participating in a non-violent and peaceful protest called Moral Monday. I join ministers, students, teachers, and other concerned citizens in Raleigh because I am deeply concerned about the legislation of this session of the North Carolina General Assembly. In my judgment, many laws and pending laws that will guide public policy and practice are not in the public interest, and in many instances, will have a negative effect on the future of our state. Children and youth, who are our future, need schooling and health that fosters the best of citizenship as well as preparation for living and working in our society. I am most concerned about the bills affecting the public schools and opportunities of post-secondary education. Families and women’s health issues also relate to and affect educational opportunities.

I was born in 1932 and am a child of the Great Depression and World War II. My oldest brother went into the army in January 1942 and I knew many older brothers of my friends who did not survive. Part of my DNA is being concerned about family and neighbors and helping each other whenever we could. It was fathers and daughters who kept farms going; indeed, a neighborhood girlfriend and her father were with my dad and me in a field working when someone came along to tell us that the war in the Pacific had ended. My brother was on the Pacific high seas that very day, and he got to come home safely, thank goodness.

Back then, neighbors and citizens knew how to care about each other, which brings me to my concern about what is happening right now to families and communities around the state. The list of bills proposed by one or both houses of the North Carolina General Assembly in spring of 2013 is long. Too many of these proposals appear to be poorly thought out. As a citizen who has never missed the opportunity to vote in local, state and national elections, I now have the feeling that my voice is not being considered. Participating in a protest is my way of letting members of the General Assembly know that there are other voices that they need to hear.

My career in public education began in the fall of 1954, following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which made it unlawful to deny black children the same opportunities as white children in our public schools. For the next 40 years I served as an elementary teacher, middle-school mathematics and science teacher, school counselor, elementary school principal, and as a teacher of future teachers and administrators at North Carolina State University.

Six years as principal of Wiley Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina were a major influence in all that I have accomplished. Calvin H. Wiley, for whom the school was named, was the first state superintendent of schools. He convinced the governor not to divert school funds to the Civil War effort, among other important achievements. At Wiley School I learned firsthand how effective teachers are and the extent to which they go beyond their duties to not only teach, but to establish a climate for learning that makes a difference in their students’ lives. Not only were the three Rs essential but also music and art. We considered our school a “workshop for learning.”

Inequalities in education have always been in the forefront of my work. In the early years in public schools, there were two important changes underway: the desegregation of schools and the special education movement. Change comes slowly; for example, Wiley and another Raleigh school (Murphey) had the very first teachers in special education in the state. My teacher’s salary for that first year was provided by the Woman’s Club of Raleigh because there were no funds available. The next year, local school supplement funds were used to pay the teacher, and eventually the state began funding special education instructors. When I was principal, the teachers and I spent weeks prior to the first day of school working out transportation for students coming from all across the city.

Fortunately, the rights of special needs students are very different today. Progress in education is occurring -- and I don’t want the legislature and the governor to slow it down, which various legislative proposals will surely do.

In the late 1960s, I was on a statewide committee’s researcher for the legislation establishing kindergartens in North Carolina. Here, again, local funds were already supporting kindergarten classes as the state began to do so. More recently, preschool education has focused attention on preparing children for kindergarten. I salute the state's early childhood teachers, whose work is as important as the teachers of doctoral students at the university. Society loses when either level is neglected. All teachers warrant our respect and support. When conducting curriculum audits in school districts across the state during which I and members of my team visited all schools in a district, my respect increased. Teachers deserve praise, not threats.

It seems to me that the members of the General Assembly need to “make haste slowly” and not introduce and pass laws that appear too often to be an effort to cater to special interests rather than to foster education. Unintended consequences of such action may be more troublesome than addressing the motivation for such laws. Here is a list of specific bills that are pending and need to be defeated:

Senate Bill 337. Creating an independent board to manage charter schools is a bad idea from all perspectives, especially in diluting the State’s responsibility to assure a quality education for all. One board for public elementary and secondary education is sufficient along with the elected school superintendent. Both reflect the people of the State in ways two separate boards cannot. Also, more information is needed before having the State pay for charter school teachers who do not have a teacher license; caution is required to safeguard students’ right to reliable and responsible instruction.
House Bill 969 has a good feature in having the state paying for students’ advanced placement exam fees, but linking teachers’ bonuses to students’ high scores is not. Too many variables make such a practice unfair to both students and teachers. An unintended consequence can be more selective students thereby fostering the higher scores whereas more students should be challenged to seek the AP status thereby benefiting from the challenge.
Senate Bill 189 and House Bill 230 in expanding the definition of home schools, should it pass, will require more oversight in assuring students; rights to quality education. Transparency is essential; this may be where tying students' test scores to teacher effectiveness might be revealing.
Senate Bill 236. Providing for county commissioners to take over school construction is another bad idea. School building plans need decision-making close to the users. Duplication of offices and staffs would occur as both school boards and boards of commissioners would need to collaborate. The justification for this law escapes me.

I could go on to deplore many proposed laws that tend to turn back the clock on gains made for greater equality and opportunity for citizens and their families. Employers, private and public, benefit from strong families and communities. I devoted my entire career to making sure that all of our children get the very best education possible, and I am willing to be arrested today to make my voice heard to the North Carolina General Assembly.

Barbara Parramore is professor emerita at North Carolina State University.

There's a Major Assault on Democracy and the Public Good in Chicago, Led by Rahm Emanuel

Henry A. Giroux, Truthout — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:50:00 -0700

As profit mentalities tighten their grip on society, democratic institutions and public spheres like education are downsized, if not altogether destroyed.

This article first appeared on TruthOut.

Across the globe, predatory capitalism spreads its gospel of power, greed, commodification, gentrification and inequality. Through the combined forces of a market driven ideology, policy and mode of governance, the apostles of free-market capitalism are doing their best to dismantle historically guaranteed social provisions provided by the welfare state, define the accumulation of capital as the only obligation of democracy, increase the role of corporate money in politics, wage an assault on unions, expand the military-security state, increase inequalities in wealth and income, foster the erosion of civil liberties and undercut public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.1 As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish - from public schools to health-care centers - there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. One does not have to look too far to see what happens in America’s neoliberal educational culture to see how ruthlessly the inequality of wealth, income and power bears down on those young people and brave teachers who are struggling every day to save the schools, unions and modes of pedagogy that offer hope at a time when schools have become just another commodity, students are reduced to clients or disposable populations, and teachers and their unions are demonized.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current attempt to close down 54 public schools largely inhabited by poor minorities is one more example of a savage, racist neoliberal system at work that uses the politics of austerity and consolidation to further disenfranchise the unskilled young of the inner city. The hidden curriculum in this instance is not so invisible. Closing schools will result in massive layoffs, weakening the teachers unions. It will free up land that can be gentrified to attract middle-class voters, and it will once again prove that poor minority students, regardless of the hardships, if not danger, they will face as a result of such closings, are viewed as disposable—human waste to be relegated to the zones of terminal exclusion. Not only are many teachers and parents concerned about displacing thousands of students to schools that do not offer any hope of educational improvement, but they are also concerned about the safety of the displaced children, many of whom "will have to walk through violent neighborhoods and go to school with other students who are considered enemies."2 This is not simply misguided policy, it is a racist script that makes clear that poor black youth are disposable and that their safety is irrelevant. How else to explain the mayor's plan to produce a Safe Passage Plan in which firefighters would be asked to patrol the new routes, even though they have made it clear that they are not trained for this type of special duty. That many of these children are poor black children trapped in under-resourced schools appears irrelevant to a mayor who takes his lead from politicians such as Barack Obama and Arnie Duncan, two educators who have simply reproduced the Bush educational reform playbook, i.e., more testing, demonize teachers, weaken unions, advocate for choice and charter schools, and turn public schools over to corporate hedge-fund managers and billionaires such as Bill Gates. Emanuel’s passionate zeal to downsize schools in impoverished black neighborhoods is matched only by his misdirected enthusiasm to lay out $195 million "on a basketball arena for DePaul University, a private Chicago university."3

Emanuel’s policies are symptomatic of a much larger war against teachers, public goods and the social contract. We increasingly live in societies based on the vocabulary of "choice" and a denial of reality - a denial of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands and a growing machinery of social death and culture of cruelty.4 As power becomes global and is removed from local and nation-based politics, more and more individuals and groups are being defined by a free-floating class of ultra-rich and corporate power brokers as disposable, redundant, and irrelevant. Consequently, there are a growing number of people, especially young people, who increasingly inhabit zones of hardship, suffering and terminal exclusion. Power has lost its moorings in democratic institutions and removes itself from any sense of social, civic and political responsibilities. Mayor Emanuel, along with his neoliberal political allies, occupies the dead zone of capitalism—a zone marked by a ruthless indifference to the suffering of others and self-righteous coldness that makes human beings superfluous and unwanted. At the same time, this zone of capital accumulation and dispossession destroys those public spheres and collective structures such as public and higher education that are capable of resisting the logic of the pure market and the anti-democratic pressures it imposes on American society. Peter Brogan sums it up well in his analysis of the forces behind the current attacks on teachers and public education. He writes that the neoliberal agenda behind such attacks has:

"... been outlined in numerous planning documents from different city administrations, some of which have been drafted by the Commercial Club and have at the center an urban development strategy based on revitalizing the downtown core and prioritizing the financial, real estate and tourist sectors of the economy while at the same time demolishing public housing and schools in order to gentrify historically African American and Latino working class neighborhoods. These transformations are deeply related to the larger structural crisis of capitalism. The background to this is the crisis of profitability that comes to a head in the early 1970s, and the ushering in a period of capitalist regulation known as neoliberalism, marked by savage attacks on unions, workers and working class living standards. Reconstructing the built environment of the city has been absolutely central to all of these changes. This is one attempt to deal with the structural crisis of capitalism at this critical juncture. And destroying unions, and teachers’ unions in particular, have been key to that attempt."5

This is all the more reason for educators and others to address important social issues and to defend public education as democratic public sphere. And it is all the more reason to defend the Chicago Public Teachers Union in its struggle with Emanuel because this battle is not a local issue. On the contrary, it is a national issue that will set the stage for the future of American public education, which is on its deathbed. The struggle in Chicago must be understood as part of a larger set of market-driven policies in which everything is privatized, transformed into "spectacular spaces of consumption," and subject to the vicissitudes of the military-security state.6 One consequence is the emergence of what the late Tony Judt called an "eviscerated society" —"one that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in " any viable democracy."7 This grim reality represents a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy.8 It is part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals. It is also the politics that drives Emanuel’s policies in Chicago around education and a host of other issues.

In Emanuel’s ideological script, the common good is viewed as either a source of profits or pathology. The market is the only template that matters in shaping all aspects of society, and freedom is reduced to the freedom to shop, indulge one’s self-interests and willingly support a society in which market values trump democratic values. According to Emanuel and his ilk, the arch enemies of freedom are the welfare state, unions and public service workers such a public school teachers. And as was evident in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, law and order is the new language for mobilizing shared fears rather than shared responsibilities, just as war becomes the all-embracing organizing principle for developing a market-driven society and economy.9

Emanuel supports a notion of educational reform in which pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Even worse, pedagogy becomes a sterile method for developing skills aimed at raising test scores. The Chicago public school teachers must reject this definition of teaching and educational reform, along with its endless slavish imitations, even when they are claimed as part of an "educational reform" project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method—which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship—progressive educators need to argue for modes of critical pedagogy that illuminate the relationships among knowledge, authority and power.10 For instance, any viable reform movement must raise questions regarding who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge. Is the production of knowledge and curricula in the hands of teachers, textbook companies, corporate interests, or other forces?

Central to any viable notion that what makes a pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledges and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. Of crucial importance is the question of authority and how it is legitimated, used and exercised. When teachers are stripped of authority, pedagogy becomes lifeless, methodical and militarized, reduced to low-level skills and modes of standardization that debase creativity and cripple the imaginative capacities of both teachers and students. Part of what the Chicago teachers are doing in their protests against the school closings is drawing attention to the ways in which authority, knowledge, power, desire and experience are produced under specific basic conditions of learning, and in doing so, they are shedding light on educational reform movements in which teaching is stripped of its sense of accountability to parents, place, and the complex dynamic of history and communities. Under such circumstances, the Chicago teachers are refusing educational policies in which matters of authority and pedagogy are removed from matters of values, norms and power.

Emanuel’s neoliberal educational philosophy has no understanding of what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings because it is incapable of raising questions.

Nor does it acknowledge that pedagogy is simultaneously about the knowledge and practices teachers and students might engage in together, along with the values, social relations and visions such practices legitimate. What scares Emanuel and other neoliberal reformers is that pedagogy is a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment.

At the heart of the Chicago demonstrations against Emanuel’s polices are a series of broader questions that situate the right-wing reform movement in a broader set of market-driven politics. For instance, what kind of society allows economic injustice and massive inequality to run wild in a society allowing drastic cuts in education and public services? Why are more police being put in schools just as more prisons are being built in the United States? What does it mean when students face not just tuition hikes but a lifetime of financial debt while governments in Canada, Chile and the United States spend trillions on weapons of death and needless wars? What kind of education does it take, both in and out of schools, to recognize the emergence of various economic, political, cultural and social forces that point to the dissolution of democracy and the possible emergence of a new kind of authoritarian state?

In an age of irresponsible privatization, unchecked individualism, celebrity culture, unfettered consumerism and a massive flight from moral responsibility, it has become more and more difficult to acknowledge that educators and other cultural workers have an enormous responsibility in opposing the current threat to the planet and everyday life by bringing democratic political culture back to life. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus or project, teachers are often reduced either to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one’s pedagogical practices and research undertakings. In opposition to this model, with its claims to, and conceit of, political neutrality, it is crucial that teachers in Chicago and cities across the United States combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with the operations of power in the larger society and to provide the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. The role of a critical education is not to train students solely for jobs, but also to educate them to question critically the institutions, policies and values that shape their lives, relationships to others, and myriad connections to the larger world. Equally important is the task of teacher unions all over America to forge alliances with a range of social movements so that the struggle for education is connected to the struggle for social provisions, a new understanding of politics, and the development of mass movements that can shut down the savagery of a neoliberal public pedagogy and economic machine that is the enemy of any viable notion of democracy.

Education is never innocent, and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, educators must resist all calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or ideological dogmatism. Educational dogmatism now takes the form of blatant attacks on unions, the dissolution of public schools largely inhabited by poor minority students, the imposition of disciplinary apparatuses that criminalize the behavior of low-income and poor students of color, and the development of curricula that deadens the mind and soul through a narrow pedagogy of test-taking. What is happening in Chicago and other cities in the United States is the production of pedagogy of repression. This suggests the need for educators to rethink the purpose and meaning of education, the crucial importance of pedagogy in a democracy, and the collective struggles that will have to be waged against neoliberal racism and its attempts to dismantle the power of teachers to gain control over the conditions of their labor.

Education must be reclaimed as central to any viable notion of citizenship, civic responsibility and democracy itself. What Rahm Emmanuel and his ilk fear is the potential of public education to enable students to think critically, hold power accountable and imagine education as a form of educated hope. Education and pedagogy cannot be reduced to the dictates of an audit culture with its rendering of critical thought nil and void just as it elevates a mindless pedagogy of test-taking as the ultimate pedagogical practice and the final arbiter over what constitutes quality teaching, learning and what it means to be educated. What is lost in this pedagogical practice, is a pedagogy that provides the conditions for students to come to grips with their own power, master the best histories and legacies of education available, learn to think critically and be willing to hold authority accountable—and most importantly, the dangerous notion that changing attitudes is not enough and that students should also be pressed to exercise a fearsome form of social responsibility as engaged citizens willing to struggle for social, economic and political justice. This is the last approach to education that the current mayor of Chicago wants to see materialize in the cities’ public schools.

What Chicago public schools teachers are fighting for in their three days of demonstrations is the right to define teaching as a performative practice that is not only about teaching young people to be literate and knowledgeable but also to embrace the mutually informing modalities of power and knowledge so as to engage education as an act of intervention in the world, one that moves beyond simple matters of critique and understanding. At the essence of the brave struggles waged by the Chicago public school teachers is the recognition that any viable approach to pedagogy must acknowledge the crucial nature of the labor conditions necessary for teacher autonomy, cooperation, decent working conditions, safety of the children, and the relations of power necessary to give teachers and students the capacity to restage power in productive ways—ways that point to self-development, self-determination and social agency.

What these three days of demonstrations must address is that without power over the conditions of their labor, teachers become pawns in a neoliberal politics in which they are deskilled, reduced to security guards, and work under conditions that transform education into a form of training. High-stakes testing and its corresponding tactic of promoting cheating among administrators, putting into play the most degrading forms of competition, and its killing of the civic imagination is both a debased form of instrumental rationality and a reification of method— put another way, a kind of methodological madness. What needs to be addressed is that pedagogy is more than a method or its antithesis, a free-wheeling conversation between students and teachers. On the contrary, it is precisely by recognizing that teaching is always directive—that is, an act of intervention inextricably mediated through particular forms of authority that teachers can offer students—for whatever use they wish to make of them—a variety of analytic tools, diverse historical traditions and a wide range of knowledge. At issue here is a pedagogical practice that must provide the conditions for students to learn and narrate themselves and for teachers to be learners attentive to the histories, knowledge and experiences that students bring to the classroom and any other sphere of learning. In this instance, pedagogy should enable students to learn how to govern rather than be governed.

The war being waged against Chicago public schools, teachers and students is the product of a corporate ideology and pedagogy that numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority, and disdaining the hard work of learning how to be thoughtful, critical, and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the social, public values, citizenship and democracy wither and die.

What role might public school teachers take in light of poisonous assaults waged on public schools by the forces of neoliberalism? In the most immediate sense, they can raise their collective voices against the influence of corporations that are flooding societies with a culture of war, consumerism, commercialism and privatization. They can show how this culture of commodified cruelty and violence is only one part of a broader and all-embracing militarized culture of war, the arms industry, and a Darwinian survival-of the-fittest ethic that increasingly disconnects schools from public values, the common good and democracy itself. They can bring all of their intellectual and collective resources together to critique and dismantle the imposition of high-stakes testing and other commercially driven modes of accountability on schools. They can mobilize young people and others to defend education as a public good by advocating for policies that invest in schools rather than in the military-industrial complex and its massive and expensive weapons of death, for instance, the US government’s investment in procuring a number of F35 jets that cost $137 million each. They can educate young people and a larger public to fight against putting police in schools, modeling schools after prisons, and implementing zero tolerance policies that largely punish poor minority children.

Instead of investing in schools, children, health care, jobs for young people, and much needed infrastructures, neoliberal societies celebrate militarism, hyper-masculinity, extreme competition, and a survival of the fittest ethic while exhibiting disdain for any form of shared bonds, dependency and compassion for others. Advocates of neoliberalism have eliminated social provisions, destroyed pension plans, eliminated health-care benefits, allowed inequality to run wild, and have done so in order to safeguard and expand the assets of the rich and powerful. As social bonds and the institutions that support them disappear from such societies, so do the formative cultures that make civic education, critical literacy, and cultures of questioning possible. Too many school systems operate within disciplinary apparatuses that turn public education into either an extension of the prison-industrial complex or the culture of the mall. When not being arrested for trivial rule violations, students are subjected to walls, buses, and bathrooms that become giant advertisements for consumer products, many of which are detrimental to the health of students, contributing to the obesity crisis in America. Increasingly, even curricula are organized to reflect the sound of the cash register, hawking products for students to buy and promoting the interests of corporations that celebrate fossil fuels as an energy source, sugar-filled drinks, and a Disney-like view of the world. And of course, this commodification of public education is migrating to higher education with the speed of light. University student centers are being modeled after department stores, complete with an endless array of vendors trying to sell credit cards to a generation already swimming in debt. University faculty members are valued more for their ability to secure grants than for their scholarship.

What is encouraging about the growing opposition of the Chicago teachers to the poisonous policies, pedagogies, and shameless racism of Mayor Rahm Emanuel is their willingness, under the inspiring educational leadership of Karen Lewis, the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, to develop a discourse of both critique and possibility. This has meant developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the word with reading the world and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people as critical agents and engaged citizens. In taking up this project, Lewis and others have struggled to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. Hope in this instance is educational, removed from the fantasy of idealism, unaware of the constraints facing the dream of a democratic society. Educated hope is not a call to overlook the difficult conditions that shape both schools and the larger social order. On the contrary, it is the precondition for providing those languages, values, relations of power and collective struggles that point the way to a more democratic and just world.

Educated hope provides the basis for dignifying the labor of teachers; it offers up critical knowledge linked to democratic social change; it affirms shared responsibilities; and it encourages teachers and students to recognize justice, equality and social responsibility as fundamental dimensions of learning. Such hope offers the possibility of thinking beyond the given. As difficult as this task may seem to educators, if not to a larger public, it is a struggle worth waging.

It is important to note that democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity and civic courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good.11 The right-wing governors, corporate-affiliated politicians, and the shameless hedge-fund managers and billionaires are waging a war in order to colonize public education and destroy the dignity of teachers, students and critical learning. The Chicago teachers refuse to believe that the antidemocratic market-driven forces attacking American public schools are irreversible, part of a new common sense that is beyond critical inquiry and dissent. The three days of demonstrations hold a wider meaning for all Americans. Not only do they demonstrate that the future is still open, but that the time has come through a show of collective struggle and moral and political outrage that public education is crucial to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic imagination, a renewed sense of social agency and an impassioned, collective political will. Public school teachers are one of the few remaining forces left in the land of corrupt bankers, hedge-fund managers and right-wing politicians who can imagine the promise of democracy and are willing to fight for it. The struggle being waged by the Chicago Public School teachers is part and parcel of a battle for the essence of education, if not democracy itself.

Read more articles by Henry A. Giroux and other scholars at Truthout's Public Intellectual Project.

***

1. See, for example, David Harvey, The New Imperialism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wendy Brown, Edgework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism(Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008); Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy,Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 2010).

2. Valerie Strauss, “Three Days of Marches in chicago to Protest School Closings,” The Washington Post (May 17, 2013).

3. Travis Waldron, “Why Is Chicago Devoting $125 Million To Build A Basketball Arena For A Private University?,” ThinkProgress (May 15, 2013).

4. See, for instance, on the rise of the racist punishing state, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010); on the severe costs of massive inequality, Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2012); on the turning of public schools into prisons, see Annette Fuentes,Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse (New York: Verso, 2011).

5. Peter Brogan, “What’s Behind the Attack on Teachers and Public Education?” Solidarity (September 14, 2012).

6. Quoted in Michael L. Silk and David L. Andrews. “(Re)Presenting Baltimore: Place, Policy, Politics, and Cultural Pedagogy.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 33 (2011), p. 436.

7. Terry Eagleton, “Reappraisals: What is the worth of social democracy?” Harper’s Magazine, (October 2010), p. 78.

8. Alex Honneth, Pathologies of Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 188.

9. For an excellent analysis of contemporary forms of neoliberalism, Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 25, No. 6, (November 2011, pp. 705-728; see also Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism.

10. For examples of this tradition, see Maria Nikolakaki, ed. Critical Pedagogy in the Dark Ages: Challenges and Possibilities, (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Henry A. Giroux, On Critical Pedagogy (New York: Continuum, 2011).

11. See, Henry A. Giroux, The Education Deficit and the War on Youth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013).

The Similarities Between the Charter School Movement and the War on Drugs

Paul L. Thomas, Ed.D., TruthOut.org — Mon, 20 May 2013 11:33:00 -0700

How both are creating an underclass, significantly among African American males.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

In the United States, the intersection of the criminal justice system and public schools has intensified in the wake of school shootings, prompting similar solutions from supposedly opposite ends of the political spectrum. As noted in a New York Times editorial, "The National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation's schools."

As the editorial points out, however, research tends to show that police in the hallways creates schools-as-prisons and students-as-criminals, increasing, rather than eliminating, the problems. In another piece, Chloe Angyal highlights the disturbing connection between incarceration and education:

Punishment rates in schools mirror the rates in the 'real world' - though what could be more real than entrenched discrimination in our schools? - and in fact, contribute to those real world figures. The Civil Rights Project report notes that the abuse and misuse of suspensions can turn them into "gateways to prison." Even if that were not the case, even absent a school-to-prison pipeline, the situation would be grim enough. What this report reveals is a disregard for the well-being of marginalized populations that, were it directed at other groups, would never be allowed to stand. If a quarter of white middle school boys were being suspended every school year, and if pretty white ladies were being frisked on the streets of Manhattan, there'd be an uproar.

While the term "a nation at risk" tends to be associated with the 1983 report on US education from the Reagan administration, the early 1980s also spawned an era of mass incarceration, built on claims that the United States was also a nation at risk because of illegal drug sales and use, identified by author Michelle Alexander as The New Jim Crow:

In October 1982, President Reagan officially announced his administration's "War on Drugs. At the time he declared this new war, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue facing the country. This fact was no deterrent to Reagan, for the drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and drug dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined "others" - the undeserving. (p. 49)

Within a year of each other, then, the Reagan administration launched a war on drugs and a crisis response to public education. Just as Alexander details the masked intent behind the war on drugs, John Holton exposed A Nation at Risk as less about education reform and more about political agendas.

We met with President Reagan at the White House, who at first was jovial, charming, and full of funny stories, but then turned serious when he gave us our marching orders. He told us that our report should focus on five fundamental points that would bring excellence to education: Bring God back into the classroom; encourage tuition tax credits for families using private schools; support vouchers; leave the primary responsibility for education to parents; and please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education. Or, at least, don't ask to waste more federal money on education - "We have put in more only to wind up with less."

For three decades, the War on Drugs has led to mass incarceration, primarily impacting African American males, the racially defined "others," and the education reform movement based on high-stakes accountability has targeted "other people's children" in ways that suggest market-oriented education reform is a school-based component of the New Jim Crow grounded in the criminal justice system.

Mass incarceration and market-oriented education reform share more than their genesis in the 1980s, since both have been shown to cause far more harm than good and to further marginalize African American and impoverished youths and adults.

The Dark Reality of Market-Oriented Education Reform

The education accountability era begun in the early 1980s focused on implementing curriculum standards and high-stakes testing, first at the state level and then over the decade since No Child Left Behind (NCLB), increasingly at the national level.

The evolution of the education reform movement has included some central ideological commitments - focusing on in-school-only reform and relying on slogans such as "no excuses" and "poverty is not destiny," as expressed in a 2010 manifesto from several key figures in reform, Michelle Rhee, Paul Vallas and Joel Klein:

So, where do we start? With the basics. As President Obama has emphasized, the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income - it is the quality of their teacher.
Yet, for too long, we have let teacher hiring and retention be determined by archaic rules involving seniority and academic credentials. The widespread policy of "last in, first out" (the teacher with the least seniority is the first to go when cuts have to be made) makes it harder to hold on to new, enthusiastic educators and ignores the one thing that should matter most: performance.

At first, reform was driven by revolutionary promises and often unverified claims of public school failure, but over the past 30 years, ample evidence now suggests that political education reform has failed to fulfill its promises, and, in a mechanism similar to the negative consequences of the mass incarceration, has harmed the exact students those reforms were designed to help.

The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education has resisted market-oriented, in-school-only reform championed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Rhee, Vallas and Klein, calling instead for social and educational reform seeking equity of opportunity for all families and students. In Broader, Bolder's "Market-Oriented Education Reforms' Rhetoric Trumps Reality" (April 18, 2013), Elaine Weiss and Don Long examine test-based teacher evaluations, school closures and expanded charter schools in Chicago, New York City and Washington, DC, concluding: "The report finds that the reforms delivered few benefits and in some cases harmed the students they purport to help. It also identifies a set of largely neglected policies with real promise to weaken the poverty-education link, if they receive some of the attention and resources now targeted to the touted reforms." (p. 3)

Market-oriented education reform has depended on addressing inequity indirectly, trusting mechanisms such as choice and business models of managing teachers as well as schools to initiate social change. This reform has specifically targeted goals such as closing the achievement gap, better serving impoverished and minority students, and raising international indicators of educational quality.

As Weiss and Long show, however, test-based teacher evaluations, school closures and expanded charter schools haven't succeeded, even against their advocates' promises:

· Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in "reform" cities than in other urban districts.
· Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination.
· Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
· School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.
· Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students.
· Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise.
· The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance.
· Real, sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient and multipronged. (p. 3)

Further, additional evidence reveals (ostensibly) unintended consequences of market-oriented reform have included increased segregation by race and class in charter schools and a widening gap between the type of educational experiences affluent children receive compared with the authoritarian and test-prep-focused "no excuses" schools for minority and impoverished students, notably as detailed inSarah Carr's Hope Against Hope, exploring the post-Katrina rise of charter schools in New Orleans:

But inside the schools, the war over education no longer seems so stark and clearly defined. Edges blur, shades of gray abound, and simple solutions prove elusive. . . . Many of the most powerful people in the country have a plan for the future of education in America, one focused on more charter schools, technocratic governance, weakened teachers' unions and the relentless use of data to measure student and teacher progress. (pp. 5, 6-7)

But Carr's narrative and analysis show that, as detailed in the Broader, Bolder report, market-oriented reform tends to replicate and even perpetuate inequity instead of eradicating it: Students in New Orleans sit in "no excuses" charter schools that are both authoritarian and segregated, while the post-Katrina Recovery District reduced the African American teacher workforce from 75 percent to 57 percent of the city's teachers.

Despite the slogans and the rhetoric, schools experiencing the array of market-oriented education reform policies have shown that home and communitycharacteristics do predict educational opportunities, mirroring the historically greatest challenge facing traditional public schools. Ultimately, like the War on Drugs, current education reform exists as a key element in America's New Jim Crow era.

Education Reform and "Racially Sanitized Rhetoric"

Just as the education reform movement was spurred by a "manufactured crisis," as exposed by Gerald Bracey and Holton, the War on Drugs grew out of a racially divisive political agenda, a drug crisis that did not yet exist, but created "mass incarceration in the United States . . . as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow," as Alexander details. (p. 4)

Since market-oriented education reform is producing evidence highlighting the ineffectiveness and even negative outcomes associated with those policies, that the agendas remain robust suggests, again like mass incarceration, education reform fulfills many of the dynamics found in the New Jim Crow.

Just as mass incarceration from the war on drugs continues institutional racism once found in slavery and Jim Crow, education reform, especially the "no excuses" charter school movement, resurrects a separate but equal education system that is separate, but certainly isn't equal. The masked racism of mass incarceration and education reform share many parallels, including the following:

· Both depend on "racially sanitized rhetoric," according to Alexander, that thinly masks racism. "Getting tough on crime" justifies disproportional arrests, convictions and sentencing for African Americans; "no excuses" and "zero tolerance" justify highly authoritarian and punitive schools disproportionally serving high-poverty children of color.

· Both depend on claims of objective mechanisms - laws for the war on drugs and test scores for education reform - to deflect charges of racism. Alexander recognizes "this system is better designed to create [emphasis in original] crime and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals, rather than to eliminate crime or reduce the number of criminals," (p. 236) just as test-based education reform creates and does not address the achievement gap.

· Both depend on racialized fears among poor and working-class whites, which Alexander identifies in the Reagan drug war agenda: "In his campaign for the presidency, Reagan mastered the 'excision of the language of race from conservative public discourse' and thus built on the success of the earlier conservatives who developed a strategy of exploiting racial hostility or resentment for political gain without making explicit reference to race" (p. 48). The charter school movement masks segregation within a progressive-friendly public school choice.

· Both depend on either current claims of post-racial America or the goal of a post-racial society: "This system of control depends far more on racialindifference [emphasis in original] . . . than racial hostility," Alexander notes. (p. 203)

· Both depend on a bipartisan and popular commitment to seemingly obvious goals of crime eradication and world-class schools.

· Both depend on the appearance of African American support. Alexander explains about the effectiveness of the war on drugs: "Conservatives could point to black support for highly punitive approaches to dealing with the problems of the urban poor as 'proof' that race had nothing to do with their 'law and order' agenda." (p. 42)

This last point - that African Americans seem to support both the war on crime and "no excuses" charter schools - presents the most problematic aspect of charges that mass incarceration and education reform are ultimately racist, significant contributions to the New Jim Crow.

For example, Carr reports that African American parents not only choose "no excuses" charter schools in New Orleans, but also actively cheer and encourage the authoritarian policies voiced by the schools' administrators. But Alexander states, "Given the dilemma facing poor black communities, it is inaccurate to say that black people 'support' mass incarceration or 'get-tough' policies" because "if the only choice that is offered blacks is rampant crime or more prisons, the predictable (and understandable) answer will be 'more prisons.' " (p. 210)

New Orleans serves as a stark example of how this dynamic works in education reform: Given the choice between segregated, underfunded and deteriorating public schools and "no excuses" charters - and not the choice of the school environments and offerings found in many elite private schools - the predictable answer is "no excuses" charters.

Market-oriented education reform continues to produce evidence that it fails against its own goals and standards. But more disturbing is that current education reform also shares with the war on drugs evidence that the United States is committed to the New Jim Crow, to which Alexander quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." (p. 203)

The war on drugs and highly punitive, segregated charter schools are creating an underclass, significantly among African American males - facts that must be acknowledged before equity of opportunity can be secured. About this intersection of the criminal justice system and education reform, Angyal asks, "But the real question is, what will it take for us to fix this system that punishes students and citizens for no other reason but their membership in marginalized groups?"

New York City Principals: 'We Won’t Use Test Scores to Screen Students'

Philissa Cramer, Gotham Schools — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:02:00 -0700

About a dozen principals have announced — in an open letter — that they are abandoning the use of test scores in admission.

Distressed by state tests that they say did not reflect the way they want students to learn, several city principals are pledging not to use the scores to help them pick their students.

Selective middle schools consider students’ fourth-grade reading and math scores, and selective high schools look at students’ seventh-grade scores.

But after the first round of state tests tied to new standards known as the Common Core, about a dozen principals have announced — in an open letter to parents, students, educators, and others with an interest in education — that they are abandoning the use of test scores in admission, at least for now.

“We welcome rigor, high standards and accountability, but demand that these three crucial words and concepts not be thrown around loosely; and, even more importantly, we demand that they be implemented in a proper, respectful and effective way,” write the principals, who come from a range of selective schools in three boroughs. ”Therefore, we cannot grant these recent tests the value others claim they have until [our] concerns are addressed.”

The principals say they want the state’s tests to be shorter, open to public scrutiny, and more aligned to the Common Core, which emphasizes critical thinking and problem solving over recall and the completion of rote processes.

Mark Federman, principal of East Side Community School, said he helped draft the letter after being “shocked and appalled and just really saddened” that this year’s state tests did not match up to what he expected of the Common Core.

“The power that we have as principals and as schools is we decide how important [test scores] are,” he said. “It would be hypocritical for us to use them in admissions.”

The principals are also registering their criticism in a letter that Federman said would be sent soon to State Education Commissioner John King. Journalist Andrea Gabor first reported about both letters on her blog.

Like most of the principals who signed the letters, Rex Bobbish, principal of the Cinema School, a selective Bronx high school, has never made test scores the exclusive or even prime factor when selecting applicants. But he told GothamSchools that he always considers them, and in the past, he has assumed that very low scores meant that students would not be prepared for high school. Now, he said, he won’t make the same assumption.

“I will weigh students’ grades in core courses much more heavily than the state exams going forward,” he said. “That’s the pledge I made when I signed that letter.”

At schools where test scores have factored more heavily into admissions decisions, making the same pledge is less straightforward, Federman said. Still, he said, principals there could facilitate an important discussion about the role of test scores.

“If there’s a school and parents that are boycotting the test, and yet the school is using tests to let kids in, I think that’s a good conversation for that community to have,” he said.

Among the principals who have signed on to the pledge is Ramon Gonzalez of M.S. 223 in the South Bronx. Days after the state tests finished last month, Gonzalez told a crowd of policy makers — including AFT President Randi Weingarten, who has called for a one-year moratorium on stakes for Common Core exams — that the tests had distressed his teachers and students.

“They didn’t know it would be a test of endurance,” Gonzalez said about his students. “They thought it would be a test about what they knew.”

Bobbish said changing their schools’ admissions criteria represents a small step that principals can take against state tests’ increasing stakes, an issue that several mayoral candidates have pledged to address.

“There’s not really much we can do about it,” said Bobbish, who said he supports the Common Core standards but grew concerned after colleagues told him that the tests did not appear to be fully aligned to the standards. “We can’t control the whole world, but we can send a message by saying we really value a student’s long-term effort and what they do in teachers’ classrooms more than what their tests show.”

Nerds, Jocks and Jailed Dissidents: Inside the World of Israel’s High School War Resisters

Sarah Lazare, YES! Magazine — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:31:00 -0700

High school's tough enough without having to face prison time for refusing to serve an occupation you know is wrong.

When the 19-year-old Israeli war resister Noam Gur attends weekly demonstrations against the occupation of Palestine, the soldiers who suppress the protestors—with tear gas, stun grenades, and occasionally live fire—aren’t just strangers in uniform. Among them are her former high school classmates, who have been conscripted into the Israeli army.

Gur was supposed to serve, too, but instead joined the shministim. This is a Hebrew term meaning high school students in their senior year, who face conscription into the army. But the word is also used to refer to students who publicly refuse conscription on ethical grounds.

“All my friends from high school are in the army,” Gur explains. “Now I see them at demos. It is really weird and complicated.”

With a shrug of her shoulders, Gur describes the process that led to her refusal of conscription. “I found out that what they taught me in school was different from this reality. I went to the West Bank to protests and saw the occupation. I started to realize I didn’t want to serve.”

Gur, who has cropped hair and a shy smile, was supposed to be a soldier before she was out of her teens, like most Israeli youth. But instead she served 20 days in prison for refusing orders. Now an anti-occupation activist who supports other young people questioning military service, she is one of many young Israelis who are saying no to the army. They are part of growing number of Israeli movements working to end the occupation from the inside.

Letters of resistance

To understand what it takes to become a shministi—the singular form of shiministim—it’s important to understand the powerful grip of the Israeli military on society. Israel’s occupation of Palestine and aggressive stance toward many of its neighbors requires a highly militarized society. The country devotes almost one fifth of its national budget to military spending, 18 percent of which is paid for by the United States. Israel’s military spending as a percentage of GDP is one of the highest in the world, and it boasts a larger military than any of its neighbors. The country maintains a stash of nuclear weapons and is the world's eighth largest arms exporter.

Meanwhile, children are prepared for compulsory service from an early age by constant military presence in educational settings, including “teacher soldiers” in some schools. Walking through Israeli cities and towns, one encounters streets filled with soldiers carrying M4 and M16 rifles, many of them in plain clothes.

“There is always a military background here,” Gur says.

While the Israeli army is preeminent in society, it is not invincible. Public draft resistance began in 1970, when a handful of students penned an open letter to then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, in which they explained their refusal to serve in territories seized and occupied in the 1967 war. In 1982, a group of army reservists refused to serve in the Lebanon War, founding the group Yesh Gvul, whose name means “there is a limit.” The movement of letter-writing and refusal by high school seniors grew during the early 2000s, prompting the military to crack down and sentence each of the five shministim from the class of 2002 to two years in prison.

By 2008, when almost 100 people signed public letters resisting conscription, prison terms for shministimhad become standard. The army makes it nearly impossible to get a discharge based on conscientious objector status, and many shministim escape conscription only by claiming mental unfitness, often after serving multiple prison sentences. The 19-year-old shministi Nathan Blanc is currently serving his eighth consecutive prison term for refusing army service in protest of second-class rights for Palestinians.

In addition to those who publicly resist, an unknown number engage in “gray resistance,” quietly applying for discharges on mental, physical, and religious grounds. As of 2008, about half of all potential conscripts did not enlist due to various exemptions, according to Israeli army officials.

Sahar Vardi, a shministi from the class of 2008, wants to encourage this type of resistance. She is a member of the Israeli feminist demilitarization group New Profile, which offers consultation and support to youth questioning military service. The organization reaches 2,000 people who are seeking to resist military service each year, she says.

Saying no to conscription and occupation

Gur, who grew up in Nahariya, a town just north of Haifa, had a sister in the border police in Gaza at the time of her refusal. Despite her family’s objection to her resistance, she penned her public letter in 2012. In it, she explained her unwillingness to serve in an army that has, she wrote, “been engaged in dominating another nation, in plundering and terrorizing a civilian population that is under its control.” After receiving two successive prison terms for refusing orders, she was finally released after claiming mental unfitness.

The number of public shministim has been shrinking in recent years, with just three 12th graders, including Gur, publicly declaring their draft refusal in 2012. Yet Electronic Intifada reports that the number of resisters among the Druze, an ethnic minority from the country’s north, is on the rise, with Druze musician Omar Saad publicly refusing conscription last year. Furthermore, New Profile consultants say that the number of gray resisters continues to increase.

Regardless of its size, Israeli anti-occupation organizers insist that the tradition of refusing conscription remains a relevant force, in conjunction with other demilitarization efforts. “Breaking the consensus on occupation is important,” says Netta Mishley, a shministi from the class of 2009. “It allows people to feel more free speaking their minds.”

Gur, who also supports the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanction of Israel, says that that draft resistance is one tactic among many, and it is difficult to tell how effective it is. Nonetheless, she argues that refusal is important to encourage. In a society where graduates fresh out of high school are required to participate directly in military occupation at an early age, saying no can be a way of showing another path is possible, and retrieving one's humanity in the process.

Sarah Lazare wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Sarah is a writer and organizer in U.S. anti-war and anti-militarist movements, and is a member of The Civilian-Soldier Alliance and War Times. She co-edited PM Press book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War, and her work has appeared in publications includingThe Nation, Truthout, and Al Jazeera English.

Interested?

Photo Essay: Iraelis and Palestinians Join Up to Rebuild Homes
Volunteers from both the Jewish and Arab sides of the conflict join forces to rebuild homes demolished by the Israeli government.
A Real Pro-Israel Policy Helps Palestine, Too
Stephen Zunes argues that a truly pro-Israel policy is one that is also a pro-Palestine and pro-peace.
Only the People of the United States Can End Israel's Occupation
Many progressives breathed a sigh of relief when last month’s Israeli elections set the stage for a centrist coalition and not a far-right one. Yet peace will remain out of reach until the American people pressure the Obama Administration to end Israeli impunity.

Arresting a Teen Girl for Dozing Off in Class? Why Normal Kid Behavior Is Treated As a Crime or Psychiatric Disorder

David Rosen, AlterNet — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:05:00 -0700

What happened to kids being kids?

Brianna Pena, a 5-year-old, was told she could not return to her kindergarten classroom at her Bronx, NY, charter school until she was “psychiatrically cleared” to return by a medical professional. It was her first day at a new school. She didn’t know anyone and repeatedly cried, “Nobody cares about me!” School officials insist that Brianna kept “yelling and throwing chairs” during the incident. Administrators placed her on a list of so-called “psychiatric suspensions.”

In Bartow, FL, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student was expelled from Bartow High School and arrested for conducting an unapproved chemistry experiment. She combined some household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle and the top popped off, giving off a small explosion. According to the school principal, Ron Pritchard, "she made a bad choice. ... She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did.” She was charged with possession of and discharging a weapon on school property.

Brianna’s and Kiera are but two examples of the growing “discipline” crisis besetting schools throughout the country. School administrators are resorting to an increasing number of questionable tactics to address problems associated with the breakdown of the classroom as a learning environment. These include the use of local EMS workers to remove pre-teen children as well as such high-tech methods as RFID tracking and CCTV video surveillance. An increasing number of officials are resorting to aggressive in-school policing, with on-campus uniformed and armed officers ticketing and arresting more and more kids. All to contain “disruptive” students often engaged in what was once considered bad behavior but is now criminalized conduct.

Reports that American education is in crisis appear in the media almost every day. From Pres. Obama to mayors across the country, everyone complains about the country’s supposedly failing education system. Each promises to fix the problem – and it only seems to be getting worse. Yet, efforts to police schools reflect the further shifting of education spending from the classroom to the administrative apparatus of control.

A major contributing factor to this crisis is the failed “zero tolerance” discipline program promoted by the Bush administration and still in force in school systems throughout the country. Like its abstinence-only sex ed program, Bush policies made a serious issue worse. The effort to enforce classroom discipline through the expulsion and punishment of students is an example of the moral absolutism propagated during much of the last few decades. It further extends the “school-to-prison pipeline” by aggressively incarcerating ever-younger children, particularly African-American and Hispanic youth.

***

Some cities, like New York, are increasingly turning to costly emergency medical services to restrain students. Cashmiere Turner, a 7th grader at New York’s Intermediate School 151 in the Bronx, struggled both academically and socially in the classroom. Her mother, Sonya, repeatedly sought school administrators’ help with her daughter’s learning problems and the bullying she faced, but was ignored. In October 2011, school officials claimed that the troubled teen acted out, attempting to harm herself. They contacted Cashmiere’s mother, who rushed to the school only to find that the officials had also contacted the local EMS. Refusing to let Ms. Turner take her daughter home, EMS workers and police officers brought her to a local hospital that found her neither a threat to herself nor others. She was released, but not before the hospital billed her mother an estimated $1,300 for services rendered.

The city’s Board of Education (BOE) reports that during 2010-2011 school year, EMS was called 947 times to handle disruptive or dangerous kids; this is up 12 percent from the previous year. Nelson Mar, an attorney with Legal Services NYC-Bronx, represented both Brianna Pena and Cashmiere Turner, warns, “minor children are removed by EMS for childhood behavior or misbehavior which does not rise to the level of a medical emergency.” He points out that at one Bronx hospital, there were 58 EMS calls from schools during a 10-day period in February 2011. Most troubling, doctors and psychologists found that only 3 percent of the kids brought to an Emergency Room were admitted to the hospital.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stewardship, removal and suspension are among the principal means to enforce discipline in the classroom. According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the BOE’s “Citywide Standards on Discipline and Intervention” – the discipline code -- reported infractions increased 49 percent and “zero tolerance” infractions resulting in a suspension doubled between 2001 and 2010.

Part of this increase was due to the nearly two-fold increase in the number of code “infractions,” from 38 (2001) to 67 (2007). The NYCLU found that infractions range from using profane language and throwing chalk to being insubordinate and can lead to a student’s suspension from school for a year. And “zero tolerance infractions” are the worse, misbehavior requiring suspension. Over the last decade, they jumped from 7 (in 1998-2001) to 29 (2007-2008, 2008-2010); they declined to 21 (2010-2011). Not surprising, black students, who make up a third (33%) of the student population, received more then half (53%) of the suspensions.

In New York, school administrators have increasingly turned to EMS to address disciplinary problems. Mar reports that in the 2011-2012 school year, 3,435 calls were placed to the EMS, up from the 3,024 calls in 2009-2010, a 13.5 percent increase; these calls are separate from calls to NYC police that, during the same period, declined to 241 from 291, a 17.2 percent decrease. “The practice of removing misbehaving students by EMS is a costly waste of EMS and hospital resources,” Mar warned.

* * *

A high school student from Hoover, AL, was recently beaten by a school official and then arrested for falling asleep in school, according to a recent lawsuit. Ashlynn Avery is not your typical teenager. She suffers from diabetes, asthma and sleep apnea. Sadly, while sitting in the in-school suspension room and reading “Huckleberry Finn,” she dozed off. She asserts that the classroom supervisor seized the book and hit her with it; he claims it was an accident. The police were called and the girl was “forcefully” arrested, causing her to have a seizure, vomit, pass out and end up in the hospital.

To enforce discipline, school systems across the country are employing harsher techniques and turning to the local police. In Maine, educators report an increase in school disruptions with students pulling fire alarms and scratching and bruising teachers. The state is considering allowing teachers to use restraints or seclusion on misbehaving students; the current bill limits such actions to those authorized in writing by a student's parent, whether this will remain in the final bill is an open question. In Connecticut over the last few years, nearly 1,700 students were arrested, almost two-thirds of them for breach of peace, minor fights and disorderly conduct. In-school busts account for 20 percent of all youth arrests in the state.

In Georgia, school misbehavior incidents bring in the local police. In Milledgeville, GA, a small town about 90 miles from Atlanta, Salecia Johnson, a 6-year-old student at Creekside Elementary School, was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car to the police station. According to the Baldwin County schools Superintendent, Geneva Braziel, the police were called due to Johnson’s "violent and disruptive" behavior that threatened other classmates and school staff. In Clayton County, police recently arrested seven students at the North Clayton High School for disorderly conduct; Precious Woods was busted for spiting on a fellow student who had thrown a trashcan at her and Trinell Kennedy was arrested for using profanity during the same incident.

In Albuquerque, NM, during the 2009-2010 school year, 900 of the district's 90,000 students were referred to the criminal justice system. More than 500 of were handcuffed, arrested and brought to juvenile detention. More than 200 were arrested for minor offences, including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, refusing to obey and interference with staff. (In response to a 2010 class-action lawsuit, student arrests fell by 53 percent.)

Things are far worse in Texas. In a 2010 report, Texas Appleseed, a public-interest group, found that each year more than 275,000 non-traffic tickets are issued to juveniles. It reports that the vast majority of offences are due to classroom disruptions and disorderly conduct. It noted that in 1989, only 9 school districts in Texas had separate police agencies while in 2010 more than 160 had police units. Ticketed students received fines of between $250 and $500 or do community service in lieu of fines.

* * *

Steven Teske, MA, JD, and a Judge, Juvenile Court of Clayton County, Jonesboro, GA, writing in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, defines zero tolerance as “policies operate under the assumption that removing disruptive students deters other students from similar conduct while simultaneously enhancing the classroom environment.” His detailed analysis makes clear not only that the policy doesn’t work, but contributes to the deepening crisis of American education and harms children.

The concept of zero tolerance originated during the Reagan-era’s so-called “war on drugs.” It entered the educational sector in 1994 when Pres. Bill Clinton signed the Gun-Free Schools Act that required a student’s 1-year suspension if s/he was found possessing a firearm. In the wake of the Columbine shootings of 1999, the law has been expanded to include any so-called weapon, including Kiera Wilmot’s chemistry experiment. Under Pres. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, zero tolerance was linked to teaching-to-the-test policies as a solution to the education crisis.

The increased policing of the classroom is part of the effort to transform schools from “educational” institutions that cultivate citizenship to “training” campuses inculcating workplace discipline. It is a battle that has shaped American education since mass public schooling was introduced more then a century ago.

In New York during the ‘90s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani adopted a zero-tolerance city-management approach as part of his “get-tough" policies. It originally was designed to curb minor offenses, like squatters in abandoned buildings, subway graffiti artists, squeegee car-window cleaners, panhandlers and street prostitutes; they were part of the “quality of life” troubles gripping the city. In parallel, Giuliani implemented a zero-tolerance program in city schools to address such issues as fighting, smoking and other forms of inappropriate behavior.

Zero tolerance policies are now being applied to a broad range of disciplinary infractions, both major and minor. A 2012 report by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) makes clear the painful consequences of zero tolerance. It warns, “minority students across America face harsher discipline, have less access to rigorous high school curricula, and are more often taught by lower-paid and less experienced teachers.” It found that African-American students, particularly males, make up 18 percent students, but 35 percent of suspended students and 39 percent of those expelled. Suspended students face a greater risk of dropping out of school or getting involved in criminal activity even though their initial misbehavior was minor.

A host of factors are contributing to the increase in behavior-based disruptions. Shrinking school budgets have lead to increased class size and cut backs of in-school therapeutic support. Teachers are not sufficiently trained to deal with in-class disruptions. Mounting child and family poverty rates, especially in poor and minority communities, only aggravate a bad situation.

Behavior problems are real issues; they interfere with teaching and learning and are occurring throughout the country. A recent study by Scholastic magazine and the Gates Foundation found that 68 percent of elementary, 64 percent of middle school and 53 percent of high school teachers reported increased behavior problems.

Local and state officials across the country are making school discipline a political issue. In 2012, New York City Council Member Robert Jackson declared: “I’m tired of hearing stories about children who are having tantrums or behavior problems being taken out of school by police or EMS! ... This is unacceptable! … Having police and EMS respond in these situations is both expensive and traumatizing for children and youth.”

Also in 2012, Maryland’s State Board of Education banned zero-tolerance approaches. They replaced the failed policy with one emphasizing rehabilitation over punishment, believing it would led to more classroom time and higher achievement for students. In Florida, following a much-publicized 2007 case in which the police arrested a kindergartner who threw a tantrum during a jelly bean-counting contest, a bill was introduced to block police from arresting children who commit acts that do not pose serious safety threats.

In the wake of Newtown, CT, shootings new question have arisen about the effectiveness of zero tolerance. In December 2012, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, convened the nation’s first Congressional hearing on “Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” He stressed that instead of making schools safer, the policy has redefined “rather normal behavior” into criminal activity.

Many civil liberties lawyers, educators and parents believe that the zero tolerance approach to classroom misbehavior needs to be replaced by one based on a more humane classroom environment and whole-person curriculum. They point to such programs as Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS), Safe Responsive Schools (SRS) Restorative Practice and “social-emotional learning” as alternative programs. “Although many of these approaches are already utilized in some form in many public schools in New York City,” Mar warns, “the BOE has not adopted a policy requiring all NYC public schools to utilize these methods.” “Instead,” he adds, “the BOE fails to even encourage the use of these in their policies.”

Only by ending the tyranny of zero tolerance and providing full financial and other support to schools, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods, will the school-to-prison pipeline be broken. And only then will we begin to meaningfully address the deeper crisis of American troubled education system.

* * *

David Rosen writes the Media Current column for Filmmaker and regularly contributes to CounterPunch, Huffington Post and the Brooklyn Rail, check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com; he can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net.

Inside the Cooper Union Occupation’s First Hours

Zachary Bell, Waging Nonviolence — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:55:00 -0700

Students took to President Jamshed Bharucha’s office demanding that he resign over his proposal to introduce tuition, a policy that would break the school’s 155-year tradition of free education.

Since last Wednesday, students at Cooper Union, a private free university in New York City, have staged an occupation of the president’s office in protest of the announcement that the school will begin charging tuition. As the occupation now goes into its second week, let me recall my eight-hour visit during its first full day: Thursday, May 9.

That morning, students took to President Jamshed Bharucha’s office demanding that he resign over his proposal to introduce tuition, a policy that would break the school’s 155-year tradition of free education. Later that day, all nine of Cooper’s full-time art faculty and some 200 students signed a statement of no confidence against Bharucha.

The administration repeatedly warned the occupiers — by then more than 100 engineering, architecture and art students — that they could face disciplinary actions, which could include being denied their degrees. The administration then proceeded to block the water fountains on the seventh floor with plywood and screwed the bathroom doors shut. It sent armed guards into the building. (The administration later said it wasn’t aware the guards would be armed.)

Yet the siege quickly broke. Administrators had told students that they would be given an ultimatum to leave in the early afternoon, but, later, they moved the deadline to 6:30 P.M. The students stayed put, and around 7:30 P.M. Vice President TC Westcott came into the president’s office and discussed options with the students. She said that the security guards and police were standing down and that Bharucha wanted to speak with them. Many students were distrustful, and someone asked her to explain why the administration locked students out of the bathrooms.

“The logic was that we wanted you to leave,” Westcott replied. She said that the administration was still considering its next moves.

For a few hours, students strategized over pizza in a post-ultimatum haze. Mike D’Ambrose, a master’s engineering student, explained the rationale of the campaign.

“It’s a one-way street once you start charging tuition,” he said, citing the City College of New York, which abandoned its commitment to free education in 1976 and never looked back. Bharucha made headlines when he announced a new plan for the university that called for sliding scale tuition based on need, meaning that some students would pay as high as $19,000 while others would still receive full scholarship.

Saar Shemesh, a transfer student studying art, feels that tuition would change the character of the historic institution: “It would mess up the dynamic that we’ve created here.” To Shemesh, it’s crucial that students are “not indebted to their parents, and not indebted to the government.” She transferred to Cooper from Brooklyn College, and she said that whereas socio-economic lines divide many campuses, Cooper Union stands out as an exception.

Around 9:30 P.M., Saskia Bos, the dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and Sam Messer, the associate dean of the Yale School of Art, arrived at the occupation. Broadcast over the Free Cooper Union live-stream, Messer asked the students, “But how will this end? President Bharucha is not going to step down in the next week.” Victoria Sobel, an art student in her senior year who has helped organize the occupation, replied, “Why are you so sure? We were told two hours ago that we would be forced out, and we’re still here.”

The students appeared divided whether to speak with President Bharucha, an opportunity Bos was offering to arrange. Casey Gollan, an art school senior, rejected the offer — to applause from the room — explaining that Cooper students could arrange to meet with the president at any time as part of university policy. Still, last week when Gollan tried to arrange one of these meetings, Bharucha didn’t show up. “It’s called university governance,” Gollan said. “And we’ve seen how it doesn’t work.”

Many students charged that Bharucha’s absence from campus during the affair — and his avoidance of certain students since they occupied his office back in December — is indicative of his poor leadership and his fear of the Free Cooper Union campaign. Students said that if they were to meet with Bharucha at this point, it would be on their own terms, in his occupied office.

After the two deans departed, students began discussing the future of the occupation. Gollan admitted that since the occupation was “open and fluid,” students could come and go from Cooper Union’s seventh floor as they pleased, which made consensus decision-making process difficult. Yet it also made the occupation more sustainable than most — allowing students to go to class, eat, take a shower and then return to the president’s office. It also meant that more and more people in the broader Cooper Union community could get involved — swinging by the office and signing the no-confidence statement — without having to fear retribution or an overnight lock-in.

According to the students, if the no-confidence statement were to receive enough signatures from the faculty of the architecture and engineering schools, it would initiate a legal process in which the board of regents would investigate the behavior of the board of trustees, which determined the tuition policy and appointed President Bharucha. It would take some time for the school’s bureaucracy to make such dramatic changes, but this potential for delay didn’t seem to deter the students in their midnight meeting on Thursday. After all, they had a lawyer, free food and each other. When someone asked what would happen if the occupation went through graduation, grins and raised fists filled the room — followed by a few uneasy laughs.

As the meeting closed around 1:00 am, a student erased the “2” on the blackboard next to “Days of Cooper Union Occupation,” and sketched in a block letter “3.”

At the end of my nearly eight-hour sojourn to the seventh floor, I stepped into President Bharucha’s office one last time. It was draped in deep maroon emanating from a row of standing stage lights fixed with red filters. The students were deliberating over blueprints for their final projects, riffling through bags of donated protein bars and Indian food, and constructing conjoined sleeping arrangements with mounds of blankets and pillows.

It was a familiar art-school scene — except that it was in the president’s office.

On Monday the students met with President Bharucha, who agreed in the conversation to raise the following requests with the board of trustees: to arrange a meeting between the board of trustees and 15 student representatives, to add a student with voting rights to the board of trustees and to provide public minutes for all board meetings. While short of keeping Cooper Union free, these gains could change how the school is governed in significant ways for the future.

The students are now deciding whether, once again, to demand Bharucha’s resignation.

A Handy Reference Guide on Who is Donating to Corporate-Style Education Reform

Jessie B. Ramey, Yinzercation — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:14:00 -0700

As Big Money continues to shape public education, it can be hard to keep all the players straight — from wealthy individuals, to foundations, to corporations. Here's your guide.

The way some of them throw around the green stuff, you'd think corporate style education reformers were made of money. Oh, wait. Some of them are. As Big Money plays a bigger and bigger role in shaping public education, it can be hard to keep all the players straight— from wealthy individuals, to foundations, superPACs, astroturf groups and corporations. Here's a handy reference guide:

1. Individuals

Some of the wealthiest people on the planet are pouring their money into corporate-style education reform. Some are doing this through foundations (see below) and others are happy to invest their millions in politics to shape policy, or directly into charter schools as money-making investments. Some have a profit motive and others seem more ideologically driven (to privatize public goods, oppose union rights, etc.). One thing all of these folks have in common? Not one is an educator or education researcher. And none of their ideas is based on evidence of what actually works for kids.

Start here in Pennsylvania with charter school operators like Van Gureghian, Governor Corbett’s largest campaign donor. He makes so much money that he and his wife bought beach front property in Florida worth $28.9million, while he’s been fighting for years to keep his salary a secret. [See “Soaking the Public”]
Recall that 4 of the top contributors to all political races last fall in our state had ties to charter school operators. Wealth advisors are on record recommending that people add charter schools to their investment portfolios, especially in places like Pennsylvania. [See “Charters are Cash Cows”] Cyber charter schools are particularly lucrative investments, as the public taxpayers are currently over-paying them by $1million every single day. [See “One Million Per Day”]
How about folks like Philip Anschutz? He’s the oil billionaire with ultra-right politics who owns Walden Media, which made the anti-public school films, “Waiting for Superman” and “Won’t Back Down.” He funds groups that teach creationism in our schools and oppose gay rights, environmental regulations, and union rights. [See “We Won’t Back Down Either”]
Then there’s New York Mayor Bloomberg, who likes the idea of privatizing schools so much that he put $1million into the Los Angeles school board races last month to try to maintain a corporate-reform minded majority there. Too bad his horse didn’t win. [See “School Boards Matter”]

2. Foundations

The “big three” foundation are Gates, Broad, and Walton. Education historian Diane Ravitch calls them the “billionaire boys club,” though each has a slightly different emphasis. And there are others.

The Gates Foundation is currently funding teacher evaluation systems throughout the country. As I have argued before, not only does this focus on the wrong thing, by avoiding the issue of poverty (or even early childhood education where many agree we might most effectively concentrate our resources), it starts with the faulty assumption that we have a plague of bad teachers. Though the foundation itself has warned that teacher evaluation should not be based solely on high-stakes-testing, this is exactly what is happening all over the country (or in many places, student testing is being used for a large portion of teacher evaluation). The Gates Foundation is so large and distributes so much money that it can essentially set policy through its grant making. And combined with the Great Recession, school districts and other beneficiaries have not been able to say no to the money nor been willing to point out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes (i.e. that his “reforms” don’t work). Gates has also launched a clever campaign to shift public opinion, by strategically targeting grants to community organizations (for example, over a half-million to A+Schools this year) and astroturf groups (see below) in communities where they are working.
The Eli and Edythe Broad (rhymes with “road”)Foundation runs a non-accredited superintendents training program premised on the idea that business executives with no education experience will improve urban school districts. Both the current and former Pittsburgh superintendents are Broad Academy graduates (though Dr. Linda Lane is an educator). The Foundation promotes teacher effectiveness and competition (i.e. charter schools), and drafted President Obama’s current reform strategy. They also literallywrote the book on how to close schools, using Pittsburgh as an example. Eli Broad also continues to spend his personal millions on corporate-reform, putting a half-million into the LA school board races this spring alone. [Los Angeles Times, 4-24-13]
The Walton Family Foundation derives its money from Wal-Mart and gave $158 million in K-12 education grants last year to promote charter schools and voucher programs. Its current top grantees include Teach for America, which has come under increased scrutiny for its method of placing young college graduates with only a few weeks of training in urban schools with the neediest students, where they stay only two years. (Teach for America, by the way, is looking to set up shop in Pittsburgh and has been making inquiries about hiring a local executive director. Stay tuned.) Here in our state the Walton Family Foundation is also funding the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. And they fund Bellwether Education Partners, the group hired by Pittsburgh Public Schools (through subcontract with FSG) to craft its education plan. [Walton Family Foundation 2012 Grant Report]
Let’s not overlook the role that other foundations play in education reform. Remember a decade ago when thePittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, andGrable Foundation (the big three education philanthropies in Pittsburgh) yanked their funding from the school district, forcing them to introduce new reforms? [Post-Gazette, 7-10-02] The history books have yet to finish writing that episode – and there were no doubt both positive and negative long-term outcomes – but it illustrates the power that foundations can wield over a school district.
What about when a venerable old foundation starts behaving badly? Our big sister grassroots group in Philadelphia, Parents United, recently filed a legal complaint against the William Penn Foundation “based on the fact that they had solicited millions of dollars in donations for an exclusive contract” with a consulting group, with an agreed “set of ‘deliverables’ such as identifying 60 schools for closure, mass charter expansion, and unprecedented input into labor and contract negotiations – without the School District of Philadelphia being a party to the contract.” After a legal analysis by the Public Interest Law Center that concluded the foundation was essentially engaging in illegal lobbying and funneling private donations for the purpose, Parents United joined the Philadelphia Home & School Council, and the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP in bringing the complaint. [Parents United, 2-14-13]

3. SuperPACs

The Citizens United ruling opened the door to massive spending by corporations in politics and ushered in the era of superPACS. Without spending limits, now we are seeing just how much influence money can buy in politics (where education policy is set).

Students First PA PAC (not to be confused with Michelle Rhee’s national organization, see below), started in 2010 by three Philadelphia investment brokers to funnel millions into the state races of pro-voucher candidates. Co-founder Joel Greenberg is on the board of the American Federation for Children, a national group run by Betsy DeVos with mega-wealthy (and ultra-right) backers including the Koch brothers, who have used the super PAC to channel their out of state dollars into Pennsylvania politics. [See “It’s All About the Money, Money, Money”] And Gov. Corbett tapped Joe Watkins, the chairman of Students First PA, to be the Chief Recovery Officer for the struggling Chester Uplands school district last year – a bit like putting the fox in charge of the hen house, since he now has the power to hand those public schools over to charter operators. [See “Taking the Public out of Public Education”]
Fighting Chance PA PAC shares a name with a campaign launched by the “Pennsylvania Catholic Coalition” last spring, an effort associated with the Philadelphia Archdiocese, which has been lobbying hard for voucher legislation to fund its struggling schools. The new PAC was entirely financed by three wealthy Philadelphia hedge-fund founders who started the Students First PA PAC, because apparently one super PAC on your resume is just not enough. And their largest contribution? To Rep. Jim Christiana, a Republican from Beaver County (site of the proposed Dutch Royal Shell cracker plant) who introduced last year’s voucher-in-disguise EITC tax credit bill. Rep. Christiana also received money from the Walmart PAC. [See “2-4-6-8 Who Do We Appreciate?”]

4. Astroturf groups

Astroturf groups are fake grassroots organizations. They are funded by deep pockets, manipulated to look like local efforts to give the impression that they represent real community opinion. But they are as authentic as a field of plastic grass.

Operating at the national level are groups such as Michelle Rhee’s Students First. Rhee is best known as the former Chancellor of the D.C. school district where she publicly fired a principal on film as part of her massive school closure effort there. She became well known for supposedly increasing student test scores, but there are now serious questions of large-scale cheating (by adults). Students First promotes her privatization agenda of charters and vouchers as well as merit pay and teacher evaluation systems based on high-stakes-testing. The Walton Family Foundation just gave the organization $8 million. [Washington Post, 5-1-13] At the same time, Rhee has been caught inflating the number of members in her organization to make it appear that it has a much broader base of support by using deceptive petitions (for un-objectionable issues such as anti-bullying) on the progressive change.org site to capture the names of unsuspecting new “members.” [DianeRavitch, 8-3-12]
Parent Revolution practically wrote the book on how to create an astroturf organization. Founded in California by a charter school operator – with major backing from Gates, Broad, and Walton – the group got a “parent trigger law” passed and then hired agents to convince two towns to turn their schools over to the them. But many parents later said they had been purposefully misled and filed lawsuits to try to stop the conversion of their schools to charters. [See “Won’t Be Silent”]
Closer to home, we learned just last week that the Gates Foundation is backing a new astroturf group here in Pittsburgh. Called Shepherding the Next Generation, the Washington D.C. based organization has been trying to recruit churches – especially in our African American communities – to preach the Gates agenda of teacher evaluation. [See “Astroturf”] Having one of the wealthiest people on the planet funding outside organizations like this to come into a community and shift the public conversation seriously erodes democracy. This is not about promoting an authentic community dialogue, but about promoting a specific ideology of school reform.

5. Corporations

Perhaps not surprising, corporations control some of the big money at stake in corporate-style education reform. Here are a few to keep your eye on.

Testing companies have significantly benefitted from the dramatic expansion of testing under No Child Left Behind. Nationally, we are spending $1.7 BILLION a year testing our kids. [Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, report Nov. 2012] And corporations likePearson Education, Inc. and McGraw Hill spend millions lobbying state legislatures to keep their products in favor. [Republic Report, 5-4-12] The new national Common Core Standards are also creating a bonanza for companies that make textbooks and assessment materials.
Pennsylvania has a contract with Data Recognition Corporation. Taxpayers in the Keystone state are footing the bill for average spending of $32.2 million a year on testing students. [Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, report Nov. 2012] That’s a lot of money that is not getting spent on actually educating children.
Struggling school districts are increasingly turning to hybrid or “blended” learning models to deliver content at least partially on-line as a cost-savings measure. A major 2010 Department of Education review of the literature found that blended-learning does not offer better learning outcomes for students, but it will surely be good for corporate bottom lines. Pearson is promoting its Connections Learning as the solution to schools looking to close their achievement gap and reduce the cost of teachers.
Finally, don’t forget about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council where corporate members write business-friendly laws and have them introduced word-for-word into state legislatures. In education reform, ALEC promotes the unregulated expansion of charters and vouchers, keeping both unaccountable to the public while taking away control from local democratically elected school board officials. In Pennsylvania, ALEC issued a guide helpfully pointing out how legislators could get around our troublesome constitution, which prevents public money from being spent on religious schools. The Gates Foundation granted $375,000 to ALEC from 2010-2013, before cutting all ties with the organization last spring after becoming the target of an online petition that gathered over 23,000 signatures in just a few hours. [See “There’s Nothing Smart About ALEC”]

Now that’s a lot of money coming from a lot of sources. It’s helpful to think about the “big tent” metaphor here: there are many Big Money players in this tent, with multiple motivations. Clearly some are driven by profit motive and stand to make a lot of money. Some share ultra-right interests in de-unionization and de-regulation and are happy to push those interests in the field of education. Many others are driven by an ideological agenda of corporate-style education reform. One thing is for sure: all that Big Money under one big tent is having an enormous impact on our public schools.

College Execs have Private Jets? New Report Finds Public University Presidents Live Large

Alyssa Figueroa, AlterNet — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:16:00 -0700

While college students struggle to afford an education, public university presidents are making big bucks.

A new report released by The Chronicle of Higher Educationon Monday revealed that public university presidents in the U.S. are doing quite well financially.

The report lists public university presidents’ compensation for the 2012 fiscal year. Graham Spanier, former president of Penn State University, who was forced out after his handling of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse tragedy, topped the list by bringing in $2.9 million. This includes a base pay of nearly $351,000, a deferred pay of $1.2 million and a severance package of $1.2 million.

Jack Stripling, the Chroniclereporter who worked on the survey, told The New York Times: “The fact that Graham Spanier turns out to be the highest paid president in the country says something about the nature of compensation packages for people who leave under a cloud. … Severance agreements are often very lucrative.”

Following Spanier, Jay Gogue of Auburn University had a compensation package of $2.5 million, and E. Gordon Gee of Ohio State University $1.9 million. Gee received the highest base pay of all the public university presidents at $830,439. The New York Timesreported that Gee enjoys a “lavish lifestyle,” which includes “a rent-free mansion with an elevator, a pool and a tennis court and flights on private jets.”

Stripling told the Timesthat public university presidents have seen much growth in their compensation packages over the years. The $600,000 to $700,000 compensation package range saw the highest growth, as it included 28 presidents in 2012 — up from 13 in 2011.

An increase in deferred compensation also accounts for some of the compensation package growth, as Gogue’s compensation, for instance, went from $720,000 to $2.5 million in one year after completing a five-year contract.

Overall, the median compensation package in 2012 was $441,392 — up 4.7 percent from 2011’s $421,395. The median base salary in 2012 was $373,800 — up 2 percent from 2011’s $366,519.

Meanwhile, for students, life is quite far from lavish. The median student loan debt in the U.S. is $13,600, with the average being $24,301. In total, the amount of student loan debt owed in the U.S. is $1 trillion. Funding for public universities has been cut by about 28 percent since 2008, while the cost of attending one has more than doubled since 1988. Come July 1, the interest rates on subsidized federal Stafford loans are set to double — from 3.4 to 6.8 percent — if Congress doesn’t take action.

The 182 Percent Loan? How Installment Lenders Trap Borrowers

Paul Kiel, ProPublica — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:09:00 -0700

A racket that has caused low-income borrowers a world of hurt.

This story was co-produced with Marketplace. Listen to their coverage.

One day late last year, Katrina Sutton stood at a gas pump outside Atlanta and swiped her debit card. Insufficient funds. But that couldn't be. She'd been careful to wait until her $270 paycheck from Walmart had hit her account. The money wasn't there? It was all she had. And without gas, she couldn't get to work.

She tried not to panic, but after she called her card company, she couldn't help it. Her funds had been frozen, she was told, by World Finance.

Sutton lives in Georgia, a state that has banned payday loans. But World Finance, a billion-dollar company, peddles installment loans, a product that often drives borrowers into a similar quagmire of debt.

World is one of America's largest providers of installment loans, an industry that thrives in at least 19 states, mostly in the South and Midwest; claims more than 10 million customers; and has survived recent efforts by lawmakers to curtail lending that carries exorbitant interest rates and fees. Installment lenders were not included in a 2006 federal law that banned selling some classes of loans with an annual percentage rate above 36 percent to service members — so the companies often set up shop near the gates of military bases, offering loans with annual rates that can soar into the triple digits.

Installment loans have been around for decades. While payday loans are usually due in a matter of weeks, installment loans get paid back in installments over time — a few months to a few years. Both types of loans are marketed to the same low-income consumers, and both can trap borrowers in a cycle of recurring, expensive loans.

Installment loans can be deceptively expensive. World and its competitors push customers to renew their loans over and over again, transforming what the industry touts as a safe, responsible way to pay down debt into a kind of credit card with sky-high annual rates, sometimes more than 200 percent.

And when state laws force the companies to charge lower rates, they often sell borrowers unnecessary insurance products that rarely provide any benefit to the consumer but can effectively double the loan's annual percentage rate. Former World employees say they were instructed not to tell customers the insurance is voluntary.

When borrowers fall behind on payments, calls to the customer's home and workplace, as well as to friends and relatives, are routine. Next come home visits. And as Sutton and many others have discovered, World's threats to sue its customers are often real.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new federal agency charged with overseeing consumer-finance products and services, has the power to sue nonbank lenders for violating federal laws. It could also make larger installment lenders subject to regular examinations, but it hasn't yet done so. Installment companies havesupported Republican efforts to weaken the agency, echoing concerns raised by the lending industry as a whole.

The CFPB declined to comment on any potential rule-making or enforcement action.

Despite a customer base that might best be described as sub-subprime, World comfortably survived the financial crisis. Its stock, which trades on the Nasdaq under the company's corporate name, World Acceptance Corp., has nearly tripled in price in the last three years. The company services more than 800,000 customers at upward of 1,000 offices in 13 states. It also extends into Mexico, where it has about 120,000 customers.

In a written response to questions for this story, World argued that the company provides a valuable service for customers who might not otherwise qualify for credit. The loans are carefully underwritten to be affordable for borrowers, the company said, and since the loans involve set monthly payments, they come with a "built-in financial discipline."

The company denied that it deceives customers, saying that it trains its employees to tell borrowers that insurance products are voluntary and that it also informs customers of this in writing. It said it contacts delinquent borrowers at their workplace only after it has failed to reach them at their homes and that it resorts to lawsuits to recoup delinquent payments in accordance with state laws.

"World values its customers," the company wrote, "and its customers demonstrate by their repeat business that they value the service and products that World offers."

The installment industry promotes its products as a consumer-friendly alternative to payday loans. Installment loans are "the safest form of consumer credit out there," said Bill Himpler, the executive vice president of the American Financial Services Association, of which World and other major installment lenders are members.

About 5 percent of World's customers, approximately 40,000, are service members or their families, the company said. According to the Defense Department, active-duty military personnel and their dependents comprise about 1 percent of the U.S. population.

The Starter Loan

Back in August 2009, Sutton's 1997 Crown Victoria needed fixing, and she was "between paychecks," as she put it. Some months, more than half of her paycheck went to student-loan bills stemming from her pursuit of an associate degree at the University of Phoenix. Living with her mother and grandparents saved on rent, but her part-time job as a Walmart cashier didn't provide much leeway. She was short that month and needed her car to get to work.

She said she happened to pass by a World Finance storefront in a strip mall in McDonough, Ga. A neon sign advertised "LOANS," and mirrored windows assured privacy. She went inside.

A credit check showed "my FICO score was 500-something," Sutton remembered, putting her creditworthiness in the bottom 25 percent of borrowers. "But they didn't have no problem giving me the loan."

She walked out with a check for $207. To pay it back, she agreed to make seven monthly payments of $50 for a total of $350. The loan papers said the annual percentage rate, which includes interest as well as fees, was 90 percent.

Sutton had received what World employees call a "starter loan." That's something Paige Buys learned after she was hired to work at a World Finance branch in Chandler, Okla., at the age of 18. At that point, she only had a dim notion of what World did.

At 19, she was named branch manager (the youngest in company history, she remembered being told), and by then she had learned a lot. And the more she understood, the more conflicted she felt.

"I hated the business," she said. "I hated what we were doing to people. But I couldn't just quit."

The storefront, which lies on the town's main artery, Route 66, is very much like the one where Sutton got her loan. Behind darkened windows sit a couple of desks and a fake tree. The walls are nearly bare. Typical of World storefronts, it resembles an accountant's office more than a payday loan store.

Buys said any prospective borrower was virtually guaranteed to qualify for a loan of at least $200. Low credit scores are common, she and other former employees said, but World teaches its employees to home in on something else: whether at least some small portion of the borrower's monthly income isn't already being consumed by other debts. If, after accounting for bills and some nominal living expenses, a customer still has money left over, World will take them on.

In its written response, World said the purpose of its underwriting procedures was to ensure that the borrower has enough income to make the required payments.

With few exceptions, World requires its customers to pledge personal possessions as collateral that the company can seize if they don't pay. The riskier the client, the more items they were required to list, former employees say.

Sutton offered two of her family's televisions, a DVD player, a PlayStation and a computer. Together, they amounted to $1,600 in value, according to her contract. In addition, World listed her car.

There are limits to what World and other lenders can ask borrowers to pledge. Rules issued in 1984 by the Federal Trade Commission put "household goods" such as appliances, furniture and clothing off limits — no borrower can be asked to literally offer the shirt off his back. One television and one radio are also protected, among other items. But the rules are so old, they make no mention of computers.

Video game systems, jewelry, chainsaws, firearms — these are among the items listed on World's standard collateral form. The contracts warn in several places that World has the right to seize the possessions if the borrower defaults.

"They started threatening me," a World customer from Brunswick, Ga., said. "If I didn't make two payments, they would back a truck up and take my furniture, my lawn mower." (In fact, furniture is among the items protected under the FTC rule.) The woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared the company's employees, was most upset by the prospect of the company taking her piano. She filed for bankruptcy protection last year.

In fact, former World employees said, it was exceedingly rare for the company to actually repossess personal items.

"Then you've got a broken-down Xbox, and what are you going to do with it?" asked Kristin, who worked in a World branch in Texas in 2012 and, from fear of retaliation, asked that her last name not be used.

World supervisors "would tell us, 'You know, we are never going to repossess this stuff' — unless it was a car," Buys said.

World acknowledged in its response that such repossessions are rare, but it said the collateral played a valuable role in motivating borrowers. "World believes that an important element of consumer protection is for a borrower to have an investment in the success of the transaction," the company wrote. When "borrowers have little or no investment in the success of the credit transaction they frequently find it easier to abandon the transaction than to fulfill their commitments."

'Real Gibberish'

Sutton's loan contract said her annual percentage rate, or APR, was 90 percent. It wasn't. Her effective rate was more than double that: 182 percent.

World can legally understate the true cost of credit because of loopholes in federal law that allow lenders to package nearly useless insurance products with their loans and omit their cost when calculating the annual rate.

As part of her loan, Sutton purchased credit life insurance, credit disability insurance, automobile insurance and non-recording insurance. She, like other borrowers ProPublica interviewed, cannot tell you what any of them are for: "They talk so fast when you get that loan. They go right through it, real gibberish."

The insurance products protect World, not the borrower. If Sutton were to have died, become disabled, or totaled her car, the insurer would have owed World the unpaid portion of her loan. Together, the premiums for her $200 loan total $76, more than the loan's other finance charges.

The insurance products provide a way for World to get around the rate caps in some states and effectively to charge higher rates. Sutton's stated annual percentage rate of 90 percent, for example, is close to the maximum that can legally be charged in Georgia.

ProPublica examined more than 100 of the company's loans in 10 states, all made within the last several years. A clear pattern developed: In states that allowed high rates, World simply charged high interest and other finance fees but did not bother to include insurance products. For a small loan like Sutton's, for example, World has charged a 204 percent annual rate in Missouri and 140 percent in Alabama, states that allow such high levels.

In states with more stringent caps, World slapped on the insurance products. The stated annual rate was lower, but when the insurance premiums were accounted for, the loans were often even more expensive than those in the high-rate states.

"Every new person who came in, we always hit and maximized with the insurance," said Matthew Thacker, who worked as an assistant manager at a World branch in Tifton, Ga., from 2006 to 2007. "That was money that went back to the company."

World profits from the insurance in two ways: It receives a commission from the insurer, and, since the premium is typically financed as part of the loan, World charges interest on it.

"The consumer is screwed six ways to Sunday," said Birny Birnbaum, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Economic Justice and a former associate commissioner at the Texas Department of Insurance.

Industry data reveal just how profitable this part of World's business is. World offers the products of an insurer called Life of the South, a subsidiary of the publicly traded Fortegra Financial Corp. In Georgia in 2011, the insurer received $26 million in premiums for the sort of auto insurance Sutton purchased as part of her loan. Eighteen million dollars, or 69 percent, of that sum went right back to lenders like World. In all, remarkably little money went to pay actual insurance claims: about 5 percent.

The data, provided to ProPublica by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, paint a similar picture when it comes to Life of the South's other products. The company's credit accident and health policies racked up $20 million in premiums in Georgia in 2011. While 56 percent went back to lenders, only 14 percent went to claims. The pattern holds in other states where World offers the products.

Fortegra declined to comment.

Gretchen Simmons, who managed a World branch in Pine Mountain, Ga., praised the company for offering customers loans they might not have been able to get elsewhere. She said she liked selling accidental death and disability insurance with loans, because many of her clients were laborers who were "more prone to getting their finger chopped off."

According to several contracts reviewed by ProPublica, losing one finger isn't enough to make a claim. If the borrower loses a hand, the policy pays a lump sum (for instance, $5,000). But, according to the policy, "loss of a hand means loss from one hand of four entire fingers."

Simmons took out a loan for herself from a World competitor — and made sure to decline the insurance. Why? "Because I knew that that premium of a hundred and blah blah blah dollars that they're charging me for it can go right into my pocket if I just deny it."

In its written response, World alleged that Simmons had been fired from the company because of "dishonesty and alleged misappropriation of funds," but it refused to provide further details. Simmons, who worked for World from 2005 to 2008, denied that she left the company on bad terms.

Federal rules prohibit the financing of credit insurance premiums as part of a mortgage but allow it for installment and other loans. Installment lenders can also legally exclude the premiums when calculating the loan's annual percentage rate, as long as the borrower can select the insurer or the insurance products are voluntary — loopholes in the Truth in Lending Act, the federal law that regulates how consumer-finance products are marketed.

World's contracts make all legally necessary disclosures. For example, while some insurance products are voluntary, World requires other types of insurance to obtain a loan. For mandatory insurance, Sutton's contract states that the borrower "may choose the person or company through which insurance is to be obtained." She, like most customers, wouldn't know where to begin to do that, even if it were possible.

"Nobody is going to sell you insurance that protects your loan, other than the lender," said Birnbaum. "You can't go down the street to your State Farm agent and get credit insurance."

When insurance products are optional — meaning the borrower can deny coverage but still get the loan — borrowers must sign a form saying they understand that. "We were told not to point that out," said Thacker, the former Tifton, Ga., assistant manager.

World, in its response to ProPublica, declined to offer any statistics on what percentage of its loans carry the insurance products, but it said employees are trained to inform borrowers that they are voluntary. As for why the company offers the insurance products in some states and not in others, World said it depends on state law and if "it makes business sense to do so."

Buys, the former Chandler, Okla., branch manager, said she found the inclusion of the insurance products particularly deceitful. In Oklahoma, World can charge high interest rates and fees on loans under $1,000 or so, so it typically doesn't include insurance on those loans. But it often adds the products to larger loans, which has the effect of jacking up the annual rate.

"You were supposed to tell the customer you could not do the loan without them purchasing all of the insurance products, and you never said 'purchase,' " Buys recalled. "You said they are 'included with the loan' and focused on how wonderful they are."

It was not long into her tenure that Buys said she began to question whether the products were really required. She asked a family friend who was an attorney if the law required it, she recalled, and he told her it didn't.

World trained its employees to think of themselves as a "financial adviser" to their clients, Buys said. She decided to take that literally.

When a customer took out a new loan, "I started telling them, 'Hey, you can have this insurance you're never going to use, or you can have the money to spend,'" she recalled. Occasionally, a customer would ask to have the disability insurance included, so she left it in. But mostly, people preferred to take the money.

One day, she remembered, she was sitting across from a couple who had come into the office to renew their loan. They were discussing how to cover the costs of a funeral, and Chandler being a small town, she knew it was their son's. On her screen were the various insurance charges from the original loan. The screen "was blinking like I could edit it," she recalled.

At that moment, she realized that she could advise customers renewing their loans that they could drop the insurance from their previous loans. If they did so, they'd receive several hundred dollars more. The couple excitedly agreed, she recalled, and other customers also thought it was good advice and dropped the products.

Buys' regional supervisor threatened to discipline her, Buys said. But it was hard to punish her for advising customers that the products were voluntary when they were. "All they could do was give me the stink eye," Buys said.

But World soon made it harder to remove the insurance premiums, Buys said. She couldn't remove them herself but instead had to submit a form, along with a letter from the customer, to World's central office. That office, she said, sometimes required borrowers to purchase the insurance in order to get the loans.

World, in its response to ProPublica's questions, said Buys' assertions about how it handled insurance were "false," but it declined to provide further details.

Eventually, Buys said, her relationship with management deteriorated to the point that she felt she had no choice but to quit. By the time she left in 2011, she had worked at World for three years.

World, in the answers provided to ProPublica, said that when Buys quit, she was "subject to being terminated for cause including dishonesty and alleged misappropriation of funds." The company declined to provide any details about the allegations, but after Buys quit, World filed suit in county court, accusing her of stealing money from the company. Buys retained an attorney and responded, maintaining her innocence and demanding proof of any theft. World withdrew the suit.

'It's All About Keeping Them'

Sutton's original loan contract required her to make seven payments of $50, at which point her loan would have been fully paid off.

But if World can persuade a customer to renew early in the loan's lifespan, the company reaps the lion's share of the loan's charges while keeping the borrower on the hook for most of what they owed to begin with. This is what makes renewing loans so profitable for World and other installment lenders.

"That was the goal, every single time they had money available, to get them to renew, because as soon as they do, you've got another month where they're just paying interest," says Kristin, the former World employee from Texas.

Sure enough, less than four months after taking out the initial loan, Sutton agreed to renew.

In a basic renewal (the company calls it either a "new loan" or a "refinance"), the borrower agrees to start the loan all over again. For Sutton, that meant another seven months of $50 payments. In exchange, the borrower receives a payout. The amount is based on how much the borrower's payments to date have reduced the loan's principal.

For Sutton, that didn't amount to much. She appears to have made three payments on her loan, totaling $150. (The company's accounting is opaque, and Sutton does not have a record of her payments.) But when she renewed the loan, she received only $44.

Most of Sutton's payments had gone to cover interest, insurance premiums and other fees, not toward the principal. And when she renewed her loan a second time, it was no different.

The effect is similar to how a mortgage amortizes: The portion of each payment that goes toward interest is at its highest the first month and decreases with each payment. As the principal is reduced, less interest is owed each month. By the end of the loan, the payments go almost entirely toward paying down the principal.

World regularly sends out mailers, and its employees make frequent phone calls, all to make sure borrowers know they have funds available. Every time a borrower makes a payment, according to the company, that customer "receives a receipt reflecting, among other information, the remaining balance on the borrower's loan and, where applicable, the current new credit available for that borrower." And when a borrower visits a branch to make a payment, former employees say, employees are required to make the pitch in person.

"You have to say, 'Let me see what I can do to get you money today,'" Buys recalled. If the borrower had money available on the account, it had to be offered, she and other former employees said.

The typical pitch went like this, Kristin said: "'Oh, by the way, you've got $100 available, would you like to take that now or do you want to wait till next month?'"

Customers would ask, "'Well, what does this mean?'" Buys said. "And you say, 'Oh, you're just starting your loan over, you know, your payments will be the same.'"

The company often encourages customers to renew the loans by saying it will help them repair their credit scores, former employees said, since World reports to the three leading credit bureaus. Successively renewing loans also makes customers eligible for larger loans from World itself. After renewing her loan twice, for instance, Sutton received an extra $40.

"We were taught to make [customers] think it was beneficial to them," Buys said.

"Retail (i.e., consumer) lending is not significantly unlike other retail operations and, like those other forms of retail, World does market its services," the company wrote in its response to questions.

About three-quarters of the company's loans are renewals, according to World's public filings. Customers often renew their loans after only two payments, according to former employees.

The company declined to say how many of its renewals occur after two payments or how many times the average borrower renews a loan. Renewals are only granted to borrowers who can be expected to repay the new loan, it said.

Lawsuits against other major installment lenders suggest these practices are common in the industry. A 2010 lawsuit in Texas claimed that Security Finance, a lender with about 900 locations in the United States, induced a borrower to renew her loan 16 times over a three-year period. The suit was settled. In 2004, an Oklahoma jury awarded a mentally disabled Security Finance borrower $1.8 million; he had renewed two loans a total of 37 times. After the company successfully appealed the amount of damages, the case was settled. Security Finance declined to respond to questions about the suits.

Another 2010 suit against Sun Loan, a lender with more than 270 office locations, claims the company convinced a husband and wife to renew their loans more than two dozen times each over a five-year period. Cary Barton, an attorney representing the company in the suit, said renewals occur at the customer's request, often because he or she doesn't have enough money to make the monthly payment on the previous loan.

The predominance of renewals means that for many of World's customers, the annual percentage rates on the loan contracts don't remotely capture the real costs. If a borrower takes out a 12-month loan for $700 at an 89 percent annual rate, for example, but repeatedly renews the loan after four payments of $90, he would receive a payout of $155 with each renewal. In effect, he is borrowing $155 over and over again. And for each of those loans, the effective annual rate isn't 89 percent. It's 537 percent.

World called this calculation "completely erroneous," largely because it fails to account for the money the customer received from the original transaction. World's calculation of the annual percentage rate if a borrower followed this pattern of renewals for three years: about 110 percent.

A Decade of Debt

In every World office, employees say, there were loan files that had grown inches thick after dozens of renewals.

At not just one but two World branches, Emma Johnson of Kennesaw, Ga., was that customer. Her case demonstrates how immensely profitable borrowers like her are for the company — and how the renewal strategy can transform long-term, lower-rate loans into short-term loans with the triple-digit annual rates of World's payday competitors.

Since being laid off from her janitorial job in 2004, Johnson, 71, has lived primarily on Social Security. Last year, that amounted to $1,139 in income per month, plus a housing voucher and food stamps.

Johnson could not remember when she first obtained a loan from World. Nor could she remember why she needed either of the loans. She can tell you, however, the names of the branch managers (Charles, Brittany, Robin) who've come and gone over the years, her loans still on the books.

Johnson took out her first loan from World in 1993, the company said. Since that time, she has taken out 48 loans, counting both new loans and refinancings, from one branch. In 2001, she took out a loan from the second branch and began a similar string of renewals.

When Johnson finally declared bankruptcy early this year, her two outstanding loans had face values of $3,510 and $2,970. She had renewed each loan at least 20 times, according to her credit reports. Over the last 10 years, she had made at least $21,000 in payments toward those two loans, and likely several thousand dollars more, according to a ProPublica analysis based on her credit reports and loan documents.

Although the stated length of each loan was about two years, Johnson would renew each loan, on average, about every five months. The reasons varied, she said. "Sometimes stuff would just pop out of the blue," she said. This or that needed a repair, one of her children would need money.

Sometimes, it was just too enticing to get that extra few hundred dollars, she acknowledged. "In a sense, I think I was addicted."

It typically took only a few minutes to renew the loan, she said. The contract contained pages of disclosures and fine print, and the World employee would flip through, telling her to sign here, here and here, she recalled.

Her loan contracts from recent years show that the payouts were small, often around $200. That wasn't much more than the $115 to $135 Johnson was paying each month on each loan. The contracts had stated APRs ranging from about 23 percent to 46 percent.

But in reality, because Johnson's payments were largely going to interest and other fees, she was taking out small loans with annual rates typically in the triple digits, ranging to more than 800 percent. World also disputed this calculation.

As she continued to pay, World would sometimes increase her balance, providing her a larger payout, but her monthly payment grew as well. It got harder and harder to make it from one Social Security check to the next. In 2010, she took out another loan, this one from an auto-title lender unconnected to World.

Eventually, she gave up on juggling the three loans. By the end of each month, she was out of money. If she had to decide between basic necessities like gas and food and paying the loans, the choice, she finally realized, was easy.

'Chasing' Customers

At World, a normal month begins with about 30 percent of customers late on their payments, former employees recalled. Some customers were habitually late because they relied on Social Security or pension checks that came later in the month. They might get hit with a late fee of $10 to $20, but they were otherwise reliable. Others required active attention.

Phone calls are the first resort, and they begin immediately — sometimes even before the payment is due for customers who were frequently delinquent. When repeated calls to the home or cell phone, often several times a day, don't produce a payment, World's employees start calling the borrower at work. Next come calls to friends and family, or whomever the borrower put down as the seven "references" required as part of the loan application.

"We called the references on a daily basis to the point where they got sick of us," said Simmons, who managed the Pine Mountain, Ga., store.

If the phone calls don't work, the next step is to visit the customer at home: "chasing," in the company lingo. "If somebody hung up on us, we would go chase their house," said Kristin from Texas.

The experience can be intimidating for customers, especially when coupled with threats to seize their possessions, but the former employees said they dreaded it, too. "That was the scariest part," recalled Thacker, a former Marine, who as part of his job at World often found himself driving, in the evening, deep into the Georgia countryside to knock on a borrower's door. He was threatened a number of times, he said, once with a baseball bat.

Visits to the borrower's workplace are also common. The visits and calls at work often continue even after borrowers ask the company to stop, according to complaints from World customers to the Federal Trade Commission. Some borrowers complained the company's harassment risked getting them fired.

ProPublica obtained the FTC complaints for World and several other installment loan companies through a Freedom of Information Act request. They show consistent tactics across the industry: the repeated phone calls, the personal visits.

After she stopped paying, Johnson remembered, World employees called her two to three times a day. One employee threatened to "get some stuff at your house," she said, but she wasn't cowed. "I said, 'You guys can get this stuff if you want it.'" In addition, a World employee knocked on her door at least three times, she said.

The goal of the calls and visits, former employees said, is only partly to prod the customer to make a payment. Frequently, it's also to persuade them to renew the loan.

"That's [World's] favorite phrase: 'Pay and renew, pay and renew, pay and renew,'" Simmons said. "It was drilled into us."

It's a tempting offer: Instead of just scrambling for the money to make that month's payment, the borrower gets some money back. And the renewal pushes the loan's next due date 30 days into the future, buying time.

But the payouts for these renewals are often small, sometimes minuscule. In two of the contracts ProPublica examined, the customer agreed to start the loan all over again in exchange for no money at all. At other times, payouts were as low as $1, even when, as in one instance, the new loan's balance was more than $3,000.

Garnishing Wages

For Sutton, making her monthly payments was always a struggle. She remembered that when she called World to let them know she was going to be late with a payment, they insisted that she come in and renew the loan instead.

As a result, seven months after getting the original $207 loan from World, Sutton wasn't making her final payment. Instead, she was renewing the loan for the second time. Altogether, she had borrowed $336, made $300 in payments, and now owed another $390. She was going backward.

A summons of garnishment Katrina Sutton received. When World Finance discovered that it could not garnish Sutton’s wages, the company put a hold on her “payroll card,” a kind of debit card provided by her employer. She was left without any money to pay for the gas she needed to get to work. (Erik S. Lesser/EPA for ProPublica)

Not long after that second renewal, Sutton said, Walmart reduced her hours, and there simply wasn't enough money to go around. "I called them at the time to say I didn't have money to pay them," she said. World told her she had to pay.

The phone calls and home visitsfollowed. A World employee visited the Walmart store where she worked three times, she recalled.

World didn't dispute that its employees came to Sutton's workplace, but it said that attempts to contact "any borrower at her place of employment would occur only after attempts to contact the borrower at her residence had failed."

In Georgia, World had another path to force Sutton to pay: suing her.

World files thousands of such suits each year in Georgia and other states, according to a review of court filings, but the company declined to provide precise figures.

Because Sutton had a job, she was a prime target for a suit. Social Security income is off limits, but with a court judgment, a creditor can garnish up to 25 percent of a debtor's wages in Georgia.

"When we got to sue somebody, [World] saw that as the jackpot," Buys said. In her Oklahoma store, collecting the junk people had pledged as collateral was considered useless. Garnishment was a more reliable way for the company to get its money, and any legal fees were the borrower's problem.

World said 11 of the states where it operates permit lenders to "garnish customers' wages for repayment of loans, but the Company does not otherwise generally resort to litigation for collection purposes, and rarely attempts to foreclose on collateral."

The sheriff served Sutton with a summons at Walmart, in front of her co-workers. Sutton responded with a written note to the court, saying she would pay but could only afford $20 per month. A court date was set, and when she appeared, she was greeted by the branch manager who had given her the original loan. The manager demanded Sutton pay $25 every two weeks. She agreed.

For five months, Sutton kept up the payments. Then, because of taxes she had failed to pay years earlier, she said, the IRS seized a portion of her paycheck. Again, she stopped paying World. In response, the company filed to garnish her wages, but World received nothing: Sutton was earning too little for the company to legally get a slice of her pay. After two months, World took another step.

Sutton's wages are paid via a "payroll card," a kind of debit card provided by Walmart. World filed to seize from Sutton's card the $450 it claimed she owed. By that point, she'd made more than $600 in payments to the company.

The immediate result of the action was to freeze Sutton's account, her only source of income. She couldn't gas up her car. As a result, she couldn't drive to work.

Sutton said she called a number for World's corporate office in a panic. "I said, 'You're gonna leave me with no money to live on?'" The World employee said the company had had no choice because Sutton didn't hold up her end of their agreement, Sutton recalled, and then the employee made an offer: If Sutton's available wages in her account hadn't covered her total debt to World after 30 days, the company would unfreeze her account and allow her to start a new payment plan.

Desperate, she gave up trying to deal with the company on her own and went to Georgia Legal Services Program, a nonprofit that represents low-income clients across the state.

"Her case is terribly egregious," said Michael Tafelski, a lawyer with GLSP who specializes in collections cases and represented Sutton. World had overstated the amount Sutton legally owed, he said, and circumvented laws limiting the amount of funds creditors can seize. In effect, the company was garnishing 100 percent of her wages. It's "unlike anything I have ever seen," Tafelski said, "and I have seen a lot of shady collectors."

After Tafelski threatened to sue World, the company beat a quick retreat. It dismissed all open cases against Sutton and declared her obligation satisfied.

In its response to ProPublica, World claimed that Tafelski had bullied the billion-dollar company: "Mr. Tafelski used abusive out of court threats to accomplish an end he knew he could not obtain through legal process."

"It's common practice among lawyers to contact the opposing party to attempt to resolve problems quickly, without filing a lawsuit, especially in emergency cases like this one," Tafelski said.

As for Sutton, she had missed several days of work, but her account was unfrozen, and she was done with World Finance forever.

"If I'd known then what I know now," she said, "I'd never have fooled with them."

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