It’s a little bananas over here in the completely conceptual PB offices, but there will be some proper posting going on tomorrow. Pinky promise. Until then, some links for your perusal: Obama announces a drawdown to the war in Afghanistan, beginning with bringing 33,000 troops home this summer. Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Read More
On Monday, USA Today released its latest report in a series on standardized testing in American schools. The story focused on Noyes Education Campus, a PK-8 school in D.C., which had been singled out for praise by the city’s former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, because of a big jump in its test scores. USA Today Read More
In a post about some dope-looking charts made by W.E.B. Dubois for the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris on the state of black life in America at the time, Adam offers up this aside: But you can get a hint from this of the days when teachers at black schools were among the best in Read More
All this “beiging of America stuff” — btw, have you listened to the podcast? — is muddying things for both statisticians and the government. “Under Department of Education requirements that take effect this year, for instance, any student…who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic. And students Read More
Haiti is struggling to rebuild after last year’s catastrophic earthquake and trying to resolve its national elections, but it was thrown another curveball late this weekend: the return of its corrupt and brutal former dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. No one seems to know why he’s back — he says he’s there “for the reconstruction Read More
Earlier this year, the success of Urban Prep Academy, an all-black, all-male charter school near Chicago, was the subject of rapturous praise for sending all of its graduating seniors to four-year colleges. It makes sense that this story has gotten a lot of positive press; it’s a respite from the parade of depressing-ass statistics we Read More
What’s good, everyone? Sorry for the late roundup. I’m subbing for blackink, who just upped and moved to the A and is still getting settled in. Some stuff to turn over as you go about your day… It’s kind of a moot point now, but this chart, via Ezra Klein, shows how much folks would Read More
On this week’s podcast, Nicole, Jamelle, Monica and G.D. sit around an actual dinner table to discuss some depressing new stats about the academic woes of black boys. They also try to make sense of some high-profile attempts to regulate food purchases (including a push to forbade people on government assistance from buying soda, a Read More
The USDA’s Economic Research Service put out its latest figures for food insecurity hunger in the U.S. yesterday. From the press release: In more than a third of those households that reported difficulty in providing enough food, at least one member did not get enough to eat at some time during the year and normal Read More
Crossposted from SOH. Kristina Rizga at Mother Jones writes about a new report that concludes that middle class black boys still perform worse than their white counterparts, and that “race still matters,” even for the nonpoor. According to the study: […]black boys face more obstacles to graduating high school than any other subgroup, from living Read More
