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Here’s Why Some Black Leaders Are Fighting the NAACP Over Charter Schools

by NellDooley Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

In late July, the NAACP called for a national moratorium on charter schools, claiming they target low-income and minority communities with practices mirroring the predatory subprime mortgage lending industry. Now a group of more than 160 black civic leaders is asking the civil rights group to reconsider, arguing that charters create opportunities for black families that could allow minority students to excel.

In a September 21 letter, a coalition of educators, current and former politicians, public officials, and black leaders claimed that a charter school moratorium would deny parents the opportunity to choose “what’s best for their children”—and restrict access to high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The proposed resolution cites a variety of cherry-picked and debunked claims about charter schools,” the letter reads. “The notion of dedicated charter school founders and educators acting like predatory subprime mortgage lenders—a comparison the resolution explicitly makes—is a far cry from the truth.”

The NAACP’s proposed resolution, which will be voted on at the national board meeting next month, said that charter schools contribute to racial and socioeconomic segregation and raised concerns over disproportionately “punitive and exclusionary” disciplinary practices, fiscal mismanagement, and lackluster oversight. A few weeks earlier, the Movement for Black Lives, a network of 50 organizations brought together by Black Lives Matter, released a policy agenda that included a similar call to curb the growth of charters.

While the charter school industry is littered with the occasional bad actor, and some charters have even been found to practice “skimming”—illegally screening out potentially challenging students, according to a 2013 Reuters investigation and a recent report by the ACLU and Public Advocates, a public interest law firm—the pro-charter letter highlighted research showing the positive academic benefits and opportunities for black students at charters. Here are three of its main arguments:

1. Black students stand to make short-term academic gains: The letter, citing a study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), argues that black students benefit from added exposure to charter schools. The 2015 study of 41 cities in 22 states found that students attending charter schools in those areas made slightly higher academic gains in both math and reading compared to students in traditional public schools. The gains were particularly pronounced for low-income, black, and Hispanic students, as well as English-language learners. Poor black students, for instance, received the equivalent of 59 additional days of math learning and 44 days of reading learning. For poor Hispanic students, the gains were 48 days of math instruction and 25 days of reading.

Andrew Maul, an assistant professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Graduate School of Education, questioned the CREDO report’s research methods, including that the sizes of the effects “are very small.” (In response, CREDO noted that the study looked at the change in student test scores from year-to-year as a sign of academic growth, rather than the test scores themselves.)

An earlier study commissioned by the US Department of Education in 2010 showed modest improvements for low-income and underachieving students who attended urban charter middle schools. They scored higher on math tests but fared the same on reading scores as their peers at traditional public schools. Students from higher-income backgrounds saw adverse outcomes in math and reading scores. Overall, on average, attending charter middle schools with lotteries had no “significant impacts” on student achievement.

2. There are long-term gains, too: As Kristina Rizga wrote in her latest magazine story, 35 percent of Philadelphia students attend charter schools. While the growth of charters has put a financial strain on the local school district—and contributed to school closures and the push out of black educators—many students have seen improvements in academic performance. Between 2006 and 2012, 61 percent of Philadelphia charters posted higher scores in math and reading than peers at traditional public schools, according to CREDO. In the long run, according to a study of outcomes for students in Chicago and Florida, students attending charter high schools were more likely to graduate, stay in college, and earn more money than students in traditional public schools, according to a 2014 report by Mathematica.

Still, the 2015 CREDO report notes that the effects vary by region. Students in urban areas such as Boston, Memphis, and Newark, for instance, saw positive gains in math and reading. But in the Southwest, Florida, and Texas, students saw adverse outcomes.

3. Black families view charter schools as “immensely popular”: The letter also notes that charters are a popular alternative to traditional public education—in fact, tens of thousands of students across the country are currently on charter school waitlists. A recent survey conducted by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools showed that at least 80 percent of black, Hispanic, and low-income parents supported the opening of charter schools in their area. And since 2000, the number of charters nearly quadrupled, from about 1.7 percent to 6.6 percent of public schools. The letter notes that the moratorium would affect 700,000 black families, as black students make up 27 percent of those enrolled in charter schools.

In Massachusetts, voters will decide this year on a ballot measure seeking to expand the state’s annual quota on charter schools to add 12 more to the current limit. A Brookings study in mid-September found that charter schools benefited students in the state’s urban areas, particularly for traditionally disadvantaged students. For students in rural and suburban areas, those benefits disappear.

“For many urban Black families, charter schools are making it possible to do what affluent families have long been able to do: rescue their children from failing schools,” the letter notes, adding: “Making charter schools the enemy in a fight for adequate education funding doesn’t serve the interest of all students. We cannot sacrifice another generation of students to the status quo.”

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Here’s Why Some Black Leaders Are Fighting the NAACP Over Charter Schools

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American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

by RUDKobyalnb Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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In dramatic contrast to the rest of the developed world, the rate of women dying because of complications with pregnancy or childbirth rose in the United States by 27 percent between 2000 and 2014. During the same time period, according to a study that will be published in the September issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 157 other countries reported a decrease in their maternal mortality rates.

Maternal mortality is defined as death while pregnant or within 42 days of being pregnant because of causes related to that pregnancy. The report covers 50 states and the District of Columbia, but researchers described the lack of comprehensive data surrounding maternal mortality as an “international embarrassment.” The lead researcher, editor-in-chief of Birth: Issues in Perinatal Care, with researchers from Boston University, and Stanford University, pointed to a lack of funding as reason for delays in compiling the data, but their conclusion was clear: “There is a need to redouble efforts to prevent maternal deaths and improve maternity care for the 4 million U.S. women giving birth each year.”

The nationwide rates are troubling, but Texas, whose maternal mortality rate doubled over two years, is the state with the sharpest increase. From 2006 to 2010, the maternal mortality rate stayed relatively steady in the state, at about 18 deaths per 100,000 live births. But in 2011, the rate there jumped to 33, and then to 35.8 in 2014. Texas has been at the center of a heated debate around women’s health that included a Supreme Court battle over restriction to abortion access in the state, and in 2013 the Legislature created a task force to study maternal mortality and morbidity. Its first report is set to be released in two weeks. While the state is separately analyzed in this report, the authors do not identify a specific reason for the increase, although they did speculate.

“There were some changes in the provision of women’s health services in Texas from 2011 to 2015, including the closing of several women’s health clinics,” the authors write. “Still, in the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a 2-year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely. A future study will examine Texas data by race–ethnicity and detailed causes of death to better understand this unusual finding.”

The “changes in the provision of women’s health services” in Texas began in September 2011, when the state’s family planning budget was cut by two-thirds. Programs that provided prenatal care for low-income women were deeply affected, and the move also excluded clinics that provide abortion services from the funding. And in 2013, Texas passed HB 2, an anti-abortion omnibus bill that set off a domino effect of restrictions that drained half the state’s clinics of resources, ultimately shuttering them.

More recently, Texas awarded $1.6 million in funding for the Healthy Texas Women program to the Heidi Group, an anti-abortion organization. Only the Harris County Public Health Department received more money from the fund, but just barely—it was awarded $1.7 million.

Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told the Dallas Morning News that the department considered the issue “a complex problem.”

“We’re aware of the numbers and want to see a decrease in this trend, and that’s why the task force is closely reviewing these cases and will make recommendations,” Williams said.

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American Women Are Still Dying in Childbirth at Alarming Rates

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Homeless People Are Older and Sicker Than Ever Before. Here’s One Way to Help.

by AVNMonique Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Everything,” Tom Wesley answers when I ask what’s ailing him. Diabetes. Multiple heart attacks. Chronic liver failure. “They’ve told me I’m dying.”

Wesley, a towering man in a salmon-colored corduroy shirt buttoned just at the top, is only 54. But for most of his adult life, he lived on the streets. He refused to stay in shelters because he didn’t like the structure; he says he also spent a significant time behind bars for heroin possession. “You could say I was using heroin,” Wesley says with a smirk. “But I don’t know who was using who—it sure used me up.”

This article is part of the SF Homeless Project, a collaboration between nearly 70 media organizations to explore the state of homelessness in San Francisco and potential solutions.

He quit a few years ago—after losing two wives to overdoses. Around that time Wesley’s health problems started getting worse. Last year, a terrible pain in his abdomen brought him to San Francisco General Hospital, where he says he was admitted, via the emergency room, seven times in a matter of three months. At that point he was already used to the ER, having relied on it instead of primary care. “I wasn’t one for doctors,” he says.

Wesley’s experience isn’t unique. Sixty-six percent of the country’s chronically homeless people—those who have a disabling condition and who’ve been homeless for a year or more (or four times in three years)—are living on the streets. Chronically homeless adults have high rates of mental illness, substance use, and incarceration. They tend to be sicker than both housed people and other homeless people. And they’re less likely to use primary or specialty care to address their medical needs. Many make up the group of “super-utilizers“: patients who rack up huge medical costs from recurring yet preventable ER and hospital visits.

According to one estimate from the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, more than 80 percent of all homeless people have at least one chronic health condition. More than half have a mental illness. They are frequently the victims of violent crimes, and they’re more susceptible to traumatic injuries like assault and robbery. Their living conditions also make them more likely to have skin conditions and respiratory infections.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that people experiencing homelessness have a life expectancy of between 42 and 52 years, compared with 78 for the general population. A recent study by Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, found that homeless people in their 50s develop geriatric conditions such as incontinence, failing eyesight, and cognitive impairment that are typical of people 20 years older. “When you see a homeless person in their 50s,” Kushel says, “you should imagine a 75-year-old.”

Kushel is also one of the founders of the San Francisco Medical Respite Program, a long-term medical shelter located on the edge of the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood that gives homeless people like Tom Wesley a place to recuperate after being in the hospital. With the homeless population in San Francisco and the rest of the country getting older—the number of homeless people age 60 or older in San Francisco increased 30 percent from 2007 to the 2014-15 fiscal year, and an estimated 31 percent of homeless people in the United States were older than 50 in 2014, a 20 percent increase from 2007—Respite and programs like it are seeing more people who are managing both chronic diseases and short-term illnesses. “We now have a group of homeless people that have more complex and co-occurring medical needs than ever before,” Kushel says.

For those homeless people who live on the streets or in a shelter—most of which are only open overnight—getting discharged from the hospital often means losing their meds, struggling to clean their wounds, or failing to make the specialist appointment across town. Others will get even sicker. Some will go back to the emergency room and start the process all over again.

“If you’re experiencing homelessness,” says Michelle Schneidermann, the medical director at Respite, “you’re thinking about where you’re going to get your next meal and how you’re going to keep yourself safe, not where you’re going to refrigerate your meds or make your next appointment.”

As a result, homeless people visit the hospital at rates up to 12 times higher than low-income people with housing. A 2007 study in Boston found that the majority of high emergency room users were homeless, according to the NHCHC. At one hospital, 16 homeless patients visited the ER a combined 400 times in one year. Hospital readmissions for homeless people are “strikingly high“; one study found that more than half of the homeless people it followed after discharge were readmitted to inpatient care within 30 days. Another recently published study found that homeless people had a 30-day readmission rate of 22 percent, compared with a rate of just 7 percent for housed people with the same health concern. And once in the hospital, homeless patients stay nearly twice as long as housed people.

This reliance on emergency medical services is extremely costly to San Francisco, which spends more on health care than on any other type of homeless service. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the city spends $241 million annually on homeless services, including an average of $87,480 in medical costs per year for each of the sickest people on the streets, compared with $17,353 a year for each person in supportive housing. Another estimate, from 2004, places the cost of hospital care for the city’s homeless people at more than $2,000 per person per day, by far the priciest service. “People who are homeless use the most expensive parts of the health care system,” says Schneidermann, who notes that SF General discharges an average of 130 homeless people each month.

This is despite the fact that, in a city like San Francisco, health insurance and access to outpatient primary care clinics are relatively accessible, thanks mostly to Medicaid expansion. “Access to insurance is not the biggest problem” Kushel says. “Their chaos of life prevents even those with insurance from getting care.” Indeed, evidence shows that even with access to primary care and specialty doctors, homeless people still use emergency services at rates higher than everyone else. In one study based out of Canada, where health coverage is universal, people experiencing homelessness still had longer inpatient stays and cost the hospital more than housed patients.

“Appointment-based care is difficult for all of us, let alone someone who is homeless,” Schneidermann says. “That’s where medical respite comes in.”

The first medical respite programs for the homeless were founded in Boston and Washington, DC, in 1985, but the model gained currency in 2006, when an elderly woman in a hospital gown and slippers was spotted wandering on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. The woman, a homeless 63-year-old with dementia, had been released from a nearby Kaiser hospital, which was later sued by the city and forced to establish new discharge rules. At least four other hospitals were caught “patient dumping,” including once incident when a paraplegic man was dropped on Skid Row and was later seen dragging himself, along with a torn colostomy bag, down the street.

There are now nearly 80 homeless medical respite programs, more than twice as many as in 2006. San Francisco’s Respite was founded in 2007 by the city’s Department of Public Health to address the acute medical needs (think broken bone or stab wound) of homeless patients who’ve ended up in General’s inpatient care via the emergency room. But beyond that, it might just offer an emergency room alternative to reach the city’s sickest, most vulnerable homeless population.

With only 45 beds and a waitlist at least equal that, Respite prioritizes people who are both the sickest and also the highest users of the ER. More than a quarter of Respite clients have seven or more chronic illnesses, and the average stay is five weeks, a figure that has risen as the client population has aged. (The longest stay was almost eight months.)

A 2006 study that compared homeless people who’d gotten into respite programs with those who hadn’t found that the respite group had fewer ER visits the following year. Among those admitted to the hospital following an emergency visit, the respite group stayed an average of three days, compared with eight days for the nonrespite group. A 2009 study found that discharging homeless people from the hospital to respite was associated with a 50 percent reduction in their likelihood of readmission in the next three months.

The dining area at the San Francisco Medical Respite Program Mark Murrmann/Mother Jones

Still, despite evidence that medical respite programs reach the health system’s super-utilizers, only 10 respite centers nationwide are covered through Medicaid or Medicare. Instead, most programs rely on funding from hospitals, donations, or state and local governments.

And so Respite has its limitations. A quarter of its clients go straight from the program into permanent housing or long-term residential treatment. Another 50 percent are discharged back to a shelter with a case manager. The last quarter return to the streets.

The first time Tom Wesley was admitted to Respite, he was discharged to a single-room-occupancy hotel. He promptly ditched that setup, traveled to Cincinnati to see his children, and then returned to San Francisco’s streets. Shortly afterward, he was back in the hospital and then Respite, where he was diagnosed with chronic liver failure and moved into what he calls a glorified nursing home—a permanent supportive housing apartment just blocks away. Feeling like he’d tied up loose ends, he decided to stay.

When I meet Wesley in Respite’s foyer, in front of the room that houses the few dozen beds where the men stay, he’s been out for a few months already. He’s wearing a Golden State Warriors cap, and his eyes are blood red. We take the elevator up and walk to the facility’s small meeting space, past the dining room where patients receive three meals a day and the single-person rooms where women stay.

He grabs a seat with his back facing the bright light coming through a window. As he tells me about his connection to Respite, Wesley’s legs bounce up and down. “If there were more programs like this,” he says, “people wouldn’t be dying on the streets every day.”

Mark Murrmann/Mother Jones

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Homeless People Are Older and Sicker Than Ever Before. Here’s One Way to Help.

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Obama Is Right: We Need to Expand Social Security. But Not For Everybody.

by DelilahRegister Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday President Obama joined the retirement crisis bandwagon:

A lot of Americans don’t have retirement savings. Even if they’ve got an account set up, they just don’t have enough money at the end of the month to save as much as they’d like because they’re just barely paying the bills. Fewer and fewer people have pensions they can really count on, which is why Social Security is more important than ever.

We can’t afford to weaken Social Security. We should be strengthening Social Security. And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous, and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.

I concur in part and dissent in part. First the dissent: it’s not true that “fewer and fewer” people have pensions they can count on. There has been a change in the number of old-style pensions (“defined-benefit plans”) vs. 401(k)-style pensions (“defined-contribution plans”), but the overall share of workers covered has stayed pretty steady:

The total share of workers in pension plans of one kind or another was 45 percent in 1979 and 45 percent in 2011. There’s been virtually no change over the past 30 years.

But wait! Those old-style pensions were more generous. Surely that’s what Obama meant by pensions that people “can really count on”? Not so much, it turns out. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has been warning about the retirement crisis for some time, but recently they re-analyzed pension data based on new NIPA data that allows a more accurate look at pension accruals. Here’s their updated chart:

The total pension wealth of the American public has barely budged even as the source of pension wealth has changed dramatically. It was about 13 percent of total wages in 1984 and 14 percent in 2012. CRR’s conclusion from this new data is that “the accumulation of retirement assets has not declined as a result of the shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans.” As they cheerfully admit, “We are going to have to change our story!”

Now it’s true, in theory, that old-style pensions were safer than 401(k) plans, which bob up and down with the stock market. But this difference is often overstated. For one thing, 401(k) plans generally show fairly steady growth over any time frame more than three or four years. Even the Great Recession only weakened them from 2009-12, and they’ve recovered very nicely since then. For another, all those old pension funds were invested in stocks and bonds as well, and if the market goes south, they go south as well. The most recent example of this is the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund.

That said, I concur in part with President Obama. Probably the biggest problem with 401(k)-style plans is that they tend to benefit high earners more than old-style pensions did. The difference isn’t enormous—though we can’t say for sure since distributional detail isn’t available for past decades—but it’s probably true that 401(k)s are somewhat less generous to low earners than older defined-benefit plans were. This is not a fatal defect, however, and it’s one that’s being addressed fairly successfully already. Another problem with 401(k) plans is high fees, and that’s also a problem that’s being addressed—though for my money it could stand to be addressed with considerably more vigor.

Here’s what all this adds up to: the best way to address retirement security is to continue reforming 401(k) plans and to expand Social Security—but only for low-income workers. Middle-class workers are generally doing reasonably well, and certainly as well as they did in the past. We don’t need a massive and expensive expansion of Social Security for everyone, but we do need to make Social Security more generous for the bottom quarter or so of the population that’s doing poorly in both relative and absolute terms. This is something that every liberal ought to support, and hopefully this is the bandwagon that President Obama in now on.

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Obama Is Right: We Need to Expand Social Security. But Not For Everybody.

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Rising Seas Could Deluge US Coastal Cities Sooner Than We Thought

by KimberlyDing062 Posted on April 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Boston and other coastal cities may want to batten down the hatches. A new study from climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Pennsylvania State University warns estimates of future sea level rise may be significantly underestimated. The real picture 100 to 500 years from now, they claim, will be ugly for US coastal cities from New York to Miami, which could be underwater or at risk of flooding. Boston, for example, could see about 5 feet of sea level rise in the next 100 years, according to the researchers.

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Rising Seas Could Deluge US Coastal Cities Sooner Than We Thought

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Everyone Loves the Idea of Preschool, So Why Don’t All Our Kids Get to Go to One?

by LucieU73vymkaoj Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s hard to think of another education reform idea that has garnered as much support among advocates of various ideological stripes as early childhood education. California and New York liberals support it, and so do conservatives in Oklahoma and Florida. A 2015 national poll showed that 76 percent of voters support the idea of spending federal money to expand public preschool, and the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act includes more funding for early childhood. Helping the idea along is decades of research (which continues to pour in) that suggests effective preschools can benefit all children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. “We have better evidence that preschool works and has long-term effects than we do for any other social policy,” David L. Kirp, one of our country’s leading experts on early childhood education and a professor of public policy at the University of California-Berkeley, told Mother Jones.

But can we identify what a good preschool looks like and make that accessible to the kids most in need? That topic has been debated fiercely by parents, preschool advocates, and policymakers all over the country. This week, early childhood education experts and city chiefs of preschools came together in Sacramento, California, to talk about the latest research. As presenter Abbie Lieberman, an early-education policy analyst at New America, put it: “When we step into a preschool, how can we tell what is actually learning through play and what is true chaos?”

What the Studies Say:

The growing pile of evidence on the long-term benefits of high-quality preschool stretches all the way back to a 1961 Perry Preschool Study. Researchers at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation decided to follow 123 three- and four-year-olds from public housing projects in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Fifty-eight toddlers were randomly placed in a preschool class for two years; 65 kids from the neighborhood were left without preschool. Researchers then collected data on the students until they turned 40—an astonishingly long time in education research. They found that the kids in preschool were much more likely to have better grades and test scores and more likely to go to college, earn a higher income, and own a house. In fact, their income and other assets pushed them well above the poverty line, as Kirp documents in his book, The Sandbox Investment.

A similar study started in 1972, the Abecederian Project. It followed 111 infants in North Carolina until they turned 35. The results were similar, piquing the interest of economists. Steven Barnett, a professor of economics and the executive director of the National Institute on Early Childhood Research, eventually calculated that every $1 the government invests in high-quality early education can save more than $7 later on by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancies, and even reducing crime. Such arguments about long-term savings made preschool appealing to conservatives and big philanthropists in the business world.

More recently, other scholars were able to show the disparities between students who had some form of early childhood education and those who didn’t. Jane Woldfogel, a professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University and the author of Too Many Children Left Behind, looked at the test scores of 8,000 students in the United States and found there was a huge gap in reading abilities before kids even arrived at first grade. “If we are going to give teachers a fighting chance at narrowing our achievement gaps later in school, our kids have to come in more equally prepared,” Woldfogel told Mother Jones.

So What Does a Good Preschool Look Like?

Marjorie Wechsler, an early-childhood-education researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, recently synthesized research from a number of preschool systems and identified 10 common foundational building blocks among programs that demonstrated positive impacts on a variety of measures. Wechsler, who presented her findings in Sacramento, found that the best preschools have college-educated teachers with specialized skills in child development; they also use curriculum that emphasizes problem-solving rather than unstructured play or “repeat-after-me” drills. Successful educators know how to teach cognitive, social-emotional, and physical skills. Plus, high-quality preschools support their teachers with experienced coaches, and classroom sizes don’t get bigger than 10 kids for every teacher.

The Roadblocks:

While expanding preschool for low-income students might have garnered more advocates than almost any other school reform idea in the country, there are inevitable problems: Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has pointed out that studies like the Perry Preschool research have only looked at small school programs that are difficult to replicate on a large scale. Other opponents point to a recent large-scale study looking at the impact of Tennessee’s state-funded preschool; the study found that by second grade, students who attended preschool actually performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. The researchers, however, blamed in part repetitive, poorly structured teaching for these results.

Steven Barnett, the director of the National Institute of Early Education Research, argued in the Hechinger Report that the Tennessee study mostly provides additional evidence that preschool on the cheap doesn’t work. Perry and Abecedarian students had highly trained and well-paid teachers, and these programs cost about $14,000 to $20,000 per child in today’s dollars, compared with $4,611 that Tennessee spends currently.

And unsurprisingly, the numbers and research bolster Barnett’s point: The strongest preschools have been well funded—some estimates vary between $8,000 and $10,000 per student. Barnett pointed to New Jersey, Boston, and Tulsa, Oklahoma—places that spend energy and money on highly trained teachers, coaching, and strong curriculum—as examples of where governments are serving children well.

Image courtesy of the National Institute of Early Education Research

Is There Hope?

The dollar figures show the United States has a long way to go. While the city of Boston spends $10,000 for each preschooler, in 2014 the average expenditure, nationwide, was $4,125 of government spending per kid. That’s not much more than the government was spending a decade earlier.

The good news is that after years of dismal cuts following the recession, a movement to increase funding and enrollment for preschool is regaining its momentum—driven mostly by local and state policymakers. What’s more, both the federal Every Children Succeeds Act and California’s state budget include more funding to increase the number of low-income kids in high-quality preschools.

Getting the United States all the way to universal preschool, of course, is a long road. The nation ranks 30th out of 44 for preschool enrollment among developed nations; 66 percent of American four-year-olds went to preschool in 2012. Of those, only 13 percent of low-income children were enrolled in high-quality early childhood programs, according to a study by RAND Corp.

“Six years ago, we started talking about what does quality look like? How does it work?” Camille Maben, the executive director of First 5 California, a state agency, said at the end of the Sacramento gathering. “We know now that quality works in all kinds of different ways. One size truly does not fit all. But when there are so many of us, changes are like turning an elephant in the bathtub. It’s an enormous challenge.”

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Everyone Loves the Idea of Preschool, So Why Don’t All Our Kids Get to Go to One?

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Ted Cruz Uses Rush Limbaugh in Radio Ad to Take Down Marco Rubio

by PatriciaAlcala2 Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz is hoping Rush Limbaugh can push him over the top in next Tuesday’s New Hampshire Republican primary. Here’s a spot that the senator from Texas is running on a Boston sports radio station, using the conservative yakker’s words to brand Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who holds a slight edge in the race for second place, as a pro-amnesty hypocrite:

Rush Limbaugh: “If you’re looking for the Republican candidate who is the most steadfastly opposed to liberalism, whose agenda is oriented toward stopping it and thwarting it and defeating it, it’s Ted Cruz.”

Narrator: “Rush is right. It’s Ted Cruz who’s led our fights in Washington. To secure our border. To stop taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal immigrants. And it was Cruz who stood up for us against the Washington establishment. When the Gang of Eight proposed amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, it was wrong. Ted Cruz fought them. But what about Marco Rubio? When Rubio ran for Senate, he made this pledge:

Marco Rubio: “I will never support it, never have and never will support any effort to grant blanket legalization amnesty.”

Rush Limbaugh: “That’s what he said. It’s not what he did. It was Marco Rubio that was a member of the Gang of Eight, and Ted Cruz that wasn’t.”

Narrator: Ted Cruz, the only one we can trust.”

The ad is not an endorsement from Limbaugh, who made the comments on his radio show. Limbaugh isn’t quite the voice of God, but in a tight Republican primary, he might be the next best thing. Cruz is talking about immigration every chance he can get in the Granite State—even when he’s supposed to be talking about heroin—as he tries to catch up to Donald Trump and keep his rival from Florida at bay.

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Ted Cruz Uses Rush Limbaugh in Radio Ad to Take Down Marco Rubio

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5 Unlikely Industries Where Workers Are Clamoring to Join Unions

by WhitneyClogstoun Posted on January 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Fifty years ago, one-third of American workers belonged to a union. Today, it’s 1 in 10. And that number is likely to slip further if, as expected, the Supreme Court weakens public-sector unions, which today account for nearly half of all union members.

Yet despite decades of setbacks, the labor movement still shows signs of life—and not just in its typical blue-collar stomping grounds. Workers across the economy are realizing that unions can help them win better working conditions and higher wages. Here are five industries where unions have made surprising gains:

Digital News Media

Maxx-Studio/Shutterstock

Last month, more than 220 writers, editors, and other staffers at the Huffington Post voted to join the Writers Guild of America, East. The guild’s victory followed other successful drives in recent months at Gawker, Salon, ThinkProgress, and Vice Media. Another union, NewsGuild-CWA, last year helped organize the Guardian US and digital staffers at Al Jazeera America.

Although unions have represented many newspaper reporters for decades, they’ve only recently begun to penetrate web-only publications. These fast-growing startups typically woo young writers with the promise of huge audiences and considerable editorial freedom—while offering little in the way of salaries, benefits, or family-friendly scheduling.

But as digital reporters have matured, so have their expectations. “The idea that someone will continue to work all his waking hours is not sustainable,” Bernard Lunzer, president of the NewsGuild, told the journalism site Poynter.org. “If owners are doing well, workers will say, ‘Let’s get a bit more reasonable.'”

Security Firms

Fh Photo/Shutterstock

Most of America’s 1 million security guards don’t have much security on the job. With scant health benefits and pay that averages just $11 an hour, they are often just one mishap away from disaster.

So some of them are looking to unions for protection. Since 2003, more than 50,000 security guards have won contracts through the Service Employees International Union—often with big improvements in wages, health care, paid time off, and other benefits. In 2015 alone, more than 2,100 security officers in Baltimore, Sacramento, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh formed unions.

The SEIU has focused primarily on the 60 percent of security guards employed by independent contractors, which tend to pay bottom-of-the-barrel wages. In May, responding to pressure from labor groups, Facebook announced a $15 minimum wage and a new-parent benefit for all its subcontracted workers. Google and Apple recently went even further by bringing their security guards in-house and offering them the same benefits as their other workers.

Tech Shuttle Services

Bauer’s IT

In 2014, private buses for tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area became potent symbols of inequality and gentrification. Last year, however, they became known for something more positive: union contracts.

It all started last February, when newly unionized drivers employed by Facebook contractor Loop Transportation won a sweetheart contract through Local 853 of the Teamsters. It guaranteed a $9 raise to $27.50 an hour, fully paid family health insurance—a first—up to five weeks of paid vacation, 11 paid holidays, and a pension. “It was just an amazing first contract,” says Doug Bloch, the Teamsters’ Northern California political director. “They were literally catapulted into the middle class overnight.”

The deal sent ripple effects through the Bay Area labor market. The following month, Apple and Google announced a 25 percent raise for all contract shuttle bus drivers. In May, unionized shuttle drivers at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency won a 44 percent wage increase, 25 days off (up from 12), and a 401(k) plan with an employee match.

Other drivers scrambled to join the union, too. In November, Local 853 won a similarly sweet deal for nearly 200 newly organized employees of Compass Transportation, which serves Apple, eBay, PayPal, and Yahoo, among others. Next up on the union’s radar is Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, a contractor for Twitter, Yelp, Cisco, and Salesforce.

“In the Bay Area there’s a lot of discussion about the intersection between the high-tech economy and income inequality,” says Bloch of the Teamsters. Tech companies “are politically vulnerable for the exact same reason, and that created an opening for us.”

Colleges and Universities

Duke TIP

In the 1970s, two-thirds of college and university faculty was tenured and a third was not. Now those percentages are flipped: Nearly half of professors don’t even have full-time jobs. As with other involuntary part-time workers in restaurants or retail, these “adjuncts” often have a hard time making ends meet.

Enter the SEIU’s Faculty Forward campaign. Since launching three years ago, it has won union contracts for more than 10,000 adjunct and nontenured faculty at more than 30 colleges and universities, including Georgetown, Tufts, Boston University, and the University of Chicago. Some profs have seen raises of 30 percent.

In a related campaign, the United Auto Workers is unionizing graduate student workers such as teaching assistants and resident advisers. There are already grad student unions at some 60 public university campuses, but a 2004 National Labor Relations Board ruling has prevented similar unions from forming at private colleges—until now. In 2013, worried that Obama appointees on the NLRB would reverse the Bush-era ruling, New York University agreed to let its grad students form a union. The UAW now has campaigns at Harvard, Columbia, and the New School in New York City—the union also is in talks with students at many other private campuses. The NLRB is expected to revisit its 2004 ruling sometime this year.

Bike Share Companies

Oran Viriyincy

In 2013, Citi Bike became the nation’s largest public bike-sharing program after opening 332 bike stations across Manhattan.

“When it first started we didn’t pay much notice,” admits Jim Gannon, a spokesman for the New York local of the Transport Workers Union. “It was just a bunch of bikes.”

But then the union heard from some of the company’s 150 workers—mechanics and “balancers” who make sure that the racks don’t go empty. They joined the TWU in late 2014 and last year won a contract that guarantees parental leave, paid vacation, and 20 percent raises within five years.

The company’s workers in Jersey City, the District of Columbia, Boston, and Chicago soon followed, becoming union members over the next several months. “We kind of take the position that if it’s public and it moves on wheels,” Gannon now says, “it should be TWU and it should be unionized.”

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5 Unlikely Industries Where Workers Are Clamoring to Join Unions

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The Feds Are Now Investigating Chipotle Over That Nasty Norovirus Outbreak

by eG8kJ4fQ7z Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Its plummeting stock price wasn’t the only dismal year-end news for Chipotle in 2015.

The once hugely popular burrito chain revealed on Wednesday that the company was also served with a grand jury subpoena last month to investigate the nasty norovirus outbreak that started at a Simi Valley, California, restaurant in August.

That outbreak caused about 100 people to suffer gastrointestinal distress—with everything from diarrhea to vomiting.

According to a company memo released on Wednesday, Chipotle said the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, along with the Federal Drug Administration’s criminal investigation’s office, has requested the company “produce a broad range of documents” related to the California incident. Chipotle said it intended to fully cooperate in the probe.

News of the subpoena comes on the heels of multiple similar outbreaks all linked to restaurants in the chain around the country, including an E. coli outbreak that affected more than 50 people in the Midwest and another norovirus outbreak that sickened 80 people in Boston.

In the same company memo, Chipotle said the company’s stocks were down a staggering 30 percent in December.

“Future sales trends may be significantly influenced by further developments,” the company added.

For more on burrito safety and how to avoid potential outbreaks, check out our helpful charts here.

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The Feds Are Now Investigating Chipotle Over That Nasty Norovirus Outbreak

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Here’s the Most Offensive GOP Response to Obama’s New Syrian Refugee Plan

by IgnacioZavala Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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As my colleague Tim McDonnell reported earlier today, the Obama administration has announced that the United States will take in 10,000 Syrian refugees starting October 1, in what the White House described as a “significant scaling up” of the US commitment to the ongoing migrant crisis.

Cue the terrorism-conflating saber-rattling of one Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.), who issued the following statement this afternoon:

There’s evidently much wrong with King’s statement, not least of all the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers who bombed Boston spent time growing up in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, and were part of a family originally from war-torn Chechnya. Not Syria.

It also takes a long time for a Syrian refugee to apply for a coveted spot in the United States—precisely due to the fact that the United States is going to extraordinary lengths to prevent terrorists from slipping in, according to the Washington Post:

The United States has so far lagged far behind several European countries in this regard, largely due to the time-consuming screening procedure to block Islamist militants and criminals from entering the United States under the guise of being legitimate refugees.

As a result, it takes 18 to 24 months for the average Syrian asylum seeker to be investigated and granted refugee status. The process takes so long that the UNHCR takes biometric images of some applicants’ irises to ensure that when refugee status is eventually granted, it goes to the same person who applied.

King hasn’t been the only politician warning of an increased terror threat if the United States allows more Syrians into the country. But fellow Republican Marco Rubio struck a less incendiary tone this week. “We would be potentially open to the relocation of some of these individuals at some point in time to the United States,” he said, according to CNN, but added that, “We’d always be concerned that within the overwhelming number of the people seeking refugee status, someone with a terrorist background could also sneak in.”

According to an investigation by Mother Jones in 2011, Rep. King might possess one of the most hawkish voices in Washington, but his record on terror has raised some eyebrows. King was one of the nation’s most outspoken supporters of the Irish Republican Army and a prolific fundraiser for the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NorAid), allegedly the IRA’s American fundraising arm. (King’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment on that article.) You can read Tim Murphy’s fascinating report here.

King had previously told the Daily News, “Obviously, we have to take refugees… But we have to be extremely diligent, very careful.”

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Here’s the Most Offensive GOP Response to Obama’s New Syrian Refugee Plan

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