NJ Spotlight, Mar. 26, 2014

By Scott Gurian

Gov. Chris Christie heard more tales of woe from people still struggling to recover from Superstorm Sandy at his latest town hall meeting yesterday.

It was the sixth Q&A he’s held in Belmar, as well as the sixth town hall he’s held since the Bridgegate scandal erupted in January. But the governor encountered a friendlier crowd here than at some other recent events.

A few residents asked questions about education and good governance topics, but the majority of the focus was people’s individual Sandy-related situations. Questioners shared tales of fighting with their insurance companies, dealing with recurrent flooding problems and continuing to wait for state grant money. They also asked about plans to construct dunes and to dredge rivers still clogged by storm debris. And they shared their concerns and suggestions.

A resident of Brick Township recommended that the rules be changed so people like herself could start rebuilding while waiting for grant money and get reimbursed after the fact. Christie said he’s raised the issue multiple times with federal officials, but was told there’s a specific federal statute that prohibits that.

Another person wanted to make sure that the dunes would be handicapped-accessible so her disabled husband would still be able to go to the beach. The governor assured her that the state would comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Responding to criticism that his administration was sitting on aid money, Christie said that all the funding for housing programs has already been allocated and that the state has listened to people’s concerns and made changes, such as allowing them to use their own contractors.

There were also suggestions that in-state contractors should do all the repairs.

“We’re trying to rebuild 365,000 homes,” Christie responded. “There’s simply not enough contactors in New Jersey to do all that work in a timely way.”

He also had some recommendations of his own, including that the federal government should get out of providing flood insurance and let the private market take over.

“What we really need is more competition in the industry,” he said, calling on people to contact their members of Congress to complain.

As at past town halls, several members of the governor’s cabinet, including Sandy “Storm Czar” Marc Ferzan, were also in attendance, but none of them said anything except Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin, who was called on to answer a few detailed questions pertaining to dunes and waterways.

Christie acknowledged that there have been problems with the state’s handling of the recovery process.

“Let me be, once again, the guy to admit that this has not gone perfectly," he said. "Far from it. This is the first time we’ve ever done this.”

But he asked residents to be patient. He said he’ll do his part by continuing to listen to their concerns and pledged to try to continue holding at least one town hall meeting a week.

Though the overall tone of the event seemed more supportive than at some previous town halls, and none of the questions were very challenging, there was still some anger evident in the crowd. Before the event began, about a dozen demonstrators stood quietly across the street, holding signs saying things like, “We have not forgotten Bridgegate,” “Tourism ads won’t pay my rent” and “If I were a Sandy contractor, I’d have gotten paid by now.”

Several small-business owners affected by the storm also spoke to members of the media about their frustrations with delays in getting aid through the Stronger NJ Business Grants program. Christie had said at a previous town hall that there was little demand for the program, but that’s not the case, they said.

Marilyn Schlossbach and her brother own four restaurants in Asbury Park and Normandy Beach. They applied for grant money last May, but most of it has yet to come through, and they’ve received few updates on the status of their applications.

Schlossbach said she’d much rather be back running her business than attending a town hall where she was unlikely to get in a question, but felt she had no choice.

Her opinion of the governor?

“Originally, I was very much behind him. And I’m a Democrat,” she said. “But over the last six months, I’m seeing him talk like everything is great. It’s not great for any of us. It has been one of the hardest years that I’ve ever been in business. And I don’t think any politicians really understand what we’re all going through.”

Speaking with reporters, Neptune resident James Spinelli also expressed frustration trying to understand just what he was going through. He has signed documents, dated December 5 , stating that he’s been awarded $180,000 through two state grant programs to tear down his house, which was flooded beyond repair in the storm. Nearly four months later, he has yet to receive a penny.

“I’ve got everything right here. It’s all signed! Everything!” he said waving copies of his paperwork. “What are they waiting for? I’m not on the waiting list. I have the grant! I’ve been awarded it!”

Spinelli had just spoken to representatives from the NJ Department of Community Affairs, who’d set up a table to answer questions from town hall participants. He said they were scrambling on their computers to figure out what had gone wrong.

“I told these people I’m tired of taking numbers, I’m tired of filling out this application and that application. I’ve already done it all! I’ve done everything! What more proof do you want that I need this money to do my house?” he asked.

The timing of yesterday’s town hall coincided with the federal deadline for the state to turn in its spending plan to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the second $1.46 billion of Community Development Block Grant Sandy aid. Christie said he hopes the plan will be approved and that money can start flowing by the end of April. And he’s optimistic that the state will get word of a third batch of federal aid money in late May or early June.

It remains unclear, though, what the total will be after all is said and done. The governor repeated the prediction he’s voiced in recent weeks — he now expects the state to receive a total of just $10 billion to $15 billion in federal Sandy aid, a drop from the $20 billion to $25 billion he mentioned last spring.

NJ Spotlight, Mar. 27, 2014

By Colleen O’Dea

New Jersey has the nation’s highest rate of autism among children, with 1 in 45 having the spectrum of disorders, according to new data released yesterday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new study prompted two state representatives to call for greater action by both state and federal officials to determine both what triggers and how to treat a number of conditions in the the autism spectrum that are characterized by difficulties in social interaction, problems with verbal and nonverbal communication, and repetitive behaviors.

"It is a pandemic," said Rep. Chris Smith, R-4th, at a press conference with officials from the national organization Autism Speaks, following the release of the new CDC study.

Nationally, the CDC found 1 in 68 children with autism in 2010, based on a study of 8-year old students in 11 states, including New Jersey. That’s 30 percent higher than the estimate for 2008 and 120 percent higher than the 2000 estimate. CDC officials said they don’t know what is causing the increase in the prevalence of the condition, though some may be due to the ways in which children are identified, diagnosed and served.

New Jersey’s rate of 1 in 45 is the highest ever recorded by the CDC.

"It’s not just disturbing, it’s numbing," Smith said. "There is reason for alarm."

Several factors might explain why the autism rate in New Jersey is so much greater than in other states: The state’s relative affluence and high education levels mean parents have access to, can afford, and seek out a diagnosis and help for children exhibiting signs of autism.

"New Jersey has one of the best systems in the nation for identifying, diagnosing and documenting children with Autism Spectrum Disorders," said Mary O’Dowd, the state’s health commissioner. "New Jersey is one of only four states with an Autism Registry that requires reporting by neurologists, pediatricians, nurses and other autism providers so children can be referred for resources and services. Approximately, 12,400 are registered and that has heightened awareness among parents and providers of indicators for Autism Spectrum Disorders."

Walter Zahorodny, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, has been a principal investigator for the CDC’s studies from the beginning and told Rutgers Today there are no easy answers to the questions surrounding autism.

"This state does have some of the best resources anywhere for detecting and caring for autism, but if the higher documented prevalence were only due to better detection, sooner or later the numbers would plateau and other states would catch up. That hasn’t happened," he said. "In 2002, the prevalence in New Jersey translated to one child in 94. In 2006, it was one child in 57. The latest numbers show one child in 45. We need to start acknowledging that what once was a rare disorder now affects two percent of the state’s children, and unfortunately I think the numbers will continue to rise."

Zahorodny said there’s likely nothing in the state’s environment influencing the findings, but the state’s demographics probably have something to do with its unenviable ranking.

"Many people here are more affluent and better educated than elsewhere, and those people tend to marry each other and have children later in life. It is considered a risk factor for autism if both the mother and father are older when the child is born," he said. "It’s also very likely that our findings apply beyond New Jersey. The same demographic profile exists in counties throughout the New York metro area, and I would expect that if those areas were monitored as closely as we have studied New Jersey, their autism prevalence would be found to be similar."

While the number of school children specifically labeled as autistic is likely too small — children with autism may also be placed in a number of other categories, including specific learning disabilities or multiple disabilities — it has nevertheless grown more than 250 percent between 2002 and 2013.

According to the CDC data, autism affects boys far more often than girls — 3.4 boys for every girl — and whites more than any other race or ethnicity.

The new study did have one bright spot for parents, finding an increase in the percentage of autistic children with average or above average intelligence — about least half of all those with autism spectrum disorders have an IQ of at least 85.

Numbers don’t really tell the story of families struggling with children who have autism, though.

“Behind each of these numbers is a person living with autism,” said Autism Speaks President Liz Feld. “Autism is a pressing public health crisis that must be prioritized at the national level. We need a comprehensive strategy that includes the research community, policymakers, educators, and caregivers coming together to address our community’s needs across the lifespan.”

Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, agreed. Speaking at the Autism Speaks press conference, he said the CDC report is "a clarion call for increasing efforts at the federal level" for autism funding.

“We must redouble our efforts and secure the funding needed to not only ensure critical autism programs aren’t shuttered but to find new diagnostic tools, early intervention techniques, therapies, and lifelong support and services to ensure individuals with autism can fulfill their God-given potential," said Menendez, author of the Combating Autism Act.

Smith agreed, saying, "We need to be much more generous" in investing in autism research.

O’Dowd said that the Governor’s Council for Medical Research and Treatment of Autism has provided nearly $25 million in research grants since 2008 and that the health department is at the forefront of supporting research, including a Center for Excellence at Montclair State University.

She urged parents to be vigilant in taking action when there is a suspicion of a developmental delay that could be due to an autism spectrum disorder. The department’s Early Intervention System, funded by $135 million, provides early identification and referral, service coordination, evaluation and assessment, and services for children from birth through age 3 with disabilities.

"The earlier a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder or developmental delay is identified and connected to services, the sooner services can be provided to ensure the child is able to reach their full potential," O’Dowd said.

NJ Spotlight, Mar. 24, 2014

Independent special interest groups, many of which operate with little or no public disclosure, have spent an estimated $63 million on gubernatorial and legislative elections in New Jersey since 1977, according to a new report by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC).

“In federal, state, and even local races, independent spending has emerged as a dominant force in political campaigns,’’ said Joseph Donohue, Deputy Executive Director and the study’s author. “It’s a new ballgame, both nationally and in New Jersey.”

More than $55 million — 87 percent — has been spent just in the past five years, according to “White Paper No. 24 — Independents’ Day — Seeking Disclosure in a New Era of Unlimited Special Interest Spending."

The report also indicates that the 2013 gubernatorial and legislative elections attracted a record $39 million in so-called outside spending — campaign funds spent independently of parties or candidates by groups or individuals with special interest agendas.

NJ Spotlight

By Tom Johnson

Credit: philly.com

The Legislature is once again trying to get the state to rejoin a regional initiative to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global climate change.

The Senate Environment and Energy Committee is scheduled to take up a bill (S-151) on Thursday that would require New Jersey to participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

In May 2011, Gov. Chris Christie unilaterally pulled New Jersey out of the 10- state effort to reduce pollution from power plants contributing to global warming. In doing so, the Republican governor said the program was not effective and simply imposed a new tax on utility customers.

The program, commonly known as RGGI, is a collaborative effort by the states to deal with climate change. Its proponents hope it will eventually serve as a model for a nationwide strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a vision that has yet to be realized.

To encourage less pollution from power plants, RGGI imposes a tax on emissions of greenhouse cases, such as carbon dioxide. The funds raised by the tax are used by member states to finance clean-energy projects to reduce energy consumption.

To date, legislative efforts to force New Jersey back into the program have proved fruitless, with Christie twice vetoing bills to that end. Senate President Stephen Sweeney is the sponsor of the bill.

The bill said the funding of clean-energy programs by RGGI benefits consumers by reducing their costs and by decreasing energy use for both homeowners and businesses. The funds also would help promote the state’s efforts to achieve greater energy efficiency and implement cleaner ways of producing electricity, according to the bill.

Democratic lawmakers and clean-energy advocates have long been unhappy with many of the Christie administration’s energy policies. Besides pulling out of RGGI, the administration has diverted nearly $1 billion in ratepayer subsidies that were supposed to fund clean-energy programs, but instead have been used to plug holes in the state budget in the past several years.

More recently, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities killed the first offshore wind project to be considered by the agency, saying it was not financially viable and failed to provide economic benefits to ratepayers. It also adopted regulations earlier this month that may force Tesla, the maker of high-priced electric vehicles, to cease selling the cars in New Jersey.

“It’s good to get it out there,’’ said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, referring to Sweeney’s bill. “RGGI is a symptom of a broader anti-climate change agenda by the Christie administration.’’

Center for Public Integrity, Mar. 21, 2014

by Susan Ferriss

Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed shock at data released Thursday showing that thousands of preschool kids were suspended nationwide during the 2011-2012 school year. The suspensions fell heavily on black children, who represented 18 percent of preschool enrollment yet 48 percent of all suspensions.

“I was stunned — I was stunned — that we were suspending and expelling four-year-olds,” Duncan said at a Washington D.C. elementary school, where he and Holder discussed findings of the latest Civil Rights Data Collection by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The survey showed that nearly 5,000 preschool students were suspended in the 2011-12 academic year.

“This preschool suspension issue is mind-boggling,” Duncan said. “And we need to as a nation find a way to remedy that tomorrow.”

Duncan said training is needed at schools that suspend large numbers of kids at all grade levels to demonstrate a “better way” of handling problem behavior. “We know there is a correlation between out-of-school suspensions and ultimately locking people up,” Duncan said. “And folks don’t like it when we talk about it. But for far too many children and communities the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ is real.”

Holder said the findings of the data collection are “unacceptable. And it’s important to bear in mind…that these are not abstract statistics,” but rather hard data collected from schools.

The racial disparities in preschool suspensions, Holder added, “reflect where we are as a society.”

“There are certain preconceptions that people have about kids of color,” he said. Kids can engage in “the kinds of things that kids normally do,” he said, and behavior can sometimes be “misconstrued if you deal with a child with a preconceived notion about that child.”

“We have to break through that. It means we have to train our teachers in ways that are sensitive to cultural differences,” Holder said. “There are a whole variety of ways (to respond to children) that we have so we don’t misunderstand behaviors.”

The collection of national data—accessible to the public online—came from every public elementary, middle and high school in the nation during the 2011-2012 school year; the scope of the data requested from schools was unprecedented. The database includes a trove of detailed information about access to college prep courses, access to counselors, classroom size, teacher pay and other subjects. The data is broken down, school by school, and by demographic groups.

The collection also drills down on a variety of school discipline practices—including the use of restraints—and reports the numbers of students who were referred to police officers.

Nationally, minority kids of all ages were subjected to suspensions and expulsions at a rate three times higher than their white peers. Black students, 16 percent of overall enrollment, were more than a quarter of students referred to law enforcement from schools that year and 31 percent of those arrested. Students with disabilities represented a quarter of kids arrested and referred to law enforcement although they were only 13 percent of the nation’s student population.

Young children enter school “from various types of backgrounds,” Holder said.

“But at the end of the day,” he said. “They’re four-year-olds. They’re five-year-olds. They’re six-year-olds. And when you see these disparate numbers… you have to wonder: What is it that we are doing? Why are we seeing these numbers? It’s not because these kids are fundamentally different. I think that’s the kind of things we have to understand. We are getting disparate treatment here.”

“That’s a painful thing for this nation to accept,” Holder said. “But unless we deal with these hard truths we are not going to ultimately come up with the kind of country we want to have.”

Holder is involved in Obama Administration initiatives announced this year to reform school discipline, as the Center for Public Integrity reported in January. Studies have linked out-of-school suspensions with increasing risks that students will drop out and get into trouble with law enforcement.

“Every data point (in the civil rights collection) represents a life impacted,” Holder said, “a future potentially diverted or derailed, and a young man or woman who was placed at increased likelihood of becoming involved in the criminal justice system.”

Across the country, districts with high rates of out-of-school punishment have seen a large number of kids being forced to drop out—as the Center reported on farmworker kids in California — or forced into dubious at-home learning plans, as the Center also reported from California.

The Education Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine LLamon, said Thursday that the database collection has proved useful to detect districts where black children have been left out of college courses — because a principal didn’t think they were prepared to take such classes — and where children have been subjected to high levels of unaddressed sexual harassment. The collection is the “fullest, richest, most comprehensive” in history, Llamon said.

“This data was meant for you and me,” LLamon added, urging the public to use it to scrutinize individual schools and districts and detect inequities that deserve to be addressed.

NY Times, Mar. 22, 2014

By the Editorial Board

The across-the-board cuts to federal programs that took effect last spring receded from the headlines after Republicans were shamed into allowing the government to pay its bills. But the cuts, known as the sequester, continue to take a toll on crucial housing programs that are intended to shield the elderly, the disabled and impoverished families with children from homelessness.

These cuts arrived in the midst of an affordable housing crisis, at a time when only one in four families who would qualify for federal rental assistance actually get it.

The sequester seriously damaged the Section 8 housing program, which subsidizes rents for more than two million of the nation’s poorest families. Local housing authorities reacted to the across-the-board cuts by tightening the screws on this voucher program. They ceased to issue new vouchers that would ordinarily have gone to homeless or needy families and even recalled vouchers that had been issued but had not yet been committed to landlords.

An analysis released by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that, as of December, there were 70,000 fewer low-income families using vouchers to rent private housing than there were a year earlier. The number of families using vouchers fell precipitously in states like Alaska (by 11.69 percent), Kansas (10.05 percent) and Montana (9.02 percent).

The drop in the number of vouchers in circulation works against the program; Congress generally funds the program based on the number of vouchers in service the previous year.

The December budget deal that ended sequestration will allow housing agencies to replace less than half of the 70,000 vouchers lost in 2013. Given the pressing need, it should come up with the money to restore the rest.

The sequester also hurt the long-neglected public developments that house about 1.1 million of the country’s most vulnerable families. These developments had been staggering along under ever-shrinking operating budgets — and a $26 billion backlog in repairs — even before the sequester.

When further cuts came along, three quarters of state and local housing agencies reacted by cutting the number of families served, letting waiting lists grow and leaving damaged apartments vacant rather than repairing them.

As if all that wasn’t enough, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, federal housing officials have estimated that sequestration cuts to homeless assistance grants “led states and localities to remove 60,000 formerly homeless persons from housing and emergency shelter programs.”

All this comes at a time when record numbers of families have been caught in the squeeze between rising rents and falling wages — and are at greater risk of homelessness. In other words, this is the worst possible time for Congress to let affordable housing programs go begging.

Al Jazeera America, Mar. 21, 2014

Advocates seek removal of paint sludge around former Ford dump sites in NY and NJ, compensation for health problems.

by Kaelyn Forde

Chuck Stead is a tall man with an easy smile and a booming voice that rises from underneath his wide-brimmed leather hat. On a cold February morning, Stead stood outside the Ramapo Saltbox, a cabin perched on the slope of New York’s Torne Valley, where he runs an environmental research center with the help of Cornell University.

Ever since he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and given just a few months to live last year, Stead has increased the pace of his work documenting what he calls the “toxic legacy” left in these woods by the Ford Motor Co.

“It’s not unusual to have cancer here. I don’t treat it as ‘Why me?’ It’s more like, ‘Well, yeah. It’s what happens,’” Stead, now in remission, said. “I trapped all through this creek here. I skinned all of these animals, so I was exposed to whatever they were exposed to, and we ate some of the animals. Years later, I got my intestinal cancer and my liver cancer. If you look up the cancers and then you look up the compounds that are in the automobile paint, you have a correlation right there.”

Ford produced more than 6 million cars at its plant in nearby Mahwah, N.J., from 1955 to 1980. Automobile paint containing lead, arsenic, benzene, chromium and other chemicals was sprayed on the cars rolling off Ford’s assembly line. But with large-scale production came large-scale pollution. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ford dumped millions of gallons of paint sludge in the woods surrounding Mahwah. More than 40 years later, some of the paint sludge is still there.

Among the largest dump sites were two abandoned iron mines and a landfill in Ringwood, N.J. The paint sludge is still visible in hardened lavalike pools on the forest floor, stuck between rocks and cascading down hills. Break off a chunk of the dried paint sludge and the smell of acetone is almost as potent as ever, Stead said. The paint was dumped into 55-gallon drums and then carted to places like Ringwood and Hillburn, N.Y. Some of the rusted-out drums are still visible in the woods.

“You would get $100 to make six drums disappear off of the back of the dock. Sometimes they would dump the paint directly into a trench and fill it in. That’s what I saw when I was a kid trapping up here,” Stead said.

Contamination from the paint sludge has made him and many other people here sick, he said, and no one has been harder hit than the Ramapough Indians, who have called this land home for centuries.

Ramapough clan mother Vivian Milligan embraces her sister-in-law, Janet Van Dunk, who passed away from cancer just a month after speaking with Al Jazeera America.

Al Jazeera Ramapough Chief Dwaine Perry said the approximately 3,500 tribal members who live in the area have higher rates of cancer, birth defects and other health problems from decades of contaminated water and soil. The tribe, which is recognized by the states of New York and New Jersey but not by the federal government, uses the old Dutch spelling of its name.

Like many adults here, Ramapough clan mother Vivian Milligan remembers playing in the paint sludge as a child. Some children even chewed the sweet lead-containing substance like gum because the community didn’t know it was dangerous, she said. “We used to jump around on it, and it was so enjoyable, jumping around on that pretty, colored hard stuff. And did we know it was going to affect us? No,” she said.

Milligan is one of many Ramapough who have pushed for a full cleanup of the Ford dump sites. But it has been an uphill battle.

She fears time is running out for the Ramapough as they fight for cleanup of the contamination and for acknowledgment of and compensation for their health problems.

Milligan has researched the tribe’s genealogy and life expectancy, and she said the tribe once had members live well into old age. Now, she said, the tribe is struggling to preserve its culture as its members appear to be dying younger.

“I try to write down everything — the traditions, the home remedies — before this little brain stops remembering,” she said. “But it’s very difficult when you can’t go to an elder.”

Three years after the Ford plant shut its doors in 1980, the EPA put the company’s dump sites in Ringwood, N.J., on its Superfund list of the most contaminated sites in the United States. After declaring that the Ringwood sites had been “appropriately cleaned” in 1994, the EPA found much more contamination. Ringwood was restored to the Superfund list in 2006. The latest EPA cleanup plan for Ringwood is estimated to cost $46.7 million, paid for by Ford.

In response to Al Jazeera America’s request for comment, Ford issued a statement saying the company “takes its environmental responsibility seriously and has shown through its actions a commitment to addressing the issues in Upper Ringwood … Ford is working cooperatively with the federal EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in the development of a final remediation plan.”

Paint sludge along Torne Valley Road, which leads to the closed Ramapo landfill in New York, just a few miles from a former Ford auto plant in Mahwah, N.J. Thomas E. Franklin/North Jersey/Landov

The current EPA plan involves excavating more than 22,000 tons of contaminated soil from around the Peters Mine pit and putting permeable caps on it and the Cannon Mine pit. Under the plan, the two pits will not be completely excavated.

“The digging out is a dangerous engineering task, and workers would be at considerable risk doing it,” said Walter Mugdan, EPA Superfund director for the Ringwood site.

He said that the caps are completely safe and that there is little risk that contamination from the mines will migrate into the groundwater. But Milligan, Stead and others in the community still want the pits dug out and the contamination fully removed.

“I can well understand why their reaction would be, ‘Get it out of my community. It shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and I don’t want it here now. Make it go away.’ I understand that. If I were living there, I would want that as well, but my task as the Superfund director here is to select a remedy that is fully protective so that, going forward, people will not be exposed to the same chemicals these poor people were exposed to in the past,” Mugdan said.

Investigative reporting by The Bergen County Record has called into question the impact the paint sludge could have on the Wanaque Reservoir, a drinking water source for more than 2.5 million people. Local officials told the Record there is concern that the chemicals could make their way into the drinking water.

Mugdan said the reservoir is routinely tested for hazardous chemicals and that the EPA will separately be making a decision on whether anything beyond capping is needed to protect it.

But the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said in 2011 that the “incidence of specific cancers was not elevated” in Ringwood, compared with the rest of New Jersey.

Ramapough tribal leaders are pushing state and federal authorities for another health study that compares the cancer rate of Ramapough living in Ringwood with the cancer rate of Ramapough in uncontaminated Stag Hill, N.J.

If the study confirms what the Ramapough have long believed, then the battle for compensation will be a lot easier. In the meantime, they will continue to push for a cleanup. “It’s very hard to get [compensation] out of them. But what we can get out of them is full extraction and full removal,” said Stead.

NY Times, Mar. 21, 2014

By Charles M. Blow

Paul Ryan continues to be flogged for disturbing comments he made last week about men “in our inner cities” and their “culture” of not working.

In a radio interview with Bill Bennett, Ryan said, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

Reactions to the comment were swift and brutal.

Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said in a statement, “Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’ ”

Charles M. Blow

Ryan has agreed to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Lee’s a member and which found his remarks “highly offensive.”

But at a town hall meeting on Wednesday, Ryan was rebuked by one of his own constituents, a black man from Mount Pleasant, Wis., named Alfonso Gardner.

Gardner told Ryan, “The bottom line is this: Your statement was not true.” He continued, “That’s a code word for ‘black.’ ”

But instead of cushioning his comments, Ryan shot back, “There was nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all — it had nothing to do with race.”

That would have been more believable if Ryan hadn’t prefaced his original comments by citing Charles Murray, who has essentially argued that blacks are genetically inferior to whites and whom the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a “white nationalist.” (The center’s definition: “White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites.”)

Whatever Ryan meant by men “in our inner cities” and their culture, the comment obscures the vast dimension of poverty in America and seeks an easy scapegoat for it.

According to the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (in Ryan’s home state), the gap between the poverty rate in inner cities and that in rural areas and small towns is not as great as one might suspect. The inner city poverty rate is 19.7 percent, and the poverty rate in rural areas and small towns is 16.5 percent.

Furthermore, as Mark R. Rank, a professor of social welfare at Washington University, argued several months ago in The New York Times:

“Few topics in American society have more myths and stereotypes surrounding them than poverty, misconceptions that distort both our politics and our domestic policy making. They include the notion that poverty affects a relatively small number of Americans, that the poor are impoverished for years at a time, that most of those in poverty live in inner cities, that too much welfare assistance is provided and that poverty is ultimately a result of not working hard enough. Although pervasive, each assumption is flat-out wrong.”

His research, he noted, indicates that “40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period” and “54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty.” Rank concluded, “Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans.”

By suggesting that laziness is more concentrated among the poor, inner city or not, we shift our moral obligation to deal forthrightly with poverty. When we insinuate that poverty is the outgrowth of stunted culture, that it is almost always invited and never inflicted, we avert the gaze from the structural features that help maintain and perpetuate poverty — discrimination, mass incarceration, low wages, educational inequities — while simultaneously degrading and dehumanizing those who find themselves trapped by it.

Other parts of Ryan’s original interview were on target, when he talked about the value and dignity of work and the way that work builds character. Work doesn’t always alleviate poverty, in part because some people are forced to work for less than a living wage, though work does bring dignity.

But this is in part the problem, and danger, of people like Ryan: There is an ever-swirling mix of inspiration and insult, where the borders between the factual and the fudged are intentionally blurred and cover is given for corrosive ideas.

Ryan is “one of the good guys,” a prominent Republican operative explained to me last week. Maybe so, but even good people are capable of saying and believing bad things, and what Ryan said was horrific.

NY Times, Mar. 21, 2014

By Motoko Rich

Racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to comprehensive data released Friday by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor.

Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer any Algebra II courses, while a third of those schools do not have any chemistry classes. Black students are more than four times as likely as white students — and Latino students are twice as likely — to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements.

“Here we are, 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the data altogether still show a picture of gross inequity in educational opportunity,” said Daniel J. Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Civil Rights Project.

In his budget request to Congress, President Obama has proposed a new phase of his administration’s Race to the Top competitive grant program, which would give $300 million in incentives to states and districts that put in place programs intended to close some of the educational gaps identified in the data.

“In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement.

One of the striking statistics to emerge from the data, based on information collected during the 2011-12 academic year, was that even as early as preschool, black students face harsher discipline than other students.

While black children make up 18 percent of preschool enrollment, close to half of all preschool children who are suspended more than once are African-American.

“To see that young African-American students — or babies, as I call them — are being suspended from pre-K programs at such horrendous rates is deeply troubling,” said Leticia Smith-Evans, interim director of education practice at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“It’s incredible to think about or fathom what pre-K students could be doing to get suspended from schools,” she added.

In high school, the study found that while more than 70 percent of white students attend schools that offer a full range of math and science courses — including algebra, biology, calculus, chemistry, geometry and physics — just over half of all black students have access to those courses. Just over two-thirds of Latinos attend schools with the full range of math and science courses, and less than half of American Indian and Native Alaskan students are able to enroll in as many high-level math and science courses as their white peers.

“We want to have a situation in which students of color — and every student — has the opportunity and access that will get them into any kind of STEM career that takes their fancy,” said Claus von Zastrow, director of research for Change the Equation, a nonprofit that advocates improved science, technology, engineering and math education, or STEM, in the United States. “We’re finding that in fact a huge percentage of primarily students of color, but of all students, don’t even have the opportunity to take those courses. Those are gateways that are closed to them.”

The Education Department’s report found that black, Latino, American Indian and Native Alaskan students are three times as likely as white students to attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers. And in nearly a quarter of school districts with at least two high schools, the teacher salary gap between high schools with the highest concentrations of black and Latino students and those with the lowest is more than $5,000 a year.

Timothy Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit that recruits teachers, said that while the data looked at educator experience and credentials, it was also important to look at quality, as measured by test scores, principal observations and student surveys.

“Folks who cannot teach effectively should not be working with low-income or African-American kids, period,” he said, adding that the problem was difficult to resolve because individual districts are allowed to make decisions on how to assign teachers to schools.