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Why Detroit’s Teachers Are Suing Their School District

by AlbertaCxb Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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After six years of growing class sizes, pay cuts, the declining quality of student work, and more and more mold, roaches, and rodents in their classrooms, Detroit teachers have had enough. On Thursday, the Detroit Federation of Teachers and several parents filed a lawsuit against the city’s school district, claiming the poor school conditions threaten students’ health and asking a judge to fire Darnell Earley, a state-appointed “emergency manager” who previously worked as an emergency manager for the city of Flint.

A few weeks earlier, teachers staged some of the biggest “sick out” strikes in recent memory. Because it’s against the law for teachers to organize a strike in Michigan, the Detroit educators used their sick days to make their point. During the most recent strike on January 21, 88 of the city’s 104 schools were shut down.

For more than a decade, the system has been struggling with large deficits caused in part by post-industrial middle-class flight from cities and the subsequent decline in school revenues. In 2009, there were about 95,000 students in Detroit’s public schools; last year that number was 48,900. Even though the funding per student has gone up—from $12,935 nine years ago to $17,995 last year, according to Mother Jones calculations—the overall money for the school district is in decline because funding follows the students.

Despite years of cuts and increased class sizes, the “total net deficit” (a budget line that measures shortfalls against assets) has grown from $369 million in 2008 to $763 million in 2014.

Earley is the fourth emergency manager to oversee the Detroit Public School system in almost six years. After Gov. Rick Snyder took office in 2011, he greatly expanded the power of emergency managers. They can now end contracts (including collective bargaining agreements), sell off public assets, abolish or create new ordinances, and decide what authority elected officials—from mayors to city council schools board members—can have over schools. And an emergency manager can make these moves without having to worry about being voted out of office. As Paul Abowd reported for Mother Jones, Michigan’s emergency-manager law is considered by many to be more far-reaching than any other like it in the nation.

A few weeks before the strike, Earley sent a memorandum to all teachers instructing them to report all instances of employees advocating for “work stoppage.”

“Teachers call it the ‘snitch memo,'” Margaret Weertz, the editor of the Detroit Teacher, a magazine published by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, told Mother Jones. Despite the memo and a restraining-order request by the district against 23 teachers who took part in the strikes, the protests prompted an inspection of school buildings by Mayor Mike Duggan and a written promise from Earley to take care of the many code violations the inspection uncovered. (Earley’s former work in Flint isn’t helping teachers have faith in their boss and his promises, Weertz added.)

Earley also reportedly failed to meet with teachers in any public forums before the sick outs, says William Weir, a veteran social studies teacher with 19 years of experience in the Detroit Public School system under his belt. Weir tells Mother Jones that none of the four emergency managers he’s worked under “made any real efforts to engage with us.” He added, “The biggest changes and cuts in my school took place under Earley.”

Earley’s office didn’t return repeated phone calls from Mother Jones.

Weir was hired by the Schulze Academy for Technology and Arts in 2010 when the school’s scores were at rock bottom. Like much of the Detroit population, 82 percent of the students at Schulze are poor; only 12 percent of the kids’ parents in the neighborhood have at least a bachelor’s degree, according to Bridge Magazine, a nonprofit publication of the Center for Michigan. And yet, even though half of Weir’s students read below grade level and a third of the class has issues that range from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to learning disabilities, a few years ago his students won a statewide award for a research project on the lack of neighborhood grocery stores.

Image by Brian Widdis, courtesy of the Bridge Magazine

Over the last three years, the Schulze Academy has lost its music, arts, and gym classes, and Weir’s classes grew from 25 students to between 30 and 36 students. The teachers’ aides are gone, too. And this year, even though Weir is a social studies teacher, the principal asked him to teach English classes. The gym teacher became the social studies teacher.

Because of the school system situation—pay cuts, deteriorating conditions, class sizes—it’s simply difficult for Detroit to attract enough teachers. According to the union, there are 170 vacancies right now. “The English and math tests are the big tests that matter. It was either me or our gym teacher doing English,” Weir explained.

Citing the growing budget deficit, Weir says, “Why should we keep these emergency managers around if they are not doing their main job and the quality of student work is going down?”

Weir believes that Earley and previous emergency managers have added to the deficit by wasting resources on expensive consultants that haven’t increased students’ achievement. “Once we got these managers, we started getting these consultants,” Weir said. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was hired by Earely’s predecessor, Robert Bobb. The Detroit Metro Times reported that Bennett was paid close to $18,000 a month and brought at least six other consultants with her who were collectively paid about $700,000 for nine months of work.

“It’s not that our teachers don’t like professional development,” Weir explained. “But we have all of these successful, experienced teachers right here. Why not pay them to do coaching? They won’t leave like these consultants and they know our kids.”

In the same time, Detroit public school test scores in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, have remained the worst among large cities since 2009, according to Bridge Magazine.

“These consultants bring expensive books that the principal tells us to take home. And every year there is a new method. And they show you these videos with kids in a middle-class school, with 12 kids in the classroom, and tell us we should teach the same way,” Weir says, “Well, I have 35 kids and about half of them are about three grades behind.”

The consultant-led curriculum, Weir says, “is designed at the grade level and slightly above. Can you imagine being a child who is three grade levels behind? Knowing you’ll be a failure every day you come in?”

“It used to be you’d have a class where five or six kids were behind,” Weir says about the years before the schools started losing students to suburbs and charter schools. “Now you have five or six who are not behind,” he told Bridge Magazine.

About 100 new charter schools have been opened in the Detroit area since mid-’90s taking some of the most motivated and skilled students away from public schools.

Students at the Schulze Academy in Detroit protesting the loss of gym and music programs Photo courtesy of William Weir

Despite all this, Weir—who worked as a police officer before—says teaching is the best job he’s ever had. He wants to be able to meet the kids where they are, he says, providing as much individual tutoring as possible, a difficult task in a classroom with 35 kids and no teacher aides.

Earlier this year, in his first class as an English teacher, he taught the kids a course he helped create, called “Take a Stand.” Students read standard texts about Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez, and after weeks of reading and writing, Weir assigned them a research project he had designed himself.

“What would you like to take a stand on?” he asked 35 wiggly, excited 11- and 12-year-olds. “I really miss our gym and music classes,” one student replied. “Why don’t we have them anymore?” another student chimed in.

In the next few weeks, Weir’s students read studies about the cognitive, physical and emotional benefits of music and gym classes. They also researched articles about their school’s financial woes, budget cuts, and emergency managers—and they held a protest at the district and wrote letters to their federal, state, and local officials. The state superintendent of Michigan schools, Brian Whiston, responded to students by promising to restore the programs as soon as he can. Emergency Manager Darnell Earley still hasn’t replied.

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Why Detroit’s Teachers Are Suing Their School District

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What Flint’s Dirty Water and Detroit’s Angry Teachers Have in Common

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Michigan is having a rough year, to put it mildly. Flint is reeling from the news that its water supply was contaminated with lead for 17 months. In Detroit, teacher “sick-outs” have been shutting down schools; 88 of the city’s 104 schools were closed on January 21. These two seemingly unrelated episodes are joined by a common policy: Both Detroit’s school system and Flint’s water system have been under the control of emergency managers, unelected officials who are empowered to make sweeping decisions and override local policies in the name of balancing budgets.

What’s an emergency manager? Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was elected in 2010 on a platform of fiscal austerity. Snyder, the former head of Gateway computers and a darling of the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, promised to run the state like a company, complete with “outcomes” and “deliverables.” In 2011, he introduced a signature piece of legislation, Public Act 4, which expanded the state’s authority to take over financially troubled cities and school districts. Similar laws exist in about 20 states, but Michigan’s is the most expansive: Emergency managers picked by the governor have the power to renegotiate or cancel city contracts, unilaterally draft policy, privatize public services, sell off city property, and even fire elected officials.

Since 2011, 17 municipalities or school districts in Michigan have been assigned emergency managers. The majority of them are in poor, predominantly African-American communities that have been hit hard by depressed economies and shrinking populations. Some EMs have worked with communities to generate local buy-in, but their outsider status, lack of accountability, and propensity for cutting public services to save money have generated harsh criticism. As Michael Steinberg, the legal director for the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said a recent statement, “Flint is Exhibit A for what happens when a state suspends democracy and installs unaccountable bean counters to run a city.”

So what does this have to do with Flint? Flint was one of the the first cities to be assigned an emergency manager, in 2011; it would have four EMs in as many years. In 2013, its city council voted to build a pipeline to Lake Huron that would free the city of its dependence on Detroit’s water system by 2017. Ed Kurtz, the then-emergency manager, signed off on the plan, and the question became where Flint would source its water in the intervening years. According to a recent Daily Beast investigation, Kurtz rejected the idea of using Flint River water based on conversations with Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality. Longtime Flint residents were also skeptical of the idea: General Motors, which calls Flint home, had used the river as a dumping ground for years.

Yet in 2014, under emergency manager Darnell Earley, the city switched water sources to the Flint River. It remains unclear what led authorities to believe that Flint River water was safe to drink; Earley maintains the decision was supported in a vote by the city council, though there is no record of such a vote. Howard Croft, the former director of public works for Flint, told the ACLU that the decision was financial, had been reviewed by state authorities, and went “all the way to the governor’s office.”

In March of 2015, after months of residents reporting unusual health symptoms and foul-smelling, tainted water coming from their taps, the Flint City Council voted to “do all things necessary” to switch back to Detroit’s water system. Then-acting emergency manager Jerry Ambrose nixed the vote, calling it “incomprehensible.”

And what about Detroit? For the past few weeks, Detroit teachers have been protesting with coordinated sick days that have caused dozens of temporary school closures. The sick-outs, the teachers say, are in response to disgraceful school conditions, from black mold and dead rodents in classrooms to class sizes of more than 40 students.

The Detroit Public School system has been under the authority of an emergency manager since 2009, when the beleaguered system of roughly 100,000 students was mired in debt. Today, after six years under four emergency managers, the number of students has shrunk by about 50 percent while the system’s debt has ballooned to $515 million. It risks going bankrupt by April. Over the past five years, every public school employee has taken a 10 percent wage cut.

“Emergency management is not working,” Ivy Bailey, the president of Detroit Federation of Teachers, told CNN. “If the goal was to destroy DPS, emergency management has done an excellent job.”

Governor Snyder’s latest pick for DPS emergency manager was Darnell Earley, the same official who oversaw Flint’s transition to corrosive river water. On January 21, the day 88 schools were shut down, the school system filed a restraining order against the protesting teachers meant to stop them from calling in sick. The motion was denied. On January 23, Earley posted new rules requiring teachers to submit a written report to him if they learn about their fellow employees organizing a strike. “Failure to immediately comply with this order may be grounds for discipline up to and including termination,” the rules read. Earley’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

What’s next for Michigan’s emergency managers?

There are currently no Michigan cities with emergency managers, though three school districts still them. But they remain unpopular with many Michiganders. Democratic legislators say they will introduce a bill to repeal the EM law. Voters already overturned the EM law in a November 2012 referendum, but a month later, the Republican-led state legislature passed a nearly identical law attached to an appropriations bill that is immune to voter referendum.

“Appointing an emergency manager is the last thing I ever want to do,” wrote Snyder in a 2012 blog post entitled “Why Michigan Needs Its Emergency Manager Law,” written just before the voter referendum. “But if worse comes to worse, the state has a responsibility to protect the health, welfare and safety of its citizens. We can’t stand by and watch schools fail, water shut off, or police protection disappear.”

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What Flint’s Dirty Water and Detroit’s Angry Teachers Have in Common

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3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

by Kieran63O330 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, education officials in New York City approved a controversial school rezoning plan that will reassign some affluent, white children to a high-poverty Brooklyn school that is 90 percent black and Latino. The city’s department of education proposed the plan to reduce overcrowding in the predominantly white Public School 8, which serves kids from Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo—home to some of the most expensive apartments and condos in the country. Meanwhile, their new school, P.S. 307, serves mostly kids from the nearby public housing project, the Farragut Houses.

Many parents at both schools fiercely opposed the integration plan. “When rich people come in, they have the money to force people to do what they want,” said Farragut Houses resident Dolores Cheatom. Citing historic precedents, Cheatom and others argued the rezoning would change the school to benefit wealthy newcomers and slowly push out students from the Farragut community.

The parents whose kids are now bound for P.S. 307 said they were most concerned about the school’s low standardized test scores—which is no surprise, since that’s a common argument against sending white kids to schools that serve large numbers of low-income black and Latino students. The assumptions behind this argument go something like this: (1) Integration mostly benefits poor Latino and black students by allowing them to attend “good,” majority-white schools with better test scores, and (2) sending white children to schools that serve students from diverse racial and economic backgrounds will hurt the academic outcomes of white children.

But here’s the thing: The academic and social advantages white kids gain in integrated schools have been consistently documented by a rich body of peer-reviewed research over the last 15 years. And as strange as it may sound, many social scientists—and, increasingly, leaders in the business world—argue that diverse schools actually benefit white kids the most.

Here’s a summary of some of the most convincing evidence these experts have used to date:

1. White students’ test scores don’t drop when they go to schools with large numbers of black and Latino students.
In 2007, 553 social scientists from across the country signed an amicus brief in support of voluntary school integration policies for a Supreme Court case known as Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District. The brief continues to serve as a treasure trove of some of the most important research in this field, and in its 5-4 decision in favor of integration, the justices concluded that the academic progress of white children is best served in multiracial schools. Soon after the seminal court case, Harvard researchers Susan Eaton and Gina Chirichigno launched the One Nation Indivisible initiative, which now serves as a clearinghouse for the most rigorous current research on the benefits of integrated schools.

When it comes to the impact on standardized test scores, research cited in the case—as well as the most recent data from the federal government—confirmed that there is no negative impact on the test scores of white children. Some studies found that test scores of all students increased, especially in math and science. Others found that they stayed the same. The debate on whether test scores increase in integrated schools continues, but there is overwhelming evidence that they don’t drop when white students go to economically and racially integrated schools.

2. Diverse classrooms teach some of the most important 21st-century skills, which matter more than test scores.
Psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have done some really exciting research in education in the past 10 years, synthesized in the best-selling book by Paul Tough, How Children Succeed. This research tells us that some of the most important academic, social, and emotional skills—curiosity, complex and flexible thinking, resilience, empathy, gratitude—are not captured by standardized test scores but are keys to a successful and productive life.

Other researchers, including Stanford’s Prudence L. Carter, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Linda R. Tropp, and Loyola University of New Orleans’ Robert A. Garda Jr., have found that skills like cross-cultural collaboration, critical thinking, problem-solving, effective communication, reduced racial prejudice, and empathy are best fostered in diverse classrooms. Many of these researchers argue that we need to expand our definition of academic advantages to include these important skills, which are captured mostly through qualitative assessments like presentations, group projects, and student surveys.

3. Graduates of socioeconomically diverse schools are more effective in the workplace and global markets.
Researchers who have been trying to figure out which office settings allow for the most powerful breakthroughs in innovation have consistently come up with the same answer: daily practice and comfort with diverse perspectives, according to Scott E. Page, the author of The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies. Virginia Commonwealth University’s Genevieve Siegel-Hawley argues that daily classroom interactions with students from different racial and economic backgrounds help students develop the ability to view and understand complex problems and events through multiple lenses. Research also shows that an integrated workforce helps companies design and sell products more effectively to a wide range of customers.

Notably, the average white student today goes to a school where 77 percent of her or his peers are white. Schools are as segregated and unequal today as they were shortly after Brown v. Board of Education was decided. This means that too many students, especially in suburban schools, are being socialized in environments that deprive them of one of the most important skills in the global economy: the ability to communicate and collaborate with people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Research is clear that such skills are difficult to teach without daily exposure to integrated communities—a trip abroad, a diversity workshop, or an ethnic studies class taught in a predominantly white classroom isn’t enough. And because students of color are much more likely to interact with diverse people in their neighborhoods and schools, in this sense integrated schools give greater advantages to white students.

Garda writes that getting involved in the issues of income and racial inequalities at the policy level is often too daunting for many parents. But choosing a school or a neighborhood is actually one of the most meaningful ways in which parents can act out their values and help reduce income and racial disparities.

As journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones reported in her important This American Life segment last year on integration, our country made the largest gains in reducing achievement gaps at the peak of integration in the mid-1970s. And then the country gave up, mostly because white parents were afraid to put their kids in the same classrooms with students from “underperforming” schools. “We somehow want this to have been easy,” Hannah-Jones, who as a child lived in a working-class African American neighborhood in Waterloo, Iowa, and was bused to a majority-white school across town. “And we gave up really fast.”

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3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

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The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

by TheodorWashingt Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’m not as cynical about the purpose of universal education as the late Aaron Swartz, but I love this historical retrospective from a piece of his reprinted today in the New Republic:

In 1845, only 45 percent of Boston’s brightest students knew that water expands when it freezes….In 1898, a…Harvard report found only 4 percent of applicants “could write an essay, spell, or properly punctuate a sentence.” But that didn’t stop editorialists from complaining about how things were better in the old days. Back when they went to school, complained the editors of the New York Sun in 1902, children “had to do a little work. … Spelling, writing and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn.”

In 1913…more than half of new recruits to the Army during World War I “were not able to write a simple letter or read a newspaper with ease.” In 1927, the National Association of Manufacturers complained that 40 percent of high school graduates could not perform simple arithmetic or accurately express themselves in English.

….A 1943 test by the New York Times found that only 29 percent of college freshmen knew that St. Louis was on the Mississippi….A 1951 test in LA found that more than half of eighth graders couldn’t calculate 8 percent sales tax on an $8 purchase….In 1958, U.S. News and World Report lamented that “fifty years ago a high-school diploma meant something…. We have simply misled our students and misled the nation by handing out high-school diplomas to those who we well know had none of the intellectual qualifications that a high-school diploma is supposed to represent—and does represent in other countries. It is this dilution of standards which has put us in our present serious plight.”

A 1962 Gallup poll found “just 21 percent looked at books even casually.” In 1974, Reader’s Digest asked, “Are we becoming a nation of illiterates? There is an evident sag in both writing and reading…at a time when the complexity of our institutions calls for ever-higher literacy just to function effectively.”

Education was always better in the old days. Except that it wasn’t. As near as I can tell, virtually all the evidence—both anecdotal and systematic—suggests that every generation of children has left high school knowing as much or more than the previous generation. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But if I am, I sure haven’t seen anyone deliver the proof.

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The Kids Today…Seem Pretty Smart, Actually

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Why Donald Trump Loves Vladimir Putin

by AlphonsVeasley Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last week—before Donald Trump schlonged Hillary Clinton and charitably pledged not to kill journalists—there was a curious episode involving the GOP front-runner and Russian President Vladimir Putin that remains, even after the passage of several news cycles, worthy of a few dollops of reflection, since it may provide a true key to understanding Trump.

It all began when the Russian strongman hailed Trump as “a very bright and talented man.” He also pointed out the obvious: that Trump was the leader in the GOP presidential race. Trump replied with a bear hug. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, he proudly commented, “When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.” Though host Joe Scarborough pressed Trump, noting that several journalists critical of the Putin regime have been slain, the tycoon turned politician stuck with his admiration for Putin and replied, “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.”

Days later, Trump declined to distance himself from his Putin-friendly remarks. He insisted it would be good for the United States if he became president because Putin respected him. Trump also defended Putin, saying, “If he has killed reporters, I think that’s terrible. But this isn’t like somebody that’s stood with a gun and he’s, you know, taken the blame or he’s admitted that he’s killed. He’s always denied it.” (According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, “Russia remains the worst country in Europe and Central Asia region at prosecuting journalists’ killers…In nearly 90 percent of murders of journalists in Russia, no one is convicted.”)

Many Republicans and other human beings were astonished by Trump’s embrace of Putin. Mitt Romney was so enraged he put out a tweet. And I’m told that GOP insiders once again started telling each other that this Trump misstep—a candidate playing footsie with the repressive ruler of Russia!—would be the one to topple Trump’s tower-like standing in the polls. Well, perhaps. But, then again, Trump tends to not schlong himself.

Still, the episode left many members of the politerati puzzled: What could have prompted Trump to become a kissing Cossack of Putin? Though time has marched on, this question still warrants an answer. Or a theory. And I have one.

Trump is a narcissist—at least, several experts in narcissism have raised (quite strongly) this possibility. As Jeffrey Kluger, author of The Narcissist Next Door: Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed—in Your World noted in Time, “To call Donald Trump a narcissist is, of course, to state the clinically obvious. There is the egotism of narcissism, the grandiosity of narcissism, the social obtuseness of narcissism.” And writing in the New York Times, Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory University, and Ashley Watts, a graduate student there, observed:

The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration.

They declared that it would be “inappropriate of us to offer a formal assessment of his level of narcissism.” But according to the Mayo Clinic, these are the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder:

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
Exaggerating your achievements and talents
Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people
Requiring constant admiration
Having a sense of entitlement
Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations
Taking advantage of others to get what you want
Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
Being envious of others and believing others envy you
Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

Yes, mental health specialists should not diagnose anyone from afar. But it would be hard to read this list and point to a public figure who exhibits more of these traits than Trump. In Psychology Today, journalist Randi Kreger, who has written on personality disorders, applies this list to Trump’s statements and actions and finds—guess what?—compelling evidence for each symptom. Some experts have been so sure of Trump’s narcissism that they have been willing to brand him with the N-word merely on the basis of his public life. As Vanity Fair reported recently:

For mental-health professionals, Donald Trump is at once easily diagnosed but slightly confounding. “Remarkably narcissistic,” said developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “Textbook narcissistic personality disorder,” echoed clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis. “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics,” said clinical psychologist George Simon, who conducts lectures and seminars on manipulative behavior. “Otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He’s like a dream come true.”

Let’s assume that Trump, if he’s not a full-blown case of narcissistic personality disorder, is narcissistic-ish. And then let’s ask: How does a narcissist judge other people in his super-self-centered world? Certainly, it’s all about how these other people relate to the narcissist. And for a narcissist, what’s most significant is how others think of him. So in the case of Putin, what counts for Trump is how Putin regards Trump. If Putin says Trump is brilliant, then Putin must be okay. Other parts of Putin’s record—say, invading a country or running a corrupt, repressive regime—don’t matter as much. After all, those things don’t affect Trump directly.

Trump seems to inhabit a world that he views as one big green room, full of bold-faced names, with Trump as king of the hill. At campaign speeches, he often refers to famous people—the famous people in his world—by their first names, inviting his followers and supporters into this exclusive, otherwise-gated community. (His campaign is like one long episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.) And Putin is just another inhabitant with the sense to recognize Trump’s undeniable greatness. During a Republican presidential debate in early November, Trump boasted of forging a bond with Putin during a taping of 60 Minutes. He made it sound as if he and Putin had buddied it up in the green room at CBS: “I got to know him very well because we were both on 60 Minutes, we were stablemates, and we did very well that night.” Trump the salesman was selling his connection with über-man Putin as a qualification for the presidency.

Well, it did not take fact-checkers long to report that Trump’s statement was a total lie. As Factchecking.org put it, “The two did appear on the same ’60 Minutes’ episode, which aired on Sept. 27. But journalist Charlie Rose traveled to Moscow for the two-hour interview with Putin, and Trump was interviewed by Scott Pelley in Trump’s Fifth Avenue penthouse in Manhattan.” In this instance, Trump’s big green room in the sky was a fantasy. Yet somehow, in Trump’s mind, his proximity to Putin via videotape elevated him to the level of a superpower leader. Clearly, Trump had a need to identify with Putin.

Trump’s full-on fib about getting to know Putin “very well” while both were being promoted by 60 Minutes did nothing to slow down Trump’s campaign. And it seems that the next time Trump had a chance to show everyone he was on Putin’s level—with Putin now identifying with Trump and endorsing his manifest brilliance—he seized it.

The Putin affair illustrates that Trump’s main currency is not money or power; it’s Trump-love. Putin showed it, and, for Trump, that defined the man. Putin, as far as Trump sees it, has passed the most critical test: He validated Trump’s magnificence. For a narcissist, what in the world could be more important?

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Why Donald Trump Loves Vladimir Putin

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Just How Few Professors of Color Are at America’s Top Colleges? Check Out These Charts.

by MelvaKepert Posted on November 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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After allegations of racism on campus led to demonstrations at the University of Missouri and Yale, protests have erupted on college campuses across the country, from Occidental College in California to Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Among the common demands made by the student activists is that their schools try harder to hire more diverse and representative faculties.

Just how well do the professors at America’s top colleges reflect the country’s race and gender breakdown? Each year, universities are required to report diversity data to the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the Department of Education. Unsurprisingly, the numbers show that the teaching staff America’s universities are much whiter and much more male than the general population, with Hispanics and African-Americans especially underrepresented. At some schools, like Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Princeton, there are more foreign teachers than Hispanic and black teachers combined. The Ivy League’s gender stats are particularly damning; men make up 68 and 70 percent of the teaching staff at Harvard and Princeton, respectively.

Here are the race and gender breakdowns of instructional staff at selected universities from the 2013-2014 school year, the most recent data available. A racial breakdown of the entire US population can be found at the bottom of the chart.

A few notes about the data: These charts include the 20 four-year universities with the biggest instructional staffs and the eight Ivy League universities. They also include the University of Missouri. “Other” includes individuals who are Native American, Pacific Islander, multiracial, or declined to report their race. The US population stats come from the Census, which doesn’t separate “foreign” from other races.

In cases where there is more than one campus in a university system, the data shows the diversity of faculty on the main campus. (The campus names that have been shortened are: University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, University of Florida, University of Texas-Austin, University of Colorado-Denver, University of Pittsburgh-Pittsburgh Campus, Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus, University of Washington-Seattle Campus, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Rutgers University-New Brunswick.)

Want to find a university that’s not on the chart? Hang tight! We’re working on making the diversity data from more than 3,000 colleges and universities available.

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Just How Few Professors of Color Are at America’s Top Colleges? Check Out These Charts.

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Uncovering the Painful Truth About Racism on Campus

by MyrtisLawyer Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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After a series of racist incidents sparked campus-wide protests at the University of Missouri, demonstrations have spread rapidly across the country, from Princeton and Claremont McKenna, to the University of South Carolina and Stanford. Students from dozens of colleges and universities have raised demands ranging from improvements in student and faculty diversity to the renaming of campus buildings, and even reparations. Several university heads and professors have resigned amid the upheaval.

Fully understanding the rising wave of campus protests over racial injustice requires looking back centuries, explains Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Wilder spent more than a decade researching the fraught racial history of America’s colleges and universities—including their roots in one of the country’s most ignominous eras. “It’s difficult to celebrate diversity while standing in front of buildings that are named after slave traders,” he says.

Wilder spoke to Mother Jones about how that history came to light, and how it informs current politics and the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mother Jones: What went through your mind when you first heard about the protests at Mizzou and Yale?

Professor Craig Steven Wilder. Courtesy of MIT

Craig Steven Wilder: I had just given a talk at Yale. One of the things that came to mind was the reemergence of a student activism that is increasingly important on our campuses and also in the broader social conversation about racial inequality and racial justice. If you look back at what’s happened over the past few years, with both Occupy and Black Lives Matter, you’ll see a heavy student involvement. The fact that they’re now beginning to articulate a kind of common vision seems to me predictable.

MJ: In 2013, you published Ebony and Ivy, a book about the role slavery played in the founding of America’s earliest colleges and universities, dating back to the 1700s. Do you see any connection between the racial injustices then and the protests we are seeing now?

CSW: It actually dates back to the early 1600s, to the founding of the very first English academy in the American colonies. I don’t see a direct linear connection between those things, but there is a connection. Institutions are a product of their histories, like Georgetown has experienced. We have campuses that are filled with buildings named after founders and early participants in the founding and establishment of universities who both owned and traded human beings. It’s difficult and awkward to celebrate diversity while standing in front of buildings that are named after slave traders.

An advertisement for a slave auction on a ship owned by a charter trustee of the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Gazette/Courtesy of Craig Steven Wilder

MJ: For those who haven’t read your book, tell us more about how slavery played a significant role in the growth of American universities.

CSW: Every college that survived the American Revolutionary war did so by attaching itself to the slave economies of the Atlantic world. It’s those economies that sustained them. Slavery wasn’t just an aspect of their early history—slavery decided which colleges would survive. When Harvard was founded in 1636, it was founded just before the Piqua war breaks out—the war between the Puritans and the native communities of Southern New England. Which culminates in the massacre of several hundred Piqua, and the survivors are sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The ship that sells them is the first to transport slaves out of the British colonies. It returns with African slaves to New England. The year that it returns, Harvard gets its first slave on campus. Yale became a college that expanded in the 18th century by finding more intimate connections to slavery, including owning a small slave plantation in Rhode Island that it leased out to a series of slaveholding tenants. The rent from that estate helped Yale establish its first graduate program and its first scholarship.

There’s an academic revolution that happened in the quarter century just before the American Revolution. There are only three colleges in the British colonies until the 1740s. William and Mary in Virginia, Harvard, and Yale. Then, between 1740 and 1769, seven new colleges get established. That’s the moment when the slave trade is peaking. New wealth is being produced in the Americas that allows the various Christian denominations to establish colleges to help cement their presence in the colonies. Engineering schools in the pre-Civil War period were largely funded by people who were making significant amounts of money off the products of slavery: cotton manufacturers, textile manufacturers in New England, and sugar refiners in places like New York.

You spend a whole bunch of time in the university archives and then you walk outside to put coins in the meter or to grab a sandwich, and you’re walking past buildings named after the people who are in those records. The slave traders and slave owners. Those legacies are very real.

MJ: When did we first begin to see universities confront these legacies, and where?

CSW: It’s just before 2003, when Ruth Simmons, an African American woman who had been president of Smith, is selected as the next president of Brown University. President Simmons decided to challenge the university and the trustees, and the alumni body, by establishing a commission to look directly at Brown’s relationship to the slave trade, and to bring forth a report on it, to make it public, with suggestions of ways of addressing that history. Northern universities in particular have been terribly effective at hiding their relationship to the slave trade. So that was a moment of tremendous courage.

It didn’t happen in a complete vacuum. A couple years before Simmons became Brown’s president, Yale had its 300th anniversary, during which they often commission a history. Yale’s history focused heavily on its contribution to the abolitionist, anti-slavery movement. A lot of Yale graduates became abolitionists, but the university was actually anti-abolition in its official position. Even more important, Yale had a much longer history with slavery, like all of the universities did, than it did with abolitionism. A group of graduate students and staff pointed this out on a website, “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition.” There was a huge backlash. People accused them of attacking the university by bringing up things that were uncomfortable to deal with at the moment when people should be celebrating.

But whatever the motivations, it’s simply true that these universities have a much deeper relationship with slavery, which they’ve successfully avoided. Brown gave a template for how to wrestle with this history.

MJ: We’ve also seen a backlash against the protests at Mizzou and Yale. Where do you see this coming from?

CSW: I once gave a radio interview in which one of the callers accused me of digging up the past. Which is a strange accusation to make against a historian—that’s the job description. What that accusation really is, is the protest of someone who’s uncomfortable with a certain historical truth. I think there’s a fear of where this will lead.

When I was doing the research for the book, you have these references to enslaved people who are on campus. At Princeton, after the president died, his slaves were auctioned off from the president’s house. The founder of Dartmouth showed up to New Hampshire with eight enslaved black people. He’s got more slaves than faculty. He’s got more slaves than active trustees. I’m not the first one to have seen this. But a lot of historians have made the decision that what they were seeing isn’t all that important to the story they were telling.

Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Virginia, leased its slaves to bring in additional revenue. Library of Congress/Courtesy of Craig Steven Wilder

When these investigations first started, one of the fears was that any acknowledgement that slavery played in the histories of institutions would lead to calls for reparations. That’s an extraordinarily cowardly position to take. The truth can’t be held hostage to our fear of consequences.

MJ: Has the lack of diversity among university faculty and students had anything to do with the time it has taken to accept these truths?

CSW: I think in the past 25 to 35 years, the increasing diversity of American colleges and universities has created the conditions for beginning to unpack some of this history and to challenge it on campus. On historically white, predominantly white university campuses, we’ve developed a tendency to celebrate diversity and to talk about diversity as a positive good, particularly for marketing purposes, and how we should be ranked with competitors. But at the same time, there’s been a reluctance to do the very difficult work of managing a diverse community of people and thinking about what it really requires to sustain a diverse community of people.

The business of dealing with diversity has gotten harder to do as colleges and universities have gotten more corporatized, as costs have inflated, and as we’ve turned to our upper administration to deal with the business of raising money, building campuses, expanding endowments, and primarily focus on the fiscal health of the institutions. One of the things we’ve created is a generation of higher education officials who don’t necessarily have the skill set to manage diversity.

MJ: How do the ongoing campus protests tie in with the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged more than a year ago?

CSW: Actually, I believe that the campus protests are influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement. Some of these students got their initial experience in organizing and political action from BLM. It is, unfortunately, not difficult to see how the social crises that produced BLM also play out on campus. These movements are grassroots reactions to social injustice.

I also think this is a moment where we need to look at the health of our university system more broadly—is it performing the role we think it’s supposed to? And as the students come to experience their own campaign’s successes and failures, their goals will evolve. The original Montgomery bus boycott had very modest aims. It wasn’t until community action began to experience its own power that the aim of desegregating the transit system emerged. Even in a movement that broad and spectacular and historically significant, you have this evolution. So what I see happening with the students is that—much like the student athletes over the past several years who’ve been pushing for compensation and recognition of the roles they’re playing, and the money that’s being generated off their labor—their aims have been evolving over time.

Diversity is not disconnected from those broader conversations. It needs to be embedded in those broader conversations, which is how we hold ourselves accountable over time. It’s how we avoid this habit of pretending to be surprised by things that we know are bubbling up on our campuses.

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Uncovering the Painful Truth About Racism on Campus

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Ted Cruz Is Not Going to Eliminate the IRS

by AlannahVKGC Posted on November 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ted Cruz wants to eliminate the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, and HUD. Big deal. Even if he could do it, all it means is that all their functions would get divvied up among other departments. Wake me up when Cruz tells us what actual programs he’d eliminate.

But Cruz also thinks he can eliminate the IRS. Or, in any case, “the IRS as we know it.” Has anyone asked him just why he thinks this? His tax plan still has a 10 percent income tax. It has a standard deduction. It has a child tax credit. It has an EITC. It includes a charitable deduction. It includes a home mortgage deduction. And there’s a business VAT to replace the corporate income tax. So who’s going to oversee and collect and audit all this stuff? Tax fairies?

And while we’re at it, I’m still waiting to hear more about Carly Fiorina’s three-page tax code. Can’t we at least see a rough draft?

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Ted Cruz Is Not Going to Eliminate the IRS

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Here Are 6 Things You Should Care About in Today’s State Elections

by JewelLabarbera Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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As John Oliver reminded viewers this week, the much-hyped presidential election may still be 12 months away but important state and local elections are on Tuesday. From the battle over health care in Kentucky to the return of Michigan’s tea party lovebirds, here are six states to watch in Tuesday’s elections.

1. Medicaid in Kentucky: Kentucky’s gubernatorial race has also turned into a battle over Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The race pits the state’s current attorney general, Democrat Jack Conway, against millionaire Republican businessman Matt Bevin. Bevin has sworn to roll back current Gov. Steve Beshear’s expansion of the state’s Medicaid program, saying that Kentucky taxpayers can’t afford it, even though this expansion allowed an additional 400,000 residents to receive health care coverage. It also made Kentucky one of the only Southern states to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. If Bevin wins, it would become the first state to reverse that expansion, according to the Associated Press. Bevin, who has never before held political office, was trailing Conway by 5 points in a recent poll.

2. Gun control in Virginia: The state Senate race in Virginia has attracted millions of dollars in outside funding from groups eager to make headway in the national fight over gun control. Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control advocacy group backed by billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has put $2.2 million into television ads supporting two Democratic candidates for the Senate, Reuters reported. A win by either of these candidates would give Democrats the majority in the 40-seat state Senate, which could allow Gov. Terry McAuliffe to push through gun control measures that were blocked by a state Senate committee in January. The National Rifle Association, which is based in Virginia, has contributed to the Republican campaigns.

3. Campaign finance reform in Maine and Seattle: Both Maine and Seattle residents will vote Tuesday on initiatives to limit the power of money in politics. Seattle’s city ballot includes a novel initiative to create a system of “democracy vouchers,” which would give voters four $25 vouchers to contribute to the campaign of their choosing. It would also limit contributions in city races to $500 or less. Meanwhile, Maine—historically a leader in campaign finance regulation—will vote on a package of reforms that would require additional disclosures in political advertising and gubernatorial races, raise penalties for breaking campaign finance rules, and add $1 million to the state’s fund for public campaign financing.

4. Restrictions on Airbnb in San Francisco: San Francisco residents will vote Tuesday on Proposition F, a measure to limit short-term rentals in the city—which would strike a potentially precedent-setting blow to locally based hospitality startup Airbnb. For its part, Airbnb has poured more than $8 million into lobbying against the initiative. The company tried to win favor before the vote with a tongue-in-cheek ad campaign last month that backfired, prompting an apology from the company’s management.

5. Education funding in Mississippi: While no surprises are expected in Mississippi’s gubernatorial election, in which an unknown truck driver is running as the Democratic nominee against Republican incumbent Phil Bryant, a racially tinged battle over an amendment to the state’s constitution is one to watch. Initiative 42, which gathered 200,000 signatures to get on the ballot, would force the state to meet levels of education funding that lawmakers set in 1997 but have repeatedly failed to meet. If the measure passes, and lawmakers again fail to appropriate sufficient funds, a state court could step in and rule on the issue. Republicans have opposed the measure, arguing that it would give the courts control over the state’s budget. But the issue has also taken on distinctly racial overtones, with one state lawmaker, Bubba Carpenter, caught on camera last month telling constituents they should be afraid of what a “black judge” might do with their tax dollars. “If 42 passes in its form, a judge in Hinds County, Mississippi, predominantly black—it’s going to be a black judge—they’re going to tell us where the state education money goes,” Carpenter said. Carpenter later apologized for his statement.

6. Tea party tryst in Michigan: And last but not least, two tea party politicians in Michigan who left office after their extramarital affair and peculiar attempts to cover it up were revealed are running for the same positions they just vacated. Todd Courser, who resigned after the scandal broke, and Cindy Gamrat, who was kicked out of the Legislature in September, are running less than two months after the left their respective offices. Courser in May famously sent a fake email to journalists and politicians claiming he had been caught having sex with a male prostitute—a ruse he believed at the time would make news of the affair appear less credible. He was wrong.

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Here Are 6 Things You Should Care About in Today’s State Elections

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Ben Carson’s Babysitter Attacks Press for Allowing Ben Carson on TV

by TobyGarrett17 Posted on October 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen points me to Jake Tapper, who interviewed Ben Carson recently about his opposition to “wealth redistribution”:

TAPPER: I want to ask you about comments you made year to Politico about education funding, in which you said—quote—“Wouldn’t it make more sense to put the money in a pot and redistribute it throughout the country so that public schools are equal, whether you’re in a poor area or a wealthy area?”

CARSON: Well, that’s a different concept altogether…

TAPPER: But isn’t it redistribution of wealth? It’s redistribution of education wealth, but it’s redistribution, right?

…CARSON: I think that’s very different than a situation where someone is working hard, is making, you know, a lot of money, is providing a lot of jobs and is contributing to the fabric of America and then us going along and saying, well, he’s got too much. And this guy over here, he has too little, so let’s just take this one and give it to that one. That’s much more arbitrary.

TAPPER: Well, you’re talking about doing it on an individual level. But when it’s school districts, if it’s funded from local taxes, so isn’t it the same principle at stake?

CARSON: No, it’s not the same principle at stake because we are talking about the entire nation and we’re talking about what makes us competitive in the world, and the great divide between the haves and the have-nots is education. That’s very different than redistributing funding because you feel that that’s the social thing to do.

After a while you start to run out of things to say about this. We’ve already been through this dance once before, posting all the idiotic things Donald Trump said and then shaking our virtual heads over them. That finally got boring, so now it’s Ben Carson’s turn. But it’s weirdly different. Trump used bluster to hide his ignorance, but at least that suggests he knew he was ignorant. Carson doesn’t even seem to know. He tosses out his flaky ideas and then earnestly defends them. In this interview, he didn’t take the easy route of saying he’d misspoken, or was taken out of context, or has since changed his mind. He just went ahead and defended himself. Massive redistribution in education funding isn’t real redistribution that’s done because “you feel that’s the social thing to do.”

In other words, it’s okay if your motives are pure. I guess. Anyway, one of Carson’s minders quickly covered for his boss, saying “Dr. Carson does not support the national pooling of property tax receipts. That is a falsehood.” So I guess we’re redefining “falsehood” too. Now it means something Carson actually said that turns out to be sort of inconvenient.

I can only assume Carson is a smart man. How can a smart man who’s running for president know less about policy than the average Joe in a construction yard? It is a mystery.

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Ben Carson’s Babysitter Attacks Press for Allowing Ben Carson on TV

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