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Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America’s Schools to Build "God’s Kingdom"

by WilbertMoulds8 Posted on January 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s Christmastime in Holland, Michigan, and the northerly winds from Lake Macatawa bring a merciless chill to the small city covered in deep snow. The sparkly lights on the trees in downtown luxury storefronts illuminate seasonal delicacies from the Netherlands, photos and paintings of windmills and tulips, wooden shoes, and occasional “Welkom Vrienden” (Welcome Friends) signs.

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Dutch immigrants from a conservative Protestant sect chose this “little Holland” in western Michigan more than 150 years ago in part for its isolation. They wanted to keep “American” influences away from their people, and their orthodox ways of running their community. Many of their traditions have lasted generations. Until recently, Holland restaurants couldn’t sell alcohol on Sundays. Residents are not allowed to yell or whistle between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. If city officials decide that a fence or a shed signals decay, they might tear it down, and mail the owner a bill. Grass clippings longer than eight inches have to be removed and composted, and snow must be shoveled as soon as it lands on the streets. Most people say that rules like these help keep Holland prosperous, with low unemployment, low crime rates, good city services, excellent schools, and Republicans at almost every government post. It’s also where President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos, grew up.

Sitting in his spacious downtown office suite, Arlyn Lanting is eager to talk about his longtime friend, who will begin confirmation hearings Tuesday to become the nation’s top-ranking education official. DeVos is married to Amway scion Dick DeVos (whose father, Richard DeVos, is worth more than $5 billion, according to Forbes) and is seen as a controversial choice due to her track record of supporting vouchers for private, religious schools; right-wing Christian groups like the Foundation for Traditional Values, which has pushed to soften the separation of church and state; and organizations like Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which has championed the privatization of the education system.

President-elect Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos at a January rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan Paul Sancya/AP

But Lanting, a tall, 75-year-old businessman, investor, and local philanthropist, is quick to wave off the notion that DeVos has it out for traditional public schools. “Betsy is not against public schools,” he says. “She does believe that teachers in charter and private schools are much more likely to lead the way toward better education—the kind that will actually prepare students for our current times and move us away from standardization and testing. But Dick and Betsy have given money to public schools, too.”

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Lanting is a warm and generous host who’s quick to point out his favorite Bible verse, painted right there on his wall: “‘I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the Truth’ (3 John 4).” He and Betsy were both raised in the tradition of the Christian Reformed Church—a little-known, conservative Dutch Calvinist denomination whose roots reach back to the city’s founders. They went to the same grade school in the city’s parallel private school system, the Holland Christian Schools, which was first established by members of the church. Like many people I met in Holland, Lanting wasn’t a Trump supporter initially—he voted for Ben Carson in the primaries—but he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton, whom he calls “a professional spin doctor.” “Trump is much more likely,” Lanting says, “to bring Christ into the world.”

For deeply devout people like Lanting and DeVos, that’s no small detail, and education plays a key role in that mission. Since her nomination, DeVos hasn’t said much publicly about her views on education—or whether she plans to defend the separation of church and state in public schools. (DeVos declined Mother Jones‘ request for an interview, but a Trump transition team spokeswoman replied in an email, “Mrs. DeVos believes in the legal doctrine of the separation of church and state.”) However, in a 2001 interview for “The Gathering,” a group focused on advancing Christian faith through philanthropy, she and her husband offered a rare public glimpse of their views. Asked whether Christian schools should continue to rely on philanthropic dollars—rather than pushing for taxpayer money through vouchers—Betsy DeVos replied: “There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education…versus what is currently being spent every year on education in this country…Our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God’s Kingdom.”

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Said Dick DeVos: “As we look at many communities in our country, the church has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity…It is certainly our hope that more and more churches will get more and more active and engaged in education.”

Although the DeVoses have rarely commented on how their religious views affect their philanthropy and political activism, their spending speaks volumes. Mother Jones has analyzed the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation’s tax filings from 2000 to 2014, as well as the 2001 to 2014 filings from her parents’ charitable organization, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation. (Betsy DeVos was vice president of the Prince Foundation during those years.) During that period, the DeVoses spent nearly $100 million in philanthropic giving, and the Princes spent $70 million. While Dick and Betsy DeVos have donated large amounts to hospitals, health research, and arts organizations, these records show an overwhelming emphasis on funding Christian schools and evangelical missions, and conservative, free-market think tanks, like the Acton Institute and the Mackinac Center, that want to shrink the public sector in every sphere, including education.

The couple’s philanthropic record makes clear that they view choice and competition as the best mechanism to improve America’s education system. Overall, their foundation gave $5.2 million from 1999 to 2014 to charter schools, which are funded by taxpayers but governed by appointed boards and often run by private companies with varying degrees of oversight by state institutions. Some $4.8 million went to a small school they founded, the West Michigan Aviation Academy. (Flying is one of Dick’s passions.) Their next biggest beneficiary, New Urban Learning—an operator that dropped its charter after teachers began to unionize—received $350,000; big-name charter operators Success Academy and KIPP Foundation received $25,000 and $500, respectively.

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Meanwhile, when it comes to traditional public schools run by the districts and accountable to democratically elected school boards—the ones that 86 percent of American students attend—the DeVoses were far less generous: Less than 1 percent of their funding ($59,750) went to support these schools. (To be fair, few philanthropists donate directly to underfunded public school districts.)

But the DeVoses’ foundation giving shows the couple’s clearest preference is for Christian private schools. In a 2013 interview with Philanthropy Magazine, Betsy DeVos said that while charters are “a very valid choice,” they “take a while to start up and get operating. Meanwhile, there are very good non-public schools, hanging on by a shoestring, that can begin taking students today.” From 1999 to 2014, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation gave out $2,396,525 to the Grand Rapids Christian High School Association, $652,000 to the Ada Christian School, and $458,000 to Holland Christian Schools. All told, their foundation contributed $8.6 million to private religious schools—a reflection of the DeVoses’ lifelong dedication to building “God’s Kingdom” through education.

Most people I meet in Holland tell me that it’s hard to understand the DeVos and Prince families without learning something about the history of Dutch Americans in western Michigan. In the mid-1800s, a group of mostly poor farmers, known as the “Seceders,” rebelled against the Dutch government when it tried to modernize the state Calvinist church, including changing the songbooks used during worship and ending discriminatory laws against Catholics and Jews. In 1846, an intensely devout Calvinist priest named A.C. van Raalte led several hundred settlers from the Netherlands to the United States.

Those who ended up in western Michigan overcame hunger and disease to clear thickly wooded, swampy land with much colder winters and deeper snow than their native Netherlands. In the city of Holland, they built a virtual replica of their Dutch villages. And just like back home, their church was essentially their government, influencing almost every part of farmers’ lives.

Ten years after first Seceders came to Holland, one-third of the Dutch community broke off from the Reformed Church of America and created the Christian Reformed Church. What really solidified this split were disagreements over education, according to James D. Bratt, professor emeritus at Calvin College and author of Dutch Calvinism in Modern America. Members who stayed in the Reformed Church of America supported public schools; Christian Reformed Church members believed that education is solely the responsibility of families—and explicitly not the government—and sent their kids to religious schools.

It was the Christian Reformed Church that opened Holland Christian Schools and Calvin College in nearby Grand Rapids. Betsy DeVos, 59, is an alum of both and was raised in 1960s and 1970s in the Christian Reformed tradition. (Her brother, Erik Prince, is a former Navy SEAL and the founder of Blackwater, the private-security contractor infamous for its role during the Iraq War.) During those years, that often meant growing up in a home that forbade dancing, movies, drinking, working on Sundays, or even participating in the city’s May Tulip Festival, with its Dutch folk costumes and dancing in wooden shoes. Holland Christian Schools’ ban on teaching evolution wasn’t lifted until 1991, according to Larry Ten Harmsel, the author of Dutch in Michigan. (DeVos left the Christian Reformed Church about a decade ago and has been a member of the evangelical Mars Hill Bible Church.)

When the 1960s cultural revolution rocked the nation, many members of the Christian Reformed Church—including Betsy’s parents, who would become one of the richest couples in Michigan thanks to Edgar’s automotive parts company—allied themselves with the evangelical movement. While the Princes would go on to contribute to some of the country’s most powerful far-right religious groups, like the Family Research Council, Betsy and Dick DeVos eventually focused on funding education reform groups and think tanks pushing for vouchers, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars through their foundation to organizations seeking to privatize education and blur the separation of church and state in public schools, including:

• Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty: Betsy DeVos once served on the board of this Grand Rapids-based think tank, which endorses a blend of religious conservatism and unrestrained capitalism. It is headed by a Catholic priest, Fr. Robert Sirico, who has argued that welfare programs should be replaced by religious charities. In a paper titled “America’s Public Schools: Crisis and Cure,” a former Acton advisory board member named Ronald Nash wrote: “No real progress towards improving American education can occur as long as 90 percent of American children are being taught in government schools that ignore moral and religious beliefs.” The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation contributed $1,289,750 from 2000 to 2014, and the Prince Foundation donated at least $550,000.

• The Foundation for Traditional Values: Led by former priest James Muffett, the organization is the education arm of Citizens for Traditional Values, a political action group whose mission is preserving “the influence of faith and family as the great foundation of American freedom embodied in our Judeo-Christian heritage.” On the website dedicated to Muffett’s seminars, a page devoted to a lecture titled “The Greatest Story Never Told” states: “There was a time when schoolchildren were taught the truth about the Christian influence in our foundations but no longer. Our past has been hijacked by a secular philosophy, and we have lost the original vision, ideas, and principles of our forefathers who gave birth to the greatest free nation the world has ever seen.” The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation contributed $232,390 from 1999 to 2014.

• Focus on the Family: Both the DeVoses and the Princes have been key supporters of Focus on the Family, which was founded by the influential evangelical leader James Dobson. In a 2002 radio broadcast, Dobson called on parents in some states to to pull their kids out of public schools, calling the curriculum “godless and immoral” and suggesting that Christian teachers should also leave public schools: “I couldn’t be in an organization that’s supporting that kind of anti-Christian nonsense.” Dobson also has distributed a set of history lessons that argue that “separating Christianity from government is virtually impossible and would result in unthinkable damage to the nation and its people.” The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation gave $275,000 to Focus on the Family from 1999 to 2001 but hasn’t donated since; it gave an additional $35,760 to the group’s Michigan and DC affiliates from 2001 to 2010. The Prince Foundation donated $5.2 million to Focus on the Family and $275,000 to its Michigan affiliate from 2001 to 2014. (It also gave $6.1 million to the Family Research Council, which has fought against same-sex marriage and anti-bullying programs—and is listed as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FRC used to be a division of Focus on the Family before it became an independent nonprofit, with Dobson serving on its board, in 1992.)

Meanwhile, the DeVos clan is perhaps best known for aggressive political activism against organized labor. A 2014 Mother Jones investigation revealed that the DeVoses had invested at least $200 million in various right-wing causes: think thanks, media outlets, political committees, and advocacy groups. In 2007, coming off Dick’s unsuccessful gubernatorial bid in their home state of Michigan, the DeVoses focused their advocacy and philanthropy on controversial right-to-work legislation that outlawed contracts requiring all employees in unionized workplaces to pay dues for union representation. Back in 2007, such a proposal in a union-heavy state like Michigan was considered a “right-wing fantasy,” but thanks to the DeVoses’ aggressive strategy and funding, the bill became law by 2012.

Right-to-work laws, now on the books in 26 states, have been a major blow to the labor movement—including teachers’ unions, the most powerful lobby for traditional public schools and opponents of charter schools (whose instructors often aren’t unionized). Teachers in Michigan are not allowed to strike; when educators in Detroit demanded a forensic audit of their district’s murky finances and protested classrooms plagued by mold, roaches, and rodents, they used sick days to make their point. A month later, Betsy DeVos wrote a Detroit News op-ed arguing that teachers shouldn’t be allowed to stage sick-outs, either.

DeVos in 1992 Detroit Free Press/Zuma

Which brings us back to Michigan, “school choice,” charter schools, and vouchers. Betsy DeVos has spent at least two decades pushing vouchers—i.e., public funding to pay for private and religious schools—to the center of the Republican Party’s education agenda, thanks in large part to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based think tank.

In the mid-’90s, Mackinac leadership suggested a long-term strategy on how to make the unpopular voucher policies more palatable for the mainstream America. Its then-senior vice president, Joseph Overton, developed what became known as the Overton Window, a theory of how a policy initially considered extreme might over time be normalized through gradual shifts in public opinion. Education policies were placed on a liberal-conservative continuum, with the far left representing “Compulsory indoctrination in government schools” and the far right, “No government schools.”

Charter schools became the main tool of voucher advocates to introduce school choice to public school supporters, with the aim to nudge public opinion closer to supporting tax credits to pay for private schools. Since about 80 percent of American students outside the public system attend religious schools, “universal choice”—or allowing taxpayer money to follow individual students to any private or public school—could eventually mean financing thousands of Christian schools.

In Michigan, Detroit has been at the heart of the charter push, which began in the early ’90s. In 1996, former Metro Times reporter Curt Guyette showed how the Prince Foundation, as well as the foundation run by Dick DeVos’ parents, funded a carefully orchestrated campaign to label Detroit’s public schools as failing—and pushed for charters and “universal educational choice” as a better alternative. While Betsy DeVos has not called for an end to traditional public schools, she has written about the need to “retire” and “replace” Detroit’s public school system and pressed for aggressively expanding charter schools and vouchers. (In 2000, Dick and Betsy DeVos helped underwrite a ballot initiative to expand the use of vouchers in Michigan and lost badly.)

Detroit’s schools—where 84 percent of students are black and 80 percent are poor—have been in steady decline since charter schools started proliferating: Public school test scores in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have remained the worst among large cities since 2009. In June, the New York Times published a scathing investigation of the city’s school district, which has the second-biggest share of students in charters in America. (New Orleans is No. 1.) Reporter Kate Zernike concluded that lax oversight by state and insufficiently regulated growth—including too many agencies that are allowed to open new charter schools—contributed to a system with “lots of choice, with no good choice.”

Statewide, about 80 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit management companies, a much higher share than anywhere else in the country. And two years ago, DeVos fought aggressively against legislation that would stop failing charter schools from expanding, and she and her husband were the biggest financial backers of the effort to oppose any new state oversight of charters.

“School choice” is now accepted by nearly two-thirds of Americans—although 69 percent oppose using public funding for private schools. Donald Trump’s signature education proposal calls for dedicating $20 billion in federal money to promote “school choice” to help families move away from what the he has called our “failing government schools” and instead choose private, religious, or charter schools. With most states under Republican leadership and some major charter school proponents signaling their willingness to work with the Trump administration, the stage is set for an aggressive push to lift state caps on charter schools (26 states have some kind of charter cap) and expand voucher programs (13 states and the District of Columbia have active programs). In 2008, then-DC Public Schools chancellor and staunch charter school advocate Michelle Rhee—whom Trump also considered for the position of education chief—refused to express support for vouchers. By 2013, she’d made her support public.

It’s hard to tell how many more charter advocates will support—or simply overlook—the inclusion of vouchers for private schools in “choice” policies, but one thing is clear: The prospects for an aggressive policy push for “universal choice”—including funding more religious schools with taxpayer money—have never been better.

Betsy and Dick DeVos and three of their children at Michigan’s Republican conventions in 2006 Regina H. Boone/Detroit Free Press/Zuma

On my last day in Holland, a retired public school teacher, Cathy Boote, is giving me a tour of the city she has called home for 37 years. Dressed in a black cashmere sweater and a white winter jacket, Boote is a self-described moderate Republican and teachers’ union member who went to public schools and later taught art in the nearby West Ottawa public school district. In her close to four decades of working in public schools, she saw how the decline of the automotive industry, and the hollowing out of the middle class, affected poor and working-class kids she taught more than any other factor. “When parents have to work longer hours, more jobs, and get paid less, there is more stress at home,” Boote reflected. “That means less time to read and do homework, more time spent watching TV and online rather than learning.”

“Betsy’s father, Edgar Prince, is considered the patron saint of Holland,” Boote says as our truck rolls over heated asphalt—a unique underground grid of tubes circulates hot water beneath the streets and melts snowflakes just as they touch down. It was Prince who helped bring this innovative system here, suggesting the heated streets in 1988 and forking over $250,000 to cover nearly a quarter of the cost. Like Boote, most Hollanders I talked to credit Prince’ vision for the city’s transformation in the ’90s to a tourist destination.

It was this business acumen, and a drive to take care of “our people,” that turned Prince into the wealthiest man in Michigan. In 1965, Prince left his job as chief engineer at Buss Machine Works after workers decided to unionize. He opened his own company that eventually specialized in auto-parts manufacturing and became one of the biggest employers in Holland. When Prince Automotive was sold for $1.35 billion in 1997, two years after his death, some 4,500 former employees received a combined $80 million in bonuses. “Most people here feel that you build your own family. You don’t need a union to build a competing family,” Boote explains, adjusting her glasses. “You treat your employees well and they don’t need to complain. Complaining, protesting is bad. You work hard and you don’t complain.”

Boote’s truck takes a sharp turn into the predominantly Latino section of town, with large, free-standing Victorian cottages, fenceless yards, and ancient trees. Most kids in this neighborhood go to public schools. In the two decades since school choice was implemented, white student enrollment in Holland’s public schools has plummeted 60 percent, according to Bridge Magazine. Latino students are now the face of the system, and 70 percent of all students are poor, more than double the district’s poverty rate when choice began. The Holland Christian Schools are predominantly white.

We leave downtown and drive along Lake Macatawa for about three miles before parking in front of a huge, castlelike mansion. This is Betsy and Dick DeVos’ summer home—a three-story, 22,000-square-foot estate that the Holland Sentinel once boasted was the the biggest in the city, if not the county.

As we look out at the stone-and-shingle house, Boote reflects on how most people around here—her family, Betsy DeVos’ family—grew up among proud Dutch immigrants who overcame deep poverty. DeVos went on to attend a small, elite, mostly white private religious school, and a similar college. She married into a rich dynasty.

“‘Look at us. God has given to us. I can fix this. All you have to do is be like me.’ You can understand how you might think that way, if you grew up here,” Boote says later, as we take one final glance at the mansion over its tall, iron gate. “If you come from the small, sheltered, privileged environment of Holland, you are most likely going to have a very limited worldview—including how to fix education.”

Holland, Michigan, in summer Craig Sterken/iStock

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Betsy DeVos Wants to Use America’s Schools to Build "God’s Kingdom"

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A Tip for Parents as the School Year Begins: You’re Not Totally in Control, and That’s Okay

by WendyWWQHcs Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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For more than a quarter century, psychologist and author Ross Greene specialized in the most challenging children. Last year, I wrote about how his collaborative approach to discipline is diverting the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools trained in his method reported suspensions falling by as much as 80 percent. And after implementing his model, youth prisons and an adolescent psychiatric ward saw recidivism, injuries, and the need for restraints drop by more than half.

Greene’s new book, Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership With Your Child, addresses a broader audience and articulates a discipline and parenting framework for all children. One day, after he dropped his oldest child off at college, he spoke to me about the biggest parenting challenges, raising kids in a scary world, what parents should know as they face the back-to-school season, and what truly builds grit in children.

Mother Jones: This is your first book for a general parenting audience, as opposed to focusing on behaviorally challenging kids. What is different here?

Ross Greene: For a very long time, people have been saying to me, “What if you want to do this approach with every kid?” For a behaviorally challenging kid, you’re parenting this way just to help bring the kid’s behavior under control and to greatly reduce conflict. But you want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one’s behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another’s perspective, honesty.

READ: What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong? Tristan Spinski/GRAIN

MJ: What are the most common mistakes you see parents make?

RG: The biggest mistake is overdoing it on the unilateral approach. Thinking you have more control than you really do. Losing sight of the fact that you’re your kid’s partner, not the person who’s pulling all the strings. Not letting them struggle. Swooping in and fixing everything and being way too punitive when punitive really doesn’t accomplish very much.

MJ: You write that modern parents are rejecting both authoritarian and permissive parenting—you call the approaches the “Dictatorial Kingdom” and the “Pushover Provinces.” But parents report feeling lost. Why is it so hard for parents to find a new path?

RG: Reason No. 1 is because of how they themselves were raised. Reason No. 2 is we’ve been lacking the technology. A lot of parents aren’t exactly sure how to go about solving a problem with a kid in a way that’s mutually satisfactory—doing that with their child feels very foreign to a lot of people. It probably explains why so many parents tell me their kids don’t listen to them and why so many kids tell me that they don’t feel heard.

MJ: Your discipline model has three specific steps. First, reflective listening to gather information from a child about the problem; second, sharing your concerns with the kid; third, working toward mutually satisfactory solutions. This can appear complicated and time-consuming, but when we wrote about it, some readers said it seemed intuitive and plain common sense. Which is it?

RG: I like to call it uncommon common sense. There is still quite the vibe out there that as a parent you have to be completely in control and in charge. This model acknowledges that being completely in control is a fantasy. This kid was someone the minute he or she popped out, and the idea that we can take this lump of clay and mold it into a form of our choosing is absolutely ludicrous. People still look askance at a kid in the supermarket who’s pitching a fit and think the parent is not sufficiently in control or not being sufficiently punitive. That’s an issue for a lot of parents as well.

MJ: Your chapter on “Parental Angst” resonated with me. It’s one thing to read a book and decide to change your parenting—it’s another thing to stick with it. What gets in the way of parents implementing your model?

RG: It does take practice. It’s not something you do well the first time. Another huge challenge is that most parents are accustomed to dealing with problems in the heat of the moment. When people are rushed, they’re stressed and you greatly increase the likelihood of being punitive and unilateral just because you’re trying to grasp control. The vast majority of things parents and kids get in conflict over are highly predictable. We’re disagreeing about the same expectations the kid is having difficulty meeting every hour, every day, every week. Because it’s predictable, we can have these conversations proactively. That is very hard for people.

MJ: Why is it useful to shift one’s view from “this child is misbehaving” to “the child is having difficulty meeting expectations”?

RG: Parents are much more likely to be attuned to what they don’t like than they are to the expectations that the kid is having difficulty meeting. Challenging behavior is just a signal, the fever, the means by which the kid is communicating that he or she is having difficulty meeting an expectation. Everybody is talking about the behavior. Behaviors float downstream to us. We need to paddle upstream. The problems that are causing the behaviors, that’s what’s waiting for us. It’s a crucial paradigm shift. We’re moving away from carrots and sticks, and time-outs and privileges gained and lost, and suspensions and detentions in schools, none of which will actually solve the problems that are actually causing the behaviors. It’s a whole lot more productive to be in problem-solving mode than it is to be in behavior modification mode. We’re focused on what’s causing the fever.

MJ: Can you explain how compatibility informs parents’ actions?

RG: When there’s a good fit between skills and expectations, there’s what we call compatibility, and we would expect a good outcome. When there’s a poor fit between expectations and the capacity of the kid, there is incompatibility, and that’s when we see people exhibit challenging behavior. People don’t scream or swear or pout or sulk when there’s compatibility. But most growth occurs when there’s incompatibility. When it comes to resilience, when it comes to pulling yourself up when you’ve fallen down, you don’t learn those things when things are going well. You learn those things when you’re struggling. So that’s when parents have to decide: “Am I going to swoop in and take control here to make sure that things go really well for my kid? Or am I going to do this in a collaborative fashion so that the problem ultimately does get solved but I’m involving my kid in the process so he learns how to do it for himself?” How I conduct myself when I get involved goes a long way to determining whether my kid is going to have the skills to solve the problem themselves in the long run.

MJ: What are the most common conflict areas between parents and kids?

RG: Homework. It’s so crucial to really get a good handle on what’s getting in the way of the kid completing a homework assignment. It can be so many things. Kids are overprogrammed these days. School is very demanding these days. No kid should be getting three or four hours of homework a night. There’s no breathing time, there’s no family time, there are just extracurriculars and homework and then go to bed. That’s a solution that has to involve the school as well.

Screen time is another very common one. It’s become a really important way for people to communicate with each other these days. But if we’re sitting at dinner and there’s no conversation going on because everybody’s got their head someplace else in their iPhone, that’s a family problem that needs to be solved. Solutions can’t be imposed. That just fosters resentment. If a solution isn’t mutually satisfactory, it’s not going to stick.

MJ: You write about kids who become suicidal, cut themselves, struggle to succeed in life. Parental fear is behind a lot of the controlling behavior. What can parents do to let go a bit and follow your advice to raise human beings?

RG: I just dropped my 18-year-old daughter off at college. I have fears about how she’s going to do academically. I have fears about how she’s going to do socially. I’m worried. I also have faith. Over 18 years of us solving problems together, my daughter has shown me that she’s got a good head on her shoulders, that she is pretty good at solving the problems that affect her life. If she wants my input, she gets it. If we’re being unilateral, then communication does not happen, the relationship does not happen. We never get to see that our kid is capable of solving problems on her own. We never start to build up the faith that they can actually do it.

We have forgotten that those skills on the more positive side of human nature have to be taught, have to be modeled, have to be practiced. The method of parenting described in Raising Human Beings is a perfect mechanism for teaching those skills. This is not me in sales mode, I fervently believe there’s never been a more important time for this book. It’s a scary world out there.

MJ: As we go into a new school year, what’s the one takeaway you want parents to have from your book?

RG: Be your kid’s collaborative partner, but also be a collaborative partner with the folks at school. Schools can be pretty unilateral too. Show them you know how to collaborate. Show them this is not about power. Let them know detentions and suspensions and paddling don’t solve the problems that are affecting kids’ lives. Those problems can be identified and solved but not by being punitive. My advice to educators is collaborate with parents; they know a lot about their kids.

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A Tip for Parents as the School Year Begins: You’re Not Totally in Control, and That’s Okay

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Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

by BreannaDonohoe Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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On January 19, a high school in Gardiner, Maine, received a message saying there was a bomb inside the school and a shooting was imminent. That day in Millsboro, Delaware, a caller claimed to be armed and on the roof of an elementary school, threatening to injure students and staff. In Wellington, Florida, a threat of a shooting was found on a sign at Palm Beach Central high school—the third threat on Palm Beach County schools in just over a week.

That was only a portion of the dozens of threats against schools that day, including those targeting nearly 30 schools in New Jersey. Amid an atmosphere of insecurity from a bad year of mass shootings in 2015, a wave of violent threats has hit schools across the nation. A series of bomb threats disrupted Ohio schools last fall, drawing attention from the Department of Homeland Security. And in December, threats resulted in a shutdown of all 900 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, with the region still on edge after the San Bernardino massacre. (Similar threats to New York City schools the same day were deemed less worrisome and drew a different response.)

Threats to schools are nothing new, and the vast majority of them turn out to be benign. According to experts, there is no comprehensive national data on school threats, so there is no way to determine if the recent problems represent a rising trend. Growing awareness of them could be explained by increased media coverage, for example. We asked experts to help explain what’s going on.

Are bomb and shooting threats to schools on the rise? Kenneth Trump, the president of the National School Safety and Security Services, says that based on a limited study he did using news reports, it appears there has been a recent uptick in school threats. Last February, Trump released a study that reviewed 812 threats reported in the media from the first half of the 2014-15 school year and found that threats had risen 158 percent since the first time he conducted such a study the prior year. That said, no law enforcement agencies tally the number of school threats, and there is no mandate for schools themselves to track or report them, so there is no way to be confident about a trend one way or the other.

The early warning signs that could help prevent the next attack

How are the threats being made? Of the 812 threats Trump assessed, more than one-third were sent electronically, either by email or on social-media platforms. Others are phoned in. Perpetrators sometimes use internet phone systems to call in threats using anonymous numbers and computer-generated voices. This is a tactic called “swatting,” which is intended to trick law enforcement officers into responding to a perceived threat.

That turned out to be behind a disruption last week in which 30 schools in New Jersey and elsewhere received automated phone calls traced to Bakersfield, California, announcing bomb threats in “robotic-sounding voices.” The tactic originated in the online gaming community, sometimes as part of a game and sometimes as a form of retaliation. “Some people have the capability of tracking you by your IP address, getting your location, and using technology to spoof a 911 call, for example, that would actually make it appear like it was from your address,” explains Trump. Similarly, some threats are sent electronically through international proxy servers that disguise the identity of the sender. “Schools have been a major target,” he says.

How do authorities rate the seriousness of these threats? “The vast majority of threats are young people who make very poor decisions, looking at it as a prank or a hoax that won’t have serious consequences and not realizing that a ton of bricks is going to fall on them—suspension, expulsion, or felony prosecution,” says Trump.

The threats fall into two basic categories: “Transient” and “substantial” threats. Transient threats tend to be made impulsively, out of a moment of anger or perhaps even out of fear related to academic pressures, according to Scott Poland, a psychology professor and school crisis expert at Nova Southeastern University. Poland says the overwhelming majority of bomb threats are transient, according to his own and Trump’s research. “We’ve even had threats come in from high-flying students like, ‘I’m not ready for my AP history test today.'” Authorities generally regard these threats to be of little concern.

Substantial threats are when the perpetrator has a grudge, has developed plans to strike, or has access to weapons. For example, when two teens threatened to kill “as many students as possible” at South Pasadena High School in 2012, the police uncovered sufficient evidence to consider the threats credible, including that the teens had researched weapons and how to make explosive devices. But plots like these are rare.

Some threats are more difficult to gauge. For example, last Monday some 2,000 students in Tallahassee, Florida, stayed home from school or were taken out of class by their parents after four schools received threats posted to social-media accounts warning that students would be shot if they went to school. The posts were shared widely on social media and went viral, and in the following days those schools operated under heightened security as law enforcement investigated.

A threat against Godby High School in Tallahassee, Florida, was posted to Instagram and went viral. Tallahassee Democrat

How much danger are school kids really in? Experts caution that anecdotal evidence of a rise in threats doesn’t mean schools have become more dangerous places. The chances of any given school coming under attack are infinitesimal. “Our perception of this is just totally off,” says Poland. He surveyed his doctoral students as to whether they thought the average college or university can expect a homicide on campus every 7 years, every 30 years, or every 175 years. “They all went for every 7 years, when the reality is that it’s about every 200 years.” Schools are the safest places children go,” adds Poland, noting that when schools cancel classes without assessing the validity of a threat it may actually put students more in harm’s way.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s top school safety official, David Esquith, said at a recent conference that despite high-profile mass shootings, “schools are safer than they’ve ever been.”

How should schools respond? “School threat assessment teams are sorely lacking across the country, as are training and protocols associated with such teams,” says Trump. This can lead to poor policy decisions, he says. In Trump’s study, 30 percent of the schools evacuated and 10 percent closed for at least one day.

Los Angeles Unified School District said in December that it closed its 900 schools out of an abundance of caution. “It’s really pretty hard to argue with that,” notes Poland—unless you stop to think of the disruption to the lives of families. “I would argue that the several hundred thousand students would have been safest at school, with increased surveillance, than they would be on the streets.” One high school student, he notes, was struck and killed by a utility truck when the district was shut down that day.

“Administrators and police are reacting and then assessing instead of the other way around,” Poland adds. Threat assessment teams, training, and better crisis communications plans would help ease unnecessary school closings, he says. “When threats become known in the community, misinformation spreads, and school leaders have to not only manage the threat and the investigation of it, but also the communications crisis at the same time.”

One positive development, Trump says, is that schools and law enforcement agencies are increasingly coordinating to counter and resolve such threats, a practice that wasn’t so common in the past.

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Schools Across America Are Facing a Rash of Shooting and Bomb Threats

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

by MuhammadStillman Posted on January 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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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.”

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

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High School Police Ask Judge to Let Them Pepper-Spray and Arrest Unruly Students

by JennaManifold Posted on February 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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When B.J. ambled into his fourth-period class at PD Jackson-Olin High School in Birmingham, Alabama, he could hardly have predicted that he would soon be handcuffed and crying, with pepper spray searing his eyes and nasal passages. Nor would he have guessed that by the day’s end he would be sequestered in a holding cell, vomiting from the chemicals.

Here’s how it happened, as described in court documents: One day in September 2010, “Mr. Cook,” a substitute teacher in the Birmingham City Schools, told B.J. (his initials), then a wiry 10th-grader, that he couldn’t be in the classroom until he tucked in his shirt. The teen obliged—dress violations were known to escalate at the school—but as he slipped back into the room a few minutes later, the sub heard someone among the rows mutter, “Fuck you, Mr. Cook.” Unsure who’d dissed him, he zeroed in on B.J. and summoned “Assistant Principal Gaston.”

Out in the hallway, Gaston subjected B.J. to a forced physical search. B.J. objected, and wriggled to loosen himself from the administrator’s grip. He tripped and landed facedown on the floor—whereupon Gaston took advantage of B.J.’s vulnerable position to check his back pockets. B.J.’s defiance led Gaston to call in backup. The kid soon found himself upright and pinned to a row of lockers by Gaston and a fellow administrator, “Assistant Principal Gates.”

That’s when School Resource Officer (SRO) Marion Benson arrived on the scene. Her face was the last thing B.J. saw before she blasted him with a cloud of pepper spray. He sunk to the ground in tears. If you try getting up, I am going to spray you again, she told him, her knee digging into B.J.’s back. She handcuffed him and led him to the main office.

“Woo! That’s the first macing of the year!” Mr. Gates remarked as the shackled teen sat in the office. Twenty minutes later, still wearing his chemical-infused clothes, B.J. was taken to the hospital, where staff said it was too late to do anything about the pepper spray, and then to a nearby detention center. He was held in a cell there until 7 p.m., when his grandmother came to pick him up.

This Was One of eight stories presented to US District Judge Abdul Kallon these past few weeks in a lawsuit whose outcome, which is expected in a decision Monday, may determine whether the city cops who work within the Birmingham school district as SROs can keep using pepper spray to break up fights and thwart what they consider disorderly conduct.

The suit, filed in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleges that eight students, including B.J., suffered physically and emotionally from unnecessary use of pepper spray. It names six SROs, as well as Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper. In 2012, a judge granted the case class action status, which means the outcome will henceforth apply to all of the district’s students.

“We want it to be declared unconstitutional because it allows officers to spray people, specifically students, without considering a wide variety of factors—such as whether they are in a school environment, the fact that they are in a closed environment, and the fact that these things that they are accusing kids of doing and acting on are actually just student misconduct issues,” says Ebony Howard, the SPLC staff attorney representing the students.

Since 2006, Howard says, there have been at least 110 pepper-spray incidents in the district. At the very least, her team wants the judge to insist upon written guidelines that state explicitly the circumstances in which it would be appropriate to reach for the Freeze +P chemical agent the officers use. “We want training for these officers on adolescent development, de-escalation techniques, conflict management, and conflict resolution,” she told me. “Basically, we want them to be trained on how to actually be SROs, and to work in an environment where they have the tools to help calm down a conflict that do not involve spraying chemicals in kids’ faces.”

The modern police presence in schools emerged from the same crack-era hysteria that brought us mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and an explosion of the US prison population. During the early-to-mid-1990s, with juvenile arrests for violent crime on the rise and legislators shrilling about the so-called juvenile superpredators, more and more schools contracted with police departments to put uniformed officers on campus.

Looking back in 2013, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported that about 25 percent of existing SRO programs were originally created because of media-incited fears, and another 25 percent because of school rowdiness and vandalism. Only about 4 percent of districts and law enforcement agencies cited the level of violence in local schools as the motivation for initiating a program. (The rest of the programs were created for “other” reasons, such as a school taking advantage of grant money or taking part in a drug awareness program.)

The number of school resource officers deployed nationwide continued to surge into the early oughts. According to the CRS, there were about 12,000 SROs in 1997—by 2003, the number of officers had grown to nearly 20,000. When the Birmingham district began putting local police in its schools in 1996, it made what the authors of a Justice Department assessment would later describe as a “frequent and destructive mistake.” Like many other districts, it enlisted the cops without first working out their roles and responsibilities in a school setting. “When programs fail to do this, problems are often rampant at the beginning of the program—and often persist for months and even years,” the 2005 assessment warned.

A few years after that report appeared, the district’s then-interim superintendent Barbara Allen began to take notice of what had become an increasingly troublesome partnership. In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police were stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.

Indeed, in 2007-08, a whopping 513 students from the district landed in Jefferson County Family Court. This represented 82 percent of the referrals from schools to court in the county, even though only 25 percent of Jefferson County’s public school students attend Birmingham City Schools. Brian Huff, then a presiding judge, complained to the Birmingham News that fewer than 1 in 10 of those kids ever should have been arrested.

Allen knew she had a real problem on her hands when she learned that multiple school officials were heading to court at least once a week. “Other school systems aren’t arresting kids for small things; they handle it from within,” she told the Birmingham News in the spring of 2009. “We call the police.” The district’s high schools had a total of 12 SROs, plus two sergeants and a lieutenant, patrolling their hallways and grounds. (The same Birmingham News article quoted Mayor Larry Langford saying he would “pull officers off the streets and put them in the schools,” after the mayor had encountered graffiti and disrespectful students during a high school visit.)

After meeting with Judge Huff that summer to discuss the problem, Allen took action. That December, she persuaded the Birmingham PD to sign a “collaborative agreement,” which fleshed out, somewhat, the role of police in the schools. Notably, it acknowledged that pepper spray and cuffs were being used for minor offenses, and that teachers and administrators should be the ones addressing noncriminal violations in the future.

But the agreement had fatal flaws: For one, it didn’t detail how officers should act when their intervention was deemed necessary, so officers continued to behave in schools as they would on the streets. The document also had an “exceptional circumstances” clause, which gave police employees the right to exercise their discretion. The defense in the SPLC lawsuit is now pointing to this provision to argue that the officers have the green light to arrest and deal with students as they see fit.

IF POLICE OFFICERS happened upon a couple of 16-year-olds fighting off campus, they would be allowed to use pepper spray, so why would it be any different on a school campus? That’s a question posed by Michael Choy, the police department’s defense attorney, during the second week of the trial.

The court, Choy said, must remember that these students “are not children” but, rather, “big adults.” One of the former students in the case, he emphasized, would be testifying by video from a New York prison. The implicit message: These kids were the bad apples.

Choy’s comment was “very disturbing,” says Dennis Parker, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program. It reminds him of how police in Ferguson, Missouri, tried to portray Michael Brown as a hoodlum after one of their own shot the unarmed teenager. The tactic distracts from the question at hand, which is “whether or not the police or the SRO were acting in an appropriate way.”

The criminalization of minor student misconduct, and the effect it has on high school kids, is a topic Thomas Pedroni, an associate professor at Wayne State University’s College of Education, is studying in partnership with the ACLU. “Police set up a different environment in a school,” he explains. “It becomes less focused on nurturing and caring and growing, and more focused on control…It’s sort of tough in the environment of police presence to go, ‘Oh, no, we’re really a community of trust.'”

In many ways, Pedroni adds, the school-to-prison pipeline could be renamed the prison-to-prison pipeline, given how so many schools have adopted the sterile, suspicion-first qualities of juvenile detention centers.

This notion of a dehumanized high school experience played a central role in Howard’s legal strategy, especially as she aimed to convey the ripple of effects of a zero-tolerance school culture.

“When you use a tactic like chemical sprays in schools, what you do is you teach a kid who has been sprayed, a kid who may have been accidentally sprayed, a kid who saw another kid get sprayed, as well as a kid who just knows about the use of the chemical—all of those kids learn to distrust law enforcement officers,” Howard says. “They learn that they will not be treated fairly.”

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40 Percent of Colleges Haven’t Investigated a Single Sexual Assault Case in 5 Years

by KieranNorthey Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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According to the results of a national survey commissioned by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and the Senate Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight, nearly half the country’s four-year colleges haven’t conducted a single sexual assault investigation in the past five years. The survey was completed by 236 four year-institutions across the country—private and public, small and large—but in order to encourage candid reporting, the names of the schools surveyed were not released.

Here’s what scores of survivors of sexual assault in college have to deal with, according to the results:

Simply not receiving an investigation: Forty-one percent of schools hadn’t investigated a single sexual assault in the past five years, despite the fact that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the White House, one in five undergraduate women experience sexual assault during college. Meanwhile, more than 20 percent of the country’s largest private schools conducted fewer investigations than the number of sexual assault incidents that they reported to the Department of Education.
Having no clue what to do: One in three schools don’t train students on what constitutes sexual assault or how to respond to it. Among private, for-profit schools, 72 percent don’t provide students with any sexual assault training.
Untrained, uncoordinated law enforcement: Though in general colleges work with a number of parties to keep campuses safe—like campus police, security guards, and local law enforcement—30 percent don’t actually train the school’s law enforcement on how to handle reports of sexual assault, while a staggering 73 percent of institutions don’t have protocols on how the school should work with local law enforcement to respond to sexual assault.
The athletic department deciding if you were raped: Yes, you read that correctly. Thirty percent of public colleges give the athletic department oversight of sexual violence cases involving athletes.
Your peers deciding if you were raped: Experts agree that students shouldn’t be part of adjudication boards in sexual assault cases—friends or acquaintances of the survivor or alleged perpetrator face a conflict of interest, and those involved in a sexual assault likely don’t want to divulge the details of the assault to, say, someone they recognize from chemistry class. Still, 27 percent of schools reported students participating in the adjudication of sexual assault claims.
Untrained faculty, staff, and medical professionals: Often, the first person to whom a student reports sexual assault is a member of the college’s faculty or staff. But 20 percent of schools don’t provide any sexual assault response training to faculty and staff, and only 15 percent of schools provide access to Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners—nurses who are trained to provide medical and other services to survivors of sexual assault.
Knowing that the perpetrator still plays sports and goes to frat parties: Only 51 percent of schools impose athletic team sanctions against student-athletes who have been deemed perpetrators of sexual assault, and 31 percent impose fraternity or sorority sanctions.
Seeing the perpetrator on campus, even if you don’t want to: Nineteen percent of institutions don’t impose orders that would require the perpetrator of the assault to avoid contact with the survivor.

McCaskill says that the results of the survey demonstrate failures at “nearly every stage of institutions’ response” to sexual assault. Together with Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), she plans to unveil legislation addressing the campus assault later in the summer.

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40 Percent of Colleges Haven’t Investigated a Single Sexual Assault Case in 5 Years

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Can You Guess When Violent Crime in Our Schools Peaked?

by Burt Bollman Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Tim Lee, here’s a pretty interesting chart from a newly released report on crime in schools. It shows the rate of violent crime committed on campus: rape, robbery, assault, and sexual assault.1 And it sure looks pretty familiar, doesn’t it? It peaks in 1993, about 18 years after leaded gasoline started being phased out in 1975, then turned down and continued declining for the next 20 years.

Since the oldest students in our schools are 18 years old, the crime rate should start to flatten out approximately 18 years after the final elimination of leaded gasoline in 1995. That would be 2013. And so far, it looks like that’s about what’s happening.

All the usual caveats apply. This isn’t proof, it’s just a data point. But it’s a pretty compelling data point, isn’t it?

1Homicide isn’t included, but the homicide rate in schools is so low that it doesn’t affect these figures noticeably.

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Can You Guess When Violent Crime in Our Schools Peaked?

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Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

by AbdulEncarnacio Posted on April 10, 2014

Photo: Recyclebank

Recyclebank‘s eighth annual Green Schools Program is moving along at full force.

In case you aren’t familiar with the program, it awards grant money to schools for unique projects that will green their classroom and community.

Since 2007, the Green Schools program has granted close to $450,000 that helped more than 150 schools across the country bring their sustainable ideas to life.

From now until March 16, Recyclebank members are encouraged to donate points to schools of their choice participating in the program to help them reach their target funding goals.

Members can learn about the schools’ project ideas, donate their points and track each school’s progress online. For every 250 member points donated, Recyclebank awards schools $1 that can be used toward their green project.

Twenty-nine schools are participating in the program this year, with projects ranging from school gardens and recycling programs to upcycled art projects. Each school can request up to $2,500 in grant money for their project.

“The whole reason we feel so strongly about the Green Schools Program is that we want to empower youth to be thinking about the environment, thinking about what they can do–in their school, in their community, in their home–to make an impact,” Karen Bray, vice president of marketing at Recyclebank, told Earth911.

In addition to member donations, Domtar Corp. is supporting the Green Schools Program for the second year in a row and will contribute additional donation dollars as well as a year’s supply of its EarthChoice Office Paper to the school with the most innovative project.

So far, Burton Elementary School in Huntington Woods, Mich. has already achieved its $2,500 goal to fund a lunchroom waste reduction program. Keith Elementary in Cypress, Texas also met its $850 target to construct an on-site greenhouse for environmental education, while Central High School in Philadelphia crossed the finish line for its $2,000 goal to restore patio boxes for urban gardening.

Two other Philadelphia schools, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School, are also tantalizingly close their funding goals to construct birdhouses and launch a recycling program. Other leading projects so far include a horticultural project and a school-wide art installation.

For Recyclebank, these projects represent small changes that carry potentially big impacts for the future of our planet.

“A lot of the conversations around being a little greener center around the next generation,” Bray noted “So what better way to start to build that awareness and that passion than going directly to the students and giving back a little bit?”

To view a full list of participating schools, donate to your favorite and track their progress, visit the Green Schools Program online.

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Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

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Greenpeace Activists Detail Russia’s Capricious Justice System

by Myrna Posted on December 3, 2013

The crew of a Greenpeace ship seized by Russian authorities in the Arctic in September described a prosecution bound by the letter of the law but remarkably opaque. View article –  Greenpeace Activists Detail Russia’s Capricious Justice System ; ;Related ArticlesPanel Says Global Warming Carries Risk of Deep ChangesUrban Schools Aim for Environmental RevolutionWorld Briefing | Australia: Where Eagles Dare (the Eagle’s Cut) ;

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Greenpeace Activists Detail Russia’s Capricious Justice System

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Italy makes huge haul of mafia assets in green energy case

by Posted on April 3, 2013

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<!– google_ad_section_start –> Italy made its biggest confiscation of mafia assets in history on Wednesday, including dozens of alternative energy companies worth a total of 1.3 billion euros (HK$12.96 billion), police said. A court in Trapani on the island of Sicily ordered the definitive confiscation of assets first seized in 2010 from Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old businessman, who was deemed a front man for the Sicilian mafia, known as Cosa Nostra. <!– google_ad_section_end –>

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