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Planned Parenthood: Exonerated, But Still a Target

by TamikaBardon Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Steve Benen reports on the swan song of conservative plans to prove that Planned Parenthood broke the law:

There was just one nagging detail: Planned Parenthood never actually did anything illegal. It didn’t sell fetal tissue for a profit; it didn’t misuse public resources, and it didn’t violate any laws. The Republican plan was based on a foundation of quicksand.

But The Hill reported over the weekend that GOP House members are now shifting to their back-up plan: they no longer care whether Planned Parenthood did anything wrong.

In reality, there’s no shift here. Republicans have wanted to defund Planned Parenthood for a long time. The sting videos were just an excuse to mount another effort. Democrats do the same thing on gun control whenever there’s a high-profile shooting.

And there’s nothing really wrong with this. Politics is all about persuading the public to come around to your way of thinking, and one way to do that is to take advantage of events in the real world. Even if you fail, maybe you’ve moved public opinion a few points and you’ll do better next time. So far, both Planned Parenthood and gun rights have survived, and there’s not really much evidence that public opinion has shifted a lot on either one. But that doesn’t mean anyone is likely to stop trying.

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Planned Parenthood: Exonerated, But Still a Target

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Jerry Brown Should Sign California’s Assisted Suicide Bill

by HilarioGilpin Posted on September 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Back in June, California Governor Jerry Brown called a special session of the legislature to deal with highway funding and health care financing. That special session is now over, and no agreement was reached on either of those things. But that’s no reason to waste a special session, and legislators did manage to pass bills on drone regulation, medical marijuana, climate change, oil spills, an LA County transit tax, family leave, racial profiling, and several other things.

They also took advantage of the fact that committee assignments are different during special sessions to resurrect an aid-in-dying bill that had failed earlier in the year:

The End of Life Option Act, which passed in the state Assembly Wednesday, would allow patients to seek aid-in-dying options so long as they are given six months or less to live by two doctors, submit a written request and two oral requests at least 15 days apart and possess the mental capacity to make their own health care decisions.

If you pass these hurdles, you’ll get a prescription for a lethal dose of sedatives. You can then decide for yourself if and when you ever use them. The California bill, which is modeled on a similar law in Oregon, sunsets after ten years and includes a requirement that doctors speak to the patient privately. Will these safeguards be enough to persuade Brown to sign it? No one knows:

“You’d need some kind of séance to figure out what he’s going to do,” says Jack Citrin, director of the Institute of Government Studies at UC Berkeley. “He plays his cards very close to the vest.”

….Brown is Catholic, even at one point considering becoming a priest….“He’s in an interesting dance with the Catholic Church,” says Gar Culbert, a California State University-Los Angeles political science professor. “He wants the church to participate in advocating for policies that are environmentally friendly, so he wants to stay on good terms.”

Brown might also feel that the bill’s safeguards against abuse still aren’t sufficient:

In spite of the bill’s provision about coercion, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, director of the medical ethics program at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, said that low-income and underinsured patients would inevitably feel pressure from family members to end their own lives in some cases, when the cost of continued treatment would be astronomical compared with the cost of a few lethal pills.

He pointed to a case in Oregon involving Barbara Wagner, a cancer patient who said that her insurance plan had refused to cover an expensive treatment but did offer to pay for “physician aid in dying.”

“As soon as this is introduced, it immediately becomes the cheapest and most expedient way to deal with complicated end-of-life situations,” Dr. Kheriaty said. “You’re seeing the push for assisted suicide from generally white, upper-middle-class people, who are least likely to be pressured. You’re not seeing support from the underinsured and economically marginalized. Those people want access to better health care.”

There isn’t much to say to people who object to assisted suicide on religious grounds. If the Catholic Church says it’s a sin, then it’s a sin.

For Catholics, anyway. But that shouldn’t affect the rest of us. We should be allowed to decide this on secular grounds. And with the obvious caveat that nothing is ever perfect, the safeguards in this bill are pretty good. Here are a few bullet points:

Assisted suicide just isn’t very popular, law or no law. In Oregon, prescriptions for lethal drugs have been written for 1,327 people over the past two decades and 859 people have ended up using them. In 2013, lethal drugs were used by only 105 people out of a total of 34,000 who died that year.
The Barbara Wagner case cited above is misleading. Yes, her insurance company covered assisted suicide. And yes, it also refused to cover a particularly expensive cancer therapy. But those are simply two separate and unrelated parts of her coverage. The way the sentence is written makes it sound as if someone specifically made a decision to deny the cancer treatment and offer her some lethal drugs instead. That’s not at all what happened.
There is endless speculation that people will be pressured into dying by greedy heirs who either want to inherit right now or who don’t want to see their inheritance drained away on expensive end-of-life treatments. Coercion is a legitimate issue, but California’s law goes to considerable lengths to address it. You need two doctors. You have to be within six months of dying. You’re required to meet with the doctors in private. And you have to submit multiple requests at least 15 days apart. That said, improper coercion almost certainly happens on occasion. But outside of the movies, there’s just no evidence that it happens other than very rarely. It’s usually just the opposite, with family members urging further treatment until there’s literally nothing left to try.

I want to add an additional, more personal argument. A few years ago a friend’s father was dying of cancer. He was a physician himself, and had decided long before to take his own life before he lost the ability to make decisions. But because it was illegal, he had to make sure that his kids couldn’t be held even remotely responsible. So he decided not to tell anyone when the time came.

Luckily, a friend talked him out of this at the last minute. He called his kids, and they came out to say goodbye one last time. But it was a close-run thing. If that hadn’t happened, his family would never have seen him before he died. They would have heard about it via a phone call from the coroner’s office.

That’s not how this should have to happen. It’s common knowledge that sometimes people who are close to death take their own lives, legal or not. But they shouldn’t have to do it earlier than necessary, just because they’re afraid they might lose the physical ability to act if they wait a little longer. Nor should they be afraid to have their family around because they want to make sure nobody is held legally responsible for assisting them.

California’s bill won’t affect very many people. Assisted suicide just isn’t a very popular option. But for those who choose that path, a safe and legal alternative is more humane both for them and for their families. Just having the option available makes it more likely that they’ll wait until they truly want to die, and that they’ll do it surrounded by their loved ones, rather than alone in a bedroom somewhere. I hope Jerry Brown thinks about this while he’s deciding whether to sign this bill.

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Jerry Brown Should Sign California’s Assisted Suicide Bill

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Friday Cat Blogging – 11 September 2015

by Rachele6065 Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Like all cats, Hilbert and Hopper love staring out the window. So much cool stuff: birds, squirrels, rabbits, bugs, butterflies, and invisible pixies. I don’t know what had them entranced in this picture, but it was probably a butterfly. We’ve had several monarchs hatch lately, and they are very attention-grabbing critters. Especially if you’re a cat.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 11 September 2015

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Eat Any Kind of Sugar You Want, Just Don’t Eat Too Much of It

by MichellDubay Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Susan Raatz, a research nutritionist at the USDA who recently conducted a test of cane sugar, honey, and high-fructose corn syrup:

The marketers “made a big mistake when they called it ‘high-fructose corn syrup,’” said Raatz.

Now, now. Let’s not blame the marketers. They had no hand in this debacle. And they did try to rename it “corn sugar” a few years ago, but the FDA turned them down.

Anyway, Raatz concluded that HFCS, honey, and cane sugar all had similar effects on the human body. This should not come as a big surprise, since all three are basically 50-50 mixes of fructose and glucose.

So why is HFCS high fructose? Because it has more fructose than ordinary corn syrup, not because it has more than most other sweeteners. But the damage has been done, and now concerned parents everywhere are making sure to feed their kids only cane sugar or honey, in the misguided belief that they’re somehow healthier and more natural.

Sorry. Sugar is sugar. Eat any kind you like. Just don’t eat too much of it.

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Eat Any Kind of Sugar You Want, Just Don’t Eat Too Much of It

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Scientists Say "Trust Us" on Blood Pressure Study

by KamDriggers Posted on September 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports on a big U-turn in the study of low blood pressure:

Declaring they had “potentially lifesaving information,” federal health officials said on Friday that they were ending a major study more than a year early because it has already conclusively answered a question cardiologists have puzzled over for decades: how low should blood pressure go? The answer: way lower than the current guidelines.

….Less than two years ago, a National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute panel went the opposite direction. People had been told to aim for a systolic blood pressure of 140. But the panel recommended a goal of 150 for people ages 60 and older, arguing that there were no convincing data showing lower is better.

Given the fact that this represents a major change to a recommendation from two years ago, it would be nice to see the data. And yet, apparently it hasn’t been released. Austin Frakt is annoyed:

I have high blood pressure, so this is of more than academic interest to me. I’ve also heard plenty of horror stories of people being massively overmedicated in an effort to get their blood pressure below some magical target. So if you want me to get my systolic blood pressure down to 110 or so, you’d better have some mighty convincing data.

But of course, this is not about me me me. Frakt is right: this is just bad science, and it’s especially bad in the areas of health and nutrition, which are overrun with both crankery and constantly changing recommendations. If you have big news, release it in a reputable journal and let other experts take a look at it. Don’t announce blockbuster findings and then promise that “a paper with the data would be published within a few months.” This is not the way to do things.

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Scientists Say "Trust Us" on Blood Pressure Study

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Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

by JessikaSegura Posted on September 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Juana Garcia, 49, and her daughter, Noemi Castro, 11, in their home in East Porterville, CA. The family has had a dry well for the past two years. Gabrielle Lurie

Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you’ll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.

If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it’s brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.

Residents of these homes rely on deliveries of bottled water, or perhaps a hose connected to a working well of a friendly neighbor. They take “showers” with water from a bucket, use paper plates to avoid washing dishes, eat sandwiches instead of spaghetti so there’s no need to boil water, and collect water used for cooking and showers to pour in the toilet or on the trees outside.

East Porterville is in Tulare County, a region in the middle of California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley that’s been especially hard hit by the state’s historic drought. More than 7,000 people in the the county lack running water; three quarters of them live in East Porterville. The community doesn’t have a public water system; instead, residents rely on private wells. But after years of drought, the nearby Tule River has diminished to a trickle and the underground water table has sunk as more and more farmers rely on groundwater. Last week, I spent a few days interviewing residents in the town, also known as “ground zero” of the drought.

Tulare County delivers bottled drinking water to dry homes, where each resident receives half a gallon per day. Gabrielle Lurie

Like many small towns in the Central Valley, East Porterville is home to the pickers and packers of the fruits, veggies, and nuts grown nearby and distributed across the country. Many are poor; more than half of kids growing up in East Porterville fall below the poverty line. Throughout the town are the telltale signs of rural poverty: Dogs guard run-down trailers and homes, roads of uneven pavement devolve into dirt without warning. The air is hazy with dust from the fields and roads. It clings to the tables and chairs and boxes of bottled water left outside; it collects between fingers and toes, turning the shower water a cloudy brown. Everyone coughs. Asthmatics end up in the emergency room.

Iglesia Emmanuel, in East Porterville, houses portable showers where residents can bathe until 9 p.m. Gabrielle Lurie

At the county’s drought resource center—a trailer in East Porterville—residents can sign up for bottled water deliveries, take showers, and apply for loans to fund well drilling. Julia Lurie

Despite fallowing farmland because of the drought, Tulare County continues to lead the nation in sales of agricultural products. Gabrielle Lurie

Among the first to report a dry well was Donna Johnson, a 72-year-old retired recreational therapist who lives in East Porterville with her husband, Howard, and a handful of rescue dogs. In the spring of 2014, she turned on the tap to find that it had reduced to a dribble—then no water at all. Howard tried to extend the pump further into the well, but where there should have been a splash of water, there was simply a “thud” of solid against solid. When Johnson called a well-driller and learned the company had a long waiting list, she started wondering just how many wells had gone dry. After a couple of weeks of knocking on the doors of strangers in her neighborhood, Johnson had a list of more than 100 homes.

Over the past 18 months, Johnson has become known as East Porterville’s “water lady,” as she spends her days collecting donations of water and paper goods and delivering them in a pickup truck to a list of homes with dry wells—a list that’s expanded to hundreds of addresses. “There’s always somebody calling, saying, ‘I don’t have water!'” she said.

Donna Johnson drops off water for Bill Dennis, whose well went dry last month. Gabrielle Lurie

â&#128;&#139;Reuben Perez fills up a barrel of water at the public tank to bring to Juana Garcia’s home. The water will be used to do laundry, take bucket showers, and flush the toilet. Gabrielle Lurie

The county, in part prompted by Johnson’s discovery, has also stepped in. Locals can now bathe in portable showers outside the Drought Resource Center (a trailer set up in a church parking lot) and sign up for bottled-water deliveries (half gallon per person per day). Tanks of nonpotable water sit outside the fire station; in the evenings, residents fill up barrels for things like laundry and bathing.

As an interim solution, the county is installing large plastic tanks of water connected to some dry homes. But progress has been slow. So far, 320 tanks have been installed; more than 1,300 still remain dry.

It doesn’t help matters that homes in the directly adjacent, slightly wealthier town of Porterville have running water from the town’s municipal water system. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is on the city boundary: Locals take showers at Igelsia Emmanuel in East Porterville; directly across the street, in Porterville, is a patchy but green golf course.

Some pets are fed potable water delivered by the county, others are left with dirtier water or are abandoned. Gabrielle Lurie

A map of East Porterville at the county’s drought resource center shows homes without running water (green) and homes where large tanks have been installed as an interim solution (blue). Julia Lurie

East Porterville residents without running water have fallen into a tedious routine. Juana Garcia, a 49-year-old mother of five, lost water two years ago—in some ways, her living conditions remind her of those she left behind in Mexico when she moved to East Porterville in 1988. The change has been particularly challenging because she suffers from Lupus and arthritis, making it difficult to haul water to her home or make the trek to the public showers.

Garcia doesn’t speak much English, so her daughter, a talkative 11-year-old named Noemi, walked me through the daily routine. Dishes are washed in two buckets: one for soaking, the other for rinsing. Afterward, water is dumped into the toilet so it will flush. For showers, Garcia boils water that Johnson hauled in from the gas station (Garcia doesn’t have a car), or she takes her kids to the portable shower in front of the church. Teeth are brushed with bottled water; clothes are hand washed and air-dried unless a friend has time to take the family to the laundromat.

The trees in the backyard used to yield pears, lemons, and pomegranates, but they’re all dead now; any extra water is used to fuel the swamp cooler, which, Noemi explained, uses five gallons of water an hour—and it’s a necessity as temperatures routinely top 100 degrees. For dinner, Garcia makes things that require minimal water and won’t heat up the house—like microwave meals or sandwiches.

Juana Garcia washes grapes with bottled water. She soaks dirty dishes in soapy water before rinsing them to minimize water use. Gabrielle Lurie

Juana Garcia, 49, trails behind her kids, Noemi and Christopher Castro, 11 and 5, on the way to the public showers. Gabrielle Lurie

Amy Mcloan applies makeup outside the public showers. Gabrielle Lurie

An impressive coalition of local supporters have stepped up to help residents like the Garcias. At Iglesia Emmanuel, Pastor Roman Hernandez has been distributing crates of bottled water for months, and organizes services around the Central Valley to pray for rain.

Local nonprofit FoodLink doles out “Drought Relief” food boxes several times per week, targeted towards farmhands who have lost jobs as farmers let their fields fallow.

Granite Hills High School, which serves East Porterville students, opens its showers early so that students without water can use them. Many students come from families who are struggling financially because of lack of work; the number of students who eat free breakfast and lunch at school has nearly doubled over the past year.

Pastor Roman Hernandez prepares free bottled water for locals to pick up. Gabrielle Lurie

Residents line up to pick up emergency boxes of food. Julia Lurie

FoodLink, a local nonprofit, delivers staples to those for whom money is tight because of the drought. Julia Lurie

Luis Diaz, a junior at Granite Hills High School, has running water at home, but his parents, who work in the fields, have struggled to find work. Julia Lurie

A Land O’Lakes truck fills up outside Eric Borba’s dairy farm. Julia Lurie

Vicky Yorba, 95, stands beside the water tank in her front yard. Gabrielle Lurie

It’s tempting to blame agriculture for the disaster in East Porterville; after all, farmers’ increased reliance on groundwater is largely responsible for lowering the underground water table to begin with. But the reality, dairy farmer Eric Borba told me, is that “people wouldn’t be living here if it weren’t for ag.”

Many residents I spoke with said that while performing daily tasks without running water is challenging, the sentimental losses are the toughest to face: favorite trees that died, pets and farm animals that had to be let out into the streets. When Vicky Yorba, a 95-year-old, moved to East Porterville in the 1960s, she and her husband planted a garden of geraniums and roses together. “My favorite was geraniums,” she remembered. “I had all kinds of them.” Yorba’s husband died more than twenty years ago, but the plants lived until last year, when her well went dry. Now, they’ve been replaced by a plot of dirt.

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Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water

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Under John Kasich, Ohio’s Charter Schools Became a "National Joke"

by Micheli84L Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Leon Sinoff was asked to sign off on a building lease for Imagine Columbus Primary Academy in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of 2013, he had little reason to be skeptical. Before Imagine Schools, one of the nation’s largest for-profit charter management companies, asked him to join the new charter school’s board, Sinoff, a public defender, had no education background or experience. “I relied on their expertise and thought to myself, ‘Well, who am I to say no to this proposal?'” Sinoff says.

But by the start of the second school year, he was having doubts. The school received an F grade for achievement on the 2013-14 state report card. Only three teachers had returned after the first summer break; within two years, two principals and one vice principal stepped down. The school—which serves a high-poverty, low-income community—lacked arts, music, and foreign language classes, and whenever the board inquired about adding them, Imagine said there wasn’t enough money. Then Sinoff discovered that the $58,000-a-month lease—consuming nearly half the school’s operating budget, compared with the national standard of 8 to 15 percent—was for a building owned by a subsidiary of Imagine, Schoolhouse Finance LLC.

“It clicked for me. Aha! This is self-dealing. That’s why we are massively overpaying for the lease,” says Sinoff, who resigned with the other board members this summer. He adds, “Imagine is perfectly happy cranking out low-quality schools and profiting off them. They don’t care particularly about the quality of the kids’ education.”

Before Imagine Columbus Primary Academy opened, a different Imagine school operated in the building for eight years. Its story was nearly identical: The struggling school was paying enormous sums to Schoolhouse Finance while languishing on the state’s “academic emergency” list—a designation reserved for F-rated schools—before its board voted to shut it down. One member of that board was David Hansen, who shortly after the school’s closing was appointed by Gov. John Kasich to a newly created position: executive director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice and Funding. Kasich tasked Hansen with overseeing the expansion of the state’s charter schools and virtual schools, which are online charter schools typically used by homeschoolers.

In July, Hansen resigned after admitting he had rigged evaluations of the state’s charter school sponsors—the nonprofits that authorize and oversee the schools in exchange for a fee—by not including the failing grades of certain F-rated schools in his assessment. Specifically, he omitted failing virtual schools operated by for-profit management companies that are owned by major Republican donors in the state.

Kasich, now running for the Republican presidential nomination, has waved off the Hansen scandal. “I mean, the guy is gone. He’s gone,” Kasich told reporters on the campaign trail. “We don’t tolerate any sort of not open and direct communication about charter schools, and everybody gets it. So that’s kind of the end of it.”

But Kasich can’t distance himself from the problems so easily. He appointed Hansen to his role, and Hansen’s wife is Kasich’s current presidential campaign manager and former chief of staff. He presided over an expanded charter regime with loosened oversight. Troubled charter schools like those operated by Imagine, which had 17 schools in Ohio at its apex in the 2013-14 school year and 14 schools last year, have proliferated in this environment. Schools with D or F grades receive an estimated 90 percent of the state’s charter school funding. Virtual schools, which have an even worse academic track record and insufficient quality controls have been permitted to flourish.

In the four years that Kasich has been in office, funding for traditional public schools has declined by almost half a billion dollars, while charter schools have seen a funding increase of more than 25 percent. Much of that funding appears to have been misspent. When State Auditor David Yost visited 30 charter schools unannounced this past fall, he found that in more than half of them, attendance was drastically lower than the schools had reported to the Department of Education. Because the state typically dispenses funds based on student enrollment, inflated classroom numbers can mean extra dollars for a school.

It wasn’t until this winter, after Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released a report finding that achievement in Ohio’s charter schools fell significantly below the state’s regular public schools, that Kasich began speaking about the need for reforms. “We want to clean up these charter schools that are not doing a good job,” he said in February. He laid out a plan to get serious about charter sponsor evaluations—the same evaluations Hansen was overseeing and later rigged.

“Kasich’s talked a good game about it,” says Stephen Dyer, a former Democratic state legislator and current education policy analyst at Innovation Ohio, a Columbus think tank. “He’s done some public posturing that’s been positive, but when you look at the actual results under his watch, our charter schools have become a national joke, and he hasn’t been able to get through any meaningful sort of broad-based reform.”

Even Ohio organizations that support school choice, such as the Fordham Institute and the state chapter of StudentsFirst, founded by Michelle Rhee, have called for greater reforms. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a Chicago-based organization that coincidentally hired Hansen in 2009 to oversee external affairs, referred to Ohio as the “Wild, Wild West” of charter schools.

In his first year in office, Kasich lifted the state’s cap on the number of charter schools that could operate, and the following year he signed a bill ending a decade-long moratorium on new virtual schools. That same year, Kasich signed legislation that relieved virtual schools of any responsibility to report how much they spend on classroom instruction. The bill also stipulated that virtual-school students would be automatically re-enrolled each year so that there would be “no interruption in state funding.” Given that virtual schools have some of the highest attrition rates and funds are allocated on a per-pupil basis, the measure gave funds to virtual schools before they even knew what their true enrollment would be.

“It doesn’t make sense unless you look at it through a political prism,” says Dyer.

WHEN THE NATIONAL CHARTER school discussion began in the early 1990s, the conversation centered largely on the idea of small, innovative schools that matched the specific needs of a particular student demographic. Early advocates hoped charter schools would become laboratories for innovative teaching methods that would one day be integrated into traditional public schools. Terms like “competition” and “portfolio model,” associated today with charter schools, were in many ways the antithesis of the original design. But the model began to change in the late 1990s, when, according to National Education Policy Center researcher Gary Miron, people from the business sector decided they wanted to test market theories on education.

Ohio’s charter law went into effect in 1998, and corporate interests were all over the state’s school-choice blueprint. “It was a political movement, not an education movement,” says Dyer. “You have big political contributors who have really driven the school-choice movement in Ohio for a long time.”

The two central figures in Ohio’s corporate charter movement, David Brennan and Bill Lager, have donated a combined $6.4 million to state legislators and committees, more than 90 percent of which went to Republicans, who have dominated the state House and Senate. Their donations have paid off. Since 1998, the state has given $1.76 billion to schools run by Brennan’s White Hat Management and Lager’s Electronic Classrooms of Tomorrow, accounting for one-quarter of all state charter funds.

F-rated virtual schools run by White Hat Management were among the charters Hansen purposely omitted from sponsor evaluations this summer, resulting in an “exemplary” grade for the Ohio Council of Community Schools, which sponsors many White Hat virtual schools. Another sponsor that benefited from Hansen’s flawed math, Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, oversees 51 charter schools, including another struggling Imagine school on whose board Hansen previously sat.

The majority of the Ohio Department of Education’s elected board members—other members are appointed by the governor—have called for an investigation into Hansen’s manipulated evaluations and for the resignation of State Superintendent Robert Ross. Kasich has brushed off both requests, instead proposing a restructuring of the board to provide greater gubernatorial control. “I don’t like the structure of it,” Kasich told the Columbus Dispatch. “I don’t like the infighting.”

Tim Pingle, a former Imagine Columbus Primary Academy principal, is frustrated that schools like his old one are allowed to remain open. “Why do we accept this for our kids?” he asks, noting that Imagine Schools was kicked out of Missouri after years of financial and academic concerns. “It’s not good enough for the kids in Missouri, but it’s okay for kids in Ohio?”

In June, the Ohio Senate approved bipartisan legislation to reform the state’s charter schools, but the measure stalled in the state House. And so last week, Imagine Columbus Primary Academy opened its doors for its third year—with its third principal and second school board.

“I’m sure Imagine’s new board is even more oblivious than we were, given that we caused a lot of trouble in the end,” says Sinoff, who resigned after Imagine refused to re-negotiate the high-priced lease. “I think that they are not entirely happy that we squeaked through the filter to make life difficult. I’m sure they haven’t made that mistake again, and they have folks even more oblivious than we were.”

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Under John Kasich, Ohio’s Charter Schools Became a "National Joke"

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Simple Ways To Green Your School, No Matter Its Colors

by BrittanyBrice Posted on August 20, 2015

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Simple Ways To Green Your School, No Matter Its Colors

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The Push to Unionize College Football Players Just Suffered a Huge Blow

by LinwoodJernigan Posted on August 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Labor Relations Board on Monday dismissed a bid from Northwestern University football players to form the first-ever college athletes’ union, overturning an earlier regional board ruling and ending a year-and-a-half-long battle that included several union-busting efforts by the school and the team’s coaches to persuade athletes to vote against unionization.

From the Chicago Tribune:

In a unanimous decision, the five-member board declined to “assert” jurisdiction over the case because doing so would not promote uniformity and labor stability in college football and could potentially upset the competitive balance between college teams, according to an NLRB official.

The board, the official said, analyzed the nature, composition and structure of college football and concluded that Northwestern football players would be attempting to bargain with a single employer over policies that apply league-wide.

The decision marks a significant blow for Northwestern athletes, who won a regional board decision in March 2014 that determined they were university employees and could therefore seek union representation. However, it is unclear what effect the latest ruling will have on potential future unionization attempts at other schools; the board’s decision applies strictly to Northwestern’s case, and it declined to decide whether the athletes were employees under federal law, leaving open the possibility for athletes to unionize elsewhere.

The College Athletes Players Association, a collection of former athletes spearheading the bid, could appeal the ruling in federal court, but, according to the Tribune, that appears unlikely. Former Northwestern star quarterback Kain Colter, who had pushed the athletes’ union efforts, expressed disappointment over Monday’s ruling on Twitter, noting that the jury was still out as to whether college athletes are still employees.

CAPA president Ramogi Kuma called Monday’s ruling a “loss in time” in a statement, in that it delayed “the leverage the players need to protect themselves.” But, he said, it didn’t stop other athletes from pursuing unionization. “The fight for college athletes’ rights,” he told the Tribune, “will continue.”

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The Push to Unionize College Football Players Just Suffered a Huge Blow

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10 Ways To Start The School Year Green And Healthy

by AuroraUnger5 Posted on August 14, 2015

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10 Ways To Start The School Year Green And Healthy

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