Thursday, July 9, 2020
A DECADE OF RESEARCH ON THE RICH-POOR DIVIDE IN EDUCATION
By Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report.
July 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/a-decade-of-research-on-the-rich-poor-divide-in-education/
Many Studies Show Large And Growing Inequities.
Americans like to believe that education can be a great equalizer, allowing even the poorest child who studies hard to enter the middle class. But when I looked at what academic researchers and federal data reports have said about the great educational divide between the rich and poor in our country, that belief turns out to be a myth. Basic education, from kindergarten through high school, only expands the disparities.
In 2015, during the Obama administration, the federal education department issued a report that showed how the funding gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade between 2001-2 and 2011-12. That meant that the richest 25 percent of school districts spent $1,500 more per student, on average than the poorest 25 percent of school districts.
I wish I could have continued to track this data between rich and poor schools to see if school spending had grown fairer. But the Trump administration crunched the numbers differently. When it issued a report in 2018, covering the 2014-15 school year, it found that the wealthiest 25 percent of districts spent $450 more per student than the poorest 25 percent.
That didn’t mean there was a giant 70 percent improvement from $1,500. The Trump administration added together all sources of funds, including federal funding, which amounts to 8 percent of total school spending, while the Obama administration excluded federal funds, counting only state and local dollars, which make up more than 90 percent of education funds. The Obama administration argued at the time that federal funds for poor students were intended to supplement local funds because it takes more resources to overcome childhood poverty, not to create a level playing field.
Rather than marking an improvement, there were signs in the Trump administration data that the funding gap between rich and poor had worsened during the Great Recession if you had compared the figures apples to apples, either including or excluding federal funds. In a follow-up report issued in 2019, the Trump administration documented that the funding gap between rich and poor schools had increased slightly to $473 per student between the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years.
It’s not just a divide between rich and poor but also between the ultra-rich and everyone else. In 2020, a Pennsylvania State University researcher documented how the wealthiest school districts in America — the top 1 percent — fund their schools at much higher levels than everyone else and are increasing their school spending at a faster rate. The school funding gap between a top 1 percent district (mostly white suburbs) and an average-spending school district at the 50th percentile widened by 32 percent between 2000 and 2015, the study calculated. Nassau County, just outside New York City on Long Island, has the highest concentration of students who attend the best-funded public schools among all counties in the country. Almost 17 percent of all the top 1 percent of students in the nation live in this one county.
Funding inequities are happening in the context of increased poverty in our schools. In 2013, I documented how the number of high poverty schools had increased by about 60 percent to one out of every five schools in 2011 from one out of every eight schools in 2000. To win this unwelcome designation, 75 percent or more of an elementary, middle, or high school’s students lived in families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. It’s since gotten worse. In the most recent federal report, covering the 2016-17 school year, one out of every four schools in America was classified as high poverty.
It’s not just that poverty is becoming more concentrated in certain schools; more students in the school system are poor. In 2014, I documented a 40 percent jump in the number of school-aged children living in poverty between 2000 and 2012 from one out of every seven children to one out of every five students. In the most recent report, for the 2016-17 school year, the poverty rate declined from 21 percent in 2010 to 18 percent in 2017. About 13 million children under the age of 18 were in families living in poverty.
When you break the data down by race, there are other striking patterns. One-third of all Black children under 18 were living in poverty in 2016-17, compared with a quarter of Hispanic children. White and Asian children have a similar poverty rate of 11 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Sociologists like Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California have built a body of evidence that school segregation by income is what’s really getting worse in America, not school segregation by race. But it’s a complicated argument because Black and Latino students are more likely to be poor and less likely to be rich. So the two things — race and poverty — are intertwined.
In 2019, Reardon studied achievement gaps in every school in America and found that the difference in poverty rates between predominantly Black and predominantly white schools explains the achievement gaps we see and why white schools tend to show higher test scores than Black schools. When white and Black schools have the same poverty rates, Reardon didn’t see a difference in academic achievement. The problem is that Black students are more often poor and attending schools with more poor students. And other than a handful of high-performing charter schools in a few cities, he couldn’t find examples of academic excellence among schools with a high-poverty student body.
“It doesn’t seem that we have any knowledge about how to create high-quality schools at scale under conditions of concentrated poverty,” said Reardon. “And if we can’t do that, then we have to do something about segregation. Otherwise, we’re consigning Black and Hispanic and low-income students to schools that we don’t know how to make as good as other schools. The implication is that you have got to address segregation.”
Previous Proof Points columns cited in this column:
The number of high-poverty schools increases by about 60 percent
Poverty among school-age children increases by 40 percent since 2000
The gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade
Data show segregation by income (not race) is what’s getting worse in schools
In 6 states, school districts with the neediest students get less money than the wealthiest
An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that poverty is the biggest hurdle
Rich schools get richer: School spending analysis finds widening gap between top 1% and the rest of us
THE WORLD CAN SHOW HOW PHARMA MONOPOLIES AREN’T THE ONLY WAY TO FIGHT COVID-19
By Prabir Purkayastha, MR Online.
July 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/the-world-can-show-how-pharma-monopolies-arent-the-only-way-to-fight-covid-19/
After His Disastrous Handling Of The COVID-19 Epidemic, Trump Is Trying To Improve His Waning Electoral Chances By Reserving All Of Gilead’s Stock Of Remdesivir.
The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world. After making America sick again, Trump is trying to compensate for his administration’s failure by buying Gilead’s production for the next three months for the U.S., leaving nothing for the rest of the world.
This makes it all the more urgent for India and other countries that featured prominently in previous drug license fights against Big Pharma in the U.S. and around the world for more than a decade to break Gilead’s patent and issue compulsory licenses to manufacture the drug locally. The patent laws of most countries and the World Trade Organization’s 2001 Doha Declaration have clear provisions for compulsory licensing during a health emergency or an epidemic. COVID-19 obviously qualifies on both accounts.
On July 1, the U.S. reached a point of more than 50,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day, about 23 percent of the 218,000 new cases worldwide that day, making it the global leader on how not to fight the COVID-19 epidemic. As of July 1, Brazil and India were in second and third place, respectively, for new cases.
Remdesivir is the only drug that in drug trials has shown some benefit in fighting the virus infection. Remdesivir works by reducing the replication of the virus in the human body, and this helps in shortening the hospital stay of the patient by about 25 percent. If the patient progresses to a more serious stage, needing oxygen support or ventilation, remdesivir is of little help. Here, anti-inflammatory drugs like dexamethasone become important. Dexamethasone has shown efficacy treating COVID-19 patients in clinical trials, and, unlike remdesivir, it works by reducing lung inflammation arising out of the infection, rather than by fighting the infection itself. Dexamethasone is off-patent and is widely available at low costs.
But if remdesivir cuts down the infectious period, not only is it beneficial to the patients who receive it, but it is also useful for society. By reducing the patient’s infectious period, it lowers the rate of virus transmission.
I have argued previously that after the battle for access to cheap AIDS drugs, the next big battle would be fought over COVID-19 medicines and vaccines. In the World Health Assembly, the U.S. was the only country that opposed the resolution that all medicines and vaccines should be put in a common patent pool, and accessible to all countries at reasonable costs.
We now know the reason for the U.S. opposition. It wants control over medicines and vaccines for the fight against the pandemic. One reason is to make U.S. citizens feel that Trump is looking after them by providing medicines, even if his administration has failed miserably in the fight against COVID-19. The second reason is that by controlling the medicine for the rest of the world, Trump can bargain with them and try to regain the global hegemon status that the U.S. has lost.
With this step, the U.S. has also made clear its intention regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The U.S. has backed a set of five companies with a $13 billion purse, as a part of its Operation Warp Speed to support vaccine development. One of these five is Moderna, a U.S. biotech company, and one of the frontrunners in the current vaccine trials. The other four backed by the U.S. are AstraZeneca (in consortium with Oxford University); Johnson & Johnson; Merck; and Pfizer with BioNTech. If any of these vaccines succeed and others do not, we can expect the U.S. will guard that vaccine as it is doing with COVID-19 medicine in the case of remdesivir. Fortunately for the world, there are a total of 17 vaccines in the World Health Organization’s list of ongoing clinical trials, and another 132 in the pipeline.
Apart from the U.S. buying up almost all of the remdesivir stock, the other issue in making remdesivir accessible to those who need it is the price at which Gilead is selling this drug. For U.S. patients, the cost is about $3,000 for a typical five-day course (which consists of six vials of the drug—two on the first day, and one per day after that). Gilead has granted a handful of licenses to drug manufacturers in other countries—including three Indian companies, Cipla, Hetero and Jubilant—to sell generic remdesivir. This means a full course of remdesivir to Indian patients will cost about $400 (at $66 per vial, for six vials).
What is the actual cost of a course of remdesivir? According to an article in the Journal of Virus Eradication by Hill et al in April, the active pharmaceutical ingredient for one day’s treatment should not cost more than $1. If we add to that the cost of making it into the typical five-day course of six injections, the total cost should not be more than $6. Calculations by two authors from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review in the U.S. use Hill’s data to estimate that the price of remdesivir for a full course of treatment (they use a longer course of 10 days) in the U.S. should be less than $10.
Why should a full course of remdesivir, costing less than $10 to produce, be priced at $3,000, or 300 times its cost of production, in the U.S.? Even at Gilead’s concessional price of $400 for India, it is still 40 times the cost of its production! Gilead’s argument is that because its medicine decreases the duration of hospitalization, it saves COVID-19 patients about $12,000 each in hospital bills—and by charging only one-fourth of that, even if it is 300 times the cost of production, Gilead is doing the customers a big favor.
As we know from the results of the clinical trials, remdesivir fights the virus, but if the patient becomes seriously ill, it does not have a statistically significant impact on mortality rates. If it did, Gilead’s price probably would have factored in lifetime earnings saved by remdesivir, and its price would probably have been even 10 times higher!
But even if remdesivir becomes significantly cheaper, it is uncertain that it can get to countries outside the U.S. thanks to the U.S.’s plan to buy almost all of Gilead’s stock of the drug. So what can the rest of the world do? It may need to prepare to fight a long battle, as India and other countries did during the AIDS epidemic against the U.S. and its drug cartel allies like Switzerland, France, the UK and Germany.
Big Pharma priced AIDS drugs around $10,000-15,000 for a year’s worth of treatment in the U.S. and Europe, and a ‘concessional’ price of $4,000 for poor countries. Indian companies were manufacturing the generic version of these drugs at a fraction of these prices, but countries who wanted to import AIDS drugs from India faced lawsuits and political pressure from the U.S.
This battle was fought for nearly a decade. In the World Trade Organization’s Doha Round in 2001, the Doha Declaration accepted that in the case of a health emergency or an epidemic, any country has the right to issue a compulsory license for producing lifesaving drugs. And the license to produce the drug could be issued even to a company outside the country’s borders. Indian generic drug manufacturer Cipla could then supply the AIDS drugs at $350 for a year’s course to a number of countries, which would otherwise have been completely bankrupted by patented drugs’ higher prices—or else they would see their AIDS patients die in large numbers without medicines.
The victory to secure cheap generic AIDS drugs sets a precedent for the current pandemic. COVID-19 has already killed an estimated half a million and infected more than 10 million. No one can dispute that is both a health emergency and a pandemic. The remedy of using a compulsory license already exists in most countries’ patent laws and in the Doha Declaration.
Why, then, are other countries not starting the manufacture of remdesivir? Are they hoping that Gilead and the U.S. will behave better than they did earlier during the AIDS epidemic? Or are they afraid of the threat of retaliatory sanctions from the U.S.?
Every year, the U.S. Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) issues a Special 301 Report that it has used to threaten trade sanctions against countries that don’t comply with its patents. India figures prominently in this report year after year, for daring to issue a compulsory license in 2012 to Natco to sell the cancer drug nexavar for less than 3 percent of Bayer’s price of more than $65,000 a year. After India issued the compulsory license on Nexavar, Marijn Dekkers, the CEO of Bayer, said, “We did not develop this medicine for Indians… We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.”
In April, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi buckled under Trump’s threat and exported hydroxychloroquine to the U.S. even though it was under an export ban at that time. Will he—and the leaders of other countries—be willing to stand up to the U.S. on remdesivir? Or will they agree with Trump that remdesivir should be reserved for only U.S. patients, even if they have the capacity to produce it for their people?
WHY DID THE BUREAU OF PRISONS IMPOSE A NATIONAL LOCKDOWN?
By Natalia Schuurman, AFGJ.org.
July 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/why-did-the-bureau-of-prisons-impose-a-national-lockdown/
It Started Days After The Murder Of George Floyd.
Following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, a nationwide uprising of unprecedented proportions has swept the U.S. in thousands of cities and towns, large and small, across all 50 states. This surge of mass resistance around issues of racial injustice, occurring against the backdrop of a major public health crisis and increasingly deteriorating economic conditions, has laid bare the failure of our capitalist system to protect working class communities of color. In addition to facing a much higher possibility of being endangered by an encounter with law enforcement, these communities are also coping with disproportionately high rates of unemployment and COVID-19 contagion.
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Instead of providing just social and economic solutions, our political institutions have mobilized the National Guard to militarize our streets in at least 24 states in order to help police quell the unrest. So far, police have arrested tens of thousands nationwide on “protest-related” charges. A handful of protestors are now facing lifelong prison sentences for various charges associated with their attacking of police cars, while law enforcement continues to use violence and “less than lethal” deadly force against protestors, medics, journalists, and bystanders alike.
This most recent wave of state-sanctioned violence carried out by law enforcement against the civilian population has made very clear how the repressive U.S. state apparatus working under the political domination of a capitalist oligarchy continues to internally intervene in mass civil unrest when material conditions create explosive socioeconomic inequities and breed widespread public insecurity.
Less evident is the significance of the national lockdown swiftly put in place by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for the first time in 25 years in response to the eruption of nationwide civil unrest, as word has gotten out that the brutal repression of anti-racist protests by law enforcement officials on the streets is drawing solidarity from the incarcerated population within our federal prisons and detention centers.
On June 1, the BOP announced that its facilities would begin operating under an “enhanced modified operating model” through the enforcement of “additional, temporary security measures” to “ensure the safety of staff and inmates.” This is an extension of what staff and union officials have called a federal “modified lockdown” already put in place to promote social distancing and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Unsurprisingly, these “modified operations” have failed to implement basic precautionary measures needed to trace and contain the spread of the virus. Prisoners–the disproportionate majority of which are poor people of color–continue to be confined in overcrowded and extremely unsanitary facilities. Meanwhile, arrests, imprisonments, and releases without testing have continued throughout the pandemic and have undoubtedly contributed to the spread of the disease to their communities.
This criminal mistreatment of prisoners throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating unlivable conditions and fueling unrest already taking place within federal prisons for months now–most notably in Kansas, Ohio, and Mississippi. The full-fledged national lockdown currently in place (as of the time this was written)–which restricts inmate internal movement, suspends social and legal visits, and is encouraging a massive rise in solitary confinement of prisoners speaks to the BOP’s concern that a nationwide uprising against racial injustice could be making its way into one of the most foundational institutions of race and class oppression: the prison system.
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Prison rebellions have historically coincided with uprisings against deteriorating material conditions and resistance to racial injustice in wider society. The last time the BOP imposed a national prison lockdown was 25 years ago, when a series of rebellions from within four widely separated federal prisons known as the “October Rebellion” erupted. Prisoners were unified against the racial injustice evident in the imposition and execution of prison sentences related to drug possession charges. The trigger was the U.S. Congress’ refusal to reduce crack cocaine sentences to parity with sentences for the more expensive powder cocaine. This decision enabled a skyrocketing in “zero tolerance” policing, arrests, and mass incarceration of poor people of color in possession of the cheaper form of the drug who faced prison sentences 100 times longer than wealthy white people in possession of powder cocaine.
The strength of solidarity between protestors and prisoners during this historical moment sheds light on how the struggle to end police brutality continues to intersect with the struggle to end mass incarceration. “Tough on crime” policing and mass incarceration go hand-in-hand as functions of a racist criminal justice system designed to uphold the social order.
The police brutality we’re seeing today is a legacy of the racist “zero-tolerance” policing introduced by the Clinton Administration, which has enabled the skyrocketing in policing, arrests, and mass incarceration of disproportionately people of color from poor inner-city communities. Working class people of color are more likely to be targeted by police, not only for subversive actions but also for commonplace behaviors deemed undesirable by the state (such as possession of narcotics, drunkenness, petty thefts, or begging). Before Derek Chauvin put George Floyd in a chokehold and murdered him, he had planned to arrest him for selling loose cigarettes illegally on the streets and using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy the pack of cigarettes. Floyd’s murder is emblematic of the risk people of color face when they are forced to interact with law enforcement, particularly within urban working class communities. It follows they’re also more likely to be convicted by the justice system and incarcerated by the state as the penalization for having allegedly wronged society as a whole.
Who’s actually wronged society at large? The ultimate responsibility falls on the ruling economic class, which has capitalized on yet another business opportunity created by mass incarceration: the industrial-scale production of maximum security prisons, the provision of prison services, and forced prison labor for the profit of private prison contractors.
The established punitive approach to “criminal justice” deliberately falls short of tackling root problems of social rupture and public insecurity within and outside of U.S. borders: the systemic dismantling of the welfare state, reduction of social benefits, and continued impoverishment and dispossession–all harmful byproducts of the expansion of neoliberal economic policies pushing sectors of the poor to the margins of society.
Just as police brutality and mass incarceration go hand-in-hand as functions of the repressive U.S. state apparatus, so too does the resistance to police brutality and resistance to mass incarceration in the struggle to decolonize society. Wealth redistribution and the abolition of the class system, as anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon argues, are necessary conditions for decolonization, but likely to fail if attempted within the framework of a fundamentally oppressive political system backed by the violent state apparatus. The defunding of law enforcement institutions is an important first step for depriving the settler-colonial capitalist oligarchy of its monopoly over the use of violence, as well as the dismantling of the most foundational institution for the systematic perpetuation of race and class-based oppression: the prison-industrial complex. As Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, “the colonist has but one recourse: force or whatever is left of it.” It’s time to take away that force.
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BOLIVIAN POLLS SHOW SOCIALIST CANDIDATE TO WIN ELECTIONS IN FIRST ROUND
By Telesur English.
July 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/bolivian-polls-show-socialist-candidate-to-win-elections-in-first-round/
The U.S.-backed, interim president Jeanine Añez only has 13 percent of the voting intention.
The Latin America Strategic Center for Geopolitics (CELAG) Tuesday published the results of a survey according to which the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) presidential candidate Luis Arce would get 41.9 percent of the votes in the upcoming elections in September.
This percentage of popular support would allow him to win the elections in the first round, far exceeding the Bolivian right-wing candidate, Carlos Mesa, who would barely get 26.8 percent of the vote.
The coup-born regime leader Jeanine Añez, who self-proclaimed herself as interim president and also wants to participate as a candidate, has half the vote intention as Mesa.
The CELAG study also reports that only 8.5 percent of those interviewed consider that the pandemic and its economic effects have not affected them.
Meanwhile, nearly 40 percent of respondents reported that they have stopped having an income.
Two out of three respondents said they were in favor of creating new taxes to tax the income of the richest people and companies, a position consistent with the proposal to suspend the payment of the country’s foreign debt.
The survey also shows three out of four Bolivians conceive of US President Donald Trump in a negative way.
Warming oceans deter more fish from spawning
July 9th, 2020, by Tim Radford
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/warming-oceans-deter-more-fish-from-spawning/
When the moment to mate arrives, fish like to play it cool. So warming oceans create special problems for the generation game.
LONDON, 9 July, 2020 – German scientists now know why so many fish are so vulnerable to ever-warming oceans. Global heating imposes a harsh cost at the most critical time of all: the moment of spawning.
“Our findings show that, both as embryos in eggs and as adults ready to mate, fish are far more sensitive to heat than in their larval stage or as sexually mature adults outside the mating season,” said Flemming Dahlke, a marine biologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute at Bremerhaven.
“On the global average, for example, adults outside the mating season can survive in water that’s up to 10°C warmer than adults ready to mate, or fish eggs, can.”
The finding – if it is confirmed by other research – should clear up some of the puzzles associated with fish numbers. There is clear evidence, established repeatedly over the decades, that fish are responding to climate change.
But almost three fourths of the planet is blue ocean, and at depth is responding far more slowly than the land surface to global heating fuelled by fossil fuel exploitation that releases greenhouse gases.
Nearing the brink
Since fish in the temperate zones already experience a wide variation in seasonal water temperatures, it hasn’t been obvious why species such as cod have shifted nearer the Arctic, and sardines have migrated to the North Sea.
But marine creatures are on the move, and although there are other factors at work, including overfishing and the increasingly alarming changes in ocean chemistry, thanks to ever-higher levels of dissolved carbon dioxide, temperature change is part of the problem.
The latest answer, Dr Dahlke and his colleagues report in the journal Science, is that many fish may already be living near the limits of their thermal tolerance.
The temperature safety margins during the moments of spawning and embryo might be very precise, and over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, marine and freshwater species have worked out just what is best for the next generation. Rapid global warming upsets this equilibrium.
“Adults outside the mating season can survive in water that’s up to 10°C warmer than adults ready to mate, or fish eggs, can”
The Bremerhaven scientists looked at experiments, observations and recorded data for the life cycles of 694 marine and freshwater species, to decide that oxygen supply is the key decider of reproductive success. Warmer waters carry less dissolved oxygen. Embryo fish have no gills: they cannot simply take in deeper breaths.
Fish about to mate are busy producing extra mass in the form of sperm and egg cells: this additional body mass also needs oxygen. Even at lower temperatures, piscine cardiovascular systems are under stress.
So the reasoning follows that, if global heating continues, climate change and rising water temperatures are likely to affect the reproduction of perhaps 60% of all fish species.
“Some species might successfully manage this change,” Dr Dahlke said.
“But if you consider the fact that fish have adapted their mating patterns to specific habitats over extremely long timeframes, and have tailored their mating cycles of specific ocean currents and food sources, it has to be assumed that being forced to abandon their normal spawning areas will mean major problems for them.”
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