#Casey Parks, "Going Home," The New Yorker June 21, 2021. - "(Before the pandemic, six per cent of Detroit fourth graders met proficiency benchmarks in math, and seven per cent on reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)" "Around three per cent of Black students were homeschooled before the pandemic; by October, the number had risen to sixteen per cent." "In 2020, around seventy percent of Detroit public school revenues came from per-student allocations by the state."
"Most of the earliest homeschooling textbooks were written from a Christian perspective, and some were racist. Bob Jones University, the private South Carolina college, refused to admit Black students until 1971, began issuing homeschooling textbooks through its press later that decade." " 'United States History for Christian Schools,' first published in 1991, stated that most slave-holders treated enslaved people well, and that slavery 'is an example of the far reaching consequences of sin.' "
"Betsy DeVos's first budget proposal as Secretary of Education under President Trump, in 2017, would have cut nine billion dollars from federal education funding, while adding more than a billion dollars for school-choice programs."
"About half of Detroit's students are now enrolled in charters, one of the highest proportions of any U.S. city."
#Ari Berman, "Facing Down Jim Crow Again," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. "The basic idea is the same: to couch voting restrictions in race-blind language to disenfranchise new voters and communities of color." "There are strong similarities between the Mississippi plan of 1890 and the Georgia plan of 2021." President Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, asked the Georgia state legislature to appoint its own presidential electors to overturn the will of the voters.
The overall election board in Georgia has the authority to take over up to four county election boards it deems underperforming. "And since November, at least nine GOP-controlled counties have dissolved their bipartisan election boards to create all-Republican panels."
"By the early 1900s, only 7percent of Black residents were registered to vote in seven Southern states, according to data compiled by the historian, Morgan Kausser, and Black turnout fell from 61 percent of the voting-age population in 1880 to 2 percent in 1912." The states-right jurisprudence of the post-Reconstruction era has been resurrected.
#Rachal Monroe, "The Go-Between," The New Yorker, June 7, 2021. -"The half-dozen ransomware negotiations specialists and the insurance companies they regularly partner with, help people navigate the world of cyber extortion. But they've also been accused of abetting crime by facilitating payments to hackers." "By 2015, The F.B.I. had estimated that the U.S. was subjected to a thousand ransomware-recovery attacks per day; the next year, that number had quadrupled.:
"In 2018, the average payment was about seven thousand dollars according to a ransomware-recovery specialist [online company, Covewear (sp?)] By 2020, further increases in average payments caused some cyber-insurance companies began to exit the market. "Around three quarters of Fortune 500 companies eventually invested in kidnap-and-ransom insurance, but there was some discomfort with an industry that turned a profit by funneling money to the Mafia, terrorist groups, and criminal gangs." "These days, some ninety per cent of kidnappings are resolved, when specialists are involved, the success rate rises to ninety-seven percent."
#Aaaron Wiener, "A Ride, Not a Privilege," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "The cuts that cash-strapped transit agencies proposed, before being bailed out by Congress -- eliminating 40 percent of New York's City's subway services, a fifth of the DC regions Metro stations, and two-thirds of Atlanta's bus routes -- wouldn't have been their instant demise, but it was hard to see a way out of the death-spiral of mutually reinforcing service cuts and ridership losses."
"There's something for everyone in good public transit. It's essential to curbing climate change. The American Public Association estimates that every dollar spent on transit generates $15 in economic activity."
#Tom Philpott. "Empire of Dirt," Mother Jones, July + August 2021. - "The Gateses own 242,000 acres nationwide, an empire of dirt more than 1.5 times the size of Chicago, and worth a cool $5 billion." "The world's cache of arable land is shrinking under pressure from sprawl, pollution, and desertification. Between 1940 and 2015, the average price of an acre of farmland increased six-fold, and economists expect that trendline to steepen."
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