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Iowa Dismantles Child Labor Laws, with 14 Other States

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2023 //
13

Iowa recently enacted legislation that rolls back the clock on child labor laws. The Economic Policy Institute reports on the Republican-led effort to put young children to work in hazardous industries, which conflicts with federal law.

What a disgrace these laws are! Are the red states lowering the age of employment because they don’t have enough immigrants to take these jobs? Are they ready to sacrifice the well-being of their children to keep immigrants out? All of the jobs opening for children under 18 appear to be the kind that are usually filled by minimum-wage adult workers.

EPI writes:

Last Friday, this concerted attack on child labor safeguards further expanded. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed an expansive bill enacting numerous changes to the state’s child labor laws, including:

  • allowing employers to hire teens as young as 14 for previously prohibited hazardous jobs in industrial laundries or as young as 15 in light assembly work;
  • allowing state agencies to waive restrictions on hazardous work for 16–17-year-olds in a long list of dangerous occupations, including demolition, roofing, excavation, and power-driven machine operation;
  • extending hours to allow teens as young as 14 to work six-hour nightly shifts during the school year;
  • allowing restaurants to have teens as young as 16 serve alcohol; and
  • limiting state agencies’ ability to impose penalties for future employer violations.

Multiple provisions in the new state law conflict with federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) prohibitions on “oppressive child labor”involving hazardous conditions or excessive hours that interfere with teens’ schooling or health and well-being.

In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Sanders signed a law in March that eliminated youth work permits. Under the law, 14- and 15-year-olds will no longer need an employment certificate from the state Division of Labor verifying proof of their age and parental consent to work.

At a moment when exploitative child labor is on the rise, such changes are dangerous, removing an important paper trail intended to provide “proof that the companies that hire children at least acknowledge—in writing—that they’re following the law.”

In intervening weeks, the U.S. Department of Labor has cited employers for hundreds more serious child labor violations, while additional state legislatures have advanced proposals to weaken child labor standards…

Iowa’s extreme new child labor law violates federal prohibitions on hazardous occupations and excessive work hours

Iowa labor unions and their allies organized significant opposition to weakening the state’s child labor laws, compelling lawmakers to remove some of the original bill’s most egregious proposals—including language allowing teens to work in some areas of meatpacking plants and granting employers blanket immunity from liability for deaths or injuries caused by negligence while employing teens in “work-based learning programs.”

Yet even after several amendments, the final bill(passed with only Republican support) remains one of the most dangerous rollbacks of child labor protections in decades.

Many aspects of the newly enacted Iowa law contradict federal child labor law. In a May 10 letter to Iowa lawmakers, U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda and Wage and Hour Division Principal Deputy Administrator Jessica Looman clarify that “the FLSA establishes federal standards with respect to child labor, and states cannot nullify federal requirements by enacting less protective standards.”

Because most employment situations are covered by the FLSA, employers who follow weaker new state rules in Iowa will be violating federal child labor law. Enforcing federal standards that the state no longer maintains will, however, now be solely up to the federal government.

In their letter, Nanda and Looman report that “the Department currently has over 600 child labor investigations underway nationwide, including in Iowa” and detail the ways in which Iowa’s proposed bill (most of which has now been enacted) contradicts prohibitions on hazardous work or excessive work hours considered “oppressive” forms of child labor under federal law.

Federal law generally prohibits the employment of children in hazardous occupations. The new Iowa law allows several forms of hazardous child labor that are expressly prohibited under DOL regulations on work permitted for 14–15-year-olds or are banned for all youth under 18 under “Hazardous Occupations Orders” (HOs). These are specific types of work the DOL prohibits based on National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health findings that certain jobs have proven particularly dangerous for teens.

The article lists the details of the Iowa law, showing the age at which children as young as 14 are allowed to work in previously forbidden jobs.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Economy, Iowa

Throw Kindness Like Confetti —Seen at PS 264K in Brooklyn

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2023 //
17

Categories Childhood, Goodness, New York City

A Washington Post Reporter Fights to Get Insurance Coverage for a Vital Drug for Her Infant

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2023 //
22

Carolyn K. Johnson writes about science and the business of healthcare for The Washington Post. She recently learned that her child had a rare and dangerous disease, and she became a warrior in a fight to get her private insurance company to cover the high price of the drug. She knows she had advantages unavailable to most parents, given her knowledge and access. What she shows is the fundamental unfairness of the American healthcare system. Another parent, without her background, might have been resigned to watching her child be permanently damaged or die.

Johnson wrote in The Washington Post:

When a salmon-colored rash flared on my 3-year-old son’s tummy one afternoon in August, I shrugged it off. The next time I asked Evan to lift up his shirt to take a photo, it was gone. When he stopped sleeping through the night, I thought it was a dreadful new developmental phase. But then on a Saturday, he stopped walking and spiked a 104-degree fever. A nurse gave me clear directions: “Get in your car, and start driving to the ER.”


After days in the hospital, the doctors had ruled out a long list of infections, as well as scary conditions like leukemia. That left them circling around a rare type of childhood arthritis called systemic onset juvenile idiopathic arthritis, or sJIA, in which the innate immune system, the body’s first line of defense against pathogens, goes haywire. Young children are tormented by daily spiking fevers, a fleeting rash and arthritis. Some develop a life-threatening immune activation syndrome. Untreated, destructive joint damage can occur. We were in shock.

But the doctors mentioned a drug that they’d probably want to try — anakinra, a biologic drug that blocks a key prong of the immune system and quells inflammation. Like most rare disease drugs, anakinra (also known by the trade name Kineret) was obscure, but I’m a health and science reporter and I’d heard of it. In 2020, I interviewed a pediatric rheumatologist, Randy Cron at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wanted to test whether anakinra could help people with severe covid-19.

Now, he told me that anakinra and similar biologics had transformed treatment for kids with sJIA. “Remarkably effective and safe,” he’d replied after I emailed him about our situation. “There may be a window of opportunity early during treatment to get the best long-term benefit.”

Anakinra was clearly the favored route back to health for Evan. We were determined to take advantage of any early “window of opportunity.” Unfortunately for us, our insurance company, Aetna, disagreed. We began a health journey that many people encounter when dealing with rare diseases, health insurance and pricey drugs.


Anakinra is expensive — on average, private health plans pay about $4,000 a month for it — so we needed to get approval before it would be covered. In early September, Aetna denied the request, requiring an additional test. Our doctors ordered the test and appealed.


In October, after another emergency room visit, daily spiking fevers, $2,000 of bloodwork and a growing feeling of despair about whether our son would ever be able to walk or play normally again, I received a letter from Aetna. It was a decision to “uphold the denial” to cover the drug, and it came from a team led by a urologist, a medical specialty that would not typically treat sJIA.


Aetna required that Evan try 30 days on drugs such as naproxen or ibuprofen, or two weeks on a steroid first to see if those worked. This type of decision isn’t unusual — nearly all insurance companies use this process, called step therapy, and it’s meant to save health-care dollars.

The idea is a logical one — to “step” up from inexpensive therapies to more expensive ones. It’s a guard rail to prevent unnecessary spending on drugs that cost more but may not offer much more benefit.

The painful irony was that we already had tried those medicines. A few days on ibuprofen and we were back in the ER. It failed to control Evan’s miserable fevers or assuage his knee pain. Steroids, which Evan was still taking, were only sort of helping.


We carried him between his bed and the living room couch, the only two places he was comfortable. We hand-fed him bites of food in bed. We went back to using diapers. One day, I tried to encourage Evan to walk, but watched in horror as I saw his knees buckle underneath him in slow motion, nearly falling backward down a flight of stairs. My mom came to help out, but left our house in tears after a few minutes.

In the midst of our August to October limbo, Evan received his first doses of anakinra through a free program offered by the drugmaker — and his symptoms dissipated. One of his rheumatologists had described this almost magical effect. Before the drug was standard treatment, one of her patients suffered from fevers for a full year. They had abated within hours of the first dose.


Patients vs. insurance companies

This isn’t a unique story about American health care, a single high-priced drug or just one insurance company. It is a tale of routine aggravation, inconvenience, futility and fear, but fortunately, not tragedy. Our battle was hair-raising but typical.

What’s different is that I have more tools, more time and more knowledge about how the system works than the average health-care consumer.


Before I came to The Washington Post, I covered science in Boston — the epicenter of the biotech industry and its sometimes miraculous, almost always high-priced drugs. I had been welcomed into the homes of families on diagnostic odysseys for children with rare and sometimes life-threatening illnesses. At The Post, my first job focused on the affordability of health care to consumers, particularly the weird economics behind drug prices.

I was also knowledgeable, even sympathetic, to the rationale behind insurance company policies that cause immense frustration to people. I’ve interviewed insurance and drug company executives, but I also did billing for a pediatric neuropsychology practice part-time after college.
I felt like I had been preparing for a situation like this for years.

Trying everything

Biologic drugs such as anakinra are produced in bioreactors by living cells. They’re given by injection or IV infusion and are much more expensive to produce than the familiar yellow jar of pills that people pick up at the pharmacy. Prices vary, but the monthly costs typically have a comma in them.

Insurance companies often put obstacles in the way of access to high-priced drugs. There are sensible reasons for this. Doctors aren’t incentivized to pick the most cost-effective care. They are the targets of aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies pushing new, more expensive drugs. Yet older, cheaper ones may work just as well.

Like other insurers, Aetna says that its step therapy program had been “designed to ensure patient access to clinically appropriate, evidence-based care” and is updated as new evidence becomes available.
So when the company denied the drug right off the bat in September, upset and worried as we were, we were also not surprised.

The doctors appealed the decision. We crossed our fingers. Evan’s fevers came under control while he was on high doses of steroids, but he refused to walk, couldn’t sleep at night, demanded meals at 1 a.m. and never seemed comfortable. He spent most of his time in bed, moaning. And we waited.

These insurance barriers are so common that drug companies sometimes provide initial doses of a drug for free, to bridge the time before insurance begins to cover it. Which is why, as we awaited action on our appeal, we were able to get three weeks’ worth of free drugs from Sobi, the drugmaker. It was enough though to get our little boy out of bed and eating dinner at the table for the first time in weeks.

These free drug programs are not a form of selfless charity. They offer immediate access to patients but also give drug companies cover, insulating them against critiques of the prices of their medicines.
“Once they hook you, they are going to go to the insurer and get the real dollars,” Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an architect of the federal Affordable Care Act and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.

Put more simply: Health care is a battlefield. Patients often become cannon fodder.

I knew all this. I expected it. Still, when our appeal was denied in October, I felt like I had been punched.


Several specialists told me that a short trial of ibuprofen — not 30 days — could be tried, but in their experience didn’t work in most children with this disease. Steroids are not recommended as an initial solo therapy by guidelines and, if used, are cautioned to be limited “to the lowest effective dosage for the shortest duration possible.”


“Your son was sick, but some of these kids die,” said Cron, who co-wrote the 2021 American College of Rheumatology guidelines on how to treat sJIA. He has also served as a consultant to Sobi, receiving $6,400 in fees in 2021. “So if you waited to put him on anakinra, that would not go well.”


The sludge effect


After I received that denial in October, I set aside chunks of time each day to make phone calls — primarily to my insurer, but also to a care manager at Sobi’s patient support program, Evan’s rheumatologists and a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts that had sent us the free drugs.


Why was I notified of the denial nine days after the decision? Why did a urologist, who had probably never seen a child with sJIA, have the last word on how my son should be treated? I wanted another option besides filling out a second appeal form and faxing it into the void. I was terrified about what would happen when we used up our last dose in a few days.
I kept detailed notes about the calls. Jordan, Alicia, Joseph, Alex, Alexis, Julie, April, etc., were polite but largely unhelpful. My son’s doctor suggested screaming and crying to get better results.


This tip — a serious suggestion — pushed me over the edge. I called other rheumatologists to find out if what we were going through was unusual. No. Other doctors echoed what our own had told us: requests typically got denied right off the bat, but were often approved after an appeal — or two.

Put more simply: Health care is a battlefield. Patients often become cannon fodder. I knew all this. I expected it. Still, when our appeal was denied in October, I felt like I had been punched.

The struggle varied, depending on the insurer and the specific drug that the child needed, but it seemed especially cruel in this case, because “there isn’t a clear alternative that has a reasonable chance of being effective,” said Grant Schulert, a pediatric rheumatologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.


“It’s something we spend a huge amount of largely uncompensated time on, as providers. And for patients, it delays significantly the time it takes to access care,” he added.


There is a name for what I was going through, which is also an accurate description of how I felt: sludge. The administrative burden of people dealing with their insurance adds up to about $21.6 billion a year in lost productivity, half of it during work hours, according to a paper from Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford Graduate School of Business.


Pfeffer said that, like me, he got interested in the problem when he ran into insurance barriers and realized how many advantages it took to succeed. “I have fancy doctors who know how to play the system,” Pfeffer said. “If you don’t have those resources, if you’re a less-educated human being with a crappy job and maybe African American or Latino, your ability to access the system is much less.”


I tweeted about my frustration, without mentioning most of the details — and got an outpouring of empathy. My Twitter profile identifies me as a Washington Post reporter, but I shared the story because it felt like a universal problem with American health care. Someone offered to ship doses from their personal stockpile of a similar drug. People inside insurance companies messaged me, offering personal contact information for executives. A person with Type 1 diabetes told me that due to her activism online, she had been labeled a “media threat” and now had the phone number of a person inside her insurance company to help get prescriptions covered.

Receiving health care shouldn’t require special favors. I interacted with Aetna as an ordinary health-care consumer, and kept trying 800 numbers.


After nearly three weeks on the anakinra doses supplied by Sobi, Evan’s doctors confirmed what we knew. He was so much better. Bloodwork showed his out-of-whack immune response was headed back in the right direction. After weeks of refusing to stand or walk across a room, he ran down the hallway and smiled behind his mask. We’d gone hiking.
It was great news, but we had only one syringe of anakinra left in the fridge.
Because getting anakinra covered had proved so difficult, our medical team had decided to shift gears a week before we even knew about the final denial. They decided to try, in parallel, to see if insurance would approve a different biologic drug called canakinumab that worked in a similar way but cost about four times as much. The doctors had started with anakinra, a fast-acting, once-a-day injection, to see if Evan responded. They’d preferred, based on his case, to start with a short-term daily shot, instead of canakinumab, which is given once a month and offers less flexibility.
Shortly after we lost the battle for anakinra, we qualified for a free first dose of canakinumab from Novartis, the company that makes that drug. But with only one syringe left in the fridge, there would be a gap. These drugs can’t just be picked up at the local pharmacy. Our free dose would be shipped to us from a pharmacy in Massachusetts, then we’d need a nurse to come to our house to administer it.
Our doctors mulled various options. Could we go to the ER to get a shot? What about going back on high-dose steroids? That afternoon, I took out our last syringe, and began squirting bits of the medicine into other syringes. It was not a recommended practice, but a way to stretch the supply.
Three days later, our first free dose of the new drug arrived. A nurse came on a Sunday at 8 p.m. to give it to Evan. His illness stayed at bay.
This is, in many ways, a story of a success in saving health-care dollars. For two months, our health insurance avoided paying for expensive drugs. The canakinumab was ultimately covered.
In January, after an editor suggested I write about the experience, I asked Aetna for their perspective.
“In reviewing the situation for your son, our team could have explained all requirements for step therapy more clearly in the first letter to you. Our initial decision was upheld on appeal, based on the information we had available at the time,” Aetna spokesman Ethan Slavin said in a statement. “We are working to clarify our communications process on these types of matters.”


Aetna said the canakinumab was approved because it was subject to different rules. “Your health care provider submitted the request as a continuation of existing care,” Aetna said in a statement. Reading between the lines: Evan was doing well on another biologic drug when the doctors made the request for the new one. He now qualified for the treatment, no thanks to our health insurance.

As a journalist, I often found prior authorization a difficult story to sell to an editor. The process caused families stress and delayed needed treatment. It drove doctors and nurses absolutely crazy. But it is a clumsily applied Band-Aid on a legitimate problem: high-priced drugs.

And as with us, a Rube Goldberg-like workaround often materialized.
The people who simply give up may not have the time, resources or sense of entitlement to keep fighting — or tell their stories to reporters.
In our case, we patched together two free drug programs and split up doses. It was incredibly precarious, time-consuming and tense. Other families face longer, harder fights. We were lucky. It was still horrible.


We don’t know what the future holds. Evan might need the medication long-term. He might need to try other drugs, if it stops working. He may be able to wean off it. What we do know: We’ll need to be ready for the next battle.

My struggle to get essential health care covered taught me how isolating the experience can be. We would like to collect these stories.

Have you struggled to get insurance to pay for high-priced drugs? Tell The Post your story here: wapo.st/insurerstories.

Categories Childhood, Ethics, For-Profit, Health, Science

Dark Money Pushes Weakening of Child Labor Laws

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2023 //
15

The Washington Post revealed the organization promoting the dilution of child labor laws. Iowa and Arkansas, both solid red states, were first to remove protections for children to meet the needs of employers.

To learn more about the gutting of child labor law in Iowa, watch this chilling video, thanks to reader Greg B.

Remember, the GOP is the party that loves the unborn but disdains the born. They value life in the womb but not actual children.

Investigative reporter Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post wrote:

When Iowa lawmakers voted last week to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group.
At 4:52 a.m., Tuesday, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15 year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.
The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children.
The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.”
“As a practical matter, this is likely to make it even harder for the state to enforce our own child labor laws,” said Annie B. Smith, director of the University of Arkansas School of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic. “Not knowing where young kids are working makes it harder for [state departments] to do proactive investigations and visit workplaces where they know that employment is happening to make sure that kids are safe.”

That law passed so swiftly and was met with such public outcry that Arkansas officials quickly approved a second measure increasing penalties on violators of the child labor codes the state had just weakened.
In Missouri, where another child labor bill has gained significant GOP support, the FGA helped a lawmaker draft and revise the legislation, according to emails obtained by The Washington Post.
The FGA for years has worked systematically to shape policy at the state level, fighting to advance conservative causes such as restricting access to anti-poverty programs and blocking Medicaid expansion.


But in February, the White House announced a crackdown on child labor violators in response to what activists have described as a surge in youths — many of them undocumented immigrants — working at meat packing plants, construction sites, auto factories and other dangerous job sites.
The administration’s top labor lawyer called the proposed state child labor laws “irresponsible,” and said it could make it easier for employers to hire children for dangerous work.
“Federal and state entities should be working together to increase accountability and ramp up enforcement — not make it easier to illegally hire children to do what are often dangerous jobs,” Labor Solicitor Seema Nanda said. “No child should be working in dangerous workplaces in this country, full stop.”
Congress in 1938 passed the Fair Labor Standards Act to stop companies from using cheap child labor to do dangerous work, a practice that exploded during the Great Depression….

On the surface, the FGA frames its child worker bills as part of a larger debate surrounding parental rights, including in education and child care. But the state-by-state campaigns, the group’s leader said, help the FGA create openings to deconstruct larger government regulations.
Since 2016, the FGA’s Opportunity Solutions Project has hired 115 lobbyists across the country with a presence in 22 states, according to the nonpartisan political watchdog group Open Secrets.
“The reason these rather unpopular policies succeed is because they come in under the radar screen,” said David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame. “Typically, these things get passed because they are often introduced in a very quiet way or by groups inching little by little through grass-roots efforts.”
Minnesota and Ohio have introduced proposals this year allowing teens to work more hours or in more dangerous occupations, such as construction. A bill in Georgia would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.

The FGA-backed measures maintain existing child labor safety protections “while removing the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” Nick Stehle, the foundation’s vice president, said in a statement.
“Frankly, every state, including Missouri, should follow Arkansas’s lead to allow parents and their teenagers to have the conversation about work and make that decision themselves,” said Stehle, who is also a visiting fellow at the Opportunity Solutions Project.
The FGA declined to make Stehle and other representatives available for interviews.
It’s one of several conservative groups that have long taken aim at all manner of government regulations or social safety net programs. The FGA is funded by a broad swath of ultraconservative and Republican donors — such as the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and 85 Fund, a nonprofit connected to political operative Leonard Leo — who have similarly supported other conservative policy groups.
The youth hiring or employment bills, as they are often titled, represent growing momentum among conservatives who contend that parents and not government policy should determine whether and where 14- and 15-year-olds should work.
“When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular,” Campbell said. “You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with….”

Supporters of the child worker proposals say they reduce red tape around the hiring process for minors. A spokeswoman for Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a rising Republican star, said her state’s law relieved parents of “obsolete” and “arbitrary burdens.”
“The main push for this reform didn’t come from big business,” Stehle, the FGA vice president, wrote in an essay for Fox. “It came from families like mine, who want more of the freedom that lets our children flourish…”

Tarren Bragdon, a former Maine state legislator, founded the FGA in 2011 with a focus on cutting social safety net and anti-poverty programs. It quickly tapped into conservative political fundraising networks and grew from $50,000 in seed funding to $4 million in revenue by its fourth year, according to tax filings and the group’s promotional materials.

In 2020, the most recent year for which the FGA and its funders’ full financial disclosures are available, more than 70 percent of its $10.6 million in revenue came from 14 conservative groups.

The FGA joined the State Policy Network, a confederation of conservative state-level think tanks that practice what leaders call the “Ikea model” of advocacy, its president said during the group’s 2013 conference. Affiliates such as the FGA display prefabricated policy projects for state officials, then provide the tools — including research and lobbying support — to push proposals through legislative and administrative processes.
In 2021, for example, Arkansas legislators passed 48 measures backed by the FGA, according to the foundation’s end-of-year report. It identified Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa among its five “super states” where it planned to increase its advocacy presence.
In 2022, the FGA claimed 144 “state policy reform wins,” including 45 related to unemployment and welfare, across a slew of states.
“Success in the states is critical for achieving national change, as it often opens the door to federal regulatory reform,” Bragdon wrote in the group’s 2021 report. “Once enough states successfully implement a reform, we can use the momentum and proven results to build pressure for regulatory change.”
Yet even legislators who support the FGA’s policies expanding child labor have found their limits.
Missouri’s bill was amended to require a parental permission form for children aged 14 to 16 who want to take a job. The original legislation, edited by the FGA, did not contain any such provision.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Childhood, Cruelty, Dark Money, Economy, Evil, Extremism, For-Profit, Health, Injustice, Iowa, Jobs

Misty Griffin: Religious Rights Should Not Outweigh Children’s Human Rights

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2023 //
44

Misty Griffin has an important story to tell, based on her dreadful personal experience. Her story is important especially at this moment when so many politicians are repeating the mantra of “parent rights.” Misty reminds us that children too have rights, and not all parents are trustworthy. Misty wrote her story in a book titled Tears of the Silenced: An Amish True Crime Memoir of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Brutal Betrayal, and Ultimate Survival.

I asked her to write her story for you.

She wrote:

In the United States, freedom of religion has the ability to cancel out every single child safety law/regulation on the books. Children across the nation are cloistered into strict religious communities that either have their own private religious schools or homeschool their children. Most of these groups do not believe in reporting child abuse and stress the importance of severe corporal punishment and view sexual abuse as a moral failing rather than a serious crime. Children in such religions/churches/cults are left with no one in their orbit who will help them out of abusive situations. Many of these children suffer greatly on a daily basis and seem forgotten by regular society.

A bit of my story.

My stepdad was a wanted pedophile who fled the Seattle area in the late 70s after a warrant was put out for his arrest for molesting the neighbor’s 2 small daughters. My mom met him in 1986 when I was 4. My sister and I became isolated and cut off from society. We were sexually abused and severely beaten multiple times a day.

When I was 7 years old, we started dressing in long dresses and scarves. When I was 10 years old we were dressing like the Amish. My mom told everyone we were being homeschooled (in reality we just did sporadic math and reading lessons here and there in case anyone from the state wanted to see schoolwork.) When I was 11 we moved to a remote mountain ranch in northern WA. At 18 yrs old, I tried to escape and was taken to a real Amish community. Three and half years later I fled the Amish community after 6 months of sexual abuse by the bishop.

My entire church knew that the bishop was a sexual predator. They had shunned him for six weeks for molesting his daughter a few years before I landed in the community. I reported the bishop to the police because I was suspicious he was molesting the children. The police drug their feet and told me point blank that they had to be careful not to trample on the religious rights of the Amish community. The bishop ended up escaping to Canada with his whole family and went on to molest almost all of the 11 children. Eleven years later he was finally sent to prison after one of his daughters asked a neighbor for help. They had come back to the United States by that time.

Child Rights Act

I had approximately a third-grade education when I came out into the “world.” It’s so sad that stories like mine are allowed to happen, but my story is not the only one, In recent years I have received thousands of emails from people who grew up in strict religions/cults. We must call out this religious aspect of child abuse because no matter how many laws and regulations we put on the books if this issue is not addressed and children are not given rights, children in strict religions and cults will never be reached.

I am not anti-religion; I am a non-denominational Christian, but religion should not allow anyone to bypass child safety measures. If you agree please sign my Child Rights Act Petition and share it on social media. Religious Rights should not outweigh children’s Human Rights.

photo

Misty Griffin

www.mistygriffin.com

mistyegriffin@gmail.com

Pasadena, CA

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Discipline, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Parents, Religion

Mercedes Schneider: Jesus Loves the Little Children, So Let’s Put Them to Work.

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2023 //
29

For her Easter post, Mercedes Schneider wrote about the hypocrisy of those who loudly proclaim their love of Jesus, but also pass laws to put adolescents to work in dangerous low-wage jobs.

She writes:

The corporate world is short on workers, sooo, let’s see what states will pass legislation to loosen restrictions on child labor.

This drive reminds me of the blindside on K12 education that is Common Core– the justification (and assumption) being that the chief purpose K12 education is to “prepare students for 21st century jobs.”

Well, its the 21st century, and it seems that business is short on bodies, and any warm body will do.

So, on this Easter as I think of Jesus, who brought to the attention of his male-centric culture the importance of considering children as people valuable in their own right, I also think of the primarily-Republican push to feed children to the god of business and industry.

On March 14, 2023, journalist Jacob Knudsen published a piece in Axios, stunningly entitled, “Lawmakers Target Child Labor Laws to Ease Worker Shortage.”

Forget childhood. We must appease the god of business and industry.

Knudsen writes, in part,

Legislators in multiple states are invoking a widespread labor shortage to push bills that would weaken long-standing child labor laws.

Why it matters: Some bills go beyond expanding eligibility or working hours for run-of-the-mill teen jobs. They’d make it easier for kids to fill physically demanding roles at potentially hazardous work sites. …

Driving the news: A new Arkansas law signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) last week makes it easier for teens as young as 14 to work without obtaining a permit.

Between the lines: The laws and proposals have largely been introduced by Republicans but received support from some Democrats in Ohio and New Jersey. …

Zoom in: Iowa lawmakers are considering Republican legislation that would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work in industrial laundry services and freezers at meatpacking plants. It’d also prevent many of them from receiving worker’s compensation if they are sickened, injured or killed on the job.

The Iowa law specifically excludes businesses who hire teens from any civil liability in the event they suffer harm or even death in the workplace.

Mercedes concludes:

This exploitation (make no mistake that this loosening of child labor laws in numerous states is exactly that) has at its center a lack of planning combined with the desire for a lower bottom line (and greater profits). Many of my teenaged students already drag themselves to school, only to fall asleep in class with the apology that “I had to close last night.” Therefore, making it easier for employers to squeeze even more out of school-aged employees even as society expects of them (and their schools) stellar academic results (dog whistle: test scores) is indeed speaking out of both ends of a hypocritical, corporate-adulating mouth.

Jesus loves the little children, sooo let’s exploit their labor potential, even for dangerous jobs, as we simultaneously absolve ourselves of any responsibility– even death.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Economy, Ethics, Health, Safety

Why Are So Many of America’s Children Dying Young?

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2023 //
13

The New York Times published an important article by David Wallace-Wells about the mortality rate in the USA. Shockingly, the biggest increase in mortality is among the young. CNN reported only days ago that gun deaths are now the leading cause of death among children, having passed car accidents in 2020. “Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database.”

Wallace-Wells wrote:

How long a person can expect to live is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country, and here, in the richest country in the world, the answer is not just bleak but increasingly so. Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.

You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80 or perhaps about the so-called deaths of despair among white middle-aged men. These were the predominant explanations five years ago, after the country’s longevity statistics first flatlined and then took a turn for the worse — alone among wealthy nations in the modern history of the world.

But increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers. One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19. Over three pandemic years, Covid-19 was responsible for just 2 percent of American pediatric and juvenile deaths.

Firearms account for almost half of the increase. Homicide accounted for 6.9 percent of deaths among that group, defined as those 19 years old or younger, and suicide accounted for 6.8 percent, according to a January analysis published in JAMA Network Open. Car crashes and accidental drug overdoses — which the National Center for Health Statistics collates along with other accidental deaths as “unintentional injuries” — accounted for 18.4 percent. In 2021, according to a JAMA essay published in March, more than twice as many kids died from poisoning, including drug overdoses, as from Covid-19. More than three times as many died of suicide, more than four times as many died from homicide, and more than five times as many died in car crashes and other transportation accidents (which began increasing during the pandemic after a long, steady decline).

Last week, the former Treasury secretary Larry Summers called the deepening life expectancy crisis, documented in recent surveys and studies, “the most disturbing set of data on America that I have encountered in a long time” and “especially scary remembering that demographics were the best early warning on the collapse of the U.S.S.R.” In many ways this feels like hyperbole. And yet, by the most fundamental measures of human flourishing, the United States is moving not forward but backward, at unprecedented speed, and now the country’s catastrophic mortality anomaly has spread to its children.

The new life expectancy studies pick up the thread of work by Anne Case and the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, economists who, beginning in 2015, suggested that a broad social malady was visible in the growing mortality rates of non-college-educated white men in middle age. Their research into what they called “deaths of despair” offered a sort of data-based corollary to a narrative about the country’s left behind, stitched together in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s rise, in part to make sense of it. In the years since, the same data has invited a whole competitive roster of divergent analyses: that such deaths reflected social dysfunctions driven by ballooning income inequality; that they illustrated health disparities that frequently tracked those inequalities, from obesity and cigarette smoking; that they showcased the country’s threadbare social safety net, which briefly expanded during the pandemic and then abruptly shrank; that they arose from striking declines in what conservatives often call prosocial values like patriotism and religiosity.

The new data tells a somewhat different story. In the big picture, opioids still play a large role, and suicide contributes, too. But that pattern of elevated middle-aged mortality is giving way to a growing crisis of juvenile death. The demographics are shifting away from those narrow markers of class and race identified by Case and Deaton, as well.

Mortality is still increasing more quickly for those without a college degree, but as John Burn-Murdoch demonstrated vividly in The Financial Times, except for a few superrich Americans, individuals at every percentile of income are now dying sooner than their counterparts in Britain, for instance. For the poorer half of the country, simply being an American is equivalent to about four full years of life lost compared with the average Brit. For the richer half, being an American is not quite as bad but is still the equivalent of losing, on average, about two years of life. And this is even though an American earning an income in the 75th percentile is much richer than a Brit at the same income percentile, since American incomes are much higher.

This is not to say that longevity declines are uniform, exactly. Black Americans, on average, can expect to live five fewer years than white Americans; Black American men have lower life expectancies than men in Rwanda, Laos and North Korea. White Americans, in turn, can expect to live seven fewer years than Asian Americans. Life expectancy in the Black Belt of the Deep South is as much as 20 years lower than it is north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi, according to the American Inequality Project. And there is even a notable difference between counties that supported Joe Biden in 2020 and counties that supported Trump.

While the past few years of data are skewed by Covid mortality, you still see the American anomaly even if you subtract the pandemic: In all other nations of that counterfactual world, The Financial Times calculated, life expectancy would have either stabilized or increased, while in the United States the huge surge in violent deaths alone would have cut the country’s life expectancy by a full year.

For earlier generations, life expectancy at birth was often a misleading statistic, because before modern medicine, if a person survived childhood and adolescence, he or she could be expected to live at least to contemporary middle age, and so the remarkably low median life expectancy estimate was suppressed by how many newborns did not make it to 10 or 20. (Thomas Jefferson wasn’t an old man when he wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33, when life expectancy was probably about 45, but only two of his six children with his wife, Martha, survived to adulthood.)

In modern America, a similar if less dramatic threshold appears to have emerged. If you make it to retirement age, you can expect to live about as long as your counterparts in other wealthy countries. This is its own kind of failure, given how much more money Americans spend on health care. But it is merely a waste, not a horror. The horror is that, as Burn-Murdoch memorably put it, in the average American kindergarten at least one child can expect to be buried by his or her parents. The country’s exceptionalism of violence is more striking among the young but extends into early adulthood; from age 25 to 34, Americans’ chances of dying are, by some estimates, more than twice as high, on average, as their counterparts’ in Britain and Japan.

And the death rates are growing at a startling speed. According to that March JAMA essay, the death rate among America’s youths increased by 10.7 percent from 2019 to 2020 and 8.3 percent from 2020 to 2021. The phenomenon was more pronounced among older children and adolescents, but the death rate among those age 1 to 9 increased by 8.4 percent from 2020 to 2021, and almost none of that effect was the result of the pandemic itself.

The pandemic years look even grimmer when we examine pediatric mortality by cause. Guns were responsible for almost half of the increase from 2019 to 2020, as homicides among children age 10 to 19 grew more than 39 percent. Deaths from drug overdoses for that age cohort more than doubled. In 2021, as schools reopened, pediatric deaths from Covid nearly doubled but still accounted for only one-fifth of the increase in overall pediatric deaths — a large increase on top of the previous year’s even larger one.

The disparities are remarkable and striking, as well. Most of the increase in pediatric mortality was among males, with female deaths making only a small jump. Almost two-thirds of the victims of homicide were non-Hispanic Black youths 10 to 19, who had a homicide rate six times as high as that of Hispanic children and teenagers, and more than 20 times as high as that of white children and teenagers. In recent years, the authors of the JAMA essay write, deaths from overdose were higher among white children and teenagers, but increases in the death rates among Black and Hispanic children and teenagers erased that gap, statistically speaking, in 2020.

In this way, the new data manages to invert and upend the deaths of despair story while only confirming the country’s longstanding patterns of tragic inequality. That narrative, focused on the self-destruction of older and less-educated white men, took hold in part because it pointed to an intuitive sense of national psychic malaise and postindustrial decline. But the familiar narratives about the country’s problems are proving more enduring: The country is a violent place and is getting more violent, and the footfall of that violence and social brutality is not felt equally, however much attention is paid to the travails of the “forgotten” working class. Probably we should be much more focused on protecting our young.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Failure, Guns, Health

Katherine Marsh: Why Children Don’t Fall in Love with Reading

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2023 //
37

Katherine Marsh is an award-winning novelist who writes for children in grades fifth-through-eighth. At that age in the 1980s, she remembers falling in love with books. But she knows that children today are not reading for fun as much as they used to. NAEP data say so; parents as well. She knows that the ubiquity of cell phones, the Internet, abd television explain some of that decline in reading.

But she believes there is a problem with the way children are taught reading. No, she’s not talking about phonics and how children learn to read. She refers to the pedagogical approach that is required by the Common Core. children in school are taught to analyze what they read. This technical mindset, she believes, kills the joy of reading.

She writes in The Atlantic:

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educatorexperienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

Under the duress of Commin Core, students are analyzing passages without reading the whole book. They are getting read to do the same on the tests. This is a sure fire way to make reading a chore, not a pleasure.

The architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, used to claim all sorts of miraculous things that would happen, if everyone taught the way he wanted. Test scores would rise, achievement gaps would close, etc. in the decade after Commin Core was introduced in 2010, none of those miracles came to pass.

Coleman believed that children needed to interpret what was put in front of them, without context. Understand the four corners of the text in front of them. This may make sense for a test, where the only thing in front of the student is a short passage, but it’s no way to read for pleasure.

Worse, this approach is a sure fire way to turn reading into a dull exegesis of language, not into a source of joy.

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Reform, Failure, Literacy, Literature, Real Education, Students

Florida: A Tribute to Donna Mace, a Champion of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2022 //
3

Donna Mace recently died, unexpectedly, and the public schools of the United States and Florida lost a dear friend.

Sandy Stenoff wrote this tribute to Donna, who taught elementary school students for 35 years, then became an outspoken activist for public schools and against the overuse of standardized testing. Of course, she was a BAT.

She concluded:

Donna Mace made the world a better place by being a force for good. She was a class act, approaching life’s challenges with courage, grace, humility, humor, and optimism, We all benefited from Donna’s wisdom, gained from her experience as a lifelong educator and a life well lived. She really was the best of us.

To the Mace family: Our thoughts are with you now and we send you love, gratitude, and a wish that your fondest memories will bring you peace and comfort.

I am sadened that we have lost Donna Mace. Many were inspired by her and will follow in her footsteps, never abandoning the struggle to do what is right for children. I hereby add her name to the honor roll, a list of distinguished fighters for public schools and children.

Categories BATS, Childhood, Courage, Creativity, Education Reform, Florida, Honor Roll

Rachel M. Cohen: The Last-Ditch Effort to Renew the Child Tax Credit

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2022 //
5

Rachel M. Cohen has a very informative article at VOX about the last-ditch effort during the lame-duck session of Congress to bring back the Child Tax Credit, which was amazingly effective at reducing child poverty during its brief existence. I have to admit that I didn’t really understand the program until I read her article. I suggest that you read it also. I didn’t realize that the controversial expansion included non-working families, where poverty is most dire. Currently, only working families can claim the credit. She argues that Democrats are eager to reach a deal because they will lose their slender majority at the beginning of the year, and some Republicans might be open to a compromise because they are chastened by their poor performance in the last election.

She begins:

In 2021, an expansion of the child tax credit delivered hundreds of dollars monthly to some 35 million parents across the United States, helping them afford gas, food, and school expenses, and lifting almost 3 million children out of poverty. But last December, Democrats narrowly failed to approve an extension of the expanded credit, and it expired. 

Now, with only a few weeks remaining before a new Congress takes office, advocates for the child tax credit are trying again to get an expansion included in any end-of-year tax package.

It’s a tall order, especially because Democrats would need at least 10 Senate Republicans to agree to pass any broad deal; last year, even a simple Democratic majority proved out of reach. But Democrats believe the political dynamics have since changed in their favor, and so have their policy demands, making a compromise potentially easier for Republican moderates to stomach. 

The sticking point since the expanded credit expired has been Republicans and West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s resistance to the idea that a more generous child tax credit should go to families where no parents are working. 2021 marked the only time in its quarter-century history that the CTC had no parental work requirement, and it was that feature, experts agree, that drove the policy’s substantial reduction in child poverty: a stunning 46 percent drop in one year, according to US Census data. Until the Inflation Reduction Act passed in August, Democrats and their allies were unwilling to entertain any child tax credit expansion that maintained a connection to work. 

Now, though, Democrats are signaling they’d embrace a more modest expansion — ideally one that keeps the credit fully available for all families, but at least makes it easier for parents with little to no earnings to access, even if at a reduced rate. Whether lawmakers can increase the amount of funding available for parents of infants and toddlers, as opposed to all kids under 18, is another option on the table.

The biggest negotiating card Democrats have right now is certain expiring business tax breaks. Since 1974, companies have been allowed to deduct research and development (R&D) spending the same year they make the investments, but as a budget gimmick included in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, businesses, as of 2022, now must expense those costs over five or 15 years instead. Restoring the right to annually deduct R&D spending is a top legislative priority of the business community.

Advocates are hoping to pair any restoration of R&D tax breaks with an extension of the child tax credit. In November, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who chairs the Senate finance committee, declared his intent to push for both together while Democrats still control both chambers of Congress. 

Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, chair of the Senate banking committee, has stated that expanding the CTC is his top priority. “I’ll put it this way, no more tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy unless the child tax credit’s with it. I’ll lay down in front of a bulldozer on that one,” he said in September.

Additional aid for Ukraine, public health, and disaster relief are the Biden administration’s top priorities for any end-of-year deal, but in late November, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said that if corporate tax breaks are included in a final deal, tax cuts “for working families” should be as well. 

The negotiations ultimately may turn on just how much corporate lobbying pressure Republican lawmakers face. Prior to the midterms, Republicans anticipated much bigger electoral gains, making compromise with Democrats ahead of the new Congress seem less urgent. But now, with Democrats set to retain Senate control and Republican House margins tighter than expected, the expectation that Republicans would even be able to reach a deal on the business tax breaks next year if they wanted to looks dicey.

This reality, in fact, partly explains why Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced last week that he’d like to negotiate an omnibus tax package in December, rather than a temporary spending deal that prevents a government shutdown but kicks the can on serious legislative decisions. Pushing the tax negotiations to 2023 would mean incoming House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, rather than current Speaker Nancy Pelosi, would be tasked with getting an acceptable deal through his chamber. “Nobody trusts McCarthy to pass anything (not even McCarthy),” quipped Politico in late November.

Though some advocates are still publicly calling for the expanded CTC of 2021, most acknowledge they’d accept more modest improvements

The 2021 expansion of the child tax credit, passed as part of President Joe Biden’s pandemic relief program, sent thousands of dollars to parents across the US. It made non-working and poor families fully eligible for the credit’s full value and increased the value of the subsidy itself — up to $3,600 per child.

Democrats had been optimistic that if they could just seed the generous program through the American Rescue Plan, then they would amass the kind of political support that makes a popular subsidy hard to repeal. But they failed, and the CTC is resultantly back to its pre-Covid form, with a maximum of $2,000 per child for working families only — and will remain there unless lawmakers change it.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Categories Childhood, Elections, Poverty
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