Cato Institute Reputation Under Siege by Koch Brothers!

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that Charles Koch, a Cato Institute founder, is threatening the Institute’s  reputation for independent research.

“A rift with one of its founding members — the billionaire conservative Charles Koch — is threatening the institute’s identity and independence, its leaders say, and is exposing fault lines over Mr. Koch’s aggressive and well-financed brand of Republican politics.

The rift has its roots, Cato officials said, in a long-simmering feud over efforts by Mr. Koch and his brother David Koch to install their own people on the institute’s 16-member board and to establish a more direct pipeline between Cato and the family’s Republican political outlets, including groups that Democrats complain have mounted a multimillion-dollar assault on President Obama. Tensions reached a new level with a lawsuit filed last week by the Kochs against Cato over its governing structure.”

This is sad but typical of the Koch Brothers.  It is unfortunate for the Cato Institute but if you play in the mud, you get dirty.

Tony

 

Black Students Especially Boys Face More Discipline in Public Schools – USDOE Reports in New Study!

Dear Commons Community,

New data to be released later this week from the United States Department of Education (USDOE) indicate that black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students.   Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.  One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

The New York Times reported that:

“The USDOE began gathering data on civil rights and education in 1968, but the project was suspended by the Bush administration in 2006. It has been reinstated and expanded to examine a broader range of information, including, for the first time, referrals to law enforcement, an area of increasing concern to civil rights advocates who see the emergence of a school-to-prison pipeline for a growing number of students of color…

The data also showed that schools with a lot of black and Hispanic students were likely to have relatively inexperienced, and low-paid, teachers. On average, teachers in high-minority schools were paid $2,251 less per year than their colleagues elsewhere. In New York high schools, though, the discrepancy was more than $8,000, and in Philadelphia, more than $14,000.”

Arne Duncan will announce the results at Howard University today after which the data will become publicly available  at ocrdata.ed.gov

Tony