Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is Surrender is victory:
• Economic Policy Institute: Mass incarceration of parents educationally toxic to their children:
As many as one in ten African American students has an incarcerated parent. One in four has a parent who is or has been incarcerated. The discriminatory incarceration of African American parents is an important cause of their children’s lowered performance, especially in schools where the trauma of parental incarceration is concentrated. In this report, we review studies from many disciplines showing that parental incarceration leads to an array of cognitive and noncognitive outcomes known to affect children’s performance in school, and we conclude that our criminal justice system makes an important contribution to the racial achievement gap.
Educators have paid too little heed to this criminal justice crisis. Criminal justice reform should be a policy priority for educators who are committed to improving the achievement of African American children. While reform of federal policy may seem implausible in a Trump administration, educators can seize opportunities for such advocacy at state and local levels because many more parents are incarcerated in state than in federal prisons.
• Fed shows confidence in the economy by raising its benchmark interest rate for the second time in a decade: The governors did the same thing a year ago. And they vow to do it again three times in 2017. Will that put the brakes on an economy that has, with some exceptions, crawled almost back to where it was in 2007 when the Great Recession began?
• Reindeer shrink as climate change heats up their environment:
Reindeer are getting smaller and lighter as a result of climate change's disruption to their food supply, researchers revealed during the British Ecological Society annual meeting in Liverpool this week.
The findings come by way of ecologists from the James Hutton Institute, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences who have been measuring reindeer in the high Arctic every winter since 1994. According to their measurements, adult reindeer have shown a 12 percent decrease in overall body mass over the years—from 121 pounds in 1994 to 106 pounds in 2010.
• NAACP and Moral Monday leader—the Rev. William Barber—suing American Airlines for removing him from flight:
The leader of North Carolina's "Moral Monday" progressive movement and the state's NAACP is suing American Airlines saying he was removed from a flight because he is black.
News outlets report that The Rev. William Barber filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday in Alexandria, Va., demanding unspecified monetary damages and changes at the airline.
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(You can see a larger, more detailed version of this chart on page 6 of this document.)
• Former CIA chief has reservations about Trump, Flynn and making common cause with the Russians.
• On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Today, the president-elect was distracted by a bad Trump Grill review. NC’s Gop doesn’t mind the optics of a legislative coup. Should anyone else? Driverless Uber car nearly hits pedestrian. CO school dist. OK w teachers bringing guns. Who’s Stephen Miller?
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