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Suicide Rates Doubled Among African-American Boys
Ages 5 To 11 Since 1993
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(What is it that African
American boys see about the world in which they live and their futures
that causes them to kill themselves? And to kill others?) Image: John
Vachon/Wikimedia Commons
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May 23, 2015
Researchers
have found that rates of suicide among African-American children,
specifically boys, have doubled since 1993, surpassing for the first
time the rates among white children which dropped over the same period.
The study published in
the journal JAMA Pediatrics Tuesday, was based on data obtained from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which gives a breakdown
of causes of death in 657 cases of suicide among children ages five to
11 between 1993 and 2012, 84 percent of whom were boys.
Researchers
were surprised to find that suicide rates among black boys ages five to
11 nearly doubled between 1993 and 2012, rising from 1.78 to 3.47 per
million. This happened while the rates among white boys of the same age
group decreased from 1.96 to 1.31 per million.
Jeffrey Bridge, epidemiologist at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital, Columbus, Ohio, who led the study, told CNN that the results were surprising because suicide rates have historically been higher among whites across the age groups.
"Suicide
rates in the U.S. have historically been higher among white individuals
across all age groups. We were very surprised to see higher suicide
rates among black children over time."
"I
was shocked, I'll be honest with you. I looked at it and I thought,
'Did we do the analysis correctly?' I thought we had made a mistake," he
said.
To
confirm the trend, the researchers waited for a year until the 2012
data was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The data only confirmed the trend they had observed.
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Long-Term Gains Seen for Kids Who Leave Poor Neighborhoods
Researchers cite role of school leniency
By Liani Heitin
May 19, 2015
The
younger children are when they move out of impoverished neighborhoods,
the better their long-term outcomes are, including college-attendance
rates and later salary levels, according to two studies released this
month.
Those
results may derive in part from the likelihood that children in
low-poverty neighborhoods are more liable to be given second chances in
any number of situations, said a researcher who worked on one of the
studies.
"There
are less permanent consequences for youthful indiscretion in better
neighborhoods and modestly better schools," said Lawrence Katz, an
economics professor at Harvard University and co-author of a new analysis of the Moving to Opportunity program,
a federal anti-poverty initiative from the mid-1990s in which families
were randomly selected for vouchers to move to higher-income
neighborhoods.
The
relative leniency of schools and authorities in lower-poverty areas may
have a positive effect on educational outcomes even if the academic
programs don't differ significantly, researchers suggested. Previous analyses of the Moving to Opportunity program were
unencouraging. Moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty
neighborhood, they found, had no positive effects on parents' earnings
or on students' academic achievement.
But
the new analysis by Harvard University researchers Raj Chetty,
Nathaniel Hendren, and Mr. Katz indicates that the community where
children live has a significant impact over time-and the longer they
live in low-poverty neighborhoods, the more opportunities they'll have
as adults.
The researchers linked the data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment-which
was conducted from 1994 to 1998 and included about 4,600 families from
Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York-to federal
income-tax records. They found that children who moved to low-poverty
neighborhoods before age 13 earned an annual income as adults that was
$3,477, or 31 percent, higher than their counterparts who stayed in
high-poverty neighborhoods.
They
were also more likely to attend college and attend a better college,
and less likely to live in a low-income neighborhood as adults as well.
The women were also less likely to be single parents. "This overturns
the conventional wisdom on the effects of the Moving to Opportunity
study," said Adam Gamoran, the president of the William T. Grant
Foundation, which funds research on how inequalities affect U.S.
children, though it was not involved in the new studies. "It's leading
us to believe that moving to a new neighborhood does have effects on
longer-term outcomes."
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Minorities and poor college students are shouldering the most student debt
By Danielle Douglas-Gabriel
May 19, 2015
A day away from crossing
the stage at Montclair State University's graduation, Evangelia Stone
reflects on her journey from community college, the "amazing" professors
she met along the way and the $50,000 in student loans she took out to
get a bachelors' in sociology.
Stone, the first in her
family to graduate from college, qualified for the maximum award in Pell
Grants, the federal program that provides money for the country's
poorest students to attend college. The free aid was enough to cover all
her costs at Atlantic Cape Community College in southern New Jersey,
but it barely paid for a quarter of the more than $20,000 in-state
tuition, room and board at Montclair. The school offered Stone no
scholarships or grants, but she received several thousand dollars from
the New Jersey Commission for the Blind and Visual Impaired. It wasn't
enough.
"Nobody should have to
spend this much money, period. But in-state students going to public
universities...the fact that I'm leaving with this much debt is absurd,"
said Stone, 25, who plans to pursue a master's degree in social work at
Rutgers University this fall. "Higher education is supposed to be a
public good, not just a private purchase that wealthy students get to
enjoy."
Amid state cuts in higher
education funding and modest increases in federal grant aid eclipsed by
rising tuition, African American, Latino and low-income students like
Stone must borrow to get a degree, according to a new reportfrom liberal think tank Demos.
Eighty-four percent of
college students with Pell grants graduate from four-year public schools
with debt, compared with less than half of students without the
need-based grants, the report said. While less than two-thirds of white
graduates from public schools borrow, four out of five black graduates
take out loans for college. And black students who do borrow come out
with more debt than their peers.
"We have now entered a
new phase where student borrowing is now the primary way young people
pay for college," said Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos and
author of the report. "This shift places an unequal burden on
communities that have historically been denied an opportunity to gain
and leverage wealth."
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An
estimated 100,000 Black teachers were retired, fired, removed from or
"structured out" of education in America since 1990. After the "Atlanta
Massacre", few Black students will want to become teachers and schools
won't want to hire Black teachers. Is the plan working? - Phillip Jackson, The Black Star Project
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The Atlanta Cheating Scandal: Students Were the Victims, but the School System Suffers Too
By Eric Cooper and Co-authored by Phillip Jackson
May 19, 2015
Over
the last 13 years, Atlanta students have made significant progress on
another test -- the widely respected National Assessment of Educational
Progress (NAEP), administered through the U.S. Department of Education
and considered the "gold standard" of educational testing in the United
States.
In
a comparison of grade 8 reading assessments for Black students in
Atlanta, in Georgia and in the United States between 2002 and 2013, the
U.S. percentage of Black students at or above grade level increased from
13 percent to 16 percent, and the Georgia percentage increased from 14
percent to 17 percent. But Atlantic Public Schools' Black student scores
increased a stellar 10 points, from 5 percent to 15 percent.
If these NAEP scores are
any indication, then Atlanta educators under the leadership of former
Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall, who died of cancer in March, did
something right. We're not spending enough time figuring out what it was
and how other districts can duplicate those results.
"The
bottom line in this entire discussion," Smith wrote, "is that for the
most part, the gains for Atlanta schools from 2003 to 2011 are for
real!"
Besides, if the APS system
had massive cheating, as prosecutors claimed at trial, then it would
follow that grades would have spiked during the cheating, then gone back
down once it stopped. After a small dip, however, scores continued to
rise. We believe the groundwork, momentum, and high expectations for the
students and educational reforms instituted in Atlanta had something to
do with that. Other schools and school districts can benefit from
Atlanta's teaching methods and experience. What worked on the NAEP ought
to be shared.
Approximately
100,000 African-American teachers have retired or been terminated since
the late 1990s. Yet experts continue to call for more "minority"
teachers in the classroom who can better relate to an increasingly
diverse student population. The Atlanta cheating case may be responsible
for just a handful of those terminations, but the damage it does to
effective teaching and our system of justice is profound.
Click Here to Read Full Story and to "Like" Our Page
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Positive Black Men Asked to Volunteer as Mentors
at
Wentworth School
1340 W. 71st Street
Chicago, Illinois
Any Day in May 2015
Call 773.535.3394
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Recommend a Black Male High School Graduate for The
Mass Black Male Graduation Ceremony on Satruday, June 20, 2015 with
Keynote Speakers Attorney James Montgomery and Hip Hop Artist Jasiri X.
Call 773.285.9600 to register the young Black men at your high school
and in your life.
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