Their Siblings Were Killed By Police. Now They’re United In The Fight For Justice.

The families of Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson were drawn together by tragedies that have become all too familiar in the United States.

By Hayley Miller
10/29/2019

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5db855bae4b036b6a16755f0

NEW YORK ― On a mild fall evening, two strangers bound together by unimaginable tragedy at the hands of those sworn to protect and serve met for the first time in Manhattan.

Ashley Carr and Alissa Charles-Findley never wanted the spotlight. But their families were thrust into it when Texas police officers, in separate incidents roughly a year apart, opened fire on their siblings in their own homes.

In the days and weeks that followed, each woman, like so many other members of Black families who have been victimized by systemic police brutality, would join the frontlines of a national movement they had once supported from a distance.

Hours after their first meeting, Carr and Charles-Findley stood beside each other in Foley Square as keynote speakers at a National Day of Outrage protest against police violence, led by Until Freedom, a social justice organization. It was Carr’s first rally, but the words flowed easily.

“This is something that could happen to anybody,” she told the crowd. “When does this stop? When are we able to just live, to be productive citizens like we were told to be?”

Elizabeth Warren Unveils Education Plan To Fight Segregation And High-Stakes Testing

The sweeping plan also takes aim at charters, suggesting they divert precious resources away from traditional public schools.

By Rebecca Klein 10/21/2019

Huffpost:
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5dacfaffe4b0422422c73a78

The detailed plan also seeks to equalize school funding between low and high-income areas and decrease the influence of police in schools. It proposes a new education grant program funded at a whopping $100 billion over 10 years — the equivalent of $1 million for every school in the country — for schools to use on programs or resources of their choice. Her plan would be paid for by a wealth tax on fortunes above $50 million.

However, her newly released plan is extensive, taking direct aim at some of the most entrenched sources of inequality in K-12 education... On the issue of school segregation ― a polarizing issue that even liberal politicians often shy away from ― Warren pledges to encourage states to use a portion of their federal funds on school integration projects. Under a Warren administration, the departments of Education and Justice will crack down on wealthier, whiter communities that try to break away from their more diverse school districts and hoard resources ― a phenomenon called school district secession.

“Broad public affirmation of the Brown v. Board of Education decisions in the 1950s and recent debates about historical desegregation policies have obscured an uncomfortable truth ― our public schools are more segregated today than they were about thirty years ago,” states the plan, titled, “A Great Public School Education for Every Student.”

Notably, Warren also pledges to “eliminate high-stakes testing.” High-stakes testing came to prominence during the Bush administration, after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, which tied schools’ test scores to a series of carrots and sticks. The Obama administration continued to center high-stakes tests as federal officials encouraged states and districts to tie teacher evaluations to test scores.... Warren’s plan represents a stark departure from this line of thinking. She pledges to ban test scores as a significant determinant in personnel terminations, school closures and other “high-stakes decisions,” noting that “the push toward high-stakes standardized testing has hurt both students and teachers.”

...Warren pledges to fight to ban for-profit charter schools, which represent around 15% of the sector. But she also goes after nonprofit ones, promising to end a federal program that provides funding for new schools and opposing provisions that allow them to sometimes evade the same level of transparency and accountability as traditional public schools. The plan seeks to ban nonprofit charters that employ or outsource operations to for-profit service providers and calls for the IRS to investigate these schools’ nonprofit tax status.

"Try to remember, if you can, how astonishing it was on Jan. 6, 2017, when America's intelligence community made public its finding that Russia had intervened in our election to help Trump. Imagine if we knew then [AND COULD REMEMBER NOW] just a fraction of what we know now, like the November 2015 email exchange between Felix Sater, a Trump associate and convicted felon with ties to Russian organized crime, and the Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, recently the subject of an FBI raid. Sater boasted:

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