A Single Spark

Release Date: January 22, 2016 

"As we marched down the street, I felt inspired that our scholars pulled together with pride and courage fighting for what they know to be true. I saw big smiles filled with pride. I also felt angry because of the disregard for scholars but motivated by their willingness to fight.” 

- Tyra Griffith, Urban Impact's CDF Freedom Schools® student-teacher

Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. should sharply remind us that the Civil Rights Movement should never just be chapters in history books. I was so proud of high school students from Seattle, Washington who learned how they could make a difference in the world around them. They took lessons from the Civil Rights Movement’s 1961 Freedom Rides when Blacks and Whites put their lives on the line to ride interstate buses into the segregated South. This bold student-led nonviolent action inspired a student-led action in 2015 that turned into a victory for many low-income Seattle students who need to ride city buses to get to school. This is the power of learning history and learning from history – the truth can set us free.

Seattle students, many from Rainier Beach High School, took part in the 2015 Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® program at two sites sponsored by Urban Impact, a local community-based organization. As part of a national day of social action, the students learned how they can use their voices to make policy change. Like the Freedom Riders, they realized they couldn’t count on riding the bus to get where they needed to go—most of all, to school—because they couldn’t afford it.

Rainier Beach High School students marching

Over 80 percent of children at Rainier Beach High School qualify for free or reduced price lunch. The city only provided transportation for middle and high school students who lived more than two miles away from school, which disproportionately impacted students at Rainier Beach and other high poverty schools. The hardships for students like sophomore Mariam Bayo dramatically illustrated the challenges. Mariam’s family couldn’t afford the $1.50 bus fare each way and her asthma made the nearly two mile walk to school especially difficult. She often got chest pains while walking and didn’t always have access to medicine. Often late for school, her grades suffered and by the end of her 9th grade year she was failing several classes.

Other students were concerned about walking through unsafe neighborhoods, especially following after-school activities after dark. So for their day of social action, 130 students marched to City Hall where Mariam and others testified to city leaders about why more children needed transit passes to get to school. The Seattle Transit Riders Union supported the children; one leader told the Seattle Times, “Fifteen dollars per week, or $54 for a monthly pass, is too much for low-income families to pay just to get their kids to school. For many low-income students, public transit means freedom.”

Mariam became part of the Seattle School District-approved pilot program at the start of the school year giving transit passes to 50 low-income students. With the bus pass in hand, Mariam was getting to school on time and her grades soared to all As and Bs. She and other students shared the impact the transit passes had made in their lives at a Town Hall style meeting they organized. The City Council then approved the 2016 budget including $1 million for bus passes for middle and high school students who are eligible for the federal free- or reduced-price lunch program and live one to two miles from their school. Mariam says, “Freedom Schools was the most amazing thing that happened to me ever.”

Communities and children across the country need to believe they can stay on the march towards justice, just as Mariam Bayo is doing. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be proud of the Seattle students’ actions to break down a barrier to children getting to school.

Keeping Children Healthy, In School, and Learning

Release Date: January 15, 2016 

Brandon, a six-year-old in the Houston Independent School District, had two working parents until his father was laid off. Brandon lost his health insurance when his father lost his job. Brandon’s mother quickly scrambled to try to enroll her son who has asthma in new coverage, but met some obstacles and didn’t know where to turn. Then the school district, which had been working with the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) and AASA (The School Superintendents Association), through a partnership supported by The Atlantic Philanthropies, stepped in and helped her find coverage for Brandon under the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). With his new health coverage, doctors discovered Brandon also had high blood pressure and prescribed medicine to control it. Now the school nurse monitors his blood pressure every day and Brandon is healthy and happy to be in school learning.

Watch Brandon's Story

This morning, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Acting Deputy Secretary Mary Wakefield on behalf of HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell and Acting U.S. Department of Education Secretary John King spoke from Brandon’s school district to encourage other districts across our country to take important steps to ensure children everywhere are in school each day healthy and ready to learn. They called on school districts to recognize the strong link between children’s health and academic performance and to forge deeper connections between health and education for students and families by increasing access to health insurance coverage and health care, creating school environments with physical and mental health supports to help students succeed, and strengthening coordination between health and education systems at the local and state levels. The Secretaries urged state and local health and education entities to collaborate around five action items:

1. Helping eligible students and family members enroll in health insurance;
2.  Providing and expanding Medicaid reimbursable health services in schools, including immunizations, health screenings and others;
3. Providing or expanding services that support at-risk students, including through Medicaid-funded case management;
4. Promoting healthy school practices through nutrition, physical activity, and health education; and
5. Building local partnerships and participating in hospital community needs assessments.
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The Departments of Health and Human Services and Education have created a toolkit of existing resources to support real action in states and communities to strengthen the link between health and education. CDF and AASA’s school-based child health outreach and enrollment model that links health enrollment to school enrollment is one the Secretaries highlight as a best practice to increase enrollment in health coverage for students and their families. After five years of piloting school-based child health outreach and enrollment in Texas, in 2007 CDF began working in partnership with AASA to introduce and expand health enrollment as a routine and ongoing part of school district operations. The model provides a basic question for districts to add to their school registration materials: “What type of medical insurance do you have for this child?” Parents who answer “none” are noted and able to receive information from school district staff on Medicaid, CHIP or other health coverage options. But it doesn’t stop there. Parents can receive help applying for or renewing coverage for their children and for themselves and are introduced to community partners who can help them successfully navigate the process.

CDF and AASA over the years have partnered with school districts in Texas, California, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi including urban, rural and suburban school systems serving elementary through high schools and hundreds of thousands of Black, Latino, Asian and White students. This work has gotten many children health coverage and led to an increased awareness among school superintendents, staff and parents about the important and positive connection between health and academic success. Many now see a link between chronic absences, poor health and lack of health coverage. When children with chronic conditions like asthma have health insurance allowing them regular access to doctors and needed treatment, they come back to school healthier just as Brandon has.

In one of these districts, the Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District (ECISD) in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, health coverage screening has been built into the daily operations of Parental Involvement Assistants, or PIAs. Each of the district’s 41 school campuses has a PIA who, among other responsibilities, calls absent students’ homes every morning to ask why students are missing school. The PIAs make a home visit that same day if they don’t reach anyone, about 80 visits each day. If a child is home sick, the PIA asks about their insurance status and, if the student lacks coverage, offers the parent assistance filling out the application. During a recent phone call, a mother told the PIA all three of her children were previously enrolled in Medicaid but were no longer covered. The mother, whose native language was not English, had received three notices about renewing coverage but hadn’t understood them, and had not been able to renew. The PIA helped her navigate the process to reenroll the children in Medicaid.

Sandra Rodriguez, the district’s PIA Coordinator, is especially excited they have a new school-based health center attached to the district headquarters to refer families to through a partnership with the Doctors Hospital at Renaissance. The clinic serves all students regardless of ability to pay and served about 2,000 children, parents, and school district staff in its first four months of operation. For many Edinburg families this is the first time they can receive care near their home, school, and work, and regardless of their immigration status. Thanks to additional support from another local health system, the 945-square-mile district will soon have two mobile clinics making scheduled visits to school campuses farther from the clinic site.

More students and families need these kinds of supports. It is critically important that school districts and community partners across the country respond to Acting Secretary King’s and Secretary Burwell’s call to action to connect children to needed health coverage and ensure they’re in school and ready to learn. As Superintendent Lillian Maldonado French of the Mountain View School District in El Monte, California puts it, “Being in school matters and if we can do something to make sure our kids are in school every day, then that’s what we need to do.”

Guns Leathalize Anger and Despair

Release Date: January 8, 2016 

“Every single year, more than 30,000 Americans have their lives cut short by guns—30,000. Suicides. Domestic violence. Gang shootouts. Accidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost brothers and sisters, or buried their own children. Many have had to learn to live with a disability, or learned to live without the love of their life.”

President Obama spoke movingly about the lives shattered by America’s gun violence epidemic on January 5 as he announced a series of new executive actions to reduce gun violence. These new measures will not prevent every shooting that snuffs out the lives of nearly seven children to gun violence daily; they will save many lives and help staunch the relentless plague of gun violence that terrorizes our nation’s homes, schools and communities.

The President’s executive actions clarify that for purposes of requiring background checks a person does not need to sell guns in a traditional storefront to be “engaged in the business” of selling guns. Some of those who conduct sales over the Internet or at gun shows will now be required to obtain a license and run background checks on potential purchasers or face stiff penalties. These steps, coupled with greater efficiency and effectiveness in our background check system, enforcement of existing gun laws, and new investments in mental health treatment and research into gun safety technologies, are long overdue. Legislative action to strengthen huge weaknesses in our nation’s gun laws is still required but the President's common-sense executive actions move us in the right direction.

Several measures highlight one of the key components of our gun violence crisis: that much gun violence begins at home. So many wrongly believe that gun violence happens mostly “out on the streets” and others believe owning a gun will protect their family from gun violence. The opposite is true: A gun in the home increases the risk of homicide, suicide, and accidental death.

Guns lethalize anger, domestic disputes, mental illness and despair. A gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher, suicide three to five times higher, and accidental death four times higher. The pro-gun lobby has created the fantasy of a gun as a homeowner’s perfect protection against a mythical intruder. In reality, each time a gun in the home injures or kills in self-defense, there are four unintentional shooting deaths or injuries, seven criminal assaults and homicides with a gun, and 11 completed or attempted gun suicides.

Suicides are the leading cause of gun deaths in America. In 2014, 21,334 adults, children and teens committed suicide with a gun compared to 10,945 gun homicides. Whites are most likely to die by gun suicide followed by American Indians and Alaska Natives. Whites were more than three times as likely as Blacks and nearly five times as likely as Hispanics to commit suicide by guns. In 2014, 929 children and teens committed suicide with a gun and 1,455 children and teens died in gun homicides.

Guns lethalize suicide attempts. Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Means Matter suicide prevention campaign explains, “Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk.” People who die by suicide are more likely to live in homes with guns. States with high gun ownership levels have higher suicide rates because they have more gun suicides while the non-firearm suicide rate is about equal across states. They sum it up simply: “What is it about guns? Guns are more lethal than other suicide means. They’re quick. And they’re irreversible. About 85 percent of attempts with a firearm are fatal: that’s a much higher case fatality rate than for nearly every other method.” Nine out of ten people who attempt suicide and survive do not go on to die of suicide later—but most people who use a gun for their first try do not get a second chance.

Guns can lethalize domestic violence. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence notes the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide 500 percent. CDF noted in its Amicus Brief with the American Academy of Pediatrics in the U.S. Supreme Court case U.S. v. Castleman, that even when it is not used to kill, a gun wielded by a domestic abuser increases the frequency of ongoing, nonfatal domestic abuse by increasing the abuser’s ability to control a victim; the ever-present threat of gun violence makes it more difficult for victims to leave their abusers. Children are severely impacted. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Castleman that domestic violence abusers are prohibited from possessing guns regardless of whether “violent force” is an element of the underlying offense.

In August 2015, Texas mother Valerie Jackson, her husband, and her six children, ages six through 13, were killed by a gun inside their home by her ex-partner, the oldest child’s father. The FBI defines a “mass murder” as an event in which four or more people are killed. By that definition the majority of “mass shootings” are cases of domestic violence and the majority of mass shooting victims are women and children. Valerie Jackson’s shooter was an ex-felon who had been arrested and charged for domestic violence against her in the past, and there was a warrant out for his arrest for a new charge of violence against her when he killed her and her entire family. He would not have been able to pass a background check to purchase the gun he used in the murders—but he avoided one by buying the gun online, one of the loopholes President Obama’s executive actions aim to help close.

We can do better. We must do better. President Obama said: “We know we can’t stop every act of violence, every act of evil in the world. But maybe we could try to stop one . . .” He echoes Nobel Literature Laureate Albert Camus’ words while speaking at a Dominican Monastery in 1948: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” Camus described our responsibility as human beings “if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it” and “to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents.”  “I continue,” he said “to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." And so must every one of us in our gun saturated nation which takes the life of a child or teen every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 every day, 48 every week, and more than 2,500 a year.

Whither America

Release Date: January 1, 2016 

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. . . . I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word[.]”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964

The start of this New Year finds America at an inflection point as wars and terrorism abroad are echoed in violence, suspicion, and fear at home. How will we meet the moment? Hundreds of organizations and individuals have signed on to the urgent message of the campaign We Are Better Than This: “We grieve the many lives that have been lost or painfully transformed in recent weeks through extreme acts of violence. And we are appalled by the surge of divisive rhetoric that sows the seeds of more violence to come. A dangerous tide of hatred, violence, and suspicion is rising in America—whether aimed at Arab and Muslim Americans, women and the places we seek health care, Black people, immigrants and refugees, or people just going about their daily lives. This tide is made more dangerous by easy access to guns. When has hate ever led to progress? Is this really what we want America to be? We are better than this.”

We are better than this. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian who died opposing Hitler’s holocaust, believed that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children. We flunk Bonhoeffer’s test every hour of every day in America as we let the violence of guns and the violence of poverty relentlessly stalk and sap countless child lives. A child or teen is killed by a gun every three and a half hours, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week. More than 15.5 million children are poor and children are the poorest age group in America—the world’s largest economy. And the younger children are the poorer they are. Children of color, already the majority of our youngest children, soon will be the majority of our children in 2020. Millions of them lack their basic needs for enough food, decent housing, health care and quality early childhood supports during their years of greatest brain development. And over six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, a majority of children of color are still waiting for a fair and equal chance to learn. A majority of all fourth and eighth grade public school students and more than 80 percent of Black and 73 percent of Hispanic students in these grades cannot read or compute at grade level and face dim futures as a jobless landscape looms. They also lack assurance that their lives matter and are at great risk of being sucked into a prison pipeline. Those of us who remember McCarthyism see familiar signs in the hateful rhetoric and hatred aimed at Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. Even children report being bullied and attacked and hearing hateful words. And the pervasive and relentless threat of violence and terror continues to attack and frighten children and adults from Syria to Paris to California and in our cities and rural areas.

There is another way. Once again, Dr. King’s words lead us there—through a world that often can feel suffocated by “starless midnight” to belief in a new day. He warned us that excessive materialism, militarism, racism, and poverty could be America’s undoing but that it was up to us to act and combat these evils. The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, introducing Dr. King to a Rabbinical Assembly shortly before he was assassinated, said: “Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States. God has sent him to us.” Heschel continued, “His mission is sacred…The situation of the poor in America is our plight, our sickness. To be deaf to their cry is to condemn ourselves.” Heschel believed, “Martin Luther King, Jr., is a voice, a vision, and a way. I call upon every Jew,” and I would add, every person of faith, “to harken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow his way. The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King.” I would add the world.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Dr. King also told us he had “the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” And he said: “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. . . . Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Let’s hear and decide that this is the voice we will follow into this New Year. And let us pray and act for an end to preventable poverty and violence in our nation beginning with our children.

A Christmas Prayer

Release Date: December 23, 2015 

This holy season as Christians honor and celebrate the birth of the world’s most famous poor baby born in a manger, I hope we all will pause to remember the 15.5 million invisible poor babies and children in our rich country who need our help to survive and thrive and reach their God-given potential. Together let us recommit ourselves to ending child poverty now. If we love America we must all stand tall against the excessive greed that tramples millions of the children entrusted to our care. Every child is a sacred gift and deserves just treatment in our nation and world.

Praying and Standing for Children

We pray and stand for children blessed by parents who care and for children without a parent or anyone who cares at all.

We pray and stand for children filled with joy and for children whose days and nights are joyless.

We pray and stand for children with hope and for children whose spirits have been dimmed and dashed.

We pray and stand for children high on play and study and laughter and for children high on pot, glue, cocaine, and ecstasy.

We pray and stand for our children for whom we pray every day and for children who have no one to pray them along life’s way.

We pray and stand for children poised by circumstance to soar and conquer life’s challenges and for children bogged down by the pain of survival.

We pray and stand for children who love to read and for children who can’t read at all, for children who learn with excitement and for children told by adults that they cannot achieve.

We pray and stand for children who expect and are helped to succeed and for children whom no one believes in or helps to succeed.

We pray that we will be a help and not a hindrance to children we call our own and to all the children You created who are part of our family too.

Why Are Children Less Valuable Than Guns in America? IT'S TIME TO PROTECT CHILDREN

Release Date: December 18, 2015

Three years after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut where a lone 20-year-old gunman wielding an assault weapon snuffed out 26 child and teacher lives, our nation has done shamefully little to protect children instead of guns. This week more than ten thousand people attended over 100 Orange Walks in 43 states to stand up and deliver a rallying cry that we must and can end gun violence in America, according to Moms Demand Action – a cry that must continue and get louder and louder until our tone deaf political leaders hear or are retired from office.

New data this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show 2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in our nation in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week. What is this moral                                                  perversity in our midst that values guns more than children and human life?

In the three years since Sandy Hook’s nightmare we have not passed even one common sense federal gun law to reduce gun violence and deaths and protect children from our out-of- control scourge of violence. Universal background checks work. The evidence is clear. The overwhelming majority of gun owners and non-gun owners support stricter background checks, yet the Congress has done nothing. How do we change this?  

Seventy-eight children under 5 died by guns last year – 30 more than the 48 law enforcement officers killed by guns in the line of duty. Is there no shame in the shooters or in the lawmakers who protect the shooters or in the industry who makes profits off the blood of children? Shouldn’t Republicans, Democrats, and Independents of every race, income, color and faith be able to agree that child gun deaths are a moral blight on our nation which we have the means but not the will to prevent and change course?

Last month our hearts at the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) were broken by the death of our extraordinarily generous, creative, and decades-long partner and board member Pat Fallon, cofounder of the award-winning Fallon Worldwide advertising agency. Some of his agency’s most searing images depicted the relentless carnage of gun violence that kills and maims thousands of children year after year. CDF began our antiviolence campaign in 1994 after Peter Hart Research Associates conducted intergenerational focus groups of Black youths and adults. We were shocked to learn their number one concern was gun violence: Black male youths didn’t believe they’d live to adulthood and Black parents saw gun violence as the number one threat to their children.

Then came Columbine with two White teen boys wearing trench coats who shot and killed 13 people and injured 21 others in a rampage at their school that shocked the nation. Shouldn’t it be illegal to sell and buy these weapons of war in America that turn our streets, schools, and workplaces into killing fields? Surely we are better than this. How can we let our lawmakers stand by and do nothing to stop the slaughter of innocents?  Since 1963, over three times more children and teens have died from guns in America than U.S. soldiers killed in action in wars abroad.

Pat Fallon and his creative colleagues did everything in their power to help bring us to our senses over the years to staunch the tide of gun violence with these and other powerful violence prevention campaigns urging us to value our children more than our guns. Why is a child’s right to live less important than a gunman’s right to kill and the gun manufacturers’ profits?

Children are certainly not the only ones in danger in our gun-saturated nation which accounts for less than 5 percent of the global population but owns between 35 to 50 percent of all civilian-owned guns in the world. Recent estimates of U.S. civilian gun ownership are as high as 310 million — about one gun for each person. U.S. military and law enforcement agencies possess approximately 4 million guns. Isn’t there something horribly wrong with this picture? A gun in the home makes the likelihood of homicide three times higher, suicide three to five times higher, and accidental death four times higher. For each time a gun in the home injures or kills in self-defense, there are 11 completed and attempted gun suicides, seven gun criminal assaults and homicides, and four unintentional shooting deaths or injuries. Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native children and teens are disproportionately likely to die from a gun.

These horrendous facts are not acts of God. They are our indefensible choices as Americans. We must urgently push policymakers to confront and end our national gun violence epidemic as the huge public health crisis it is and there are some steps we can all take now:

• End the federal ban on gun research and fund research on effective gun violence prevention strategies. Why is the National Rifle Association (NRA) so afraid of the truth and why do our lawmakers and voters capitulate to NRA bullying? Almost 20 years ago Congress blocked the CDC’s gun research funding by 95 percent. The agency’s budget that year was cut by the exact amount provided the previous year to study prevention of gun injuries and fatalities. Similar restrictions were put on research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2011. Public health professionals continue to believe studying our epidemic gun violence crisis will lead to new understandings of its root causes and possible breakthroughs in new approaches to reduce the daily death toll caused by guns. This is the same process that occurred after focused research on automobile deaths in the 20th century. In 2013, President Obama signed an executive order clarifying that the CDC and NIH are not prohibited from studying gun violence and included $10 million in funding to study prevention of gun injuries and fatalities. That funding was never approved by Congress. Over the years, some academic institutions and organizations have stepped in to fund some excellent research but a much more coordinated and concentrated research effort is crucial to make gun violence reduction one of the first major public health goals of the 21st century. It is time to fire the NRA as our head of national security and of our national public health research agenda. Even former Representative Jay Dickey (R-AR), author of the current language banning gun violence research recently noted that “doing nothing is no longer an acceptable solution.”

• Continue to broaden the range of supporters for effective gun prevention action at the federal, state, and local levels. Transforming change is slow and very very hard. It requires dogged, sustained effort from a critical mass of determined citizens. We cannot stay numb, cowed or intimidated by bullies who value profits over human life. Do not let your passion for stopping relentless gun violence wane however long it takes. Insist political leaders support common sense universal background checks including checks on private and internet sales. Restore the assault weapon ban and limit the size of ammunition clips. Require that gun owners carry liability insurance. Promote the development of smart guns; and require guns be stored unloaded and locked in the home. And we must stop guns being the only unregulated consumer product in our nation while killing tens of thousands of children and adults every year.

• Pledge to ASK about guns in the home where your children visit. Make clear that you will not let your child play in a house with unlocked guns just as you would not let your child ride in a car without a seatbelt. One in three homes with children in the United States has a gun. If you don’t own a gun, one of your child’s friends’ families likely does. It may be awkward to ask about guns in the home but it may help save a child’s life. More than 19 million parents and grandparents have taken the Asking Saves Kids (ASK) pledge promoted by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the American Academy of Pediatrics to ask about guns in the homes where their children play. Join them today and promote this important message in your community and on social media.

• Divest in gun companies. Don’t invest in violence and death. Are you one of the many Americans whose retirement plans include gun manufacturers’ stock? There are tens of millions of Americans with 401Ks. Let’s ask and check now to see whether our 401K retirement funds are invested in gun and ammunition companies and make a change if they are. Let’s ask if our religious, philanthropic, nonprofit organizations and universities with endowments are supporting gun violence through investments. Learn more.

In this season when Christians profess to believe God entered history as a poor child seeking peace in our world, let us protect children, not guns. As tireless fighter Pat Fallon reminded us—we can and must do better.

The Education Inequality Struggle

This has been a hard year for poor children and children of color in a gridlocked and cantankerous Congress. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) replacing the No Child Left Behind Act was enacted after gutting a strong federal role in education policy designed to protect these children and jeopardizing their opportunity for a fair and adequate education to prepare them for work in our globalizing economy. Over the past 50 years under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act too many states violated their responsibility to serve their poor and non-White children equitably, did not comply with the law and misused huge amounts of the funds intended for poor children for other purposes. With the loss of federal accountability in the new Act, I hope we will not see the mistakes of the past repeated and poor children fall further behind.

In 1969 the Children’s Defense Fund’s parent body the Washington Research Project and the Legal Defense Fund conducted a thorough study of how funds from Title I of the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act were being spent through on-the-ground monitoring and examination of federal audit reports from states. In our report, Title I ESEA: Is It Helping Poor Children?, we answered a resounding “no” as states widely used federal money as general state aid for all their children without targeting it to eligible children most in need, sometimes to maintain still segregated and unequal schools, and squandered money intended to lift achievement levels of poor children on things like swimming pools in suburban White schools.

Massive and continuing state and local violations of accountability and poor achievement levels for the neediest children resulted in passage during the George W. Bush Administration of the No Child Left Behind Act with bipartisan support including Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman George Miller — which attempted to build in a much needed stronger federal accountability role. The new Every Student Succeeds Act begins a new era but without needed federal accountability and relying on hopes that all states will fulfill their crucial responsibility to educate all their children fairly and prepare them for work and life. To ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, all of us — every parent, child and community advocate who cares about our nation’s future — will have to work very very hard.

It is nation threatening when we look at how our children in public schools are performing in the fourth and eighth grades in 2015 and see more than 75 percent of lower income children, more than 80 percent of Black children and more than 73 percent of Latino children cannot read or compute at grade level. What is a child going to do in a competitive globalizing world if he cannot read and compute at very basic levels, is unable to graduate from high school, or is shunted into a Cradle to Prison Pipeline™ accelerated by unjust zero tolerance school discipline and misdirected special education policies?

There is some good news in the new Act. Thanks to the leadership of Senator Patty Murray and Representative Bobby Scott, working with Senator Lamar Alexander and Representative John Kline, some of the most harmful proposals were excluded including one that would have diverted Title I funds from high poverty to low poverty schools — the portability provision. The new law requires states to continue to track the performance of all children and subgroups of children by race, ethnicity, disability, and English language learners, with data breakdowns by gender. While states will set their own goals and timelines for academic progress, their plans will require federal approval. States will be required to help fix schools where student test scores are in the lowest five percent, where achievement gaps are greatest, and in all high schools where fewer than 67 percent of students graduate on time using evidence-based programs approved by the U.S. Department of Education.

The Act takes significant positive steps to help students in foster care who have not had targeted attention before by state and local education agencies. Although public child welfare agencies have had obligations for ensuring educational stability for these children for a number of years, the new law helps ensure their school stability and educational success. This should help prevent students from needlessly changing schools — falling further and further behind with each move. It ensures they can remain in their same school when they enter foster care and change placements unless it is not in their best interest. It also requires these children be immediately enrolled in a new school without the typically required records when a school change is necessary to eliminate gaps in their education, and encourages the prompt transfer of records when a child in foster care enters a new school. Both school districts and child welfare agencies must have reciprocal points of contact for students in foster care, and both systems must have a point of contact for them at the state level. Local education and child welfare agencies also must collaborate to develop and implement a plan for transportation for those students who will need it to remain in their school of origin. New data on high school graduation rates for students in foster care will help track their progress.

There are important improvements in the Act for more than 1.3 million children and youth experiencing homelessness also focusing on school stability and success. State and local education agencies must ensure their Title I plans promote identification, enrollment, attendance and school stability of these children. Local education agencies must reserve a portion of their education funding to support homeless children. State report cards must include dis-aggregated information on graduation rates and other achievement measures for these children. The new Act increases by more than 20 percent the authorized funding level for the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Program which offers critical protections for homeless children.

As hard as it has been for poor and other vulnerable children to move ahead and to make adequate progress even with federal accountability, it will be even harder without it. Parents, community leaders, public officials and child advocates must hold state, district and school leaders accountable for establishing and meeting performance targets for children. They must join with state and local education agencies to insist on increased resources to address the needs of the most vulnerable children. Child advocates and parents must ask for and review state and local school plans and notify the U.S. Department of Education and local media if they think school districts are neglecting some children or violating the new law. At stake are millions of children’s hopes, lives and futures. Those unable to read and compute and graduate from high school are being sentenced to social and economic death. They deserve better in the world’s biggest economy.

- See more at: http://www.childrensdefense.org/newsroom/child-watch-columns/child-watch-documents/TheEducationInequalityStruggle.html#sthash.4IQYhq3l.dpuf