Just past Fifth Avenue, where the gourmet food shops shift into dollar stores and Fourteenth Street turns suddenly seedy, there is a squat, metal-sided building that looks like a relic from a half-familiar past. Coated in grime so thick it’s hard to tell whether the striped siding is green or blue, it still bears boxy traces of postwar optimism (it was built in 1946), but mostly it looks haggard, a smile snaggled with broken teeth.

This is the home of the Waverly Food Stamp Center, one of eighteen such centers in New York City. On a recent Monday morning, it was choked with visitors—men, women and kids in strollers—heading to appointments, picking up applications and pressing to get cases reopened. They came in waves, big and constant, which got sucked upward in two tin-can elevators and then spit out into a room that one applicant, Erica, described as “really hot,” “crowded” and “loud.” It was the kind of place where no one seemed to be in control, and where anyone who might be in control didn’t seem to care. And yet somehow, Erica said, the place functioned. Despite hoops and hurdles, visitors frequently walked out with the help they so desperately needed when they came in.

“They do assist you, they do,” said a middle-aged man who asked to be identified by his nickname, Mr. Monk, as he breezed out of the Waverly Center. Mr. Monk had lost his job, then his home, to the recession and had decided to apply for benefits because “I have to eat.” Still waiting to see if his welfare application would be accepted, he’d already received an emergency food stamp disbursement. “Every red penny goes to food.”

Welcome to the food stamp system: decaying, inundated and one of the most unexpectedly effective safety net programs still standing. Indeed, like the crumbling Waverly Center, the food stamp program, more formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, still stands, still works—remarkably well, all things considered. It may not look pretty, but while other social safety net programs, like public assistance (more commonly called welfare), public housing, Section 8 and even unemployment insurance, have been so thoroughly hobbled that they can no longer respond to the struggles of millions of Americans, the food stamp program has remained surprisingly sensitive to people’s needs. It is one of the defining reasons more Americans were not as immiserated by this recession as they were in eras past.

The statistics tell the story. On any given day, nearly 1.8 million New Yorkers participate in the program, using electronic benefit cards to buy bread, milk, cheese and other staples. Across the country, the number is 46.3 million, or one out of every seven people. And thanks to an infusion of $45.2 billion in stimulus money, SNAP has helped millions of unemployed and underemployed recession victims. In 2010 alone, food stamps lifted 3.9 million people above the poverty line, the Census Bureau reports. And it did this, continues to do it, despite decades of on-again, off-again neglect, budget cuts and Republican attacks.

“Food stamps are really the only functioning part of the safety net,” says Joel Berg, executive director of the New York Coalition Against Hunger. “It’s the only thing left.”

The question now is, how much longer can the food stamp program withstand the conservative assault on the nation’s safety net? And why haven’t Obama and the Democrats done more to defend such a vital program?

• * *

The modern-day food stamp system is, in many ways, a model entitlement program—far from perfect, but as good as it gets in social welfare–wary America. Born of the Food Stamp Act of 1977, which in turn was born of the anti-hunger movement of the 1970s, it is accessible, far-reaching, resilient and lean, with an overhead that consumes less than 10 percent of its budget. True, its benefit levels are so stingy that many recipients are forced to survive on little more than $1 a meal. True as well that it fails to reach three of every ten people who are eligible, helping explain how some 14.5 percent of this country’s households experienced food insecurity in 2010. Among those denied: a desperate mother of two who walked into a Texas food stamp center earlier this month and took a supervisor hostage, ultimately killing herself and two kids.

And yet, for all these stunning and starved beast failings, SNAP remains the best of the bunch, a program whose essential effectiveness has enabled it not only to stave off food insecurity for millions but to catch the overflow of need caused by the attack on other entitlement programs. Call it the safety net’s safety net.

“In terms of food security in this country, food stamps really are the foundational component of the safety net,” says Triada Stampas, director of government relations and public education for the Food Bank for New York City. “It is a program that by and large works.”

The fact that the program remains as successful as it does is remarkable given the beatings it has taken since Ronald Reagan began sweeping away the buttresses of the welfare state. Since the Reagan revolution, funding has regularly been slashed, eligibility tightened and, during the Gingrich years, most immigrants banned from the program. And yet, even amid these attacks, food stamps have enjoyed enough bipartisan support to avoid the radical disemboweling experienced by, say, the welfare system. The reason, at least in part, is the way the program has historically been framed: as a voucher (always Republican-friendly) supporting the working (and hence “deserving”) poor. As a result, funding has often been restored, some categories of documented immigrants have been readmitted to the rolls, and the program has retained sufficient flexibility to respond quickly when the need is greatest.

The past few years provide a textbook illustration of how the food stamp program works when it functions best. In 2007, before this country’s economic engine gave out, the number of people receiving food stamps hovered at 26.3 million, a number that had crept up steadily since the start of the decade, thanks to the 2001 recession and stagnating wages. In the almost four years since, the number of people participating in SNAP exploded, nearly doubling as unemployment and underemployment rocketed ever higher. Obviously it would have been far better if the economy had improved and the need evaporated. But given today’s unhappy economic reality, the spiking SNAP rolls are one of the clearest signs of a functioning food safety net.

“The program’s almost a model countercyclical program, in the sense that as more people are unemployed, as more people’s wages fall, food stamps can step in quickly and effectively to pick up some of the slack and ameliorate some of the pain,” says James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), one of the country’s most prominent national anti-hunger organizations.

Today’s food stamp legions are a diverse group, a cross-section of ages, ethnicities and biographies. They include recession casualties like Rosalinde Block, 59, a middle-class single mother in Manhattan, who lost nearly half her piano students as well as her freelance gigs and medical coverage at almost the same moment in 2008 when her son became seriously ill. They are double-barreled hardship victims like Carmen Perez-Lopez, who suffered a stroke followed almost immediately by a breast cancer diagnosis in the fall of 2009 and quickly ran through her savings as she slogged through treatment. They are disproportionately women; roughly half of them are children. And for many of them, food stamps have made all the difference.

“They actually rescued me—they gave me food when I had none,” says Perez-Lopez, a former office manager who was reduced earlier this year to subsisting on the free nutrition bars handed out by her cancer clinic. Unable even to afford bananas, she was weak and losing weight—until an advocate at the Food Bank for New York City helped her navigate the food stamp application process. “Oh, I went to buy milk, I went to buy broccoli and cabbage and eggs… it feels so good,” she says of her first food stamp shopping excursion.

“I guess food is essential, huh?” she half-jokes.

Yes, food is essential. But it is also something else: a source of economic growth, a stimulus. As a 2008 study by Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, found, every government dollar spent on food stamps lifts GDP by $1.73, making it the most effective way to inject money into the economy. The reason is simple: “People who receive these benefits are hard-pressed, and will spend any financial aid they receive very quickly,” writes Zandi, one of John McCain’s economic advisers during his presidential campaign, hardly a bleeding heart. This money, in turn, disperses outward to the store clerks, store owners, truckers and farmers, who then feed it back into the economic loop.

Small wonder, then, that the program is widely popular. In a 2010 poll of registered voters by FRAC, 74 percent said food stamps are “very or fairly important for the country” and 71 percent said that cutting food stamps would be the “wrong way for Congress to reduce spending.”

• * *

Given the program’s popularity, to say nothing of its strengths as an anti-poverty program and recession-buster, one could be forgiven for assuming that food stamps are enjoying widespread government support right now: that Congress would be debating funding increases, not cuts, and that the administration would be working hard to bolster and even boost one of its more effective stimulus initiatives.

And yet.

In recent months, the nation’s food stamp program has come under increasing pressure—from the reverse Robin Hoods who have taken aim at the government and the Democratic leaders who quake before them.

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was the first to empty his quiver with his Path to Prosperity plan in April, in which he recommended garlanding the rich with yet more tax cuts while carving $127 billion (or almost 20 percent) from the food stamp program over the next ten years, imposing time limits on benefits and converting the system into block grants. Echoing the arguments used to attack welfare fifteen years earlier, Ryan warned against transforming the safety net into a “hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” If passed, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities cautioned, the Ryan plan would have thrown “millions of low-income families off the rolls, cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or some combination of the two.”

Ryan’s proposal, and the House budget that grew out of it, were defeated, but not without winning the support of almost every Republican in the House. And now there’s the sudden surge of Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich, which can only portend ill for food stamps. Gingrich has been lobbing anti-SNAP bombs for months, but his most infamous, issued in May and repeated in December, was his slam calling Obama the “food stamp president”—a declaration of barely coded racism that harked back to decades of racially inspired attacks on food stamps, most notably Reagan’s slur about “strapping young bucks” dining out on T-bone steaks. Equally troubling, Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican with a record of racebaiting, led a charge in the Senate this past fall to “reform” food stamps by restricting eligibility and undoing a planned $9 billion budget increase, supposedly to crack down on fraud and government excess. (Notably, food stamp errors have reached record lows in recent years: only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported.)

The deep racism at the heart of conservative food stamp critiques offers at least one clue as to why the Obama administration has been unable or unwilling to champion SNAP as a valuable recession antidote: as the nation’s first African-American president, Obama is vulnerable to racist innuendo, which his opponents are only too happy to exploit. Just two months after Gingrich made his “food stamp president” comment, another would-be president, Rick Santorum, picked up the theme, accusing Obama, absurdly, of “pushing more people on food stamps.”

Moreover, and in fairness, it’s not easy to sell the positive side of skyrocketing food stamp enrollment. That food stamps have performed admirably during the recession, catching those in need and stimulating the economy, is small consolation when the economy continues to stagnate and unemployment hovers at just under 9 percent. Certainly we can agree that living-wage jobs would be far preferable to an economy so broken that 46 million people need food stamps.

And yet, none of this exactly explains the Obama administration’s failure to defend a clear policy success. And it certainly doesn’t explain why the administration along with Congressional Democrats bargained away some $14 billion in food stamp funding in 2010, hacking more from the program than George W. Bush ever did. Or why the Democrats on the Agriculture Committee agreed to recommend $4 billion worth of SNAP cuts to the mercifully failed “supercommittee.” Or why Democratic leaders like Dick Durbin, Charles Schumer and Patrick Leahy failed to sign on to a passionate letter by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand imploring the supercommittee to protect SNAP.

“Who are the liberal lions anymore?” one advocate laments.

Liberal lions do seem woefully scarce these days. More precisely, full-throated defenders of a common, socially contracted good seem woefully scarce. Obama does seem to have some kind of social contract vision, but it is based largely on compromise, on the social contract as process, not values. This is all well and good until you’re forced to go up against a pack of social Darwinists who have no values or belief in process. No wonder he’s had a hard time defending even the most basic, necessary and successful programs.

Then again, maybe the fight was never completely up to him. Maybe it’s been up to us all along.

When the Food Stamp Act was passed in 1977, making food stamps free and nationwide for the first time, it bore the distinct traces of the blood and sweat of the newborn anti-hunger movement. “Most of the nation’s leading antihunger groups were founded during a fourteen-year period starting in 1970,” writes Joel Berg in his book All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? “Not coincidentally, the nation’s greatest advances in reducing hunger came in the same decade.”

Many of the groups that helped fight for the Food Stamp Act still exist and are still fighting valiantly, but there hasn’t been much of a movement surrounding them in years. In fact, as progressives dived into the culture and terror wars and all but forgot the anti-poverty wars, there’s barely been the glimmer of a movement—until now. Until a ragged group of young, old, utopian, hard-luck, some-luck visionaries began occupying the country’s squares and minds with their calls for a society based on shared, mutual good rather than rogue individualism.

Lizzy Ratner
December 14, 2011 | This article appeared in the January 2, 2012 edition of The Nation.

“Being hungry is possibly the worst feeling anyone could ever experience, and honestly, when you’re hungry, you can’t be productive, and you can’t really do anything. And I just remember, sometimes in school I would definitely be hungry,” said 17-year-old New York City high school senior Ninaad Dave. During the recession, his father had to close the small business he’d successfully run for 25 years but found another job after nearly nine months of unemployment. “Now, when I am able to have a nice meal or eat, I’m just always thankful that there is food on the table, there is food in my stomach. I’m just always considerate, and I always think back when I was hungry and how privileged all of us are to eat.”

So many American families, including my own, celebrate Thanksgiving Day with a traditional feast and an overabundance of food. In many homes, the sight of a table with enough food for everyone to eat and to get seconds and even thirds is actually nothing special. The tablecloths and menu might be a little fancier on Thanksgiving but every night there’s something in the house for dinner and everyone goes to bed full. For some families Thanksgiving may be the only meal of the year where they pause long enough before eating to truly give thanks for the food in front of them. But for millions of our neighbors—including Ninaad Dave and children like him—they cannot always count on the next meal.

Sixteen million U.S. households are food insecure—struggling to afford food their family needs. With record numbers of families living in poverty and unemployed and food prices increasing, one in seven Americans rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. The overwhelming majority—three quarters—are families with children. The latest data showed that in August nearly 46 million Americans relied on food stamps to eat—the 37th straight month the number has increased, and the highest number since food stamps began in 1939. These families do not take any meals for granted.

Like so many American children, Ninaad knows what it’s like to feel hungry. He recently told the Children’s Defense Fund, “I’ve always tried to do what I could to help my family out and achieve the American dream.” For most of his childhood, that meant being helpful with his mother’s health problems at home and a good student at school. But when his father was struggling to keep his business afloat and it became harder for his family to make ends meet, Ninaad found a new way to help: “It was very visible that the business wasn’t doing as well. So I would just try to help alleviate the problem by just making a note to eat at school, to take advantage of school meal programs, eat breakfast at school in the morning, eat school lunch, and then come home and have just, you know, a small meal…I just felt that there should be enough food to go around for everyone, and that my dad was just doing the best he could, so I shouldn’t have to be burdensome.” After his father became unemployed, Ninaad really learned what it was like to go hungry—“possibly the worst experience anybody could ever go through.”

On December 14th, Ninaad is being celebrated by the Children’s Defense Fund-New York City’s Beat the Odds® program as one of five exceptional high school students who have overcome tremendous challenges to excel academically and give back to their community. They will receive a scholarship, college counseling, a laptop computer, and an invitation to join CDF’s youth leadership training ladder to help pave the road to college and a successful adulthood.

Hunger and food insecurity are particularly devastating for children and Ninaad and millions of young people like him will never forget how it feels to be hungry. Proper nutrition is essential to a child’s health, development, and well-being. Hunger and poor nutrition are linked to low birthweight and birth defects, obesity, mental and dental health problems, and poor education outcomes. We know safety net programs like food stamps, WIC—the Women, Infants and Children—nutrition program, summer feeding and school food programs work to combat child hunger. In the current recession they have proved to be indispensable lifelines for the millions of jobless families with no cash income in our rich nation.

During this Thanksgiving week, I hope those political leaders who refuse to invest in creating new jobs to help struggling families while protecting tax breaks for the richest Americans and corporations and refuse to ask the privileged to contribute their fair share in this difficult economic period will reflect on what their and America’s true values are. I believe it’s morally unconscionable that the rich should keep getting richer while the poor get poorer—and hungrier.

Click here to share your comments and find out what others are saying.

Marian Wright Edelman is President of the Children’s Defense Fund whose Leave No Child Behind® mission is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. For more information go to http://www.childrensdefense.org.

Mrs. Edelman’s Child Watch Column also appears each week on The Huffington Post.

At least six states have opened their Children’s Health Insurance Program to the kids of low-income state employees, an option that was prohibited until the passage of the 2010 health-care law.

This relatively small step has as its backdrop years of debate over the program, known as CHIP, including concerns that it encourages states — and consumers — to replace private insurance with taxpayer-subsidized coverage.

Now, as a result of the policy change, families of lower-income state workers who have struggled to pay for family coverage can qualify for the program. CHIP, which is jointly financed by the states and the federal government, provides coverage to the uninsured children of families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance.

The federal government had closed that option to most states when CHIP was established in 1997, because of concerns that it might be an easy way for financially strapped states to shift the costs of some public-employee health benefits to the federal government. Federal employees were allowed to enroll their children.

“State employees shouldn’t be the only people in the country who cannot access the program,” said Steven Kreisberg, director of collective bargaining and health-care policy at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. In an era of frozen wages, pay cuts and furloughs for state employees, the ability to participate in CHIP is critical for families, he said.

States must show that they have not cut their share of employee health insurance costs in an effort to push their workers’ children to CHIP and that the cost of the coverage available to employees is a financial hardship for families.

Tricia Brooks, a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, said the federal matching funds that will flow to the states are a plus but are not the primary reason states pursued the policy change.

“I think the intent was much more motivated by the fact that there were children who were being discriminated against,” she said.

Georgia, which is awaiting final federal approval for the program, is the latest state to offer its lower-income workers the CHIP option — known as PeachCare for Kids. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has given the nod to plans in Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Georgia’s open enrollment period began last month, and officials expect 42,000 children to switch to PeachCare, for a total state savings of $32 million in fiscal 2012. That would give Georgia, out of the six states, the highest number of state employees’ children enrolled in CHIP.

Leigha Basini, a program manager at the National Academy for State Health Policy who works with state CHIP directors, said states are enthusiastic about the option because of the potential savings and the chance to expand coverage to more kids.

“It potentially is a win-win for the states and the employees,” she said.

In each state, the number of employees eligible for the coverage will be affected by the income ceiling the state sets — in Georgia, it is $52,500 for a family of four — and how much workers are paid.

And employees’ opinions about the quality of their state-based coverage and CHIP will affect decisions about switching programs.

A spokeswoman for Georgia’s Department of Community Health said the state expects that the new option will benefit state employees through lower out-of-pocket costs, although the exact savings will depend on factors such as the private plan in which the child was enrolled, family income and the child’s age.

inShare

Meanwhile, for some states, new cost-sharing requirements for the qualifying state employees sometimes go along with the CHIP change.

Diane Joiner, a single mother who works for Alabama’s health department, enrolled her teenage daughter in All Kids, Alabama’s version of CHIP, when a state-subsidized CHIP look-alike program was canceled because the state prohibition was lifted. (A number of states had such plans in place to aid low-income state employees when they weren’t allowed to participate in CHIP.)

Joiner said she is pleased with the coverage but points out that she now pays a $100 annual premium. Although that amount is more than she paid in the state-subsidized program, it is much less than she would have to pay in regular coverage premiums.

Otherwise, her benefits and copays are the same. “My daughter’s got to be covered, and I can’t afford [the state plan],” she said.

And some state officials say the change is making a real difference for children and families.

Katherine Buckley-Patton, who directs the Healthy Montana Kids program, said some low-income state employees have been struggling to keep their families insured or may not be able to afford coverage for their children. Allowing them to move to CHIP has relieved that pressure and helped to keep some at-risk kids covered.

Here’s how the policy change is playing out in the other states:

● Montana has enrolled 513 children of state employees in its CHIP program in the past year. State officials expect that number to increase as the state does aggressive outreach efforts. Buckley-Patton noted that some employees had questioned why they were excluded when federal workers were not. “The door has been closed on them a number of times in the past,” she said.

● Texas expects to save $16 million over two years, according to a spokeswoman. The state’s CHIP spending is $340 million this year.

● In Kentucky, which had used state dollars to cover its workers’ CHIP-eligible children, the change has saved the state $2 million.

● Pennsylvania officials expect part-time and seasonal workers to be among the beneficiaries of the state’s policy change. They estimate that fewer than 1 percent of state employees qualify for the program.

— Kaiser Health News

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Policy Advisor Stephen Meunier heard from UU’s on the front lines of programs that will be seriously affected by the deficit reduction cuts:

Jessica from First Parish Cambridge and Tuesday Meals said “We have three young children and have experienced our own overwhelming stress. We were denied disability insurance and relied on unemployment benefits until they expired. We have not, however, ever had to fear that we would not be able to feed ourselves or our children. That is a fear that nobody, across the globe, should ever have to experience. There are enough resources for all and basic needs of people should never be anywhere but at the top of our government’s priorities.”

Alex from Renewal House, a Ministry of UU Urban Ministry in Roxbury said “We get calls every day from women who are in unsafe homes. However, we cannot take them in because we do not have enough space at Renewal house. The reason is that our current residents have to stay beyond the normal three month period because they cannot find housing and we will not let them become homeless. We need more housing assistance not less.”

Becky from the UU Church of Greater Lynn and Promise the Children said “I am really concerned about cuts to healthcare for children. The federal government funds programs that support the basic medical needs of children and families. If these are cut our emergency rooms will be even more overflowing then they already are. These programs need to be protected.”

Lorn, an 8 year old, from First Unitarian Church of Salem said “My class has 30 students in it. We have kids who barely speak English and a kid who is always misbehaving and distracting us. The class is just too big for our teacher and it is hard for all of us to learn. I feel really bad for the kids who cannot speak English because they are really not getting enough help.”

We all know the statistic but it is so much more powerful to tell the stories of the people we encounter as we work with those living on the edge and struggle with layoffs and cutbacks on a personal level ourselves.

When asked what we could do to help Senator Kerry to fight for programs that keep the safety net strong he encouraged us to ORGANIZE. We were going to do that anyway so we will continue to do just that!

Promise the Children delivered over 250 “Circle of Protection” post cardsCircle_post_card1.pdf and the UU Mass Action Network delivered a number of post cards and a petition. These efforts are ongoing.

Matt Meyer led us in song.

After weeks of behind-closed-doors discussions among the dozen members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, last week reports began to emerge about a proposal unveiled by a majority of the panel’s Democrats and another plan put forward by its Republicans. Neither plan has been made public and reports are that both were discussed without benefit of details in writing. But this much seems reliable: the Democratic proposal offered $1.3 trillion in revenue increases, far less than the earlier bipartisan Bowles-Simpson and Gang of Six plans, and Republicans were quick to reject even that much revenue.

Both plans would reduce the deficit by much more than the minimum $1.2 trillion called for in the Budget Control Act (the deficit reduction law passed in August). The plan offered by a majority of the Democrats on the Committee would save about $3 trillion over 10 years in addition to the $900 billion in appropriations cuts already scheduled. The Republican plan would save $2.2 trillion, with almost no tax increases but including $640 billion described as new revenues (some seeming much more like benefit reductions – see below).

Spending Cuts in the Democrats’ Plan: The plan presented by Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus (D-MT) on behalf of a majority of the Democrats on the Joint Select Committee [although publicly opposed by one of its members, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC)] included $1.3 trillion in spending cuts in addition to the $900 billion in appropriations cuts already agreed to. The $1.3 trillion in cuts include $475 billion from Medicare and Medicaid, $425 billion from other mandatory programs, and $400 billion from other discretionary programs (annual appropriations), according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As reported, the nature of the proposed spending cuts is causing anger and disappointment among many advocates. The cuts to Medicare are said to include $200 billion in beneficiary cuts. Since most Medicare beneficiaries have relatively low incomes (half have incomes below $21,000), higher payments or reduced services will compromise older people’s ability to cover their health care and other needs.

A big part of the other mandatory spending cuts comes from cutting Social Security benefits over time by reducing the cost of living increases based on inflation calculations. This change (a proposal called the “chained Consumer Price Index (CPI)”) would shrink Social Security payments more and more over the coming decades; someone now 65 would receive $1,400 a year less when they reached age 95 than they would if the calculation did not change. Reducing inflation adjustments is opposed by many groups concerned about seniors, including the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. The chained CPI would also affect other spending and revenues determined by inflation calculations. Other savings in this category are likely to include reductions in farm subsidies and cuts to federal employee retirement benefits, but the full details are not known.

Little is known about the additional $400 billion in discretionary programs, although some accounts reported that it includes additional military savings beyond what will be achieved in the $900 billion in appropriations cuts already scheduled over the next decade.

Republican Proposals to Cut Spending: Republicans on the Joint Select Committee countered with their own plan, at least 70 percent of which were spending cuts. CQ reported that the Republicans also included the chained CPI, estimated to save $185 billion by reducing Social Security benefits. In addition to Medicare and Medicaid cuts, the Republican plan also is likely to cut food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and other nutrition programs.

The Democrats’ Revenues Plan: As noted, the plan included $1.3 trillion in revenues. However, not all the sources of the revenues would be specified. It was reported in CQ that several hundred billion dollars in new revenues would be listed as a first step, but that the rest would come in a second step as tax-writing committees came up with a tax reform plan. Some Democrats had discussed forcing Congress to act on the second stage by triggering automatic tax increases affecting the highest earners if no agreement on tax reform generating the required new revenue were accomplished. It is not known whether the plan included such triggers. Without such a mechanism, the ultimate amount of revenues could of course be far less than the $1.3 trillion called for.

In addition, the proposal includes job creation initiatives. These are almost certain to include tax reductions (extending employee payroll tax cuts that would otherwise expire and certain incentives for businesses). These tax reductions will make the net increase in revenues smaller.

The Republican Revenue Proposals: Almost none of the $640 billion in new revenues discussed by the Republicans on the super committee come from new taxes. Some would come from higher co-payments and premiums for Medicare, which would increase the negative impact on Medicare beneficiaries of modest means. There would be higher user fees and revenues from sales of broadband spectrum.

What’s Ahead: The Joint Select Committee must propose a plan to Congress by November 23. If Congress can vote on it by December 23, debate will be limited, with no filibuster or amendments possible. Getting to such a vote seems very difficult right now. Coalitions of advocates including the SAVE for All Campaign have urged Congress to walk away from any deal that hurts low-income and vulnerable people and that does not include substantial revenues and military savings. They are very disheartened by Democrats putting cuts that will hurt low-income people on the table, only to see their package rejected by the Republicans, who are likely to adopt every spending cut proposal but little or none of the revenues.

There will be another public hearing of the Joint Select Committee on November 1 at 1:00 p.m. EST. This hearing will focus on previous deficit reduction proposals, with testimony from Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson and Alice Rivlin and former Senator Pete Domenici, whose proposals each recommended far more revenue than the $1.3 trillion included in the Democrats’ draft. Bowles and Simpson, co-chairs of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, included $2.2 trillion in new revenues in their plan.

Also expected soon, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, is a letter to the Joint Select Committee by about 100 Members of Congress from both parties, calling for deficit reduction of $4 trillion by 2021. Whether those hundred or the dozen on the super committee can agree to anything specific is anyone’s guess.

By JAKE SHERMAN & MATT DOBIAS | 9/27/11 6:30 PM EDT Updated: 9/28/11 5:45 AM EDT

The supercommittee has become supersecret about most of what it’s doing.

On Tuesday, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) encapsulated the attitude of the members of the Joint Deficit Reduction Committee: “I don’t want to discuss what we discussed.”
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As 12 lawmakers tackle the historic task of slashing at least $1.2 trillion from the nation’s deficit, they have spent lots of time behind closed doors, speaking almost nothing of their proceedings while leaving behind little more than a trail of sandwich wrappers and unanswered questions.

It’s a remarkable show of secrecy after an election year that ushered in nearly 90 new Republicans who rejected the idea that sweeping legislation would be authored outside the public view.

Tuesday was the second straight closed-door day for the supercommittee.

The panel met for roughly 6½ hours in the Capitol, and when its members left, they wouldn’t answer basic, innocuous questions about the policies they were discussing nor specify when the next meeting would take place.

After the lawmakers left, staff seemed to clear the room of paperwork so as to leave no trace of evidence about how they were tackling the grave task of saving the nation’s fiscal health. They didn’t, however, clean up the dozens of napkins, used plates, potato-chip wrappers and plates strewn throughout the room. They left those for the custodians to pick up.

Nobody took questions — the supercommittee members rarely do. And when their meetings let out, they make a bipartisan dash for the exits.

Asked whether the committee was living up to the promise of transparency, Kerry said that they’re “living up to the commitment of getting the job done for the American people.” He said “some” meetings will be open, “some will not.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) ran down a set of stairs, declining to talk, saying he had to catch a flight. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) ducked reporters as he exited. Rep. Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who chairs the powerful Ways and Means Committee, left using a back exit. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) drew a crowd of reporters as he walked up a flight of stairs, sidestepping any questions about policy.

“Right now, as you know, we have a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations,” he said. “We’re going to continue that next week. We met for seven hours today, seven hours yesterday, so we’re just going to keep at it.”

Asked by a reporter whether or not the level of detail behind closed doors matched what the members shared publicly, Van Hollen chuckled. “Let’s not get into the details right now on that question,” he said. “We’re having a healthy exchange of views.”

Senators were no different. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who exited the meeting from a side door, followed a staffer to at least one dead end before they reversed course and found an escalator.

Asked whether he would stop to answer a few questions, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said, “No I won’t, but thank you for asking.”

“I think you all know the rules,” Kyl said to reporters. “If you want to talk to somebody, talk to our two co-chairmen. Thank you.”
So what do the chairmen have to say?

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) would allow only that they had a “very productive day.” She also said she was not going to discuss “any of the details.” She then walked away with an aide in tow.

Her co-chairman, the cowboy-boot and plaid-shirt-wearing Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), left through a side door, avoiding the throng of reporters and cameras that waited all day to hear how a small group of lawmakers might rewrite the nation’s Tax Code and entitlement spending.

Kerry would say only that the group had a “good meeting, we had a good meeting, a good meeting.” Asked what that good meeting might have entailed, he wasn’t interested. He said they’re getting into the “real meat of things.”

So far the committee has had four private meetings — two of them this week, lasting the bulk of the day. They’ve had two substantive public meetings. There was chatter that the committee would have a hearing on Oct. 4, but the committee cannot announce a hearing with less than a week’s notice. As of press time, nothing was announced. And while topics are announced for the open hearings, no one utters a word about what’s on the agenda for the closed meetings.

And there’s 57 days until the committee has to make a recommendation to Congress. After that, they’ll have a month before they have to vote.

An aide to a committee member points out this should be a welcome sign.

“In this era of hyperpartisanship, the fact that 12 members have been in the room for substantive discussions without leaks should be a breath of fresh air,” the aide said, speaking without attribution. “The truth is that while every vote this committee takes will be public and every hearing will be open and televised, progress around a bipartisan plan is going to also take closed-door sessions in which members can be frank in their negotiations.”

There was a public hearing that was slated for this week, but there were difficulties with witnesses, so it had to be rescheduled. The panel has already had meetings on tax policy with the chief of staff of the Joint Committee of Taxation. Before that, there was a hearing on the “drivers of our nation’s debt and its threats,” where Doug Elmendorf, chief of the Congressional Budget Office, testified.

The secrecy is a departure — of sorts — from the prior deficit negotiations. Members on both sides of the aisle said the talks led by Vice President Joe Biden were productive, and Biden frequently held court after those meetings — as did House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) — although neither of them let out many details. To be sure, this supercommittee is different because it is mandated by law.

Sources on Tuesday gave some clues as to what was going on inside the room. There’s some chatter about committees proposing spending cuts. Medicare waste, fraud and abuse are said to be on the menu as are alterations to Medicaid.

But as for the details on those proposals? Nobody’s saying — yet.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/64573_Page2.html#ixzz1ZLvpAFLU

The K Street office of Mark Bloomfield, president of the American Council for Capital Formation, is full of knickknacks collected in three decades of lobbying for cutting the capital gains tax.

The coffee table has campaign buttons that read “Capital Gains = Better Jobs.” One wall displays a blown-up cartoon retracing the steps that led President Jimmy Carter to reluctantly sign a cut in the capital gains tax rate. On a shelf sits a framed, handwritten note from President George W. Bush in December 2003 that says: “Dear Mark, I got your treatise on taxes — many thanks. I will look it over with keen interest. Merry Christmas.”

How the rich are pulling away from the rest of America

For the very richest Americans, low tax rates on capital gains are better than any Christmas gift. As a result of a pair of rate cuts, first under President Bill Clinton and then under Bush, most of the richest Americans pay lower overall tax rates than middle-class Americans do. And this is one reason the gap between the wealthy and the rest of the country is widening dramatically.

The rates on capital gains — which include profits from the sale of stocks, bonds and real estate — should be a key point in negotiations over how to shrink the budget deficit, some lawmakers say.

“This is something that should be on the table,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), one of 12 members on the congressional “supercommittee” tasked with reducing the deficit. “There’s no strong economic rationale for the huge gap that exists now between the rate for wages and the rate for capital gains.”

Advocates for a low capital gains rate say it spurs more investment in the U.S. economy, benefiting all Americans. But some tax experts say the evidence for that theory is murky at best. What is clear is that the capital gains tax rate disproportionately benefits the ultra-wealthy.

Most Americans depend on wages and salaries for their income, which is subject to a graduated tax so the big earners pay higher percentages. The capital gains tax turns that idea on its head, capping the rate at 15 percent for long-term investments. As a result, anyone making more than $34,500 a year in wages and salary is taxed at a higher rate than a billionaire is taxed on untold millions in capital gains.

While it’s true that many middle-class Americans own stocks or bonds, they tend to stash them in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, where the capital gains rate does not apply. By contrast, the richest Americans reap huge benefits. Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

“The way you get rich in this world is not by working hard,” said Marty Sullivan, an economist and a contributing editor to Tax Analysts. “It’s by owning large amounts of assets and having those things appreciate in value.”

Republicans have led the way in pressing for low capital gains tax rates, but they have been able to rely on a significant bloc of Democratic allies to prevent an increase and to protect the preferential treatment of money earned through investments over money earned through labor.

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Here in Michigan, more than 11,000 families received letters last week notifying them that in October they will lose the cash assistance they have been provided for years. Next year, people who lose their jobs here will receive fewer weeks of state unemployment benefits, and those making little enough to qualify for the state’s earned income tax credit will see a far smaller benefit from it.

Some political leaders see these sorts of cuts as unfortunate necessities to help bridge their state’s financial gaps. Others see them as overdue limits on out-of-control government handouts — some lawmakers here fumed, for example, that 30,000 college students, newly dropped from the state’s food stamp rolls, should never have been allowed to collect such benefits in the first place.

Whatever the motive, such policy changes come as the downturn has left a growing number of low-income families in worse financial trouble.

The percentage of children living in poverty rose during the last decade, particularly once the recession hit and unemployment soared.

By 2009, about 2.4 million more children’s families lived below the poverty line than in 2000, an increase of 18 percent, according to a recent analysis of Census Bureau data by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a child advocacy group. In states like this, where Republicans took control of the capital this year, the new cuts have helped resolve Michigan’s expected budget gap, once estimated at $1.4 billion.

“Michigan can no longer afford to provide lifetime assistance,” said Sheryl Thompson, an official with the state Department of Human Services, which reported that of those being dropped from the state’s cash-assistance rolls, some 1,200 families had been receiving payments for 10 years, more than 700 others for a dozen years, and an additional 400 families had been getting payments for 14 years.

The pattern of new cuts around the nation leads some advocates to fear that the number of low-income families will only grow in the next few years if programs they can lean on shrink or vanish.

“We’re O.K. unless something — anything at all — goes wrong,” said Rachel Haifley, who lives here in Lansing and said she works part-time making a little less than $9 an hour and receives child support for her two young sons, 1 and 3.

Ms. Haifley said she has become an expert at seeking out giveaways, thrift shops and bargains — for clothes, portable cribs, toys for the boys. “All I want is for them to feel like everyone else,” she said. “I don’t want them to grow up and ask me why they’re poor.”

In Dearborn Heights, Celia Kane-Fecay, another mother of two, said she has given up on the job hunt for now and returned to college — with help from $597 a month in cash assistance, Medicaid and any other aid she can track down with what she has come to describe unhappily as her daily list of begging phone calls. “You don’t ever want to be here,” she said.

Signs of new poverty are already evident. A project by the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book found that by 2010, nearly 11 percent of the nation’s children, or 7.8 million children, had at least one parent who was unemployed, when only about half as many were in such circumstances in 2007. And since four years ago, the study found, at least 5.3 million children have been affected by home foreclosures.

Meanwhile, around the nation, lawmakers have weighed new limits to tax credits for low-income people; in Michigan, a proposal to throw out the earned income tax credit entirely was dropped, but lawmakers shrank the benefit — to an average of $138 a year for a Michigan family, advocates say, from $432 last year.

Six states have approved reductions in the length of state unemployment benefits. The notion appalls people like Jeananne Bishop, who has been desperately searching for a job since July 2010 and found herself washing her hair with laundry detergent at one point because she could not afford shampoo.

Ms. Bishop said her continuing benefits — now part of a federally financed extension — are the only thing keeping her afloat. Michigan’s shortened unemployment benefit limits will apply starting next year, but Ms. Bishop, 56, of Benton Harbor, seemed skeptical that much will have changed in the job market for them, cautioning, “No one calls back.”

And while at least three states, including Michigan, shortened the period during which poor residents can receive cash assistance, other states began enforcing stricter limits already on the books.

“We clearly recognize that states have huge deficits they’re dealing with, but all of these things add up in certain states to very little safety net protection for children,” said Patrick McCarthy, president of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

In Michigan — where 23 percent of children were living in poverty by 2009 (compared with 14 percent in 2000) and with an unemployment rate, at 10.9 percent, worse than the nation’s — state leaders defended their changes.

Sara Wurfel, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican in his first term, said his efforts had focused on creating an economic climate in the state for more and better jobs, while also protecting and even enhancing core safety-net services like Medicaid, she said.

Ms. Wurfel added that the state had, for instance, hired hundreds of new child welfare workers. And as part of their decision to cut state unemployment benefits next year, Michigan lawmakers had accepted a federal extension of benefits this year for residents.

“In this state, we are losing hard-working families and taxpayers and gaining people who were moving here for our entitlement programs,” said Ken Horn, a Republican state representative who introduced a bill setting strict limits on cash assistance to those who have had it at least four years. That bill was signed into law on Tuesday, even as state officials were newly carrying out five-year lifetime federal limits on such assistance, which in Michigan averages $415 a month for an eligible family.

“The bill is designed with the simple idea that there should be a safety net but it should not be a lifestyle,” Mr. Horn added. “As we looked at it, it turned out to be part of the budget solution.”

Republicans said that even the cuts to those who have been on cash assistance the longest allow some exceptions (for those with disabilities, for instance), and that the rest will get special attention from social workers.

But Fred Durhal Jr., a Democratic state representative from one of Michigan’s poorest regions, said that will not be enough. He has begun calling Oct. 1 — the start of cuts to cash aid — doomsday.

“Sometimes you’ve got what’s fiscally sound, and you’ve got what is morally and ethically the right thing to do,” Mr. Durhal said. “Those don’t always jell well together. You can’t take grandmas away and put them on the street, and you can’t take milk from babies.”

Families Feel Sharp Edge of State Budget Cuts

Posted on August 26, 2011, Printed on August 30, 2011

Education expert Diane Ravitch and New York schoolteacher Brian Jones discuss the real problems with—and real solutions for—our public school system.

JUAN GONZALEZ: As children across the nation head back to school, we turn now to a number of recent developments in education news. Here in New York, nearly 780 employees of the city’s Education Department will lose their jobs by October in the largest layoff at a single agency since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. I reported in today’s Daily News that those layoffs are going to be hitting particularly hard the poorest school districts in the city.

The layoffs stem from budget cuts to schools, which have occurred in each of the last four years. The cuts have cost more than 2,000 full-time public school teachers their assignments and now threaten the job security of more than 400 school aides and 82 parent coordinators

At last month’s “Save Our Schools” rally in Washington, D.C., education author Jonathan Kozol criticized the drive toward fewer teachers and larger classes.

JONATHAN KOZOL: Class size is soaring in the poorest schools. I walk into classes with 35, 40, 42 children packed into a single room. Originality? Forget it. Creativity? Forget it. Critical thinking, asking questions? There’s no time for children to ask questions. If they learn to ask demanding questions, they might start to question why the people we elect to office will not keep their promises.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, a Manhattan appeals court ruled unanimously yesterday the City of New York should release performance rankings of thousands of public school teachers to the public. Known as “Teacher Data Reports,” the rankings grade more than 12,000 of the city’s 75,000 public school teachers based on how much progress their students make on state standardized tests. The teachers’ union opposes the ruling, arguing the reports are deeply flawed, subjective measurements that were intended to be confidential.

JUAN GONZALEZ: The court decision comes just days after the New York Times reported that annual allegations of test tampering and grade changing by educators have more than tripled since Mayor Bloomberg took control of New York City’s school system. The revelation is the latest in a string of cheating scandals across the nation. In Atlanta, a recent government probe found that 44 schools and 178 teachers and principals had been faking standardized test scores for the past decade.

Matt Batesky, a global history teacher at Lyons Community School in Brooklyn, criticized the emphasis on school testing.

MATT BATESKY: One of the things that we do constantly now is just test prep all the time. Our curriculum is basically, “Here is our test. How can we get our students to pass it?” because it’s so high stakes that if the students don’t pass it, they don’t graduate. And if they don’t graduate, you know, that hurts the student and it also hurts our school.

JUAN GONZALEZ: In other education news, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to use waivers to rewrite parts of the nation’s signature federal education law, No Child Left Behind. The controversial law’s reauthorization has been stalled in Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, to discuss these developments, we’re joined now by a woman who’s long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart in recent years. I’m talking about the influential education scholar Diane Ravitch. She was assistant secretary of education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She’s the author of over 20 books, a research professor of education at New York University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book chronicles how and why she decided to break with conservative education policies she once championed. It’s called The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

We’re also joined by Brian Jones, a Harlem elementary school teacher for the last eight years, a member of the Grassroots Education Movement and narrator of a documentary called The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.

Diane Ravitch and Brian Jones, thanks so much for being with us.

DIANE RAVITCH: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And I just wanted to start by saying, as we were playing Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Diane, you said you were there.

DIANE RAVITCH: I was. I was at the Mall and marched, and it was one of the great moments of my life. So I’m very happy I had that chance to hear him.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s move from the 1963 March on Washington and the dream that Dr. King had to where you think education is today.

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, we have been, for at least the last decade and more, trapped in this standardized testing obsession. And we have the No Child Left Behind law, which George W. Bush sponsored, and it was overwhelmingly endorsed by Congress in 2001. And it has imposed on the schools utopian goals that, by the year 2014, 100 percent of children will be proficient. And if they’re not proficient, your principal will be fired, the teachers will be fired, the school will be closed, or it will be turned over to private management or turned into a charter school.

So, I can’t imagine what they were thinking, except that there was this idea that there had been a Texas miracle. That’s what George W. Bush ran on, was the Texas miracle. And we now know there was no Texas miracle. And yet we’re stuck with a law that no one has the wits to change, and it just stays there, crushing schools across the country with standardized testing. So we had, for example, President Obama in his State of the Union address this year said the most important way to win the future is to encourage innovation, creativity and imagination. We will never do that with the route that we’re taking now, with all of this emphasis on high-stakes testing and attacking teachers. And, you know, what’s going on across the country—budget cutting in state after state, increasing class sizes—this is all terrible for the future.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you hear about all of these testing scandals now that are breaking out, where obviously educators, under pressure to produce results so that they can save their jobs, are erasing test results—but not just a few, we’re talking about, in the case of Atlanta, possibly Washington, D.C., and some other cities, massive fraud that’s gone on.

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, there was a pretty dramatic scandal in Washington, D.C., which USA Today broke open. And that was, there was one particularly celebrated school, where the principal had gotten awards. He was used in advertisements for the district: “Do you want to be the next…” — and they had his picture and names in the ads. He’s resigned, because the rate of erasures in his school, from wrong to right, was so dramatic, they said you could win the Powerball more easily than come up with this rate of erasures. So, we’re seeing these scandals because we have a system that incentivizes cheating. We’re saying to people, if you don’t meet a goal that we know is impossible, you’ll be fired.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how the cheating exactly works. The teachers switch the answers after the kids hand in, so the kids don’t even know that their answers have been changed?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, there are many ways to cheat, and I’m sure that Brian has seen—I’m sure he hasn’t done it, but he knows the ways. But it’s been documented in Washington and Baltimore and Atlanta. There were people—there were teachers and principals literally changing the answers from wrong to right, and they were going through these Scantron sheets and making the erasures. And so, there was an electronic analysis. Interestingly enough, New York City, when mayoral control began, eliminated the erasure analysis, which is the easiest way to see that the answers had been changed from wrong to right or right to wrong. They’re usually almost always changed from wrong to right. That’s one way.

There are other ways in which you can not test certain children, discourage them from coming to school, because they’re low-scoring, keep those kids out of your school, which some schools do. Particularly charter schools will push out low-performing kids or simply not accept them. And then there’s statewide institutionalized cheating. New York State saw its test scores go up year after year. And then, last year, after the mayoral election, announced that the test scores that we had boasted about for so many years were actually not true, and all the scores dropped across the state. That was institutionalized cheating.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the state did that merely by changing what they would consider the number of questions had to be answered right to reach a certain level.

DIANE RAVITCH: Right.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So, and basically dumbed down the—

DIANE RAVITCH: They dropped the passing mark.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan plans to use waivers to rewrite parts of the nation’s signature federal education law, No Child Left Behind. I want to turn to a clip of the interview he recently did on CNN.

BROOKE BALDWIN: What will these schools have to prove, have to offer, to get a waiver?

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION ARNE DUNCAN: Well, we’re still working through that package. We will announce the final package next month after Labor Day. But I’ve tried to hit on a couple of the key points. Where there are high standards, we want to partner with folks. Where they’re dumbing down standards, reducing them, that’s not a state we want to partner with. Where districts and states are focusing on growth and gain rather than absolute test scores, how much are folks improving, we want to work with them. Where they’re being very thoughtful and creative around teacher and principal evaluation, we want to work with them.

BROOKE BALDWIN: What about—

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION ARNE DUNCAN: Where they’re willing to challenge the status quo in very low-performing schools, dropout factories, where 50, 60, 70 percent of students are dropping out—where we’re seeing real courage, Brooke, that’s where we want to partner.

AMY GOODMAN: Diane Ravitch, what about these waivers?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, he’s giving states—or offering them a waiver from the mandates of No Child Left Behind and substituting the mandates he likes, none of which have any evidence behind them. When he talks about improving teacher evaluation, what he really means is Race to the Top things like judging teachers by test scores. There is hardly a testing expert in the country who thinks that this is a good idea, and there is none that I’ve been able to find who thinks it’s a good idea to release these ratings to the media, because they are largely inaccurate.

They say you can identify those at the extremes, the best and the worst. And frankly, if you have a principal who doesn’t know who their best and worst teachers are, they’re not a very good principal. But in the middle, there is so much inaccuracy, instability, that they’re—not worthless, but they should be confidential. What Secretary Duncan is doing is saying, if you want to get the federal funding, you have to evaluate teachers by test scores, you have to be prepared to close schools. This is NCLB brought up to an even higher level. And you also have to be prepared to increase the number of charter schools, which are private management.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Brian Jones, you’re a teacher in the trenches. Can you talk about the pressures on teachers these days with this emphasis on standardized testing and what it means actually to the kind of work that you do?

BRIAN JONES: Well, to me, the students are cheated even before the test is taken. Look, the cheating, the real social cheating, happens in the way that the high-stakes standardized testing distorts school itself.

Let me tell one story. I was doing a science experiment with a group of fourth graders. We were in the middle of a week-long science experiment, and we had—everyone had trays out on their tables, and they were pouring and mixing and investigating. We were having all kinds of rich discussions. And an administrator came in and said, “You have to stop what you’re doing right now,” handed—put down a pile of workbooks and said, “You have to begin doing this right now.” I begged her, in front of the students, “Please, let us just finish this experiment right now, in the next few minutes, and then we’ll do that.” She said, “No, you have to put all this away right now and get working on the workbooks.” So, the kids are cheated ahead of time. It teaches teachers to jump through these hoops, to not encourage critical thinking. It teaches all of us that knowledge is somewhere produced by Pearson or by one of these test companies, and you can’t create it, you can’t investigate it, you can’t do any of that. All you have to do is, more or less, remember it.

Here’s another way students are cheated. In elementary school, which I teach, we tend to go through genre studies. We take a genre of literature at a time and go through it. Well, now what more and more schools are doing is teaching the test itself as a genre—that is, studying the features of a test, as you would a novel, or as you would historical fiction or mysteries. You’re laughing, but this is very serious. Any teacher watching this knows what I’m talking about, that you, in elementary school, in many schools, especially the schools where that gun to the head is already cocked—in the poorest schools, in the schools that teach the most disadvantaged students, students of color, in schools in Harlem—you have to teach students how to take a test. You have to tell eight-year-olds about multiple choice, right? And the thing that gets me is that the, you know, wealthy individuals who promote these policies send their own kids to schools that look nothing like that, where inquiry is promoted, where they don’t spend all day obsessing about how they’re going to do on someone else’s test.

JUAN GONZALEZ: In the private schools, where athletics starts in the third grade—

BRIAN JONES: Of course, right.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —with teams of all kinds of intramural teams that the schools have.

BRIAN JONES: Right, right.

AMY GOODMAN: When does testing start?

BRIAN JONES: Well, it depends on the school, but I’ve seen schools that begin right away, that begin the first week of school, where they begin with pretests to try to, you know, tell the kids—if you ask a kid in Harlem—go to any school in Harlem and ask a young elementary school student, “What’s the point of school? Why are you here?” They’ll tell you, “It’s to pass tests, so that I can get a job.”

There’s nothing about—you know, I heard Jonathan Kozol speak at the Save Our Schools march, and he said something that really stayed with me. He said, at the wealthy schools, at your Phillips Exeter and Andover Academies, you know, those kids get to feast on the treasures of the earth. They get to enjoy literature and savor it. And they get to savor their savoring of it. And in our schools, too often kids are given these kind of cardboard passages that are meant to show them what a noun is. But there’s no joy in it. And there’s no—I would argue there’s no real learning.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, and we’ll come right back. Brian Jones, Harlem elementary school teacher, and Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Brian Jones, an elementary school teacher in Harlem for eight years, also an actor, and Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary of education. We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Diane Ravitch, I want to ask you about the business side of all of this education reform, not only in terms of the testing companies, but increasingly the new wave of reform now is the question of online learning. The school’s chancellor of New York City, Joel Klein, resigned to go work for Rupert Murdoch in a company that Rupert Murdoch bought that’s going to specialize in basically replacing the teacher in the classroom with online learning. Could you talk about that?

DIANE RAVITCH: Sure. There is a narrative. You can read about it in Chubb and Moe’s most recent book called Liberating Learning, where they imagine online learning replacing teachers, where there’s a teacher somewhere, let’s say, in a barn in Kansas monitoring 100 or 200 computer screens, 24/7. And I recall that Chancellor Klein said at the time, we could reduce our teaching staff by 30 percent if we could have more online learning. New York is now investing—I forget how many hundreds of millions of dollars—in IT contracts, technology contracts, because they see online learning as the future.

I can tell you, because I reviewed the research just last night, because I was having a Twitter debate with someone, there is no research behind this. They say, “We don’t have any evidence.” Personally, I believe that children need teachers. They need an adult, a grown-up. They need the interaction with other students to talk about things, to debate, to discuss. What I’ve heard from many people is children sitting at home on a computer interacting with a blinking screen, all they’re doing is answering questions. And frankly, you don’t know who answered the questions. If they submit an essay, you don’t know who wrote the essay.

But we have states like Florida now mandating online courses. The state of Utah, where the state superintendent ran for office with huge contributions from online companies, is mandating online learning. Rupert Murdoch gave a speech not long ago, when he bought this company Wireless Generation. He bought it for $360 million, and he said at that time, “This is a $500 billion industry, and we want to be the leader in that industry.” So there is a lot of money in play here and no evidence that it’s going to improve kids’ education. And, you know, my view is, it’s the poor will get computers, the rich will get computers and teachers.

AMY GOODMAN: Talking about big business, big business and the tests.

DIANE RAVITCH: Right. And the testing industry itself is a multibillion-dollar industry that has grown and fattened over the past decade. Pearson, for example, McGraw-Hill, the two big ones. Pearson has a $500 million contract with the state of Texas, another, I forget how many, hundreds of millions with Florida. Now they’ve just taken the New York contract. This is a multibillion-dollar enterprise. So, it will be very difficult to back away from what we’re locked into now, the kind of intellectual wasteland of so many of our public schools, because there is big business in keeping it this way.

BRIAN JONES: And if you publish the test, then the school is—I mean, they would be suicidal not to purchase the test preparation materials made by the same company that makes the test. So think about all those disposable workbooks that you have to then buy every year, in huge quantities, for every student.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Brian, you were heavily involved with this film, The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.

BRIAN JONES: Right, right.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Clearly, Waiting for Superman had a major impact across the country, in terms of this debate and was very much promoted by some of the television networks, as well. Why did you get involved in that, and what were you trying to do with the counter-documentary?

BRIAN JONES: Well, this film was made, Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman was made, by a group called the Grassroots Education Movement. And we just felt that the film, having seen it, was so outrageous and so full of lies and slander and so slanted, before we even had done the homework of figuring out who was really behind it and who had funded it and all of that, just on its own, on its face value. But the other thing about the film is it was so effective. It was such a well-made film. I mean, it really takes you in. It’s artfully done, a beautifully made film. So, we thought, well, you know, we might have some idea how to use iMovie, and maybe we can make our own film. So—

AMY GOODMAN: Who funded Waiting for Superman?

BRIAN JONES: Oh, well, it’s funded by all of the same forces that you’ve—it’s the same names that have lined up again and again. It’s actually escaping my mind at the moment. Do you remember?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I can tell you that the two major producers—

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Gates was among them.

DIANE RAVITCH: No, the two major producers were Participant Media, whose CEO was previously the CEO of a for-profit chain of post-secondary institutions, vocational schools, for-profit. And the other company, Walden Media, is headed by a very conservative billionaire named Philip Anschutz, who contributes to the Discovery Institute, which is against evolution, and to all the right-wing think tanks that advocate for privatization and vouchers.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now!’s Jaisal Noor spoke with author Lois Weiner about teacher unions. She’s the author of The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers, and Their Unions. I wanted to play a clip from that interview.

LOIS WEINER: Unlike school boards, unions are membership organizations. And we can’t just blame union leaders. We have to understand that the issue here is that teachers don’t see the unions as vehicles for struggle. And I think that if that—I think that if that doesn’t happen, we really are going to see the destruction of public education in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Lois Weiner. Brian Jones, talk about the relationship between teachers and unions.

BRIAN JONES: Well, I think right now what we’ve seen is that teachers need to be more active in their unions. There needs to be a movement of ordinary teachers to challenge what we see, because we’re the ones who see it it happening in the classroom. I think we need to unite with parents and try to build a kind of social justice unionism that takes on not only questions of our working conditions, which are learning conditions, but also questions of curriculum and pedagogy. The group I’m a part of, the Grassroots Education Movement, gemnyc.org, is trying to do just that right here in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds. Can you address the issue of unions and teachers?

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, to me, the big issue today is there’s a narrative that says teachers are the problem in American education. I have been arguing poverty is the problem. We tie right into your segment on Dr. King. Poverty is the problem. Thirty-five percent of black kids live in poverty. Twenty percent of all American kids live in poverty. That’s the problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Diane Ravitch, Brian Jones, thanks so much for being with us.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!.

Juan Gonzalez is the co-host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!.
© 2011 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/152182/

Massachusetts may join a growing number of states in revolting against an unpopular provision of a federal education law that has caused thousands of schools nationwide, including more than half the schools in Massachusetts, to be designated as in need of improvement.

The schools, nearly 1,000 in Massachusetts, have repeatedly stumbled in boosting state standardized test scores fast enough to fulfill what many educators consider to be an elusive and unrealistic requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act: that all students, regardless of a learning disability, lack of motivation, or any other academic barrier, will demonstrate proficiency – a solid command of grade-level material – on state exams by 2014.

It is a particularly high bar for Massachusetts, whose statewide standards for student attainment are among the toughest in the country. And the consequences of falling short are serious – including the possibility of the state taking over underperforming schools.

Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said in an interview last week that Massachusetts is giving serious consideration to filing for a waiver from the 100 percent proficiency rule, under a new program announced this month by the Obama administration.

“For me, the reason filing a waiver makes sense for Massachusetts is that [the rule] no longer does a good job of differentiating our strongest performers from our weakest performers,’’ Chester said. “We have many schools in the Commonwealth at this point that are failing the federal requirements but are not failing schools.’’

But in a state with a reputation for having some of the highest academic standards in the country, the possibility of abandoning the 100 percent proficiency rule is drawing sharp criticism from some education advocates.

A waiver could thwart state efforts to galvanize more school districts to develop innovative approaches to accelerate student achievement, said Christopher Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and a former state board education chairman.

“The state with the best-performing students in the country shouldn’t need a waiver from a high expectation regulation,’’ Anderson said. “I don’t think Massachusetts should apply for a waiver to reduce expectations on what we expect kids to achieve.’’

The waivers have sparked heated debate in Washington, with many members of Congress arguing that the Obama administration has no legal right to waive the requirement. Administration officials contend that they do, as they deride the George W. Bush-era law for exaggerating the number of potentially failing schools and thereby preventing school districts from devoting their limited resources to the schools actually in greatest need.

A waiver for Massachusetts could lift a burden from hundreds of elementary, middle, and high schools in urban and suburban districts, as well as dozens of charter schools, that have been designated for improvement under the law.

Chester, who has expressed misgivings about the 100 percent rule over the past three years, said he will decide definitively on filing a waiver after the Obama administration releases the program’s criteria, which is expected to happen next month.

The 100 percent rule has been immensely unpopular since its debut nine years ago. Massachusetts educators have long charged that the rule has led to a regrettable public shaming of schools – including many that fare well according to other measures, such as national standardized tests or graduation rates – and has fostered a culture of “teaching to the test’’ as some schools labor to avoid public ridicule or state sanctions.

Under the law, states are required to announce annually whether schools are making progress in getting all students to proficiency on state exams, such as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System. Schools that fall short of testing targets can receive one of three designations – in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring – and must come up with plans to address their weaknesses. Remedies range from providing tutoring for students to radical overhauls of programs, teacher training, and staffing. Failure to improve could lead to a state takeover, although Massachusetts has not taken that step.

An analysis six years ago by Cape Ann economist Edward Moscovitch predicted three-quarters of the state’s schools would fail to achieve 100 percent proficiency by 2014, and the trajectory Moscovitch laid out then appears to be on track with actual state counts, according to the state’s superintendents association.

Local educators and representatives for the state’s school committee, superintendent, and teacher unions welcomed the possible change, while stressing they would keep pushing every student to achieve at high levels.

“We have high expectations for all students, but you have to be realistic as well,’’ said Kamal Chavda, assistant superintendent for research, assessment, and evaluation for the Boston public schools, noting for example that immigrant students who enroll in the city’s schools not knowing English are going to need more time to reach proficiency.

Last fall, more than three-quarters of Boston schools were identified for improvement, corrective action, or restructuring, and few schools over the years have shed those designations. It has been a source of frustration for district leaders, especially at schools where test scores are rising, but not fast enough.

Some education advocates blame Massachusetts officials for the predicament, arguing the state set the bar for proficiency too high with MCAS testing. The federal government let each state define proficiency, and Massachusetts decided students needed to score in at least the second highest of the four MCAS scoring categories. Several other states set a much lower bar, enabling more students to reach proficiency.

“It’s the state that created the problem here, not the federal government,’’ said Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, who supports less regulatory control of local schools.

The Obama administration pitched the waiver program this month, after efforts to change the law as part of its reauthorization stalled again in Congress.

The US Education Department was also facing a growing revolt from many western states, such as Montana and Utah, which vowed to ignore the proficiency rule or lower the bar for proficiency, a move that could have forced US education officials to cut off funding or enact other sanctions.

US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has called the law a “slow-motion train wreck,’’ has pushed for a more nuanced way to judge schools that would go beyond reliance on test scores.

While some members of Congress support that move, others prefer tinkering with the proficiency requirement or killing the law entirely, believing Washington should have no role in telling states how to educate students.

Justin Hamilton, a US Education Department spokesman, said the department hopes all states will apply for a waiver.

“States across the country have been asking for relief from this law we all know is broken,’’ he said. “We want to help them put in place a system that will help all children succeed.’’

Massachusetts appears to have favorable odds of securing a waiver. Duncan has said states can qualify if they sign onto the president’s education agenda, which Massachusetts did last year in order to win $250 million from Obama’s Race to the Top grant program.

While it is still unclear what the criteria will be for a waiver, those states that qualify would be allowed to replace the 100 percent proficiency requirement with their own accountability system, subject to US approval, Hamilton said.

Last year, Massachusetts created a new way to identify the schools in greatest need of help, zeroing in on the 20 percent of schools with the lowest MCAS scores and giving superintendents extraordinary powers to extend school days and make other union-contract changes at schools designated as “underperforming’’ by the state.

“Our own state law does a good job of drilling down on schools that are failing too many students,’’ Chester said. “The problem with the federal standard is that when it identifies a majority of schools in a state like Massachusetts as needing improvement, the standard loses its credibility.’’

James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.

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