'Make Me a Woman'

One of my sheroes is Sojourner Truth. A brilliant but illiterate woman, she was a great orator and powerful presence who possessed great courage and determination. I often wear a pendant with her image and words: “If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.” An unwavering defender of women’s rights and an abolitionist, Sojourner continues to fuel my determination to fight for equality for women, people of color, and children left behind. She was born into and lived nearly three decades in slavery but dedicated her life to combating slavery and gender inequality and second-class citizenship. She never gave up talking about or fighting for justice and equality.
Sarye Huggins is a high school senior who knows her Black history and has also been inspired by Sojourner Truth. Read a few lines from her spoken word poem “Make Me a Woman”:

Make me a woman in this world of poverty and deceit. They'll know I’m a woman by the sounds of determination coming from my feet. ... Just make me a woman.  Don’t you think the time has come? I can hear my ancestors summoning me by the sounds of their drums. A woman, me? Imagine that. Once you grant me this wish, I’m never turning back.

She also writes that she knows “strong women run through my blood”—but her journey towards becoming a strong, confident young woman has not been easy.
Sarye lives in Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, a community disproportionately plagued by poverty and violence. Her teacher explains, “She’s survived ‘Bed-Stuy, do or die’—that’s the motto of our neighborhood.” Sarye’s mother, a teacher, died from a brain tumor when Sarye was 2. Her father was frequently part of her early life, and she was raised by a beloved aunt. As a smart, shy girl attending some of the poorest and roughest schools in New York City, Sarye didn’t always feel she fit in. Although she won awards in elementary school for being an outstanding student, she also endured a lot of teasing and bullying from her peers and harbored much of the pain inside. In middle school things got worse when her father stopped calling and visiting. For the first time her grades started slipping, causing her to lose her confidence, and she began trying desperately to change herself to gain acceptance by her peers. When the inner turmoil reached a breaking point, she started cutting herself and described some of the pain she was feeling in another poem:

I didn’t want to be smart anymore. I was no longer myself. I got angry, and placing blades to my skin just did not help. I knew that what I was doing to myself wasn’t a felony, nor was it a crime, but at the same time I didn't realize that I was just destroying my heart, my soul, my body, and my beautiful mind.

The odds were stacked against Sarye, as they are against so many of our Black girls and boys today. Black children are the poorest children in America; every other Black baby is poor, and every two minutes a Black baby is born into poverty in our wealthy nation. Black children are less likely to live in two-parent families, are more likely to be abused or neglected or enter foster care, and suffer worse health outcomes than white children. Black students fall behind in school early and do not catch up; more than 80 percent of fourth- and eighth-grade Black public school students cannot read or compute at grade level, and a Black high school student drops out every 33 seconds during the school year. Black children and youths are at greatest risk of being funneled into the prison pipeline and are at highest risk of gun violence, the leading cause of death among Black children and teens ages 1 to 19. For many of the children in Sarye’s neighborhood, these odds have already proven too much.
Sarye was blessed by her aunt’s unfailing support, and by caring teachers who began nurturing her potential during her freshman year of high school . She says, “They just saw something in me that I didn’t even really see in myself at the moment, and I think that’s what I really needed.” After Sarye attended the Summer Bridge Program at Boys & Girls High School, her English teacher recommended she apply for the Smart Scholars Program, which would allow her to take classes at Long Island University beginning in 10th grade. She surprised herself by testing into college-level English during the entrance exam. Though still in high school, she’s maintained a 4.0 in her college classes while excelling in her high school courses. Unsurprisingly, English has remained one of her strengths—and she’s embraced writing as a way of expressing some of the feelings she struggled to hide inside. From her poem “I’m Free From It”:

I didn't have to hide behind the bars of shame, hurt, or declaration. I could build on the things that were given to me and renovate the parts that were taken. My dreams that were deferred had me shaken up, but only to produce a better me in the making. ... I can look in the mirror and smile, embracing all my scars, marks, and imperfections, perfectly imperfect, not stressing to make the perfect impression, not ashamed, scared, nor confused because I am who I am for a reason.

Sarye is one of five extraordinary high school students the Children’s Defense Fund-New York will honor next week for beating the odds. A scholarship will help ease their way on the path to college. She knows she’s already made great strides and says, “I feel like allowing people to actually help me and to influence me to do better is what saved me.” What a privilege it is to help young people like Sarye become the strong Black women and men they want to be. All of us must change the odds and help all of our Black girls—and boys, and all children—become the strong and contributing adults they want to be and we need them to be as we look at the security of future generations and our nation.

No ESEA Bill Is Better Than One That Fails to Protect the Poorest Children

For fifty years Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) has been the primary source of federal funding targeted to schools to serve poor children. Its purpose has been to raise achievement for poor children through extra support to their schools to help meet their greater educational needs. Sadly, from the beginning states didn’t keep their end of the bargain. 

In 1969, the Washington Research Project (the Children’s Defense Fund’s parent organization) and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. partnered with others and examined federal audit reports on how Title I funds were being used and talked to numerous federal, state, and local officials and community leaders and parents about how those critical funds were being spent. Our report, Title I: Is It Helping Poor Children?, found the answer to our question was a resounding “No.” Rather than serving the special needs of poor and disadvantaged children, many of the millions of dollars Congress appropriated had been wasted, diverted, or otherwise misused by state and local education agencies. Title I funding was often being used as general aid and to supplant -- rather than supplement -- state and local education funds, including for construction and equipment unrelated to Title I goals. For example, Fayette County, Tennessee used 90 percent of its Title I funds for construction of a predominantly Black school despite a recent federal court order that the school system desegregate, and Memphis, Tennessee used Title I funds to purchase 18 portable swimming pools in the summer of 1966. 

The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) subsequently conducted several other major studies that reinforced the importance of federal accountability for money targeted to help children most in need, especially poor children and children of color. In CDF’s first report, Children Out of School in America (1974), after knocking on thousands of doors in census tracts across the nation and interviewing many state and local school officials, we found that if a child was not White, or was White but not middle class, did not speak English, was poor, needed special help with seeing, hearing, walking, reading, learning, adjusting, or growing up, was pregnant at age 15, was not smart enough, or was too smart, then in too many places school officials decided school was not the place for that child. 

We should learn from and correct our mistakes and stop repeating them over and over again for our children’s sake. It is crucial that a strong Title I program reach the children in areas of concentrated poverty if and when ESEA is reauthorized. Unfortunately the House Education and Workforce Committee, charged to lead in moving an ESEA reauthorization bill in the House of Representatives, just approved a bill (H.R. 5) in a party line vote that fails to target the needs of the poorest children by adding a “portability” provision assuring these children less help. AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and many others join us in opposing the portability provision.

The portability provision in H.R. 5 would move us backwards by distributing the same amount for a poor child regardless of the wealth of the district or school she attends. This will unravel the intent of Title I by taking resources away from children in areas of concentrated poverty and offering extra resources to schools and districts with a few poor children who may not need them. The poorest students in schools with the highest concentrations of poor children need extra help to combat poverty’s barriers. Compounding this huge backwards step, H.R. 5 also removes strong accountability provisions required to make sure the children who need help most will actually be helped. 

It is morally indefensible and extraordinarily expensive that we have 14.7 million poor children in our country -- 6.5 million of them living at less than half the poverty level. All of these poor children exceed the combined residents in all 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia. That more than 80 percent of Black and almost 75 percent or more of Latino public school students are unable to read and compute at grade level in 4^th and 8^th grades and, if they reach 9^th grade, 3 in 10 do not graduate within four years is a cause for extreme alarm and focused attention. Without targeted federal funding with accountability, the poorest children will lose out.

Poor children are not the only ones at educational risk. Special measures are needed to protect English language learners, children and youths with disabilities, children of color, and children and youths who are homeless or in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems. States and school districts must target resources to address achievement gaps for these vulnerable groups of children. The federal government must hold states accountable for making sure they make progress towards grade level achievement targets, high school graduation, and college and career preparation. 

The mistakes of the past should not be repeated and children and our nation need us to move forward, not backwards. No ESEA bill is better than a bill that has poor children subsidize the education of wealthier children. It is way past time for us to level the educational learning field for all children, especially those left behind.

Girls in Justice

I’m grateful for a powerful new book, Girls in Justice by artist Richard Ross, a follow-up to his moving earlier Juvenile in Justice, which combines Ross’ photographs of girls in the juvenile justice system with interviews he gathered from over 250 detention facilities across the United States. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the deeply disturbing photographs speak volumes. Ross uses the power of photography to make visible the hidden and harsh world of girls in detention. These heartwrenching images coupled with the girls’ ages and life stories should move us to confront the cruel and unjust juvenile justice system in our nation. These girls are ours: our neighbors, our children’s classmates, our daughters and granddaughters, sisters, cousins, and nieces — and, for some young children, our mothers. Girls in Justice invites the question:Why are so many girls, especially girls of color, confined in our nation’s detention facilities, and what are we as a society going to do about it? 

We must all work tirelessly to give hope and a fair chance to these girls and all children by promoting policies, programs, and supports that help them and their families, especially those most at risk. We must combat systemic problems that contribute to family and community dysfunction and wreak havoc on developing children, including girls; we must dig beneath the surface and examine the root cause of girls’ “offenses” and why injustice saps the hopes of so many young lives on our watch. 

In 2013, one in five girls in the United States was poor, and girls of color were disproportionately poor. From birth to young adulthood, children — especially poor children and children of color — encounter multiple and cumulative risk factors that often result in their being funneled into the prison pipeline through the juvenile and criminal justice systems and locked up behind bars. Such massive incarceration is sentencing millions of children to social and economic death. The pipeline to prison is lodged at the intersection of poverty and race and is intolerable in a professed society of opportunity. In 2007, the Children’s Defense Fund launched the Cradle to Prison Pipeline® crusade to confront youth incarceration and the factors driving it and propose solutions to replace it with a pipeline to college and career. While twice as many boys as girls are arrested, girls are the fastest-growing segment of the juvenile justice system. As girls rock the cradle, they rock the future, and we must pay attention to both girls and boys to ensure the development of healthy families.

Girls of color and poor girls face special challenges before they enter the juvenile justice system, during their confinement, and when they return to their communities after release. At the front end, racial disparities and the lack of appropriate treatment and support that run through every major child-serving system negatively impact their life chances by pushing more children into juvenile detention and adult prison. These include limited health and mental health care; lack of quality early childhood support experiences (including home visiting, Early Head Start and Head Start, child care, preschool, and kindergarten); children languishing in foster care waiting for permanent families and shunted through multiple placements; and failing schools with harsh zero-tolerance discipline policies, mostly for nonviolent offenses, that suspend, expel, and discourage children who then too often drop out and do not graduate. Too little effort is made to divert girls from the juvenile justice system despite the existence of successful evidence-based programs.

Girls in the system often encounter a unique set of challenges. Almost three quarters of them have been sexually or physically abused. Most are arrested for nonviolent offenses such as truancy, running away, or alcohol and substance use which can often be linked to severe abuse or neglect. These nonviolent offenses, or status offenses, would not be considered offenses for an adult. Poverty has an impact: although the trauma of sexual violence and abuse affects many girls, poor girls often lack adequate supports to keep them from juvenile detention.

Victimized girls often face more trauma and stigmatization by being held in juvenile detention facilities instead of diverted to appropriate community-based alternatives. Whether confinement is temporary or longer term, programs and personnel are often not equipped to deal with their unique needs and sometimes exacerbate the trauma. Reports are rampant of confined girls being emotionally, physically, and sexually abused, isolated, separated from their babies, unable to visit their family members regularly, and humiliated through common practices like pat downs. Detention centers need more comprehensive, gender-responsive, trauma-informed, culturally relevant services for girls. 

After release, girls, many of whom may already have been disconnected from their families and communities, need help through education, employment, and family and community support including programs to strengthen their families and assure them access to health and mental health services. Effective reentry plans should include school reenrollment, housing, job training, case management, and mentoring. All help reduce recidivism. We should all feel ashamed as the girls in this book talk about reentering detention multiple times and how these are generational patterns. This revolving door of individual and family confinement must end — now.

It is way past time for every adult to take responsibility for reducing the number of girls and boys behind bars through prevention and diversion programs and community supports both before and after detention. And it is way past time for adults of every race and income group to break our silence about the pervasive breakdown of moral, family, community and national values, to place our children first in our lives, to rebuild family and community, to model the behavior we want our children to learn, and to never give up on any child. We do not have a “child and youth problem” in America, but we have a profound adult problem. It is time for adults to address it and to give all of our children true justice: hope, opportunity, and love. 

Push for Progress: Children Cannot Wait

“We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow.’ His name is today.”
-- Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral

The President’s budget released this week proposes billions in critical new federal investments for 2016 and beyond to improve the life chances of millions of poor children. It also would prevent more harmful budget cuts in cost effective child investments while providing essential new investments to decrease the morally indefensible number of poor children (14.7 million, 6.5 million of them extremely poor) desperately in need of hope and help. 

So many children have lost ground as the trumped-up fear of excessive debt children did not cause has been used by some in Congress to cut safety net programs we know work. For example, the indiscriminate and unjust sequestration guillotine cut 57,000 children from Head Start and 100,000 low-income households from critical rent assistance. Yet Congress did nothing to curb hugely unfair tax loopholes disproportionately benefitting powerful and wealthy corporations and individuals while starving federal programs millions of poor children depend on to survive. Members of Congress in both parties must now join the President to help our nation move forward by protecting and investing in America’s neediest children and future.

The President’s budget proposal includes major increased investments in the critical early childhood years of rapid brain development which help prevent poverty. The most significant of the President’s new child investments would add $80 billion over 10 years for the Child Care and Development Fund to guarantee child care assistance to all low-income working parents with children under 4. Currently only 1 in 4 eligible children under 5 receives this crucial assistance. New investments in voluntary home visiting, Early Head Start/Child Care Partnerships, Head Start, and Pre-School for All grants (totalling $75 billion over 10 years) for low income 4-year-olds will all bolster child readiness for school. It is hard to find a better investment. Society reaps an $8 return for each dollar invested in high-quality early childhood programs and we cannot afford not to help children and decrease current and future costs. Members of Congress on all sides of the political aisle should put politics aside and build on the important 2014 bipartisan reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant to help ensure states implement the quality improvements that legislation requires and enable more children to benefit. 

There’s much other good news for children in the President’s budget which all Americans and all members of Congress should strongly support: 

• Four more years of funding for the successful bipartisan Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to ensure 8 million children in working families will continue to have access to high-quality, affordable, and effective child health coverage. If Congress takes no action, CHIP funding will run out this fall.
• A $1 billion boost for Title I education funding for poor children – a critical program children living in areas of concentrated poverty desperately need. Title I must include strong accountability measures to make sure poor and vulnerable children truly benefit.
• Funding to make permanent key improvements in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) scheduled to expire at the end of 2017. These two tax credits lifted 5 million children out of poverty in 2013. Making these improvements permanent would prevent one million children falling into poverty and 6.7 million falling deeper into poverty.
• New help for abused and neglected children and children in foster care including $1.4 billion over 10 years in new guaranteed funding for preventive services to help keep children safely in families and out of costlier foster care, promote family-based care for children with behavioral and mental health needs, and help American Indian children removed from families remain in their communities.
• An additional $1.8 billion for rental assistance for low-income families and youths aging out of foster care, including $512 million for restoring 67,000 housing choice vouchers lost from sequestration.

The President’s forward looking budget pays for his critical proposed new investments to alleviate child poverty and reverse harmful unjust cuts by eliminating egregious tax loopholes benefitting powerful corporations and the super-wealthy and other spending inefficiencies. Additionally, the President’s balanced approach would generate more than $1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. However, his laudable increased child investments still would not recoup lost funding for non-defense, non-entitlement programs which would still remain 15 percent below 2010 levels adjusting for inflation and population growth.

As Congress considers budget legislation in the coming weeks, I hope they will stop hurting and start helping our most vulnerable children. The President’s proposed new measures are giant steps towards cutting child poverty. The Children’s Defense Fund’s recent report Ending Child Poverty Now shows we can cut child poverty 60 percent – and Black child poverty 72 percent – immediately by investing just 2 percent more of the federal budget in existing programs that work including the EITC, the CTC, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), housing subsidies, child care subsidies, and subsidized jobs.

Children really do have only one childhood and it is right now. Protecting precious child lives and America’s future demands that we act immediately and move forward and not backwards. Let’s stand up to those who hurt children and dim America’s dream of becoming a just society for all.