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Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare – NYTimes.com

22 Aug

Protect children,  but not the rights of corporations to exploit children for profit.

A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children.

Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.

Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices.

via Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare – NYTimes.com.

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? – Magazine – The Atlantic

11 Aug

Don Peck, in the Atlantic.

Plutonomy, an economy in which the economy activity of the top 1% of the income stream.

In a plutonomy, Kapur and his co-authors wrote, “economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.” America had been in this state twice before, they noted—during the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. In each case, the concentration of wealth was the result of rapid technological change, global integration, laissez-faire government policy, and “creative financial innovation.” In 2005, the rich were nearing the heights they’d reached in those previous eras, and Citigroup saw no good reason to think that, this time around, they wouldn’t keep on climbing.

The Great Recession has been a Great Sorter, shifting people out of the middle class:

It’s hard to miss just how unevenly the Great Recession has affected different classes of people in different places. From 2009 to 2010, wages were essentially flat nationwide—but they grew by 11.9 percent in Manhattan and 8.7 percent in Silicon Valley. In the Washington, D.C., and San Jose (Silicon Valley) metro areas—both primary habitats for America’s meritocratic winners—job postings in February of this year were almost as numerous as job candidates. In Miami and Detroit, by contrast, for every job posting, six people were unemployed. In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.

Housing crashed hardest in the exurbs and in more-affordable, once fast-growing areas like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and much of Florida—all meccas for aspiring middle-class families with limited savings and education. The professional class, clustered most densely in the closer suburbs of expensive but resilient cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago, has lost little in comparison.

More excerpts below the fold. Continue reading →

In Pennsylvania, Suspicious Erasing on State Exams at 89 Schools – NYTimes.com

4 Aug

We can’t have Truth and Tradition if the schools lie to themselves, to us, and to their students (our children and grand children, remember?) about how things are going.

Never before have so many had so much reason to cheat. Students’ scores are now used to determine whether teachers and principals are good or bad, whether teachers should get a bonus or be fired, whether a school is a success or failure.

Will Pennsylvania do what it takes to root out cheating? Few school districts have. Most inquiries are led by educators who are not first-rate investigators and have little incentive to make their own districts look bad.

via In Pennsylvania, Suspicious Erasing on State Exams at 89 Schools – NYTimes.com.

Diane Ravitch, the Anti-Michelle-Rhee

23 Jun

The best way to improve American education, the post-epiphany Ravitch argues, is to fight child poverty with health care, jobs, child care, and affordable housing.

via Diane Ravitch, the Anti-Michelle-Rhee – Washington City Paper.

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