Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.
“Ninety-five percent of education reform is about trying to make separate schools for rich and poor work, but there is very little evidence that you can have success when you pack all the low-income students into one particular school,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who specializes in education issues.
The current obsession with firing teachers, attacking unions and creating ever more charter schools has done very little to improve the academic outcomes of poor black and Latino students. Nothing has brought about gains on the scale that is needed.
If you really want to improve the education of poor children, you have to get them away from learning environments that are smothered by poverty. This is being done in some places, with impressive results. An important study conducted by the Century Foundation in Montgomery County, Md., showed that low-income students who happened to be enrolled in affluent elementary schools did much better than similarly low-income students in higher-poverty schools in the county.
The study, released last October, found that “over a period of five to seven years, children in public housing who attended the school district’s most advantaged schools (as measured by either subsidized lunch status or the district’s own criteria) far outperformed in math and reading those children in public housing who attended the district’s least-advantaged public schools.”
Studies have shown that it is not the race of the students that is significant, but rather the improved all-around environment of schools with better teachers, fewer classroom disruptions, pupils who are more engaged academically, parents who are more involved, and so on. The poorer students benefit from the more affluent environment. “It’s a much more effective way of closing the achievement gap,” said Mr. Kahlenberg.
About 80 school districts across the country are taking steps to reduce the concentrations of poverty in their schools. But there is no getting away from the fact that if you try to bring about economic integration, you’re also talking about racial and ethnic integration, and that provokes bitter resistance. The election of Barack Obama has not made true integration any more palatable to millions of Americans.
Continue reading “Separate and unequal”
Category: Class War
Paternal prison
Thank God someone’s looking after those stupid womenfolk, who schedule abortions on a goddamned whim. And thank God some rich rightwinger organization will be picking up the tab for this:
PIERRE, S.D. — South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard signed a law Tuesday requiring women to wait three days after meeting with a doctor to have an abortion, the longest waiting period in the nation.
Abortion rights groups have already said they plan to file a lawsuit challenging the measure, which also requires women to undergo counseling at pregnancy help centers that discourage abortions.
Daugaard, who gave no interviews after signing the bill, said in a written statement that he has conferred with state attorneys who will defend the law in court and a sponsor who has pledged private money to finance the state’s legal costs.
“I think everyone agrees with the goal of reducing abortion by encouraging consideration of other alternatives,” the Republican governor said the statement. “I hope that women who are considering an abortion will use this three-day period to make good choices.”
You mean, like having the women who voted for you reconsider their choice?
Supporters of the measure say South Dakota’s only abortion clinic, Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls, gives women little information or counseling before they have abortions done by doctors flown in from out of state. The bill would help make sure women are not being coerced into abortions, they said.
Opponents say the law forces women to go to pregnancy help centers that harass them, rather than providing sound medical advice. They also say the waiting period and the counseling are an undue burden for women who have a constitutional right to have an abortion.
Michigan
Give us your money or lose everything! I wonder if Republicans used to be bank robbers in a past life.
Why do I suspect that workers will make significant concessions – and end up losing their collective bargaining rights, anyway? Because that’s how Republicans roll!
Michigan’s new Emergency Manager Law is already forcing major concessions from unions. The law gives the governor the power to declare a city insolvent and appoint an emergency manager with virtually unlimited power to reorganize every aspect of city business, including dissolving the city entirely. The emergency manager even has the power to terminate collective bargaining agreements.
As a result of these expanded new powers, public employees unions in some Michigan municipalities are already making large preemptive concessions to keep their cities from tripping any of the “triggers” in the new law that might give the governor an opening to send in a union-bustingemergency manager, Eartha Jane Melzer reports in the Michigan Messenger.
In Flint, the firefighters’ union agreed to increase contributions to health insurance and give up holiday pay and night shift differentials. Flint Firefighters Union President Raul Garcia told the Wall Street Journal that these concessions were driven by fear of a state takeover of Flint. “I would rather give concessions that I would like than have an [emergency financial manager] or something of that magnitude come in and say this is what you are going to do,” Garcia said.
The new law also gives the Emergency Manager the power to privatize prisons, Melzer notes.
Upping the ante
This is a good sign. Instead of sitting around and waiting for leadership from the White House, liberal Congress members are taking the initiative to push tax legislation that will clearly draw the lines between the rich — and everybody else. From The Hill:
In an interesting development, liberals are calling for taxes to be raised on people making more than $1 million annually while Obama and other party leaders have embraced $250,000 or more per year. The left-leaning lawmakers stress that while they still support what Obama wants to do, the president wasn’t able to convince the Democratic-led Congress to pass his tax blueprint last year.
The group of legislators, which includes Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), argue that poll numbers suggest the public is on their side and that added revenue is needed to narrow deficits and keep programs such as Head Start from being placed on the chopping block.
But they downplayed the dollar figure differences between their plans and the president’s.
“I don’t think there’s anything magical about 250,000 or a million. It’s how much money do you need,” said Sanders, whose proposal would set a 5.4 percent surtax on income over $1 million a year. “In my view, the Democrats and the president should be very strong on this issue: that our goal is shared sacrifice and let’s not balance the budget on the backs of the working and middle class.”
Schakowsky signaled that her legislation – which would create a 45 percent bracket for income between $1 million and $10 million a year, with a top rate of 49 percent for income of $1 billion a year and above – could work in concert with a plan to return rates to Clinton administration levels. The current top individual tax rate of 35 percent would rise to 39.6 percent at the end of next year, unless Congress again extends existing high-income rates.
“I certainly don’t see it as a counter to the real and specific debate on the Bush tax cuts,” Schakowsky said. “The fact is, Republicans don’t want to do anything to take away tax breaks from the richest Americans, and we want to stimulate that debate.”
Virtually Speaking Susie
9pm EST tonight, talking with Athenae from First Draft about her blog’s team coverage of the workers’ movement in Wisconsin. I love Athenae, she’s one of my favorite bloggers, so tune in — or call in with questions to 646-200-3440.
Food for thought
Matt Taibbi on the bank bailouts:
I have no doubt there were mountains of improprieties committed before and during these transactions. I think in the end we’re going to find out that the emergency bailouts of 2008 were really a wide-scale government-aided effort at consolidating financial power, in which the taxpayer was asked to fund a series of lucrative mergers that greatly limited consumer choices and made the entire financial system markedly less transparent. To me there’s a dangerous precedent involved when you have one group of investors who get all their news from the papers, and another group of active traders who are on the phone with the Treasury and the Fed in real-time as they marionette the economy.
Elizabeth Warren
Yves at Naked Capitalism: Why she’s not ever going to be effective.
Hiring the unemployed
A Wharton School publication says refusing to hire the unemployed is a really bad idea:
As an article yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, some employers feel that people who fail to find a job after months of looking probably have “something wrong” with them. In addition, the article noted, companies worry that unemployed workers fall behind in job skills, especially when one in three job seekers has been out of work for more than a year.
Is that an accurate assumption? “It’s always tempting to give an ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand’ response to such practices, but in this case, there really seems to be only one hand. This is a bad idea,” states Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli. “I’m sure what these employers are thinking is that people who lost their jobs did so because employers didn’t think they were good workers. The essence of a recession like this one, though, is that lots of people lose their jobs” because, for example, the plant closes, the company fails or the employer offers buy-outs.
Continue reading “Hiring the unemployed”
Indiana
Courage is contagious, and the Democrats in Indiana are taking a page out of the Wisconsin playbook:
Republicans control every Statehouse power base — governor, Senate and House — but they remain virtually powerless to enact laws so long as 39 House Democrats remain holed up in an Urbana, Ill., hotel.
For now, at least, Indiana’s GOP majority has been outmaneuvered.Those 39 Democrats managed to shut down the House for a month and win concessions from Republicans on labor and education bills — and they’re angling for more.
As long as they hang together — and thus far the House Democrats are withstanding fines, the threat of censure and blistering accusations that they are derelict in their duty — the legislature is at an impasse.
Without them, the House lacks the quorum it needs to do business. For now, at least, Indiana’s GOP majority has been outmaneuvered.
Those 39 Democrats managed to shut down the House for a month and win concessions from Republicans on labor and education bills — and they’re angling for more.
As long as they hang together — and thus far the House Democrats are withstanding fines, the threat of censure and blistering accusations that they are derelict in their duty — the legislature is at an impasse.
Without them, the House lacks the quorum it needs to do business.
It’s a pretty interesting article, explaining all the pros and cons.
Ayn rantings
Krugman (remember, your Times links are limited):
Greenspan writes in characteristic form: other people may have their models, but he’s the wise oracle who knows the deep mysteries of human behavior, who can discern patterns based on his ineffable knowledge of economic psychology and history.
Sorry, but he doesn’t get to do that any more. 2011 is not 2006. Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it’s gone to meet its maker, it’s joined the choir invisible.
He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible.
If he wants to redeem himself through hard and serious reflection about how he got it so wrong, fine — and I’d be interested in listening. If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time.