By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

We’re not going to “non-profit” our way out of poverty, housing affordability and economic injustice.
Historic discrimination and structural inequality have laid the groundwork for multiple life-sucking neighborhood factors that black children face every day: Neighborhood poverty, crime, unemployment, unaffordable housing, inaccessible health care and limited transportation make it difficult for children to learn.
The rise of the non-profit industrial complex is a necessary response to in-your-face suffering, but our investments in non-profits can’t shield us from the source-problem of bad policy.

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Posted on October 4, 2016

By Stephen Engelberg/ProPublica

Several years after I returned to New York from Oregon, I made a strange discovery. Bank accounts I was certain I had closed were inexplicably racking up service charges.
It seemed bizarre, particularly because I had gone in person to a newly opened local branch of my West Coast bank to make sure the accounts were shut down.
The failure to pay these charges (bills were sent to my old address and never caught up with me) resulted in penalties and a report to a credit agency.
After an increasingly frustrating series of exchanges at the local branch, the bank agreed to wipe out the charges but said I would have to deal with the credit agencies on my own.
It seemed outrageous, and as the editor-in-chief of an investigative news operation, I thought about asking Paul Kiel, ProPublica’s crack reporter on bank shenanigans, to take a look.
But I stopped myself. There’s an old saying in the journalism business for this sort of thinking: News is what happens to an editor. As with so many newsroom aphorisms, it’s meant to be proclaimed with an eyeroll and a tone of deep sarcasm. Reporters view editor-generated stories as the bane of their existence, and not without reason. Random events and pet peeves are not often a great starting point for serious stories.

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Posted on October 3, 2016

By Deirdre Fulton/Common Dreams

Raising further questions about his presidential bona fides, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson failed to name a single foreign leader he admired, in what he called an “Aleppo moment” during a town hall-style interview on MSNBC Wednesday night.
When asked by host Chris Matthews to name his “favorite foreign leader,” Johnson drew a blank. “Prodded to come up with something, he finally settled on a former president of Mexico – but couldn’t recall his name,” the Associated Press reported.
Watch the exchange, also featuring Libertarian vice-presidential candidate Bill Weld (who named German Chancellor Angela Merkel as his top choice), below:

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Posted on October 1, 2016

By Joshua Schneyer and M.B. Pell/Reuters

EAST CHICAGO, Indiana – In this industrial Northwest Indiana city, hundreds of families who live in a gated public housing community with prim lawns and a new elementary school next door are searching for new homes. Their own places have been marked for demolition.
The school, temporarily closed, has been taken over by the Environmental Protection Agency and health officials who offer free blood tests to check residents for lead poisoning. Long after the U.S. lead industry left East Chicago, a toxic legacy remains. Smokestacks at one smelter next door, shuttered 31 years ago, for decades polluted these grounds.
Emissions from the now-defunct U.S. Smelter and Lead Refinery Inc., or USS Lead, left a potent hazard in the soil. By early this year, the EPA detected concentrations of the heavy metal so high in some yards that they could pose a serious health risk to families at the West Calumet Housing Complex. Children are told not to play outdoors.
At the 44-year-old housing complex, all 1,100 residents are being forced to move out. Many are outraged about why the dangerous soils weren’t identified and removed earlier.
One reason: Five years ago, a unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a 19-page report that all but ruled out the possibility of children here getting lead poisoning.

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Posted on September 28, 2016

By Madison Donzis/Unbendable Media

On Tuesday, dozens of Chicagoans, medical experts and myalgic encephalomyelitis advocates and patients will rally outside the James Thompson Center in an effort to raise awareness of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and call for increased funding for research, clinical trials and medical education into the disease.
The Chicago rally is part of a global day of action spearheaded by #MEAction.net, an international network of patients and allies empowering each other to fight for health equality for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.
The event aims to bring attention to the #MillionsMissing around the world who suffer from the disease with little hope for improvement, lacking a clear cause of their disease or path to treatment.
At the demonstration, Chicago mother Amy Mooney will talk about how her 11-year-old daughter has been robbed of her childhood by ME spending 90 percent of her days in a dark room in pain, and missing her 4th, 5th and 6th grade education.

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Posted on September 26, 2016

By Thomas E. Patterson/The Conversation

Years ago, when I first started teaching and was at Syracuse University, one of my students ran for student body president on the tongue-in-cheek platform “Issues are Tissues, without a T.”
He was dismissing out of hand anything that he, or his opponents, might propose to do in office, noting that student body presidents have so little power as to make their platforms disposable.
Sadly, the news media appears to have taken a similar outlook in their coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign. The stakes in the election are high. Key decisions on foreign and domestic policy will be affected by the election’s outcome, as will a host of other issues, including the appointment of the newest Supreme Court justice. Yet, journalists have paid scant attention to the candidates’ platforms.
That conclusion is based on three reports on the news media’s coverage of the 2016 campaign that I have written for the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where I hold a faculty position.

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Posted on September 23, 2016

By Renee Dudley/Reuters

In the days after the redesigned SAT college entrance exam was given for the first time in March, some test-takers headed to the popular website reddit to share a frustration.
They had trouble getting through the exam’s new mathematics sections. “I didn’t have nearly enough time to finish,” wrote a commenter who goes by MathM. “Other people I asked had similar impressions.”
The math itself wasn’t the problem, said Vicki Wood, who develops courses for PowerScore, a South Carolina-based test preparation company. The issue was the wordy setups that precede many of the questions.

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Posted on September 22, 2016

By Jonathan Lash/The Hechinger Report

A few years ago I was speaking to a group of parents whose children had just started at Hampshire College. A father asked a question that was on many minds: “How can your college be rigorous without grading student work?” Before I could respond, another parent stood up and asked, “May I answer that?” I nodded with interest.
“I run a company,” he said, “and I have a few thousand employees in multiple locations. They’d be mystified if our managers started to give them grades. We manage by setting goals, evaluating progress, and mentoring employees on how to improve their performance. What would a letter grade tell them?”

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Posted on September 21, 2016

By Lee Reiners/The Conversation

Having spent five years supervising large financial institutions on Wall Street, I am rarely surprised by the latest news of banks behaving badly.
But even the most hardened cynics, such as myself, were taken aback by the recent announcement that Wells Fargo was being fined $185 million for fraudulent sales practices that included opening over two million fake deposit and credit card accounts without informing its customers.
Adding to my shock was the revelation that the firm fired 5,300 employees over the course of five years for engaging in this behavior, clearly evidence that this was more than just a few bad apples.

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Posted on September 20, 2016

By Robert Faturechi/ProPublica

Donald Trump says he has donated millions to charity.
Earlier this year, Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold set out to prove him right.
But finding evidence to support Trump’s claims turned out to be surprisingly difficult. The Republican presidential nominee provided few details. His campaign offered little help. Even Trump’s son, Eric, who runs his own charitable foundation, couldn’t cite specific donations.
Fahrenthold reached out to dozens of charities, and took to Twitter, asking his followers for leads. Despite his exhaustive efforts, he hasn’t been able to come close to accounting for the $8.5 million Trump publicly pledged over a 15-year period.
The lack of evidence to support Trump’s claims has raised [further] questions about Trump’s honesty – and just how charitable the self-described billionaire has actually been.
We spoke with Fahrenthold about how he reported this series.

A few highlights from our conversation:

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Posted on September 19, 2016