RaceWire

School Grounds as Battlefield: Political Lessons at an Arabic-themed School

2010-03-19T18:41:25Z

In 2007, New York City public schools were poised to break new cultural ground. The city established the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a comprehensive public school specializing in the Arabic language. The grade 6-12 school, the first of its kind, was designed as a symbol of cross-cultural understanding in a city still healing from the scars of September 11.

It was also the opportunity of a lifetime for Debbie Almontaser, a Yemeni-American New Yorker, longtime educator and activist, who was chosen to head the new school. But that dream was soon extinguished by those who believe the city has no business engaging Arab culture through the classroom.

Before the school even opened its doors,a right-wing cabal launched a smear campaign against Almontaser and the city's Arab and Muslim communities (see Seth Wessler's previous coverage). In the end, the school survived, but Almontaser was ousted in a storm of anti-Muslim screeds from the conservative media and blogosphere.

But last week, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission vindicated Almontaser, ruling that the New York City Department of Education's treatment of Almontaser was discriminatory “on account of her race, religion and national origin.”

]]> Linking labor ethics and civil rights, the panel declared:

[The Department of Education] succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on DOE as an employer.

The ruling, while not binding, underscores the racial and ethnic tensions percolating throughout New York City, as well as the threatened rights of educators in marginalized communities.

In the months leading up to the school's opening, a local coalition that called itself "Stop the Madrassa" went full-throttle to paint Almontaser as a Muslim extremist, suggesting the school would serve as a a junior terror training camp in the middle of Brooklyn. (They seemed to gloss over the background of the school's namesake, a Lebanese-American Christian writer known for his culturally transcendent works.)

The final blow came when Almontaser was cornered by a reporter for the Murdoch-owned New York Post. He questioned her about a T-shirt displaying the word "Intifada"—which was supposedly tied to Almontaser because the activist group that designed it, Arab Women Active in the Arts and Media (AWAAM), shared office space with an organization affiliated with her.

Almontaser then did the unthinkable. She acted like an educator and gave an honest answer, providing a nuanced definition of "intifada" and its connotations of Palestinian struggle, while insisting that she herself had nothing to do with the T-shirts.

Nevertheless, the rabid opposition (tied to a nationwide network of right-wing idealogues) pounced on the statement. Within days, Almontaser was ousted and replaced with a less controversial administrator. The Commission's report and Almontaser both concluded that Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration forced her resignation.

The ouster exposes the kind of subtle disenfranchisement that teachers may experience in the city's mayor-controlled school bureaucracy.

Though Almontaser's ordeal centered on employment equity, her defenders did not include the teacher's union (then-chief of the local United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, in fact openly condemned Almontaser's supposed validation of the word "intifada"). But various local officials and community groups have stepped up, including the Center for Immigrant Families and Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition. Undaunted by the hateful spew, AWAAM led the effort, campaining online and in the streets, petitioning the Mayor's office, and supporting a lawsuit demanding that the city put Almontaser back in the principal's office.

The fervor faded after the Mayor's Office made it clear it wouldn't rescind its original decision. But the EEOC's ruling could reinvigorate the communities that came together in support of Almontaser. Almontaser recently told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that she still hopes for reconciliation:

It’s my life’s dream, Amy, to have the opportunity to lead a school that I created, with the help of others, to establish an institution that would set precedents in helping building bridges of understanding and certainly creating young people who will be global thinkers and, you know, competing in the twenty-first century workforce. And so, I’m still committed to that dream.

The future of Almontaser and the school are uncertain. Khalil Gibran has struggled with personnel disputes, and its leadership remains in limbo with the recent departure of its principal.

The Khalil Gibran controversy resurfaces in the midst of mounting tensions over cultural diversity in education: the system is fraught with questions over civil rights in Obama's school reform initiative, flaring racial hostility at the University of California, a right-wing takeover of Texas textbooks, and the controversy over education access for immigrant youth.

All these issues reflect a country that is constantly confronting, blurring and redefining cultural borders. The trajectory of Almontaser's career highlights the role that educators play in the movement for multicultural, multilingual schools, yet it exposes their vulnerability as workers in an increasingly politicized public sector. Teachers have a mandate to act as civil servants, but they often lack the freedom to act as agents of change in their communities.

Back in 2008, Sara Said, a Yemeni-American college student whose younger brother was enrolled at Khalil Gibran, spoke out alongside other local activists at a rally in support of the school:

One of the most important things education should do is just really teach a student how to question things... The students need to question society and not accept society as it is, because if we continue accepting it, this is what is going to happen, like letting a newspaper or a few individuals run our country.

Whatever happens to the students and staff of the Khalil Gibran Academy, Almontaser's struggle has already given New York a tough lesson on the meaning of a worldly education.

For more on the Khalil Gibran International Academy campaign, go to Communities in Support of KGIA.

Cross-posted at Working In These Times. Image courtesy AWAAM

Friday Twitter Break: Reading Rainbow Is Back, And Immigration Reform Bill Is Here

2010-03-19T17:44:44Z

After a brief hiatus, your favorite Friday Twitter Break is back with a roundup of the best of the race talk on the Twittersphere. There's plenty going down as we speak, and lots happening in D.C. this weekend. Folks in D.C. are gearing up for what promises to be a massive turnout for the March for America for immigration reform, which also happens to fall on the seventh anniversary of the war. If that weren't enough, we are also fighting through the final moments of healthcare and student aid reform.

All that and more, including reactions to New York KGIA principal Debbie Almontaser's ousting, white boy soul singer Robin Thicke's "conversion" to Blackness (I kid you not), and the Wall Street Journal's profile of Rev. Al Sharpton. Enjoy!

Be sure to follow ColorLines at @racialjustice!

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One in Four Black Men in Kentucky Can't Vote, But DRA Could Change That

2010-03-18T20:30:59Z

Those are the stats from the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, which released its report on the state of Black folks there last month. Kentucky's got the special distinction as being one of two states that bars people with past felony convictions from voting for their entire lives.

That could change though, if the Democracy Restoration Act passes. The bill would restore the right to vote in federal elections to four million people around the country who've served their time, been released and now live--and likely pay taxes--in our communities. On Tuesday, the House Subcommittee on Committee, Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties convened a hearing to listen to testimony on the bill.

If passed, DRA would join the larger state-based movement in the last ten years to restore folks with prior convictions the right to vote. Since 1997, twenty states have made adjustments to laws to allow at least some portion of the formerly incarcerated the right to vote in state elections. Kentucky's actually got a state version of DRA in committee right now, awaiting passage by its Senate before it goes to a public vote.

Ex-felon voter disenfranchisement is a voter suppression tactic left over from the Jim Crow-era, a classic example of discriminatory laws that don't mention race but have a disproportionate impact on people of color. Literacy tests, anyone? Poll taxes? We don't stand for that these days, yet voter disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions still stands on the books.

]]> According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, 50,000 of Kentucky's two hundred thousand Black residents were unable to vote in 2004 because of voter disenfranchisement. Nationwide, it's estimated that 13 percent of all Black men in this country are forbidden to vote. Some democracy, huh?

But talk of voter disenfranchisement must be considered alongside a conversation of the deeper, broader issues embedded in the criminal justice system. You know, the criminal justice system that convicts and imprisons Blacks and Latinos at higher rates than white people, that doles out harsher sentences to Black folks than white folks for similar crimes, that executes people of color at higher rates than white people. The two go hand-in-hand.

The Democracy Restoration Act is a no-brainer. Stay with us as we follow this bill.

Criminal Flaws in Obama's Immigration Reform Vision

2010-03-18T20:08:07Z

Advocates are gearing up for this weekend's march on Washington for immigration reform, and the White House has done its best to get out ahead of the movement in recent weeks. It remains unlikely that Democrats will work reform into the 2010 agenda. But in an essay over at ColorLines today, Seth Wessler asks a deeper question: Whenever Democrats get moving on reform, what will they actually achieve? Seth writes:

The Obama administration’s reform goal is to achieve what Bush only purported to do: Focus enforcement on dangerous criminals and terrorists. "As an investigative agency, ICE prioritizes our immigration enforcement efforts to target those who threaten the security of the American people," says Obama's ICE chief, John Morton. The political tradeoff seems clear: A tough-enforcement perspective can give Democrats the space to create paths to citizenship.  ...
[snip]

The problem is that tough “enforcement” has never really been about deporting dangerous criminals or securing the border against terrorists. It's really meant tearing apart thousands of families a year as a result of minor and often decades-old interactions with the cops. 

Read Seth's essay here. And we'll be covering the march over the weekend and next week.

South Carolina's AIDS Crisis Shows Health System's Worn Patches

2010-03-18T19:45:18Z

South Carolina is once again making really bad news on HIV/AIDS: People living with HIV are rallying against a budget plan that will end funding for a program that helps low-income people living with HIV/AIDS buy meds. More than 2,000 people would lose their insurance and potentially have to end treatment. It’s an unfortunately timely reminder of how poorly our current national health care system works.

South Carolina has been among a batch of largely southern states that have struggled chronically to maintain their AIDS Drug Assistance Programs, which are jointly funded by the feds and state governments. The programs patch up a huge hole in the health care safety net, by offering coverage to thousands of working Americans who don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford the hefty price tag of HIV drugs. Like Medicaid, however, ADAPs have long created budget problems - particularly in southern states, where the epidemic has grown most quickly.

South Carolina’s program has stood out as a problem. In 2005, four people died while lingering on a waiting list for entering the program. But South Carolina isn’t alone. Throughout the Bush era, several states developed ADAP waiting lists, and as of March 5, 662 people were on waiting lists in 10 states. Check out the blog of Housing Works, a New York City-based AIDS group, for a solid round up of the budget pressures nationally.

Advocates are petitioning President Obama to make an emergency allocation of $126 million to keep ADAPs around the country afloat this year. But the bigger picture, of course, is health care reform. ADAPs are a disturbingly fitting example of our problem: The programs exist only because our larger system has so utterly failed, leaving tens of thousands of people neither covered by Medicaid nor able to participate in the private market. ADAPs were a patch, but even the patches to our health care system have worn through.

What the Broadband Debate Says About Race

2010-03-17T20:42:05Z

The FCC officially released its long-awaited National Broadband Plan (PDF) today, and so far the 360-page report has gotten a lukewarm reception. “More of a national broadband to-do list,” wrote Nancy Scola on Tapped, referring to the plan’s general lack of practical strategies.

But there’s another part of the battle brewing, one that pits longtime civil rights groups against a relatively new generation of bloggers and online activists of color, aka the netroots. While everyone agrees that communities of color need wider access to broadband Internet, there are different approaches on how to make that happen.

]]> Currently, the United States is behind many similarly resourced countries, like Japan and Germany, in developing a national broadband plan. A national survey released by the FCC in February showed that nearly a third of the country doesn’t have regular broadband access -that’s roughly 93 million people. And poor folks of color generally fare among the worst: 40 percent of households of color subscribe to broadband, compared to 55 percent of white households. According to commission's own findings, 36 percent of people haven't adopted broadband because it's too expensive.

Despite the discrepancy in access, the Internet has still played the role of a sort of great equalizer. It’s what brought us activist efforts like MoveOn, Color of Change, and Presente. It was key in mobilizing a national grassroots effort to elect a President. It’s also brought us rappers like Drake and Souljaboy. Each of these efforts was premised on the fact that most anyone can start their own website (or send a petition or mixtape) and feel assured that it’ll load and be just as accessible as the New York Times, or any other site on the web. That's net neutrality.

So if that’s how it’s been working, why try to fix what’s not broken? Why add formal regulations guaranteeing the even flow of content? Because industry analysts believe we're not far from the day when big telecom companies start making profit-based decisions about what content moves where and how. Plus, the fact that they're openly opposed to any sort of regulation is a subtle hint that we should be worried.

In 2009, 72 democratic members of Congress wrote a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski urging the committee to consider the "full range of
consequences that government action may have on network investment."

Then, last fall, 20 national civil rights organizations signed on to a letter asking the FCC to think twice about imposing net neutrality regulations on big telecom companies, saying:

“The Commission needs to ensure that net neutrality would not delay bridging the digital divide by altering consumer prices and discouraging broadband adoption and deployment.”

Which brings us to the FCC's broadband plan released yesterday. The plan didn't directly address the civil rights groups' concerns. But it did suggest expanding the Lifeline and Link-Up programs, which currently provides affordable telephone service to low income customers, to include broadband support. There was also mention of using advertising revenue to offer a free- or low-cost broadband service tier, but no details on how to ensure its reliability. And on a promising note, there's also talk of creating a Digital Literacy Corps, which would encourage tech-savvy young folks to get out into their communities and show why -- and how -- broadband is even worth the bother.

So now the big question is: are the civil rights groups' concerns valid? We'll be here to answer that.

Michelle's Got Data on Her Side: Food Deserts are Vast

2010-03-17T13:18:32Z

As Michelle Obama turns up the heat on food manufacturers, PolicyLink and The Food Trust have released a report that maps America's "food deserts" and looks at their lasting effects in rural areas and low-income communities of color.

The report culls research from more than 100 previous studies to bring together the best data available on food access. The findings won't shock anyone living in one of America's many food deserts, but they prove Obama's childhood obesity campaign can't stop with telling parents to feed their kids better:

23.5 million Americans lived over a mile away from the nearest supermarket in 2009;

African Americans were nearly four times as likely to live a food desert as whites;

80 percent of nonwhite residents in Albany, N.Y., can't find low-fat milk or high-fiber bread sold in their neighborhoods;

More than 70 percent of families eligible for food stamps in Mississippi travel at least 30 miles to reach a supermarket.

Mississippi, it turns out, has the highest obesity rate in the nation. But it's not just Mississippi. Nationwide, geographic barriers to fresh fruits and vegetables bring dire health consequences, as residents of communities without grocery stores are more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease—all health conditions that disproportionately affect African Americans in particular.

Michelle Obama has framed her Let's Move! childhood obesity campaign, unveiled last month, in a way that all Americans can rally behind—not just those who are affected by the problem. That's good. But yesterday she spoke for the first time directly to food manufacturers about their corporate responsibilities. "We need you not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products that you're offering, the information that you provide about these products and how you market those products to our children," she said in a speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

]]> The Washington Post reports:

Obama applauded the industry's early efforts in reformulating its products. Last year, for example, Campbell's lowered sodium in 90 soups by 25 percent to 50 percent. But the first lady warned that future action must also be substantial. She warned against tricks such as replacing fat with another no-no such as salt or adding a gram of fiber to a product already laden with calories.
"This isn't about finding creative ways to market products as healthy," she said. "As you know, it's about producing products that actually are healthy -- products that can help shape the health habits of an entire generation."

Exactly. While it remains to be seen if food companies are actually willing to make the changes necessary to create across-the-board, revolutionary adjustments to the national dietary intake, the best part of this conversation is that it’s happening. We still have a long road ahead of us, but that’s great news for people of color.

Juell Stewart is a research fellow of the Applied Research Center.

The Morning Browse: Big Stuff in Today's News

2010-03-17T10:39:34Z

The Obama administration has halted work on the multibillion-dollar “virtual fence” - a Bush-era project in which Boeing would help “secure” America’s southern border with electronic surveillance.

The White House acknowledged our jobless recovery yesterday. The president’s economic team told Congress unemployment will remain around 10 percent this year, Bloomberg reports.

The number of people in state prison is down for the first time since 1972, according to a Pew Center on the States study, which cited sentencing diversion programs for the downward trend.

Haiti’s government and international donors offer a preliminary number on what it’s going to cost to rebuild: At least $11.5 billion.

NYT points out how state legislatures are bringing federal nullification back in vogue. No word on how Utah and Alabama could bridge geography to form a new Confederacy.

WSJ has fun saying Al Sharpton and Barack Obama in the same lede. The paper digs into the much-ballyhooed Sharpton-Tavis Smiley debate over whether Obama should have a Black agenda, and profiles Sharpton as an Obama surrogate in Black communities.

Senators tell Roll Call they’re spoiling for the soon-to-come fight to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, who’s expected to announce his retirement any day now.

New America Media talks to one of the four students walking the Trail of Dreams from Miami to D.C. to ask for immigration reform.

Death by Birth: Race and Maternal Mortality

2010-03-17T01:47:28Z

On December 14 2004, Tameka McFarquhar became a mother. On Christmas morning, the Jamaican-born 22-year-old was found dead in her apartment after bleeding to death. A later investigation found that part of the placenta had been lodged inside her body—a complication that might have been prevented if she had received adequate postpartum medical care.

On any given day in America, a number of births will result in tragedy. But misfortune doesn't strike randomly. The chances that a mother will survive till tomorrow is tragically tied to the color of her skin.

Amnesty International has released a report maternal death in America showing appalling differences in maternal mortality rates of white and Black women. The prevalence of the disparities, which persist even across different socioeconomic levels, expose one of the deepest scars of a failed health system:

African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. These rates and disparities have not improved in more than 20 years.

]]> From a human rights standpoint, that statistic places the United States behind many other industrialized countries despite the enormous amount the country spends on health care. The high rate of maternal deaths among Black women—along with the shockingly high Black infant mortality rates—are a haunting testament to stark inequalities in health insurance coverage and access to prenatal care and family planning services. Drawing on federal data in the context of international human rights mandates, Amnesty reports:

Despite representing only 32 percent of women, women of color make up 51 percent of women without insurance.

Women of color are also less likely to have access to adequate maternal health care services. Native American and Alaska Native women are 3.6 times, African-American women 2.6 times and Latina women 2.5 times as likely as white women to receive late or no prenatal care. Women of color are more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women. In high-risk pregnancies, African-American women are 5.6 times more likely to die than white women.

Women of color are more likely to experience discriminatory and inappropriate treatment and poorer quality of care.

Despite some Medicaid-based prenatal programs for poor women, the lack of comprehensive health coverage means that many women fall through the cracks. Moreover, the private insurance market is rigged to restrict women from purchasing affordable maternity coverage.

The Centers for Disease Control has suggested that obesity (another health problem linked to race and class) along with increased use of C-section operations, could be contributing to maternal deaths.

But the problems may begin long before a woman becomes pregnant. Women may live in an isolated rural area with no access to quality health care, they may be undocumented immigrants and therefore generally barred from Medicaid, or they may live in one of the vast majority of underserved communities lacking a Federally Qualified Health Clinic, a frontline health system for low-income households. Then there are the roughly 8 million women who should qualify for affordable public family-planning services but somehow never receive the aid they need.

Other barriers are harder to detect, quietly eroding women's health in their everyday struggles:

Women interviewed by Amnesty International also cited lack of transport to clinics, inflexible appointment hours, difficulty in taking time off work, lack of child care for other children, and the absence of interpreters and information in languages other than English, as major barriers to health care.

Eleanor Hinton Hoytt, president of the Black Women's Health Imperative, comments in the report on the untenable choices pregnant women face in an unforgiving economy:

We've had women tell us that they're afraid to miss time from work when they have prenatal appointments. They are faced with the choice of coming to work or missing work and losing their jobs. that is their reality.

Health care reform could expand the range of prenatal and maternity care resources available to low-income women. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the plans under consideration would, despite severe limitations in the proposed subsidized insurance system, provide for basic "maternity and well-baby care" in the proposed insurance exchange plans, along with "support for nurse midwives and free-standing birth centers, as well as tobacco cessation programs for pregnant women on Medicaid."

But Amnesty calls on Washington to go further to close racial disparities in maternal mortality: establishing a White House office of Maternal Health; engaging the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights to combat medical discrimination, and easing the Medicaid enrollment process for pregnant women.

Those measures could go a long way toward preventing avoidable maternal deaths. Yet until we push forward a real overhaul of the health system, so that all women have access to the resources they need for safe childbirth, many more mothers of color will die at the moment when life should begin.

Obama's No Child Left Behind: New Name, Same Sketchy Policies

2010-03-16T20:37:03Z

This past Saturday the Obama administration released its plan for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, which is hereafter to be referred to by its new--well, make that old--name as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESEA was originally passed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and has had several face lifts over the years till it became what we know it as today.

But the Obama administration is giving up the No Child Left Behind moniker, ostensibly to distance itself from the Bush version of the law. If only education reform were as simple as giving up a tainted name.

This is what we know right now: the new ESEA proposal is a 41-page blueprint. Much of it is remarkably uncontroversial: Obama wants new academic standards that are more comprehensive. The goal is to have all high school students college-ready by 2020. The new plan would take students' rate of academic growth and improvement into consideration when measuring school achievement, regardless of the level the student started at. The state will stop offering vouchers to parents to send their children to private schools if their local public school is failing. Hard to argue over, no?

While the new ESEA is still just a proposal, education advocates are voicing concern over already-implemented initiatives that really show Obama's ideological stance on ed policy and how ESEA will shake out for communities of color. Race to The Top, a national competition for $4.35 billion worth of federal money dangles up to $700 million in front of states that adopt Secretary of Eduation Arne Duncan's dramatic tactics for dealing with underperforming schools.

These reforms include drastic measures like closing and reopening schools as charter schools, firing all and rehiring no more than half of a school's teaching staff, or shutting down schools altogether and sending students to better-performing schools in the district. They certainly sound impressive on paper, but in implementation, it's students of color and students from low-income families that are often left out in the cold.

]]> "People can look to Race to the Top for the foundation of [the Obama administration's] policies," said Jack Loveridge, a policy analyst with Justice Matters, a racial justice think tank that works on education policy.

Much of a state's eligibility for Race to the Top money depends on its willingness to let its public schools be taken over by charter schools. And despite some very public wins recently, the jury is still out (or firmly against charter schools) when it comes to assessing their ability to adequately and fully serve the communities of color and those most in need.

"Of all the public schools in the country, only 3 percent have been converted to charter schools," Loveridge said. "When schools are shut down, many of the students that don't make it into the charter school are moved to the surrounding public schools, which further overloads those schools and makes them comparatively lower performing."

It ends up being a downward spiral. When overburdened and underfunded public schools struggle to compete against exclusive charter schools, they become vulnerable to being shut down. "We're still dealing with the other 97 percent of schools," said Loveridge.

So, there isn't a whole lot to get angry about yet when it comes to the new No Child Left Behind, because most education advocates have already been fighting Arne Duncan's brand of education reform for a while now.

photo credit: Pete Souza, White House flickr

NCAA Champions But College Dropouts? 80 Percent of Black B-Ball Athletes Won't Graduate

2010-03-16T20:02:23Z

(Photo: Kentucky—#2 ranked team in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament. Graduation rates for Black basketball student-athletes is 18% and 100% for white student-athletes.)

With March Madness starting this week, The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida released "Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Rates for 2010 NCAA Men's Divsion I Basketball Tournament Teams." This study compares the overall graduation rates of white and Black student-athletes. The study found that:

Universities need to start valuing Black athlete-students for more than just their free-throw averages.

The Morning Browse: Big Stuff in Today's News

2010-03-16T10:25:01Z

The evil ad wizards who brought us Willie Horton are tying Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid to Dubai “slave labor,” which they in turn equate with union labor in Nevada. MoJo’s Stephanie Mencimer reports.

The FCC’s releasing it’s National Broadband Plan this morning. Tech geeks can live stream it. People of color and poor families are less likely to have broadband than others. We'll have more later this week on how that fact has muddied the effort to pass “open internet” regulations.

Doctors are dropping out of Medicaid all over the country after years of budgetary neglect has kept rates too low. NYT reports and explains how it relates to the upcoming health insurance vote.

Think Progress has a handy chart comparing Sen. Chris Dodd’s consumer financial protection proposal with earlier versions from the president and House.

Talking Points Memo has the White House's talking points for how House members can sell health insurance reform. Fun with slides!

The gap between white and black players graduating from NCAA’s tournament-bound basketball teams is growing, according to a new study. Shocking, of course.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson points out there’s a new Gates-gate unfolding in the bedroom suburbs of L.A. following a racial-profiling stop of prominent black minister Robert Taylor.

Community College Funds, Pell Grants Getting Cut In Last Days of Student Loan Reform Fight

2010-03-15T19:30:38Z

In the span of a week, the student loan reform bill (commonly known as SAFRA) was alive, then nearly killed, and then quickly revived. Credit's being given to folks around the country who jammed their senators' phone lines and put pressure on our elected officials to make sure that student loan reform passes.

But it's Monday, and oh, what a difference a weekend makes. It's showdown week, again, for SAFRA and plenty is being cut from the bill. On the chopping block is $12 billion over ten years that was slated for community colleges, which have seen enormous jumps in enrollment since the recession.

Another casualty will be the Perkins Loan Programthat provides low-interest loans to low-income students. The maximum cap on Pell Grant money, which also serves low-income students, would have been bolstered an extra 1 percent every year under the proposed SAFRA. But today's version of SAFRA eliminates that. Money that was going to go toward elementary and secondary education construction projects is being scrapped, as is some money intended for early education programs.

The bickering and haranguing hinges on two numbers. See, the Congressional Budget Office initially estimated that overhauling federal student loans would free up $87 billion. Right now, private companies like student loan giant Sallie Mae provide loans to students that are fully backed by the federal government. It's a tidy business model for the company--especially when they can charge upwards of 9 percent interest and rake in even more money in fees--and no wonder that they are fighting reform.

But SAFRA would institute a direct loan program so that the federal government could loan money to students directly.

]]> With this new information and at President Obama's request, colleges began switching over to the direct loan program last year. So when the CBO came out with its brand new estimates ten days ago regarding projected SAFRA savings, turns out that SAFRA would only save $67 billion in federal money.

With $67 billion as the new magic number, the so-called "CBO score," Senate Democrats are scrambling to shave whatever they can from the bill.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed explains it much better than I could:

The budget-office estimate is critical because Democratic party leaders in the Senate believe they have only enough support to pass the measure by using a procedure known as reconciliation, in which a bill that reduces overall federal spending can be approved with a simple majority of 51 votes, rather than the 60 necessary for ending a filibuster.

That means the $67-billion, once it takes effect as the official "score" of the student-loan bill, would represent the maximum amount of new spending under the measure. For now, Congress could adopt the $67-billion figure immediately as the bill's score, or continue to use the old $87-billion estimate, but it must use the new figure once it passes a budget outline for 2011, which is expected to occur in the next month or two.

Hang in there, folks! We'll be keeping our eye on this bill. The current federal student loan program literally shovels taxpayer money into the pockets of corporations like Sallie Mae. Passing SAFRA is purely basic, common sense, but it's sounding like SAFRA will continue to be whittled down.

Parsing the Details of Dodd's Not-Independent Consumer Watchdog

2010-03-15T18:23:04Z

Sen. Chris Dodd came out swinging today to defend his revamped proposal for fixing the financial regulatory system, and he’s won cautious support from some key reformers. Bailout watchdog Elizabeth Warren, who has been the most vocal Beltway advocate of an independent agency to protect consumers, called the bill an “important step” and no Democratic members of Dodd’s Banking Committee have rejected it. Check out the bill’s summary here.

The primary complaint, however, remains Dodd’s choice to house a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency inside the Federal Reserve rather than make it a stand-alone regulator. It’ll be a bureau, not an agency. Dodd strongly defended the move, arguing that creating a bureau inside the Fed strengthens rather than weakens the effort. As Huffington Post reports, Dodd’s main point is budgetary: The bureau would be funded through the Fed’s money and thus shielded from the political whims of congressional appropriation. “Look at Equal Employment Opportunity Office, what happens when you starve a budget,” Dodd told HuffPo. “You can have all the wonderful laws on the books; if you don't have a budget that allows you to operate, you die.”

Fair enough. And the director will be presidentially appointed for five year terms. But critics point to a provision that allows an oversight board to rein in the bureau if it treads too heavily on the “safety and soundness” of the banking sector. Who sits on that board? The existing regulators, who failed to stop the subprime predation and risky lending that started all of this.

]]> The new bureau would also have to confer with existing regulators before making rules and would have to publish those regulators’ feedback. Of course, the whole point of a consumer protection agency is that existing regulators have an outsized interest in the health of the banks, not their customers and certainly not the financial wellbeing of our neighborhoods.

As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition points out, all of this sets up a tall job for the new bureau’s chief. “Does anybody believe that the director of the CFPA will be ‘independent’ with Secretary Geithner and Chairman Bernanke breathing down their neck?” asked NCRC head John Taylor, who’s been another vocal advocate for an independent agency. “The moment you don’t have a strong director, this agency will be forever changed,” adds NCRC’s David Berenbaum. “It’s like the Civil Rights Commission. It used to be very effective.”

Berenbaum also notes that Dodd's legislation doesn’t appear to explicitly put the Community Reinvestment Act under the new watchdog’s purview. The CRA is the federal answer to redlining -- it forces banks to lend in any community from which it takes deposits. That’s one area Dems could improve upon the bill. Another is to peel back the regulator-stacked oversight board’s veto power.

Two important positives in Dodd’s bill, however. He appears to have closed the carve outs in the House bill that put nonbank lenders, like auto dealers and payday joints, beyond the new regulator’s reach. And states have clear authority to take their own action on behalf of consumers, which is something banks have lobbied heavily to prevent.

Cross-posted at The Nation.

Internet Activism From Behind Bars

2010-03-15T17:05:52Z

Efrén Paredes Jr., a 15-year old honor roll student, found himself locked up for life without the possibility of parole for a robbery and murder he most likely did not commit.

An increase in youth crime in the 1980s caused a national trend towards harsher criminal punishment for youth. Now, Paredes is just one of about 1,175 prisoners who were sentenced to life without parole as youth under these laws. Leticia Miranda reports:

Today, Black youth are sent to adult courts at about 10 times the rate of white youth, and Latino youth are 43 percent more likely than white youth to be tried in adult court, according to recent studies, including a 2009 report by the Campaign for Youth Justice and the National Council of La Raza. Michigan, Paredes’s home state, ranks second in the country for the highest number of youth offenders serving life without parole.

Paredes and his family launched an online campaign to bring attention to these startling trends and advocate for his release. The campaign’s online efforts have resulted in a thriving network of supporters. Miranda writes:

Thanks in part to his savvy online activism and the committee’s on-the-ground organizing, more than 150 supporters showed up to Paredes’s public parole hearing in 2008. The Robert G. Cotton Correctional Facility, where the hearing was held, was standing-room only. Although parole hearings are usually just one and a half hours long, his was nine hours, according to a spokesperson for the Michigan Parole Board. Supporters stood for the hearing wearing “Free Efrén” T-shirts and holding signs as the parole board considered his release. The board, however, refused to release him.

Despite these challenges, Paredes and his supporters are hopeful that he will be released.

Check out Colorlines.com’s web exclusive story to read more on how the Internet transformed Paredes’s political organizing. While you’re there, read up on national trends in sentencing youth to life in prison and what advocates are doing to change it.