Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — The House is expected to vote later Friday on a reworked and even more conservative package to address the ongoing border crisis, with measures that would speed up deportations and a separate vote to end a policy that protects from deportation undocumented young people with long-standing ties to the U.S.

Then they’ll leave Washington, having successfully gone after one of President Barack Obama’s key policies but approving funding legislation that couldn’t get through the Senate — which isn’t here to pass it anyway.

Congress, in other words, is set to skip town until September without sending a bill to the president’s desk to deal with an influx of more than 57,500 unaccompanied minors who have been apprehended at the border since the beginning of October — even though nearly all members in both chambers have deemed the situation a crisis.

House Republicans brought more GOP members on board Friday for a funding bill that would now offer $694 million to address the border crisis. They said after a meeting Friday morning that they’re optimistic the bill can pass after the changes.

“Those new ideas were rolled out today and it was the best rendition of ‘Kumbayah’ I’ve ever heard in my life,” Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.), a member of the working group that helped draft the bill’s policies, told reporters.

Leadership was forced to scrap a vote at the last minute on Thursday when it appeared it couldn’t get the 218 votes needed for passage. Nearly all Democrats opposed that legislation, along with some Republicans.

Along with the original bill’s $659 million in funding — a fraction of President Barack Obama’s $3.7 billion request and the Senate’s failed $2.7 billion package — it included measures to send National Guard troops to the border, add immigration lawyers and change a 2008 law so unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada could be deported more quickly.

It still wasn’t considered strong enough for some Republicans, so leadership promised an additional vote on Thursday, if the first bill were to pass, on legislation that would end the president’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy on undocumented young people and prevent him from taking additional executive action in the future.

That wasn’t enough to win over hard-line GOP members, either. But the revised package presented to members on Friday received more support, Republicans said after a meeting.

It will include the general framework of the original package, but will sub in language from Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) to change the 2008 law so minors can be removed more quickly.

The bill will also provide $35 million in funding to reimburse border states who send National Guard troops to the border — a move already made by Gov. Rick Perry (R) in Texas, which is facing most of the influx. A GOP aide said the $35 million will be offset, as is the rest of the legislation.

If the funding bill passes, a vote is expected on legislation to end DACA and prevent the president from further moves to slow deportations. The language for that bill was changed as well, members said.

The White House issued a veto threat earlier this week for the House Republicans’ $659 million bill and gave a strong condemnation of the plan to vote to end DACA.

Even if the House passes something, it won’t make much of a difference. The Senate has already finished votes until September, after the Democrats’ bill to address the border crisis was killed in a 50-44 vote Thursday, with Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana joining Republicans in opposition.

Some House Republicans called for the Senate to come back from the August recess to work on border funding, should it get through the House.

“There’s always hope the Senate will come to their senses and pass this bill over there. If we’re able to pass this here, I would hope that the Senate would come back,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.). “I would hope that they do their job.”

Marina Fang, Sam Levine and David McCabe contributed reporting.

My grandfather came to America from a shtetl near Minsk with five cents in his pocket and three words of English. Or maybe it was three cents in his pocket and five words of English. He worked hard and sacrificed so that his children and grandchildren could prosper. With a fifth grade education he parlayed a job changing car tires in an alley into a business changing car tired in an alley and eventually a tire store that also sold household appliances. He had six brothers. Some did as well as he did, others struggled but all of them were able to send their kids to college.

I grew up learning this American Dream story and have passed it on for inspiration to my own children — those I’ve raised and those I’ve taught — but I’m starting to lose confidence in that inspiration and I’m beginning to worry that I’m not only perpetuating a myth but a destructive one. As JFK said, “…the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

The American Dream has, of course, always been at least part fraud. African Americans and others were largely denied access to many of the opportunities that defined it for a long time and even for those individuals with opportunity the hard work=prosperity correlation has not always been a reliable one.

But I’m afraid we now find ourselves in an era of increasingly shattered American Dreams and nowhere is that more true than for the students I teach in South Los Angeles. These are young men and women who have defied all the perils of poverty, violence, ignorance, and despair. They are the ones who’ve made all the right choices and worked their asses off and faced their struggle head on. They are the young women and men who haven’t dropped out, who haven’t joined a gang or made a baby or succumbed to the escape of drugs or alcohol or apathy. These are the kids who’ve believed in the power of hard work. They’ve shown up to school every day and done their homework every night. They’ve taken college classes while they were in high school. And they’ve never backed down from a challenge, academic or otherwise. It is a beautiful thing to see their accomplishments and to be a part of them.

But now I feel a little queasy about the whole thing because while I’ve been a true believer and I’ve perpetuated the belief in hard work as the great poverty buster, now when I talk to some of them I feel that I’ve perpetuated a great fraud upon them.

Because I am hearing from young men and women who have just graduated college — just like I urged them to four and five years ago — and now they owe thousands in student loans and it seems they are lucky to get any job at all and most of them are working in jobs that don’t require a college education. The lucky ones can move back with their parents and not all of them are that lucky. Surely the job market will improve — won’t it? I hope so because that is what I’m telling these unemployed and under-employed former students who drank the Kool-aid about a college education that I served them when I was their teacher. I hope I’m right and their struggle is not the result of long-term structural economic shifts. I hope I’m not just perpetuating more myths because it is what I told this year’s senior and this year’s juniors. I don’t know what else to tell them. Go to college. Go to the best college you can. I’m still a believer but I wonder if I’m perpetrating a fraud.

This year one of the seniors in my class needed a little extra prodding to apply to college. Let’s call her Yazmin — not her real name, of course. She is bright and hard-working but a broken family and a life of poverty and abandonment left her without much confidence. Fortunately, a graduate from a few years ago, now a Harvard University student, agreed to help her complete her applications. It was a beautiful thing to watch, the two of them huddled at my computer plotting a future. Yazmin got into five very good private colleges. All of them gave her financial aid, scholarships, and still expected her to borrow 25 or 30 thousand dollars a year. This is a child with nothing. A fractured family at a subsistence level. How do you ask that child to make a decision about taking on that much debt? She’s never had more than $20 in her pocket. And what am I supposed to tell her? Unless I’m willing to co-sign on those loans — and I still owe thousands I borrowed to put my own children through college.

I called the admissions offices of a few of those private universities to ask them why they would offer such an arrangement to a poverty-stricken child, to ask if they understood what it might be like for that child to be given such an impossible choice. I was told that a superior college experience is worth any amount of money. I understand that argument. College is not a job training program. It’s a life-transforming experience. But so is owing more money than you might ever be able to pay off. So, I’m sorry, but if the university wants to transform poor children they need to try a little harder to understand what it is like to have nothing.

Yazmin decided, instead, to attend a campus of the California State University system, the largest university system in the world and the gateway to post-secondary education for thousands of underprivileged young people. She will have to borrow about $8000 a year, still a terrifying amount for someone with nothing, but she has faith in what I’ve told her, that a college education is her way out of poverty. I wish I had as much confidence in our economy and the potential for economic justice as Yazmin has in me.

I’m trying to believe and I’m hoping like hell that things get better. Yazmin was supposed to sign up for a freshman orientation but when she tried to she was asked for a $174 fee. Apparently her financial aid did not cover it. No one — at this university that serves thousands of underprivileged young people — would tell a child with nothing at all what to do. She was too ashamed to tell me or anyone else at our high school and then last month was told that her admission to the university had been revoked — she was now on a wait list for fall enrollment. This news was compounded when her father told her he could no longer provide her a place to live. I wrote to the university on her behalf and within a few days a sympathetic administrator re-instated her. I am grateful for the administrator with a heart but still baffled by the brutality of the institution.

I guess there has never been an abundance of sympathy for those with nothing. Contempt comes easier than empathy. I am not always sympathetic to students who struggle in my class, especially if they seem not to be working hard — though often those seemingly lazy students are reacting to a storm of misfortune in their lives outside of school or are overwhelmed by the demands of a class they’ve been insufficiently prepared for. I sometimes have to check myself and get real about who these young women and men are and what they are up against. I will always preach hard work but I’m at my best when the sermon is tempered by a little understanding.

Too many of these young people are born falling backward and the obstacles are prodigious and even sometimes insurmountable. Some of these students are in my classes for two or three years and by the end of it I have invested an enormous amount of time in them — much of that investment beyond my job description — and an even greater emotional investment. Sometimes it is difficult not to think of them as my own children, especially those who are no longer being taken care of by their own parents — and what is happening to a lot of these children has left me angry and heartbroken.

Universities complain that high schools aren’t adequately preparing our students for college. They are not unjustified in that complaint. We are not committing enough of our secondary resources to that kind of intellectual and academic preparation. We pay lip service to college prep and all too often allow too many obstructions and too much compromise.

But I’d like to turn the tables on the post-secondary industry and ask them what they are doing to ensure that our students succeed once they get to college and after they graduate. I’m sure that most universities could present a power point demonstrating all the supports they have for minority students and struggling students but let’s be real. They could do more, probably a lot more. Starting with a real commitment to full inclusion and an outright rejection of elitism.

Elitism is a form of ignorance as destructive as any other and universities need resist the seduction of money and power so they aren’t repositories of that ignorance. They — and anyone else who gives a damn — need to promote the ideals of equal opportunity and the American Dream and help support me and other idealists who try to help struggling children.

Despite all the efforts of every president from Kennedy to Obama, kids not completing their high school education are a blight on our society. According to DoSomething.org, every year, over 1.2 million students drop out of high school in the United States alone. This comes to 7,000 kids a day dropping out. Twenty five percent of high school freshmen fail to graduate on time. The U.S., which in 1970 had had the world’s highest graduation rates of any developed country, now ranks 22 out of 27 countries in the developed world. Two thousand high schools across this country graduate fewer than 60% of their students. In the U.S., high school dropouts commit 75% of our crimes.

The unemployment rate for dropouts is 9.1%, for those with high school diplomas it’s 5.8% and with college degrees, 3.3%. The average high school dropout earns $20,240 annually versus $30,600 for a high school graduate. According to The New York Times, if we could reduce the number of dropouts by a little over half, this would yield close to 700,000 new high school graduates each year. These 700,000 new graduates a year would obtain a higher rate of employment and earnings and would be less likely to draw on public money for health care and welfare and less likely to be involved in the criminal justice system. And because of the increase in income, these 700,000 graduates each year would contribute more in tax revenues. Each of these graduates over their lifetime produces a net benefit to taxpayers of $127,000 in government savings. This would benefit the public close to $90 billion each year, which turns into $1 trillion after 11 years. That is serious money and an easy issue that both Democrats and Republicans can rally behind to reduce our deficit while supporting funding for education.

Throughout the years, all of our leaders have made attempts to reduce the dropout rate through improving our educational system. Kennedy hastened school desegregation to integrate public schools to give all kids the hope of a better education. Johnson established Head Start so all kids would have a chance to start on equal footing. Carter upgraded the Department of Education to cabinet level status. Clinton passed the “Goals 2000 Educate America Act,” which gave resources to states and communities to enact outcomes-based education with the theory that students will reach higher levels of achievement when more is expected of them. George W. Bush passed the “No Child Left behind Act,” which worked to close the gap between rich and poor students by targeting more federal funding to low-income schools. And Obama passed the $4.35 Billion “Race to the Top” legislation which has competitive grants supporting education reform and innovations in classrooms. Yet, we still have 1.2 million students dropping out of high school each year…

In my own state, from a new report by our mayors, according to the Arizona Republic, the 18,000 high-school dropouts this year will cost Arizona $7.6 billion over their lifetime. Phoenix, the country’s sixth largest city, in 2012 had the highest rate of youth disconnection among the country’s 25 largest metro areas with 24% of its students dropping out of high school. Our mayors say this year’s dropouts will cost Arizona $4.9 billion in lost income, $869 million in health costs, $1.7 billion in crime-related expenses and $26 million in welfare over their lifetime. On top of all this, statewide, 22% of youth 16-24 years old are not working or not in school, which is 182,000 young people.

The societal impact of our kids dropping out of school is devastating. Our schools know early on when many of these kids are in trouble. Key indicators include poor grades in core subjects, low attendance rates, failure to be promoted to the next grade and disengagement in the classrooms which would also include behavioral problems. So to save these kids, we have to start early. Our government needs to invest in early childhood education. When students enter school without the needed knowledge and skills, they begin behind and just never catch up. Early childhood programs need to support the emotional, cognitive and social development of kids.

So what should our schools do to curb this enormous economic problem? Because many dropouts feel alienated from others and disconnected from the school experience, schools must ensure that all students have meaningful relationships with adults while at school. This obviously includes teachers and administrators, but should include counselors, volunteers and more paid and unpaid mentors. Schools must have individualized learning sessions and non-traditional options. These options may include online learning and intensive tutoring programs. Also, students with disabilities, who are twice as likely to dropout as students with no disabilities, must be offered greater personalization programs from k-12.

This is truly a grassroots effort in each community to lower our dropout rates. There are national programs to help on the local level. Communities in Schools is an organization that has been around for 30 years that helps bring community resources inside public schools, providing resources for at risk kids to succeed in the classroom and in life. The Boys & Girls Clubs of America provide programs, services and a safe place to learn and grow and connect with adults. And at DollarDays through our Facebook page, we are giving away $5,000 worth of products schools can use, so please nominate a school that deserves our help.

Dropouts cause our society emotional pain, because we all feel sorry for those less fortunate and struggling to survive. But the cold hard facts are they cause us economic pain that could be avoided once we admit, like the mayors of Arizona, that our dropout rate has an economic impact that we can’t ignore any longer. We have got to get our schools the resources to go at this problem head on. Maybe if we approach our current Congressional leaders that this is an economics problem, not a school funding issue, we can finally get their attention…

It’s easy to become disheartened when perusing the endangered species list. However, conservationists are making strides to keep these animals from disappearing forever. Their hard work, and dedication are making enormous progress each and every day.

There is an overwhelming fear of the rapidly changing Manhattan skyline. Where that fear stems from is up for debate–is it a fear of the aesthetics of the new look or of the “starchitects” who design the buildings.

The New York Times opened a debate between various industry professionals on the role of “starchitects” on city skylines throughout the country. Opinions varied as the terms, “homogenizations of architecture” and “locatecture” were thrown around, but there seemed to be an agreement that building designs are a collaborative effort by a team and the result responsibility cannot be placed on a single architect. However, instead of looking at the impact of the architect’s team on the skyline, I want to focus on the building’s significance on their residents and the neighborhoods they are in.

When looking at the most renowned “starchitect’s” new developments throughout Manhattan, like Harry Macklowe’s 432 Park, it is overwhelmingly evident that they prioritize the potential resident’s needs and preferences. Chackrabarti was right when he said so much more than just blending into a neighborhood and the skyline comes into considerations when developing a new structure. At that price point, buyers want something different–they want to have something that no one else in the world does–and that’s the focus of Manhattan developers.

Taking a step back, into neighborhoods–Williamsburg and the Lower East Side–where new developments are starting to make rise, the new structures show a positive economic and cultural future for them. The new buildings attract new business, whether they be restaurants or grocery stores, a new clientele, and of course new residents to match the structures. “Innovation” and “future” are words desired to describe up and coming neighborhoods. The history will still be there, just so will new homes.