WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Oklahoma City Thunder players kneel during anthem despite a threat from GOP state lawmaker 

Nikole Hannah-Jones on Bill Clinton's hit on Kwame Ture

Literally cringed. Stokley was radicalized differently after getting arrested for the 27th time fighting for civil rights in Greenwood. He decided from then on if white people hit him, he was going to hit back... One can eulogize Congressman John Lewis without demonizing other freedom fighters you didn’t agree with. -- The Grio

Hasan Kwame Jeffries

This mischaracterization of Carmichael serves a purpose. It allows people to dismiss his critique of America. -- Washington Post Op-ed

IL Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton

 “What would any of us want for our own children if they had to go to a facility like this? Do we want them in large, cinder block warehouses? Or would we want our children to be in home-like or dorm-like facilities?” Stratton said in explaining the “my child standard.” -- Chicago Tribune

Rev. William Barber and Bernice King

Removing monuments is the easy part. We must make America a real democracy... In fact, many who support flags and statues coming down today also advocate voter suppression, attack healthcare and re-segregate our schools. -- Guardian

I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020

Ben Zimmer, contributing writer

The political play here is not hard to decipher. Trump feels he needs to portray “the suburbs” as under an imminent threat to provoke racist fears among white voters. -- The Atlantic

Rep. Raúl Grijalva after testing positive for COVID-19 

“While I cannot blame anyone directly for this, this week has shown that there are some members of Congress who fail to take this crisis seriously,” he said. “Numerous Republican members routinely strut around the Capitol without a mask to selfishly make a political statement at the expense of their colleagues, staff, and their families.” -- 
Guardian

Celtics guard, Jaylen Brown

Jaylen Brown: "Angela Davis once said that racism is so dangerous, not because of individual actors, because it's deeply embedded in the apparatus."

— Bobby Krivitsky (@BobbyKrivitsky) August 2, 2020

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Protesters shut down Klobuchar’s rally in St. Louis Park, Minn., on Sunday. Now it looks like she won't even carry her home state in the primary. 

Mary Moriarty, a public defender in Minnesota’s Hennepin County

“In the case of Myon Burrell -- where you had a really high-profile shooting of an innocent girl and you put a lot of pressure on the system to get someone to be responsible for that -- I think a lot of corners were probably cut.” -- AP

Richard Wolffe on Buttigieg 

All that was missing was a reason for being: a purpose, a mission. Something with more meaning than a talented youngish man who was on the rise. Something more meaningful than a preternatural prescience that the former vice-president would implode. When Joe Biden failed to do so, there was no reason for Pete Buttigieg. -- Guardian

Stacey Abrams on voting in GA

“Across Gwinnett, across Georgia, there are folks who are afraid of their power, who are afraid of what they remember, and they’re afraid to try this time...In 2020, our responsibility is to erase their fear, to take their hands and walk with them. . . . Yes, they have been silenced . . . but this time they are not going alone.” -- Rolling Stone

Lisa Donovan at The Spin

On Friday, my colleague Lolly Bowean asked Mayor Lori Lightfoot if she plans to make an endorsement and whether she could share who it is. The mayor smiled and said only: “When or if I do, I’ll let you know.” -- Tribune

Public Schools Try Ditching A-to-F Letter Grades

“The focus is more on learning for learning’s sake because you want to learn the material and you’re actually interested in it,” said 17-year-old Taylor Daniels, who grew up going to Winnetka Public Schools District 36, which doesn’t give letter grades until mid-year 7th grade. “Teachers are able to teach more to engage the student than teaching to a test.” -- WBEZ

JUST IN: more than 100 Black Scholars, Writers, and Educators including @BarbaraRansby, @murchnik, @marclamonthill, Robin DG Kelley + have just announced their support of the movement to elect @BernieSanders.

Read the POWERFUL statement HERE: pic.twitter.com/WY8gh1lQvl

— phillip agnew (@iPhilSomething) February 29, 2020

All you need to know about our system of justice

Cyntoia Brown

51 YEARS... Cyntoia Brown was only 16 when she was sentenced to life in prison, and the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled this past week that she will have to serve 51 years before she could be eligible for release. Kut Throat had raped Brown and forced her into prostitution, making her a sex trafficking victim, as she was not an adult at the time. Brown claimed that on the day of the murder, Throat had hit her and insisted she go out and bring home money. -- Rolling Stone

TEN YEARS...When a homeless drug addict steals some underwear, what’s the right punishment?  Ten years behind bars, according to a Cook County judge who handed down the sentence to David Lundy for stealing four packs of underwear, worth $33.25, from a Family Dollar Store in 2015. -- Sun-Times

Papadopoulos

12 DAYS...Ex-Donald Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos was released from federal prison Friday morning after serving 12 days for lying to investigators about his contact with individuals tied to Russia during the 2016 campaign. In his first tweet after being released, Papadopoulos thanked "patriots" for their support of his cause and announced the pending release and available pre-order of his new book, "Deep State Target." -- CNN

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

 “Given the ongoing inspector general investigation, I am unable to comment.” -- Sun-Times

John Kass

The Tribune reported on Rahm's golden circle of campaign contributors — with about 100 of them ponying up almost half of the $30 million political war chest he's built since 2010. These aren't neighborhood guys. These are the oligarchs that run things. -- Tribune

Ta-Nehisi Coates

If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink. -- Atlantic

Carmen Fariña 

Norm Fruchter 

“I think that her appointment had a very reassuring effect on the line educators who actually are at the core of the system. I think they feel like she knows who they are, she understands what their job is, she understands what the challenges are and she’s got their back.” -- NYT

Alice Hu

The current resistance to college-in-prison is founded upon political rhetoric rather than any factual evidence. -- Harvard Political Review

'Right to Work'

First a clarification. The phrase “right to work” is a misnomer that has little to do with the right of a person to seek and accept gainful employment.  -- Robert Bruno, Sun-Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Darling-Hammond wins UFT's Dewey Award

“Teacher unions are the only ones now standing up for public education funding and for real education that goes beyond data and test prep." -- Linda Darling-Hammond

Prison funding sucks resources from schools

The United States spends $70 billion a year on incarceration, $50 billion of which comes from state governments. This matters because $9 out of every $10 in state prison funding comes out of state general funds, the same accounts that fund higher education. So it should be of no surprise that in the last two decades, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of spending on higher education. --Lindsay McCluskey,  President, United States Student Association

A question many of my students are asking

By all indications I’m an effective teacher. But I am not good enough to overcome the barriers some of my students face. I don’t know who is. But I know if next year I have 10 students who face the barriers of my lowest five then you’ll see a drop in my students’ performance. For this I’ll be held accountable. If this is the case what is the incentive to teach at a school which serves our community’s neediest families?  -- Teacher, Charles Duerr

Jailing kids for money

Then again...

First two judges shut down the country-run juvenile detention center and help privatizers secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up. Then Judges Conahan and Ciavarella pocket $2.6 million in kick-backs for sentencing kids to prison terms for minor infractions.

Conahan’s cover was blown when, in a most bizarre case, he sentenced a Wilkes-Barre high school student Hillary Transue to three months in prison for the unspeakable crime of publishing a piece of satire on a MySpace page that “mocked” an assistant principal.

Now everyone is wondering why juveniles like Hillary don’t have the right to legal counsel when they are charged.

Last year, the Juvenile Law Center, which had raised concerns about Judge Ciavarella in the past, filed a motion to the State Supreme Court about more than 500 juveniles who had appeared before the judge without representation. (NYT)

But I also wonder why the high school (name of the school is never mentioned in any of the national press coverage) would have one of its students arrested on such an outrageous charge in the first place?

Obama’s first 100 days

Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Andrew McCarthy and a host of wing-nut bloggers all claim that I’ve been palin’ around with Barack Obama. Now, I wish it were true. If it were, here are a couple of things I would put on his radar screen for his first 100 days in office.

Hey Barack, my friend--stop this

Catherine Gewertz at Edweek, “Urban Districts Urged to Prepare for Immigration Raids,” reports that horrible damage is being done to immigrant students as more and more of their parents are swept up in raids by the INS.

Rosa Maria Castañeda, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank that co-authored a report last year detailing the impact on children of three large-scale workplace raids, said that when such arrests occur, children often find themselves at school or day care with no one to pick them up, or alone at home with no adult supervision.

And this...

Colleen Shaddox, writing for Miller-McCune, “Juvenile Justice and the Theater of the Absurd,” makes a strong case against trying kids as adults:

About 200,000 minors enter the adult criminal justice system each year. Research on minors sent to the adult system says that they are more likely to re-offend and escalate into violent behavior than their peers who go to the juvenile system, where rehabilitative services are far more extensive. We also know that youths in adult prisons are at high risk for suicide and for victimization by adult inmates.

More agenda points to follow.