Monthly Archives: March 2016

Some thoughts on DeRay Mckesson’s campaign

According to newly released campaign finance forms, DeRay Mckesson, the national Black Lives Matter activist running for Baltimore mayor, has had far and away more individual donors to his campaign than any other candidate in the race. Over 4,500 people from across the country have helped him to raise nearly $223,000, and a majority were small donors.

Of that $223,000, though, just 4.2% came from Baltimore. By contrast, donors from four states—California, New York, Massachusetts, and Florida—contributed more than half of all his funds.

I have no issue with Mckesson running, and would argue that he’s introduced some pretty valuable policy ideas to the primary debates. Yet the way national media has largely ignored the other candidates, suggested he’s been the only person proposing police reform, and just failed to do any serious reporting on the race or the city, has been pretty frustrating to watch. (Local outlets have done a much, much better job.)

Anyway, on Tuesday Re/code reported on Mckesson’s campaign finance forms, and noted that he received a lot of money from tech executives.

Taking a look myself, I found that the biggest donors to Mckesson’s campaign were an assemblage of individuals involved in the education reform movement, working in the tech industry, alumni of Bowdoin College, celebrities, real estate developers, and a handful of others. (Some of these categories overlap; for example, some Bowdoin alumni work in the tech industry, and some tech CEOs support the education reform movement, etc.) I’ve put a list of notable donors at the bottom of this post.

I don’t have much to say for now, other than I’d love to learn more about why tech companies have taken such an interest in his campaign, and why real estate developers, especially those in Florida, have too. I’d also be curious to hear how his campaign is working on mobilizing Baltimore voters, since it was clear they hadn’t raised much money within the city. (He had about 250 donors from Baltimore as of March 15th.)

Earlier this week DeRay tweeted, “I’ve not taken money from the establishment funders who run Baltimore city politics.”

A day earlier he wrote,

His comments raise a really interesting question. Does taking money from companies and real estate developers in other states mean you have avoided establishment politics? I’m sure opinions would vary.

In early February I wrote a Slate piece saying that despite his national reputation with the Black Lives Matter movement, DeRay’s education reform ties would likely garner more attention in the Baltimore mayoral race. Education is politically fraught in the city, and all Democratic candidates were already open to, and talking about, police reform.

In the weeks thereafter, Baltimore residents pressed Mckesson to clarify his views on school reform. While the education policy platform he released in early February did not mention charter schools, unions, or Teach for America, voters continually asked him about these issues. Residents raised questions at candidate forums, journalists questioned him in interviews, and voters discussed and debated his education ties on social media.

Towards the end of February, Mckesson’s campaign posted a lengthy “reality check” on its website—a response to some of the concerns and criticisms he had been receiving.

factcheck.png

Examples included:

tfa1tfa2

Though I certainly believe Mckesson does not work for Teach for America, and has decided to run because he genuinely wants to, I think it’s hardly conspiratorial to acknowledge that he is receiving thousands of dollars from them—from their PAC, their allies, and from a number of current and former TFA staffers across the country.

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Education Reform:

  • Leadership for Education Equity PAC: $2000
    (Commonly known as LEE, the PAC to elect TFA alumni)
  • New Yorkers for Putting StudentsFirst: $500
  • Matthew Kramer, former CEO of Teach For America: $400
  • Jessica Kramer, Senior Managing Director of Alumni Engagement for Teach for America: $500
  • Leslie Miller Saiontz, Board Chairman of Teach For America in Miami: $2,500
  • Kwame Griffith, Executive Vice President of Regional Operations for Teach for America: $200
  • Brian Johnson, Vice President for Regional Impact at Leadership for Educational Equity: $1,000
  • Brianna Twofoot, Vice President for Diversity and Equity at Leadership for Educational Equity: $250
  • Bradford Derrell, Executive Director of NYCAN: $250
  • Kira Orange Jones, Executive Director Teach for America New Orleans: $250
  • William Graves, Executive Director at the John & Denise Graves Foundation: $250
  • Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-Founder of Teach For All: $100
  • Jonathan Marker, CEO at Youth Leadership Institute: $250
  • Jessica Marker, Head of Knowledge Development for Teach for America: $250
  • Mark Fraley, Senior Advisor for Advocacy and Organizing at Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE): $100
  • Darin Yankowitz, Chief of Staff, Regional Operations at Teach for America: $100
  • Judy Wurtzel, Director of Education at the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation: $200
  • Ifeyinwa Walker, The Offor Walker Group: $1,000

Tech:

  • Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr and Slack: $6,000
  • Esther R. Dickens, Google: $500
  • Malik Ducard, Global Head of Family and Learning at YouTube: $2,500
  • Myles Grant, Principal Engineer at Slack: $200
  • Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix: $6,000
  • Ashley Mosley, Marketing and Sales Twitter: $500
  • Chris Kaminski, Fugue Inc, a venture­backed software startup: $500
  • Gisel Kordestani, Crowdpac: $6,000
  • Omid Kordestani, Executive Chairman at Twitter: $6,000

Celebrities:

  • Harrison Barnes, NBA player: $3,000
  • Rashida Jones, Actress: $2,000
  • Susan Sarandon, Actress: $600
  • Jesse Williams, Actor: $3,000
  • Sean Kleier, Actor: $350

Businesses/Developers:

  • Jeffrey Lamkin, the Retina Group of Northeast Ohio: $500
  • Beth Azor, of Azor Advisory Services, a Florida-based commercial real estate advisory and investment firm: $1000
  • Stephen H. Bittel, Terranova Corporation, a Florida-based commercial real estate firm: $2,500
  • Mark Friedland, an Aspen-based real estate developer, private investor and entrepreneur: $500
  • Gerson, Preston, Robinson & Company PA, a Florida-based public accounting firm: $1000
  • Kevin Letorneau, Online Buddies: $6,000
  • Katherine Vizas, Intercontinental Exchange, a network of regulated exchanges and clearinghouses for financial and commodity markets: $1000
  • Brooks Washington, Roha Ventures, a venture investment group that builds and launches companies across Africa: $1,000
  • Jason Weiss, Terrapin Palisades Ventures, a private investment firm focused on land-based assets: $500
    Melvyn Schlesser, Jameck Development Inc, a Miami-based property development and management company: $500
  • Michel LePage, real estate agent in Yarmouth: $250


Bowdoin College Alum:

  • Deborah Barker, Trustee: $1000
  • Alexandra Codina, Filmmaker: $500
  • Barry Mills, former college president: $6,000
  • Michael LoBiondo, Senior Director at Warner Brothers Records: $500
  • Jackson Wilkinson, website developer: $500

 Others:

  • Kim Coco Iwamoto, Commissioner on the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission: $6,000
  • Henry Louis Gates, Harvard Historian: $1,000
  • Suzanne Lehmann: $1,000
  • Aaron Sojourner, Economist at the University of Minnesota: $500
  • Eric Vittinghoff, Biostatistician at UCSF School of Medicine: $500
  • Ebonie Williams, Computer Scientist at the Defense Information Systems Agency: $500
  • Roger Luke DuBois, Associate Professor of Integrated Digital Media at NYU: $1,250
  • Margaret Savarino, Seattle-based writer: $750
  • Deborah Kaplan, Safari Books Online: $500

 

North Carolina Educators Fight Deportations of Central American Students

Originally published in The American Prospect on March 23, 2015.
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Wildin David Guillen Acosta, a Durham, North Carolina, high school senior, was set to graduate from Riverside High School in June. Instead, he is being held at a federal detention center in Georgia. In late January, U.S. Immigration and Enforcement agents (ICE) apprehended the 19-year-old student as he was on his way to school. While languishing in the detention center, Acosta asked his teachers to send along his homework, so that if he gets released, he would still be on track for commencement. In late February, his teachers mailed him his assignments, but detention center officials refused to accept the package.

In January, the Obama administration authorized a series of raids to arrest, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala over the past two years. About 15,500 Central American mothers and children have received deportation orders since July 2014, and ICE is now ramping up its enforcement of those orders. More than 330 young people have been arrested nationwide so far. Although students do not comprise all the youths being targeted, local educators have been galvanized by the arrests. Teachers say the raids have had a chilling effect on other students, too.

The ICE raids, which involve barging into homes and picking up individuals off the streets, are reminiscent of Bush administration–era immigration enforcement tactics. While immigration officials avoid making arrests in “sensitive locations”such as churches and schools, immigration advocates say this policy hasn’t stopped ICE agents from detaining undocumented students on their way to school.

ICE agents picked up Yefri Sorto, a 19-year-old Charlotte high school student on his way to a bus stop in late January. Sorto came to the United States from El Salvador in 2014 as an unaccompanied minor. He says he fled his country because he feared gang violence and was finally reunited with his parents, who had been living in the U.S. for more than a decade.

“These raids are impacting not just the individuals we know of who have been picked up; there is wide and deep fear across the community,” says Allison Swaim, a Durham high school teacher.“Kids are not coming to school because they’re afraid, kids are dropping out because they don’t want to be picked up, or maybe they still have a legal process pending, or they’re trying to file for asylum—everyone has their own story.”

The majority of Central Americans who crossed the U.S. border were apprehended, or turned themselves in, hoping to apply for some type of asylum. Immigration advocates say these individuals should be treated as refugees, not as criminals, given the extreme violence found in their home countries. A Guardian investigation found that since January 2014, 83 people who were deported to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered, some just a few days after they returned.

Swaim has been working to organize teachers statewide around what she calls a humanitarian crisis across the South. In Atlanta, ICE agents pulled over 19-year-old Kimberly Pineda Chavez, while she was driving to school. Kimberly arrived in Georgia from Honduras in 2014 with her mother and sister after receiving a series of threats from local police.

Swaim hopes that teachers across the region will collect data and anecdotes about how students are being affected by raids in their communities. Durham teachers held a conference call with U.S. Department of Education officials to express their concerns. “We’re asking federal officials, including Education Secretary John King, to get involved because part of their mission is to provide an equal education for all students, and that includes immigrant students,” Swaim says. “These raids are directly in contradiction with the mission of the Department of Education.”

Rebecca Costa, a Charlotte ESL teacher, says that educators in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district are also trying to duplicate the Durham organizing efforts in their community. Two of Costa’s students stopped coming to school after Yefri Sorto was arrested, and have since gone into hiding. “It all felt very isolating, but now we realize this is happening all over North Carolina and we have to reach out and unite,” she says.

Obama immigration officials stress that ICE is not targeting anyone under 18. But many high school upperclassmen who are completing their secondary education are 18 or older. “My two kids that have gone into hiding were 18 and 19, both juniors,” says Costa.

Mayra Arteaga, a 20-year-old living in Charlotte, has been involved in immigration advocacy since she was in middle school. Mayra has been raising awareness about the deportation raids by rallying students, testifying at school board meetings, and helping to organize protests, like a recent Charlotte march.

“I think once teachers started noticing what was going on, the ball really started rolling,” Arteaga says, noting that these raids have mobilized a much more diverse group of people than immigration advocates typically see at their events.

Advocates worry that the undocumented immigrants are not receiving fair legal treatment, and say that deportation orders have frightened many. Tin Than Nguyen, a Charlotte immigration lawyer, has been working to try and help undocumented families in the city understand their legal rights. “The recent rounds of raids have truly sent shockwaves through the community and everyone is shuddering in fear,” he says.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, of the roughly 10,000 deportation orders given to unaccompanied minors since July 2014, roughly 87 percent were issued in absentia; advocates say many immigrants never received sufficient notice of their scheduled court hearings.

Meanwhile, North Carolina activists have appealed to federal lawmakers to help stop the raids. Representative G.K. Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat who represents Durham, has been pressuring ICE to delay Wildin’s deportation, so that he can apply for asylum.

“Wildin Acosta and other young people like him fled extreme violence and mayhem in Central America in search of refuge and a better life in the United States,” said Butterfield in a statement. “I believe that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) limited resources would be better utilized focusing on dangerous criminals who pose a threat to our communities rather than high school students and teenagers trying to make better lives for themselves.”

“[Wildin] is being labeled as some kind of internal threat to the security of the United States,” Bryan Proffitt, president of the Durham Association of Educators told WNCN, a CBS affiliate. “He’s a kid sitting in a detention cell hoping to get his homework, so that he can graduate on time.”

 

Can Charlotte-Mecklenburg Desegregate its Schools … Again?

Originally published in The American Prospect on March 18th, 2016.
—–

It was not so long ago that Charlotte, North Carolina, was widely considered “the city that made desegregation work.” The Queen City first pioneered busing to desegregate schools in 1969, and when the Supreme Court upheld that strategy as a legal remedy for school segregation two years later in its landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, districts across the South began busing students as well.

In the past 15 years, however, Charlotte has seen a rapid resurgence in segregated schooling. Following a late 1990s decision that said court-mandated integration was no longer necessary, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) grew quickly divided by race and class, and the economic isolation continues to intensify with each passing year. Though CMS is still considered a relatively high-performing school system, a closer look at the data reveals deeply unequal outcomes among the district’s 164 schools.

For more than a decade, local residents ignored the demographic shifts taking place within CMS. Political leaders, as well, seemed to just have no energy left to expend on school diversity following their highly publicized school segregation lawsuits. Yet now, due to a district policy that requires school board members to revisit student assignments every six years, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community finds itself facing a rather unusual opportunity. Wary of litigation, but troubled by the damning diversity data, Charlotte leaders have been working cautiously over the past year to see if there might be any popular support for breaking up pockets of poverty within CMS.

Their timing may be just right. In addition to sobering statistics on school segregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, new research out of Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley found that Charlotte ranks dead last in the nation in terms of upward mobility, and that racial segregation and school quality are two main culprits behind this. Moreover, after years of lackluster results from other school turnaround efforts, resistance to shuffling students as a way to improve school quality is softening.

The political momentum in favor of school segregation in Charlotte is fairly new, but so is the backlash against it. Charlotte-Mecklenburg has seen a 15-year population surge, predominately in the county’s northern and southern regions. Many of the county’s newcomers missed Charlotte’s desegregation history, and see no real reason to bring it back. They moved into their communities, they say, largely for the schools. As more leaders explore how CMS might revamp student assignment, a growing number of parents have begun to raise objections—warning officials that they would not hesitate to send their children to private schools, or to the state’s notably segregated charter sector, if they had to.

Last summer, when it became clear that the CMS school board was thinking of revisiting student assignment, a group of pro-integration community members began organizing in support of the idea. And so back in July, OneMeck was born—a grassroots coalition of residents committed to making Charlotte-Mecklenburg a place where diverse individuals live, work, and attend school together. Through public forums, social media, and one-on-one conversations, OneMeck advocates began to make their case.

“We spent a few months figuring out what we were for and how we would structure ourselves, and we’re still evolving even now,” says Carol Sawyer, a co-founder of OneMeck. “But we have no intention of becoming a 501c(3); we really value our nimbleness and our ability to advocate as a community organization.”

Students also got involved. Through the organization Students for Education Reform, (SFER), CMS students began to strategize how they could best interject their personal experiences into an increasingly heated public debate over school segregation.

“Even though school board members said they wanted to hear from students, they weren’t actually invited to the table in any of these conversations,” says Kayla Romero, a former CMS teacher and current North Carolina SFER program coordinator. “This issue is going to directly impact students, they are the ones currently in the system, but people were not seeking their opinions out or intentionally bringing them to the table.”

OneMeck supporters say they are not advocating for any one specific policy, and that they believe there are a number of steps CMS could take to reduce racial and economic segregation. They are encouraging the school board to hire a national consultant who could come in and study the school district, and make recommendations on how to best legally, and strategically, diversify CMS schools.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2015, the public discussion in Charlotte revolved largely around issues of race and desegregation. But beginning in 2016, suburban families started to ramp up their efforts to shift the narrative. In February, hundreds of parents joined two new groups—CMS Families United for Neighborhood Schools and CMS Families for Close to Home Schools and Magnet Expansion—which sought to reframe the conversation around the importance of neighborhood schools, and to express collective opposition to what they called “forced busing.” Some even began to sell T-shirts that read “#Close-To-Home-Schools #NOforcedbusing.”

Christiane Gibbons, a co-founder of the CMS Families United For Neighborhood Schools, (now renamed CMS Families for Public Education) says when she first learned that the school board was rethinking student assignments in early February, she felt compelled to alert local parents to the dangers of forced busing. I asked her if forced busing was on the table at this time. “Who knows?” she responded. “But it seemed like, for a lot of people, an option for alleviating pockets of poverty is to bus in and bus out.”

Advocates of diverse schools point out that CMS actually buses students more now than the district ever did at the height of desegregation. The CMS school board chairperson, Mary McCray, has also stressed that student assignments would be based on choice, and not on forced busing. Since 20,000 students already attend magnet schools throughout the district, integration advocates say figuring out how to improve and expand those models is one choice-based option CMS could consider.

“In some high-wealth suburban neighborhoods there’s been claims that OneMeck is pushing ‘forced busing,’ but that’s been sort of dog whistle politics,” says Sawyer. “We’ve never said anything like that, and neither has any board members. It’s a pure fabrication.”

Whatever the case, many parents began pressing the school board and other local political leaders to commit to “home school guarantees”—promises that no matter what else changes with student assignment, children could still attend the neighborhood schools that their parents have expected them to enroll in. In three towns north of Charlotte—Huntersville, Cornelius, and Davidson—political leaders passed resolutions affirming that they want every student guaranteed a spot within their neighborhood school. In two towns south of Charlotte—Matthews and Mint Hill—the mayors even floated the idea of splitting off from CMS if the school board goes forward with revamping student assignments.

“That’s not a realistic threat,” says Sawyer. “Though it makes good copy.”

Aside from discussions that smaller suburban towns may secede from the district, leaders take far more seriously the threat that parents may send their children to private schools or charter schools if their traditional public schools no longer seem desirable. Last year, researchers at Duke University published a study suggesting that white parents in North Carolina were already using charters as a way to avoid racially integrated public schools.

On the nine-person CMS school board, Rhonda Lennon, who represents northern Mecklenburg County, has been the fiercest critic of redrawing lines; for months she has emphasized that families would certainly leave CMS if the board interferes with student assignment, and that she might open her own charter school, if parents in her community lost their home school guarantee.

“I think it’s a valid fear that parents have; I don’t think this is ‘chicken little’,” says Amy Hawn Nelson, an educational researcher at UNC Charlotte. “When you look at the aggregate school level performance data in some high poverty racially segregated schools, it can look frightening. Every parent wants the best school for their child, and for parents that have a choice, they are going to choose a school that is high-performing.”

At the end of January, the school board released an online survey inviting parents, CMS staff members, and other Mecklenburg County residents to share their thoughts and opinions on student assignments. Board members said they would use the results—which were published in a 241-page report—to guide their decisions. The online survey, which ran from January 29 until February 22, garnered more than 27,000 responses.

In addition to the survey, the CMS school board voted in late February on a set of six goals to consider when re-evaluating student assignment. These included providing choice and equitable access to “varied and viable” programmatic options; maximizing efficiency in the use of school facilities, transportation, and other resources to reduce overcrowding; and reducing the number of schools with high concentrations of poor and high-needs children.

CMS has since put out a request for a proposal for a national consultant to help the district develop a plan. The consultant would consider, among other things, the board’s approved goals and the results of the countywide survey. CMS plans to make a hire sometime this month.

Some parents say the board is getting this all wrong, and that focusing on student assignments is a distraction from the district’s real problems. “What’s really disheartening about all this is that people are making it about ‘us versus them’ and about race and desegregation, but it’s not,” says Gibbons. She thinks there should be greater focus on improving individual schools, through strategies like increasing parent involvement and expanding after school programming. Gibbons says she does not see changing student demographics as a way to improve schools.

At the start of the 2012-2013 school year, CMS, along with local philanthropic and business communities in Charlotte launched Project LIFT—a five-year public-private partnership to boost academic achievement. The program selected nine low-performing Charlotte schools and infused them with an additional $55 million in private investment. Three years into the experiment, however, researchers have found only modest and mixed evidence of academic improvement.

“I think Project LIFT is a school reform effort to make segregation work, and it hasn’t,” says Sawyer, of OneMeck.

Gibbons disagrees. “I think it’s a great turnaround program, I think it’s obviously beneficial,” she says. “It was the first time they did it so it may need tweaks, I don’t know enough about the actual numbers, but I think those types of turnaround programs are what is going to really benefit the under-performing schools.”

Some of the SFER students that Kayla Romero works with attend Project LIFT schools. “When people say ‘oh we just need more money,’ it’s been helpful to use Project LIFT as an example,” she says. Though spending more money has undoubtedly helped in some ways—such as providing students with better technology, and enabling administrators to employ more strategic staffing—Romero says students recognize that it hasn’t been enough.

The disagreements taking place in Charlotte mirror those playing out in districts all over the country. How much does money matter? Can segregated schools be equal? How should we factor in school choice? How should we define diversity?

Proponents of desegregating Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools point to a significant body of research that says diverse schools provide better social and academic education for all children. OneMeck launched the #DiversityWorks campaign, where organizers asked CMS residents to submit videos explaining how they have benefited from attending diverse schools. They also point to research on economic opportunity that came out of Harvard and Berkeley last year, which found Mecklenburg County is the worst big county for escaping poverty after Baltimore; in 2013 the researchers ranked Charlotte as 50th out of 50 big cities for economic mobility.

Still, some CMS residents balk at OneMeck’s fervent advocacy. In a Charlotte Observer op-ed, Jeremy Stephenson, who previously ran for school board, protested that those who push to use student assignment to break up concentrations of poverty “accept as gospel” that this will raise the achievement of all students. “They accept this diversity panacea as both empirical truth and an article of faith,” he writes, alleging that academia is “merging into advocacy” as it did with tobacco-funded cancer research. Stephenson argued that panel discussions “feature no diversity of thought; support for neighborhood schools is cast as xenophobic; and so postured, any questioning is heretical.”

Despite Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s historical legacy of school desegregation, hardly anyone describes that history as central to the conversations taking place today. Sandra Conway, an education consultant who has been working in conjunction with OneMeck, says she and her allies hope to mobilize Charlotte-Mecklenburg around a new, shared commitment to diverse schools.

“We’ve just really been trying to get people together to think about what kind of city we want to be,” says Conway. “We’ve grown so dramatically, we’re a Technicolor city, we’re a Southern city, and race is at play. But we need to have a new vision going forward, and if you don’t understand your history, and you don’t understand the data—that’s a problem. So we’ve just been working hard for over a year to get that out there.”

James Ford, awarded the 2014-2015 North Carolina Teacher of the Year, was a black CMS graduate during desegregation. As an educator today, Ford has been sharing his story to help raise support for reviewing student assignment. “As America becomes more brown, the question is not just whether or not we want integrated schools, but do we want to live in an integrated society? Are we an inclusive or exclusive community?” he wrote in Charlotte Magazine. “The answer depends on how we see ourselves.”

“I think for many kids growing up in Charlotte, segregation has just been the norm,” says Romero. “Some of them could live in this city for their whole lives and never come across white kids. However, some of their parents have had those experiences and do speak out about being part of the integration movement and the opportunities it created for them.”

The school board plans to continue reviewing student assignments throughout most of 2016, and any approved changes it makes would take effect no sooner than the 2017-2018 school year.

Tensions are high, but some school diversity advocates predict that the political landscape will calm down if and when a consultant presents the community with a real plan. “In the absence of a plan, you’ll have all sorts of fear mongering,” one activist confided. “It doesn’t matter how much we say that’s not the case, that there won’t be forced busing—until a plan is presented, people will continue to freak out.”

Even opponents of reassigning students have acknowledged that some of the current CMS boundaries are a bit peculiarly drawn. An article published in The Charlotte Agenda looked at various “gerrymandered” maps and found that it would be relatively easy to increase student diversity in schools without resorting to miles and miles of extra busing. Gibbons acknowledged “there are definitely some lines that don’t make sense” on the maps.

“OneMeck is feeling pretty energized,” says Sawyer. “We realize that we are facing tremendous fear, but we’re trying to show that we can make all our schools better for all our kids.”

Arrests and Suspensions Are Out of Control in Baltimore Schools

Originally published in VICE on March 9th, 2016.
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An eight-second video was released last week showing a Baltimore school police officer attacking an unarmed student while another cop stood by and watched. The clip went viral and spurred national outrage, as well as calls for a federal investigation. The two officers, Anthony Spence and Saverna Bias, turned themselves in Tuesday night to face second-degree assault and misconduct in office charges—Spence is also charged with second-degree child abuse—and had posted bail by early Wednesday. But with criminal trials still pending for the six cops charged over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray last year, the footage has stoked an already strained conversation around policing in Baltimore City.

Upon the clip’s release, politicians and advocates quickly began to criticize the city’s ill-defined school police policies, pointing out that there are no public arrest statistics, including who gets busted, why, and whether those incidents might have been handled outside the criminal justice system. There’s also little or no oversight of the school police budget and officers’ use of force. All of which is especially alarming given that policing aside, Maryland actually has some of the most progressive school discipline policies in the country—at least on paper.

Still, a lack of leadership and a persistent culture of criminalization within public schools have the city suspending, expelling, and arresting students too often—and in discriminatory fashion.

Baltimore’s unique place in America’s school discipline hierarchy emerged over the past decade. In 2004, the city’s school issued more than 26,000 suspensions in a school district of 88,000. Alarmed city advocates began speaking out, forming networks to push for disciplinary alternatives, and fighting for district leaders to reckon with the glaring suspension data. Research has long shown that excessive suspensions and expulsions are tied to higher rates of school absence, school drop-outs, and academic failure. Suspended students often sit around at home, or in low-quality alternative programs, falling further behind on their studies. There’s also evidence that school suspensions lead to higher rates of arrest and juvenile detentions, fueling what is commonly referred to as the “school to prison pipeline.”

In 2007, Baltimore hired a new school CEO, Andres Alonso, who began overhauling the district’s school discipline policies. He worked to scale back not only the scope of offenses that could warrant an out-of-school suspension, but also expanded the number of restorative alternatives to keep kids in class and on top of their school work.

The results were dramatic. During the 2009-2010 school year, the district issued fewer than 10,000 suspensions, a decrease of more than 50 percent from 2004. The suspensions were also significantly shorter, and graduation rates went up, particularly for young black men.

“One of the things that really sets us apart from other school districts is that students can no longer be suspended for low-level and ambiguous infractions, such as disrespect,” explains Karen Webber, director of the Education and Youth Development at the Open Society Institute-Baltimore, a local think tank and advocacy group. “Before, a child might say something edgy, and if an administrator didn’t appreciate what was said or how it was stated, that child could be sent home for five days.”

Advocates around the state began to push for similar reforms, and in 2014 the State Board of Education approved new regulations to reduce the numbers of suspensions and expulsions across Maryland. The new policies encouraged teachers and principals to keep students in the classroom whenever possible and to promote alternative disciplinary measures. And the feds took notice: In light of Baltimore’s substantial drop in suspensions, and the statewide work done around discipline reform, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder came to Baltimore in 2014 to unveil the first set of national school discipline guidelines.

But even as suspensions have plummeted, critics point to a series of disturbing school police scandals and argue that Baltimore City still hasn’t implemented many of the progressive policies passed statewide two years ago. The district hired a new CEO that year, Dr. Gregory Thornton, who has made less of a fuss about school discipline reform.

“You can have the most promising policies on the books but rules are only as good as their implementation,” says Monique Dixon, deputy director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

“While there’s been great work done to write these policies, those changes have not been filtered down to the staff level—nobody has been retrained,” adds Jenny Egan, a juvenile public defender in Baltimore.

For example, some suspended Baltimore students languish for months outside of school just because the district failed to make a final decision about their punishment. Neeta Pal, a legal fellow at the Maryland Public Defender’s office, says that when the district leaves students in this bureaucratic limbo—indefinitely suspended—it violates both state law and the US constitution.

One such student was 15-year-old Kuran Johnson, a ninth grader with a disability who was suspended this past October. Johnson spent four months in an alternative program, and was only allowed to return back to a traditional public school a few weeks ago after Nicole Joseph, an attorney with the Maryland Disability Law Center, threatened to sue. “This is their way to get rid of kids,” Sabrina Newby, Johnson’s grandmother, tells me over the phone. “They feel these kids are so easy to suspend, and then they wonder why kids end up dropping out or wind up in juvenile facilities.”

Following the standoff between students and police back during the April 2015 Freddie Gray protests, Karl Perry, a Baltimore high school principal, penned a memo in which he attributed the local uprising in part to their “soft code of conduct.” He promised a “return to zero-tolerance enforcement,” and within two months, he was hired to be the district’s Chief Supports Officer—overseeing, among other things, suspensions and school police.

Joseph wrote an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun criticizing Perry’s remarks, arguing that zero-tolerance policies “feed the school-to-prison pipeline” and increase the likelihood at-risk students will be excluded from school. She called for reforms like increasing the number of mental health providers, promoting positive behavior interventions, and increasing engaging curriculum and job skills training.

She points out that in Baltimore, despite all the changes and national attention, black students and those with disabilities are still suspended at higher rates than the general student population.

“Yes, suspension numbers have gone down, in almost every district across the state, but the disproportionately is not going down,” Joseph says in an interview. “Both by race, and also for students with disabilities, these minority groups are not experiencing the same reduction in harsh discipline that non-disabled and white kids are.”

Officials with the Baltimore City Public Schools did not return repeated requests for comment on Perry’s remarks, on students left in suspension limbo, and on whether the district feels it has adequately implemented the state’s discipline regulations. Meanwhile, critics see the suspensions, expulsions, arrests and abuse cases as part of the same problem—a school culture that tries to kick students out rather than engage them where they are, as they are.

“We know so many of our kids have serious challenges, and one of the goals of our schools should be to address them, to help them, and not to punish them,” Egan says. “We have to change the culture so that schools actually take kids as they come. We can’t just pass the buck.”

Future of Abortion Access Remains Unclear After Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Originally published in The American Prospect on March 2nd, 2016.

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A deeply and now evenly divided Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in the most consequential reproductive rights lawsuit to come before the high court in nearly 25 years.

The touchstone for the justices, who now number only eight since the death last month of Antonin Scalia, was the standard established by the high court in its 1992 ruling Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which found that abortion restrictions may not place an “undue burden” on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.

At issue in the current case, known as Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, is a package of abortion restrictions passed by the GOP-controlled Texas legislature in 2013. During oral arguments Wednesday, the eight justices seemed divided along predictable ideological lines. The Court’s four conservatives challenged whether the Texas restrictions impose an “undue burden” on women, and its four liberals questioned the medical necessity of the restrictions.

In Casey, the court ruled 5-4 that states may legally pass restrictions on abortion access so long as those restrictions do not create unreasonable obstacles for women who seek to exercise their constitutional right to safely terminate a pregnancy. InHellerstedt, reproductive rights supporters have set out to prove that Texas’s new restrictions indeed violate the standard established under Casey.

The Texas law, known as HB2, requires that all abortion providers in the state obtain admitting privileges at a local hospital, and that clinics meet ambulatory surgical center (ASC) building standards. A key argument from the plaintiffs challenging HB2 is that these requirements have led to the closure of roughly half the state’s abortion clinics.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy all questioned whether there was sufficient evidence to make that claim. Stephanie Toti, the attorney representing Texas abortion providers, noted that in the five years prior to HB2’s passage, the number of abortion clinics in Texas stayed relatively constant. Once HB2 became law, however, eight clinics closed in anticipation of the restrictions, and 11 closed the day they went into effect.Toti argued that the timing of the closures, as well as testimony from the plaintiffs, provided ample evidence to show that the clinics closed as a result of HB2’s mandates. But the conservative justices seemed unconvinced.

The four liberal justices all pressed Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller on why the admitting privileges and the ASC requirements were medically justified. They pointed out repeatedly that Texas has not required other providers of such outpatient procedures as colonoscopies and liposuction to meet ASC standards, despite the fact that those procedures carry far greater medical risk. (The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have also said there is “simply no medical basis to impose a local admitting privilege on abortion providers.”) Moreover, Justice Stephen Breyer noted that even if the Texas legislature thought it was improving women’s health care by putting these standards in place, there’s evidence that women now face more barriers to abortion access, which increases the likelihood for riskier late-stage or self-induced abortions.

Another disagreement centered on whether the few abortion clinics left in Texas are capable of providing service to everyone who needs reproductive care in the state. More than 70,000 women in Texas seek abortions each year, but Alito argued that it’s impossible to know for certain whether there are too few clinics because “we really don’t know” what the capacity is of the existing providers. Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the U.S. solicitor general, disagreed, arguing that it’s “common sense” that just eight, nine, or ten clinics in all of Texas would not be enough to meet the demand.

The case’s outcome rests largely with Kennedy, the justice who originally helped craft the vague “undue burden” standard in 1992’s Casey decision. If Kennedy sides with the state of Texas, that will presumably leave the high court deadlocked 4-4. That would leave in place the Fifth Circuit Court’s decision to uphold HB2. But it would also mean that the Hellerstedt ruling sets no new national precedent. Kennedy also signaled the possibility of sending the case back to the lower court for remand—or further fact-finding—to better determine whether the number of clinics left in Texas can meet the state’s demand for abortion. It’s possible that another version of Hellerstedt will return to the Supreme Court when a successor to Scalia is appointed. The Hellerstedt ruling is expected this summer.

Hundreds of reproductive rights supporters, dressed in purple, and anti-abortion activists, wearing blue, rallied energetically outside the Supreme Court this morning in the cold; holding up signs, chanting songs, and making speeches—at times drowning one another out. Some supporters camped outside the high court Tuesday night, while others arrived early in the morning by bus, from states like North Carolina and Georgia, and cities like Philadelphia and Cleveland.