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Will Forcing High School Kids to Make a Post-Graduation Plan Actually Help Them?

by DeanSealey Posted on April 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel got a lot of attention two weeks ago when he announced a new graduation requirement for high school seniors: They would have to have a plan. Starting with the class of 2020, Chicago Public School students will be required to show proof of their next step after graduation—such as a college acceptance letter or a job offer. It may seem like a good motivational tool, but in a city where access to resources depends on your neighborhood, and where budget cuts have strained existing programs, some observers consider the mayor’s proposal “deeply insulting.”

So says Stacy Davis Gates, the political and legislative director for the Chicago Teacher’s Union, who adds, “It spits in the face of everything we know about CPS right now.”

Emanuel announced the proposal (“Learn. Plan. Succeed: A Degree For Life”) in early April. Students will have to show a school counselor that they have a post-secondary plan. It needn’t be college or a job: A kid also can enlist in the military or find an apprenticeship or a “gap-year” program, among other options. There are exceptions for students facing special circumstances, including incarceration. Emanuel wants to “make 14th grade universal,” as he told CBS. Graduates of the school system, meanwhile, are automatically eligible to attend the City Colleges of Chicago.

The mayor first explored the idea in conversations with Arne Duncan, who served as Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama, and who once ran the Chicago schools. The Chicago Board of Education is expected to greenlight “Learn. Plan. Succeed” at its next meeting.

On its face, the program reflects the goals of teachers and principals: to prepare kids for a bright future. Janice Jackson, the chief education officer for the Chicago schools, compares Emanuel’s proposal to others that faced opposition at first, such as mandatory ACT testing and the requirement that kids complete a program of community service in order to graduate.

According to internal reports from local high schools, about 60 percent of students already graduate with a plan. Emanuel is intent on ensuring that half of all public school students end up with a college or career credential (from internships, work experience, etc.) by 2019—up from around 40 percent today. Under his new proposal, the school district will spend $1 million to make sure each school has at least one counselor well trained in college advising. Additional specialists will be hired to work externally with colleges and employers, Jackson says.

Emanuel’s critics, however, doubt that $1 million is enough. They also express frustration that the city isn’t doing more to tackle systemic problems, including: slashed budgets, school closures, and overcrowded classrooms—city schools may even end classes three weeks early this year due to a lack of funding. The Rev. Jesse Jackson joined the dissenters this week, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times that “a majority of young black high school graduates are looking for work and can’t find it. The mayor’s plan does nothing to address this grim reality.”

The same morning Emanuel introduced “Learn. Plan. Succeed,” he also announced that the city may close multiple schools on the South Side and build one new high school there at a cost of $75 million. (A school district spokeswoman said on Thursday that no final decisions have been made.) Gates, the teachers’ union rep, claims this is in line with Emanuel’s “lead by press release” style: using a flashy proposal to steer the media away from the district’s persistent troubles.

According to research from the Urban League, more than half of Chicago public school students are in majority-black, majority-poor schools. The district has a 37 percent achievement gap in grade-level proficiency between its white and black students.

The district’s Janice Jackson says the funds generated for the new program should allow all schools to meet the new requirement by 2020. She acknowledges the resource disparities between richer and poorer schools, but “now that it’s a requirement, I think that that 40 percent of kids who don’t have a post-secondary plan will have one, and they’ll benefit as a result.”

Gates begs to differ. She says the counselor-to-student ratio varies widely across the city, and that 63 percent of high schools have counselors handling more kids than recommended. “As a district, we would fail miserably in meeting this harebrained idea,” she told me. “There are not enough resources to support something like this. Remember, getting a diploma is not a senior year activity. Getting a diploma and getting ‘college ready’ is something that starts in early childhood.”

Chicago’s budget woes largely come from the top. The district had to cut $46 million from its budget earlier this year, meaning less money for textbooks, afterschool programs, and field trips. Emanuel’s handling of the schools has been repeatedly criticized. Teachers called a 2012 strike to seek better benefits, proper job evaluations, and additional training. In 2013, the mayor decided to close 50 schools, mostly in black and Latino communities.

Sheryl Bond, who works as a counselor at George Washington High School, says she supports the goals of the the new policy, but considering that counselors are already trying to help kids plan their futures, and since it’s easy enough to put a “plan” on paper, she’s skeptical whether the “plan” requirement will change anything. “Is this going to be a compliance issue,” she asks, “or are we going to make sure that kids have a real plan?”

Kristy Brooks, a Chicago elementary school counselor, also doesn’t see how giving kids another hoop to jump through will help. “The only thing standing in the way of our kids having a bright future is that nobody’s forcing them to have some sort of plan? I don’t think so,” Brooks says. “If a kid makes it far enough to graduate high school, they’re doing it for a reason.”

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Will Forcing High School Kids to Make a Post-Graduation Plan Actually Help Them?

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This Rookie Chicago Politician Is Ready to Resist Donald Trump’s Deportation Fervor

by GSCClarita Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a press conference Wednesday to assure anxious residents that Chicago would remain a “sanctuary city”—meaning local law enforcement won’t help federal agents with President Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, a plan that just got a lot more real. In December, Emanuel told Trump to his face that he should rethink his proposed policies—specifically, that he should retain the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought here as young children (and for all practical purposes are Americans) to stay in the United States.

Yet even as Emanuel gets recognition as a mayor willing to stand up to Trump on immigration, 27-year-old rookie Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has been pushing for stronger legal protections in the city—especially given the White House’s reported intent to engage state and local police in its deportation efforts. “What we really need,” the alderman told local reporters “is less symbolism and more action.”

Ramirez-Rosa is a Chicago native, the son of a Puerto Rican dad and a Mexican-born mom. He grew up in the Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side and went to a magnet high school before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduating, he become an aide to Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, running his boss’ social-media efforts and working directly with families facing deportation. Just two years later he managed to unseat Rey Colon, the four-term 35th Ward incumbent, to become one of the youngest members of the City Council and its first openly gay Latino.

As an alderman, Ramirez-Rosa has made immigrants’ rights his main focus, and the overwhelming message he hears from affected families is that the city hasn’t done enough to protect them. “I’ve been fighting this mayor since before I took office,” Ramirez-Rosa told me. “I wasn’t elected to cozy up with the rich and powerful. I was elected by my constituents to represent their interests.”

Chicago’s 2012 sanctuary city law, the Welcoming City Ordinance, prevents city police from detaining undocumented immigrants on behalf of federal authorities. But the law contains several exceptions: for immigrants who have a criminal warrant out on them, who have been convicted of a serious offense, who are defendants in a criminal case, or who have been identified as part of a gang. Some of these carve-outs mean that people who haven’t been found guilty of a crime could be refused sanctuary. A Chicago Police Department spokesman told me that, to his knowledge, the police have not acted on any of the exceptions, and that they were intended for extreme circumstances. Still, Ramirez-Rosa and his constituents want those carve-outs removed to give legal backup to the city’s commitment to not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ramirez-Rosa wants Chicago, with its 183,000 undocumented immigrants, to be a model for immigrant protections. While Chicago’s law is already stronger than those of many sanctuary cities, it falls short of Philadelphia (which has no exceptions, barring extreme circumstances) and Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco (which have only a couple). He has been busy organizing and educating immigrant communities to be ready for the Trump administration. “The focus right now,” he said, “is preparing the community.”

Back in 2015, Ramirez-Rosa and more than a dozen local immigrants’ rights groups joined forces to create the Chicago Immigration Working Group, which has come up with six key policy goals. Bolstering the Welcoming City ordinance is one of them. They’ve also persuaded the city to launch an ID program that’s open to undocumented immigrants and helps them access city services. Emanuel has committed just over $1 million to a legal defense fund for would-be deportees, although Ramirez-Rosa points out that San Francisco, with a fraction of Chicago’s undocumented population, has just proposed a $5 million legal-defense fund. The alderman also co-sponsored an amendment that makes it illegal for police to threaten people with deportation during a confrontation, or to verbally abuse them. (During a 2013 raid, a Chicago cop famously yelled at a naturalized Chinese American man that he’d “put you in a UPS box and send you back where the expletive you came from!”)

This week, Trump signed orders to begin construction on a Mexican border wall and add detention centers and federal agents to the deportation effort. He also doubled down on his threat to rescind federal funding from sanctuary cities that won’t cooperate with the feds on deportations. If Trump follows through, Chicago stands to lose an estimated $1.3 billion—Congress would need to approve the cut. Trump’s attorney general pick, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is in favor of repealing DACA and opposes a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants. Democrats in the Senate have delayed his confirmation vote, which is now expected to take place in February.

Given all the uncertainly about what will happen, Ramirez-Rosa and his office are making it a priority to educate the immigrant community. Earlier this month, he started a door-to-door outreach effort and “know your rights” trainings to teach undocumented families what they can do to fight deportation attempts. Next up: a “cop-watch” type network in his ward so neighbors can alert one another if federal immigration agents are in their area. In an act of solidarity, Ramirez-Rosa has even declared his office a sanctuary location, a move he hopes other aldermen will copy.

Ramirez-Rosa was in talks with Emanuel’s office last year. The mayor wasn’t always such a full-throated defender of immigrant rights, the alderman notes; as chair of the House Democratic Caucus, Emanuel once called immigration the “third rail of American politics,” and he actually pushed to ramp up deportations while working under President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. “We know the history of this mayor,” Ramirez-Rosa says. “He just wants the sound bite on TV where he says ‘I’m your champion.'”

But the alderman is feeling more hopeful of late. The talks with the mayor have gone well, he says, and Emanuel even asked for a memo outlining the working group’s proposals. Emanuel’s office wouldn’t comment on plans to alter the carve-outs. But it pointed out in a statement that the mayor started a task force (“Chicago Is With You”) with Rep. Gutierrez and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) late last year to provide legal and mental-health services to immigrants and others in need, and he’s involved in other efforts to help immigrants.

But Chicago leaders have to do much more, Ramirez-Rosa insists. The measure of progress, he says, “is in the actual ordinances and resources that the city is bringing to bear. And we’re nowhere near the other cities that are actually national leaders on this.”

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This Rookie Chicago Politician Is Ready to Resist Donald Trump’s Deportation Fervor

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Major Investigation Blasts Chicago Police for Abuses

by LeonoreYXSX Posted on January 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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The US Department of Justice on Friday released a scathing report concluding a 13-month investigation into the conduct of the Chicago Police Department, finding rampant uses of excessive force and other abuses. The investigation was launched in November 2015 after the release of video showing a white officer shooting black teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times, killing the youth who was armed with a knife. The Justice Department reviewed documents related to the Chicago PD’s training policies and procedures and reviewed reports and investigative files for nearly 600 police-shooting and use-of-force incidents between January 2011 and April 2016. It also interviewed community members, city officials, hundreds of police officers, and investigators with the city’s independent police review board. Key findings from the report include:

Chicago police officers routinely used unreasonable force—including deadly force. Officers engaged in tactics that made the need to use force more likely or more risky, such as engaging in unnecessary foot pursuits and shooting at moving vehicles, the report says. In one incident, officers drove up to a man on the street and ordered him to freeze because he was fidgeting with his waistband. The man ran and three officers chased him, shooting as they ran. The officers fired a total of 45 rounds in the pursuit, in which the suspect was killed.
Neither the police department nor the independent police oversight agency adequately investigated use-of-force incidents or misconduct complaints. The Internal Police Review Board—tasked with investigating police misconduct until Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel overhauled the agency last year—found just two of the 409 shootings that occurred in the period covered by the DOJ’s investigation to be unjustified. And despite that Chicago paid more than $500 million in judgments in misconduct cases since 2004, it conducted disciplinary investigations into fewer than half of them. When cases were investigated, the report notes, witnesses and officers often were interviewed long after the incidents occurred, or never at all; officers were heavily coached by union attorneys; and some officers colluded to cover up misconduct.
Training in Chicago’s police academy is insufficient to train recruits to modern standards. In one training that DOJ investigators sat in on, recruits were instructed with a video that was 35 years old, pre-dating Supreme Court decisions that altered use-of-force standards, the report says. The instruction was also inconsistent with police department’s own use-of-force policy, the report said.

Notably absent from the DOJ’s report is an assessment of whether Chicago cops disproportionately target people of color—which the DOJ has repeatedly found with investigations of other cities’ police forces. Asked about this during a press conference on Friday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged that the abuses outlined in the report had a greater impact on minority neighborhoods. The report also discussed how distrust between police and communities of color affected Chicago’s skyrocketing murder rate, noting that the tension made it harder for police to investigate shootings. (Chicago police have made significantly fewer stops and arrests in Chicago in 2015, which President-elect Donald Trump and some city authorities have attributed to increased scrutiny on officers and blamed for the worsening gun violence.)

The release of the report and the agreement reached between the DOJ and Chicago officials, in which both parties agreed to work toward reforms, were reportedly finalized in a hurry, due to concern that the process would stall under the incoming Trump administration. Both president-elect Donald Trump and his attorney general pick, Jeff Sessions, have been critical of federal involvement in local policing issues. Asked if the DOJ’s agreement with Chicago would stick after the change in administration, Lynch said the agreement was not dependent upon “one or two or three” people who lead the DOJ, but on the work of all involved in the process, including Chicago city officials. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson both said they were committed to making sure the reform recommendations made by the DOJ were implemented.

The DOJ announced yesterday that it had also reached a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department, five months after concluding its investigation into that department following protests over the in-custody death of Freddie Gray. The department also rushed to finalize that decree before Obama leaves office, Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh told the Baltimore Sun.

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Major Investigation Blasts Chicago Police for Abuses

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Chicago’s "Black Site" Police Scandal Is Primed to Explode Again

by PSZLinneap Posted on December 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the past couple of weeks, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been busy doing damage control related to his administration’s botched handling of Laquan McDonald’s killing by police. Last week, the mayor fired his top cop and begrudgingly welcomed an investigation by the Department of Justice. On Monday, after a high-ranking detective stepped down (plenty of critics have been calling for Emanuel’s head, too), officials released video from last October’s fatal police shooting of Ronald Johnson (another black man), and US Attorney General Loretta Lynch accepted Emanuel’s invitation, announcing a DOJ probe into the Chicago Police Department’s use of force. The biggest remaining question is whether the DOJ—or the mayor, for that matter—will tackle the city’s other major police scandal.

It began in February, when UK newspaper the Guardian published the first in a series of articles questioning doings at a Chicago police detention facility known as Homan Square. Police hold and interrogate suspects at the facility, a former Sears warehouse in a predominantly black, low-income neighborhood on the city’s West Side. But it’s neither jail nor booking station. Attorney Flint Taylor described Homan to me as “an intelligence gathering place” akin to a CIA “black site.” In October, he filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of three clients who allege they suffered unconstitutional abuses while detained there.

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Chicago’s "Black Site" Police Scandal Is Primed to Explode Again

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Rick Perry: Don’t Blame Guns for Charleston Attack. But Maybe Blame Drugs.

by AshliHartq Posted on June 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston Wednesday night has reignited the conversation about access to guns in the US, drawing the predictable refrain that this wouldn’t have happened had the people at the Bible study been armed. A board member of the National Rifle Association went so far as to blame one of the victims for the shooting because of his political position on concealed-carry laws. So when President Obama talked about Charleston and how easy it was for someone like 21-year-old Dylann Roof to get a gun, the critics pushed back.

One of them was former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who told Newsmax that the massacre, which he called an “accident,” might have had more to do with drugs than with guns. Watch:

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Rick Perry: Don’t Blame Guns for Charleston Attack. But Maybe Blame Drugs.

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The Lawyer Who Handled Dylann Roof’s Drug Case Says He Seemed Like "Just a Normal Kid"

by RondaMoonlight Posted on June 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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After Dylann Storm Roof was arrested Thursday morning for allegedly shooting nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Ken Mathews, an attorney who has been representing Roof in an ongoing drug-possession case, was, he says, “very shocked” to hear about what Roof had allegedly done. He tells Mother Jones, “The dealings I had with him, he was just a normal kid.”

Mathews, a Columbia, South Carolina, attorney, notes that so far in the drug case he has had “very limited dealings” with Roof. He says he saw “nothing that would indicate that Roof would take this type of action.”

The local police have called the shooting a hate crime. Mathews says he has seen no signs that Roof harbored any racial animus: “I had no inkling of anything like that in the dealings I had with him.”

Mathews has known the Roof family for years, dating back to a custody dispute between Dylann’s father Ben and mother Amy over visitation rights concerning Dylann. Mathews says he spoke to Dylann’s father this morning, and “it’s very, very difficult.”

Mathews became Roof’s lawyer after Roof was arrested in March at the Columbiana Centre, a mall in Columbia, and charged with possession of suboxone, a narcotic painkiller. Mathews says Roof had gone into some stores and “asked people some questions, which made some people uncomfortable,” including what time the stores closed. Someone at one of the stores contacted the authorities. Roof was stopped and searched, according to Mathews, and the police found he was carrying suboxone and arrested him. Roof was also given a trespassing warning, which he violated a couple of weeks later, Mathews notes, and Roof was subsequently cited for trespassing.

Here’s what else we know about Roof:

Roof, 21, was arrested midday Thursday in Shelby, North Carolina, about a three and a half-hour drive from the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The shooting of nine black churchgoers happened at about 9 p.m. Wednesday.
Charleston police chief Greg Mullen said he believed the shooting to be a “hate crime.”
Roof’s uncle told Reuters that Roof was introverted and soft-spoken.
The uncle also said Roof’s father had recently given him a .45-caliber handgun as a birthday present. “I don’t have any words for it. Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming,” he said.
Roof is from Lexington, South Carolina, and attended White Knoll High School, which a high school friend said had a mix of black and white students.
An ornamental license plate on the front of Roof’s car had a Confederate flag on it.
Roof’s roommate told ABC News that Roof was a “bit into segregation and other stuff,” and “said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

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The Lawyer Who Handled Dylann Roof’s Drug Case Says He Seemed Like "Just a Normal Kid"

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Piles of tar-sands waste in Chicago are pissing people off

by gerdi Posted on November 19, 2013

Piles of tar-sands waste in Chicago are pissing people off

By

Southeast Environmental Task Force

Clouds of coal dust and petroleum coke, a waste product from the refining of tar-sands oil, have been enveloping neighborhoods on Chicago’s southeast side. Federal, state, and city officials are finally moving to temper the dangerous air pollution.

The villains: KCBX Terminals (a division of Koch Industries) and Beemsterboer Slag Co.

The villainous acts: The companies own three terminals along the Calamut River that are storing huge piles of coal and petroleum coke, aka petcoke, which is coming from a nearby BP refinery. But they aren’t bothering to cover all that gunk to make sure it stays on site, so it’s being picked up by winds and blown over neighboring homes, forcing residents to stay indoors.

Anthony Martinez

via Southeast Environmental Task Force

A pollution cloud in southeast Chicago.

The plot: The piles of petcoke are expected to grow in Chicago and elsewhere around the country as refineries switch to processing tar-sands oil from Canada. Detroit suffered a similar problem (also courtesy of the Kochs) until city, state, and federal officials banded together to chase it away with lawsuits and legislation.

The victims: Residents of Chicago’s East Side and South Deering neighborhoods.

What the victims want: “Move the piles!” That was the chant that went up Thursday evening at a community meeting to discuss the problem. Another obvious solution: Cover the damned things. That’s what California law requires.

The latest twists: The U.S. EPA on Friday ordered the terminal owners to install pollution monitors, part of an effort to determine whether they are violating the Clean Air Act. That followed lawsuits filed last month by Illinois. On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) joined the fray, as the Chicago Tribune reports:

The mayor’s office announced in an email that Emanuel is ordering the Department of Public Health to adopt “strict regulations on the maintenance and storage” of petroleum coke stored in massive uncovered piles along the Calumet River just south of the Chicago Skyway bridge.

The email was short on specifics but promised that three storage terminals will be required to take more aggressive action to tamp down thick black dust that blows into surrounding neighborhoods and washes into the river.

Here’s hoping that Chicago, the state of Illinois, and the EPA can step up the pressure and close out this story as heroes.

(Memo to Obama: Approving Keystone XL would help flood the country with more tar-sands oil, leading to more petcoke piles and more air pollution.)


Source
Emanuel vows crackdown on air pollution from refinery waste, Chicago Tribune
Feds order pollution monitors near S. Side refinery waste, Chicago Tribune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Piles of tar-sands waste in Chicago are pissing people off

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Climate change could bring more hurricanes

by pawel Posted on July 9, 2013

Climate change could bring more hurricanes

By John Upton

NASA Goddard

Climate scientists have long predicted that cyclones and hurricanes would become more destructive as the climate changes, but that the number of such storms each year would decrease, or perhaps remain constant.

That notion was challenged Monday by Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Emanuel’s computer models foresee stronger cyclones and hurricanes, in line with previous research, but they also foresee a growing number of the storms each year as warming continues.

The Carbon Brief explained Emanuel’s research:

Six global scale climate models were used to produce a broad picture about what earth’s climate would be like under high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. From this, information about air and sea temperatures, wind patterns and atmospheric moisture, was used to simulate where and when tropical cyclones might occur in the future.

The results suggest that the number of tropical cyclones could exceed 100 per year by about 2070, compared to an average of 90 per year at the moment. Tropical cyclones could get more intense too, if the modelling is right.

The total amount of energy tropical cyclones release is expected to increase by 45 per cent over the course of the 21st century. Some of that energy would be spent by the extra 10 or so tropical cyclones per year, but half of it would be released by intense storms getting even stronger – meaning higher winds, taller storm surges and greater economic costs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Emanuel’s findings are being received with some skepticism by other atmospheric scientists, at least for the moment. From Climate Central:

James Elsner, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University who was not involved in this study, downplayed the study’s conclusions given the considerable uncertainties involved with using computer models to simulate complex storms such as hurricanes.

“The results from the new Emanuel are provocative, but in my opinion there is little reason to put much weight on them when considering what might happen to tropical cyclone activity during the next 50 to 80 years,” he said in an email to Climate Central.

Emanuel points out that scientists are still learning what drives cyclonic frequency, which helps to explain the discrepancy between previous studies and this one. “The physics behind these numbers remains enigmatic, and the general relationship between tropical cyclone activity and climate is only beginning to be understood,” he wrote in the paper.

So will there be more cyclones and hurricanes as the climate changes, or not? We’ll be watching to see whether other climate scientists start reaching conclusions similar to Emanuel’s. If they do, we could be in for an even bumpier ride as the globe warms.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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