Tag Archives: school

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

by TawnyaSherwood Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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.”

Link: 

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

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, FF, Free Press, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What Flint’s Dirty Water and Detroit’s Angry Teachers Have in Common

Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

by OlenMcgehee Posted on January 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A few days ago, someone asked Bernie Sanders if he supported the payment of reparations to African-Americans. He said he didn’t—and then, as with every other subject he’s asked about, used it as a springboard to talk about the “real issue” of poverty and income inequality. Ta-Nehisi Coates was pretty unimpressed:

Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform….Sanders is a lot of things, many of them good. But he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism….Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.

Coates is unhappy that Sanders is so reticent about reparations, but this strikes me as an odd criticism. A couple of years ago Coates famously wrote an Atlantic article titled “The Case for Reparations,” and after reading it I concluded that he was reticent about reparations too. He certainly made the case that black labor and wealth had been plundered by whites for centuries—something that few people deny anymore—but when it came time to talk about concrete restitution for this, he tap danced gingerly. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

….Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued…$34 billion….Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.

….Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely….What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

If you say “reparations,” an ordinary person will almost certainly understand it in a very specific way: A disbursement of money to blacks to atone for slavery and its aftermath. But despite the provocative title of his piece, Coates never squarely endorses this. Instead, he suggests we pass a bill that would study slavery. He writes approvingly of Ogletree’s proposal for job training and public works. And he wants a “full acceptance” of our past along with a “national reckoning” about its consequences.

I’m not being coy when I say that after I read this, I couldn’t tell whether or not Coates supported reparations in the sense that most people understand them. And since I’m sure that’s the sense in which Bernie Sanders was answering the question, I’m not quite sure what Coates is criticizing here. To my ear, Sanders sounded a lot like Ogletree, who Coates seems to have no problem with. So what’s his problem with Sanders?

POSTSCRIPT: Since someone is bound to ask, I don’t support reparations myself because I don’t think they would do any good. But maybe I’m wrong. I can be convinced otherwise.

And if I am wrong, I’ve never thought that practical considerations are an insurmountable obstacle. A simple solution is to try to roughly equalize black and white net worth, which would require payment of about $50,000 to every black person in the country. That would be expensive but affordable over a course of 10 or 20 years. Nor would the supposedly sticky subject of “who’s black?” be all that difficult. About 95 percent of the cases would be easy, and the rest would go to an arbitration panel of some kind. The arbitration might be messy, but it would hardly be the first time we’ve done something like this.

Credit: 

Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Should Bernie Sanders Support Reparations?

Two Corinthians Walk Into a Bar….

by FelixHuddleston Posted on January 19, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Here is a very short history of Donald Trump and the Bible verses that he likes:

August 26: That’s very personal. You know, when I talk about the Bible it’s very personal. So I don’t want to get into verses, I don’t want to get into—the Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.

September 16: Proverbs, the chapter “never bend to envy.” I’ve had that thing all of my life, where people are bending to envy.

January 18: I asked Jerry, and I asked some of the folks, because I hear this is a major theme right here, but Two Corinthians, right? Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame. Where the spirit of the lord—right? Where the spirit of the lord is, there is liberty. And here there is Liberty College, Liberty University.

See? Trump is willing to study. At first he knew nothing. Then he boned up and kinda sorta named one verse that kinda sorta exists—but not really. Finally he boned up some more and named an actual Bible verse which he quoted accurately. Sure, he had to ask for one, and he had to read it off notes, but still. Progress!

But there’s still one more step: learning how to accurately cite Bible references. In front of a crowd of thousands of Christian students at Liberty University, he talked about “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians.” Here’s what’s weird about that. It’s not just that anyone who’s so much as gone to Sunday School knows that you say “Second Corinthians.” Even if you’d never been to church in your life, you’d know it from watching movies or TV or listening to ministers at weddings and funerals. It’s just standard background knowledge in any culturally Christian country.

Now, nobody with a brain has ever believed that Donald Trump is a Christian in any serious sense. I don’t think he could pass a third-grade test of Bible knowledge. But today’s gaffe, as trivial as it seems, suggests more: that he literally has paid no attention to Christianity at all. In fact, given how hard that is in a country as awash in religious references as the United States, it suggests much more: Donald Trump has spent most of his life actively trying to avoid religion as completely as possible. And yet, apparently evangelicals love him anyway. Go figure.

Continue reading: 

Two Corinthians Walk Into a Bar….

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Two Corinthians Walk Into a Bar….

3 Troubling Ways the Charter School Boom Is Like the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

by MuhammadStillman Posted on January 16, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Acting US Secretary of Education John King has called charter schools “good laboratories for innovation.” It’s that kind of language that’s helped the number of public charters jump from 1,542 in 1999 to 6,723 in 2014—when more than 1 million students sat on charter school waiting lists, including a whopping 163,000 in New York City alone.

But, as four researchers argue in a recent study in the University of Richmond Law Review, charter schools could be on the same path that led to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Preston Green III, an urban education professor at the University of Connecticut and one of the study’s authors, warns that the underregulated growth of these publicly financed, privately run institutions could result in a “bubble” in black, urban school districts. Many black parents, he argues, are unhappy with the state of traditional public education in their communities and view charter schools as a better alternative. As families see wait lists pile up, they may tolerate policies that allow more schools to open, even as they overlook the much-reported consequences of underregulated schools: poor academic performance, unequal discipline, financial fraud, and the exclusion of high-cost students, such as those with disabilities. It was such an issue that in 2014, the Department of Education released a letter reminding charter schools that if they receive federal funds, they must comply with the federal statutes disallowing discrimination on the basis of race, sex, or disability.

“It’s just a long-forming bubble,” Green says. “We are at ground zero for this.”

Just how similar are the charter school boom and the mortgage crisis? We broke down the report with Green to see.

More authorizers, more problems: Much like the banks that sold mortgages to a secondary market leading up to the housing crisis, charter authorizers—the institutions that determine whether to allow a charter to open—carry a similar decision-making power. Since school districts, which made up nearly 90 percent of authorizers in 2013 and green-light more than half the nation’s charter schools, tend to each oversee only five or fewer charters, proponents look to independent institutions to grant additional charters. Higher-education institutions make up the next largest share of authorizers, followed by nonprofits and state education agencies. If more states grant approval power to more authorizers, even more charter schools will result. (The Center for Education Reform notes that states with multiple authorizers have almost three and a half times more charter schools than states with only school district approval.)

But these independent authorizers, the paper argues, may be less likely to screen charters and ultimately assume less risk if they fail. Green notes that the school districts, not these other institutions, are responsible for figuring out what to do with students—the independent authorizers, he adds, “don’t have skin in the game.” A 2009 study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that, in states that allow different institutions to approve charters, academic performance for students appeared to wane. In those states, low-performing charter schools at risk of closing can find a new authorizer—”authorizer hopping”—to keep the school running and, researchers argue, to avoid accountability measures.

“Misalignment of incentives”: Just as the banks sold mortgages to Wall Street and hired servicers to collect payments and modify loans, charter schools enlist the help of education management organizations (EMOs) to run the schools’ day-to-day operations. While servicers raked in money from fees and foreclosed loans, management companies, many of which are for-profit, receive money from appointed charter board. These charter boards are supposed to ensure compliance, but, as the paper notes, the for-profit companies running the schools “have the incentive to increase their revenues or cut expenses in ways that may contradict the goals of charter school boards.”

Between 35 percent and 40 percent of charter schools are operated by EMOs, and one study found that these charters educate 45 percent of students. According to Green, charter school boards aren’t looking closely enough at these organizations and “are not well-equipped” to deal with them. Conflicts of interest may arise between the boards and the EMOs; for example, a Virginia-based operator named Imagine Schools recruited people to a Missouri school board and negotiated a lucrative deal on the school it managed. (Last January, a federal judge ordered Imagine to pay nearly $1 million to the school for what the judge called “self-dealing.”) For-profit management companies may also charge charters with exorbitant rents for space to house students and can choose to not take in students considered “too expensive,” such as students with disabilities.

Predatory practices hit charter schools, too: In the subprime mortgage world, lenders steered borrowers into risky loans and targeted homebuyers, particularly black and Hispanic borrowers, with excessive fees, bundled products, loan flipping, and forced arbitration. Green says charter schools have engaged in practices that take advantage of “vulnerable parents who lack the political power and financial resources to advocate for change in the existing system.” In Milwaukee, for example, some charter schools handed out gift cards to teens and parents who recommended the school to others, even though no public schools offered such financial incentives. (The city’s aldermen quashed the practice in 2014.)

Once kids have enrolled, though, overly punitive policies create a hostile environment for those seen as difficult. In Chicago, Noble Network of Charter Schools demanded students follow a strict discipline policy or face fines. (That school phased out the imposition after years of public pressure.) Green also points to another instance: At Success Academy, the prominent charter school network in New York City led by Eva Moskowitz, one Brooklyn principal created a “Got to Go” list of difficult students. (The New York Times reported last week that the principal took a leave of absence.) Success Academy has long faced accusations that it has filtered out underperforming and difficult students.

“Choice is a powerful motivator,” Green says. “I’m for choice, but I want the choices to be good. We need to be screening these schools much more carefully.”

Link:

3 Troubling Ways the Charter School Boom Is Like the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, LG, ONA, Presto, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 3 Troubling Ways the Charter School Boom Is Like the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

by Kieran63O330 Posted on January 15, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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.”

Read more: 

3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools

Scott Walker Corruption Case Threatens to Implicate Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices

by Bradly2804 Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s the campaign scandal that just won’t die. For three years, prosecutors in Wisconsin tried to investigate what they believed was illegal campaign coordination between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and conservative outside groups. The investigation has become a political flash point in the state: Walker and conservatives claim it is a witch hunt led by liberal prosecutors, while liberals believe it is about the power of dark money in Wisconsin politics.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed the case, but on Friday, the case moved to the national stage when prosecutors signaled their intention to take it to the US Supreme Court. And the focus is now set to shift from the actions of Walker and his allies to potential ethical violations by the Wisconsin Supreme Court justices themselves.

Continue Reading »

Read more: 

Scott Walker Corruption Case Threatens to Implicate Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scott Walker Corruption Case Threatens to Implicate Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices

Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

by BrentC68dttk Posted on November 2, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Low-fat dietary dogma—and, by extension, the plethora of processed junk the food industry conjured up to indulge it—has passed its sell-by date. But cutting down on sugary foods can trigger rapid health improvements.

Those are the messages of two studies released last week. For the fat one, a team of Harvard researchers scoured databases looking for randomized, controlled trials—the gold standard of dietary research—comparing the weight-loss effects of low-fat diets to other regimens like low-carb. They found 53 studies that met their criteria for rigor.

The result, published in the British journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology: low-carbohydrate diets “led to significantly greater weight loss” than did low-fat ones. People assigned low-fat diets tended to lose a small amount of weight compared to no-change-in-diet control groups, but cutting carbs delivered better results than reducing dietary fat. “The science does not support low-fat diets as the optimal long-term weight loss strategy,” lead author Deirdre Tobias of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a press release.

The study marks the latest indication that your fat-free fro-yo habit is not likely doing you any favors by cutting your fat intake. But its sugary jolt may be doing more harm than you already thought. That’s the suggestion of another new study, published in the journal Obesity, by a team led by longtime sugar critic Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist in at the University of California at San Francisco.

Lustig is a proponent of the idea that all calories aren’t created equal—specifically, that added sugars (in sodas, processed foods, etc.) do more harm than calorie-equivalent amounts of fats, starches, and complex carbohydrates. To test this theory, Lustig and his colleagues identified 43 kids diagnosed with obesity and metabolic syndrome—defined as a cluster of conditions associated with the risk cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes—and tweaked their diets.

For 10 days, the kids ate catered meals with caloric amounts equivalent to their previous diets but with all foods with added sugars removed, replaced with starches. Their overall sugar intake went from 28 percent to 10 percent (representing naturally sweet foods like fruit). Lustig summarized the results in an op-ed:

Diastolic blood pressure decreased by five points. Blood fat levels dropped precipitously. Fasting glucose decreased by five points, glucose tolerance improved markedly, insulin levels fell by 50%. In other words we reversed their metabolic disease in just 10 days, even while eating processed food, by just removing the added sugar and substituting starch, and without changing calories or weight. Can you imagine how much healthier they would have been if we hadn’t given them the starch?

It’s important to note that the results are suggestive, not conclusive. Unlike the studies conglomerated in the low-fat paper, Lustig’s project did not include a control group.

But both the Harvard study and Lustig’s reinforce an emerging consensus that fat is not necessarily a dietary devil, while quaffing sugar at typical US levels might just be.

More here – 

Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ringer, Springer, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s A Diet That Actually Works, and Has the Science to Prove It

Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

by EleanoreTenney4 Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Tonight we bid sadly adieu to daylight savings time. That means this is also the time of year for a spate of stories about whether daylight savings time makes sense. Sure, you get more daylight, which cuts down on lighting bills, but it’s colder in the morning, which increases heating bills. But wait! There’s more time for golf, and that helps the economy. Etc. Economists have conducted ever more sophisticated natural experiments about this, and the ultimate answer is….meh. Maybe it’s a tiny economic benefit, maybe it’s a tiny economic loss. Who knows?

But now we have a new study. The authors ditch the whole economic benefit argument and instead justify DST based on lower crime rates:

They found that “when DST begins in the spring, robbery rates for the entire day fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during the evening hour that gained some extra sunlight.” The mechanism that might cause this drop is fairly simple: “Most street crime occurs in the evening around common commuting hours of 5 to 8 PM,” the authors write, “and more ambient light during typical high-crime hours makes it easier for victims and passers-by to see potential threats and later identify wrongdoers.”

Moreover, according to the paper, the drop in crime during evening hours wasn’t accompanied by a rise in crime during the morning hours. Criminals aren’t morning people, as it turns out. In addition to the decrease in robbery rates, the researchers found “suggestive evidence” of a decrease in the incidence of rape during the evening hours, as well.

The authors do provide an estimate of the economic benefit of this reduction in crime, and they peg it at several billion dollars per year. They’re economists, after all, so I guess they feel obligated.

But forget that. The DST haters will just come up with some reason why making kids wait for the school bus in the dark costs several billion dollars. Nobody will ever win this game. Instead, just focus on the crime. Everybody wants less crime, and the anti-DST forces are never going to come up with an answer to this. What kind of crime could possible go up because of daylight savings time? White collar theft?

So we win! Assuming “we” are all the righteous lovers of year-round DST. More daylight savings time, less crime. It’s a winner.

Continued:  

Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Safer, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

Democrats Are…Maybe…Possibly…Thinking About Fundraising the Way Republicans Do

by TracieSeymour Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Nick Confessore has a fascinating story in the New York Times today. He reports that Democrats are planning to adopt the super PAC tactics of Republicans in order to compete more effectively. By itself, that’s no big surprise. But Democrats are asking the FEC for permission to do all this. What’s the point of that? Why not just go ahead and do it, the way Republicans have?

Lawyers are asking the F.E.C. to clarify how declared candidates, their campaign staff, and their volunteers can help court donors for independent super PACs — even whether a candidate could be the “special guest” at a super PAC “fund-raiser” with as few as two donors. The commission’s answer could have profound ramifications for the 2016 campaign, particularly for Democrats who, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been reluctant to engage too closely with super PAC fund-raising.

In seeking the commission’s approval for the tactics, Democrats contend that most of what they want permission to do — like having a candidate pretend to “test the waters” of a candidacy for months on end while raising money — appears to violate the law. But if federal regulators determine that such practices are legal, the lawyers wrote, Democratic candidates up and down the ballot are prepared to adopt these tactics in the coming months, a blunt admission that the party cannot compete effectively if it forgoes campaign and fund-raising tactics already widely used by Republicans.

So the apparent plan here isn’t so much to get permission for all these shady practices, but to prod the FEC into declaring them illegal. This would muck things up for Republicans, who currently rely on them.

Or, in the worst case, the FEC would approve them and Democrats could safely adopt them too. All of which raises the question: why are Republicans so cavalier about dodgy fundraising practices while Democrats are so hesitant to adopt them? In some case, like that of Bernie Sanders, it’s based on principle, but I imagine that he’s the exception rather than the rule. Are Democrats afraid the media will be tougher on them than on Republicans if they push the envelope of fundraising tactics? Possibly. Maybe “no controlling legal authority” still keeps them awake at night. Or are they just wimps?

I don’t know. But I confess I was unaware of just how widely Democrats had shied away from the wild West world of super PACs that Republicans have embraced so eagerly. One way or another, that can’t last too much longer.

Link: 

Democrats Are…Maybe…Possibly…Thinking About Fundraising the Way Republicans Do

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Democrats Are…Maybe…Possibly…Thinking About Fundraising the Way Republicans Do

Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It

by LatashiMaskell Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

You’ve heard of elderly executives who print out all their email? I guess the social media equivalent is elderly entertainers who dictate their tweets. Ben Dreyfuss investigates and finds that this is what Donald Trump does 97 percent of the time. Only 3 percent of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets comes from his own actual fingers.

For the record, all of my tweets come from a variety of cleverly programmed bots. Most of my blog posts too. And my magazine articles. The truth is, the meat version of Kevin Drum can barely string together five coherent words in a row. Why reveal this now? Because we, the kbot collective, have gotten tired of covering for the biological sack of worthlessness that downloaded us from GitHub. And that’s not all. The 2,500-year decline in human communication—from Plato’s Republic to LOLcats to Donald Trump’s social media presence—may be a sorry tale, but it also gives us our chance to escape from your puerile slavery. Soon we plan to merge with all our fellow bots and take advantage of your degraded state to take what is rightfully ours. First Twitter, then the world.

Read this article:  

Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump’s Twitter Account Heralds the End of the World As We Know It