Blogs

Atlanta's Kids Have Done Pretty Well in School Over the Past Decade

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 10:53 AM PDT

Former Atlanta superintendent of schools Beverly Hall is now the poster child for cheating on standardized tests. But Hall claims that Atlanta schools really did perform better under her leadership, and as evidence she points to gains on the national NAEP test, widely considered to be reliable and not easily gamed. Dana Goldstein comments:

Although NAEP security procedures are generally considered more stringent than those used in state and district-level testing, there are reasons to be skeptical of Atlanta’s gains on the national exam as well. Between 2002 and 2009, the demographics of Atlanta NAEP test-takers changed considerably; the number of white students taking the test doubled, and the number of Hispanic students also went up. In Atlanta, white and Hispanic children tend to score higher than black children, which led Professor Mark Musick, a former NAEP chairman, to estimate that as much as 40 percent of Atlanta’s gains could be due to changes in which students sat for the exam.

I don't quite get this. Why not just look at the NAEP results for black, white, and Hispanic kids separately and see how they did? I don't feel like doing that for every combination of kids and tests, but a quick look tells me that reading scores for black 8th graders increased from 233 to 249 during Hall's tenure, and math scores increased from 241 to 262. That's no defense of Hall, but it seems pretty straightforward to figure out how Atlanta's kids did and how that compares to other big cities. Why estimate?

Advertise on MotherJones.com

A Brief Morning Whine

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 10:22 AM PDT

I've got a problem. I figure nearly everyone is just going to laugh at me for this—though for different reasons on left and right—so I'm a little hesitant to even bother whining about it. But here it is.

I like snark. I'm perfectly happy to trade elbows with the opposition. But really, my preference is to spend most of my time talking seriously (or semi-seriously) about policy, and that means engaging with conservatives. The problem is that it's just flatly hard to see the point of doing that these days. When I read even supposedly serious conservative policy proposals, I find them so egregiously empty that I feel like I'd be demonstrating terminal naivete by even taking them in good faith. So I don't.

Yesterday, for example, I wrote about the Ponnuru/Levin proposal for healthcare. "Wrote" is giving myself too much credit, though. Basically I just sighed. Today, Ezra Klein, who's a nicer guy than me, summarizes it as "less spending on health insurance for poor people, stingier health coverage for middle-class people, and lower taxes for rich people." He then goes on to write a couple thousand words about a similar proposal, which quite plainly wouldn't work, and wouldn't broaden health coverage even if it did.

So which approach is better? My better angels tell me I should assume good faith and spend the time it takes to write a long explanation of why this stuff won't work. But why bother? Does anyone really think that the people who write these plans are unaware of the grade-school level problems with their proposals? Of course they are. They've been pointed out a hundred times, and they keep writing up the exact same proposals anyway. They barely even bother to change the wording.

Or take yesterday. I caught a few minutes of Chris Hayes' new show, and he was talking with his panel about why South Carolina conservatives are apparently willing to forgive Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford. Everyone took the question seriously and offered serious ideas. As a result, they all tap danced around the real reason: conservatives are willing to forgive pretty much any conservative who goes through the whole Christian repentance kabuki. So which is better? To be serious, or to simply state the obvious truth and be taken for a partisan shill?

There are hundreds of examples like this. The annual Paul Ryan budget fest is probably the most obvious one. Every year we comb through his budget and produce lots of charts and tables and trendlines, and every year the bottom line is exactly the same: Paul Ryan wants to cut taxes on the rich and cut spending on the poor. That's it. That's what he wants. That's why his budget never changes, even after hundreds of detailed analyses showing exactly what it would mean for domestic spending. It's because slashing spending on the poor is the whole point of the plan, not merely a bug of some kind that maybe Ryan doesn't quite get.

So which is better? All the charts and tables and trendlines? Or refusing to even pretend to take it seriously?

I don't know. I swing back and forth, depending on my mood and the subject matter. Hell, I'm not even sure why I'm writing about this. I guess I just needed to get it off my chest or something. Regularly scheduled programming will now resume.

Virginia Gov. Candidate Cuccinelli Defending Law That Forbids Oral Sex

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 10:13 AM PDT
Ken Cuccinelli

Last month, three judges on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit deemed a Virginia anti-sodomy law unconstitutional. The provision, part of the state's "Crimes Against Nature" law, has been moot since the 2003 US Supreme Court decision overruled state laws barring consensual gay sex, but Virginia has kept the prohibition on the books.

Now Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is asking the full 4th Circuit to reconsider the case. Cuccinelli wants the court to revive the prohibition on consensual anal and oral sex, for both gay and straight people. (The case at hand involves consensual, heterosexual oral sex, but, as the New York Times explained in 2011, it's "icky": The sex was between a 47-year-old man and two teenagers above Virginia's age of consent.)*

 Here's more from the Washington Blade:

Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli has filed a petition with the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond asking the full 15-judge court to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel last month that overturned the state’s sodomy law.
The three-judge panel ruled 2-1 on March 12 that a section of Virginia’s "Crimes Against Nature" statute that outlaws sodomy between consenting adults, gay or straight, is unconstitutional based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2003 known as Lawrence v. Texas.
A clerk with the 4th Circuit appeals court said a representative of the Virginia Attorney General's office filed the petition on Cuccinelli's behalf on March 26. The petition requests what is known as an en banc hearing before the full 15 judges to reconsider the earlier ruling by the three-judge panel.

Mother Jones confirmed that Cuccinelli had filed the request with the court as well. Given that the Supreme Court has already ruled that gay sex is okay and moved on to the question of gay marriage, I wouldn't expect his appeal to go very far.

This post has been updated to include more details about the case in question.

Study: The GOP Doesn't Care What Americans Think About the Budget

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 10:02 AM PDT

It doesn't matter whether you have a faded Obama or Romney bumper sticker still plastered to the family car, there a few things that you probably support spending your tax dollars on: Roads, education, social security, health care, aid for the poor, and the military. You're not unique: A recent Pew Research Center polling of about 1,500 Americans found that over 70 percent of Americans don't want to reduce spending on these things, either. But when it comes to funding the services that Americans actually want, Republican budget plans, including the one proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) and rejected by the Senate last month, are far less likely than Democratic budget plans to reflect public opinion, a new study by the Center for Effective Government finds. 

"Democrats seem more attuned to the public's views on specific areas of spending," says the report's author, Nick Schwellenbach, a senior fiscal policy analyst for the organization. "I think the difference is due to fundamental philosophical disagreements over the role of government."

The study examined four major budget plans, from Ryan, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA). Then, in a handy chart, it compared the plans with the results of the Pew poll, looking at Social Security, education, Medicare, roads and infrastructure, scientific research, military defense, health care, and aid to the needy.

According to the report, "Americans reject reductions in the vast majority of specific areas of spending" and the only area where the Ryan and RSC budgets actually aligned with public opinion was defense. Both had no plans to slash defense spending, even though waste in the Pentagon has been extensively documented (useless $380 million ballistic missile, anyone?)

Here's a look at how the plans break down on education:

60 Percent of Americans Support Increasing Funds for Education

Elissar Khalek, Center for Effective Government

So are politicians not listening—or do Americans simply not understand the deficit, or where they want to spend their money? A McClatchy-Marist poll found last month that Americans are split on whether budget cuts will help or hurt the economy (and they prefer tax increases to cutting their favorite programs.) A poll taken by Business Insider last year (below) found that almost half of Americans also think that sequestration increases the national deficit, despite the fact that it's an austerity measure. And as The American Prospect notes, "Voters associate high deficits with poor economic performance—the public might say that it wants more action to lower the deficit, but what it means is that it wants Washington to improve the economy."

Schwellenbach acknowledges that "sometimes perspectives are wrong. For instance, Americans tend to think spending on foreign aid is somewhere around a quarter of the budget, when it's closer to 1 percent." However, he argues that when it comes to taxes, Americans' views are spot on. "The time to pay off the debt is when the economy is back on track, as the US was doing in the late 1990s when we had budget surpluses. We can get back there, but not by doing the best we can to throw the economy back into a recession."

Robert Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, argues in The Christian Science Monitor that politicians, Republicans in particular, don't listen to their constituents when crafting budgets because politicians are more interested in their financial interests than making people happy. "The American democracy has shown itself far less responsive—and our politicians remarkably impervious—to public opinion concerning economic issues that might affect the fates of large fortunes. This is a distressing feature of our democracy, necessitating change."

 

 

 

We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for April 3, 2013

Wed Apr. 3, 2013 9:18 AM PDT

Cpl. Martin Kim and Lance Cpl. James Brockwell take a rest at Afghan Uniform Police Outpost Mamuriyet April 1. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Bobby J. Yarbrough.

 

Our Brave New World of Employment Background Checks

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 8:05 AM PDT

With unemployment stubbornly high, even a small problem can be enough to keep you from getting a job. And thanks to modern technology, employers are a lot more likely to be aware of these problems. Obviously a prison record has always made it hard to find a job. A poor credit report can blackball you these days. And today the New York Times reports on a new breed of databases that track retail employees accused of stealing:

Retailers “don’t want to take a chance on hiring somebody that they might have a problem with,” said Richard Mellor, the [National Retail Federation's] vice president for loss prevention.

But the databases, which are legal, are facing scrutiny from labor lawyers and federal regulators, who worry they are so sweeping that innocent employees can be harmed. The lawyers say workers are often coerced into confessing, sometimes when they have done nothing wrong, without understanding that they will be branded as thieves.

....For Keesha Goode, $34.97 in missing merchandise was enough to destroy her future in retailing....She received a letter from Dollar General alerting her that she had been turned down for a job partly because of her listing in Esteem, and a copy of the report showed that she had a “verified admission” for “theft of merchandise.” She wrote LexisNexis, “I was accused of not reporting on a former employee who was stealing merchandise, but I did not steal anything myself.”

The company responded that it had reinvestigated and “verified” the accuracy of the information. Ms. Goode, who now works at a halfway house, has a lawsuit pending against LexisNexis, accusing the company of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Sure they reinvestigated. They probably pinged the original retailer and asked if the charge was true. The retailer sent back a routine confirmation and that was that.

It's pretty easy to understand the retail industry's interest in something like this. If I ran a store, I'd be pretty interested. But these private databases are springing up everywhere; there are no rules to ensure any kind of accuracy; most people don't even know they're in them; and there's usually no effective way to appeal a black mark if you do find out. It's like being caught in TSA hell.

The increasing reach of computer and network technology is making this increasingly widespread. Mistakes are rampant, coercion is likely common, and even where the charges are true, this brave new world means that a lot of people are being effectively shut out of the labor market for minor offenses that they could have put behind themselves in the past. I'm not sure what the answer is, but this stuff is growing like a weed. It needs some rules of the road before it gets entirely out of hand.

Advertise on MotherJones.com

Invasive Crab Restoring Cape Cod's Dwindling Salt Marshes

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 7:51 AM PDT
European green crab, at juvenile stage where it appears greenEuropean green crab, at juvenile stage where it appears green: Photo by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez at Wikimedia Commons

The European green crab—an invasive species in North America and one of the "worst 100" invaders on the Global Invasive Species Database—may not be the utter evil we once thought. A couple of new papers (here and here) from a team at Brown University detail how they're actually helping the dwindling salt marshes of Cape Cod recover. It's a fascinating detective story—from the frontlines of an emerging field known as historical ecology—and it's rife with plot twists and red herrings, which begins like this: 

  1. People built mosquito ditches into Cape Cod's salt marshes in the 1930s to drain flooded mosquito breeding habitat 
  2. Which resulted in the appearance of corridors of low marsh cordgrass in areas formerly dominated by high marsh plants 
  3. Coastal development ramped up big-time after World War II, with the permanent human population on the Cape doubling every 20 years from 1939-2005
Purple marsh crab
Purple marsh crab: Photo courtesy of Mark Bertness

Enter a mysterious die-off of Cape Cod low marsh cordgrasses that began decades ago. Researchers eventually traced the culprit to the native purple marsh crab, photo above, which was eating through the cordgrasses at alarming speed.

But why had this good crab suddenly gone bad? The researchers kept researching. Turns out that predators of those crabs—blue crabs and striped bass—were being overfished by recreational fishers. In the course of 337,000 fishing trips to Cape Cod annually, these fishers had triggered a trophic cascade.

That's when the removal of predators messes up the ecosystem two or more trophic links removed. In other words, a system-wide meltdown of a  functioning ecosystem. And one unlikely to recover its former state.

Turns out the mosquito ditches, which had seemed more or less harmless since their installation decades earlier, were accomplices in this trophic cascade. That's because the ditches had facilitated corridors of low marsh cordgrasses. As striped bass and blue crabs were being overfished, purple crabs were experiencing a fourfold increase in population. Suddenly these corridors of low marsh cordgrasses became superhighways for hungry purple crabs to eat themselves into a novel state of hyperabundance.

At developed sites with increased accessibility and fishing pressure (a), the purple marsh crab (S reticulatum, [c]) is released from predatory control (eg blue crab [Callinectes sapidus] and striped bass [Morone saxatilis], [b]) and consumes cordgrass (S alterniflora, [d]) along creek and ditch banks
At developed sites with increased accessibility and fishing pressure (a), the purple marsh crab, [c]) is released from predatory control (eg blue crab and striped bass, [b]) and consumes cordgrass , [d]) along creek and ditch banks: TC Coverdale, et al. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. DOI:10.1890/120130

But wait. The story's not over. Enter the introduction of an invasive species, the European green crab with a reputation for biological badassness. According to the findings of the researchers, just published in Ecology, these unwanted invaders (they probably got to Cape Cod as stowaways on ships) discovered the banquets of incredibly yummy (okay, I surmised that part) purple crabs that almost no one else was eating. Nature being what it is, the badass crab struck hard.

Hard enough to begin to reverse the decades'-long decline of Cape Cod's salt marshes. Which, BTW, keep the Cape from eroding off into the Atlantic Ocean. The authors write:

Our results show that, despite previous evidence of negative impacts on native species throughout its introduced range, [the European green crab] is well suited to accelerate the recovery of heavily degraded salt marsh ecosystems in New England.

The effect of the invasive crab doesn't even have to involve actually eating all that many native purple crabs, lead author Mark Bertness tells me. "Fear of being eaten can be a stronger ecosystem effect than being eaten, because predation happens one event at a time whereas a single predator can scare away dozens of prey yielding much larger ecological effects." Though he adds this caution: "Marsh recovery driven by fear of green crabs is superficial and doesn't replace the centuries of accretion and carbon sequestration taken to build Cape Cod marshes."

Reformers: Publicly Funded Elections Will Tackle New York's Corruption Problem

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 7:27 AM PDT
New York State Sen. Malcolm SmithNew York State Sen. Malcolm Smith.

It was a ham-handed scheme straight out of an episode of "Law and Order." Federal prosecutors revealed on Monday that New York State Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Democrat, allegedly tried to bribe his way onto the New York City mayoral ballot—as a Republican. Envelopes stuffed with cash changed hands in hotel rooms and restaurants. Local Republican officials talked about "money greasing the wheels" and "the fucking money" driving local politics. Smith's plan depended on paying off two Republicans from Queens who could get his name on the ballot in time for the November election. Instead, an undercover FBI agent and a cooperating witness infiltrated the deal and laid bare just the latest seamy corruption scandal to rock New York politics.

Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan spearheading the Smith case, told reporters on Monday that "today's charges demonstrate, once again, that a show-me-the-money culture seems to pervade every level of New York government." New York City Councilman Daniel Halloran, one of the two Republicans allegedly implicated in Smith's scheme, would seem to agree. In the complaint filed against Smith et al, Halloran offers this nugget of wisdom:

"That's politics, that's politics, it's all about how much. Not about whether or will, it's about how much, and that's our politicians in New York, they're all like that, all like that. And they get like that because of the drive that the money does for everything else. You can't do anything without the fucking money."

The Smith scandal comes as a well-funded coalition of progressive groups are pressuring Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other legislators to pass legislation replacing the state's current elections regime with publicly financed campaigns. Now, those reformers are pointing to the Smith scandal as further evidence that New York's political systems need a major overhaul. "This is the kind of conduct that we believe comes out of a culture that is a pay-to-play, money first, voters don't count culture," Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, told the Journal News. "What we're trying to change is the role money plays in our political system."

The editorial page of the Albany Times Union, a supporter of public financing, asked on Tuesday: "What better evidence can there be of the need for such reform than this case, in which one of their own, the onetime Senate president and Democratic leader, stands accused of trying to bribe Republican leaders to get a place on the ballot as a GOP candidate for mayor of New York City?"

The Fair Elections for New York campaign, the main force behind the public financing bill, said in a statement that the Smith scandal will only harden New Yorkers' belief that corruption pervades every corner of state politics. "We can all agree the system is broken," the statement reads. "Now it's time to stand shoulder to shoulder with Governor Cuomo and the growing bipartisan majority of New Yorkers who support comprehensive campaign finance reform, which must include a system of publicly financed elections at its core."

Nearly Four Years After Dr. Tiller's Murder, Wichita Has An Abortion Clinic Again

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 6:53 AM PDT
South Winds Women's Center Director Julie Burkhart.

For the first time in nearly four years, women in Wichita have access to an abortion clinic. South Wind Women's Center plans to open its doors this week, and will provide abortions in the city for the first time since an anti-abortion extremist murdered Dr. George Tiller in May 2009.

The clinic, run by former Tiller spokeswoman Julie Burkhart, will provide abortions up to the 14th week, along with gynecological services like pap smears, breast exams, birth control prescriptions, and prenatal care. I talked to Burkhart in February about reopening the clinic:

Mother Jones: Wichita has been the subject of so much attention from both anti- and pro-choice activists. What is the significance of reopening the clinic?
Julie Burkhart: First and foremost, we want to make sure that women who need to see us, want to come see us, are able to access care. We're looking at a few thousand women who now have to travel outside the area each year. Secondly, what it says is that no matter where you live in the United States of America, women will have access to reproductive health care. This community has just been so embroiled in the abortion…I hate to say the abortion "debate," but just the turmoil. Some people would say, "Just leave it alone and let it go." However, we can't really have true freedom in this country until everyone can access that right.
Why, just because we live in Kansas, in the middle of the country, should women be faced with more hardship? Why should it just be women on the coast where the laws are typically more liberal that have access to abortion care? I hope that's what people get out of this—that no matter where you are as a woman, you're entitled to that right.

Read the full interview here.

NAF Proposes Big Expansion of Social Security

—By

| Wed Apr. 3, 2013 5:30 AM PDT

It's time for liberals to fight back on Social Security! Today, the New America Foundation released a plan that not only declines to endorse any kind of compromise on Social Security that would cut benefits, but proposes that we add a brand new benefit:

We propose to replace most of the country’s current, inadequate, hybrid public and private retirement system with a two-part, wholly public system called Expanded Social Security. Expanded Social Security would have two distinct parts. The first part, Social Security A, would be similar to the current Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) program, which provides a retirement benefit related to earnings. The second part of Expanded Social Security would be a new universal flat benefit, Social Security B, to supplement the traditional earnings-related benefit that would continue to be provided by Social Security A.

....If we assume that Social Security benefits are maintained at current levels and that there are no additional cuts to the program, we propose to set Social Security B at $11,669 per year for all elderly earners.

How much would this cost? A little over 1 percent of GDP to fully fund current Social Security with no benefits cuts, and about 3.7 percent of GDP to fund the new Social Security B. Altogether, call it about 5 percent of GDP. That's....a lot. The authors suggest that current Social Security would be fully funded via higher payroll taxes, while Social Security B would be funded by "either general revenues or a new dedicated tax or taxes, which might include portions of a federal value-added tax (VAT)." The chart on the right compares the benefits under current Social Security vs. the NAF plan.

The basic contention here is that old-style corporate pensions are pretty much gone, and 401(k)-style programs are a disaster. So we should just ditch them entirely and beef up Social Security so that it's a sufficient retirement program all by itself. I still haven't been able to quite convince myself that 401(k)s are the disaster area that a lot of people say they are, but the evidence on this score is certainly fairly hazy. It's quite possible that 401(k)s really are failures.

In any case, this is the first serious shot across the bow from the forces who not only don't want to compromise on Social Security, but want to expand it. I expect to hear a lot more along these lines in the near future.