birminghammail--2019-04-11--The children most likely to skip school in Birmingham revealed

The most vulnerable children in Birmingham are more than three times as likely to skip school as their peers.  New figures from the Department for Education reveal that the city’s children in need missed 48,703 school sessions in 2017/18 without permission.  It means they were absent for 5.7 per cent of all sessions - or roughly one in 18 lessons.  Children who are not considered in need missed only 1.7 per cent of sessions over the same period.  The figures show 34.9 per cent of children in need were classed as persistent absentees - having missed at least 10 per cent of possible school sessions.  That compares with 13.0 per cent of children overall.  A child in need is someone who has been referred to social services but whose parents are still responsible for their care.  Experts said the most vulnerable children who are missing school are at a greater risk of being groomed for criminal and sexual exploitation.  Iryna Pona, policy manager at The Children’s Society, said: ““Participation in education may be difficult for these children and they might struggle to keep on top of their school work.  ““In the short-term, if children are not in school they could face greater risks including grooming for criminal and sexual exploitation, especially if they are missing from home or care.  “Our research suggests that without adequate support, children’s happiness and well-being is likely to be damaged and they are less likely to do well at school and college as they approach adulthood, continue their education or find work or training opportunities.  “It’s vital that these children get extra support, both inside and outside school, which is focused upon improving their well-being and resolving issues in their lives.  “The government must also urgently address the £3bn funding shortfall facing children’s services departments by 2025, which is making it harder for councils to offer children and families early support before problems spiral out of control and have a real impact on their lives, including affecting school attendance.”  There is a difference between children in need and children in care.  Parents remain responsible for a child in need, while a child in care is looked after by their local authority - either in a care home or in foster care.  The figures show that children in need are more likely than children in care to miss school for no good reason.  Some 4.2 per cent of all possible school sessions were skipped by children in care.  The DfE data covers all primary, secondary and special-school pupils aged between five and 16.  Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, said: “The key to keeping vulnerable children in school is to offer early help to prevent problems developing when they start school, not waiting to intervene when they are already skipping school or at risk of exclusion.  “That means investing in early support for families who are struggling and need targeted help to tackle problems like domestic violence, mental health problems or substance abuse help, alongside more investment in speech and language therapy so children are not starting school unable to communicate properly and providing stability for children in care so that they’re not having to move around from one home to another and one school to another every few months.  “Talk to any child in prison, in trouble with the police or caught up in gangs and they will tell you that falling out of school was a trigger point.  “Gang members are 5.5 times more likely to have been excluded than the rest of the population. We need to do much more to keep children in school, where they have the structure, access to support and the opportunity to build relationships with trusted adults.  “I want to see a step change in the way we think about schools with a much greater focus on well-being, pastoral support and a drive to tackle off-rolling and exclusions.”  Damian Hinds, Education Secretary, said: “Education is the key to unlocking potential, and we cannot ignore the stark reality of the poorer outcomes for children who face chaotic lives or have experienced trauma or adversity.  “That is why we’ve provided practical advice to schools and social workers to adapt the way they support them, including having a consistent and trusted member of staff to talk to.  “We are also investing £84 million to support families and help provide stability at home.  “School leaders, social workers and other professionals have been responding to our Children in Need review to go further in improving outcomes and help us identify the support needed for those who need it most.”


birminghammail--2019-05-30--Coleen Rooney furiously condemned over letting sons watch iPads at football match

Coleen Rooney has found herself on the end of some scathing criticism - for letting her sons watch iPads at the side of a football pitch.  The wife of former England footballer Wayne, who is currently plying his trade in the USA, has been blasted on social media.  Coleen is mum to four, including her youngest three Klay, Kit and Cass, who were being entertained by technology while their older brother Kai took part in a football tournament.  She posted a snap of her kids on social media, writing: "Kai’s Football (soccer here) tournament set up!!! When Dads away .... we all have to go along!!"  But fans blasted the wife of the Manchester United and Everton legend.  "Yeah just stick em all on the iPad. Top parenting", one fumed.  Another said: "And none of them are watching the sport just screens, how very sad."  A third added said: "Let technology look after the children while mum is posting on social media."  And a fourth said: "Sad sad sad. Out in the glorious sun and you've them glued to a screen."  A fifth, meanwhile, wrote: "Why is a small child sat playin on an iPad. No wonder more an more kids are growing up with absolute s**t social skills. Cringey to look at."  But Coleen was quick to respond to the criticism, the Manchester Evening News reports.  She replied: "Calm down, calm down... yes my children have and use iPads!!! And even my 15 month old watches Peppa Pig on one would you believe!! They come in handy sometimes and can be very educational. Mathletics and spelling apps are used all time by kai and klay ... check them out."  And other parents also came to the defence of Coleen, who moved to Maryland, USA, with footballer husband Wayne after he signed to football team DC United.  Ian Queen said: "Haha I suppose you expect her to be doing tree leaf rubbings and making daisy chains whilst also cheering her other son who’s playing football!! #getreal."  Sarah Warner said: "Mine would be on iPads as well. 5-6hours at a football tournament with one kid who isn’t playing is bad enough, but 3. At least all sat in one place and not running in 3 diff directions."  And Lisa Cook added: "Oh my god you judgemental bunch of sh**ts first thing you jump on like your kids never watch iPads!! Amazing mum of 4 boys all prob into their own thing and your juggling life making each child happen by supporting Kai doing his thing! Keep doing what your doing kids are happy."  Even supernanny Jo Frost has joined in the debate. Replying to Coleen's tweet she said: "They do come in handy for parents looking 4 a quick bit of relief n also can b educational as well as entertaining. I'm sure u wld also agree 15months need more edu interactive learning and toddlers certainly need parents who will regulate use too."

newsdesk@birminghamlive.co.uk (Emma Gill), newsdesk@birminghamlive.co.uk (James Rodger)


birminghammail--2019-05-30--The number of Birmingham kids with special needs soars to record levels as parents protest in street

The number of Birmingham kids with special needs soars to record levels as parents protest in streets

The number of children and young people with special needs eligible for extra support has risen to record levels in Birmingham.  The figures were released as thousands of parents, disabled children and young people took to the streets across the country on Thursday (May 30) to demand that the government act on a “national crisis” in special needs funding.  The new statistics from the Department for Education show that 805 children and young people were put onto an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan to aid their learning last year.  That brings the total number with special needs in Birmingham to 9,437 - the highest figure on record.  The figure is rising partly because since 2014, those aged 19-25 have been eligible for an EHC plan.  However campaigners warn that government funding is not matching demand.  An EHC plan is a document that describes a child or young person's special educational, health and social care needs.  Children with EHC plans are those who require more attention than would normally be given in a school setting because of their special educational needs.  According to figures from the National Education Union (NEU), special needs provision in England has lost out on £1.2 billion since 2015.  The union says that this is because increases in funding have not matched increases in the number of children with an EHC plan, due to the “unplanned and insufficiently funded” policy of extending provision to those aged 19-25.  At the same time as marches were going on in Birmingham Victoria Square and across the country, campaign group SEND National Crisis delivered a petition to Downing Street.  It demanded an independent enquiry in to the unfair treatment of young people with additional needs.  Nationally, Department for Education figures show the number of children with an EHC plan rose from 319,819 in 2018 to 353,995 this January.  That’s up 49% from the 237,111 in 2014 - the year that the new policy took place which extended provision to 25 year olds.  However an Ofsted report in December cast doubt over the new system, finding that provision was “disjointed and inconsistent”, diagnoses are “taking too long and are often inaccurate” and that “mental health needs are not supported sufficiently”.  Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the NEU, said: “This is clearly a crisis, with pupils and parents bearing the brunt of real-terms funding cuts and the wholly inadequate planning by Government.  “Last year, when the NEU won an additional £350m for children and young people with additional needs, the Government admitted that ‘more needs to be done’. We hold them to those words today. Get on with it.”  The Department for Education were contacted for comment.

newsdesk@birminghamlive.co.uk (Michael Goodier, James Rodger)


birminghammail--2019-05-31--Our children are at breaking point - hundreds of parents rally over shameful SEND funding crisis

'Our children are at breaking point' - hundreds of parents rally over 'shameful' SEND funding crisis

Hundreds of parents from across the West Midlands descended on Victoria Square today to protest funding cuts that are pushing their children to “breaking point”.  The SEND National Crisis rally was one of a number of national events aimed at pressuring the government to do more to fund special education specifically, and school budgets generally.  The rally brought together parents from all walks of life - but they all share a similar experience.  Every single parent speaking to BirminghamLive described getting educational provisions and support for their children as a battle.  They voiced the heartbreaking struggles they face daily.  One parent said she was attending the event as she claims the education system she has witnessed is “completely and utterly broken”.  Sylvia Stanway has two Autistic children and the battle to ensure they receive an education has cost her and her husband thousands.  She said: “If we weren’t the kind of parents who are financially able to raise the money for an independent report and advocacy, my daughter would not have an educational health care plan. Our mortgage has gone up thousands.  “There are so many children who are unable to access education. The older they get the worse it is - they end up in mental health facilities or with addictions.  “So I’m marching so policy makers listen and follow the law and provide robust education health care plans.  “The nature of inclusivity is that you need a variety of types of education and facilities. Not one size fits all.”  Rachel Tenacious has also spent thousands in campaigning to get her autistic daughter the right provisions.  The 52-year-old said the battle not only caused a financial strain, but also damaged her own mental health and wellbeing.  “I can’t imagine how much it has cost us,” she said. “It took us 81 weeks instead of the set 18 to get an education health care plan.  “All of that time my daughter was out of provision. We had to finance everything ourselves - including tutors. She had seven hours of tutoring provided by the council a week - but there’s no way she would get enough teaching in that time to do her GCSEs.  “Parents are talking about the fight all the time because they’re forced to fight to get their children the education they need.  “Potentially my daughter could work and earn a living, she could even live independently with some support. But if she never gets an education then how can she do that?  “I keep saying to the council that if they invest in these children now, they won’t have to support them with adult social care and benefits later down the line.  “They can’t be self sufficient unless they’ve had an education.  “The council are fighting the wrong battle. They are fighting against parents instead of fighting so that children can succeed."  Many parents at the event say their experience can be incredibly isolating - which is why rallies and support groups are so important.  Event organiser Kate Taylor said the event wasn’t just about pushing for more funding, but also to bring together parents in their struggles.  “As a parent of a child with special needs it’s very isolating and actually this event isn’t very isolating, it’s enabling and that’s what is so important about it. It brings people together; we can be here and we can be united and hopefully make our point heard.  “We’ve tried to make the event as inclusive as possible, so we’ve made it so that people can come and their children can play and they can be here and listen to the speeches that are happening.  “In 2014 when they introduced the children and families act, they introduced something called an EHC and that was meant to be a really simple and easy process that brought together health and education.  “It’s meant to take 20 weeks, but it can take years. In that time, your children are not getting the support they need. You are also waiting round for services.  “At one point my son needed help from CAMs, but it took a year for that to come through. During that time he was in crisis.  “We got the support in the end, but it could have ended very differently. Nothing is joined up and people don’t communicate properly.  “We have a postcode lottery where you might have a different experience in Birmingham than you do in Worcester or elsewhere. So we’re asking for a joined up approach which all local authorities have to follow.”  The postcode lottery Kate explained is something Elisabeth Roberts from Shropshire has suffered in. There is no school fit for her son’s needs in her area, meaning he’s currently at a residential school in Lancashire.  “It’s a six hour round trip to see him,” she said. “He no longer feels like part of our family, it’s horrendous.  “Children should have the right to get an education at home. There was no school here that would support his needs.”  Some parents have struggled so much they’ve resorted to setting up their own community organisations.  Jane Thomas-Wright runs Aspire Leisure Group in Erdington. The group holds numerous activities for children and young adults with autism.  She said: “I set up the group because when my daughter came back from residential college we couldn’t access services because of cutbacks. I just thought right, we’ve got to do this ourselves.  “We do a wide range of things so parents and children can get support and a safe place to go.  “I’m trying to do that on top of work, supporting my own family and trying to have my own life, but it gives me a lot of joy. Just to see the children and parents enjoying themselves makes it all worth it.  “I just feel sorry for parents with younger children. If this doesn’t stop now we know it’s going to get worse and lead to damage down the line. We’re seeing the fall out of that.”  Parent Jenny Jones said each of her children had suffered from not being able to attend school.  She said: “One of my sons was out of school for five months as there was no where for him to go. For my others it has been about getting support in schools for them. At every single stage there is a battle or a court tribunal.  “Some of the basic things we’ve had to fight for is speech and language therapy, just a school place for my son.  “My daughter has brittle bone disease, but it took three tribunals for her to get supervision at school.  “No parent at all should have to go through what we’ve been through.”  Children and Families Minister Nadhim Zahawi said: “Our ambition is for every child, no matter the challenges they face, to have access to a world class education that sets them up for life.  "Funding for the high needs budget is a priority for this government and we know that councils and schools are facing pressures – that’s why in December, we provided an extra £250 million up to 2020 to help manage these costs.  "This takes the total amount that we have allocated for high needs funding to £6.3 billion this year, compared to £5 billion in 2013.  “At the same time, the Education Secretary has been clear that we are working closely with the sector as we approach the spending review, we have launched a call for evidence to make sure the funding system is getting money to the right places at the right time and we are revising the SEND Code of Practice to improve ways to identify and meet special educational needs.”


birminghammail--2019-10-18--Anderton Park School parents feared LGBT teaching would 'subdue religious beliefs'

Concerned Muslim parents and their children felt they were being "made to accept LGBT teaching" and "subdue their own beliefs" to show they were not extremist, a High Court hearing into the Anderton Park school protests heard.  Protests at the gates of the Sparkhill school came about because the rights of parents were being infringed, a judge was told.  Barrister Mr Ramby de Mello said: "Parents feel they are told: 'You have got to accept our teaching and keep your own beliefs under the bushell in a closet at home'...this conflict amounts to discriminatory treatment."  “They hear: ‘We would like you to learn about equality at the expense of subduing your own religious belief because (doing so) demonstrates tolerance, inclusivity and stepping away from extremism.”  He said this also indirectly discriminates against the 644 Muslim, mostly Pakistani heritage, pupils who attend the school.  Citing from the witness statement of an imam, Mr de Mello said the parents feel they have a “moral obligation” to stand up against any teaching that impinges on the “heterosexual norm”.  His comments came on the fifth and final day of an injunction hearing triggered by protests over LGBT teaching at the school.  Judge Mr Justice Warby, who has to decide whether an exclusion zone should remain around the school to stop further protests, has now reserved judgement and will announce the outcome in writing "as soon as possible".  He will weigh up five days of evidence and hundreds of pages of witness statements, videos and social media messages before announcing his ruling.  In the meantime the existing temporary exclusion zone will stay in place.  The case, brought by Birmingham City Council, is seeking an injunction that would permanently ban protests at the gates and in the streets surrounding the school. The council is also seeking to extend the zone to include two grassy areas on Yardley Wood Road, where protesters have continued to gather.  The current temporary injunction prohibits three named defendants – Mr Afsar, his sister Rosina Afsar and Amir Ahmed - along with “persons unknown” from protesting or encouraging others to protest inside the exclusion zone.  It also prohibits use of social media accounts to make abusive comments about any member of staff at the school in relation to teaching.  The injunction application is being contested by Afsar, Afsar and Ahmed along with a fourth defendant, John Allman, from Okehampton in Devon, who sought to join the case to represent "persons unknown", claiming the injunction was too wide ranging and prohibited free speech online.  Mr Ramby de Mello, representing the Afsars and Ahmed, said the protests came about because the rights of parents were being infringed. There was discrimination against families because of their religious and cultural beliefs, he told the judge.  “This group are made to feel, because of their religious and cultural beliefs, in some way inferior to others – in this case over the teaching of LGBT,” he said.  He said much had been made of the behaviour of a couple of outsiders who had joined protests, including an imam whose comments were condemned and disowned by Mr Afsar and Mr Ahmed.  Earlier barrister Paul Diamond, representing Mr Allman, 66, a Christian campaigner, claimed a “politicised” Birmingham City Council was driving the injunction and claiming harassment and abuse against teachers at Anderton Park School, even though no criminal offences had been committed.  There was often a difference in understanding and values that meant people “talked past each other” because of their beliefs. Someone telling another they risk “going to hell” is seen by some not as offensive but instead as “informing this person of their spiritual destiny and wanting to help them,” said Mr Diamond.  He added that teachers had no "special privilege" not to face online comments as long as it does not reach a level of criminality.  After the hearing concluded, teaching union chief Rob Kelsall, of the NAHT, said head teachers across the country were now "anxiously waiting" on the ruling outcome and watching events unfold in Birmingham "with fear".  He said: "Whatever the outcome this is not the end. We have been supporting around 70 more schools across the country over pressure they have received over equality teaching. In our view it's completely unacceptable for public servants doing their job to be subject to this kind of torment."  Describing Anderton Park head teacher Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson as "one of the strongest, most courageous people I've ever met", he said the pressure of the case has had "a very negative and wearing effect on her and her staff. That for me is extremely concerning."  He reiterated calls on Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to "stop passing the buck to heads", and to be unequivocal that teachers should include all aspects of equality in relationships education, including LGBT. "We need to avoid this happening to any other school."  Shakeel Afsar, representing the protesters, said after the hearing: "We parents should not have been here. We hope the judge will see that parents were within their rights and were forced to protest.  "Whatever the outcome we would urge the school to start a fresh dialogue with parents...for the betterment of the community."  Mr Justice Warby said he would deliver his judgement in writing "as soon as possible" and would begin work on it on Monday. "I can't at the moment given any reliable commitments as to when judgement will be but I assure I will reach a verdict as quickly as I can."


breitbart--2019-09-23--Seize the Means of Education Labour Backs Abolishing Private Schools Redistributing Their Assets

Seize the Means of Education: Labour Backs Abolishing Private Schools, ‘Redistributing’ Their Assets

The Labour Party took another swing to the far-left under socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn after its members voted on Sunday to back plans that would see a future Labour government abolish Britain’s private schools, signalling members want the motion included in the party’s next election manifesto.  Members also voted to force universities to cut the number of independent school pupils they accept, whereby where currently 10 per cent of university matriculations are private school pupils, that would be capped at seven per cent, in line with the proportion of the wider population of children who attend fee-paying schools.  Speaking at the party’s conference in Brighton last night, shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said Labour will set its Social Justice Commission “to work on making the whole education system fairer through the integration of private schools”.  The members resolved “To include in the next Labour party general election manifesto a commitment to integrate all private schools into the state sector,” which would include “Endowments, investments and properties held by private schools to be redistributed democratically and fairly across the country’s educational institutions.”  Assets are often used by private schools to generate income, either to help maintain their independence, or, along with the tax-exemption charitable status — which Labour also vows to abolish — allows them to provide bursaries and scholarships to working class pupils.  The take-over of private schools would not be without cost, however, with the BBC noting that it would result in some 600,000 formerly-independent school pupils — the school population of Wales — to be educated by the public purse, an estimated £3.5 billion on top of the education budget.  Independent Schools Council chief executive Julie Robinson branded the move “an attack on the rights and freedoms of parents to make choices over the education of their children”, while the Independent Schools Association’s Neil Roskilly pointed out that if integration occurred, “teachers in the private sector wouldn’t choose to transfer into the state sector”.  Former deputy chairman of the Conservatives Lord Ashcroft pointed out that as a result of Labour’s to stop parental choice, private schools will “just pop up in Ireland or elsewhere”.  Labour was criticised for its hypocrisy, as a number of MPs in the shadow government and other senior figures had either benefitted from private education themselves or sent their children to independent schools, including: party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Seumas Milne, his communications director, and Jon Lansman, the Momentum chief, who all attended private school; shadow home secretary Diane Abbott sent her son to the private City of London school; and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti sent her son to the private Dulwich College.  Concern was also raised last night by Labour’s “chilling” seizure of private assets, with David Gauke MP, formerly of the Conservative Party, saying: “I didn’t go to a private school. My children don’t go to private schools. But Labour’s new policy on abolishing private schools and seizing private property is chilling.”  After Labour had banned establishing new academic-attainment selective grammar schools in a previous government, there is the question of where Labour’s policies of stopping school choice or making illegal so-called “unfairness” in the education system would end, given British parents also pay privately for tutors, music teachers, and other non-State controlled extracurricular activities. The BBC’s education and family correspondent Sean Coughlan wrote: “Why not other forms of non-state education – whether it’s nurseries, private tutors, professional training, universities or driving schools for that matter? Apart from property rights, there would be questions about human rights. How can you stop a parent choosing to pay someone to teach their child?”  While in theory no previous British government can bind the next, even if a successive Conservative government decided to reestablish private schools, those institutions would be without the assets, land, and other endowments that enabled them to be independent in the first place. Assets once seized and redistributed by the State cannot be returned to its owners with ease or without enormous further cost to the taxpayer.


breitbart--2019-10-06--John Bel Edwards Family Tradition Tainted by Grandfathers Vote to Defy SCOTUS Desegregation Ruli

John Bel Edwards' 'Family Tradition' Tainted by Grandfather's Vote to Defy SCOTUS Desegregation Ruling

Those laws helped prolong a bitter but unsuccessful four year legal fight by proponents of segregation that ended in the fall of 1960, but fueled the racial animosity captured in the iconic 1964 Norman Rockwell painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” which was inspired by a 1960 photograph of a young black girl, Ruby Bridges, walking to her newly integrated New Orleans public school accompanied by federal marshals.  Frank Miller Edwards, Sr. was in his first and only term as a State Senator representing Tangiapahoa County in 1956 when he joined his colleagues in unanimously passing what Louisiana State University Law School Professor Charles A. Raynard called “a thirteen-act package . . . calculated to maintain forced separation of the races in a variety of context” in a December 1956 article titled, “Survey of 1956 Louisiana Legislation: Legislation Affecting Segregation” published in The Louisiana Law Review:  Four of the others are concerned with public parks and recreational facilities, waiting rooms for passengers in intrastate commerce, employer-furnished sanitation, eating and drinking facilities for employees, and dances, social functions, entertainments, and athletic events. Two of the measures propose to amend the Constitution. The first designates various park and recreational bodies, and educational officers and boards to be agencies of the state, withdraws any previously granted consent to suits against them and forbids future suits against such agencies without the consent of the Legislature. The other constitutional proposal relates to voting registration and would change the procedure to be followed by an applicant who is denied the right to register when he seeks judicial relief.  These 13 pro-segregation laws unanimously passed by the Louisiana Legislature in 1956 were signed into law by Gov. Earl K. Long that same year.  One of the laws Frank Millard Edwards, Jr. voted for in 1956, Act 319, was a direct response to a February 15, 1956 decision in Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board by a panel of three federal judges, authored by Judge James Skelly Wright, which required the Orleans Parish School Board to comply with Brown v. Board of Education by desegregating the public schools in New Orleans.  “Act 319  provides for the classification of schools solely according to the race of the students, and would likely be held to be invalid on its face in light of the Brown decision, as interpreted and applied to Louisiana’s 1954 legislation in the Bush case,” Professor Raynard wrote:  “Those public schools in any city in Louisiana with a population in excess of Three Hundred Thousand (300,000) presently being utilized in the education of children of the white race through the twelfth grade of school shall from the effective date of this statute be utilized solely and exclusively in the education of children of the white race, unless otherwise classified by the Legislature as provided in [sections 3 and 4 hereof].” “Since this statute directs that each school shall be used ‘solely and exclusively in the education of … children” of one race and thereby forbids the education of a child of the other race in that school, it is inescapable that it will operate to effect segregation – the very thing declared invalid by the Brown decision. The fact that the statute is drawn so as to be applicable only in the City of New Orleans (where the 1954 legislation was declared invalid) suggests that it is intended to avoid the effect of the Bush case,”  While Gov. Edwards is accountable only for his actions, and not those of his father, grandfather, or great-grandfather, he brought their past actions into the ongoing public debate surrounding the October 12 “jungle primary” in which he is seeking a second term when he touted his “family tradition” — and specifically the conduct of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather–of “serving and protecting for generations” in a July ad.  Emboldened by the new laws unanimously passed by the Louisiana Legislature in 1956 and signed into law by Gov. Earl K. Long that same year, public school boards across the state, and particularly in New Orleans, continued to defy both the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and Judge Wright’s decision in Bush v. Orleans Parish School Board. When the Supreme Court refused to hear its appeal in 1960, the Orleans Parish School Board reluctantly announced and began implementation of a plan to desegregate New Orleans public schools.  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said of Judge Wright’s final order to the school board in a speech titled “Four Giants of Louisiana Law” delivered at the Loyola School of Law in New Orleans in 2002:  Wright’s order “incurred the wrath of uptown society, the business community, and the then powerful White Citizens’ Council of New Orleans,” The Tulanelink website recounts.  Writing at 64 Parishes, author Nikki Brown explained how the implementation of this 1960 decision by Judge Wright affected one little black girl, Ruby Bridges, whose walk to her local New Orleans public school accompanied by federal marshals that year would be captured in Norman Rockwell’s iconic 1964 painting, “The Problem We All Live With.”  In an attempt to postpone desegregation, the Orleans Parish School Board repeatedly asked Judge J. Skelly Wright for more time to implement the policy in June and July of 1960. When that failed, they asked Governor Jimmie Davis to intervene and then threatened to close all the public schools rather than desegregate them. Each time the school board resisted the order to desegregate, Judge Wright rejected the excuses and threatened to imprison any legislator attempting to thwart the law. Finally, the school board developed a plan to begin school integration utilizing a transfer arrangement. Each black student who wished to attend white schools was required to pass an intelligence test, which allegedly measured intellectual promise.  The school board planned to integrate grade-by-grade, beginning with kindergarten and first grade. Four African American six-year-olds were selected to desegregate two elementary schools, both located in the white, working-class Ninth Ward. Ruby Bridges was assigned to William J. Frantz Elementary School, while Tate, Prevost, and Etienne were to attend McDonogh No. 19 Elementary School. The children were set to matriculate in September 1960 but the desegregation date was delayed until November 14 to give the schools additional time to prepare. As soon as the girls entered their schools, a crisis erupted. Pro-segregation parents, encouraged by the Louisiana legislature and the Orleans Parish School Board, organized a boycott of the schools and bullied other parents into keeping their children home. “Cheerleaders,” as they called themselves, stood outside of McDonogh and Frantz and harassed parents sympathetic to integration. The cheerleaders screamed epithets, destroyed property, and splashed paint on the homes of sympathetic families. They even tried to get some parents fired. During this crisis, Ruby Bridges became the focus of public attention. Every day she walked a gauntlet of vitriolic hatred. Outwardly, she appeared to handle the stress well. She remained attentive, good-natured, and stoic throughout the crisis. Her mother and father argued about continuing to send her to school, but eventually agreed that Bridges had become a role model for other children in the South. On November 14 and for the rest of the school year, Bridges required the assistance of federal marshals who escorted her to and from school. A psychiatrist, Robert Coles, was also hired to counsel Bridges through the trauma. After one protestor threatened to poison her food, Bridges stopped eating the lunches her mother prepared for her. Her persistence was immortalized by Norman Rockwell in painting, “The Problem We All Live With.” As white parents continued their boycott, Bridges was the only student in attendance at the school between January and May 1961. Tate, Preevost, and Etienne faced similar abandonment by white families at their elementary school. Despite the crisis, the process of desegregation continued the following school year. The courts told the Orleans Parish School Board in unequivocal terms that desegregation would continue. Legal challenges by the legislature and the school board continued to fail, and the federal government threatened to use force to uphold the law.  Gov. Edwards faces two Republican opponents, Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-LA) and businessman Eddie Rispone, in the October 12 “jungle primary.” If no candidates receives more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff between the top two finishers will be held in November.  According to the most recent polls, Edwards is currently polling around 45 percent, and Abraham and Rispone are fighting for the second place spot in a potential runoff.  With less than a week to go before Louisiana voters go to the polls, it is unclear what impact Edwards’ “family tradition” misstep will have.


buzzfeed--2019-02-09--Heres Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans

Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans

A social and financial divide is forming — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — that will have ramifications for decades to come.  Jen’s story is like a lot of people’s stories. She’s 35 years old. She and her sister were the first in their family to go to college. She emerged from undergrad with $12,000 in debt, and even though she was making just $30,000 a year at her first job, she made her standard monthly loan payments on time. In 2008, when she was laid off into the depths of the economic crisis, she decided to do what so many other people did then: go back to school.   Jen enrolled in a one-year master’s program in public policy at an Ivy League university, where, despite having small scholarships and participating in work-study programs, she accumulated an additional $50,000 in federal loans. But by the time she graduated, the economy still hadn’t recovered, and she struggled to find work. She deferred her loans (meaning she did not have to make payments, and no interest accrued) and when the deferment period ran out, she put them in forbearance (during which payments are suspended, but interest does accrue). In 2010, she found a job — only to be laid off, again, two years later. She managed to find a contract gig that put her to work three days a week, and consolidated her loans into a single loan that would be easier to manage. Just months later, Jen, then in her twenties, had a stroke. She didn’t have health insurance, but was able to get on Medicaid, which allowed to her to focus on recovering without incurring additional medical debt. She landed a job in October 2012, but between juggling her new gig, physical therapy, and the day-to-day stressors of her life, she struggled to keep up with her loan payments. “That’s no excuse,” she said. “I dropped the ball, and I defaulted.” Originally, the loan servicer asked her to get back on a standard repayment plan — one where the payments would be far above what she could afford. “I told them I just didn’t have it,” she said. “And that’s the first time I heard about an Income-Based Repayment plan.” Since then, her loan servicer has auto-debited 10% of her discretionary income every month. Jen is one of more than 44 million Americans with student loans, and her current balance of $70,000 is just a tiny fraction of our collective $1.5 trillion debt load. The weight of all that student loan debt is markedly different than the feeling of the weight of mortgage or credit card debt — after all, those borrowers can declare bankruptcy, an option unavailable to student loan borrowers. Not even death can absolve you or your loved ones from the responsibility of a student loan. That Jen defaulted on her loans isn’t uncommon, either — default rates are projected to hit 38% by 2023. Like Jen, most who default don’t do so because they’re lazy, or not out looking for work, but because the loan payment amounts are just too much. Nevertheless, much of the conversation around student loan debt still puts the onus on the borrower. “A member of my family once said I deserved student loan debt because I chose the unrealistic field of history,” one borrower told me. “My in-laws believe poor students get everything paid for (they don’t) and that students can all just find jobs that work with their school schedule (they can’t),” another borrower explained.  If they had known PSLF was in jeopardy, or that they wouldn’t be approved for it, many borrowers would’ve taken different jobs, or attempted to pay down their loans more aggressively in order to combat ballooning interest. “I think there is a 4% chance my loans will actually be forgiven,” said Grace, a 33-year-old who’s worked meticulously to stay on top of her PSLF payments. “I think there's a 96% chance that after 10 years of payments I will find out I owe more than I took out and that my current sense of ‘I'm doing things right!’ security is totally baseless and I've been horribly naive once again.” “If PSLF suddenly vanishes, we have basically been pissing into the wind,” another borrower told me. “Not only is there no end in sight with our loans, but the balance will be so inflated that we will be buried forever. I borrowed $35,000 from the federal government. I’ve now paid back $7,000, but I also now owe them $43,000. So what’s that going to look like in 2025 when the government tells me, ‘No, sorry, you did everything we asked but we aren’t holding up our end of the agreement’?” For hundreds of thousands of Americans, the promise of student loan forgiveness has either already been broken, or they fear it will be. And while recent investigative reporting from Mother Jones has illuminated massive failures on the part of the private, for-profit companies that “service” both student loans and the PSLF program, like FedLoan and Navient, the question of who’s to blame extends far beyond their bad behavior. To really get at why all of this matters, we have to think about who’s taking out student loans and why, what students do with the money they receive, the actual options available when students enter the workforce, and the larger ramifications of shifting the burden of education away from society and onto the individual. Much of the reporting on student loans throws around big numbers ($1.53 trillion in debt!). But for those of us who hold some of that debt — and those with no student debt at all — the cold abstraction of that framing can often feel alienating. To the individual, the $1.53 trillion is not the most pressing problem. The problem is the wedge of your salary that disappears each month. The problem is not being able to find work in the field you took out loans to prepare yourself for. The problem is spending hours of your life on hold with call center representatives who can’t answer simple questions. The problem is the growing certainty that you were sold a false bill of goods about the immeasurable value of higher education, and that’ll you’ll be forever paying down the cost of a broken dream. There’s a reason our current debt situation has been dubbed a “student loan crisis”: It foreshadows radical shifts in the way millions of Americans, most of them still in early adulthood, will be able to participate in the economy, in society, in the workplace. For many of us, student debt means delaying — if not entirely forgoing — homeownership, marriage, and parenthood. This new form of social stratification — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — will have ramifications for generations to come. I think of a 28-year-old, now in her first year in the PSLF program, with $110,000 in graduate school debt. Her health insurance with a public service employer doesn’t cover specialist visits to the doctor — so she goes without, because she uses her extra income toward covering her student loans. “I basically can’t have children until I’m at least 38, and who knows if my eggs will be dead by then,” she told me. “I have pretty abysmal views that I’ll save much money at all in the next ten, twenty, THIRTY years.” And if hundreds of thousands of people aren’t even saving for themselves, we’re certainly not saving for our kids’ college tuition, effectively ensuring their future monumental student debt. It’s a slow-motion emergency, but because it is built on two cherished components of the contemporary American dream — the necessity of both debt and education — almost no one has heeded the calls for help. You might not have student loans. You might not be in a student loan forgiveness program — and, as such, might think that the problems plaguing the thousands who are struggling with their debt have nothing to do with you. You’re wrong. The experience of student debt is isolating, lonely, and often dismissed as the result of individual choices — but its ramifications span generations and demographics. To actually address those ramifications, however, means looking to the larger, societal issues underpinning student loans in general: how we, as a country, came to frame college and “credentialing” as essential and how we shifted from one paradigm of funding college to another. Because the only way to actually fix a problem of this magnitude is to really, clearly, see it: what created it, what continues to fuel it, and who profits from it.  The ideas that the report essentially took as self-evident — that schooling will not only better society, but make it more democratic and equitable, more fundamentally American — were central to what economist W. Norton Grubb and historian Marvin Lazerson call the “the education gospel.” Of course more education is better than less education, that gospel says. Of course you should go to college by any means necessary — even when the costs of college outweigh the benefits, and despite increasing evidence that college is not “worth” its cost for those who drop out or come from lower-class backgrounds. For society to arrive at the consensus that college was necessary and worthwhile, it had to become far more accessible than it had been during the first half of the 20th century. And for many, the government-funded GI Bill, passed in 1944, provided the first major step toward accessibility. My paternal grandfather returned home from World War II and spent a semester at the University of Minnesota thanks to the GI Bill, which covered tuition at a college, university, or trade school of the veteran’s choice and provided a monthly living stipend. My maternal grandfather attended a small private college in his hometown in Nebraska in the early ’40s, digging holes for telephone poles during the summer to help cover tuition. He received a fellowship to cover his MBA at the University of Oregon until he was drafted for World War II. He exited the military without debt. Thirty years later, my mother started undergrad at a private liberal arts college in Minnesota, where her tuition was covered through the combination of a National Merit Scholarship and a work-study program. (Tuition and board at the time was around $3,500, or $14,500 in 2018 dollars; current tuition and board is $55,510.) My father paid for the same college through a combination of grants, work-study, and a small federal loan. When he went to medical school, he took out $15,000 in loans, but paid them off two years after finishing his residency, allowing my parents to start saving for my own college education. That’s a typical story for many white, middle-class families in America, many of which became middle-class through the mortgage and tuition assistance afforded by the GI Bill.  When I asked people about their “debt genealogies” — whether their grandparents and/or parents went to college and how they paid for it — the responses fit this overarching pattern. The vast majority who could trace both a parent’s and grandparent’s college experience were white; the vast majority also accumulated little to no debt. “My grandpa went to University of Arizona and paid for it by being a farm laborer in the summer,” one woman said. “My dad then went there on an ROTC scholarship, while my mom went there with student loans (tuition was $800 per semester).” Another woman’s paternal grandfather was the first in the family to go to college, working his way through public university in Ohio and graduating without debt. He then paid for the state tuition costs of all eight of his children — allowing each of them to graduate debt-free. In the 1980s and ’90s, that paradigm began to shift. More students were graduating from high school than ever before — and, having internalized the education gospel, were eager to continue on to college. At the same time, funding for state universities began to decrease substantially as politicians, elected on the promise of slashing government spending, cut state budgets. College costs, both public and private, began to rise; companies that had once paid for on-the-job training — essentially credentialing workers in their fields — began asking applicants to find training themselves, generally through some sort of college. The cost of education shifted from a societal investment — spread across the tax-paying public, in the name of a thriving society and economy — to an individual one. And no matter how astronomically priced that investment became, we continued to rationalize it as a worthwhile one. Even in a culture that idolizes high-profile college dropouts (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs), to refuse higher education in America has become tantamount to refusing to fulfill your potential. And if you refuse to fulfill your potential, any struggle can and will be blamed on you alone.    “Lower Ed can exist precisely because elite Higher Ed does,” McMillan Cottom argues. “The latter legitimizes the education gospel while the former absorbs all manner of vulnerable groups who believe in it: single mothers, downsized workers, veterans, people of color, and people transitioning from welfare to work.” Half a century before, a wave of first-generation college students, most of them white, had bought the education gospel and walked out of school debt-free. And the subsequent, ever-expanding wave of high school graduates — many from working-class, rural, Latino, and black families — were eager to buy it too. While some parents warned their children away from student debt, others bought into it as a worthwhile necessity: “Both of my parents only graduated high school, and my dad was the last of a generation to make $80K per year working at a chemical plant in an affordable city,” Danielle, who took out significant loans to cover an MA and an MD, told me. “To them, taking on debt to pay for education was a natural thing you did, because it would all be repaid with a ‘good-paying job.’ Debt is as American as apple pie, so my parents never thought it would be a bad idea to take it on. However, they didn't know anything about what the economic landscape would be like now.” Like so many others I spoke to for this piece, Danielle knew about the potential risks of taking out loans. But the warnings weren’t powerful enough to drown out the promises of the education gospel. “They make you take these surveys at the outset of every loan for which you apply, trying to make you recognize the heaviness of taking on this debt,” she said. “But I definitely wasn't thinking about that as a desperate 25-year-old trying to get the hell out of Baton Rouge.” Like Danielle and her parents, most of us, whether seeking a business certification, an associate’s degree, or a master’s in education, have become convinced that more school, regardless of cost, is the way forward — and that student loans, regardless of the size, are the way to get there.  When talking about the failures of loan forgiveness, I often field responses suggesting a loan is a loan — and should always be repaid in full: “Honor your contracts”; “Pay your bills”; “I don't know how it works in your government job, but in the productive sector I'm expected to take ownership and responsibility for myself. Not only do I do that, I'm given the burden of subsidizing people who don't pay off loans. Spare me the pity party.” But the principles of loan forgiveness aren’t that different from something like military tuition assistance, which has been an uncontroversial federally funded program for decades: That’s how we incentivize military service and attract the talent needed to keep the military running. There’s broad agreement that the value of the military service equals, if not exceeds, the cost of educating the soldier — even if that cost is hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical school. When it comes to other, nonmilitarized quadrants of American society, though, something shifts — even when the student goes on to work directly for the government. Public service within the military-industrial complex is still widely gendered and conceived of as masculine, good, and — most important — valuable. By contrast, public service outside of the military (in schools, in public health, in legal defense, in nonprofits) is conceived of as feminine, and less valuable. A staggering 77% of public school teachers are women, and women make up 73% of nonprofit workers. When that work is figured as less essential to a functioning society, “investing” in it collectively (through direct government funding, in the form of tax dollars, or indirect funding, in the form of loan forgiveness) is deprioritized or rejected altogether. And that idea extends all the way to the Department of Education — the entity charged with facilitating the disbursement and payment of student loans — which has moved to roll back myriad protections for student borrowers and eliminate PSLF entirely. “The people running the federal student aid seem to have a cultural resistance to the idea of loan forgiveness,” John R. Brooks, a professor at Georgetown Law specializing in student loans, told me. “They see themselves as bankers: We made you the loan, and we need you to repay it. Their primary job is making sure the government gets its money back and then some, which is not what’s best for students, or higher ed, or society in general.” This attitude toward student borrowers is a far cry from the original conception of education as a worthwhile investment in America’s future. It conceives of the borrower not as the bearer of the future of the country, but a customer, and a petulant one at that. It also conceives of education as a transaction, in which recipients must pay back every cent, plus interest, in order to make good on the investment that has been made in them. That understanding is mirrored in every corner of the repayment process — and nowhere more so than the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.    The first income-based loan repayment plan was implemented in the 1990s — an early acknowledgment of skyrocketing loan amounts. Since then, the Department of Education has introduced a number of variants, but the premise remains the same: If you make monthly payments of between 10 and 15% of your discretionary income for between 20 and 25 years, the remainder of your loan will be forgiven. PSLF is a bolder version of those original repayment plans, and when it was first conceived, its guidelines were straightforward: To obtain forgiveness, you must have the right kind of loan (a public one, as in, owed to the federal government); the right kind of repayment plan (income-based); the right number of qualifying months (120); and the right employer (one that provides public service). The federal government contracted with a private company, FedLoan, to “service” the program. But it never provided a manual, and the servicer — which, like every other loan servicer, is a publicly held, profit-driven enterprise — has little incentive to facilitate completion of the program. When a borrower is granted forgiveness, after all, that loan (and the fees generated by it) disappears. When I finished my PhD in 2011, I began repaying my student loans on an income-based repayment plan. In a phone call shortly after, I asked my loan servicer, Navient, about Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and was assured that if I was working in public service as a teacher, I would simply need to make consecutive payments for 10 years, at which point I would apply and receive forgiveness for the remainder of my balance. That advice was wrong — and if I had followed it for the next 10 years and applied to the program, I would likely have been told that none of my payments qualified, and I would need to start over again. The biggest issue with my loans was one faced by hundreds of thousands of other borrowers who believe they are enrolled in PSLF: I was with the wrong servicer. In order to participate in PSLF, you must transfer your loans to FedLoan. But many servicers — including Navient — may be reticent to guide clients toward this option, because if a loan is transferred to FedLoan, they lose their servicing fees.  In a recent lawsuit funded by the American Federation of Teachers, a group of nine teachers accused Navient of negligence in administering their student loans. (The plaintiffs, who say that their experiences with Navient typify the company’s malfeasance, are seeking to have their suit certified as a class action.) In January 2014, Kathryn Hyland, a teacher in New York, attempted to certify her employment as part of the PSLF program. Instead of informing her that she would need to consolidate her various loans into one “direct loan,” and that she would then need to transfer her loan to FedLoan, Navient repeatedly assured her over the course of three years she was “on track” for PSLF.   The other plaintiffs’ claims are filled with variations on the same sorts of stories: Borrowers were told they did not qualify for PSLF, or incorrectly told PSLF was unavailable to them, or repeatedly placed in forbearance programs — which allowed interest to continue to accumulate — when they had requested to be placed into the PSLF program. According to AFT counsel Lena Konanova, Navient has admitted ignorance about the actual operation of its call centers, where, according to previous reporting by BuzzFeed News, employees were instructed to keep calls between three and seven minutes, or shorter. “That’s the really insidious part of this,” Konanova said. “Imagine having to pick between giving a person correct information or getting written up. And getting a bad performance review because you took too much time with them? That’s not fair.” Even if a borrower does figure out that their debt needs to be transferred to FedLoan, it’s only the beginning of the battle. Two years after the 2007 announcement of PSLF, the Department of Education realized the lack of guidelines about what type of employment could be considered “public service” might be a problem, and implemented a “certification” process. Dozens of borrowers who told me they had believed themselves “on track” for forgiveness had no knowledge of this new qualification, and were never notified; one told me she’d been working in public service for five years before learning she needed to certify — and only because a friend had told her. “And I’d read everything I could get my hands on!” she said. For borrowers working directly for the government, certification can be simple; for others, it’s an endless frustration. “There is absolutely no real guidance and the process is a sham. I recertify my participation every year, and every year I fight with the PSLF people,” one borrower told me. An employee of a US executive branch agency was told that her employer was not part of the US government. A high school teacher’s application was denied because her “principal’s title was mislabeled.” And even if you get your employer certified, you still have to convince FedLoan to allow your previous and current payments to actually count.    Kate, a 39-year-old from Seattle, recalled her difficulties with the company in detail: “FedLoan has miscalculated my payments multiple times and every time I call, it is a different story as to why,” she said. “The customer service people are horrible. I usually end up in tears after the call.” She sought advice on student loan Reddit forums, and demanded an audit of her account from the state’s attorney general, which showed that even though Kate had graduated in 2011, and started to make payments that year, FedLoan insisted she had graduated in 2015 — and refused to count those four years of payments. The audit surfaced the problem, but it still didn’t force FedLoan to act. “Every time I call, I get a different story again, and it makes me cry again,” Kate said. “I’m hoping I can build up the courage to call them back.” Kate’s frustration, like so many others’, stems from just how illogical and intractable the system remains. If you pay even one dollar more than your set income-based repayment, the payment doesn’t count toward forgiveness. If you make the payment a day early, it doesn’t count. If you make a payment on the one-day gap between switching from one public service job to the next, it doesn’t count. If, for whatever reason, you cannot make a payment for one month, your loan will then go into forbearance. For many borrowers, though, it can take up to a year of waiting time before the servicer completes the paperwork to transfer you out of forbearance and back to your original payment plan — which means losing time, and payments, that could have been spent working toward forgiveness. Those who have found themselves on track toward PSLF have only done so with considerable research acumen or outside guidance. Misti, who figured out how to navigate PSLF for her husband, said she was only able to do so because of her training as a librarian. Another borrower told me she realized her payments were ineligible only after a chance meeting with Heather Jarvis, a student loan rights attorney whom various public service employers pay to educate them on how to help their employees obtain assistance.  When I first spoke to Jen, she was dismayed that none of her payments had been counted toward forgiveness. She’d attempted to contact FedLoan to rectify its mistake, but did not have private space in her workplace to make calls — and the helpline only operated during her work hours. An online help chat resource disappeared from the website some months ago. A rep at the company told her a review would take 60 to 90 days. Then they told her it would take a year. But after we first spoke, she got “fired up,” in her words, and decided to try again. She took a day off work to handle the phone calls. She created a spreadsheet of her past payments to provide as evidence to FedLoan. She contacted the Department of Education’s Federal Student Aid Ombudsman Group, which then escalated her complaint. Two weeks later, her account record reflected that she had, in fact, made 38 payments toward the 120 necessary for forgiveness. She still has to fight for the payments made over the last year, but it’s a start. “I will do this every year until I hit that magical 120,” she told me. “What other choice would I have?” This might seem like a happy ending, or at least a passable one. But it’s not. “I’m a black, first-generation college graduate who majored in sociology,” Jen told me, “and despite my background and literal coursework about structural racism and inequality, I’ve held this very romanticized view of higher education for most of my life. In my mind, it was the only way I could escape from the stress of how I’d grown up — with the constant threat of not being able to pay rent, buy groceries, or pay bills — and the only way I’d be able to find a job where I could make a difference. That view inevitably changed as I’ve gotten older, but I’m still sometimes amazed at just how many rungs there are on the ladder to the middle class, and how, even as I (finally) make a decent salary, how precarious it still feels.” Her student loan debt, Jen says, is one of the greatest reminders of that. Jen’s words reminded me of something Frotman had told me — that we often think the only people suffering under student debt are those who have defaulted on their loans, or have fallen behind on payments. “But that’s not true,” he said. “You have people who had to get a degree, had to get a graduate degree to stay in their job. They have no savings. They have no retirement. They’re not putting away any money for their kids to go to school. And the cycle just keeps perpetuating itself.” I think of Kathryn, a 35-year-old with $118,000 in debt from a degree in museum studies, which she said, as a “naive working-class kid,” she didn’t realize was a professional field that’s “basically closed to poor folks.” “I am so far in debt that will never go away,” she told me, “and all those things people do in life — marriage, travel, homes, a career, not living with your elderly mom who you don’t get along with in a one-bedroom apartment, not being scared all the time — will never come my way. I miss insurance. I have been to the dentist once in 15 years. I’m pretty sure that if I ever get diagnosed with cancer, I’ll just let it take me. What could I do? I couldn’t afford to fight it.” Kathryn’s despair is visceral, but that doesn’t mean that it’s rare, or atypical. “I don’t think about my debt without also thinking of suicide,” a 30-year-old with $43,000 in debt, told me. “At first I felt a great a deal of anxiety about my debt, and a sense of shame about being a failure and a parasite for being unable to afford the loans. I still feel shame and anxiety, but the sense of failure has been replaced with anger. Anger about being lied to, pressured, and exploited. We were told that we were making an essential, basically non-optional investment in our futures. Instead we are now indentured servants.”  Like so many others in this story and across the US, these students believed in the education gospel — an ideology that remains as robust as ever, with little room to accommodate ambivalence and regret. Education is still a wonderful thing. But the contemporary parameters surrounding it — in which the individual takes on the whole of the risk for their education, with little faith that programs intended to ameliorate the debt load will work, or that they will be able to seek recourse when they don’t — are broken. People talk about “free college” like it’s a radical idea, but for many, the central appeal of the proposal isn’t the lack of tuition; it’s the lack of debt. That’s not radical. That’s what millions of Americans — mostly white, mostly middle class — have enjoyed for decades. Which is part of why it’s so hard for those same Americans, many of them now in or moving toward retirement, to fathom why subsequent generations have accumulated so much more debt than they did. It’s also why those whose families have long been excluded from higher education feel increasingly ambivalent about the sacrifices necessary to join their ranks. “I can't describe emphatically enough what a heartbreak student debt has been,” one borrower told me. She’d gone to undergrad on a full-ride scholarship, excelled in her classes, and was encouraged by her advisers to apply to grad school, where she then took on $40,000 in debt. “I was brought up to believe that if I worked hard and had a good education, I would do well,” she said. “I worked as hard as I could and spent more time in school than most people and I honestly believe it ruined my life. My parents wanted the best for me and, because of their social class, weren't able to adequately help me navigate what student debt would become during my lifetime, and I know they feel horrible about that as well.” Like so many in this story, she’s spent years fighting FedLoan to count her payments toward forgiveness. “The stats [on forgiveness] have been totally demoralizing,” she said, “and have pretty much eliminated the last vestiges of hope I had for building a life anything like what my parents have.” If education doesn’t elevate you, and your children and grandchildren, to the middle class — instead saddling you with debt — is it actually worth it? Or, if education is so valuable in and of itself, and shouldn’t be tethered to or contingent on one’s class status, then why is it so prohibitively expensive? Tressie McMillan Cottom proposes that “at heart, higher education is both a means of redressing socioeconomic inequality and perpetuating socio-economic inequalities in new guises.” For so many of us, it is our salvation and our damnation. It gets us everywhere and nowhere. It is our pride and our shame. It is invaluable and worth nothing at all. American life is rife with contradictions. But in our current moment, few such contradictions feel as isolating, as disproportionate, as insurmountable and heavy, as attempting to reconcile the education gospel and the student loan industrial complex. “I feel so scammed and betrayed by the government, which is honestly so naive,” Kathryn told me. “How did I ever trust they would do the right thing? I never should have dreamt about meaningful work. I should’ve settled for clerical work and been happy with it. I feel stupid for reaching for anything in life.” ●


clashdaily--2019-12-03--New Study Gives Bad News For The ‘Marriage Is Just A Piece Of Paper’ Types

Imagine that: Marriage STILL beats Shacking Up for Child well-being, relationship stability.  Cohabitation enjoys widespread social acceptance, viewed by many as a ‘test run’ that increases the chances of a successful marriage. The data doesn’t support that belief.  The cohabitation of unmarried parents is also seen interchangeably with married parents raising children, with no significant difference between the two family dynamics. The statistical impact of this difference on their children might come as quite a shock to anyone sharing this widely-held opinion.  First, lets’ look at the relationships themselves:  Trending: WATCH: White House Releases Video Of Christmas Decorations With The First Lady — Cue The Liberal Outrage In 3, 2, 1…  The reality: Couples who cohabitated before marriage are more likely to divorce. Cohabitation’s effect on marital success has been empirically tested, and the results are clear: couples who cohabit before marriage are more likely to get divorced, not less.  A 2018 article published by the Institute for Family Studies said this “premarital cohabitation effect” is so well-known, “It has a long and storied history in family science.” Contrary to popular belief, cohabitation is not “practice” for marriage. Instead, it is “practice” for lacking commitment, keeping one’s options open, and focusing on the short-term rather than the long-term. Such attitudes are antithetical to a successful marriage and may increase the risk of marital failure.   Source: Federalist  Now the impact on the children:  Most Americans believe cohabitating couples raise children just as well as married couples. Pew also surveyed people’s opinions about cohabiting couples raising children, and 59 percent of Americans declared that cohabiting couples “can raise children just as well as married couples.” Again, the younger respondents were most likely to have a favorable view of cohabitation: among adults aged 18 to 49, 67 percent agreed cohabiting couples do just as well, while 32 percent said: “Married couples do a better job raising children.”  The reality: Children of cohabitating parents face higher risks of negative outcomes. The Pew survey’s question focused on the perceived parenting skills of the couple rather than the actual outcomes for the children. The actual outcomes are notably worse for the kids.  While Americans are optimistic about the ability of cohabiting couples to raise children, a study published by the American College of Pediatricians in 2014 reported that children whose parents cohabit face a higher risk of: “premature birth, school failure, lower education, more poverty during childhood and lower incomes as adults, more incarceration and behavior problems, single parenthood, medical neglect and chronic health problems both medical and psychiatric, more substance, alcohol and tobacco abuse, and child abuse,” and that “a child conceived by a cohabiting woman is at 10 times higher risk of abortion compared to one conceived in marriage.”   Source: Federalist  So, what they are saying in this study is that, no matter how hard the social anarchists have worked to reprogram our society and culture to think otherwise, the traditional family raised with traditional morality leads to a more stable family unit with healthier and happier kids?  What else do you suppose the cultural anarchists might possibly be wrong about?


sputnik--2019-07-19--Death Sentence for Bloodthirsty Monsters Who Murdered Scandinavian Hikers in Morocco

Death Sentence for 'Bloodthirsty Monsters' Who Murdered Scandinavian Hikers in Morocco

To crown an 11-week trial, three suspected jihadists have been sentenced to death for the grisly murder of two female Scandinavian hikers on holiday in Morocco, they themselves had filmed.  Suspected ringleader and underground imam Abdessamad Ejjoud and his two accomplices received the maximum penalty over the December killings of 24-year-old Danish tourist Louisa Vesterager Jespersen and her 28-year-old Norwegian partner Maren Ueland. A fourth man involved in the murders was sentenced by the Moroccan court to life in prison.  The prosecution described the three killers “bloodthirsty monsters”, the prosecution said, citing an autopsy report that found 23 injuries on Jespersen's body and seven on that of Ueland.  The beheadings were believed to have been inspired by extremist Islamic ideology and sworn allegiance to Daesh. A total of 19 others were sentenced to between five and 30 years in prison.  While Scandinavian nations have long abandoned capital punishment as inhumane, the jihadi murderers' death sentences were well-received.  “The most important thing in this case is that these men be held responsibile", Khalid El Fataoui, attorney for Jespersen’s family, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. “They showed no regret and didn’t offer any apologies. We are glad the court ruled as it did, I am personally glad”.  A letter from the Danish victim's mother, Helle Petersen, read out in court, said: “The most just thing would be to give these beasts the death penalty they deserve”.  Maren Ueland's mother, Irene Ueland (49), referred to the double murder as “grotesque” and “madness”.  Likewise, petitions on social media have also called for their execution.  Despite having had a de facto freeze on executions since 1993, death penalty is still legal in Morocco.  The defence team cited “mitigating circumstances on account of their precarious social conditions and psychological disequilibrium”, as the culprits admittedly had a “very low” level of education and lived in low-income areas of Marrakesh.  28-year-old Maren Ueland of Norway and 24-year-old Louise Vesterager Jespersen of Denmark were slain while on a camping holiday in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, a popular tourist attaction that is home to the highest peak in the entire Maghreb and the Arab world. The women were stalked and attacked in their tent on 17 December 2018.  Barely several months after the brutal killings, the UK newspaper The Independent, came under fire for praising Morocco as a safe tourist destination for women travelling solo.


sputnik--2019-10-02--West Ignores Chinas 70th Anniversary Achievements in Favor of Escalated Hong Kong Narrative

West Ignores China’s 70th Anniversary Achievements in Favor of ‘Escalated’ Hong Kong Narrative

Tens of thousands of people flocked to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Tuesday to attend China’s National Day Parade and celebrate the anniversary of Mao Zedong’s 1949 founding of the republic.  Chinese President Xi Jinping led the 80-minute military parade, which showcased the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) array of munitions and hardware, including the Dongfeng-100 supersonic cruise missile and several unmanned aerial vehicles that were previously top secret.  However, there was another spectacle occurring nearly 2,000 kilometers south of Beijing in the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 after having been a British colony for more than 150 years.  Over 50 people were injured and dozens were arrested after protesters dressed in black took to the streets for a number of “national grief” marches across the semi-autonomous city, according to TIME.  In addition to the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway (MTR) authority shutting down a number of subway stops - possibly to avoid a situation similar to the August 31 Prince Edward MTR situation that sparked murder rumors - the Hong Kong government’s legislature was evacuated after being bombarded with petrol bombs by protesters.  However, it was the non-fatal shooting of a teen that caught the eye of Western media, which ran with the story and erroneously reported that an 18-year-old was shot in the chest, rather than the shoulder.  When asked why the officer resorted to firing a live round at the teenager, police chief Stephen Lo Wai Chung stressed that the situation occurred quickly and said his officer “did not decide the distance between him and the assailant.” The officer who fired the weapon was also equipped with a rubber bullet rifle.  Though a total of six live rounds were fired by the Hong Kong Police Force on Tuesday, authorities are only aware of the one injury.  John Ross, senior fellow at Chongyang Institute, Renmin University of China and an award-winning resident columnist with several Chinese media organizations; and Jude Woodward, author of the book “The US vs China: Asia's new Cold War?,” joined Radio Sputnik’s Loud and Clear on Tuesday to discuss the Western media’s reaction to the military parade versus the demonstrations in Hong Kong.  Ross told host Brian Becker and producer Walter Smolarek that the US should not continue to underestimate China’s progress in the past 70 years, particularly when it comes to their health advances, as “life expectancy is the best indication of social conditions”  “If the United States continues to spread straightforward lies about [China’s life expectancy] situation, this creates danger, primarily, for the United States. I think it’s one of the reasons China staged a military parade,” he said in response to the New York Times headline “Xi Extols China’s ‘Red’ Heritage in a Land Haunted by Famine Under Mao.”  “If you attack China, you’re going to die” is the message the parade sent, and the US needs to “get a grip” moving forward with how Washington handles Beijing, Ross said.  “The idea that the United States is in a position to economically defeat China is … a complete inaccuracy. It’s leading the United States to make errors which will rebound on itself,” Woodward warned, echoing Ross’ thoughts.  While there is the argument that there should have been a “cultural” parade rather than the military parade, Ross expressed that after China was invaded “for a hundred years” by British, European and Japanese powers prior to forming the People’s Republic in 1949, the PLA symbolizes “the Chinese people will be able to determine their own future” and will “not be invaded.”  As for the shooting, Woodward said that “to a certain extent, there has been a build-up to today, with a big provocation planned to coincide with the 70th anniversary” that was “aided and abetted by the West.”  In her opinion, outside powers wanted to create something that would “ensure celebrations were overshadowed by violent protests - preferably a situation in which someone was shot and killed.”  “There’s an indication of the fact that the media [in the West] wants to present the most escalated fashion in order for this story to dominate,” she added, also pointing out how Western media reported that the teen was struck in the chest by a bullet, while the official emergency report detailed that the 18-year-old sustained a non-fatal gunshot wound to the shoulder.  Ross, in agreement with Woodward, went on add perspective to the situation, concluding that “if a black person in the United States picked up a Molotov cocktail and aimed at a US cop, they’d be dead - immediately.”  The views and opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.


tass--2019-01-12--March against social ethnic inequality held in Latvias Riga

March against social, ethnic inequality held in Latvia’s Riga

RIGA, January 12. /TASS/. A rally against social inequality was held in the Latvian capital of Riga on Saturday, bringing together several hundreds of protesters, a TASS correspondent reported from the scene.  The protesters wanted to express their disagreement with the government’s policies and demanded changes. They gathered in central Dome Square and marched past the Riga Castle, the presidential residence, towards the building of Latvia’s parliament. The organizers pointed out that Riga’s residents have similar grounds for discontent as their counterparts in Paris.  "Protest rallies are being held across Europe, including Brussels and Paris. The French ‘Yellow Vests’ movement in Paris managed to get lots of [concessions] from the authorities," Miroslavs Mitrofanovs, a member of the European Parliament and co-chair of the Latvian Russian Union, said addressing the protesters. "Today, I am wearing this yellow vest for our rally and our march, and many others have come in those vests. However, unless the authorities heed people, those will be coming wearing this new uniform of European-wide protests each time further on."  Dmitry Shandybin, one of the organizers, told TASS that the French ‘Yellow Vests’ movement has inspired Latvians to hit the streets.  "The movement manifested that any nation, with small resources and a lack of support from ruling elites, could seek changes in their social conditions," he said. "That is why we opted for yellow vests as a symbol of today’s rally to show that the people are capable of achieving this and the main thing is that they want to do so."  ## Protesters’ demands  The protest was pursuing a range of goals, according to Shandybin.  "Firstly, it is a social protest against price hikes. Everybody is aware that food, energy and other goods and services in Latvia have become more expensive since the beginning of this year. Besides, the government is constantly introducing new taxes, both overt and covert. For example, there was a reform of compulsory health insurance, which ended up denying access to healthcare services for several dozens of thousands of people," he said.  The second issue is a political crisis that has gripped the country after the parliamentary election.  "We have lived without a government for three months. People might start asking a lawful question: why on earth do we need it if no tangible changes have been seen in society in recent three months? Moreover, our government does not bother about the citizens’ wellbeing. So the gap between the rich and poor is growing wider and wider, which our non-existing government is having a hand in," Shandybin said.  The third issue is a reform at Latvian schools.  "That is not just an issue of Russian schools and their transition to Latvian in instruction. That is an issue of the education reforming," he added.  "We, as the Latvian people, will not take this. We believe that Riga along with other European capitals should not remain passive. We must express our protest. We call for democratic values, for civil society and we think that civil society has the right for a peaceful protest and for protection of their rights," the march’s organizer concluded.


thecollegefix--2019-12-26--Diversity-minded academics: The sciences have a problem with ‘whiteness’

Here we go again: The mainstream media treats us to another fatuous piece about how an “incorrect” percentage of women and minorities working in the sciences is a “problem.”  Of course, most people, for some silly reason, couldn’t care less about the color or gender of those working in the hard sciences. But leave it to the New York Times to highlight several individuals who do care — who, coincidentally, have a background or employment in an academic “diversity” field.  For example, Assistant Director of Academic Affairs and Diversity Kuheli Dutt of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory claims the “lack of diversity and inclusion is the single largest cultural problem facing the geosciences today.”  Unsurprisingly, Dutt’s research focuses on “gender issues, implicit bias, and diversity in the sciences.”  Dutt wrote a piece recently for the journal Nature titled “Race and racism in the geosciences” which hits many academic race fads, especially the belief that colorblindness is “racist,” and that racism itself is all about who holds “power.”  The diversity director says one thing white geoscientists should do to help increase a “sense of belonging” among marginalized groups is “separate their privilege as a White person from their identity as a good person.”  “Conflating the two,” she adds, “leads to feelings of anger, denial and defensiveness, because racism tends to be viewed as a character defect rather than the system of advantage and social conditioning that it really is.”  This “sense of belonging” was lacking for Columbia PhD student Arianna Varuolo-Clarke who, upon receiving an internship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “quickly realized […] her path as a woman of color would not be easy.”  Despite “walk[ing] through the halls” of Columbia and seeing “a lot of old white men,” Varuolo-Clarke says she nevertheless persevered. When her department was the target of an isolated racist email back in May, Varuolo-Clarke claims the message “brought to the surface what still needs to be done in the field.”  The geosciences — which include the study of planet Earth, its oceans, its atmosphere and its interactions with human society — are among the least diverse across all fields of science. Nearly 90 percent of doctoral-degree recipients are white. In the country’s top 100 geoscience departments, people of color hold under 4 percent of tenured or tenure-track positions. A 2016 survey from the National Science Foundation showed that representation of people of color in geosciences has barely budged in the past four decades, although significant gains have been made in terms of gender balance. … “You think of a bearded guy on top of a mountain wearing flannel and hiking boots,” said Jonathan Nichols, an associate research professor at Lamont-Doherty. “We just had our big fall conference and there were 20,000-plus geologists, and you look around and it’s all old bearded guys.” That stereotype, Dr. Nichols said, can make the field feel unwelcoming to people of color, who don’t see themselves represented at conferences and among faculty members. Dr. White concurred that the geosciences had an “image problem” that prevents young people of color from applying for research opportunities. That lack of representation in turn affects the quality and focus of earth science research, especially on climate change. “It’s not rich white people who will be impacted first and most by climate change,” Dr. Nichols said. “It’s the people in marginalized communities. And if you forget that this work isn’t just an academic pursuit, then why are you even doing it? You have to keep in mind the real impact.”  Columbia PhD student Lorelei Curtin added that earth science classes could be “enriched” by more Native American voices since “Indigenous people have a unique connection to the land.”  Curtin helped create a book club, aptly titled “Race Talk,” in which fellow geoscientists yak about “race and white privilege.”  MORE: Women, minorities show less interest in research faculty careers  MORE: Math prof who argues against ‘truths and knowledge’ hosts convocation  Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter