But on the 10-year anniversary of No Child Left Behind, the school-reform movement that both candidates have embraced is in crisis. Rampant and widespread cheating on high-stakes standardized tests has been uncovered in districts nationwide. The first big scandal erupted in Atlanta, where teachers and administrators are suspected of erasing wrong answers and filling in correct ones, or simply giving students the right answers, at nearly half of city schools. In Philadelphia, one in five district schools is now under investigation, including 11 of the city's top-tier Vanguard Schools. Cheating or score inflation is suspected in cities including Houston, New York, Detroit and Washington, D.C.

How did cheating become normal in America’s schools?

Continue Reading...

“You have to get rid of corporate America,” Lewis told occupiers in Zuccotti Park. “You have to get rid of the powers that they have ... As long as they have the power they are going to continue to exploit and manipulate the working class."

The blowback from the police establishment was swift: A Nov. 23 letter from Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey demanded that Lewis “immediately cease and desist wearing, using or otherwise displaying any official Philadelphia Police Department uniform, badges or facsimiles thereof or any official departmental insignia.”

Continue Reading...

Half a year later, a collection of young people backed by major foundations and companies like Dell are promoting two new organizations, Campaign for Young America and Fix Young America. In a recent profile, the New York Times touts the groups as “advocacy groups for jobless youth” on the order of the AARP or NRA. They are, the Times claims, “younger siblings of Occupy Wall Street, but with a nonpartisan agenda, more centralized leadership and one specific mission: to help young people find jobs.”

But don't be fooled. This is Occupy as reconfigured in the subconscious of Thomas Friedman: The country's problems can be solved by promoting technological wizardry and unleashing the potential of everyone's inner risk-taker in a sink or swim economy. Think Americans Elect, for kids.

Continue Reading...

Take, for example, Pennsylvania. Democrats there are already hard at work to tie Mitt Romney to Gov. Tom Corbett, whose antiabortion statements and austere budgets have proved unpopular in the state.

“He is becoming a more polarizing figure,” says Muhlenberg College political science professor Christopher Borick, who calls the gender gap a “treasure trove” for Democrats. “If I'm putting an ad out in Pennsylvania and I want to show Republicans to be opposed to women's issues, I run sound bites from Tom Corbett next to those of Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh, and anybody else I can find.”

Continue Reading...

The billions of new dollars spent at casinos represent a net transfer of wealth to big business and to pay workers whose labor is not as productive as, say, repairing the nation's crumbling infrastructure. Casino capitalism is an apt metaphor exactly because — whatever one might think about legalized gambling — it is not generally perceived as a sound operating principle for the entire economy. Yet the steady march of casino gambling now sketches an eerie facsimile of our political economy writ large. In fact, casinos thrive amid economic misery.

Continue Reading...

Gingrich persists because it's a dependable applause line, and because his political fortunes keep rising. Compare that to September, when Mitt Romney attacked then-candidate Rick Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” Perry backtracked, insisting that he only wanted to bolster the program and ensure its solvency. But in his 2010 book “Fed Up,” Perry made his opposition to Social Security clear, calling it “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.” Scrapping entitlements is a core tenet of contemporary fiscal conservatism, but most of the time politicians only get away with attacking the most vulnerable ones: Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash assistance, which are means-tested and thus associated with the black (read: undeserving) poor, although whites make up a far greater share of food stamp recipients. Government welfare programs with Teflon political defenses — Medicare and Social Security — are nearly universal entitlements and thus associated with “regular” (read: white) Americans.

Continue Reading...

There are some oblique references, like Newt Gingrich's suggestion that child labor laws be modified so that poor children can work as school janitors. “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods,” mused Gingrich, “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works ... They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

Continue Reading...

The conflict pivots about the planned reconstruction of Dilworth Plaza, City Hall’s massive concrete front lawn where protesters are camped out. Protesters voted to stay put last Friday, citing a lack of communication from the mayor about a possible relocation. The mayor held a press conference the next day declaring that protesters must leave, and last night announced that the “project’s commencement is imminent. Accordingly, you should take this opportunity to vacate Dilworth Plaza and remove all of your personal belongings immediately.”

Protesters charge the mayor with orchestrating a media campaign against them in coordination with a nationwide movement to evict Occupy encampments, and say he is attempting to divide the movement between mainstream activists and “radicals.” On Wednesday night, protesters gathered at a general assembly to discuss a situation that seemed to be rapidly spinning out of control.

Continue Reading...

The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

Continue Reading...

As the Occupy Wall Street movement has zeroed in on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans who dominate politics, the geography of American wealth and poverty displays a slightly more complicated picture. Some of the country's richest counties are flourishing as bastions of the upper middle class or just plain rich -- but not necessarily of the super rich. These are already well-to-do areas where median income has grown since the recession began in 2007. In this sample, only one, Rockland County, N.Y., is partially fueled by Wall Street money.

The others, selected for geographic and economic diversity,  embody the contradictions of a country that often rejects government rhetorically while embracing it practically.

Continue Reading...

“The results are disturbing because they point to a system that is funneling people towards deportation without due process,” said Aarti Kohli, director of immigration policy at Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and lead author of the report.

The study found that ICE has arrested 3,600 U.S. citizens through Secure Communities.

Continue Reading...

"When reading and math count and nothing else does, then less time and resources are devoted to non-tested subjects like the arts, science, history, civics and so on," education historian Diane Ravitch, a well-known high-stakes testing critic and one-time proponent, writes in an email to Salon.

Supporters of the self-described "education reform" movement counter that evaluating teachers based on test scores is the only way to ensure good teaching, and that focused attention on reading and math is necessary to boost poor students' achievement.

But the achievement gap is still wide, and there is (hotly disputed) evidence that students are afforded less time for creative inquiry. A 2007 Center on Education Policy study found that 44 percent of elementary schools had decreased instructional time spent on non-tested subjects since the 2002 implementation of No Child Left Behind, on average reducing time spent teaching the scorned subjects by 32 percent.

Continue Reading...

The public money is helping to fund the activities of an organization dedicated to drastically cutting government spending and whose non-profit status is currently being challenged by Common Cause, which contends that ALEC is essentially a lobbying organization. Corporations are given a direct role in drafting the model legislation that ALEC urges states to adopt -- legislation that, if enacted, often benefits the same corporations. ALEC defines itself as a professional association, just like scrupulously nonpartisan organizations like the National Conference of State Legislatures and The Council of State Governments, which legislators commonly belong to.

Continue Reading...

Tony Westchester locales like Scarsdale and Bedford have long been bastions of limousine liberalism, home to Ralph Lauren, Glenn Close, Martha Stewart, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and many others. Super-rich "entrepreneurs" like Donald Trump live here too, and it's a haven for Wall Street bankers -- from Jay Gould in the late 19th century to hedge fund pioneer Michael Steinhardt today.

Meanwhile, working-class black and Latino residents remain overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of municipalities, most of which hug the Bronx border.

Continue Reading...

So I've assembled another list, based on the commentary I've absorbed this week -- The top five myths about the 10 most segregated cities:

1. My Region (Greater "________") wasn't on the list and thus (a) I think we're really segregated, what gives? or (b) Yes, this proves we're not segregated at all!

Just because your metro area didn't make the list doesn't mean you aren't segregated. A number of metro areas have segregation rates (measured by the dissimilarity index) of above 60, which social scientists consider to be high. This includes: Boston, Houston, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Denver, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Miami, Baltimore and Birmingham.

The full list is here.

Continue Reading...

Decades after the end of Jim Crow, and three years after the election of America's first black president, the United States remains a profoundly segregated country.

That reality has been reinforced by the release of Census Bureau data last week that shows black and white Americans still tend to live in their own neighborhoods, often far apart from each other. Segregation itself, the decennial census report indicates, is only decreasing slowly, although the dividing lines are shifting as middle-income blacks, Latinos and Asians move to once all-white suburbs -- whereupon whites often move away, turning older suburbs into new, if less distressed, ghettos.

We may think of segregation as a matter of ancient Southern history: lunch counter sit-ins, bus boycotts and Ku Klux Klan terrorism. But as the census numbers remind us, Northern cities have long had higher rates of segregation than in the South, where strict Jim Crow laws kept blacks closer to whites, but separate from them. Where you live has a big impact on the education you receive, the safety on your streets, and the social networks you can leverage.

Continue Reading...

Barring a last-minute resolution, 167 of the 373 police officers who patrol the city’s eight square miles, along with a third of its firefighters, will get pink slips. The police union and the city are trading accusations: Mayor Dana Redd accuses the police of failing to make concessions, a charge the Fraternal Order of Police denies.

"It’s going to be difficult," says Camden County prosecutor Warren Faulk, "but I think the plan that Chief [John] Thomson has in place is going to provide the necessary police on the streets to protect the public."

But the prosecutor’s office is also facing potential layoffs this spring amounting to a quarter of its staff, including 18 assistant prosecutors and 26 investigators. They are negotiating with the county in an attempt to find a solution.

"It’s going to be a hard lift," says Faulk. "We’re going to prepare for the worst."

Continue Reading...

When the final census numbers were released just before Christmas, Arizona was awarded a new seat in the House, thanks to its status as the country's second fastest growing state. As impressive as this seems, it was actually something of a letdown for the state, whose official census count for 2010 (6,392,017) was more than 200,000 people smaller than estimated just a year earlier. That disparity killed whatever hopes Arizona had of replicating the two-seat gain it posted after the last census, back in 2000.

The reason for Arizona's weak census showing is now the subject of some debate. The housing bubble collapse clearly slowed population growth, in part by stemming the flood of native and immigrant workers migrating to the state for jobs in the construction industry -- a phenomenon that seems to have played out in several other burgeoning states. But unlike other boom states, Arizona’s final census count came in far under estimates, which were adjusted to account for the recession’s weak growth.

Continue Reading...

Recent appearances on Beck's Fox News show have catapulted King into the conservative limelight, and she has compared Tea Partiers to civil rights marchers, "speaking out with courage and conviction peacefully for what is right." Her statements have garnered her increasing press attention, and she was even included by Keith Olbermann in a recent "Worst Persons in the World" segment for calling gay marriage "genocide."

"I didn’t get to go 47 years ago when my uncle gave the 'I Have a Dream' speech," King told Salon this week. "But I believe his dream of faith, hope and love is still alive. I’m going to talk about faith, hope and love -- no politics."

Continue Reading...

This is the response you might expect from a president whose political base believes the new law essentially legalizes racial profiling. But there's a twist: Under Obama, immigration enforcement has actually been characterized by the very same heightened collaboration between local police and federal immigration authorities that many find so troubling in Arizona, and it's prompting objections from city leaders across the country.

At issue is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Secure Communities program, a federal-local partnership in which the fingerprints of suspects booked into local police stations are checked with immigration agents, who then move to deport any detainee suspected of being in the country illegally. Secure Communities was launched by George W. Bush's administration, but under Obama it has undergone a dramatic expansion.

Continue Reading...