By Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report

In a perfect world, school choice is supposed work by allowing families to leave bad schools and enroll their children in better ones. The failing schools either close, or improve to attract students again.
But for such a system to operate smoothly, parents need information to figure out which schools are good and which are bad.
In Chicago, researchers had an unusual opportunity to study, over several years, how publicizing information about school quality influenced where families enrolled their children. And they found that many families did pull their children out of failing schools. But they usually ended up in ones that were just as bad, or only slightly better. Astonishingly, more than 25 percent of the transfer students moved to another school that was also on the city’s probation list of failing schools.

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Posted on June 4, 2016

By Aldo Zammit Borda/The Conversation

Terrorism is a threat everywhere. According to a Foreign Policy report, the worst terrorist events in 2015 occurred in Cameroon, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, Syria and Yemen. This year has followed in step, with terrorist attacks occurring in locations as diverse as Belgium, Pakistan and Turkey.

Although most of these attacks led to injuries and fatalities, some writers have decried double standards in the media reporting and have highlighted the “seemingly differing public reaction to bombs in Belgium and attacks in Turkey.”
The nature and prominence of the way the media covers terrorist attacks is a good way to judge the public’s reaction – is the story on the front page or is it hidden away on page 13?

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Posted on May 31, 2016

By Steve Schwartzberg and Steve Balkin

Bernie Sanders faces a dilemma: how to keep the political revolution he has launched alive and well if he loses the Democratic nomination. Hillary Clinton faces an equally problematic dilemma if she wins the nomination: how to win over Bernie’s supporters in order to defeat Donald Trump, a particular challenge given some polls suggesting that up to a quarter of Bernie supporters say they will not vote for Hillary. Meanwhile Trump is boasting, “I’m gonna get Bernie people to vote [for me], because they like me on trade.”
These intertwined dilemmas may have a common solution if Hillary is willing to truly embrace some of Bernie’s key proposals and organizational activities – above all meaningful wide ranging campaign finance reform – and Bernie is willing to help create and lead a Progressive Independents Coalition, allied with but separate from the Democratic Party, that could endorse Hillary and help mobilize opposition to Trump. This new coalition would help to identify, recruit and endorse candidates at federal, state and local levels, and run its own advertising campaigns on their behalf, helping to create a new wave of progressive officeholders. Over the longer term, grassroots-financed think tanks loyal to the vision of America that Bernie has articulated would combat the benighted ideas of corporate-financed think tanks.

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Posted on May 26, 2016

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

Everyone seems to think that a lack of “soft skills” is the reason why students of color aren’t ready for college and careers. More schools and after-school programs are teaching students how to have “grit,” compassion and a “growth mindset.” Under the new federal education law, states are encouraged to use “nonacademic” factors to hold schools accountable.
Rubbish! Soft skill training is disguised bootstrapping, which insidiously blames youth for failing in racist systems designed to block their success, and it abdicates the middle class from any responsibility to uproot inequality. It’s racism that really keeps students out of college and careers, not kids’ lack of resilience. Students are ready for college and jobs. Postsecondary institutions and employers are not ready for black and brown youth.

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Posted on May 25, 2016

By Deirdre Fulton/Common Dreams

An anti-Bernie Sanders column allegedly penned by Atlanta’s “influential” Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed ahead of Georgia’s Super Tuesday primary appears to have been “primarily written by a corporate lobbyist” and “edited by Correct the Record, one of several pro-Clinton Super PACs,” according to The Intercept.
“Sanders’ record is simply not strong when compared to Obama and Clinton,” Reed’s Op-Ed said, “both of whom have prioritized reducing gun violence in our cities and across our country.”

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Posted on May 24, 2016

By Annie Waldman/ProPublica

Why do many school districts fail to meet the needs of their students?
One commonly cited response is our country’s disparate school funding system; because most districts rely heavily on local property tax for funding, schools in poor districts are often left with fewer resources than schools in wealthier areas.
Even though school funding issues play out on a local level, in recent decades, it’s risen to the forefront of national issues. This past year, for the 10th year in a row, a national Gallup poll found that Americans view lack of financial support as the largest problem facing America’s schools.
But can more money really fix America’s struggling, poor schools? That is exactly what NPR’s Cory Turner and a team of over 20 NPR member-station reporters wanted to find out.
After six months of investigating, Turner and his team published a series of stories digging into school funding disparities from Chicago to Sumter County, Alabama.
ProPublica education reporter Annie Waldman spoke with Turner to learn more about their investigation.

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Posted on May 23, 2016

By Morris Pearl/Patriotic Millionaires

Hello Friends of the Patriotic Millionaires,
I hope that you are all doing well. I am writing to update you on our continued efforts against the carried interest tax loophole.
The carried interest tax loophole is the most indefensible example of money’s corruptive influence in politics. Through special interest and weak arguments, proponents keep a loophole open that allows Wall Street investment fund to pay much lower income tax rates than other Americans.

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Posted on May 20, 2016

Test Your Knowledge With The Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief Of The Financial Times

In any other presidential election year, you really couldn’t come up with a quiz quite like this, because this has been – sadly – the wackiest campaign for leader of the free world in recent memory. Maybe in history.
After all, one reason why Donald Trump may become the next president – maybe the chief reason – is that it took so long for so many to actually take him seriously and wrap their heads around the fact that he was, in fact, winning.
But Trump has had plenty of assistance from a Republican primary field that, in his own words, started with as many horses as a Kentucky Derby. Who can forget Jim Gilmore? Well, nearly everyone! Gilmore was once the governor of Virginia – and once in the 2016 field of GOP candidates! George Pataki? He was in!
A former commissioner of the IRS, Mark Everson, even ran, to little notice.
(Wikipedia lists 22 others who were speculated upon but declined to run.)
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’ surprising success and unique personality got Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm creator Larry David off the couch and onto Saturday Night Live with a spot-on impersonation, providing perhaps the best comedy of the season.
The fine folks at the Financial Times were thusly inspired to create this pub quiz for you and your friends. You’ve probably already forgotten much more than you currently know about this dreadful moment in history. Good luck!

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Posted on May 19, 2016

By Nika Knight/Common Dreams

The CIA’s inspector general office admitted to reporters that the department inadvertently deleted its copy of the U.S. Senate’s report detailing the nation’s post-9/11 detention and torture of detainees, Yahoo News reported Monday.
The department also deleted a hard disk back-up of the report.
“Clearly the CIA would rather we all forgot about torture,” Cori Creider, a director at human rights watchdog Reprieve, responded to the news in a statement.
The admission comes only days after a federal court ruled that the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to the report, blocking its release to the public. Observers noted that the deletion coincides with widespread government efforts to suppress the document.

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Posted on May 18, 2016

By Jon Queally/Common Dreams

Deeming their release “in the public interest,” The Intercept on Monday published a large, download-ready batch of NSA internal documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Though the release comes with a promise that even more files from the Snowden archive will be released in this manner over time, the journalists said Monday’s document release – re-formatted pdf versions of the NSA’s SIDToday, the agency’s internal newsletter for its clandestine Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) – is designed to give other journalists and the general public better access to the source material first entrusted to them by Snowden in 2013.

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Posted on May 17, 2016