Kansas joins the anti-CRT MAGA madness.

Dorothy: 'I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.' 
Toto: Nope. It's 2021 and we're still in freak'n Kansas.

State Sen. Caryn Tyson, R-Parker, announced last week that she would be preparing a bill that would ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in all Kansas schools. It's worth noting that Critical Race Theory isn't now and never has been taught in the state's public schools, unfortunately. It's just that CRT has become the latest Republican racist dog whistle in America's white belt. 

Jayhawk State Republicans are the latest to join the MAGA feeding frenzy on public schooling. More than a dozen red states are currently pushing bills targeting anti-racist teaching. 

Actually, it was Idaho that became the first to formally pass a law banning CRT from the schools.

Tyson's bill will likely succeed given that the GOP still dominates state politics as it has since Kansas became a state back in 1861. Back then, of course, the Republican Party in Kansas was quite different, embracing "free state" politics and opposing slavery. My, how things have changed.

For today's Kansas, this is just another brick in the wall, a continuation of the state's legacy of school segregation and an imposed right-wing/religious curriculum on its schools. 

It wasn't for nothing that the 1954 landmark court decision supposedly outlawing school segregation was called: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. 

Carrying on the tradition...in 1999 the Kansas Board of Education voted to delete virtually any mention of evolution from the state's science curriculum, in one of the most far-reaching efforts by right-wing creationists to supplant science teaching with religious doctrine.

The Topeka Capital-Journal  editorialized at the time that ''creationism is as good a hypothesis as any for how the universe began.''

And on it goes. 

Nikole Hanna-Jones

The new curriculum battlefield stretches far beyond Kansas and beyond K-12 education. Today, in North Carolina, UNC’s board of trustees is scheduled to hold a special meeting amid intensifying pressure over its failure to approve tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The New York Times Magazine.

Professor Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project, a multimedia series from The Times Magazine that re-examined the legacy of slavery in the United States and provided educators with the tools they needed to do authentic teaching about race and racism. The use of the 1619 Project by teachers in school districts across the country prompted the right-wing backlash that we're seeing in states like Kansas.

She has gained the public support of more than 200 academics and other cultural figures who published a letter last month saying the board had displayed a “failure of courage.”

On Friday, UNC students held a protest in support of tenure for Hannah-Jones. Hopefully, their voices will be heard. 

Trying to wrap my head around: Fascists vs. top U.S. general over 'Critical Race Theory'

Tucker Carlson: Critical race theory will lead to the genocide of white Americans.

Hard to wrap my head around this one...A battle royale between MAGA white supremacists and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over Critical Race Theory. No, I'm not kidding. And it's no joke. 

Gen. Milley: 

“I do think it’s important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read...and it is important that we train and we understand,” Milley said. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin,” Milley said during the hearing. “That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding about the country from which we are here to defend?”

 Tucker Carlson:

He's not just a pig, he's stupid. So, Mark Milley reads Mao to understand Maoism. He reads communists to understand communism. But it's interesting that he doesn't read white supremacists to understand white supremacy. Why not? Go to the source.

Former POTUS:

Trump, who bypassed other top military officials to promote Milley to the top uniformed military post in 2019. “I watched the statements of some others, your head of the Navy, it was pathetic. “They didn’t talk that way when I was around, I can tell you. They didn’t talk that way or I would have gotten rid of them in two minutes.” 

Contrast this with the way they MAGAs destroyed Colin Kaepernick's football career after he took a knee against racism. They claimed he was "disrespecting our men and women in uniform."

Physician, heal thyself... Conservative cold-warriors of both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump variety, posing as oracles of democracy (everywhere but here) need to take a hard look in the mirror. Here's anti-Trump conservative, Jay Nordlinger writing in National Review, 

For decades, I heard from the Left that Fidel Castro was popular with “his people.” For many years now, I have heard the same about Vladimir Putin and Russia — from the Right, usually. The answer in both cases: If that’s true, why doesn’t he allow free and fair elections, to prove it? 

The question he should be asking is, why don't we? 

Republicans on Tuesday blocked the most ambitious voting rights legislation to come before Congress in a generation, dealing a blow to Democrats’ attempts to counter a wave of state-level ballot restrictions and supercharging a campaign to end the legislative filibuster.

WaPo reports at least 250 new restrictive voting laws have now been proposed in 43 states. It's impossible for former colonial powers to credibly call for "democracy" in other countries when white supremacy and fascism are growing trends at home. 

No, not in Xinjiang... but in Canada where for decades, Indigenous children were taken from their families, sometimes by force, and housed in crowded, church-run boarding schools, where they were abused and prohibited from speaking their languages. Thousands vanished altogether. Now, the remains of as many as 751 people, mainly indiginous children, had been found in unmarked graves on the site of another former Indian boarding school.

Fearful of confronting their own colonial and imperial histories, the new Cold Warriors are arrogantly targeting China once again. They are bankrolling and encouraging secessionist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and sending warships into the South China Sea. That's how cold war turns to hot war. 

R.I.P. ~ One of my favorite singer/slide guitarists from back in the day, Ellen McIlwane who played alongside the great ones, but never got the credit she deserved. 

“The guys all had their girlfriends along, and I was relegated to being one of the girlfriends until we got onstage,” she told the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

George Clooney and a group of A-listers, including Don Cheadle and Kerry Washington, are working with the Los Angeles Unified School District to fill that gap by launching an academy that promises to provide education and practical training in the arts and sciences of filmmaking to marginalized communities.

Linda Darling-Hammond on Clooney's new school

 “Charity is no substitute for justice,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, the president of the California State Board of Education. “It’s great that people are making these investments, but we have a bigger job to do.” -- New York Times

Joe Rufo, Trump's new point man on education

“We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” -- Washington Post

 Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker 

...said today that families can expect school to look "a lot more like it did before the pandemic." -- Boston Herald

Tucker Carlson spews anti-Lightfoot racism

We want to start with an insurrection — an insurrection against the rule of law, against civilization itself — that’s been going on for more than a year in the city of Chicago. Since the death of George Floyd last May, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has embraced every part of the equity and inclusion agenda. --RCP

Fareed Zakaria 

The decay of American democracy is real. It’s not a messaging or image problem. Until we can repair that, I’m not sure we can truly say America is back. -- Washington Post

Hunter Biden (Oink!)

 He referred to Asian women as “yellow” in a January 2019 text to his cousin who was asking about the type of women he preferred. -- Daily Mail 

Dr. Anthony Fauci

"The people who are giving the ad hominems are saying, 'Ah, Fauci misled us. First he said no masks, then he said masks. Well, let me give you a flash. That's the way science works. You work with the data you have at the time." -- Axios

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Detroit residents line up to be tested for the coronavirus in April. 

Prof. Kim Phillips-Fein, author 

“There is a way that these crises fall with a different weight on people based on social class, even though there’s a strong rhetoric of ‘We’re all in it together,’ that’s not really the case.” -- New York Times

Prof. Brandi T. Summers, author, educator

But our cities have long kept their black residents contained and at the margins. Populations trapped in place are easier to price-gouge and police. Capitalism and immobility work hand in hand. -- New York Times Review

 Ann Trent, 72, of Manhattan 

“They don’t care about us,” she said on Saturday. She sat on a bench at the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge as a steady stream of mask-free sightseers and bicyclists passed her by, and she mused, “What happened to all of us protecting everyone else?” -- NY Post

The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and respected medical journals

 The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear.  -- Editorial

Barack Obama 

 The virus has “torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.” -- Speech to Class of 2020

Charles Blow

Trump was elected to restore the cultural narrative of the primacy of whiteness. Now, with the colossal disaster of his Covid-19 response threatening his re-election prospects, Trump is attempting to draft Obama once again as his primary opponent. -- New York Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Trump's gun thugs storm MI legislature. He calls them, "very good people."

Brittany Packnett, activist, educator

“The Michigan demonstrations "are what happens when people of racial privilege confuse oppression with inconvenience.” -- AP

David Axelrod & David Plouffe

“Biden in the Basement” is not a strong enough show to hold the audience. -- New York Times

Prof. Anita Hill

 “Joe Biden has denied Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations, but that should not be the end of the inquiry. Given the significance of this moment, the allegations against both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump should be investigated, with results that are “made available to the public.” -- New York Times

Tony Utano, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100

“The MTA has to recognize this with more than just thanks and praise. They need to put that thanks and praise into my members’ paychecks. You can’t keep asking people to come to work and carry such a heavy burden for the same rate of pay. It’s just not right.” -- 98 transit workers dead from coronavirus

Rev. William J. Barber

In a country as wealthy as the United States, poverty is a political choice, and it is time for real solutions that provide lasting freedom from fear and want. -- CNN

Peter Lynn, head of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

“There is a staggering overrepresentation of black people in homelessness, and that is not based on poverty,” he said. “That is based on structural and institutional racism.” -- New York Times

Ella Fitzgerald. Born on this day in 1917.

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

ELLA FITZGERALD sang jazz in a voice so pure and perfected that it admitted no pain -- and America loved her for it. In her sound we soared over the darkest passages of our nation's history, to a place where race and class lost all dominion. -- Nina Bernstein, New York Times

Growing up in poverty and a shattered home life, Ella survived on the streets of Harlem by hustling and engaging in petty crime. Smithsonian Curator of American Music John Hasse says they were terrible days. "It was a really tough time: segregation, the Great Depression, poverty, unemployment."

She was confined to a reformatory for more than a year after she was an orphaned teen-ager.

According to Bernstein, 

The unwritten story survives in the recollections of former employees of the New York State Training School for Girls at Hudson, N.Y., and in the records of a government investigation undertaken there in 1936, about two years after Miss Fitzgerald left. State investigators reported that black girls, then 88 of 460 residents, were segregated in the two most crowded and dilapidated of the reformatory's 17 "cottages," and were routinely beaten by male staff.

At a time of renewed calls for institutions to rescue children from failed families, this lost chapter in the life of an American icon illuminates the gap between a recurrent ideal and the harsh realities of the child welfare system.

Like Miss Fitzgerald, most of the 12- to 16-year-old girls sent to the reform school by the family courts were guilty of nothing more serious than truancy or running away. Like today's foster children, they were typically victims of poverty, abuse and family disruption; indeed, many had been discarded by private foster care charities upon reaching a troublesome puberty.

Later, E.M O'Rourke, one of Ella's teachers remembered her as a model student.

"I can even visualize her handwriting -- she was a perfectionist," she recalled. There was a fine music program at the school, she said, and a locally celebrated institution choir.

But Ella Fitzgerald was not in the choir: it was all white.

"We didn't know what we were looking at," Mrs. O' Rourke said. "We didn't know she would be the future Ella Fitzgerald.

After her talent was finally recognized, Ella was paroled to Chick Webb's band. The rest is history.

Food for thought for teachers... Her former school superintendent Thomas Tunney recounts:

If she was almost lost to us, how many like her have been? "How many Ellas are there? She turned out to be absolutely one of a kind. But all the other children were human beings, too. In that sense, they are all Ellas."

How many Ella's are sitting in your classroom?

PA election another hopeful sign for Dems in midterms

Emergence of Women's March and new student (anti-gun) movements could be key to midterm elections. 

“Just two years ago, Trump won this district by 20 points. Two years before that, Democrats didn’t even bother running an opponent against the Republican incumbent. You know, I’m really enjoying this radical new Democratic strategy called ‘trying.’” — Samantha Bee

Trump and the GOP suffered another major defeat this week with the election of Conor Lamb over wing-nut Republican Rick Saccone in the PA congressional race. While the vote was close, there was no way, under ordinary circumstances, that a Democrat, even a pro-gun, anti-abortion Democrat -- a Republican wolf in Democrat sheep's clothing (sorry) -- like Lamb, could have won. But these are anything but ordinary circumstances.

Actually, Lamb only carried one of the four counties (Allegheny) in the district. But it was enough. He owes his victory to an aggressive field operation, strong union support and the reality that he was running against Trump more than Saccone.

The overwhelming Trump vote here in 2016 belied that fact that there are more registered Democrats than Republicans in the district. Trump's win was key in his carrying the state by less than a percentage point, or about 40,000 votes. Clinton's loss in PA was key to the Democrat's defeat  despite Clinton winning the popular vote by nearly 4 million votes.

The difference now was that Democrats "really tried" as Samantha Bee pointed out, and that many white district Trump  voters have become disenchanted and either stayed home or voted for Lamb.

Trump won whites with some or no college education by 39 points, a wider margin than any candidate since at least 1980.

NPR reports:

There are no exit polls to know for sure how this group voted Tuesday, but Lamb made clear appeals to them and it would be impossible to make up a 20-point gap without at least some crossover. In fact, dozens of precincts went more Democratic than in the 2016 election.

Lamb benefited from Saccone's history of supporting "right to work" legislation in the state Legislature. The district has a sizable number of union households that might have been willing to support a different Republican candidate, but unions and the Lamb campaign were able to define Saccone as anti-union.

Black women voters were key in AL election win. 

Lamb's win, on the heels of Doug Jones' narrow senate race victory over Trump-backed, white nationalist, child molester Roy Moore in Alabama could signal a Dem tsunami in midterm elections. That win came as a result of huge black voter turnout organized mainly by African-American women.

The difference in this western PA district of 700,000 is that only 2% are African-American. Seventy-one percent of residents (500,438) are registered to vote. Democrats hold a majority — 46% to 41% Republican voters.

Note that there are 118 Republicans sitting in seats Trump won by less than the 18th Congressional District in PA. Dems need to flip a net of 24 seats to take back control of the House.

Of course, Democrats are quite capable of a blowing it, even while riding the anti-Trump wave. Encouraging signs for them are the emergence of the "me too" and Women's March movement (Trump won among white women voters in 2016) along with a new post-Parkland youth and student movement.  Both of which should produce a wealth of new anti-Trump midterm voters.

However, if the Democrats are banking on more pro-gun, anti-abortion candidates like Lamb, they will suffer the consequences.

A 'menu of disinvestment' leads to mass exodus of black students from Chicago schools.

The artist Jacob Lawrence depicted the Great Migration in 1941.

“It’s a menu of disinvestment,” says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Kalyn Belsha's excellent piece (Thousands of black students leave Chicago for other segregated districts), in the Chicago Reporter helps explain so much about the dramatic demographic shifts taking place in American cities. The whitening of the cities, and of Chicago in particular, isn't happenstance. Rather, it's the result of conscious planning and implementing a set of policies initiated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel which include disinvestment, the closing of schools and elimination of basic social services in already devastated black communities.

The result in Chicago has been a mass exodus or reverse migration by thousands African-American families. That exodus is larger than in any other metropolitan area in the country. It's cleared the way for gentrification on a mass scale and a weakening of black community political power, historically a key oppositional base for resistance to both Republican and Democratic machine politics.

Belsha writes:

Chicago was once a major destination for African-Americans during the Great Migration, but experts say today the city is pushing out poor black families. In less than two decades, Chicago lost one-quarter of its black population, or more than 250,000 people.

In the past decade, Chicago’s public schools lost more than 52,000 black students. Now, the school district, which was majority black for half a century, is on pace to become majority Latino. Black neighborhoods like Austin have experienced some of the steepest student declines and most of the school closures and budget cuts.

A common refrain is that Chicago’s black families are “reverse migrating” to Southern cities with greater opportunities, like Atlanta and Dallas. But many of the families fleeing the poorest pockets of Chicago venture no farther than the south suburbs or northwest Indiana. And their children end up in cash-strapped segregated schools like the ones they left behind, a Chicago Reporter investigation found.

The loss of so many thousands of students living in poverty may also explain the sudden, "miraculous" bump in test scores and graduation rates at CPS, now being lauded by the mayor. This, in a school system marked by instability, where there's been no corresponding input of resources or classroom/teacher supports. Neither has there been marked improvement in the lives of most CPS students outside of school that would account for such a bump.

We can only conclude that this addition by subtraction has to do with changing the students rather than with the mayor's "reforms".

On the other hand, as African-American families leave Chicago, the percentage of poor black students in the suburbs has grown dramatically, straining already cash-strapped school districts.

High-poverty districts in northwest Indiana that took in many CPS transfers have also seen their budgets slashed in recent years after lawmakers rejiggered the state’s school funding formula and also spent more on charter schools and private-school vouchers. 

“It’s a menu of disinvestment,” says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago. “The message that public policy sends to black families in the city is that we’re not going to take care of you and if you just keep going away, that’s OK.”

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.

Trump election has reformers reconsidering 'groupthink'.

Credit: Creative Commons/AFGE

"Ed reformers are just waiting for their turn to talk. They only want to talk about themselves. Anything you say, they just want to tell you, 'Charter schools are great.' A parent can tell them, 'I broke my foot.' And a reformer will say, 'You know what's good for that? Charter schools!'" -- Education Post's Chris Stewart 

For most of the past three decades, school reformers have been focused on dismantling traditional, mainly urban public school systems, replacing traditional public schools with a hodgepodge of market-oriented, tech-driven, resegregated and union-free "choice" options -- mainly, privately-run charter schools and school vouchers.

The unintended, or sometimes intended, consequence of these reforms is a steady rollback of the genuine reforms won by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s (the second Reconstruction period in our history). It was those reforms, limited and fleeting as they may have been, which, from 1968-88, generated the greatest educational gains for poor children this nation has ever seen.

But what we're seeing now is an increasingly racially re-segregated, two-tiered system made up of unregulated selective, heavily-resourced, high-performing schools for the few, and a collapsing infrastructure of resource-starved public schools for the many, especially in areas of concentrated urban and rural poverty.

Market-driven reform crosses traditional party lines and is based within a handful of conservative think tanks and policy groups like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Fordham Institute, and underwritten by high-powered philanthropists like billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg,  the Walton Family, the New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), and others.

It's actually difficult for me to call them "reformers" since, for the past 16 years, they have captured (or been captured by) the U.S. Dept. of Education bureaucracy, which under a string of ed secretaries (Paige, Spellings, Duncan, and King),has become a bulwark of standardization, privatization and failed top-down initiatives. In other words, the status quo.

But the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of choice supporter Betsy DeVos as the next secretary of education, have ironically thrown the current corporate and choice reformers into a state of panic and confusion. Why? Because even though they and Trump/DeVos share a common view of choice, charters and vouchers (a sticking point for some), throwing in with Trump's confederacy of alt-right white nationalists and educational know-nothings would widen the chasm between themselves and their potential customer base. A no-no for anyone working in the corporate world.

That potential base is mainly the sea of dissatisfied, largely black and Latino public school parents, many of whom have looked to charters and vouchers as potential escape routes from their faltering, underfunded and shuttered neighborhood schools.

The election of Trump has also thrown a monkey wrench into their efforts to organize, co-opt, or at least engage with that base as well as with union teachers, young progressive educators and policy people (ie. Teach for America alums) and school/community activists who are repulsed by Trump and the Republicans.

This hoped-for dialogue with progressives was a task assigned to former Duncan assistant Peter Cunningham and his on-line Eli Broad-funded journal Education Post.

So far, Cunningham's "let's find common ground" approach to the progressives has been little more than a veil. A trap set to draw them in without budging on any important issues. And the real problem is that it hasn't produced the hoped-for results. That's because the reformers are self-critical about style, but so far, not about content.

Sensing this failure, Cunningham has dropped all pretenses and sharpened his attacks on teacher unions, opt-out parents, and polemicising against school integration efforts. He's really sharpened his polemical knife for any and all who want caps on charter school expansion. Since the campaign began, national civil rights groups like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have actually hardened their stance against charters and vouchers.

So much for "common ground"...

More proof that forced integration didn't work. @mikeklonsky Lamenting segregation is just an excuse to avoid improving schools.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 16, 2016

@leoniehaimson Recruiting a small percentage of POC doesn't change the fact that opt out is largely driven by middle class whites.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) April 24, 2016

At a recent AEI conference, choice reformers appeared to taking a self-critical approach and re-evaluating their strategies. Among the hottest topics was, what they called, "race-based" reform.

AEI's Rick Hess, who hosted the conference, writes: 

There was a willingness to talk frankly but in measured tones about disagreements. Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute pointed out that, for more than a decade, education reform has been approached as a race-based endeavor and questioned the wisdom and the desirability of this shift...

 There was a recognition that groupthink is a problem for all of us. AEI's Andy Smarick observed, "We all tend to surround ourselves with people who agree with our views. Then we wind up with an echo chamber. 

It's nice to know that some reformers are reconsidering groupthink, at least for now, in the face of Trumpism. Maybe others will follow. As for civil discourse about race and reform...I'm not holding my breath.

But the Trump/DeVos assault on public education should push choice, charter and voucher proponents to reconsider, not only their style, but substance as well.

'Millennial' voters not just white

"Show the younger generation what standing up looks like," Chance the Rapper at yesterday's free concert.

Please, no more hand-wringing about under-voting, so-called "millennials". I say, so-called, because I don't really think there's one such thing as millennials. Of course I know there are young people who came of age by the year 2000. The problem is, the way the term is used in media and even by academics, it's come to mean young white people/voters/consumers. Don't believe me? Close your eyes and imagine a millennial. Who do you see?

The corporate world is smart enough to see black millennials as a vast potential profit center and for their role as "culture creators". But as you can imagine, they fail to mention the stark racial disparities in the population of incarcerated youth. Among the estimated 717,800 men ages 18 to 29 who were incarcerated at midyear 2010, 37% (290,100) were black and 23% (180,400) were Hispanic.

Here's a survey done by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics which made me cringe:

Asked about the nation's future, 51 percent of those ages 18 to 29 said they feel "fearful," while just 20 percent picked "hopeful." In responding to the question, which hadn't been asked in previous polls, every demographic group felt more fearful than hopeful, the institute said, with white women exhibiting the most anxiety, at 60 percent fearful. 

I can't help but wonder which millennials are even accessible to Harvard researchers? How about Spanish-speaking immigrant youth or young African-American men in what's left of urban public housing? Or in prison.

While there is some cultural overlap, black, Latino, urban poor men, women don't occupy the same space as middle-class or wealthy white youth when it comes to education, consumption, or voting. Averaging them all together is misleading.

For example, millennial 3rd-party voting has been limited almost exclusively to white people. While Clinton holds a 36-point advantage over Trump in most polls, there's no sense even asking black or Latino youth if they voted for Trump.

In 2012, 18-29 years-old accounted for 19% of the electorate nationally. This year, it's likely to be around the same with youth voting for Clinton by an estimated 28% over Trump. But when you look more closely at the numbers you find that black youth out-voted white youth  in '08 and by about 8% again in 2012. Will that happen again this year? It depends on what's happening and what has happened already on the ground.

Yesterday in Chicago, for example, where early voting numbers (more than 350,000) have smashed records set in 2008, hometown favorite Chance the Rapper hosted and headlined a free concert at Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park called "Parade to the Polls." Concertgoers, led by organizers from Black Youth 100 Project, Chicago Votes and other groups, then marched with CTR to the nearest available early voting location, Cook County's early voting supercenter at 15 West Washington Street, where the line to get in the door spanned nearly two full city blocks.

Much better than hand-wringing.

After a free concert in Grant Park, @chancetherapper led thousands in a #paradetothepolls on the eve of #ElectionDay in downtown Chicago. pic.twitter.com/gQpidoVEWp

— The Chicago Reporter (@ChicagoReporter) November 8, 2016

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman

"I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting. I wasn't trespassing, I wasn't engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters." -- Huffington Post

Racist Derek Black's epiphany 

He studied the 8th century to the 12th century, trying to trace back the modern concepts of race and whiteness, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. “We basically just invented it,” he concluded. -- Washington Post

Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP

“The NAACP’s resolution is not inspired by ideological opposition to charter schools but by our historical support of public schools ― as well as today’s data and the present experience of NAACP branches in nearly every school district in the nation. Our NAACP members, who as citizen advocates, not professional lobbyists, are those who attend school board meetings, engage with state legislatures and support both parents and teachers.” -- Huffington Post

Northwestern Prof Joseph Ferrie on New inequality Study

 New research suggests that social mobility in America may be even more limited than researchers have realized. “Any measure of mobility we have is too high. Whatever you thought, it’s worse.” -- Washington Post

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker

“In our democracy, those who vote decide everything; those who count the vote decide nothing,” -- Miami Herald

Trump: "Stop and frisk" isn't racial profiling it's stopping "bad people."

"But we need — Lester, we need law and order. And we need law and order in the inner cities..." -- Trump

I actually would have found at least the second half of the debate entertaining, if the stakes weren't so damn high. The Daily Show's Trevor Noah summed it up this way:

"Welcome to the real-life version of Twitter, people," Noah said. "You know that at that point, Lester Holt wasn't even moderating anymore, he was just eating popcorn with everyone else."

I admit, after watching the poorly-run Clinton campaign slide so badly since the convention, I was concerned that Donald Trump would carry his momentum into the debate. Boy, was I wrong.

An apparently sedated Hillary Clinton, halting and self-constrained, waited patiently for her moment. Then she took her best shots, in response to Trump's never ending braggadocio (his word, not mine) about his mythical business acumen, deal-making artfulness and ability to avoid paying any taxes (a charge he never denied), Hillary laid it on him.

First on his unwillingness to allow us to see his tax returns.

CLINTON: For 40 years, everyone running for president has released their tax returns. You can go and see nearly, I think, 39, 40 years of our tax returns, but everyone has done it. We know the IRS has made clear there is no prohibition on releasing it when you’re under audit.

Then on taxes. Remember Trump has been maintaining that corporations are fleeing the U.S. to evade high taxes. But Trump seems to have done pretty well here.

CLINTON: Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax...So if he’s paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. TRUMP: That makes me smart. 

On the financial crisis, Trump played the perfect disaster capitalist. Neither of them, for reasons of their own, mentioned that the global financial collapse happened under the Republican Bush administration.

CLINTON: In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, “Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money.” Well, it did collapse.

TRUMP: That’s called business, by the way.

Alicia Machado

Then finally, the coup de grâce.

CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman [Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machiado]“Miss Piggy.” Then he called her “Miss Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.
TRUMP: Where did you find this? Where did you find this?
CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado.
TRUMP: Where did you find this?
CLINTON: And she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet...
TRUMP: Oh, really?

CLINTON: ... she’s going to vote this November.

It was over.

Well, not quite. Trump, fearing even further disintegration of his dwindling poll numbers among Latinos, went after Machado again this morning on FOX, claiming, she had "attitude" and calling her "the worst we ever had. The worst. The absolute worst."

"She was impossible.... She was the winner, and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem."

Trump was either an ill-prepared, out-of-control, chauvinistic, blustering, money-grubbing, nuke-waving racist buffoon (my take), or a great-white-hope, politically incorrect, law-and-order hero, depending on which America you occupy.

Clinton tiptoed cautiously around race and the latest in a string of police shootings of black men. Her best statement was:

Race remains a significant challenge in our country. Unfortunately, race still determines too much, often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal justice system. We’ve just seen those two tragic examples in both Tulsa and Charlotte.

But she played it safe after that. Let's just say, the words Black Lives Matter, were never uttered.

Whereas the @realDonaldTrump let it all hang out. He started out by painting life in the black community as "living in hell" in need of "law and order" (code words for keep them in their place) and ended with his Rudy Giuliani-inspired call for more stop-and-frisk, racial profiling-- making Chicago his whipping boy.

Trump must not have known (and Hillary wouldn't say) that under the rule of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago had already become the nation's stop-and-frisk capital, well after stop-and-frisk had been ruled unconstitutional in N.Y.

In August 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the hundreds of thousands of Stop and Frisks performed annually by the NYPD amounted to racial profiling and violated the 4th Amendment's protections from unreasonable search and seizure because they were based on generalized suspicion.

By the summer of 2014, Chicago cops performed a quarter million stop-and-frisks in just 90 days, without making any arrests. Shootings in the city (including those by police) continued to rise at a record pace before the policy was changed. Stop-and-frisk was proven to be a failed, racist policy.

Trump continued to insist that "stop and frisk" wasn't racial profiling. It was stopping "bad people." It amounted to his only plan for resource-starved black and Latino communities.

It was a desperately-needed win for Clinton. A big defeat for Trump who limped away, crying he had a "defective mic" and that Republican moderator Lester Holt was an agent of the "left-wing" media. His mentor, Giuliani even advised him to skip the remaining debates. Good advice.

DON'T ASK. DON'T TELL...As expected, public education never came up in the debate and the word education was only mentioned in passing three times -- all by Clinton. There was never even a mention of Trump University, school closings, common core, testing, unions, or charter schools.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be." -- James Baldwin (No name in the street, 1972)

Pres. Barack Obama

"When people say black lives matter, it does not mean blue lives don't matter. All lives matter," Obama said in Warsaw. "But the big concern is that the data shows that black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents. This isn’t a matter of us comparing the value of lives, this is recognizing that there is a particular burden is being placed on a group of our fellow citizens and we should care about that. We can’t dismiss it.” -- Washington Post

Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow"

This nation was founded on the idea that some lives don’t matter. Freedom and justice for some, not all. That’s the foundation. Yes, progress has been made in some respects, but it hasn’t come easy. There’s an unfinished revolution waiting to be won. -- Something more is required of us now.

Lester Spence, professor of political science at John Hopkins University

"Over the past few decades cities have turned to policing to fulfill two functions: to surveil and discipline black populations hardest hit by economic shifts and to collect revenue in the form of fines… The black men most likely to be left out of the formal economy — who have to engage in various illegal hustles to make ends meet — are far more likely to suffer from police violence than other black men.” -- Salon

Troy LaRaviere reporting from the Dem Platform Committee

The Clinton people just voted down an amendment to ban fracking. The reaction of the amendment supporters is strong--perhaps the strongest negative reaction of the day, along with the earlier reaction against the Clinton vote not to acknowledge the occupation of Palestine. -- Facebook post

Serena Williams

Reporter: "You are one of the greatest women athletes of all time."Serena: "I am one of the greatest athletes of all time." -- Bustle

We pahked the cah...

Eve Ewing

We visited Hahvahd yesterday, only to find Chicago students tearing it up academically and politically, as expected.

First, we went over to the Law School where dozens of students have been occupying the Wasserstein Lounge, (which they've renamed Belinda Hall) trying to create a learning environment more relevant and safe for students of color. Occupiers I talked with, including Chicagoan and Whitney Young alum Keaton Allen, want more focus on critical race theory and more faculty of color.

Yesterday's speaker at the protest was none other than Harvard law prof Lani Guinier. Who could be more relevant at a time when Republicans have sworn to stonewall any Scalia replacement chosen by President Obama? Prof. Guinier is the first woman of color ever appointed to a tenured professorship at that institution.

Keaton Allen & Amanda Klonsky

But in 1993, President Bill Clinton pulled back Guinier's nomination as attorney general in the face of a brutal and racist negative Republican-led media campaign, referring to Guinier as a "quota queen." One New York Times opinion piece falsely claimed that Guinier was in favor of "segregating black voters in black-majority districts." Guinier was portrayed as a racial polarizer who believed—in the words of George Will (Newsweek 6/14/93)—that "only blacks can represent blacks." But the key to Clinton's retreat was Guinier's abandonment by Democratic senators like Ted Kennedy and even Carole Moseley Braun. What a shame.

Having heard Guinier speak before on several occasions, I took off and ran over to the Ed School to hear a presentation to the weekly research colloquium by brilliant doc student and  Chicago's own Eve Ewing.  Eve's research dissects the discourse surrounding Chicago school closings, unmasking
immoral public policy. If you haven't followed her work, a good place to start is her recent New Yorker piece, “We Shall Not Be Moved”: A Hunger Strike, Education, and Housing in Chicago."

Must be something in the Chicago drinking water, besides lead.

FOR DESSERT I caught Michael Moore's latest film, "Where to Invade Next", in Brookline. Funny and hard-hitting at the same time. Could easily be taken as a promotion for Bernie Sanders. But it isn't.

Moore at his best. Don't miss.

Little to cheer about latest CPS suspension/expulsion rates. Charters are main culprit.

There is no evidence that  frequent reliance  on removing  misbehaving  students improves  school safety or  student behavior. -- Skiba & Losen 

Rahm and spin team at CPS are cheering the good news. District leaders are claiming that they've  expelled and suspended fewer students last school year than the year before. But are their claims real? Partly yes and partly no. Is there much to cheer about? Uh uh.

They've been on a push to reduce school suspensions and expulsions since 2014, when Pres. Obama and the Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder released a set of guidelines warning schools that disciplinary policies could not have a “disparate impact” on minorities. Disgraced CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett did lead a push away from the district's horrible "Zero Tolerance" policies, giving more discretion to principals and school staff is deciding who when to suspend/expel. But African-American and Latino students still are suspended and expelled at extremely higher rates than white students to the point of absurdity.

The numbers tell the story. Let's start with expulsions. Can you believe that not one white student was expelled from CPS last year? Compare that with black students who account for 39% of CPS students (district-run and charters) but 68% of 61,349 suspensions and 81% of expulsions in the 2014-15 school year.

White students, made up about 9% of enrollment but just 3% of suspensions and zero expulsions.

Latino students fell somewhere in the middle. 

There has been some lowering of suspension rates from last year. But only in district-run schools. In charters, suspension/expulsion rates are higher and the gap between white students and students of color has grown wider.

At charter schools, for example, black students accounted for 82% of expulsions, up from 77% in 2013-14, while in district-operated schools, expulsions of African-American students fell to 76% from 87%.

That shows little has changed since this report came out in 2014 showing charters expelled 61 of every 10,000 students while the district-run schools expelled just 5 of every 10,000 students.

CPS says it has continued to invest in “restorative justice” programs that coach and counsel instead of just punishing, though the Chicago Teachers Union has questioned the depth of the district’s commitment to the idea. I don't see much when I'm out in the schools. 

The district also says it is working with charter operators to train them in the same practices that are keeping CPS students in classrooms — but it cannot under state law require them to change their discipline practices.

Hey wait. I thought district schools were supposed to be learning from the charters.

Whitenizing Chicago

The out-migration of African-Americans from the largest U.S. cities continues unabated, changing the face of urban politics, culture and education.

Greg Hinz at Crain's reports that the Chicago area is on track to become mostly people of color by 2020, a historic shift with major cultural, economic and political impact. But in Chicago proper, gentrification has created a different story -- whitenization.

The shift is almost entirely concentrated in the suburbs, with, for instance, roughly one in three residents of Will, DuPage and Lake Counties now from minority groups, up from one (or fewer) in four in 2010. In suburban Cook County, the minority share of the total population has gone from 33 percent in 2010 to 45 percent.

But the story in the city is different.

In Chicago proper, where large numbers of high-income whites appear to have moved to the booming central business district, the white share of the population rose from 31 percent in 2002 to 32 percent in 2005-09, holding at that figure in 2010-14. The African-American share continued to drop, moving from an estimated 33.8 percent rolling average in 2005-2009 to 31.5 percent in 2010-14, with the Latino share rising from 27.4 percent to 28.9 percent, and the Asian share from 4.9 percent to 5.7 percent.

The current population growth in the entire Chicago metropolitan area is being fueled almost entirely by the influx of Latinos and Asians. The white wealthy and middle-class newcomers to city are mostly younger people without families. That brings with it a declining public school population.

In the city itself, skyrocketing costs of living combined with the loss of living-wage jobs, public housing and neighborhood schools, cuts in infrastructure, social services and fear of gun violence have made life too difficult and unstable for thousands of poor and black families.

The story of urban America is indeed becoming a tale of two cities.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, will speak at today's pre-strike rally in Grant Park amid stalled contract talks with the school district. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

CEO Forrest Claypool to the City Club of Chicago 

"We are at a breaking point." -- Tribune

MTA Pres. Barbara Madeloni 

“It [Common Core testing] is destructive to our students and our teachers and the very possibility of joyful and meaningful public education...We’ve really flipped the narrative in a year.” -- NY Times

Thomas Gattuso, principal of Sullivan House

We are looking for justice. If Laquan had shot the policeman 16 times, he wouldn’t have been at a desk job 13 months later.” -- Sun-Times

Rev. Jesse Jackson

" My greatest fear is not the protest, but if there is no protest.” -- NY Times

Donald Trump

"Maybe the guy should have been roughed up a little." -- Raw Story

Letter to Mark Zuckerberg from former classmate, teacher Emily Talmage

Let me assure you that “personalized learning,” as it is being pushed by the Gates Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Digital Learning Now Council, as well as countless educational technology companies, start-ups, and venture capitalists who have invested millions into personalized learning experiments (they call them “innovations”), is a far, far cry from the type of education we got at Exeter. -- Washington Post

We've already surpassed Detroit

We've already surpassed Detroit in boarded-up schools.

I half-jokingly floated this idea this morning on Twitter.

Why not put the Obama Library in one of the 50 closed school buildings that remain vacant and boarded up?
— Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) April 10, 2015

But I'm not really all that concerned about the site for the library. Yes, it belongs in Chicago but I assume that's already been decided one way or the other by the Obama's. I'm much more concerned now about the lack of CPS school libraries and librarians.

But I was actually trying to provoke some discussion about the 47 out of 50 closed Chicago schools that remain vacant, boarded-up blights on their communities and what's going to happen to them, now that the campaign is over. Rahm never was asked to speak to this.

Other stuff missing from the campaign chatter

The media lent itself to fear mongering and racial code-talk about Chicago turning into Detroit if Chuy Garcia had won the election. You could make a case that this play on racial fears was actually the basis for Rahm's successful campaign strategy. A new and improved Willie Horton strategy for those who are old enough to remember. After all, it proved effective in Gov. Rauner's campaign, as our late colleague Mark Anderson had pointed out.

But the Mayor was never asked about the incredible number of stop-and-frisks, mostly of young African-Americans by Supt. McCarthy's boys. There were 250,000 of these S&Fs in only 3 months last summer, far surpassing even New York -- let alone Detroit-- in that department. I don't attribute harassment on this grand scale simply to the racism of a few cops. Rather to policy coming right from the top of the system.

So no, I'm not raising the specter of the next four years under Rahm Emanuel turning the city into another Detroit. Rather I'm saying that in these and many other areas, he's already far surpassed Motown.