“Why Our Schools Are Segregated”: There Is Little Support For Aggressive Policies To Integrate Metropolitan Areas
In the May issue of Educational Leadership, I attempt to show how our misunderstanding of the origins of racial segregation stands in the way of efforts to narrow the black-white academic achievement gap.
Socially and economically disadvantaged children perform, on average, at lower levels of achievement than advantaged children. The achievement gap primarily results from disadvantaged children coming to school unprepared to take advantage of what schools have to offer, not primarily from inadequate teachers or schools. Children who come to school from households with poor literacy levels, who are in poor health, whose housing is unstable, whose parents are suffering the stress of unemployment, and who are themselves stressed as well in neighborhoods with high levels of crime and violence, cannot be expected to achieve, on average, as well as middle class children, even if all have high quality instruction.
Disadvantaged children’s obstacles to achievement are exacerbated when these children are concentrated in racially and economically homogeneous and isolated schools. Meaningful narrowing of the achievement gap will not be possible without breaking down these barriers and integrating black children into middle-class schools.
Otherwise informed opinion accepts that school segregation is “de facto” because schools are located in segregated neighborhoods, and that residential segregation today is also mostly “de facto,” the result of personal choices, financial means, or demographic changes.
Partly from this conviction, there is little support for aggressive policies, including race-conscious ones, to integrate metropolitan areas, a necessary precondition for meaningful school integration. The Supreme Court’s view, expressed in the Louisville-Seattle school integration case (“Parents Involved,” 2007), that there is no constitutionally mandated remedy for existing (“de facto”) segregation is also widely accepted.
Yet most Americans have forgotten that residential racial segregation, North and South, was created and perpetuated by, and continues to exist today because of, racially motivated and racially explicit federal, state and local banking regulation, mortgage guarantee, public housing, law enforcement, planning and zoning, highway and school construction, urban renewal and other policies that succeeded in their purpose of creating racially segregated metropolises. The racial segregation of major urban areas today offends the Constitution.
Familiarizing Americans with the history of state-sponsored segregation is necessary before support will be possible for policies to undo that segregation.
By: Richard Rothstein, Economic Policy Institute, June 10, 2013
“The Quiet Closing Of Washington”: America Is Splitting Apart Without The Trouble Of A Civil War
Conservative Republicans in our nation’s capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They’ve basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It’s as if an entire branch of the federal government — the branch that’s supposed to deal directly with the nation’s problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law — has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called “sequester” that’s cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation’s poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.
But the nation’s work doesn’t stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November’s elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor’s offices in all but 13 states — the most single-party dominance in decades.
This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.
Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor’s office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session that ended a few weeks ago resulted in a hike in the top income tax rate to 9.85%, an increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of several corporate tax loopholes. The added revenues will be used to expand early-childhood education, freeze tuitions at state universities, fund jobs and economic development, and reduce the state budget deficit. Along the way, Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of trade unions to organize.
California and Maryland passed similar tax hikes on top earners last year. The governor of Colorado has just signed legislation boosting taxes by $925 million for early-childhood education and K-12 (the tax hike will go into effect only if residents agree, in a vote is likely in November).
On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas is between Governor Sam Brownback, who wants to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by repealing the state’s income tax and substituting an increase in the sales tax, and Kansas legislators who want to cut the sales tax as well, thereby reducing the state’s already paltry spending for basic services. Kansas recently cut its budget for higher education by almost 5 percent.
Other rightward-moving states are heading in the same direction. North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving $12,500 a year, on average, from a pending income-tax cut even as sales taxes are raised on the electricity and services that lower-income depend residents depend on. Missouri’s transportation budget is half what it was five years ago, but lawmakers refuse to raise taxes to pay for improvements.
The states are splitting as dramatically on social issues. Gay marriages are now recognized in twelve states and the District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of marijuana, even for non-medical uses. California is expanding a pilot program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions.
Meanwhile, other states are enacting laws restricting access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun.
Speaking of which, gun laws are moving in opposite directions as well. Connecticut, California, and New York are making it harder to buy guns. Yet if you want to use a gun to kill someone who’s, say, spray-painting a highway underpass at night, you might want to go to Texas, where it’s legal to shoot someone who’s committing a “public nuisance” under the cover of dark. Or you might want to live in Kansas, which recently enacted a law allowing anyone to carry a concealed firearm onto a college campus.
The states are diverging sharply on almost every issue you can imagine. If you’re an undocumented young person, you’re eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in fourteen states (including Texas). But you might want to avoid driving in Arizona, where state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect is here illegally.
And if you’re poor and lack health insurance you might want to avoid a state like Wisconsin that’s refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government will be picking up almost the entire tab.
Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the states on central issues affecting Americans.
Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it permits experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn’t work at the state level, where it’s affected only a fraction of the population, than after it’s harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandies once said, our states are “laboratories of democracy.”
But the trend raises three troubling issues.
First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course. If the idea of “one nation” means anything, it stands for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.
Second, it doesn’t take account of spillovers — positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way easily to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job opportunity are better. We are interdependent. No single state can easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other states.
Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century “states rights” has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.
A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national government. The Tea Partiers and other government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be together.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, June 8, 2013
“This Isn’t Complicated”: Congress Must Fix The Bankrupt Student Loan Proposals
Interest rates on student loans will double on July 1 unless Congress acts. Since the phrase “congressional action” has become an oxymoron, this will quickly degenerate into an unnecessary crisis, requiring parents and students to threaten their legislators to get any relief.
Why is action even a question? There is a universal consensus — left, right and center — that it is vital to our nation to educate the next generation. If we want to compete as a high-wage, high-skill country, our children will need the best in college or advanced technical training. And all agree that gaining that higher education is a necessary, if not sufficient, requirement for entering the middle class.
So just as we pay for public education for kindergarten through 12th grade, we should ensure that advanced training or a public college education is available for all who earn it. None of this is even vaguely controversial.
Yet, despite this consensus, we are pricing college out of the reach of more and more families. State support for public universities has lagged. Increasingly, the costs have been privatized, with the bill sent to students and families.
With incomes stagnant for all but the wealthy few, the result, not surprisingly, has been an explosion of student debt. U.S. students and parents now owe an estimated $1.1 trillion in student loan debt, a sum greater than credit card or automobile debt. In 2005, average student loan debt was just over $17,000. By 2012, it was above $27,250, increasing more than 50 percent in just seven years.
With the debt burden rising and good jobs scarce, the result is calamity. Thirty-five percent of millennials — debtors under 30 — are seriously delinquent on their payments. In total, delinquent student debtors on the verge of default owe $113 billion, more than the total sums state governments spent on higher education in 2012.
The young people who do everything we ask of them — study, graduate, go on to higher education — end up deep in a hole. Burdened by debt, they have a hard time affording cars or apartments. Starting a family becomes difficult, a down payment on a home an impossible dream. This not only crushes the dreams of our best young people; it puts a real damper on the economy.
This isn’t complicated. Washington should be moving boldly to make advanced education affordable for all. The federal government should be increasing grants to states for public colleges, on the condition that the states increase their own contributions and act to curb college costs. The government should crack down on private colleges that ripoff students. And of course, college expenses should be subsidized so that successful young people don’t graduate into debtor’s prison.
But common sense is an endangered species inside Washington’s beltway. Interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford loans are about to double to 6.8 percent. Republicans have passed a “solution” that pegs loan rates to the rate of a 10-year Treasury note plus an arbitrary 2.5 percent. (Or plus 4.5 percent for parental PLUS loans). Loans fluctuate each year with interest rates, with a cap of 8.5 percent for student loans and a stunning 10.5 percent for parental loans. Kids will end up paying more, while the government will make billions on the deal for deficit reduction. But we should be subsidizing the next generation to get the education they need, not making money off of them.
President Obama’s plan isn’t much better. He sets the rate at the 10-year Treasury note rate plus .93 percent for subsidized Stafford loans (3.93 percent for parental loans) with no cap. He does call for limiting what students have to pay to 10 percent of their income, insuring that students aren’t condemned to bankruptcy. His plan is “budget neutral.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has offered a plan that makes a lot of sense. She suggests we offer students the same rate that the Federal Reserve charges to big banks (about .75 percent) for the next year, while Congress gets serious about a permanent fix. Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) suggest that the Congress do the easy thing, simply extend the current rates for two years, paying for it with the closing of various loopholes.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), like Warren, also makes sense. She would allow students and graduates to refinance into fixed 4 percent loans.
Is it any wonder that Americans grow cynical? Multinational corporations and wealthy investors stash literally trillions abroad to avoid taxes. The big banks rake in trillions in subsidies and discounted loan rates to rescue them from their own excesses. But Congress finds it impossible to make it affordable for the next generation to get advanced education and training.
As always, common sense won’t come to Washington unless citizens mobilize to force it on Congress. With graduations marked by student demonstrations across the country and pickets outside of Sallie Mae, the giant student loan bank, that movement may have begun. Student loans may be to this generation what the draft was to the boomers – the government folly that afflicts them personally and rouses them to act.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 5, 2013
“The Sorry Spectacle Continues”: Polarized Washington Ignores Long-Term Issues At Its Peril
Scandalfest continues. Official Washington is still flitting from one minor controversy to another, with the news media breathlessly reporting the latest leaked email or unsubstantiated accusation. Clearly, the chattering classes have declared the jobs crisis ended and the economic recovery complete.
While the Obama administration hasn’t popped open champagne bottles to celebrate, the air of silliness that hangs over the Beltway is a reminder that the worst is over. After all, the stock market is soaring. Consumer confidence is climbing.
The latest national unemployment number is down to 7.5 percent, the lowest level since December 2007, when the economy started its steep descent. Indeed, the sustained economic uptick may have a direct tie-in to Washington’s current obsession with less consequential matters: The economy is strong enough to have persuaded Republicans to stop blasting President Barack Obama over joblessness, so they’ve had to find other issues with which to batter him.
Here’s an update from outside the Beltway Bubble: The jobs crisis is not over. Average Americans are still struggling through an ugly economic transformation — a structural change decades in the making that jumped into overdrive with the Great Recession. Millions of Americans of working age remain unemployed, while others patch together two or three part-time jobs to keep food on the table. Still others have found full-time jobs but at far less pay than they used to earn.
A recent Quinnipiac poll provides a clear look into the minds of voters, who have little interest in the imbroglios of the moment. Rightly, 44 percent believe the revelations about the Internal Revenue Service, which singled out conservative organizations for unfair screening, as most important among the current controversies. Only 24 percent cited the deaths of four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, despite the GOP’s obsession with it. Far fewer, just 14 percent, listed the Justice Department’s scrutiny of reporters.
But here’s the news you may have missed: An overwhelming 73 percent said that boosting the economy and creating jobs is more important than any of the other three issues. If politicians were as poll-obsessed as they are rumored to be, they’d at least pretend to be devoting most of their time to helping middle-class Americans get back into stable jobs with good pay.
The jobs crisis has been decades in the making, an economic restructuring fueled by globalization and technology. Think about it: Those Bangladeshi textile workers killed in an April building collapse were doing work once done in the United States. No matter how many affluent Americans protest the conditions and boycott the designers who contributed to the disaster, those jobs are not coming back to these shores. Manufacturers will continue to pursue cheap labor.
As a result, the jobs that once guaranteed good wages and stable futures to generations of Americans without college degrees have all but disappeared. That transformation, which started in the 1970s, has contributed to the wage gap, the ever-widening rift between the haves and have-nots. The average American worker has been losing economic ground for decades.
Politicians ignore that growing gap at their peril. The notion of an America where everybody has an equal shot has always been more myth than reality, but there was once a time when it was not so difficult for young adults to imagine a more prosperous future than their parents had. That is no longer a likely scenario.
That’s a very difficult problem to solve, which helps explain why politicians don’t like to discuss it. It calls for a multigenerational response, the sort of bipartisan approach that is usually reserved for battles against foreign enemies.
But Washington is stuck in a period of deepening polarization, incapable, it seems, of even agreeing on the causes of our economic woes. Democrats, at least, have a language for discussing widening income inequality. Republicans haven’t yet come to terms with its existence. So the sorry spectacle continues.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, June 6, 2013
“In The GOP, Every Day Is A Bank Holiday”: The Republican College Loan Plan Would Help Banks, Hurt Families
Big banks are doing better than ever. Sunday, New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson wrote that 2013 has been a very good year for the financial industry. The KWB Bank Index which tracks the stock prices of 24 leading banks has risen 30 percent this year and it’s at its highest level since 2008.
With the banks doing so well, why are House Republicans pushing so hard to make banks even more money on the backs of kids from working families who want to attend college? The answer is that every day in the Republican Party is a bank holiday.
House Republicans took a step last week to boost the fortunes of their banker backers even higher. The GOP House majority proposed changes for the college student loan program which is scheduled to expire July 1. The Republicans would allow the interest on student loans to double. This will mean even higher profits for the GOP’s banker backers. But it will end the hopes and dreams that thousands of young Americans and their families have for their future in the cut throat world economic competition.
President Obama made his case to stop the interest rate increases in a speech last Friday. The president supports a Senate Democratic plan that would freeze interest rates for 79 million students at 3.4 percent for 2 years. Congressional Republicans want to tie the interest rate to the cost of a 10 year Treasury note. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the House Republican plan would push interest rates to 5.0 percent next year and to 7.7 percent by 2018.
If Republicans get their way, increased interest rates for 79 million college students will mean a big payday for the financial industry next year and a another step down for middle income families. Millions of college grads are already up to their armpits in debt. The Republican plan would make it even harder for young college graduates to get up from under the crushing debt that they already face.
Chinese president Xi Jinping will be in the U.S. this week. His visit should focus the United States on what it needs to do to compete economically with the emerging industrial tiger.
The United States has fallen to 10th in the world in the percentage of people with a college degree. That may be why it’s much easier for people to advance economically in Western Europe than it is in the U.S. The Republican plan will push us down even further on the education ladder and give our economic competitors in the world a leg up. If we want to compete effectively internationally, we should do everything we can to get more young people into college instead of making it more difficult for them to attend college. College is the ticket young Americans need to punch to get the training they need to compete with China and other engines of international economic growth.
The U.S. should build on its strengths. We still have the best higher education system in the world. Hundreds of thousands of international students are currently enrolled in American colleges and universities to get the best college education in the world. We would be a lot better off if American students could afford to attend them too.
The GOP plan to boost banks at the expense of kids in working families mirrors the trends in the American economy at large. The Dow Jones Index, which measures the fortunes of corporate America on Wall Street, has hit record highs several times this year. While profits for corporate America have mushroomed, real income for middle class families has been stagnant. The Republican student loan program will accelerate an unfortunate trend that has enriched Wall St. and improvised middle class families who are working overtime just to meet ends meet.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, June 4, 2013
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