• Latinos, hit hard by job losses, are making strong comeback, By Don Lee, February 5, 2012, Los Angeles Times: “After scraping by on handyman jobs for a year, Bert Qintana figured he’d have to leave his wife and teenage son at their home near Taos, N.M., and find work elsewhere. Then Qintana got a call last month from Chevron Mining, which runs a mine 20 miles away. Would he be interested in hauling muck from the molybdenum mine for $17.05 an hour? He leaped at the offer. ‘Thank God,’ said Qintana, 45, a Latino who had worked as a general contractor. ‘I was able to hang in there and not have to move.’ About a dozen other workers, most of them Latino, also were hired. Like Qintana, many Latinos with ties to the home building industry got slammed by the recession, which wiped out about 2 million construction jobs. But now, as the economic rebound picks up a bit of steam, Latinos are scoring bigger job gains than most other demographic groups and proving to be a bright spot in the fledgling recovery…”
• For some black women, economy and willingness to aid family strains finances, By Ylan Q. Mui and Chris L. Jenkins, February 5, 2012, Washington Post: “The Great Recession carried special pain for black women like Jane Ladson. She had always been the one her family turned to when they needed help, and she didn’t hesitate to give it. She helped pay for weddings and rent. She made room for her nephew when her brother died of AIDS. And even now in her 50s, she took in a baby that wasn’t her own. But help was easier to give when the economy was booming and Ladson was bringing home $4,000 a month as a mechanic at Amtrak. Even an injury on the job turned into a blessing in disguise when she collected a $700,000 settlement that allowed her to build her dream home in Clinton and help her longtime partner start her own hair salon. Then the recession hit, and fate twisted the other way…”
• Unemployment drop still leaves low skill workers behind, By Michael A. Fletcher, February 6, 2012, Washington Post: “The nation’s jobless rate has declined to its lowest level in three years, a fact that has left Jamie Bean, an unemployed air-conditioner repairman, feeling more left out than ever. Bean, 36, lost his job in December. Now he is scrambling to keep up with child-support payments to his wife, who is also unemployed. ‘As it stands now, I can’t afford to get divorced,’ he said, managing a wry smile. Bean’s predicament is not unlike that of many people who have a high school education or less. Not only were they hit especially hard by the recession but they have continued losing ground in the recovery that has followed. By disproportionate numbers, these Americans have given up looking for work, making the nation’s recovery appear better than it is. If the unemployment rate counted the 2.8 million people who want jobs but have stopped looking, it would sit at 9.9 percent rather than its current 8.3 percent…”

Welfare issue makes political comeback, By Dawn Turner Trice, January 22, 2012, Chicago Tribune: “Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently offered to attend an NAACP convention to explain why African-Americans ’should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.’ And he has described President Barack Obama as ‘the most successful food stamp president in American history.’ While the Republican presidential race has brought the welfare issue to the forefront, critics say it has also resurrected stereotypical images of the black ‘welfare mother’ having out-of-wedlock babies so she can stay home and live large off the taxpayers. When it comes to welfare, perceptions have often trumped reality…”

‘Alarming’ new test-score gap discovered in Seattle schools, By Brian M. Rosenthal, December 18, 2011, Seattle Times: “African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home - typically immigrants or refugees - according to new numbers released by Seattle Public Schools. District officials, who presented the finding at a recent community meeting at Rainier Beach High School, noted the results come with caveats, but called the potential trend troubling and pledged to study what might be causing it. Michael Tolley, an executive director overseeing Southeast Seattle schools, said at the meeting that the data exposed a new achievement gap that is ‘extremely, extremely alarming.’ The administration has for years analyzed test scores by race. It has never before broken down student-achievement data by specific home language or country of origin - it is rare for school districts to examine test scores at that level - but it is unlikely that the phenomenon the data suggest is actually new…”

• How some states rein in charter school abuses, By Kathleen McGrory and Scott Hiaasen, December 10, 2011, Miami Herald: “Florida’s charter school law, which makes it easy to open charter schools and difficult to monitor them, has spurred a multimillion dollar industry and a school boom - all while leading to chronic governance problems and a higher-than-average rate of school failure. Nationally, about 12 percent of all charter schools that have opened in the past two decades have shut down, according to the National Resource Center on Charter School Finance & Governance. In Florida, the failure rate is double, state records show…”
• Florida charter schools: big money, little oversight, By Scott Hiaasen and Kathleen McGrory, December 10, 2011, Miami Herald: “Preparing for her daughter’s graduation in the spring, Tuli Chediak received a blunt message from her daughter’s charter high school: Pay us $600 or your daughter won’t graduate. She also received a harsh lesson about charter schools: Sometimes they play by their own rules. During the past 15 years, Florida has embarked on a dramatic shift in public education, steering billions in taxpayer dollars from traditional school districts to independently run charter schools. What started as an educational movement has turned into one of the region’s fastest-growing industries, backed by real-estate developers and promoted by politicians. But while charter schools have grown into a $400-million-a-year business in South Florida, receiving about $6,000 in taxpayer dollars for every student enrolled, they continue to operate with little public oversight. Even when charter schools have been caught violating state laws, school districts have few tools to demand compliance…”
• Profits and questions at online charter schools, By Stephanie Saul, December 12, 2011, New York Times: “By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers. Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States…”
• New Mexico legislators look to curb charter school costs, By Ben Wieder, December 12, 2011, Stateline.org: “One of Albuquerque’s charter schools, Academia de Lengua Y Cultura, offers a dual-language middle-school curriculum, with teachers in some classes giving lessons in English and Spanish on alternating days. Across town, the Cottonwood Classical Preparatory School, which takes students from sixth grade through high school, emphasizes seminar discussions and offers advanced international diplomas. The Southwest Secondary Learning Center, meanwhile, reinforces math, science and engineering lessons by allowing students to maintain and fly real airplanes. They represent three of New Mexico’s more than 80 charter schools. While some of those schools look and act like private institutions - their leaders have freedom to run them as they see fit as long as students meet state standards - they are part of the public school system, charge no tuition and receive nearly all of their funding from state monies. But unlike other states, where average per-student funding for charters is typically lower than it is for other public schools, a legislative report released last month found that charters in New Mexico receive an average of 26 percent more funding per student than traditional public schools. The report suggested that lawmakers change how schools are funded to address that…”
• Number of charter school students soars to 2 million as states pass laws encouraging expansion, Associated Press, December 7, 2011, Washington Post: “The number of students attending charter schools has soared to more than 2 million as states pass laws lifting caps and encouraging their expansion, according to figures released Wednesday. The growth represents the largest increase in enrollment over a single year since charter schools were founded nearly two decades ago. In all, more than 500 new charter schools were opened in the 2011-12 school year. And about 200,000 more students are enrolled now than a year before, an increase of 13 percent nationwide…”
• More whites drawn to charter schools, By Jennifer Smith Richards, December 12, 2011, Columbus Dispatch: “Charter schools statewide and in Franklin County have become much more racially diverse over the past decade, state enrollment data show. In the 2000-01 school year, when charters still were new in Ohio, 87 percent of the 748 Franklin County charter students were members of minorities. In the 2010-11 school year, roughly 33,000 students attended local charters, and 63 percent were nonwhite. The local shift mirrors one statewide, where the total percentage of black, Latino, Asian, American Indian and multiracial students has dropped from 86 percent to about 60 percent in the past 10 years. The reason for the shift, experts say, is twofold: Parents now have more charter schools from which to choose, which makes the option attractive to a wider range of parents. And many schools now are marketing to suburban families instead of focusing on students from urban districts such as Columbus…”

• Income gap stays wide in District, narrows in suburbs, By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik, December 7, 2011, Washington Post: “The income gap between whites and blacks living in the District is one of the widest in the country, new census statistics show. That stands in stark contrast to the Washington suburbs, where the gaps have become some of the nation’s narrowest. The per capita income for whites in the District is more than triple what it is for blacks, and the difference has only widened since 1990. In several suburbs, including Prince George’s, Loudoun and Stafford counties, incomes for blacks and whites are closer than ever, and today whites earn $1.30 or less for every $1 that blacks earn. Demographers and city activists say the difference reflects four decades of upper- and middle-class blacks abandoning the city for the suburbs, coupled with a more recent resurgence of affluent whites moving to the District. Some speak of the city’s middle class as a vanishing phenomenon, propelled in part by rising housing prices…”
• Census: Widening income gap as blacks leave cities, By Hope Yen (AP), December 8, 2011, Detroit News: “Affluent black Americans who are leaving industrial cities for the suburbs and the South are shifting traditional lines between rich and poor, according to new census data. Their migration is widening the income gap between whites and the inner-city blacks who remain behind, while making blacks less monolithic as a group and subject to greater income disparities. ‘Reverse migration is changing the South and its race relations,’ said Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau. He said a rising black middle class is promoting a growing belief among some black conservatives that problems of the disadvantaged are now rooted more in character or cultural problems, rather than race. But Harrison said most black Americans maintain a strong racial identity, focused on redressing perceived lack of opportunities, in part because many of them maintain close ties to siblings or other blacks who are less successful…”

• Overhaul to foster-care system wins approval, By Jennifer Sullivan, October 31, 2011, Seattle Times: “A years-long effort to overhaul the state’s foster-care system, making home placements more stable for children and keeping caseloads manageable for social workers, will be completed in just over two years. Under an agreement signed Monday, the state will have a far different child-welfare system in place by the end of 2013 than it did when a class-action lawsuit on behalf of foster children was filed in 1998. The case, known by state Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) officials as Braam, is named after plaintiff Jessica Braam, who had been bounced through 34 foster-care placements by the time she was 12 years old. Her story became emblematic of problems that plagued the foster-care system overseen by the DSHS…”
• Governor’s office calls NPR foster care report flawed; congressmen seek review, By Kevin Woster, November 1, 2011, Rapid City Journal: “Staffers for Gov. Dennis Daugaard on Monday attacked a National Public Radio report critical of state child-protection programs that remove Native American children from their homes for foster-care placement, saying NPR was biased and inaccurate in its reporting. But two members of the U.S. House of Representatives thought the NPR report was valid enough to call for an investigation into whether those South Dakota child protection policies and practices with Native American families violate federal law. U. S. Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Dan Boren, D-Okla., sent a letter to Larry Echo Hawk, assistant secretary of the Interior Department for Indian Affairs, calling for the investigation. They allege, as the NPR report implies, that South Dakota violates the Indian Child Welfare Act, a law that directs officials to place Native American children removed from homes with their relatives or tribes, except in unusual situations…”

Tackling infant mortality rates among blacks, By Timothy Williams, October 14, 2011, New York Times: “Amanda Ralph is the kind of woman whose babies are prone to die. She is young and poor and dropped out of school after the ninth grade. But there is also an undeniable link between Ms. Ralph’s race - she is black - and whether her baby will survive: nationally, black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before the age of 1. Here in Pittsburgh, the rate is five times. So, seven months into her first pregnancy, Ms. Ralph, 20, is lying on a couch at home as a nurse from a federally financed program listens to the heartbeat of her fetus. The unusual attention Ms. Ralph is receiving is one of myriad efforts being made nationwide to reduce the tens of thousands of deaths each year of infants before age 1. But health officials say it is frequently disheartening work, as a combination of apathy and cuts to federal and state programs aimed at reducing infant deaths have hampered progress, with dozens of big cities and rural areas reporting rising rates…”

Study: Worst hospitals treat larger share of poor, By Carla K. Johnson (AP), October 5, 2011, Salt Lake Tribune: “The nation’s worst hospitals treat twice the proportion of elderly black patients and poor patients than the best hospitals, and their patients are more likely to die of heart attacks and pneumonia, new research shows. Now, these hospitals, mostly in the South, may be at higher risk of financial failure, too. That’s because the nation’s new health care law punishes bad care by withholding some money, says the lead author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs…”

• Alabama life already changing under tough immigration law, By Patrik Jonsson, September 29, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “Even before federal judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn upheld the toughest parts of Alabama’s groundbreaking immigration law Wednesday, daily life in Alabama had already begun to look - and feel - a little different. The state’s agriculture commissioner says some farmers are mourning squash rotting in the fields, after migrant workers either left or avoided the state, some in fear that their children would be used as deportation tools as schools next week begin checking the immigration status of incoming students. Two days before Judge Blackburn proffered her ruling, Alabama announced a new car-registration database called ALVerify, to head off fears of citizen revolts against long courthouse lines as residents prove their citizenship. And those working to rebuild the state from this spring’s massive tornado outbreak predicted delays under the expectation that Hispanic workers will be harder to find to lay roofs, build decks, and pour foundations…”
• Law doesn’t mark end of Alabama immigration battle, By Scott Neuman, September 29, 2011, National Public Radio: “Alabama’s toughest-in-the-nation law on illegal immigration went into effect Thursday, a day after a federal judge upheld some of its key provisions, but the court battle over the issue appears far from over. State law enforcement can now question and detain without bond people they suspect may be in the country illegally, and public schools are required to verify students’ immigration status. U.S. District Judge Sharon Blackburn on Wednesday upheld those and other key aspects of the law. The Justice Department, civil rights groups and some Alabama churches had sued to stop the measure from taking effect…”

• Poverty affects 46 million Americans, By Marisol Bello, September 28, 2011, USA Today: “Billy Schlegel plunged from middle class into poverty in the time it took his daughter to play a soccer season. In January 2010, he was making $50,000 a year as a surveyor, meeting the mortgage payments on his three-bedroom home in the nation’s wealthiest county and paying for his children to play hockey and soccer. Then came February. Schlegel, 45, was laid off. During the next 18 months, the divorced father of three almost lost his house, had to stop paying child support and turned to the local food bank for basic necessities. ‘You’ve got to swallow your pride,’ Schlegel says. ‘Especially around here, people lose their status and they feel they don’t fit in.’ This is the face of poverty after the Great Recession. Millions of Americans such as Schlegel now find themselves among the suddenly poor…”
• Hispanic children in poverty exceed whites, study finds, By Sabrina Tavernise, September 28, 2011, New York Times: “Hispanic children living in poverty in the United States outnumber poor white children for the first time, a demographic shift that was hastened by the recession, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center. The number of Hispanic children in poverty jumped by 36 percent from 2007 to 2010, to a total of 6.1 million, compared with 5 million non-Hispanic white children who are poor, said the report, which analyzed recent data from the Census Bureau. The recession drove the rise, the report found. But demographics also contributed. The Hispanic population has grown by more than 40 percent over the past decade…”
• Hispanic kids the largest group of children living in poverty, By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik, September 28, 2011, Washington Post: “Hispanics now make up the largest group of children living in poverty, the first time in U.S. history that poor white kids have been outnumbered by poor children of another race or ethnicity, according to a new study. In a report released Wednesday, the Pew Hispanic Center said that 6.1 million Hispanic children are poor, compared with 5 million non-Hispanic white children and 4.4 million black children. Pew said Hispanic poverty numbers have soared because of the impact of the recession on the growing number of Latinos…”

• Slump alters Jobless map in U.S., with South hit hard, By Michael Cooper, September 26, 2011, New York Times: “When the unemployment rate rose in most states last month, it underscored the extent to which the deep recession, the anemic recovery and the lingering crisis of joblessness are beginning to reshape the nation’s economic map. The once-booming South, which entered the recession with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, is now struggling with some of the highest rates, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show. Several Southern states - including South Carolina, whose 11.1 percent unemployment rate is the fourth highest in the nation - have higher unemployment rates than they did a year ago. Unemployment in the South is now higher than it is in the Northeast and the Midwest, which include Rust Belt states that were struggling even before the recession…”
• African-American unemployment reaches record highs, By Leslie Kwoh, September 26, 2011, Star-Ledger: “Jeanette Grimes doesn’t need to look at the latest data to know black unemployment has reached record highs. She sees the growing joblessness all around her - on the streets of Trenton, at networking meetings, in her local unemployment office. And she’s felt the pain first-hand, too, as an African-American who was laid off nearly two years ago from her job as a nonprofit organizer. Grimes has since struggled to land work, agonizing as the rejection pile has grown while her savings have dwindled. ‘It’s been pretty rough,’ said Grimes, 48, of Trenton. ‘You become hopeful and think, ‘This job is exactly what I have experience in’ - and then you get a letter saying they hired another candidate.’ While high unemployment is affecting all sectors of the population in this tough economy, African-Americans are by far the hardest-hit demographic. Nationally, black unemployment reached 16.7 percent last month - the highest level since 1984 - even as the jobless rate for whites fell to 8 percent, according to the U.S. Labor Department…”

• With no new jobs in August, calls for urgent action, By Shaila Dewan, September 2, 2011, New York Times: “The nation’s employers failed to add new jobs in August, a strong signal that the economy has stalled and that policy makers can no longer afford inaction. The dismal showing, the first time in 11 months that total payrolls did not rise, was the latest indication that the jobs recovery that began in 2010 lacked momentum. The unemployment rate for August did not budge, remaining at 9.1 percent…”
• Black unemployment: Highest in 27 years, By Annalyn Censky, September 2, 2011, CNNMoney.com: “The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market. Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported…”
• In jobless data, devil may be in details, By Yuki Noguchi, September 2, 2011, National Public Radio: “The Labor Department releases its reports on August unemployment on Friday. What economists are expecting is by now a familiar story: That August did not generate enough job growth to move the needle on the jobless rate. But the most intractable part of the jobless problem might be the one that doesn’t show up in the numbers. The unemployment rate is expected to tick up slightly to 9.2 percent. Two years ago, the unemployment rate was 9.5 percent. Although that sounds like an improvement, you have to look at the reason for that decline to know the whole story, says Howard Rosen, an economist at the Peterson Institute…”

• New Orleans public school achievement gap is narrowing, By Andrew Vanacore, August 7, 2011, New Orleans Times-Picayune: “For as long as records have been kept, black students in New Orleans’ public schools have lagged far behind the city’s white students on the annual exams that Louisiana uses to track student achievement, reflecting wide income disparities and other factors. What’s more, black students in the city have traditionally fallen behind their black peers in the rest of the state, where the so-called achievement gap has historically been less pronounced. That second metric changed this year for the first time. State data show that 53 percent of African-American youngsters in New Orleans scored at grade level or better on state tests this spring, compared with 51 percent of black students across Louisiana. Just four years ago, only 32 percent of black students in New Orleans had achieved grade level, compared with 43 percent statewide…”
• Huge achievement gaps persist in D.C. schools, By Bill Turque, August 6, 2011, Washington Post: “The gulf in academic achievement separating public schools in the District’s poorest neighborhoods from those in its most affluent has narrowed slightly in some instances but remains vast, an analysis of 2011 test score data show. Children in Ward 7 and 8 schools trailed their Ward 3 peers in reading and math pass rates by huge margins - from 41 to 56 percentage points - on this year’s D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams. The tests are given annually to students in grades 3 through 8 and 10…”

• Bloomberg to use own funds in plan to aid minority youth, By Michael Barbaro and Fernanda Santos, August 3, 2011, New York Times: “The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York’s civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances. The program, the most ambitious policy push of Mr. Bloomberg’s third term, would overhaul how the government interacts with a population of about 315,000 New Yorkers who are disproportionately undereducated, incarcerated and unemployed…”
• Can George Soros, Michael Bloomberg save New York’s troubled young men?, By Ron Scherer, August 4, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to improve the lives of young black and Hispanic males. On Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg announced that the city, combined with his own philanthropy and that of billionaire George Soros, would spend $127.5 million over three years to try to cut down on some of the factors that result in higher rates of poverty, incarceration, and unemployment among young minority men…”
• A hand up, not a handout, for young black and Latino men, Editorial, August 4, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “Blacks and Latinos took the brunt of America’s Great Recession. Their wealth gap with whites is now at a record high. And with large cutbacks in government social programs, there’s a greater need than ever for private giving to help these two groups. That’s the reasoning behind a $130 million initiative in New York City by two billionaires, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and financier George Soros, to target young male minorities with innovative approaches to helping them succeed - as workers and as fathers. Each man is giving $30 million to the public-private project. (Mr. Soros already funds many such programs in other cities.) Known as the Young Men’s Initiative, the three-year project is just the latest of dozens of programs started in recent years to focus on young African-American and Latino males - groups with dreadful rates of poverty, education, and employment…”

Racial profiling laws yield data but few changes, By Daniel C. Vock, August 3, 2011, Stateline.org: “Eight years ago, Illinois began requiring police departments, including the state police force, to keep track of traffic stops to see whether their officers practiced racial profiling-stopping black or Hispanic motorists more often than whites because of their skin color. Now, a civil rights group wants a federal investigation of the Illinois state police based largely on the data collected under the law, which was sponsored by Barack Obama when he was a state senator. After examining the data, the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says state troopers ask to search the cars of black and Hispanic drivers more often than those of white drivers, in cases where police have no legal grounds to search the cars on their own without the driver’s consent. But state police are more than 2.5 times as likely to find illegal items (such as alcohol, drugs or stolen property) when searching the vehicles of whites compared to those of Hispanics. Alcohol is the most common item police find among all groups, the ACLU claims, but whites are the most likely to have drugs and drug paraphernalia. The complaint is not focused on specific allegations of prejudiced behavior. What it alleges is that state officials hardly look at racial profiling information at all. The law requiring the collection of traffic stop data created a panel to review the results, but the slots were never filled and the group never met…”

• Study: Income does not explain segregation patterns in housing, By Carol Morello, August 1, 2011, Washington Post: “Affluent blacks and Hispanics live in neighborhoods that are noticeably poorer than neighborhoods where low-income whites live, according to a new study that suggests income alone does not explain persistent segregation patterns in housing. Washington and Atlanta were the only two major metropolitan regions in the country that followed a slightly different pattern. In these two cities, the study found that the situation for high-income blacks and Hispanics was equal, but not worse, than that of low-income whites…”
• Richer minorities seen living in poorer neighborhoods, By Haya El Nasser, August 2, 2011, USA Today: “The most successful blacks and Hispanics are more likely to have poor neighbors than are whites, according to a new analysis of Census data. The average affluent black and Hispanic household - defined in the study as earning more than $75,000 a year - lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average lower-income non-Hispanic white household that makes less than $40,000 a year…”

• ‘Wealth gaps’ widen as net worth of blacks, Hispanics plunges, By Rick Montgomery, July 26, 2011, Kansas City Star: “Back when she approached her mid-40s, Edna Reed thought she’d finally made it into America’s ownership society. Now she’s 50. ‘I lost my house, lost my job, lost my car,’ said Reed while eating a free lunch Tuesday with hundreds of other needy people, predominantly black and Hispanic, at a community center in Kansas City, Kan. Earlier in the day, new research showed that ‘wealth gaps’ between white people and the nation’s two largest minority groups had expanded to their widest levels in at least a quarter-century. The collapse of the housing market, persistent joblessness and uneven recovery since 2005 may have wiped out decades of incremental gains for Hispanic and African-American households, according to the Pew Research Center…”
• Wealth gap widens between whites, minorities, By Hope Yen (AP), July 25, 2011, Salt Lake Tribune: “The wealth gaps between whites and minorities have grown to their widest levels in a quarter-century. The recession and uneven recovery have erased decades of minority gains, leaving whites on average with 20 times the net worth of blacks and 18 times that of Latinos, according to an analysis of new census data. The analysis shows the racial and ethnic impact of the economic meltdown, which ravaged housing values and sent unemployment soaring. It offers the most direct government evidence yet of the disparity between predominantly younger minorities whose main asset is their home and older whites who are more likely to have 401(k) retirement accounts or other stock holdings…”
• Wealth gap widens between whites, minorities, report says, By Peter Whoriskey, July 25, 2011, Washington Post: “The wealth gap between whites and minorities has risen to a historic high, according to new census data analyzed by the Pew Research Center, as the collapse of housing prices more severely affected the net worth of African American and Hispanic households. The report, which was to be released Tuesday, shows that the recession wreaked havoc on the wealth of all Americans but that whites lost the least amount as a percentage of their holdings. Between 2005 and 2009, the median net worth of Hispanic households dropped by 66 percent and that of black households fell by 53 percent, according to the report. In contrast, the median net worth of white households dropped by only 16 percent…”

After decades of hard-fought progress, black economic gains were reversed in Great Recession, By Jesse Washington (AP), July 9, 2011, Washington Post: “Growing up black in the segregated 1960s, Deborah Goldring slept two to a bed, got evicted from apartment after apartment, and watched her stepfather climb utility poles to turn their disconnected lights back on. Yet Goldring pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life - until the Great Recession. First, Goldring’s husband fell ill, and they drained savings to pay for nursing homes before he died. Then Goldring lost her executive assistant job in the Baltimore hospital where she had worked for 17 years. The cruelest blow was a letter from the bank, intending to foreclose on her home of almost three decades. Millions of Americans endured similar financial calamities in the recession. But for Goldring and many others in the black community, where unemployment has risen since the end of the recession, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve…”

Thousands of federal prisoners convicted of crack cocaine crimes eligible for early release, Associated Press, June 30, 2011, Washington Post: “As many as 12,000 people in federal prison for crack-related crimes can get their sentences reduced as a result of a new law that brought the penalties for the drug more closely in line with those for powdered cocaine, a government commission decided Thursday. The decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission applies to approximately 1 in 17 inmates in the federal system. Congress last year substantially lowered the sentences for crack-related crimes such as possession and trafficking, changing a 1980s law that was criticized as racially discriminatory because it came down extra hard on a drug common in poor, black neighborhoods. The question before the commission Thursday was whether people already locked up under the old law should benefit retroactively from the changes. The six-member commission unanimously decided in their favor…”

• Achievement gap for Hispanic students hasn’t narrowed in 20 years, By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, June 23, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “In 20 years, the national achievement gap between Hispanic students and their non-Hispanic white peers hasn’t budged. But hints of progress can be found with a closer look at low-income Hispanics or those who already know the English language. And some states stand out for gaps considerably lower than the national average. This first-of-its kind report on the Hispanic-white gap comes as Congress is considering how to rewrite No Child Left Behind, the federal law that has attempted to narrow gaps based on race, income, and other factors. Questions loom about how much of that accountability system will stay in place, and what specific role the federal government will play in pushing for the progress of Hispanic students…”
• National report: State begins narrowing achievement gap between Hispanic and white students in math, By Grace E. Merritt, June 23, 2011, Hartford Courant: “Connecticut has started to close the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students in math, but remains stagnant in reading, according to a national report released Thursday. Connecticut has started to close the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students in math, but remains stagnant in reading, according to a national report released Thursday. But despite the gains, Connecticut still has a larger achievement gap in both math and reading compared to the national gap, partly because scores for Connecticut’s white students are higher than white students elsewhere in the nation, the report said…”

• Is stress to blame for preterm births?, By Mark Johnson and Tia Ghose, April 16, 2011, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “A tight, persistent pain in the lower abdomen chased Jasmine Zapata from class that morning, forcing her upstairs to rest on a couch at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. It was Sept. 20, and Zapata was in her 25th week of pregnancy, just past the midpoint. She neither smoked nor drank. She knew the importance of proper prenatal care - of course she did - and had followed the doctor’s orders to the letter. Zapata, after all, was in her second year of medical school. The 23-year-old Milwaukee native had carried her first pregnancy to term and had a beautiful son to show for it: MJ, now 18 months old. At her last doctor visit the week before, all had been fine. But on this morning when Zapata rose from the couch and went into the bathroom, she saw she was bleeding. By the time the ambulance got to the hospital, she was completely dilated and in fear for her baby daughter. ‘When they were doing an ultrasound, I was mentally preparing myself,’ Zapata said. ‘What if they tell me she’s dead?’ Educated, married, with no chronic illnesses or family history of prematurity, Zapata was not, in most respects, a high risk for premature delivery, the No. 1 cause of infant mortality in Milwaukee. Only one factor suggested risk: Zapata is African-American…”
• Understanding the risks, Editorial, April 16, 2011, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “African-American babies in Milwaukee are dying before their first birthday at more than twice the rate of white infants. This tragic trend line has widened despite years of effort. Poverty, unhealthy environments, lack of prenatal care, smoking or drinking alcohol and chronic diseases such as diabetes all play a role. But researchers now believe that something else is behind these cruel numbers: the accumulated stress of a life lived as a racial minority. This insight argues for approaches that help black women understand the multiple risks they face and that give them tools to cope with these risks. Milwaukee’s black infant mortality rate was 15.7 deaths per 1,000 live births between 2005 and 2008, one of the worst rates in the country and double the rate for white babies…”

Apartheid-style neglect of kids continues, By Charl Du Plessis, March 24, 2011, Sunday Times: “So says a report, a collaboration between the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) and the SA Human Rights Commission, released yesterday. It details how the country fails the most vulnerable. The report said that 64%, or 11.9million of the country’s 18.6million children, live in poverty, and four out of 10 children live in households in which none of the adults work. About 1.7million children lived in shacks, 1.4million relied on rivers or streams as their main source of water, and 1.5million had no toilet in their home. African children were 18 times more likely to grow up in poverty and 12 times more likely to experience hunger than white children. The worst-hit areas of ‘multiple deprivation’ were still former homelands, said the report, which drew on data from the Statistics SA general household survey and other surveys. Children are failed primarily by the health and education systems…”

• Two Kentuckys: Cities grow while rural areas decline, Census shows, By Bill Estep, March 18, 2011, Lexington Herald-Leader: “Kentucky’s Golden Triangle continued to grow during the last decade as the population drained away from the eastern and western coalfields and farm counties along the Mississippi River. That’s the overarching news from the state’s official 2010 U.S. Census count, released Thursday. The state as a whole grew a modest 6.1 percent from 2000 to 2010, to a total population of 4,339,367 as of last April 1, according to a Herald-Leader analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The numbers released Thursday include more detail: population breakdowns by city, county, race, ethnicity and voting age that shed light on the state’s internal shifts and the growth in the number of Hispanic residents - up 112 percent since 2000…”
• Census data confirms suburban growth, greater diversity in Minn., By Elizabeth Dunbar, March 16, 2011, Minnesota Public Radio: “Minnesota has become slightly more racially diverse, and Minneapolis and St. Paul have lagged behind population growth in other parts of the state over the past 10 years. Those are just a few of the trends found in 2010 census data that state and local officials will examine as they re-draw voting districts and plan government services for the future. The results of the annual American Community Survey already provided officials with information about Minnesota’s population and diversity trends. The survey has replaced the long-form of the census used to track things like poverty and English proficiency. But the release of the new data gives officials detailed counts of the people who live in a particular urban neighborhood or small town. It also provides more detailed demographic information…”

Child poverty rate rose, racial gap widened, in Minnesota, By Jeremy Olson, March 16, 2011, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune: “Minnesota’s child poverty rate leapt to 14 percent in 2009 — with minority families faring worst — despite a high rate of working parents, according to a new report by the state branch of the Children’s Defense Fund. While Minnesota had the nation’s fifth-lowest rate for white children that year, its child poverty rate for Asian- Americans was the highest in the nation and its rate for African-American children was fifth highest. The racial divide was one of several showing a widening gap between haves and have-nots in Minnesota, said Kara Arzamendia, research director of Children’s Defense Fund - Minnesota, which produces the annual state Kids Count report…”

• Nebraska schools: More minority students, more meeting poverty standard, By Margaret Reist and Mark Andersen, March 6, 2011, Lincoln Journal Star: “Linda Baumert, who has taught first-graders in Schuyler Community Schools for 27 years, was there when the first hints of change squeezed into a desk in her classroom. The first Hispanic student in the district walked into Baumert’s room in the mid 1980s during her first few years of teaching, a harbinger of things to come. Drawn by a meatpacking plant 4½ miles west of town, the district’s Hispanic population grew slowly until about 10 years ago, when a trickle became a torrent. From 2005 to 2010, the district’s Hispanic population grew 533 percent, from 201 students to 1,272. Today, 89 percent of the K-3 elementary school is Hispanic, 68 percent of the high school. For reasons that go beyond race, 73 percent of Schuyler’s students are enrolled in the federal free and reduced-price lunch program. Free and reduced-price meal counts are the commonly accepted method for determining poverty in public schools across the country, Nebraska Department of Education spokesman Betty Vandeventer said. Schuyler is an extreme example of two long-term trends in Nebraska’s public schools: increasing diversity and a growing number of students who meet the districts’ poverty standard…”
• LPS student trends mirror those statewide, By Margaret Reist, March 6, 2011, Lincoln Journal Star: “Lincoln Public Schools mirrors two statewide student enrollment trends over the past 15 years: more minority students and more students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches. This school year, the percentage of K-12 students qualifying for the lunch program — a schools standard for measuring poverty — hit 43 percent, surpassing 40 percent for the first time, according to LPS statistics. In elementary grades, nearly 46 percent of students today meet the poverty standard. Those percentages are even higher when students attending LPS’s federally funded preschools are included. Last year, according to the Nebraska Department of Education, 42 percent of all LPS students from pre-K to 12th grade met the poverty standard…”

Achievement gap more than a black and white issue, By Maggie Gordon, January 18, 2011, Stamford Advocate: “The achievement gap between low-income and non-low-income students in Connecticut is the largest in the nation, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The gap between low-income students and their non-low-income peers is not the only achievement gap in Connecticut; white students also consistently outperform black and Hispanic students. ‘We know there is a high correlation between poverty and ethnicity in Connecticut, and that if you look at Hispanic and black student groups, there is a high likelihood that they’re also poor,’ said Tom Murphy, spokesman for the state Department of Education…”

• ‘Achievement gap’ between rich and poor, different races persists in N.J. schools, By Jeanette Rundquist, January 5, 2011, Star-Ledger: “The ‘achievement gap’ between rich and poor students, and among those of different races, persists in New Jersey schools, according to statewide test score data released Wednesday by the state Board of Education. The ‘achievement gap’ has long been an issue facing educators in New Jersey and elsewhere. Today, the state released results of tests taken last spring, showing as much as a 38.4-point difference in the passing rate in third-grade language arts, between African-American and Asian students. On that test, about 60 percent of black or African-American third-graders failed to achieve proficient scores, compared to 21.4 percent for Asian students and 31 percent for whites…”
• N.J. test scores reveal achievement gaps, By Leslie Brody and Patricia Alex, January 5, 2011, The Record: “New Jersey’s achievement gaps remained stubbornly wide last year, starting with the earliest round of statewide test scores in third grade. Scores released Wednesday showed that in third-grade language arts, roughly 60 percent of black students and 56 percent of Hispanic students failed to meet proficiency standards last spring, compared with 31 percent for whites and 21 percent for Asian students. Poverty played a key role; about 60 percent of low-income children did not meet standards for third-grade language arts, compared with 30 percent of those from economically stable families. Schools and families have struggled to close these gaps for years…”

• Southern Indiana’s education gains fail to stem poverty rise, By Ben Zion Hershberg, December 14, 2010, Louisville Courier-Journal: “Despite recent gains in education, poverty rates in Southern Indiana counties have climbed and average household incomes have dropped. Those findings released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau show more adults with high school diplomas in Clark, Floyd and Harrison counties and more who are college graduates in Clark and Floyd for the 2005-09 survey period, compared with 2000 Census data. But household incomes, adjusted for inflation, are down in all three counties, and poverty rates are higher in Clark and Floyd…”
• Tiny city tops lists for poverty and youth opportunity, By Sasha Aslanian, December 16, 2010, Minnesota Public Radio: “Landfall is a tiny city east of St. Paul, right behind a Harley Davidson dealership on the edge of a small lake. It’s a mobile home park of about 700 residents. More than a quarter of them live in poverty, which the federal government defines as just short of $11,000 for an individual in 2009. ‘You cannot live cheaper than living in Landfall,’ said Greg Feldbrugge, mayor of Landfall. Everyone knows him as ‘Flash’, a nickname he earned during his days as a stockcar racer. He moved here 13 years ago, and has been mayor for the last 4…”
• Data show households in southern, eastern Oklahoma get most public assistance dollars, By Gavin Off, December 15, 2010, Tulsa World: “According to U.S. Census Bureau data, public assistance payments to households in some southern or eastern Oklahoma counties nearly doubled the state’s average household payment in 2009. However, the top individual recipient counties were outside those areas. On average, households in Logan and Jackson counties received more than $130 in public assistance last year, the most of any county. Households in McCurtain and Choctaw counties received more than $90 in public assistance last year. The state average was $50. Tulsa County households received an average of $60, data show…”
• Census numbers bear out rise in poverty, By Dorothy Schneider, December 15, 2010, Lafayette Journal and Courier: “Jennifer Bickett knows firsthand that more people are struggling to make ends meet in Tippecanoe County, as was confirmed by new U.S. Census data released Tuesday. The Lafayette resident cited shopping at Goodwill as one of the ways she’s tried to save money on clothes and household items. Bickett’s husband worked in the auto industry until 2008, ‘when everything went kerplunk,’ she said. Now, she said, he’s in an electrician apprenticeship, earning about half of his former salary. Meanwhile, Bickett’s own job as a real estate agent hasn’t been paying dividends, given the ongoing sales lag and foreclosure crisis. ‘For now we definitely have to cut back on spending,’ she said. That’s a common refrain among Tippecanoe County residents, according to information released Tuesday from the American Community Survey…”
• Census: Segregation hits 100-year lows in most American metro areas, By Patrik Jonsson, December 14, 2010, Christian Science Monitor: “A drive through Atlanta’s older “intown” residential areas quickly bears out new Census findings: That segregation by race in the US is fading in many, though far from all, American neighborhoods. Atlanta is one of several predominantly Southern and Western cities that showed a noticeable integration trend over the last five years as both middle-class blacks and whites moved into each other’s neighborhoods, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey of 10 million Americans, released Tuesday. The ACS is the largest demographic survey ever done in the United States…”
• Census data show ’surprising’ segregation, By Haya El Nasser, December 14, 2010, USA Today: “Despite increased racial and ethnic diversity, American neighborhoods continue to be segregated and some of the progress made toward integration since 1980 has come to a halt this decade, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data released Tuesday. ‘This is a surprising result,’said Brown University sociology professor John Logan, who analyzed 2005-09 Census numbers. ‘At worst, it was expected that there would be continued slow progress.’ The five-year data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey provide the first opportunity to gauge post-2000 demographic trends all the way down to small neighborhoods…”
• Milwaukee area tops Brookings segregation study of census data, By Tom Tolan and Bill Glauber, December 14, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Burdened by history and shaped by demography, Milwaukee remains one of the most racially segregated large metropolitan areas in the nation, according to U.S. census data released Tuesday and analyzed by the Brookings Institution. The city and surrounding area, including Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington and Ozaukee counties, sit atop a black-white segregation index of America’s top 100 metro areas. Milwaukee is in a virtual tie with the Detroit and New York metro areas, and just ahead of Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo and St. Louis. While the study was getting national attention, two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers cast doubt on the findings, saying the way segregation is defined defies common sense…”

• Learning gaps slow to change, By Jason Wermers, December 14, 2010, Augusta Chronicle: “Student achievement gaps that run along lines of race and gender still persist, and educators’ efforts to narrow those differences have led to slow and uneven progress, according to a report being released today. That is true nationally as well as in Georgia and South Carolina, according to ‘State Test Score Trends through 2008-09, Part 2: Slow and Uneven Progress in Narrowing Gaps’ by the Center on Education Policy, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. ‘Achievement gap’ refers to the difference in test results among groups of students along racial, economic or other lines such as disabilities or English language skills…”
• Racial academic achievement gap remains a problem, By Brian Bull, December 15, 2010, Superior Telegram: “A new report says academic achievement gaps among racial lines persist among U.S. students, despite some progress. And narrowing these gaps will take awhile. The non-profit Center on Education Policy analyzed standardized test scores from all 50 states, with data going back nearly a decade. And while the center’s president, Jack Jennings says overall student performance has improved, he says it’s not nearly fast enough to close the gap…”

• Census data reveal pockets of wealth and poverty, By Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, December 14, 2010, New York Times: “The three places in the country with the highest median household income are all in Virginia, according to census datareleased on Tuesday, while those with the highest rates of poverty are in four American Indian reservations, all in South Dakota. The Virginia counties of Fairfax and Loudoun and the city of Falls Church had the highest median income, according to the data, which spans 2005 to 2009. Falls Church was the highest at $113,313, up by 17 percent from 2000. The lowest median income was in Owsley County, Ky., at $18,869. Of the five counties with poverty rates higher than 39 percent, four contain or are in American Indian reservations in South Dakota. The fifth, Willacy County, Tex., is on the Gulf Coast. The data is from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which samples 1 in 10 Americans on a variety of social, economic and demographic topics. It is the single largest release of data in the bureau’s history, with 11 billion individual estimates covering 670,000 geographic locations. It gives details on the characteristics of American society based on surveys, and is separate from the 2010 Census, which will provide a precise count of all Americans…”
• New data to shed light on Minn. towns, big city neighborhoods, By Elizabeth Dunbar, December 14, 2010, Minnesota Public Radio: “There’s a reason the new school is being built on the other side of town, and that the bus route map looks the way it does — planners studied census data to better understand where and how we live and work. The U.S. Census Bureau collects data through the ongoing American Community Survey that inform decisions about public infrastructure. For the first time Tuesday, officials will release survey data collected over a five-year period, replacing the information that used to be collected on the long form of the census once every 10 years…”
• Black segregation in US drops to lowest in century, Associated Press, December 14, 2010, Washington Post: “America’s neighborhoods took large strides toward racial integration in the last decade as blacks and whites chose to live near each other at the highest levels in a century. Still, segregation in many parts of the U.S. persisted, with Hispanics in particular turning away from whites. A broad range of 2009 census data released Tuesday also found a mixed economic picture, with the poverty rate swinging wildly among counties from 4 percent to more than 40 percent as the nation grappled with a housing boom and bust. Just three U.S. localities reported median household income of more than $100,000, down from seven in 2000. Segregation among blacks and whites increased in one-fourth of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, compared to nearly one-half for Hispanics…”
• Census data out today may offer skewed view of south Louisiana, By Michelle Krupa, December 14, 2010, New Orleans Times-Picayune: “Today marks a milestone for the U.S. Census with the release this morning of the first-ever set of five-year estimates of the American Communities Survey, which has replaced the ‘long form’ questionnaire that for decades went to select households as part of the decennial census. It includes information collected between Jan. 1, 2005 and Dec. 31, 2009, on 72 topics that go beyond the basic data contained in the Census short form, such as citizenship status, geographic mobility, means of transportation to work and educational status. Because of the volume of data available, estimates will be provided for every state, county, city and town in the country — more than 670,000 distinct geographic areas…”
• U.S. Census: Impoverished areas growing in El Paso County, By Maria St. Louis-Sanchez, December 14, 2010, Colorado Springs Gazette: “The poor in El Paso County are growing in number, and more areas of the region are considered impoverished, according to U.S. Census data released Tuesday. Data released by the 2005-2009 American Community Survey show that 24 of the county’s 111 neighborhoods have an estimated 20 percent or more of their population living below the poverty level. In 2000, there were seven neighborhoods with a poverty level that high. In September, American Community Survey data revealed that in 2009, the poverty rate in El Paso County was at its highest point in five years at 11.5 percent. In 2009, the federal poverty level was $22,050 for a family of four. The 2005-2009 American Community Survey are five-year estimates of the population throughout the United States. The estimates mark the first time that neighborhood-level information has been released by the U.S. Census since 2000. The estimates are not part of the 2010 Census, which will have its first release of data on Dec. 21…”

Numbers not adding up for minority students in algebra classes, By Joe Robertson, November 30, 2010, Kansas City Star: “Algebra I in the eighth grade - before high school - is supposed to be the ticket that helps propel students to greater success beyond high school. But Kansas City area students aren’t getting an equal shot. Minority students and students from low-income families are significantly less likely than others to be enrolled in eighth-grade algebra, a Kansas City Star analysis of Missouri test records shows. Gaps were found between the percentage of minority and low-income students in eighth-grade classes and the percentage of those groups taking Algebra I. The gaps exceeded 20 percentage points at some schools. The Center School District, however, enrolls all of its eighth-graders in Algebra I. But more often area schools with some of the highest populations of poor or minority children tested few or no students in eighth-grade algebra…”

• 12th-grade reading and math scores rise slightly after a historic low in 2005, By Sam Dillon, November 18, 2010, New York Times: “Reading scores for the nation’s 12th-grade students have increased somewhat since they dropped to a historic low in 2005, according to results of the largest federal test, released Thursday. Average math scores also ticked upward. Experts said the increases, after years of dismal achievement reports, were surprising because every year the nation’s schools are educating more black and Hispanic students, who on average score lower than whites and Asians. The black-white achievement gap dates back more than a century, though researchers debate why it persists. Researchers presume that language barriers pull down scores for Hispanics…”
• 12th grade students still below ‘92 reading scores, By Christine Armario (AP), November 18, 2010, Washington Post: “A national education assessment released Thursday shows that high school seniors have made some improvement in reading, but remain below the achievement levels reached nearly two decades ago. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, referred to at the Nation’s Report Card, tested 52,000 students in reading and 49,000 in math across 1,670 school districts in 2009. Students scored an average of 288 out of 500 points in reading comprehension, two points above the 2005 score but still below the 1992 average of 292. Thirty-eight percent of 12th grade students were classified as at or above the ‘proficient’ level, while 74 percent were considered at or above ‘basic…’”

• Proficiency of black students is found to be far lower than expected, By Trip Gabriel, November 9, 2010, New York Times: “An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented - a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another. But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known. Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys. Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches…”
• Report calls attention to achievement gap between black and white male students, By Nick Anderson, November 9, 2010, Washington Post: “Black male students trail their white counterparts in school by alarming margins and for reasons that often are not well understood, according to a report released Tuesday. The report from the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy organization for urban education, suggests that poverty is not the only factor behind the black-white achievement gap. Federal test data show that white male students nationwide who come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches outperform black males from large cities whose families are better off economically, according to the report. The report analyzed fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress…”

• Census finds single mothers and live-in partners, By Tamar Lewin, November 5, 2010, New York Times: “More than a quarter of the unmarried women who gave birth in a recent year were living with a partner, according to a Census Bureau report that for the first time measured the percentage of unmarried mothers who were not living alone. ‘Everybody tends to think of single mothers as being alone with their child, and we wanted to look at whether that was true,’ said Jane Dye, the demographer who wrote the report, ‘Fertility of American Women: 2008.’ ‘We found that 28 percent of these women were living with an unmarried partner, whether opposite sex or same sex.’ While cohabitation has increased enormously over the last generation, the catchall category of ’single mother’ has often blurred the difference between those living alone and those living with a partner…”
• Facing 72 percent rate of unwed mothers, blacks explore reasons and answers, By Jesse Washington (AP), November 6, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “One recent day at Dr. Natalie Carroll’s OB-GYN practice, located inside a low-income apartment complex tucked between a gas station and a freeway, 12 pregnant black women come for consultations. Some bring their children or their mothers. Only one brings a husband. Things move slowly here. Women sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow waiting room, sometimes for more than an hour. Carroll does not rush her mothers in and out. She wants her babies born as healthy as possible, so Carroll spends time talking to the mothers about how they should care for themselves, what she expects them to do - and why they need to get married. Seventy-two percent of black babies are born to unmarried mothers today, according to government statistics. This number is inseparable from the work of Carroll, an obstetrician who has dedicated her 40-year career to helping black women…”

• Highest teen birthrates are in the South, October 21, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “The highest teenage birthrates in the U.S. are clustered in Southern states and the lowest in the Northeast and upper Midwest, government researchers said Wednesday. Birthrates fell to an average of 41.5 births per 1,000 female teens in 2008 from 42.5 in 2007, with 14 states seeing declines. That followed an increase from 2005 to 2007, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. The differences are important because teen parents are less likely to pursue higher education, their children are less likely to be healthy, and they earn less on average than people who have children later…”
• State’s lower teen-pregnancy rate doesn’t tell whole story, By Carol M. Ostrom, October 20, 2010, Seattle Times: “Teen pregnancy is associated with all sorts of bad things - physical risks to babies, interrupted education for moms, and lower lifetime incomes all around - so it’s good news that Washington, overall, has a significantly lower rate than the U.S. average. But the statistics released Wednesday morning by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention don’t tell the whole story. Buried inside the big-picture statistics about Washington are numbers that reveal pockets of teen pregnancy, often in nearby high schools and middle schools…”
• Teen birth rate low, but racial disparities persist, By Elizabeth Dunbar, October 21, 2010, Minnesota Public Radio: “New numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show Minnesota has the eighth-lowest teen birth rate in the nation, but the rates are much higher among teens of color. Nationally, the CDC found that the worst disparities between black teens and the general population occurred in the South and the Upper Midwest. Minnesota was among the 10 states with the highest teen birth rate among black teens…”

Fewer black males are dropping out of school in Baltimore, By Liz Bowie, October 20, 2010, Baltimore Sun: “After a push to get dropouts back in the classroom and to provide students with a greater choice of schools, Baltimore has seen marked improvements in both the graduation and dropout rates for black males. In 2007, for every diploma the city handed out to a black male student, another had dropped out. In 2010, the city handed out two diplomas for every one who dropped out…”

Wage laws squeeze South Africa’s poor, By Celia W. Dugger, September 26, 2010, New York Times: “The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor - the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown - clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it. ‘Why? Why?’ shouted Nokuthula Masango, 25, after the authorities carted away bolts of gaily colored fabric. She made just $36 a week, $21 less than the minimum wage, but needed the meager pay to help support a large extended family that includes her five unemployed siblings and their children. The women’s spontaneous protest is just one sign of how acute South Africa’s long-running unemployment crisis has become. With their own industry in ruinous decline, the victim of low-wage competition from China, and too few unskilled jobs being created in South Africa, the women feared being out of work more than getting stuck in poorly paid jobs. In the 16 years since the end of apartheid, South Africa has followed the prescriptions of the West, opening its market-based economy to trade, while keeping inflation and public debt in check. It has won praise for its efforts, and the economy has grown, but not nearly fast enough to end an intractable unemployment crisis…”

Racial disparity in school suspensions, By Sam Dillon, September 13, 2010, New York Times: “In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls. School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites. The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools…”

• Social class affects white pupils’ exam results more than those of ethnic minorities - study, By Jessica Shepherd, September 3, 2010, The Guardian: “A child’s social class is more likely to determine how well they perform in school if they are white than if they come from an ethnic minority, researchers have discovered. The gap between the proportion of working-class pupils and middle-class pupils who achieve five A* to C grades at GCSE is largest among white pupils, academics found. They analysed official data showing thousands of teenagers’ grades between 2003 and 2007. Some 31% of white pupils on free school meals - a key indicator of poverty - achieve five A* to Cs, compared with 63% of white pupils not eligible for free school meals, they found. This gap between social classes - of 32 percentage points - is far higher for white pupils than for other ethnic groups…”
• White British school children ‘worst hit’ by poverty, By Richard Garner, September 3, 2010, The Independent: “Poverty has a far greater influence on the performance of white British pupils at school than any other ethnic group, according to research published today. Figures show a 31 percentage point gap between rich and poor white British pupils obtaining five A* to C grade passes at GCSE compared with just five percentage points for Chinese pupils and seven percentage points for Bangladeshi youngsters. The findings will be unveiled at the British Educational Research Association conference at Warwick University later this morning…”

Congress reduces drug sentence gap, By Erik Eckholm, July 28, 2010, New York Times: “Congress passed a bill on Wednesday that would reduce the disparities between mandatory sentences for crack and powdered cocaine violations, a step toward ending what legal experts say have been unfairly harsh punishments imposed mainly on blacks. The bill, which passed the Senate in March, was adopted by the House of Representatives in a voice vote and now goes to the President for signature. Administration officials have described the sentencing disparity as ‘fundamentally unfair,’ and Mr. Obama said during the 2008 campaign that it ‘disproportionately filled our prisons with young black and Latino drug users…’”

Ed Dept, civil rights leaders discuss reform, By Christine Armario and Dorie Turner (AP), July 26, 2010, Miami Herald: “Civil rights leaders are criticizing Obama administration education reforms aimed at turning around low performing schools and closing the achievement gap for minority students. Eight civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, contend in a document released Monday the Education Department is promoting ineffective approaches for failing schools. They also claim the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition - a program with a goal of spurring innovative reform in states - leaves out many minority students. “We want to be supportive, but more important than supporting an administration is supporting our children across the country and ensuring that they have an opportunity to learn,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Education, one of the groups that developed the document. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a White House adviser met with the groups Monday, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Al Sharpton and the presidents of the National Urban League and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The groups distributed the document to members of Congress last week…”

The importance of healthy communities for boys of color, By Marian Wright Edelman, July 22, 2010, Madison Times: “A new report was released in June that sheds a sobering light on how many Black and Latino boys grow up in communities that are, in a number of ways, dangerous to their health. Called “Healthy Communities Matter: The Importance of Place to the Health of Boys of Color,” the report contained contributions from scholars and researchers at the RAND Corporation, PolicyLink, the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, and the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice and the Department of Emergency Medicine at Drexel University. It was funded by the California Endowment. Some of its data and best practices focus on California but the lessons learned apply to communities across the country. The researchers found that boys and young men overall experience worse health outcomes than girls, that these health disparities are even more profound for Black and Latino boys, and that many of these disparities can be connected to community patterns. As they explain: “Negative health outcomes for African-American and Latino boys and young men are a result of growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, places that are more likely to put boys and young men directly in harm’s way and reinforce harmful behavior…”

• Can mobile phones narrow the digital divide?, By Omar L. Gallaga, July 3, 2010, Austin American-Statesman: “Jared Esquivel has had his new cell phone, a white Nokia Nuron, for only a week. But it’s the fifth one he’s owned since he was 10 years old. Jared is 16. The Travis High School student uses the phone to text family members, check in constantly on Facebook and view World Cup scores on ESPN’s mobile website. His family’s T-Mobile account includes phones for his sister, mother, father and grandmother. Most of them are enabled for unlimited Web access and texting. When Jared and his 13-year-old sister both need to use the family’s aging computer for homework, their mother, Juanita Esquivel, sends one of them to the mobile Web. ‘One of them would be up until 2 in the morning because the other one was sitting there using their computer,’ Juanita said. ‘I eventually was like, ‘Just use your phone!” The country has been swept up into an intoxicating romance with cell phones, especially smart phones such as Apple ’s iPhone 4, with 1.7 million units sold in its first three days on the market. A global study by research firm Gartner Inc. suggests that by as soon as 2013, mobile devices will overtake personal computers as the most common way people access the Internet. But nowhere in the U.S. is the shift from desktop and laptop computers to cell phones making as much of an impact as in Latino households like Jared’s or in African American and low-income households, in which the cell phone is often the primary tool used to get online…”
• Pew study finds rapid increase in mobile Internet use by low-income Americans, By Matt Hamblen, July 9, 2010, Computerworld: “Wireless access to the Internet has long been seen as a potential economic bridge for disadvantaged groups in those regions of the world that lack a wired infrastructure. For example, in poorer countries like Haiti, where landlines are limited, three mobile service providers have moved to widely offer the ability for cell phone users to complete wireless banking and e-commerce transactions. Some observers note that low-income groups in the U.S. can also gain profound benefits from wireless access by using some key applications. This week, the Pew Research Center in Washington said that a survey of 2,252 adults over 18 in April and May found that low-income groups in the U.S. are now the fastest adopters mobile Web devices. The survey found that 46% of households earning less than $30,000 a year are wireless Internet users. That lowest income group surveyed was the fastest growing — up by 11 percentage points from 35% in April 2009…”

Blacks in Memphis lose decades of economic gains, By Michael Powell, May 30, 2010, New York Times: “For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city. A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college. Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure. ‘I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,’ said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. ‘I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.’ Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress…”

Study: Md., Va. Latino kids fare better than peers elsewhere, still face hurdles, By Tara Bahrampour, April 29, 2010, Washington Post: “Latino children in Maryland and Virginia are faring better than their counterparts in many areas of the country but still face significant hurdles to integration and success, according to a report released Wednesday by the Population Reference Bureau and the National Council of La Raza, a Latino civil rights organization. The report found that a disproportionate number of Latino children in the United States live in poverty, drop out of school, lack health insurance and end up in the juvenile justice system. Its authors stressed the ‘urgency’ of the situation and recommended swift intervention to reverse the trends…”

School suspensions lead to legal challenge, By Erik Eckholm, March 18, 2010, New York Times: “As school let out one day in January 2008, students from rival towns faced off. Two girls flailed away for several seconds and clusters of boys pummeled each other until teachers pulled them apart. The fistfights at Southside High School involved no weapons and no serious injuries, and in some ways seemed as old-fashioned as the country roads here in eastern North Carolina. But the punishment was strictly up-to-date: Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed and briefly arrested a dozen students. The school suspended seven of them for a short period and six others from the melee, including the two girls, for the entire semester. As extra punishment, the girls were told they could not attend Beaufort County’s alternative school for troubled students and were denied aid to study at home…”

• Study: Charter school growth accompanied by racial imbalance, By Nick Anderson, February 4, 2010, Washington Post: “Seven out of 10 black charter school students are on campuses with extremely few white students, according to a new study of enrollment trends that shows the independent public schools are less racially diverse than their traditional counterparts. The findings from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, which are being released Thursday, reflect the proliferation of charter schools in the District of Columbia and other major cities with struggling school systems and high minority populations. To the authors of the study, the findings point to a civil rights issue: ‘As the country continues moving steadily toward greater segregation and inequality of education for students of color in schools with lower achievement and graduation rates,’ the study concludes, ‘the rapid growth of charter schools has been expanding a sector that is even more segregated than the public schools…’”
• Report: Racial gap grows in charter schools, By Emily Gersema, February 8 2010, Arizona Republic: “The racial gap is widening with the increase in charter schools in Arizona and other states due to a lack of regulation and enforcement of existing civil-rights regulations, a group of researchers based at the University of California-Los Angeles said in a new report. The UCLA Civil Rights Project report, ‘Choice Without Equity,’ revealed what researchers deemed a troubling pattern of racial stratification in charter schools across the country. They said they believe state and federal intervention can turn the trend around. Gary Orfield, the project’s co-director, said the Obama administration’s recent grant programs, such as Race to the Top, and charter-school grants that encourage the expansion of charters and development of new ones, are a timely opportunity for regulation…”

U.S. unemployment rate for blacks projected to hit 25-year high, By V. Dion Haynes, January 15, 2010, Washington Post: “Unemployment for African Americans is projected to reach a 25-year high this year, according to a study released Thursday by an economic think tank, with the national rate soaring to 17.2 percent and the rates in five states exceeding 20 percent. Blacks as well as Latinos were far behind whites in employment levels even when the economy was booming. But throughout the recession, the unemployment rate has grown much faster for African Americans and Latinos than for whites, according to the study by the Economic Policy Institute. Moreover, the unemployment gap between men and women has reached a record high — with men far outpacing women in joblessness…”

• Why aren’t there more Deidre Greens?, By Susan Troller, December 2, 2009, Capital Times: “Deidre Green got off to a rough start with a bad case of infant jaundice that overwhelmed her mother. She went to live with her grandmother, who showered her with attention that likely changed the arc of her life. ‘I suppose I got pretty spoiled,’ the UW-Madison freshman says with a laugh. ‘My grandma played with me all the time - she did puzzles with me, read to me. She always told me I was smart, so when I got to school, that was what I expected. It was what she expected, too.’ For Green, a variety of serendipitous factors - her own talent and hard work, supportive mentors in and out of school, a core group of good friends and key opportunities - helped her excel in Madison public schools. An educational pioneer in her family, she intends to also do well in college and then go to law school…”
• Report: Minorities, low-income students lag in college success, By Daniel de Vise, December 3, 2009, Washington Post: “A new report, billed as one of the most comprehensive studies to date of how low-income and minority students fare in college, shows a wide gap in graduation rates at public four-year colleges nationwide and ‘alarming’ disparities in success at community colleges. The analysis, released Thursday, provides a statistical starting point for 24 public higher education systems that pledged two years ago to halve the achievement gap in college access and completion by 2015. Together, the systems represent two-fifths of all undergraduate students in four-year public colleges…”
• Skills gulf near impassable for poor children, By Adele Horin, December 3, 2009, Sydney Morning Herald: “Children from poor families have fallen so far behind their peers by the age of six in language development and other measures they are in danger of never catching up, a study has shown. Researchers tracked 5000 four-year-olds and 5000 infants for two years and found stark differences in the cognitive development of children from different socio-economic backgrounds. The differences were evident by age four. As well, there were marked differences in the health of children from different backgrounds, with the most disadvantaged likely to have poorer general health, sleep problems, and ‘illnesses with wheezes.’ Dr Jan Nicholson, associate professor of psychology at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, said the results were worse than expected for cognitive development. The findings will be presented to the Growing Up in Australia conference this week…”
• How the economy is failing students, By J. Patrick Coolican and Emily Richmond, December 2, 2009, Las Vegas Sun: “The Clark County School District has always struggled with its sky-high population of poor children. The number of homeless students is expected to reach 8,000 by the end of the academic year, a 30 percent increase. And a full 44 percent of the district’s students receive free or reduced-price lunches, a commonly used indicator of childhood poverty. Family poverty, in turn, is correlated with lagging student achievement. Now, the deep recession threatens to make this problem worse, and do so for years to come. According to a study from two economists at the University of California, Davis, a parent’s job loss can increase by 15 percent the likelihood that a student will repeat a grade. This short-term damage, which is particularly acute in families where the breadwinner has just a high school degree, matches up with other data showing the negative long-term effects of poverty on student achievement…”

Trying to explain a drop in infant mortality, By Erik Eckholm, November 26, 2009, New York Times: “Seven and a half months into Ta-Shai Pendleton’s first pregnancy, her child was stillborn. Then in early 2008, she bore a daughter prematurely. Soon after, Ms. Pendleton moved from a community in Racine that was thick with poverty to a better neighborhood in Madison. Here, for the first time, she had a full-term pregnancy. As she cradled her 2-month-old daughter recently, she described the fear and isolation she had experienced during her first two pregnancies, and the more embracing help she found 100 miles away with her third. In Madison, county nurses made frequent home visits, and she got more help from her new church. The lives and pregnancies of black mothers like Ms. Pendleton, 21, are now the subject of intense study as researchers confront one of the country’s most intractable health problems: the large racial gap in infant deaths, primarily due to a higher incidence among blacks of very premature births…”