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U.N. Scientists See Largest CO2 Increase In 30 Years: ‘We Are Running Out Of Time’
Climate Progress, Sept. 15, 2014
By Emily Atkin
More carbon dioxide was emitted into our atmosphere between 2012 and 2013 than in any other year since 1984, putting humans on the fast track toward irreversible global warming, the United Nation’s weather agency said in a report released Tuesday.
The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin showed that the increase of atmospheric CO2 from 2012 to 2013 was 2.9 parts per million (ppm), the largest year-to-year increase in 30 years. Because of that growth, the average amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 396 ppm — just 9 ppm away from an average level some scientists believe could cause enough sea level rise, drought, and severe weather to significantly harm human populations across the globe.
“The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows that, far from falling, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually increased last year at the fastest rate for nearly 30 years,” WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud said in a statement. “We must reverse this trend by cutting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases across the board. We are running out of time.”
International climate negotiations generally center around preventing global average temperatures to rise 2°C above preindustrial levels, a threshold that U.N. scientists say dangerously increases the risks of severe weather, sea level rise and extermination of species. Some scientists say the 2°C increase could happen if average carbon concentrations reach 405 ppm, while others say closer to 450 ppm. At our current average of 396 ppm, temperatures have already risen 0.8°C (1.4° Fahrenheit).
To solve the problem of climate change, scientists generally agree that concentrated carbon levels in the atmosphere need to stabilize at 350 ppm. That means taking carbon dioxide and other more concentrated greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere.
According to the WMO’s report, though, methane concentrations are also on the rise. Atmospheric methane reached a record high of about 1824 parts per billion (ppb) in 2013, the report said, due to increased emissions from humans. Most human-caused methane emissions come from natural gas production, followed closely by industrial agriculture.
Even though there have been large increases of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, however the report noted that the ocean has been absorbing more and more of it, causing widespread acidification of the sea. Comparing current data of the ocean’s acid content with paleo archives over the last 300 million years, the WMO called the sea’s current rate of souring “unprecedented.”
Major concerns with acidification include large-scale die-offs of calcifying organisms like coral, algae, mollusks, and plankton, and a general decrease in biodiversity.
“If global warming is not a strong enough reason to cut CO2 emissions, ocean acidification should be, since its effects are already being felt and will increase for many decades to come,” Wendy Watson-Wright, the executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, said. “It is high time the ocean, as the primary driver of the planet’s climate and attenuator of climate change, becomes a central part of climate change discussions.”
As the WMO notes, the ocean currently soaks up about a quarter of human-caused CO2 emissions, which has reduced the amount of observed carbon in atmosphere. However, the WMO report says the ocean’s capacity for absorbing carbon is decreasing, which will eventually lead to a speed-up in atmospheric warming. Indeed, the ocean’s ability to hold carbon is only 70 percent of what it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution. By the end of the twenty-first century, it could be reduced to 20 percent, the WMO said.
At the same time, the oceans are also soaking up a lot of the trapped heat that would otherwise be retained by the atmosphere. This has perpetuated the oft-debunked argument from climate deniers that the earth “hasn’t seen any warming for 17 years,” as evidenced by a supposed lack of increase in global average surface temperature. (At the same time, the heat content of the ocean is rapidly rising.)
The good news is, according to WMO, that action can still be taken to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and prevent catastrophic global warming through cooperative international policymaking. The WMO urged policymakers worldwide to use their report as a “scientific base for decision-making.”
“We have the knowledge and we have the tools for action to try keep temperature increases within 2°C to give our planet a chance and to give our children and grandchildren a future,” Jarraud said. “Pleading ignorance can no longer be an excuse for not acting.”
© 2005-2014 Center for American Progress Action Fund
Crime, Bias and Statistics
NY Times, Sept. 7, 2014
By Charles M. Blow
Discussions of the relationship between blacks and the criminal justice system in this country too often grind to a halt as people slink down into their silos and arm themselves with their best rhetorical weapons — racial bias on one side and statistics in which minorities, particularly blacks, are overrepresented as criminals on the other.
What I find too often overlooked in this war of words is the intersection between the two positions, meaning the degree to which bias informs the statistics and vice versa.
The troubling association — in fact, overassociation — of blacks with criminality directly affects the way we think about both crime and blacks as a whole.
A damning report released by the Sentencing Project last week lays bare the bias and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it and disproportionately affect African-Americans.
This is the kind of report that one really wants to publish in its totality, for its conclusion is such a powerful condemnation of the perversity of racial oppression. But alas, this being a newspaper column, that’s not possible. Still, allow me to present many of their findings:
• “Whites are more punitive than blacks and Hispanics even though they experience less crime.”
• “White Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by people of color and associate people of color with criminality. For example, white respondents in a 2010 survey overestimated the actual share of burglaries, illegal drug sales and juvenile crime committed by African-Americans by 20 percent to 30 percent.”
• “White Americans who associate crime with blacks and Latinos are more likely to support punitive policies — including capital punishment and mandatory minimum sentencing — than whites with weaker racial associations of crime.”
This association of crime with blacks has been noted by others. Lisa Bloom, in her book “Suspicion Nation,” points out: “While whites can and do commit a great deal of minor and major crimes, the race as a whole is never tainted by those acts. But when blacks violate the law, all members of the race are considered suspect.”
She further says: “The standard assumption that criminals are black and blacks are criminals is so prevalent that in one study, 60 percent of viewers who viewed a crime story with no picture of the perpetrator falsely recalled seeing one, and of those, 70 percent believed he was African-American. When we think about crime, we ‘see black,’ even when it’s not present at all.”
As the Sentencing Project report makes clear, the entire government and media machinery is complicit in the distortion.
According to the report:
• “Whether acting on their own implicit biases or bowing to political exigency, policy makers have fused crime and race in their policy initiatives and statements. They have crafted harsh sentencing laws that impact all Americans and disproportionately incarcerate people of color.”
• “Many media outlets reinforce the public’s racial misconceptions about crime by presenting African-Americans and Latinos differently than whites — both quantitatively and qualitatively. Television news programs and newspapers overrepresent racial minorities as crime suspects and whites as crime victims.”
• “Disparities in police stops, in prosecutorial charging, and in bail and sentencing decisions reveal that implicit racial bias has penetrated all corners of the criminal justice system.”
The effects of these perceptions and policies have been absolutely devastating for society in general and black people in particular. According to the report:
• “By increasing support for punitive policies, racial perceptions of crime have made sentencing more severe for all Americans. The United States now has the world’s highest imprisonment rate, with one in nine prisoners serving life sentences. Racial perceptions of crime, combined with other factors, have led to the disparate punishment of people of color. Although blacks and Latinos together comprise just 30 percent of the general population, they account for 58 percent of the prison population.”
• “By increasing the scale of criminal sanctions and disproportionately directing penalties toward people of color, racial perceptions of crime have been counterproductive for public safety. Racial minorities’ perceptions of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with police work and impeded criminal trials. In 2013, over two-thirds of African-Americans saw the criminal justice system as biased against blacks, in contrast to one-quarter of whites. Crime policies that disproportionately target people of color can increase crime rates by concentrating the effects of criminal labeling and collateral consequences on racial minorities and by fostering a sense of legal immunity among whites.”
There is no way in this country to discuss crime statistics without including in that discussion the myriad ways in which those statistics are informed and influenced by the systemic effects of racial distortion.
Individual behavior is not the only component of the numbers; bias is the other.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
Struggling to survive: 38 percent of N.J. households can’t meet basic needs
NJ.com, Sept. 14, 2014
Every day, Kim Ticehurst walks a financial tightrope.
A single mother in Montclair, Ticehurst lost her job in the construction industry in January. At 50, she has decades of experience in project management, planning, organization and design, but the scores of resumés she has submitted have been met with no response.
“It’s a horrible feeling,” she said last week. “You definitely confront times when you’re like ‘how do I get through this day?’”
She has pieced together employment, working part-time in childcare while she tries to get her new home-organization business off the ground. For the first time in months, she’s feeling optimistic.
But she knows the littlest of things, from a toothache to a car accident, could turn her life upside-down.
“There are things like that that are piling up and I know right now they are just going to sit in that pile,” Ticehurst said, pointing to a stack of papers on her desk. “I am feeling optimistic, but it’s hard when you have kids (this) young. (My daughter) wants to go to Disney. It’s just not in the budget. That’s a wild fantasy at this point.”
A new study conducted by the United Way of Northern New Jersey shows an alarming number of New Jersey residents are in Ticehurst’s position. Data compiled by the group show that 38 percent of New Jersey households are struggling to meet basic needs. These households are just scraping by, one lost job or medical emergency away from potential fiscal ruin.
The report, called ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed), paints a stark picture of how widespread financial hardship like Ticehurst’s is in New Jersey.
While 11 percent of state residents fall below the Federal Poverty Line, which stands at an annual income of $22,811 for a family of four, the report found that when adjusted for cost of living the same family needs nearly triple that — $61,200 – just to meet a basic survival budget.
In one of the wealthiest states in the country, 1.2 million households fall below this threshold. And while the state’s economy has shown signs of recovery in the wake of the Great Recession, the number of households struggling by the United Way measure increased by about 24 percent from 2007 to 2012, the most recent data available.
“I had expected things would have improved since the recession, to be honest,” said Stephanie Hoopes Halpin, the author of the report and director of the New Jersey DataBank at Rutgers University. “I think what strikes me most is how vulnerable these people are. You look at Superstorm Sandy, for example. You had tons of people who didn’t even take on any water during the storm, but had their savings wiped out just by not working for two weeks. You have to think about the fact that there are individual emergencies like that every day that don’t get national headlines.”
For Ticehurst, a recent tooth infection turned into a weeks-long ordeal.
A MediCaid recipient, Ticehurst was only able to reschedule an appointment for a needed root canal several weeks from the time the pain in her mouth began. While she waited, attending to her day-to-day responsibilities, the pain worsened.
"It became unbearable," she said. "Finally, when it became an emergency situation, I was able to get it taken care of. Unfortunately, by that point, the tooth had to be removed, which is another issue I have to deal with."
She acknowledged that under better conditions, it likely could have been taken care of quickly. Instead, due to fiscal constraints, it became an unavoidable and drawn out focal point of her life.
Situations like Ticehurst’s are all too common.
The United Way report shows that while New Jersey is an economically diverse state where the cost-of-living varies widely, state households have continued to struggle across the board since the recession.
Among the findings:
• ALICE households exist in every age bracket in New Jersey, but the largest segment of the group is those who are typically in their income earning prime. Households headed by those aged 25-64 represent 75 percent of those beneath the ALICE threshold.
• The average budget needed to provide basic needs, both for the individual and the family household in New Jersey, increased by 19 percent from 2007 to 2012.
• High paying jobs are scarce. Jobs paying less than $40,000 a year now comprise 53 percent of all jobs in New Jersey, and these jobs are projected to be the primary source of labor growth in the coming years.
“I think this sort of verifies for all of us that ALICE isn’t going away,” said John Franklin, CEO of the United Way of Northern New Jersey. “People really begin to understand that we’re not just talking about some number somewhere. We’re talking about a huge portion of our population.”
While there have been signs of economic recovery in New Jersey, they have been weaker than hoped.
The state’s unemployment rate was 6.6 percent in June, down from 8.4 at the same time in 2013. The United Way report also shows while ALICE households have continued to increase since 2007, the rate of growth slowed considerably from 2010 to 2012.
And New Jersey Legal Services, who has published two similar reports on poverty in recent weeks, predicts that when new Census data is published Tuesday, it will show that the number of poor residents in New Jersey has plateaued or declined slightly.
New Jersey Legal Services Director Melville D. Miller was quick to note that while a potential decline in the poverty rate is good news, it still leaves the state at near record levels.
“The real question is are we making any substantive long-term progress, and right now it’s difficult to see any real strong evidence of that,” Miller said.
While the improved unemployment numbers are encouraging, Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, said they don’t reveal the true nature of what has been a weak recovery.
“For people in poverty, their attempt to escape from poverty has been more difficult because of the large number of people with more education than them competing for available jobs,” Van Horn said. “And in our own research here, we found that more than half of Americans who were able to get another job, their next job was either lower-paying or paid the same.”
“So people are either staying where they were or they’re downwardly mobile.”
Ticehurst is hopeful that her new business venture, called NEST-cessities, will take off, but she knows it’s a risk. Barring a miracle, she said, her family won’t be able to afford to stay in the apartment much longer.
“You can hang on for a little while, but six months comes up on you really quick. It’s hard,” she said of life after losing her job.
A Newark native, Ticehurst has lived with her 8 year-old daughter in a neatly organized, one-bedroom apartment above a restaurant in Montclair for the last four years. Her daughter occupies the bedroom, while she sleeps on a single bed just outside the door – except on Fridays.
“The restaurant gets noisy on Friday nights, so we have to sleep out here,” she said, pointing at the living room. “It’s not terrible, but you can’t sleep."
But like so many in New Jersey in her situation, Ticehurst said she will forge ahead, controlling what she can and girding for obstacles that she can’t. Her only goal, she said, is to find a way to maintain some form of stability for her daughter.
“It’s the foundation of whether I am a success or whether I am a failure,” she said. “I never imagined I’d be in this position at this age – a mother with such a questionable job situation. I just don’t want to let her down.”
Policies for Community Wealth Building: Leveraging State and Local Resources
The Democracy Collaborative
Sept. 10, 2014
Fostering resilient communities and building wealth in today’s local economies is necessary to achieve individual, regional, and national economic security. A community wealth-building strategy employs a range of forms of community ownership and asset building strategies to build wealth in low-income communities. In so doing, community wealth building bolsters the ability of communities and individuals to increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally, expand the provision of public services, and ensure local economic stability.
Effective community wealth building requires rethinking present policies, redirecting resources, breaking old boundaries, and forging new alliances. Over the past few decades, despite limited government support, new and alternative forms of community-supportive economic enterprises have increasingly emerged in cities and towns across the country as an important counter-trend to the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, income, and opportunity. In contrast to traditional economic development strategies that use local resources to attract outside investment, these wealth-building strategies leverage local resources to generate local equity and community-owned initiatives.
A key need now is to develop and promote policies that can build upon, support, and codify these emerging strategies, especially at the state and local levels, where there are significant opportunities to enact progressive economic development and wealth building policies. As they develop, these experiments in the “state and local laboratories of democracy,” are likely to generate larger national applications.
Our new report, which can be downloaded below, is a representative survey of some key emerging best practices in state and local policy-making to support community wealth building — designed to support economic inclusion goals, create quality jobs with family-supporting wages, address generational poverty, stabilize communities and the environment, and address growing wealth inequality. The recommendations below build off our work since 2005 tracking innovative state, local, and national strategies strategies through our Community-Wealth.org website, where we have paid close attention to the policies that have helped scale and generalize best practices in community wealth building since the emergence of the field. Our recommendations also draw specifically from our work to develop a model national policy to support comprehensive community wealth building in our 2010 report Rebuilding America’s Communities: A Comprehensive Community Wealth Building Federal Policy Proposal, our 2013 invited proposal of a policy agenda for community wealth building to the Illinois Governor’s Task Force on Social Innovation, as well as our work on the ground with policy makers and economic development officials in cities like Cleveland, Ohio and Jacksonville, Florida.
In what follows, we have tried to highlight both low-hanging fruit — tested policies with proven track records in multiple jurisdictions—as well as more promising aspirational experiments, pointing towards more systemic economic transformation. It has been our experience, as advocates for community wealth building working across the US and beyond, that policymakers and local stakeholders are much more open to transformative measures than one might expect, but only if these measures are grounded in a foundation of empirical rigor and pragmatic realism about the political and economic constraints faced on the ground. We have also found that policies which mobilize broad coalitions of stakeholders in their implementation are much more robust than policies which are identified with the efforts of a single political actor. The selected recommendations below, therefore, focus in particular on “what works” and what works best when communities work together.
Date: Sep 2014
Publisher: The Democracy Collaborative
Download:
PoliciesForCommunityWealthBuilding-September2014-final.pdf
U.S. Slammed for Failure to Fulfill Legal Obligation to Eliminate All Forms of Race Discrimination
Truthout, Sept. 5, 2014
A UN Committee has published a scathing denunciation of US failures to honor its treaty commitments.
In her monthly column, "Human Rights and Global Wrongs," law professor, writer and social critic Marjorie Cohn explores human rights and US foreign policy, and the frequent contradiction between the two.
Three weeks after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) published a report detailing how the United States has failed to fulfill its legal obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Convention).
The CERD report was scathing in its criticism of the United States for not complying with the convention’s mandates. Since the United States ratified this treaty, thereby becoming a state party, it is part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
States parties must comply with the obligations under the convention, including submitting periodic reports to CERD regarding their progress in fulfilling their obligations. CERD is the body that monitors compliance of states parties with the convention. After reviewing the most recent US report, CERD responded with its concluding observations as follows:
CERD urged the United States to prohibit racial discrimination in all its forms, including indirect discrimination. (The United States currently prohibits only intentional discrimination, but not legislation and programs that are discriminatory in effect).
CERD urged the United States to comply with the convention’s mandate that states parties adopt special measures to eliminate persistent disparities based on race or ethnic origin. (The US Supreme Court has narrowed the use of affirmative action in education).
CERD urged the United States to specifically outlaw racial profiling. (The FBI, TSA, border enforcement officials and local police engage in racial profiling).
CERD urged the United States to clean up radioactive and toxic waste, particularly in areas inhabited by racial and ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples. CERD also urged the United States to prevent US-registered transnational corporations from adversely affecting, in particular, minorities and indigenous peoples. (Racial and ethnic minorities, and indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected by negative health impacts of pollution caused by extractive and manufacturing industries).
CERD urged the United States to adopt legislation to prevent implementation of voting regulations with discriminatory impact. (The US Supreme Court invalidated procedural safeguards in the Voting Rights Act aimed at preventing the implementation of voting regulations that may have discriminatory effect). CERD also urged the United States and all states to reinstate voting rights to persons convicted of felonies who have served their sentences.
CERD urged the United States to abolish laws and policies making homelessness a crime. (A high number of homeless persons are disproportionately from racial and ethnic minorities, and homelessness is criminalized by loitering statutes).
CERD urged the United States to intensify efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in access to housing and ensure affordable and adequate housing for all. (There is persistent racial discrimination in housing and a high degree of segregation and concentrated poverty).
CERD urged the United States to develop a concrete plan to address racial segregation in schools and increase federal funds for such programs. (Students from racial and ethnic minorities attend segregated schools with unequal facilities).
CERD urged the United States to ensure that all, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, who reside in states that have opted out of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and undocumented immigrants and their families living in the United States for less than five years have effective access to affordable and adequate health care. (The US Supreme Court allows states to opt out of Medicaid expansion, and undocumented immigrants and their children are excluded from coverage under the ACA).
CERD urged the United States to fulfill its obligation to protect the right to life and reduce gun violence by adopting legislation expanding background checks and prohibiting the practice of carrying concealed handguns in public. CERD also urged the United States to review Stand Your Ground Laws to remove far-reaching immunity and ensure strict adherence to necessity and proportionality when deadly force is used in self-defense. (There is a high number of gun-related deaths and injuries, and Stand Your Ground laws are used to circumvent the limits of legitimate self-defense).
CERD urged the prompt and effective investigation of each allegation of excessive force by law enforcement officials; prosecution of alleged perpetrators and effective sanctions for those convicted; reopening of investigations when new evidence becomes available; and adequate compensation for victims and their families. (Brutality and excessive force by law enforcement officials against racial and ethnic minorities has a disparate impact on African Americans and undocumented migrants crossing the US-Mexico border; US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents enjoy impunity for abuses committed against Hispanic/Latino Americans and undocumented migrants).
CERD urged legal protection for the rights of noncitizens, including protection of migrants from exploitative and abusive working conditions; dealing with breaches of immigration law through civil, rather than criminal immigration system procedures; guaranteeing legal representation in all immigration matters; and raising the minimum age for agricultural field work. (Immigration enforcement is increasingly militarized, leading to excessive and lethal force by CBP personnel; local law enforcement increasingly uses racial profiling to determine immigration status; immigrants are detained for prolonged periods of time; and undocumented immigrants are deported without access to justice).
CERD urged the United States to intensify efforts to prevent and combat violence against women, particularly against American Indian and Alaska native women, and ensure all cases of violence against women are effectively investigated, prosecuted and sanctioned, and that victims are provided appropriate remedies. (A disproportionate number of women from racial and ethnic minorities continue to be subjected to violence, including rape and sexual violence).
CERD urged the United States to take concrete and effective steps to eliminate racial disparities at all stages of the criminal justice system. CERD also urged the United States to impose, at the federal level, a moratorium on the death penalty with a view to abolishing the death penalty. (Members of racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately arrested, incarcerated and subjected to harsher sentences, including life imprisonment without parole (LWOP) and the death penalty).
CERD urged the United States to intensify efforts to address racial disparities in disciplinary measures, as well as the "school-to-prison pipeline"; and ensure juveniles are not transferred to adult courts and are separated from adults in custody. CERD also urged the United States to abolish LWOP for those younger than 18 at the time of their crime and the commutation of sentences for those already serving LWOP. (Youth from racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately arrested at school and referred to the criminal justice system, prosecuted as adults, incarcerated in adult prison and sentenced to LWOP).
CERD urged the United States to end administrative detention without charge or trial at Guantanamo and the closure of the prison facility there without further delay. CERD also urged the United States to guarantee the right to a fair trial, in compliance with international human rights standards, and to ensure that any detainee not charged and tried is released immediately. (Noncitizens continue to be arbitrarily detained without effective and equal access to the ordinary criminal justice system, and are at risk of being subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment).
CERD urged the United States to adopt necessary measures to eliminate the disproportionate impact of inadequate criminal defense programs on racial and ethnic minorities, by improving the quality of legal representation and adequately funding legal aid. (There is no right to counsel in civil proceedings, which disproportionately affects indigent racial and ethnic minorities seeking effective remedies for evictions, foreclosures, domestic violence, employment discrimination, termination of subsistence income or medical assistance, loss of child custody and deportation).
CERD urged the United States to guarantee the right of indigenous peoples to effective participation in decisions affecting them, eliminate undue obstacles to recognition of tribes, protect sacred sites and halt the removal of indigenous children from their families and communities. (There are a lack of concrete progress in guaranteeing informed consent of indigenous peoples in decisions that affect them; burdensome obstacles to tribal recognition; insufficient protection of sacred sites; and continued removal of indigenous children from families and communities through the US child welfare system).
CERD also urged the adoption of a National Action Plan to combat structural racial discrimination and ensure that school curricula, textbooks and teaching materials address human rights themes and promote understanding among racial and ethnic minority groups.
CERD urged the United States to recognize the competence of CERD to hear individual complaints. CERD also urged the United States to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of the Their Families; the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
Finally, CERD urged the United States to widely publicize CERD’s recommendations. When the United States ratifies a treaty, the legal obligations it assumes apply at the federal, state and local levels. And although, by ratifying a treaty the United States undertakes an obligation to publicize the terms of the treaty, the US government has not taken this responsibility seriously.
© 2014 Truthout
IN ALL-CHARTER SCHOOL DISTRICTS, IDEOLOGY TRUMPS THE FACTS
NJ Spotlight, Sept. 4, 2014
Mounting evidence indicates that charter schools can’t live up to their hype
One of the latest and most ardently pursued urban education reform is the all-charter school district. New Orleans, Detroit, and the District of Columbia are far down that road, and Newark and Camden are racing to get there thanks to direct state operation of those districts. The big looming problem, however, is that the engine driving this reform is powered by ideology not evidence.
In a sense, this is a natural extension of the failed magic bullets of publicly funded private school vouchers, public school management by private for-profit entrepreneurs, and other free-market educational fixes. It’s also an outgrowth of the media and political full-court press to which we’ve been exposed over the past four years touting charter schools as the salvation of poor minority children in our cities. In rapid-fire succession, four full-length and widely distributed documentaries proclaimed the wonders of charter schools and the abject failure of traditional public schools — Waiting for Superman and The Lottery in 2010, The Cartel in 2011, and Won’t Back Down in 2012 (about the so-called parent trigger law).
A short pro-charter-school documentary, also issued in 2010, may be the most revealing of the films, however. It was produced by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. Despite its neutral name, the Mississippi Center’s website proudly advertises its mission: “To advance the ideals of limited government, free markets, and strong traditional families by influencing public policy, informing the media, and equipping the public with information and perspective to help them understand and defend their liberty.” Its vision is “For Mississippi to be a place where entrepreneurs are free to pursue their dreams, parents are free to direct the education and upbringing of their children . . . and all Mississippians are free from dependence on government for their daily needs.”
Lest there be any doubt about what the Mississippi Center means by its commitment to “strong traditional families,” its website elaborates: “Marriage is to be a lifelong relationship between one man and one woman. Government has the high honor and responsibility to protect it, to fortify it and advance it for the ‘general welfare’ of the citizenry, but the church should be at the forefront of teaching and promoting biblical principles for marriage.”
What drives other pro-charter school efforts, and especially those pressing for all-charter districts, may be different, but it almost certainly involves more ideology (or, as the Mississippi Center labels it, “perspective”) than evidence. The blunt truth is that there is absolutely no evidence that implementing a charter school regime on a large scale, whether that be district-wide or nation-wide, will improve education, especially for the most disadvantaged students. Indeed, there is growing evidence to the contrary.
Chile and Sweden both adopted school choice in the form of charter or independent schools as a national reform strategy, Chile decades ago, and both have recently recanted based on accumulating evidence that that reform was ill-conceived. A July 2014 report from the impartial Cowen Institute at Tulane University about the “charterization” of New Orleans sounds a loud early-warning signal.
Although the report indicates achievement of New Orleans students may have improved slightly, there are those who are skeptical about the accuracy and meaningfulness of the district’s achievement data. Moreover, even accepting the report’s numbers, New Orleans students still score substantially below the average of Louisiana students, not exactly the loftiest benchmark. Administrative and total education costs in New Orleans have soared far above the Louisiana averages, and the district structure is one that the cartoonist Rube Goldberg would have been proud to devise.
After rushing to decentralize the district to the school level, the district has been forced to re-centralize a variety of functions, on a largely ad hoc basis, to deal with administrative inefficiencies and with huge educational issues involving many of the most vulnerable students falling into gaping cracks in the decentralized district. In the words of the Cowen Institute’s executive director, “ Unified governance continues to be elusive . . . A unified system of schools with a single central office responsible for serving all students and holding all schools accountable to transparent and equivalent standards is unlikely at this point.” The evidence also is already accumulating about the negative effects of replacing public schools with charter and so-called renaissance schools in Detroit, D.C., Newark, and Camden. Without getting into the debate about whether the real motive of many promoters of charterization is to latch onto the hundreds of millions of public dollars spent on education every year or to reap the perceived political benefits of further undermining teacher unions, among the last of the strong unions, the educational effects are enough to ponder.
Do we really believe that the education of our most vulnerable students will be enhanced by constant churning of their schools and teachers? Do we really believe that we will improve education by replacing experienced and credentialed teachers with bright young college graduates — B.A. generalists as we used to call them in the early days of the Peace Corps — who are trained for six weeks before they are placed in the nation’s most difficult classrooms for their two-year commitments? Do we really believe that, despite growing evidence to the contrary, charter schools will begin to fully serve the needs of special education and LEP students? Do we really believe that balkanizing our already undersized New Jersey school districts to the charter-school level, where each charter school is technically an independent school district, will satisfy our state constitutional mandate of an “efficient system of free public schools”?
I suppose the ultimate question is whether we care enough to educate ourselves about the evidence of what works and what doesn’t in education reform and to make our informed voices heard. Or are we content to keep accepting at face value the self-serving claims of the ideologues? The famous journalist Walter Lippman, long ago in a 1925 book, expressed his skepticism about whether members of the American public were really prepared to inform themselves about even the most important matters that directly affected their self-interest. He labeled them the “phantom public” because “[t]he facts exceed their curiosity.” Is that still the case? Please tell me it’s not!
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Paul Tractenberg is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor and Alfred C. Clapp Distinguished Public Service Professor at Rutgers School of Law-Newark, where he has been since 1970.
Copyright 2014 NJ Spotlight
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NJ report: Families earning $64,000 are ‘poor’
According to the U.S. government, the poverty line for this size family is $23,850.
But a report out next month from a New Jersey nonprofit research group says the standard federal poverty line “grossly understate(s) the extent of poverty” in the Garden State.
According to this report, two parents raising two school-age children while earning $64,000 would be considered poor. A couple with two infants or preschool age children would need to earn $73,371 a year in order to escape poverty.
Under these guidelines by the Legal Services of New Jersey Poverty Research Institute, nearly a third of the state is struggling to make ends meet.
The report’s income threshold, based on what the organization calls the “real cost of living” in the state and about 250 percent of the federal poverty line, is a staggering figure considering that the state’s median household income is $71,637, which is the second highest among the 50 states.
Advocates for the poor and needy have criticized the federal poverty line as outdated and unrealistic for generations. But the federal benchmark, which is used by many government agencies and nonprofits to determine qualifications for financial assistance and housing programs, is especially meaningless in New Jersey, where the cost of living is so much more expensive.
“People who were donating in the past are now coming in for food,” Jackie Goedesky, president of the Hands of Hope Food Pantry in Edison, said last week.
“The unemployment numbers aren’t exactly accurate because a lot of people have been out of work for so long already that their unemployment has run out,” she added.
While the dollar amount of the federal poverty line has adjusted for inflation, the formula has essentially remained the same since the 1960s. One shortcoming is that it is the same for the whole country even though cost of living varies from region to region. People in New Jersey could make more money than workers in another state, but people in this state pay more for rent, food, transportation and property taxes.
The federal poverty line also was created during a time when there were more stay-at-home moms and fewer single parents. Childcare for working parents and transportation costs take up a larger portion expenses of working families and single mothers.
Sharon Clark, executive director of the Central Jersey Housing Resource Center, said unemployment and housing foreclosures has increased the demand for apartments. The counties of Somerset, Hunterdon and Middlesex have the most expensive rents in the state. A fair market two-bedroom apartment here goes for $1,458. A couple would have to earn at least $58,320 a year in order to afford that, she said.
The Poverty Research Institute’s “real cost of living” is based on families being able to afford housing, food, transportation, healthcare, taxes and basic needs such as clothing without having to make tradeoffs. The formula is conservative in that it does not allow for retirement or college savings, vacations, cable TV, dining out or buying a car.
The formula also uses the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “low-cost” food plan, not the emergency “thrifty” plan used in the federal formula. The USDA reported in July that a low-cost plan would cost a couple $496.90 a month and a family of four as much as $854.60. The thrifty plans would be about $100 and $150 less, respectively.
Other organizations and agencies have tried to come up with their own formula to measure poverty. The United Way developed the Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed category, or Alice, to describe people who earn more than the federal poverty line but still struggle. According to the United Way of Northern New Jersey, 24 percent of New Jersey falls in the Alice category. That is in addition to the 10 percent who fall below the poverty line.
By the numbers
According to the Poverty Research Institute’s “What is Poverty?” report:
• In Hunterdon County, 18.3 percent struggle to make ends meet. In Middlesex it is 28 percent, in Somerset it is 20 percent, and in Union it is 35.6 percent.
• Morris had the fewest people struggling to make ends meet: 16.9 percent. Essex and Hudson had the most at 44 percent.
• About 39 percent of children were living with insufficient resources. Under the federal poverty line, the percentage would 15.4.
• About 33.7 percent of adults 55 and older are struggling, as compared to the 7.9 percent figure under the federal poverty line.
• Nearly half of the population of blacks (46.9 percent) and Latinos (54.6 percent) cannot make ends meet. Under the federal poverty line, 20 percent of these m
inority groups would be considered in poverty.
Contributing: Staff Writers Joe Martino and Pam MacKenzie
Staff Writer Sergio Bichao: 908-243-6615; sbichao@mycentraljersey.com
Nearly 70% Of Minority Voters In US Want Immediate Action on Climate
DeSmogBlog.com, Aug. 5, 2014
A poll commissioned by Green For All and released last week found that 68% of minority voters in key battleground states see climate change as an immediate threat that needs to be dealt with now.
Some 70% said they are more likely to vote for candidates “willing to expand resources to tackle the issue and grow new industries over those arguing that addressing climate change will cost jobs and hurt our economy.”
Just how that compares to the rest of the population is difficult to determine, but it is clear that that’s a higher rate of concern about the climate than the American population at large.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted earlier this year found that just 29% of Americans felt climate change should be a top priority for President Obama and Congress, ranking it second to last out of 20 issues tested.
While the Green For All poll doesn’t speak directly to the question of why minorities might be more likely to be concerned about climate change and other environmental problems like air and water pollution, executive director Nikki Silvestri says, “We understand the urgency of these threats because we experience the effects every single day.”
Indeed, 68% of African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, compared to 56% of white Americans.
Of course, Americans’ political affiliation is also one of the most reliable predictors of attitude toward the government taking action on climate change. A poll by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication conducted this Spring showed that the further right one is on the political spectrum, the more likely they are to favor more limited to no action:
A majority of Americans (62%) support the U.S. making a medium (35%) or large-scale effort (27%) to reduce global warming, even if the costs are medium or large, respectively. Democrats are particularly likely to support such efforts (84%, 87% of liberal Democrats). About half of liberal and moderate Republicans (52%) would support these efforts.
Fewer than half of Independents (41%), and only three in ten (30%) conservative Republicans would support a medium- or large-scale effort, while 39% of conservative Republicans say the U.S.should make “no effort” to reduce global warming.
How the Left Is Revitalizing Itself
The Nation, Sept. 1-8, 2014
http://www.thenation.com/article/180987/how-left-revitalizing-itself
It’s been almost ten years since progressives, determined to undo the accumulated damage of the Reagan-Bush era, took a page from our opponents’ successes and got to work building our own policy, organizing and electoral infrastructure. At the outset of this effort, in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, I had a ringside seat as an aide to George Soros, who played a crucial role. I’ve recently become president of the Democracy Alliance, an organization of donors whose founding was one of the turning points in building a stronger, more cohesive progressive movement. So I have an unusual vantage point for reflection on what we have managed to do well in the last ten years.
First, we’ve seen much more coordination among donors. Progressive foundations such as Open Society, unions like the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), consortiums of funders like the Democracy Alliance, and strategic individual donors—for example, Herb Sandler and his late wife Marion, who were among the people providing substantial early capital for the Center for American Progress (CAP)—have built new institutions to fill in the gaps on the progressive side, as well as strengthened the capacity and sustainability of some key organizations that were already in place. Flagship institutions that didn’t exist or had just gotten under way a decade ago include CAP, a wide-ranging think tank and messaging operation that, while still outgunned financially by the Heritage Foundation, has considerably evened the score between left and right in this realm; Media Matters for America, which monitors the conservative press, publicizing and shaming over-the-top behavior and pressing for accountability; America Votes, which coordinates progressive campaigns at the state level; and the American Constitution Society, inspired by the success of the right’s Federalist Society in fostering a pipeline of ideas and personnel for the Justice Department and federal judgeships.
Longstanding progressive anchors whose funding has increased and diversified thanks to the concerted efforts of funders working to strengthen progressive infrastructure include the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the budget watchdog launched in the Reagan era, and the Center for Community Change, the organizing support group founded in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Among others, the NAACP, the Sierra Club and SEIU, the country’s largest labor union, have also shown strong signs of revitalization.
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The conservative writer Tod Lindberg, surveying this landscape from the right with some envy, writes of what he calls “Left 3.0”: “funder networks now gather periodically to strategize where best to deploy resources. Money for the cause appears to be abundant. Activists meet to share information and coordinate plans. Opinion journalists offer up articles and blog posts and tweets. None of this is unique to the Left, of course. But to the extent that the emerging Left 3.0 considered itself lagging [behind] efforts on the Right—what the Left likes to call the ‘right-wing noise machine’—Left 3.0 has now fully caught up.” Admittedly, it doesn’t always look that way from the inside, and we still have a long way to go, but the progress he notes is genuine.
Campaigns aimed at more specific issues have also been much better funded and coordinated. One of them, Health Care for America Now (HCAN)—of which the Atlantic Philanthropies, which I led at the time, was the largest funder—made a significant difference in the passage of the Affordable Care Act. As Harvard professor Theda Skocpol, a keen analyst of movements for public policy change, told The Washington Post: “The investments that philanthropies made in [the HCAN campaign] helped cement links between the national players and the state and local players…that made it possible to push at the very end when many Democrats were ready to drop the whole thing, after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts.”
Contrasting the path of healthcare reform with the parallel effort on climate change, Skocpol says she was “startled by the level of contempt that many environmentalists had for the health reform push.” But she concludes that progressives “have to build broader coalitions. That was one of the things that health reformers did this time around. They buried hatchets and forged ties with groups they needed to, like medical providers, and reached out to small businesses.”
The Affordable Care Act as it emerged, public option jettisoned, through a razor-thin margin in the House of Representatives is far from perfect. Also, the complexities of its implementation—not to mention the initial technological crashes during its launch—may, in time, when progressives manage to gain control of the White House and both houses of Congress, build momentum for a single-payer system like Medicare for All. But it was a victory, and the ACA has already provided access to health coverage for millions for whom it had been out of reach.
The Alliance for Citizenship, the broad coalition of groups now pressing for immigration reform, includes (as HCAN did) both labor and civil rights groups, along with faith-based movements and community-organizing networks, forging strategy together at the same table. Among other things, this kind of structure provides a mechanism for dealing with differences among allies, a place to hammer out a path between the sense of urgency felt in the field and the legislative pragmatism often voiced by Beltway-based advocates.
In part because these developments have been handled in a deliberate and coordinated manner, there is a great deal more collaboration between and among progressive organizations than has been the case for many years. Indeed, one of the most encouraging developments is that this collaboration is not just taking place among groups that have had shared goals like healthcare and immigration reform, which is significant enough; it is also causing a number of organizations in the progressive constellation to step outside their traditional “silos” to stand in solidarity with other movements.
I first had the feeling that something was changing back in 2009, when I attended the NAACP’s 100th-anniversary dinner and was struck by the prominence of underwriting from gay and lesbian donors. I noted that Urvashi Vaid, the longtime progressive activist, then executive director of the LGBT-focused Arcus Foundation, was sitting at the head table with Julian Bond, the chair of the NAACP board.
Not long after, the NAACP—led by its president, Ben Jealous—helped to fuel, not follow, the momentum toward support of same-sex marriage. Some months later, a number of LGBTleaders stood with black and Latino activists at a press conference in New York denouncing the stop-and-frisk policy of the city’s police. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force leader Rea Carey had this to say: “LGBT people, of course, have their own history of unjust treatment from law enforcement, not the least of which was the raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969, launching the modern LGBT movement. But the task force does not just stand in solidarity with LGBT people; we stand against racial profiling for all people of color. The entire concept of it goes against not only the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’; it undermines the free society we fight for every day.”
More recently, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), joined by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT groups, stepped out strongly in favor of immigration reform, asserting: “We stand shoulder to shoulder with those striving for and dreaming of a nation that embraces all who come here seeking a better life.” Among the tangible results to emerge from this stance was the series of immigration-based direct actions last fall, including a powerful women-only civil-disobedience action.
Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change and a leader in antipoverty efforts as well as the movements for immigration reform and healthcare, addressed the NGLTF’s Creating Change conference in January 2013, expressing optimism about the fight for LGBT rights and immigration reform and noting, “It is no coincidence that two movements that have been unafraid to make noise and cause trouble have made real progress.”
Writing in The Washington Post in March 2013, Frank Sharry, the director of America’s Voice, talked about how the immigration movement learned from the successes of the LGBT movement, often telling his colleagues that “it’s time to go all LGBT on their ass…quite simply, that it was time to be confrontational.”
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If all the solidarity was taking place only between the LGBT and civil rights movements, that would be reason enough to applaud, but it is not limited to that. The Communications Workers of America, the NAACP, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace came together in a Democracy Initiative last year to press for the successful reform of the Senate filibuster rule. That good beginning has led to coordinated work against voter-suppression laws and to limit the role of money in politics by groups that had little to do with one another until recently.
Not long ago, a significant segment of the environmental movement was anti-immigration on population-control grounds. While the nativist forces in the Sierra Club were defeated, there has until recently been little common ground expressed between the green and immigrant-rights movements. Yet in the current push for immigration reform, a number of environmental leaders and their organizations have spoken out.
Phil Radford, who recently stepped down as executive director of Greenpeace, wrote on the Huffington Post: “Undocumented workers are among the most vulnerable workers in our society, from their exposure to toxic pesticides and chemicals in agricultural work and manufacturing, to their isolation in pollution-choked neighborhoods caring for vulnerable families and children. Every human being deserves the dignity and right to stand up to polluters in the workplace and at home without fear of being deported and taken from their families.”
And Bill McKibben of 350.org wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “immigrants, by definition, are full of hope. They’ve come to a new place determined to make a new life, risking much for opportunity. They’re confident that new kinds of prosperity are possible. The future beckons them, and so changes of the kind we’ll need to deal with climate change are easier to conceive.”
These encouraging connections are not just taking place among organizations and movements; there are other gaps being bridged as well—for instance, the new Gettysburg Project, which brings together Anna Burger, the former SEIU secretary-treasurer, and many movement leaders with scholars like Marshall Ganz, Lani Guinier and Archon Fung.
At the state level, where less fragmentation exists among activist groups than is seen with their national counterparts, there’s even more evidence of cross-issue collaboration. The story in New York City, where the trail blazed by the Working Families Party and the Progressive Caucus has led to the expansion of paid sick leave and an end to stop-and-frisk in the early days of the de Blasio administration, has been well told of late, but it is far from the only one. As George Goehl, executive director of National People’s Action, points out, in Minnesota alone, this kind of solidarity—in conjunction with a state government in which both legislative chambers and the governor’s office are Democratic—has already achieved notable advances in voting rights, marriage equality, revenue, housing and ex-offender reforms.
In some places, the roots of cross-issue collaboration are deep. In 1992, PCUN, the union for Oregon’s farm, nursery and reforestation workers, and its largest Latino organizations voted to take part in the 120-mile Walk for Love and Justice to oppose Measure 9, a statewide anti-gay ballot initiative. “We knew that they were attacking the LGBT community first, and we [Latinos] were next in line,” recalls PCUN president Ramón Ramírez.
A few years later, when Oregon’s immigrant community faced an anti-immigrant, Proposition 187–style ballot measure, Ramírez approached LGBT leaders, who had defeated two ballot measures by that point. “They were generous in sharing their strategies and resources. They really came through for us,” Ramírez says, “and we defeated that ballot measure, learning along the way what it took to build the infrastructure and the base that would win the day for us.”
In the years since, the two communities have stood together on many statewide battles: PCUN, the voter education group Voz Hispana and the youth organizing project LUS published Spanish-language materials against an anti-gay ballot measure in 2000; and when anti-immigrant activists placed two local measures on the ballot in Columbia County, the statewide LGBT group Basic Rights Oregon devoted full-time staff, volunteers and substantial resources to the successful campaign against them.
Collaborations like these, which give the lie to the oft-repeated critique that progressive groups are too bound up in their own narrow issues—their own “identities,” it is often said, though mostly by white men who think everyone has an identity but them—do not happen by accident. On a national level, the comprehensive view of progressive infrastructure taken by Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein was one big contributing factor. Stein had closely studied the right and admired not only the sums contributed by conservative donors and the focus with which they operated, but also the way their networks fostered connection and collaboration among donors, organizations, intellectuals and allies in government. An array of nationally supported, state-focused progressive groups—ProgressNow, America Votes, State Voices and others—are proving the value of close collaboration.
The mutual support between African-American and LGBT groups is the harvest of dialogues sponsored by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Arcus Foundation going back to 2008, when it was still a struggle to have same-sex marriage embraced as a progressive issue. Another big factor in recent progressive successes is the Rockwood Institute, a progressive leadership development group based in Oakland. Over the last ten years, hundreds of activists from labor, economic-justice, civil-rights, women’s and environmental organizations and philanthropy have gone through Rockwood’s training seminars and built closer relationships, both personal and professional, that have led to the kinds of organic connections and collaborative actions detailed above.
These relatively new alliances are off to a very good start, but they will be tested in the months and years to come—when there’s a new battle royal over abortion rights or a new window of opportunity on climate change, for example, and immigrant-rights or environmental groups are asked to return the solidarity by mobilizing their own members and raising their own voices. And longstanding tensions, such as between some labor unions and environmental groups over the impact of climate action on jobs, will not disappear overnight just because the leaders in both sectors break bread.
The challenges include considerations of time and money and clashes of interests, but they also touch on deep-seated attitudes. When Ilyse Hogue, a longtime activist with MoveOn.org and other organizations, was thinking about becoming executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice America last year, she told me she was surprised by the “lukewarm reception” she received when consulting a number of progressive male colleagues about taking the position. “The concern was summed up by one person—who I admire greatly as a champion of progressive values—when he said, ‘But you are so talented! Why would you want to relegate yourself to those issues?’ Variations on this theme were echoed through other conversations, both before and after I made my decision to accept the job.
“I was floored,” Hogue continues. “In a country where access to abortion and contraception is under constant attack, and there’s also minimal to no assistance or job security for working mothers, any failure to recognize that our reproductive and economic destinies are inextricably linked not only misses the boat in authentically appealing to people’s daily experience, but also in potentially bringing together powerful movements [around] a true progressive agenda.”
Many social-justice groups believe they got where they are only by sticking to their mandates and not straying from what they—and particularly their boards, which are often more cautious than CEOs—view as their mission. And there is something to be said for taking a position only in areas where it can be backed up by real expertise: Would a campaign-finance group have much to contribute to a debate over waiting periods for abortion, or vice versa?
In the hyperpolarized environment of Washington, increasingly mirrored at the state level, there remains some common ground to be found in strange-bedfellow alliances around longtime “wedge” issues like crime and civil liberties. Civil-rights groups work with evangelical Christians focused on redemption and conservative governors focused on saving money to promote prisoner re-entry programs and alternatives to incarceration. Military leaders and human-rights advocates speak out against torture, and Grover Norquist joins the ACLU in criticizing NSA surveillance. There is much to be gained from these collaborations, but they will rarely be transformative; nor will they be available for the biggest fights, on the core issues of economic justice, environmental protection, and war and peace. In those fights, for now, progressives will need to keep forging a narrative of interdependency, acting together as often as they can.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, previously headed the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Open Society Foundation’s US programs.