If you want to eliminate all poverty in 15 years, form a commission, right?

The richest 5 percent of households in Illinois have average incomes 14.6 times as large as the bottom 20 percent of households and 4.9 times as large as the middle 20 percent of households. After decades of widening inequality, Illinois's richest households have dramatically bigger incomes than its poorest households. -- Report

It's the Republicans that bring my blood to a boil. But it's always been the Democrats who bring out my worst cynicism. 

Case in point -- Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) yesterday announced the Illinois Commission on Poverty Elimination and Economic Security. OK, that sounds like a nice thing to do. I mean, if you're going to completely eliminate poverty and close the racial/wealth gap, the first thing to do is form a commission, right? 

Next, you have to set the commission's goals.

Goals for The Commission outlined in state statute include reducing poverty in Illinois by 50% by 2026, eliminating child poverty by 2031, and eliminating all poverty by 2036. 

You read it right. Pritzker's new commission aims to eliminate ALL poverty in the next 15 years and a month. And they wish to accomplish this, I suppose with a legislature seemingly bent on cutting retirees' pensions as a way of balancing the state budget. 

Also remember, this is a governor and legislature that couldn't rally enough votes in this blue state, to pass the FairTax amendment? 

I mean, these are essentially the same pols who finally passed a $15 minimum-wage bill, but one that takes 6 freakin' years to take effect. 

The Commission, which is set to meet just twice a year, is made up of 25 members: four members of the State General Assembly; one member of the judiciary; and twenty public leaders who "represent key constituencies that are impacted by poverty." Members were appointed by Pritzker, Senate President Don Harmon, House Speaker Michael Madigan, Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady, House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, and Chief Justice Anne Burke of the Illinois Supreme Court. 

From my point of view, these names would be more apt to appear atop a Widening the Wealth Gap Commission.

I'd be willing to guess that if everyone in the state made their salaries and were covered by their health insurance plans, the problem would be solved. Ah, let's do that. 

Yes, I'm cynical or at least suspicious. But I'm also willing to give it a try and if the guv appointed me, here are some suggestions I would make to at least start narrowing the great divide between rich and poor. Don't worry, I'm not suggesting killing all rich people and taking their money. That would be illegal and probably wouldn't work anyway. 

But this might... First, guarantee a living wage for all workers and a guaranteed minimum wage for everyone. Second, implement Medicare For All or some form of single-payer, universal healthcare. Third, extend free public education from Pre-K to 16 and beyond.

Best of all, it wouldn't take 15 years to do these things. Most or at least many countries have already done them. But a prereq is the complete reform of the tax code and making the wealthiest pay their fair share. Yes, as I pointed out, they just tried this and failed. Well, try again and try harder. 

How's that for a start? Let's see if Pritzker's Commission will touch any of these with a 10-foot pole. 

They hardly even touch the deeply-rooted issues of race and gender inequality. It took many years in this, the world's richest and most powerful capitalist country, to create this great racial-wealth gap. Closing it in the state of Illinois will take time and great struggle and it will take a lot more than another bureaucratic layer. First, there must be the will and cynical me doesn't see that coming from the top. 

Talk about privilege. Rich get to live longer. Poor & middle class don't.

"Poverty is a life-threatening issue for millions of people in this country, and this report confirms it."—Sen. Bernie Sanders

There are now around 100 million, or nearly a third of the U.S. population living in poverty or near poverty. This figure is missing from glowing news reports about the booming Trump economy. While there are millions of white people living in poverty, poverty rates among African-Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans run two to three times higher. 

A newly released report from the U.S. General Accounting Office on Retirement Security, commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders reveals that the rich are living longer lives, while poor and middle-income Americans are dying at a comparatively earlier age. Talk about privilege!

This from the report:

GAO found that among Americans aged 51-61 in 1992, fewer than half of those in the poorest 20 percent of America’s wealth distribution had survived by 2014—48 percent. Among the richest 20 percent, 75.5 percent were still alive. The poorest 20 percent were twice as likely to die over the 22-year period than the wealthiest 20 percent.

 GAO similarly observed this massive disparity in life expectancy when examining income and education: only half of those without college degrees and in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution survived to 2014. Among those with college degrees and in the top 20 percent, based on mid-career earnings, 80 percent were still alive.

There's some -- but not much -- mention of racial inequality in the report.

GAO also found that white households in the bottom two earnings groups had higher estimated median incomes, and white households in all earnings groups generally had greater estimated median wealth, than racial minority households in those earnings groups.

"We must put an end to the obscene income and wealth inequality in our country, and ensure living wages, quality healthcare, and retirement security for our seniors as human rights," said Sanders. "If we do not urgently act to solve the economic distress of millions of Americans, a whole generation will be condemned to an early death."

Bernie never mentions race in his introduction to the report. It seems to be his perennial blindspot. But he deserves credit for being the only candidate speaking out forcefully on income and wealth inequality.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

UIC Prof. Josh Radinsky 

"We're getting the (CReATE) band back together... Vouchers or vouchers by any other name is just onc way of minimizing choices. They call it 'school choice' but it's actually forced choice and lack of choices." -- Hitting Left

UIC Prof. David Stovall

"We're conflating test taking with learning and if you remove thousands of the poorest students who are are struggling, why wouldn't you have an increase (in CPS test scores)? -- Hitting Left

Gloria Ladson-Billings, new president of the National Academy of Education

 "For kids, it's the 'so what' question, and we typically don't have good answers for them. Our answer typically is, 'You're going to need this next year,' and kids figure out by 4th or 5th grade that we're lying." -- EdWeek  

Judge Roy Moore tells Hannity

I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother. -- Real Clear Politics

Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.” -- ShareBlue Media 

Report...

 “Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 64% of the US population, an estimated 80m households or 204 million people,” the report says. “That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.” -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are wealthier than poorest half of US

Letter: Say no to vouchers

Not only does it allow individuals to take money meant for public funding and put it in their private little piggy bank, but it will ultimately put a greater burden on the rest of us to come up with more money to fund our school system. -- Wayne Fuller, Concord Monitor 

What's the point of boasting about grad rates when most grads can't afford college?

There's been no hurricane here in IL, but the pandemic poverty in the state is every bit the disaster as any storm. It's dimming the life chances and educational opportunities for millions of young people.

While the mayor boasts about Chicago's alleged meteoric jump in graduation rates, here's another side to the story. The claims themselves, as I have often pointed out here, are misleading because, among other things, they fail to take into account mounting evidence that the recent bump in grad rates is closely connected with the decline in CPS enrollment, especially among the poorest African-American students, statistically the least likely to graduate on time.

But the story's epilogue is that college in IL has now become the domain of the wealthy and increasingly out-of-reach to the children of the poor, working and middle class, no matter which high school they attended. 

This from the Sun-Times:

Illinois’ in-state college tuition and fees ranked fifth highest in the U.S. last year, and a new report says those costs are a major reason that degrees are increasingly out-of-reach for low-income students.

Data from 2014 show low-income families in Illinois must set aside 63 percent of their total income for a student to attend a four-year institution, according to a report from The Partnership for College Completion. Middle-class families must set aside 25 percent, the study found.

About half of our state’s elementary and high school students live in poverty. The poverty rate among Chicago students is much higher -- nearly 80%.  Without massive amounts of state aid, Most students have little hope of going to college and completing their higher education. But under Gov. Rauner's regime, state aid has all but dried up. IL was one of four states that cut higher education funding over the last two years, a year-to-year difference of 68%. Those cuts mostly took place during the state’s budget impasse.

Among those threatened by the cuts are students with disabilities and special needs, also hurt by cuts in Medicare.

About half of students eligible for needs-based tuition help through Illinois’ Monetary Award Program, or MAP, didn’t’ receive it because of insufficient state funding.

Throw in the threatened deportation and loss of college funding of DACA (immigrant) students and you begin to see how bleak the prospects are for so many students.

Many of those who do graduate are fleeing the state for better college prospects.

Getting rid of the disaster that is hurricane Rauner will be a step forward, but only if it is part of a movement for radical change in state funding for education, including for free K-16 public education for all. I've yet to hear a peep about this from Rauner's leading Democratic potential opponents.

Let's keep pushing.

Whitenizing Chicago

UNEMPLOYMENT AND DISINVESTMENT by the city and its corporations are destroying neighborhoods and pushing thousands of African-American families out of Chicago and other big cities. Some call it "reverse migration" but the net effect is the whitenizing or gentrification of the cities. 

Another driving force behind this push-out of black and poor from the city, is Mayor Rahm Emanuel's capital investment plan and his closing of schools, mental health facilities, and other city services. While investment-starved neighborhoods suffer, Rahm has pumped millions into ill-conceived projects like the new DePaul basketball arena.  Rahm's policies have further isolated, destabilized and blighted south and west-side neighborhoods, creating conditions for more crime and violence. Whole neighborhoods are now marked by boarded-up homes, stores and schools as thousands of families lose homes to foreclosure.

DePaul's new $200M basketball arena.

An article in Monday's Reader calls Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, "the eviction capital" of the county. Real estate owners and management companies like Pangea and Kass are doing most of the evicting. Last year, Pangea filed more than 1,000 eviction cases, usually also seeking back rent, and won about 60 percent of them.

 "If you want to know Pangea's ambitions, they named themselves after the ancient supercontinent," says Mark Swartz, director of the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing. "They are buying up the south side."

 "The issue is unemployment, and lack of investment by the city and by companies," says alderman Leslie Hairston, whose Fifth Ward includes parts of northern South Shore. Though she says she doesn't hear much about evictions from her constituents, she wasn't surprised to learn about the higher-than-average eviction rate in South Shore. "You look at the number of people working two, three jobs just to try to make ends meet—it's challenging," she says.

Impact on education...The next time you hear Rahm or schools chief Claypool boasting about rising standardized test scores or graduation rates, consider how these jumps (if they are to be believed) correspond to the loss of CPS enrollment, especially on the part of poor and black students.

Training time

Lori Lightfoot, head of the Police Board and the Police Accountability Task Force at yesterday's city council meeting.

More Training?... I'm having a hard time following this city council debate. How many training and sensitivity sessions do you need to attend before you stop shooting an unarmed black kid 16X or gunning down an alleged teenage car thief with a bullet in the back?

Cunningham responds... Be sure and read Peter Cunningham's lengthy response in the comments section of last Thursday's blog post. Peter begins by conceding that "concentrated poverty and segregation are part of the problem." But then admits he's lost when it comes to a political strategy to solve either one.

That's a strange admission coming from someone who spent the past seven years as a policy maker at the highest levels of government. It seems to me that should have been one of the first questions Obama's people asked when interviewing him for the Asst. Sec. of Ed post. It shows that deseg and anti-poverty were not very high of the current D.O.E.'s list of priorities.

But since Cunningham is frank about being strategically clueless, I will respond to his comment more fully in the next few days. Readers are, of course, welcome to join in.


Best Tweet of the day.

Woke up this morning and found out that @realDonaldTrump has turned into @JebBush. Kafka's Metamorphosis in reverse. Cockroach into man.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) August 25, 2016

Broke on purpose: The price of 'reform' at CPS.

Tim Cawley was Byrd-Bennett's and then Claypool's  attack dog. He cut the Children and Family Benefits Unit which provided support for CPS's neediest students. 

Late last summer, in its haste to implement savage austerity measures, CPS leaders eliminated the 10-person Children and Family Benefits Unit, saying it was not vital to the core mission of educating children. The move turns out to have cost the district millions in poverty money that would have directly supported its neediest students.

Diane Fager, who launched the unit in 2005 and retired from CPS in 2014, tells Catalyst that she and others repeatedly told leaders that the unit brought in more money than it cost.

“People should know that this was not an accident. The reality is that without assistance from these kinds of programs, kids are going to school hungry so they cannot perform as well at school, and without health insurance they’re sick a lot more,” she said. “This was pointed out over and over in numerous meetings, memos and reports, and ignored, even at the cost of giving up millions of dollars in federal and state revenue.”

According to Catalyst:

 The decision to eliminate the unit was made in what, even by Chicago standards, was a chaotic moment. Forrest Claypool had just been named CEO of schools, and had pushed through an operating budget that depended on a wish: an extra $500 million from Springfield. Contract negotiations were heating up with the Chicago Teachers Union. A small group of Bronzeville activists were drawing national attention for their month-long hunger strike over the fate of Dyett High School.

And jobs were getting cut left and right, says Taalib-Din Ziyad, vice president of SEIU Local 73, which represented the unit’s school-based liaisons. The unit's manager remained at central office — despite not having any staff left.

Diane Feger

According to Fager, the real culprit here, besides Forrest Claypool, was [then-chief administrative officer] Tim Cawley, who pushed to cut any unit which had a funding sources that left it outside of his bureaucratic control.

I have written about Cawley often in these pages. Appointed by Rahm Emanuel in 2011, he was Barbara Byrd-Bennett's and then Claypool's attack dog before retiring last fall. Cawley represented the city in contract talks that eventually resulted in the first Chicago teachers' strike in a quarter century. He was the architect of the privatization of school janitorial services, a scheme that has left hundreds of CPS staff without jobs and many buildings ankle-deep in trash and principals screaming for mercy.

It was Cawley who became the main cheerleader for disinvestment in neighborhood schools and replacing them with privately-run charters. These were the very policies that led to the closing of Dyett High School and the ensuing hunger strike by parents and Bronzeville community activists that forced the school's reopening.

The dismantling of the Children and Family Benefits Unit was just one more brick in the wall that has left CPS broke on purpose. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

The mayor of San Francisco is sworn in — to boos and arrests

Valerie Jarrett on #RahmResign

“So I really shouldn’t comment on Chicago in particular because it’s under that investigation of [Loretta Lynch] hers.” In the interview with BuzzFeed at the White House Friday, Jarrett praised the protests, giving them credit for the current focus on the Chicago police.

“We’ve seen so many peaceful demonstrations. I don’t think we get sufficient credit to the demonstrators who are out there in the cold in Chicago — all over — demonstrating, trying to say we want change." -- BuzzFeed

Community activist Jared Steverson

 "As you can see, [Mayor Emanuel] is going to black colleges. He's going to places where black people and Latino people are because he wants to get us back before election time comes in the next three years," Steverson said. When asked if that could happen, Steverson said, "not at all." -- ABC7

Pedro Noguera

[ESSA] is not addressing the real issues related to poverty that are contributing to why those schools are struggling... Students respond well to teachers they know, believe in them, care about them, but also who teach in a matter that elicits a more active approach to learning, rather than just sitting and listening. -- Mother Jones

David Kirp

Mr. Cerf and Raz Baraka, who succeeded Cory Booker as mayor, recently announced that up to $12.5 million of the Zuckerberg gift will be invested in a network of “community schools” — sunrise-to-sunset schools that offer health care and social services, located in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods. -- N.Y. Times

Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan

"Families in Flint were forced to drink lead-tainted water while the administration scoffed at their concerns and cries for help. An entire generation of Michiganders now face an uncertain future because of Republican cuts to essential and life-giving services." -- Common Dreams

Rising student homelessness not an 'excuse' but a brutal fact of life at CPS

Last night I was watching CBS News Chicago. I was surprised when I saw their report on the city's homeless children, putting the number at 11,447. It sounded low to me. I assume it's from the latest report by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. But that number includes only young people aged 14-21. ABC 7 reports that there are more that 20,000 homeless students in Chicago Public Schools.

To put that in perspective, that's about one in every 20 CPS students, the great majority being African-American or Latino.

CPS's Nancy B. Jefferson school and the Juvenile Detention Center, is packed with homeless kids, many of whom have committed no crime other than being homeless.

The number of homeless families in Chicago has tripled over the last dozen years, says CCH.

Corporate school reformers love to talk about their so-called, "no excuses" schools. But homelessness is not an excuse, but a fact.

There's only a  small body of academic research and literature that focuses on the academic achievement of homeless children. But everything I've read points to the conclusion that poverty and homelessness have a much greater impact on measurable student learning outcomes than any classroom variables.

It generally indicates that homeless children score poorly on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are often required to repeat a grade.

For one thing, homeless families with children move a lot, often from shelter to shelter. That often means lots of different schools, teachers, and high absentee rates. Many CPS schools, especially charters and selective-enrollment schools tend to push homeless kids out, or not accept them at all.

Fifty-six percent of the 118 homeless Chicago families with school-aged children that were surveyed said they moved between two or three times over a three-year period, and 20 percent reported living at four to six different residences during that time period.

Meanwhile, 57 percent of parents said their child lacked an adequate study area when they were homeless, and 66 percent reported changes in their child's behavior at school since losing permanent housing. Of the families surveyed, nearly 33 percent of the children missed six days of school last year and 17 percent missed more than 10 days.

This doesn't even touch the psychological effects of homelessness on children or their susceptibility to sexual abuse and violence.

Homelessness by the numbers from CCH report:

52.3 percent: The number of renters in Chicago who are “extremely low income,” making less than $22,000 per year.

$17,160: The annual salary for someone working a full-time minimum wage job in Chicago.

44 percent: The percentage of a full-time minimum wage worker's paycheck that goes toward housing at the median fair market price in Illinois.

629,454: The number of people living in poverty in Chicago with 298,403 of those living in “extreme poverty.”

Wednesday's press conference

At Wednesday's CCH presser, Latoya Ellis, a single parent of three whose family became homeless in August due to a lack of affordable housing, spoke to the educational challenges her children, ages 8, 14 and 16, face as a result of their housing status.

"Children need structure and routine, and due to homelessness, I as a parent cannot provide that, because I have no control over certain things like what time the lights go off. My children are often left trying to do their homework by the light of the cellphone, or on the bus on the way to school the next morning or sometimes even in class the next day," she said. "There are constant distractions that keep them from sleeping and getting a good night's rest so, as a result, they sleep during class time."

With Gov. Rauner's devastating cuts in support services for homeless families and children, those numbers will certainly go up. Consider it the next time you hear the words, "no excuses" or Mayor Emanuel's call for "better parenting" or for evaluating schools and teachers primarily on the basis of student standardized test scores.

Achievement Gap or Opportunity Gap?

At last... researchers in Boston are talking about the "opportunity gap" rather than just the "achievement gap." An Annenberg Institute study, released in November, revealed stark opportunity gaps and a separate, lesser educational track for black and Latino males in Boston.

Black and Latino males collectively make up about 78 percent of Boston schools’ male population. At every stage of education, black and Latino males have limited access to rigorous coursework such as advanced work classes, elite exam schools and college readiness curricula. As a result, the report says, black and Latino males in Boston schools have lower attendance rates, higher suspension and dropout rates, lower proficiency rates and lower graduation rates than peers. -- Learning Lab

Another recent study authored by UC Berkeley prof, Bruce Fuller,  found that a significant percentage of Mexican-American children who matched their white counterparts in cognitive growth at 9 months of age had fallen behind by the time the children reached 2 years old.

These findings exist even though other research has found that based on other measures, such as social and emotional growth and physical health, young Mexican-American children are quite similar to white children.

"These youngsters grow up in warm and supportive families and that yields emotional and social agility," Fuller said in an interview. "But all that caring and support isn't necessarily infused with rich language and asking kids questions and asking kids to articulate words and their own feelings." 

Mexican-American children who demonstrated strong cognitive growth in the study were more likely to have had mothers who had completed some college, worked outside the home, and read to their children daily, the study found.

Fuller's conclusions reflect his own racial bias as well. They reflect a whitenized vision of what good parenting is. Omit assets Mexican-American children carry with them.

Studies like these shine a light on the process of  systemic social reproduction, meaning the structures and activities that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next.

For example, our increased reliance on standardized testing as the indicator of "student achievement" only serves to maintain social and economic inequality. Higher education, rather than being the great social equalizer, threatens to become the great gate keeper as tests are used increasingly to sort and track kids rather than diagnostic tools for educators. Poverty and racial discrimination are seen simply as a "excuses" for poor performance.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

A sign, with bullet holes, along the historic route from Selma to Montgomery

Joe Hopkins, Selma veteran

“My mother told me I could get killed, and I told her we’re all going to die one day, but I was 17 years old and quick so they couldn’t catch me.” — New York Times

Barack Obama

It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America. -- Selma Speech

Jelani Cobb

Ferguson’s is not a singular situation. It is an object lesson in the national policing practices that have created the largest incarcerated population in the Western world, as well as a veil of permanent racial suspicion—practices that many people believe will deliver safety in exchange for injustice. What happened in Selma is happening in Ferguson, and elsewhere, too. The great danger is not that we will discount the progress that has been made but that we have claimed it prematurely.​ -- New Yorker

Jodi Cantor, author of "The Obamas"

 "Michelle and Rahm Emanuel had almost no bond; their relationship was distant and awkward from the beginning. She had been skeptical of him when he was selected, and now he returned the favor; he was uneasy about first ladies in general..." -- Ward Room

 Robert Putnam, author of "Our Kids"

“At the beginning you don’t know you’re doing a study of the collapse of American social life — you’re doing a study of PTA membership. 'Our Kids' was like that, too. The more we investigated, the bigger we realized the problem was.” -- Washington Post

In an effort to placate anti-PARCC activists, Mayor Emanuel has signed an executive order barring the PARCC exam at the U of C Lab Schools.
— Matt Farmer (@mifarmer) March 9, 2015

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

New York Principal Carol Burris

The bizarre notion that subjecting 9-year-olds to hours of high-stakes tests is a “civil right,” is embedded in the thinking of both parties. -- The Answer Sheet

Joan McRobbie Senior Associate, CTAC 

But with rising inequality, reality is making a comeback. Many voices are re-asserting that it's not an excuse but a necessity to acknowledge that out-of-school factors associated with poverty affect school performance. -- Huffington

FOX News host  Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery

 “There really shouldn’t be public schools, should there? -- MSNBC

Noam Chomsky

 First of all, you don’t have to assess people all the time… People don’t have to be ranked in terms of some artificial [standards]. The assessment itself is completely artificial.  -- Creative by Nature

WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

Rahm Emanuel

...said Saturday that nonbinding referendums calling for an elected school board on next month's mayoral ballot are a politically inspired effort to "trick" voters at the polls because the concept is going nowhere in Springfield

"You know, the governor said he's not for it. The legislature said that they're not for it and I don't think we should actually convince (or) trick people by having a political campaign issue as a way to fixing our schools." -- Tribune 

Bob Fioretti
... said conflict of interest issues were "running amok" within the current school board and that "we all ought to be embarrassed by what we see at CPS at this point."

He said an elected school board should represent "the diversity of our city so that we have the people that matter most in making those decisions — teachers, our parents, our students." -- Tribune  

Chuy Garcia

"Putting it into the hands of voters and the people as the rest of the state does is a good practice," he told the forum. "We need to try something else." --Tribune 

Linda Darling-Hammond

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. middle school teachers work in schools where more than 30 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. This is by far the highest rate in the world… The next countries in line after the United States are Malaysia and Chile. -- Want to Close the Achievement Gap?

More LDH

Now we have international evidence about something that has a greater effect on learning than testing: teaching. 

Tom Loveless, at the Brookings Institution on NY test scores

“If New York schools are in a state of crisis, they’ve been in a state of crisis for 20 years.” -- New York Times

Majority of U.S. students now living in poverty even while economy improves

“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.

The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton reports that for the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students live in poverty, This according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has "profound implications for the nation".

Yes, the very idea that the majority of our school children are living below the poverty line in this, the world's wealthiest country, especially at a time when the overall economy is improving, should make educators and policy makers sit up and take notice.

“A lot of people at the top are doing much better", says Michael A. Rebell [remind me to steal his name] of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University. "But the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.”

 More from Layton:

Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers.

Current destabilizing school reform policies which punish and close high-poverty schools, call for more unfunded school seat time, new standards attached to high-stakes testing, and school privatization, not only miss the point but are actually intensifying the trend towards concentrated poverty.

The growing income gap, combined with the lack of adequate investment in schools and communities, pose the greatest threat to national security and don't bode well either for the future of our schools or for a democratic society.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

President Robert Kelly of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 announces the organization's endorsement of Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for mayor of Chicago. | Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times

ATU Local 308 Pres. Robert Kelly 

“I’m a citizen of the city of Chicago. I’m tired of reading the papers and hearing about murders and school closings and transit issues,” said Robert Kelly, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents CTA train operators. “It just makes me sick to my stomach. I’m tired of it, and so is everybody else. 

Kelly’s remarks came as the local he presides over endorsed Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, one of Emanuel’s most prominent challengers in the upcoming February election. -- Early & Often

George Will

Bush’s support of Common Core is much less nuanced and persuasive, and there seems to be condescension in his impatience with the burden he bears of taking seriously the most important reason for rejecting Common Core. It is not about the content of the standards, which would be objectionable even if written by Aristotle and refined by Shakespeare. Rather, the point is that, unless stopped now, the federal government will not stop short of finding in Common Core a pretext for becoming a national school board.

Bush says “standards are different than curriculum” and: “I would be concerned if we had a national curriculum influenced by the federal government. My God, I’d break out in a rash.”  -- Washington Post

"Public school bashers"

David Sirota

Taken together with the new Department of Education numbers, we see that for all the elite media’s slobbering profiles of public school bashers like Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg, for all of the media’s hagiographic worship of scandal-plagued activist-profiteers like Michelle Rhee, and for all the “reform” movement’s claims that the traditional public school system and teachers unions are to blame for America’s education problems, poverty and economic inequality are the root of the problem.  -- Salon

 Palm Beach Cty. Board member Debra Robinson

"We're not going to approve these charters that just fill out the paperwork properly and don't have anything special to offer our children. This is an act of civil disobedience, because some of this stuff we're told to do is crazy." -- Sun-Sentinel

Author Anne Farrow

Slavery in America was not a footnote, not "the sad chapter" of our history but the cornerstone of our making. -- Philly.Com, Shrouded History of Slavery

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

St. Louis Rams protest Ferguson before Sunday's game with Oakland

Cook County Clerk, David Orr

“The mayor, with millions, has a hard time getting signatures on his petitions. Chuy Garcia in three weeks time, spending no money — all volunteers — got 60-some thousand. In another week, they probably would have gotten 90,000.”  -- Early & Often

Marcia Chatelain, Georgetown University. Started #FergusonSyllabus

 Every school isn’t the same.  Every school doesn’t want to delve into this issue in the same way.  And so for younger kids, I think we really needed to focus on feelings, what is it like when people are anxious or afraid or scared, and a lot of resources on children’s books that talk about emotions during times that are overwhelming.

For slightly older kids, I think that the paradigm of fairness, what happens when people feel like something is unfair, what happens when people feel like their rights aren’t being respected, you can engage in that conversation.  And for older kids, I think that this is an amazing civic lesson about the various responsibilities people have in a community and what happens when that trust is broken.  -- PBS News Hour

Rich Lowry, National Review

"The lessons of Ferguson are quite basic. Don't rob a convenience store..." -- NBC Meet the Press

Hillary: The sounds of silence

Hillary Clinton on Ferguson

"                         " -- New York Observer

Deval Patrick

"When democrats do stand for something, or as I have said in the past, grow a backbone ... we win." -- MSNBC

"Nor shall any state deprive any person of life . . . without due process of law." US Constitution, 14th Amendment
— Lisa Bloom (@LisaBloom) November 29, 2014

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Lots of teachers among 400,000 who marched in N.Y. yesterday. 

Linda Darling-Hammond

“The poverty rates of countries in PISA are associated with how kids do overall on the tests. The United States poverty rate far outstrips the other countries with one out of four children here living in poverty.” -- AZED News

Laura Washington

 If Chicago voters really want to divorce the mayor, a Lewis/ Fioretti union could be a marriage made in heaven. A Lewis entry would up the 2015 ante and deliver a potent one-two punch to Emanuel. Lewis and Fioretti would be friendly opponents. They talk, and they agree on most issues, such as taxing the city’s bigwigs and calling for an elected school board. -- Sun-Times

Ben Joravsky

It doesn't matter if Bob Fioretti or Karen Lewis or Bob Shaw or Amara Enyia or Brian Urlacher (why not?—the dude just quit his TV gig) are aiming for the same anti-Rahm vote. The only real issue is whether the anti-Rahm vote outnumbers the pro-Rahm one. If so, Mayor Rahm won't get the 50-percent-plus-one vote he needs to win outright. And we go to the runoff... Actually, in my moments of delusion, I convince myself that the anti-Rahm vote is so large that Rahm won't even make the runoff. -- Politics Early & Often

Janet Garrett

Public education is one of the foundations of our democracy. It is, arguably, the only equalizing force in an otherwise unequal system... People ask me from time to time what I think of the state of public education. I tell them we desperately need educational reform. What children need is not to be taught how to pass endless tests. They need to be taught problem solving, creativity and, most of all, a love of learning. We must give them the tools they need to learn. We are teaching children, today, for a world we cannot foresee. What we need is a new, child centered, not profit driven, education agenda. -- WaPo, "Why a kindergarten teacher is running for Congress"

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Tells AFT delegates, "We will go forward together."

Rev. Wm. Barber II, president of NC's NAACP chapter 

“If they’ve got to fight us this hard, we’ve got to be some bad somebodies,” Barber said eliciting a standing ovation from the crowd. -- Teacher union convention opens with fiery speech

Salim Muwakkil

Chronic poverty is criminogenic; the links are thick and reinforced by rigorous scholarship. In Chicago's communities, rates of violent crime correlate to poverty rates in ways that make that point irrefutable. There is little dispute that if violence prevention is the goal, reducing poverty is the most effective tactic. -- Chicago Tribune

Alex Caputo-Pearl, new UTLA pres. 

The new L.A. union leader framed his remarks around defining “social movement unionism,” which he said is “explicit about fighting for racial and social justice. It’s explicit in fighting against privatization. It’s explicit in taking people on who need to be taken on, including a lot of Democrats.” He added: “It’s a unionism that is willing to strike. It’s a unionism that is willing to build to a strike and strike if that’s what we need to do.” -- At AFT Convention 

Clarence Page

Obama has boosted border security and deported so many undocumented immigrants (a record-breaking 409,849 in 2012) that the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic rights organization, has branded him "deporter-in-chief." No, that was not a compliment. -- Chicago Tribune

New study on inequity and teacher "effectiveness" misses the mark

Yes, there's lots of evidence to show poor kids and children of color are generally being taught by teachers with less experience (or no experience) which puts them at a severe disadvantage. But the Huffington headline calling schools "racist" is one-sided and misleading. Credit instead should go to Race To The Top. To TFA. To the power philanthropists, corporate reformers, re-segregationists and private charter operators. They all contribute on this.

But a recent study from Center For American Progress takes this worthwhile exposure of discrimination and inequality to a different level. After basing their study on the new evaluation practices and teacher rating systems now in place in Louisiana and Massachusetts and accepting the premise that teacher quality can be assessed entirely or mainly on the basis of student test scores, (La. requires every teacher to be evaluated, with 50% of the evaluation rating based on test scores or  "student growth") they conclude that minority students have "less effective teachers" in general.

My problem with this broader, negative assessment of teachers who teach in schools with high concentrations of poverty, is that it measures the symptom and not the cause of the so-called achievement gap. The results from tests that are being used to measure teacher effectiveness are often correlating more with parent income, rather than what students are actually learning or anything going on in the classroom. And the so-called VAM or value-added model of teacher evaluation has already been proven to be flawed and unreliable. In Florida, for example,  hundreds of teachers were evaluated based on test scores of students they never taught or in subject areas they didn't teach.

_________________________

The Value-Added Metric Used to Evaluate Teachers

y = Xβ + Zv + ε where β is a p-by-1 vector of fixed effects; X is an n-by-p matrix; v is a q-by-1 vector of random effects; Z is an n-by-q matrix; E(v) = 0, Var(v) = G; E(ε) = 0, Var(ε) = R; Cov(v,ε) = 0. V = Var(y) = Var(y - Xβ) = Var(Zv + ε) = ZGZT + R.

_________________________

Studies like this and the recommendations that follow, miss the point. It's not just a matter of more and better professional development or redistributing effective and experienced teachers to resourced-starved or low-performing schools -- although that could help. Instead there needs to be more valid and reliable ways of evaluating and sustaining teachers as well as a focus on equity, desegregation, and improving the conditions, in and out of school, of students and families living in poverty.

Otherwise the focus shift entirely on teachers and we get to the point where the same teachers who are rated "highly-effective" when they are teaching in higher-income schools will suddenly be rated "ineffective" when teaching low-income kids. Not a good way to incentive-ize a more equitable distribution of teaching talent.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Team Englewood at LTAB

Team Englewood Spoken Word Team

"Hide Your Schools, Hide Your Homes, Hide Your Children, 'Cause [Rahm's] wrecking it all." -- Louder Than A Bomb

 Fran Spielman, Sun-Times reporter

"What is the one thing that trumps money? Movement." -- Rahm’s re-election and GOP gov race

Fox Business commentator Todd Wilemon

"If You’re Poor, Stop Being Poor." -- TruthDig

The Reader's Political Editor, Mick Dumke

 When asked why the unions want Toni Preckwinkle to run for mayor: 

"Well she's not Rahm Emanuel, for starters. She hasn't declared war on the teachers union and launched into school 'reform'. She's a former school teacher. And it's not just the teachers union. Other unions are upset with him for pension reform and other matters." -- Rahm’s re-election and GOP gov race