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Javier E

The Cutthroat World of Elite Public Schools - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...383382

elite public schools learning success segregation selectivity choice testing

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The issue at hand was—and still is—the city’s nine elite public high schools. Like most public high schools in the city, these schools can choose who attends. But the elite schools are their own animal: Whereas other schools look at a range of criteria to determine students’ eligibility, eight of these nine elite institutions admit applicants based exclusively on how the students score on a rigorous, two-and-a-half-hour-long standardized test.
  • The test-only admissions policy is touted by supporters as a tactic that promotes fairness and offers the best way to identify the city’s most gifted students. But the complaint, which is still pending, tells a different story—one of modern-day segregation, in which poor kids of color are getting left behind.
  • Public schools in cities across the country—schools intended to break down the walls typical of expensive, elite private institutions by opening up access to stimulating, quality education for kids of all means—are closed in their admissions. In other words, kids aren’t just automatically enrolled because they live in the neighborhood—they have to apply to get in
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  • As a result, their student populations are often far less diverse than they should be. And, sometimes, kids who would otherwise be eligible for these schools never get to enjoy them.
  • The country, he discovered, is home to some 165 of these institutions—"exam schools," as he calls them—or 1 percent of all public high schools.
  • econdly, selective-enrollment schools "are very sought after by upper-middle class people who might not consider using public schools if it weren’t for the selective-enrollment institutions. Essentially, it’s a way of ensuring greater participation from wealthier families who might otherwise move to the suburbs."
  • Selective-admissions programs are in part symptomatic of a broader, three-decade-old reform movement that has aimed to overcome the "mediocre educational performance" of the country’s students
  • They’re also an example of "school choice," the tenet that parents should have options when it comes to their kids’ education, even when it’s free.
  • "The idea was that, if you wanted to provide an excellent, gifted, and talented education for public school students, one could do a better job of that if in large cities there were specialized schools that would bring academically talented students together,"
  • These schools, some of which are centuries old, are concentrated in 31 states, including nearly three dozen total in New York City, Chicago, and Boston alone. All but three of these 31 states are located in the eastern half of the country,
  • "How do you recognize excellence on the one hand and promote genuine equal opportunity on the other?"
  • getting into selective-enrollment schools typically requires having proactive parents who know how to navigate the system—a resource many children lack.
  • The clashes over selective-admissions policies reflect the challenges districts face in reconciling two goals that are often diametrically opposed: academic achievement and equity. How can a school be color blind while simultaneously promoting educational access and diversity?
  • "the trick," he said, "is you don’t want the selective-enrollment schools to become enclaves of privilege that are separate and unequal from the rest of the system."
  • Can a fair selective-admissions system for public schools even exist?
  • urban school districts are nowhere near coming up with a model that works well and raises all students. The fact remains that many of these schools look and operate like elite schools exclusive to elite families.
  • These are schools renowned for their academic prowess and widely seen as conduits to the country’s top colleges. But, as the NAACP complaint demonstrates, they’re also notorious for their lack of racial diversity, enrolling disproportionate numbers of white and, in particular, Asian students, who made up 60 percent of the student bodies at these schools last year despite constituting just 15 percent of the city’s total enrollment.
  • Blacks and Latinos made up just 7 percent and 5 percent of the student bodies at these elite schools last year, respectively, even though the two groups together account for 70 percent of the public school population citywide.
  • many of New York City’s specialized high schools are more socioeconomically diverse than critics make them out to be.
  • "It’s not just a simple picture—there’s no one profile in this city," she said. "Those [test-only] schools are serving some first-generation strivers and working-class strivers that some of these other schools are not taking …
  • it’s hard to deny arguments that the test-only admissions policy can serve as a form of de facto discrimination. The multiple-choice exam is so rigorous some students devote entire summers to studying for it, often with the help of private tutors or intensive prep courses that cost thousands of dollars
  • much of the prejudice traces back to the lack of equal educational opportunity in kids’ earlier years, which effectively debunks the notion that a test is the fairest way to assess a student’s eligibility for enrollment.
  • When it comes to admission to one of the selective schools, most students only compete with their peers in the same tier. A student who lives in a single-parent household and relies on welfare, for example, would in theory rarely contend with a middle-class student for the same seat. Just 30 percent of the seats at each selective school goes to the highest-scoring students, regardless of their tier; the rest, for the most part, are divided among the highest-performing students in each tier. That means the bar is typically set higher for kids in the upper tiers (the fourth tier corresponds with the highest median income) than for those in the lower ones.
  • "Given the overlap between race and class in American society in cities like Chicago, giving a leg up to economically disadvantaged students will translate into [racial diversity],
  • Diversity aside, selective-enrollment high schools also raise questions about what the admissions process can do to an adolescent’s psyche, particularly when it places an inordinate emphasis on testing
  • Forget Halloween, weekend sleepovers with friends, playing outdoors. For many eighth graders in New York City, the fall is synonymous with tutors and exams, while the spring brings intense competition—and often volatile emotions—over placement in coveted spots at the city’s best high schools.
  • As for the students, "you’re given a cornucopia of beautiful and horrible choices and then held up, feeling like you’re being assessed and placed and feeling like your life is not your own," Szuflita said. "It feels very uncertain, and it feels like there are great triumphs and disasters."
Javier E

How Insurers Exploited Medicare Advantage for Billions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vantage-fraud-allegations.html

medicare insurance industry fraud cheating overbilling

shared by Javier E on 09 Oct 22 - No Cached
  • The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks. Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or a bonus in their paycheck.
  • Anthem, a large insurer now called Elevance Health, paid more to doctors who said their patients were sicker. And executives at UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest insurer, told their workers to mine old medical records for more illnesses — and when they couldn’t find enough, sent them back to try again.
  • Each of the strategies — which were described by the Justice Department in lawsuits against the companies — led to diagnoses of serious diseases that might have never existed.
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  • But the diagnoses had a lucrative side effect: They let the insurers collect more money from the federal government’s Medicare Advantage program.
  • Medicare Advantage, a private-sector alternative to traditional Medicare, was designed by Congress two decades ago to encourage health insurers to find innovative ways to provide better care at lower cost.
  • by next year, more than half of Medicare recipients will be in a private plan.
  • a New York Times review of dozens of fraud lawsuits, inspector general audits and investigations by watchdogs shows how major health insurers exploited the program to inflate their profits by billions of dollars.
  • The government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a set amount for each person who enrolls, with higher rates for sicker patients. And the insurers, among the largest and most prosperous American companies, have developed elaborate systems to make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment, according to the lawsuits.
  • As a result, a program devised to help lower health care spending has instead become substantially more costly than the traditional government program it was meant to improve.
  • Eight of the 10 biggest Medicare Advantage insurers — representing more than two-thirds of the market — have submitted inflated bills, according to the federal audits. And four of the five largest players — UnitedHealth, Humana, Elevance and Kaiser — have faced federal lawsuits alleging that efforts to overdiagnose their customers crossed the line into fraud.
  • The government now spends nearly as much on Medicare Advantage’s 29 million beneficiaries as on the Army and Navy combined. It’s enough money that even a small increase in the average patient’s bill adds up: The additional diagnoses led to $12 billion in overpayments in 2020, according to an estimate from the group that advises Medicare on payment policies — enough to cover hearing and vision care for every American over 65.
  • Another estimate, from a former top government health official, suggested the overpayments in 2020 were double that, more than $25 billion.
  • The increased privatization has come as Medicare’s finances have been strained by the aging of baby boomers
  • Medicare Advantage plans can limit patients’ choice of doctors, and sometimes require jumping through more hoops before getting certain types of expensive care.
  • At conferences, companies pitched digital services to analyze insurers’ medical records and suggest additional codes. Such consultants were often paid on commission; the more money the analysis turned up, the more the companies kept.
  • they often have lower premiums or perks like dental benefits — extras that draw beneficiaries to the programs. The more the plans are overpaid by Medicare, the more generous to customers they can afford to be.
  • Many of the fraud lawsuits were initially brought by former employees under a federal whistle-blower law that allows them to get a percentage of any money repaid to the government if their suits prevail. But most have been joined by the Justice Department, a step the government takes only if it believes the fraud allegations have merit. Last year, the department’s civil division listed Medicare Advantage as one of its top areas of fraud recovery.
  • In contrast, regulators overseeing the plans at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., have been less aggressive, even as the overpayments have been described in inspector general investigations, academic research, Government Accountability Office studies, MedPAC reports and numerous news articles,
  • Congress gave the agency the power to reduce the insurers’ rates in response to evidence of systematic overbilling, but C.M.S. has never chosen to do so. A regulation proposed in the Trump administration to force the plans to refund the government for more of the incorrect payments has not been finalized four years later. Several top officials have swapped jobs between the industry and the agency.
  • The popularity of Medicare Advantage plans has helped them avoid legislative reforms. The plans have become popular in urban areas, and have been increasingly embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans.
  • “You have a powerful insurance lobby, and their lobbyists have built strong support for this in Congress,”
  • Some critics say the lack of oversight has encouraged the industry to compete over who can most effectively game the system rather than who can provide the best care.
  • “Even when they’re playing the game legally, we are lining the pockets of very wealthy corporations that are not improving patient care,”
  • In theory, if the insurers could do better than traditional Medicare — by better managing patients’ care, or otherwise improving their health — their patients would cost less and the insurers would make more money.
  • But some insurers engaged in strategies — like locating their enrollment offices upstairs, or offering gym memberships — to entice only the healthiest seniors, who would require less care, to join. To deter such tactics, Congress decided to pay more for sicker patients.
  • Almost immediately, companies saw ways to exploit that system. The traditional Medicare program provided no financial incentive to doctors to document every diagnosis, so many records were incomplete
  • Under the new program, insurers began rigorously documenting all of a patient’s health conditions — say depression, or a long-ago stroke — even when they had nothing to do with the patient’s current medical care.
  • But for insurers that already dominate health care for workers, the program is strikingly lucrative: A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group unaffiliated with the insurer Kaiser, found the companies typically earn twice as much gross profit from their Medicare Advantage plans as from other types of insurance.
  • The insurers also began hiring agencies that sent doctors or nurses to patients’ homes, where they could diagnose them with more diseases.
  • Cigna hired firms to perform similar at-home assessments that generated billions in extra payments, according to a 2017 whistle-blower lawsuit, which was recently joined by the Justice Department. The firms told nurses to document new diagnoses without adjusting medications, treating patients or sending them to a specialist
  • Nurses were told to especially look for patients with a history of diabetes because it was not “curable,” even if the patient now had normal lab findings or had undergone surgery to treat the condition.
  • Adding the code for a single diagnosis could yield a substantial payoff. In a 2020 lawsuit, the government said Anthem instructed programmers to scour patient charts for “revenue-generating” codes. One patient was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although no other doctor reported the condition, and Anthem received an additional $2,693.27, the lawsuit said. Another patient was said to have been coded for “active lung cancer,” despite no evidence of the disease in other records; Anthem was paid an additional $7,080.74. The case is continuing.
  • The most common allegation against the companies was that they did not correct potentially invalid diagnoses after becoming aware of them. At Anthem, for example, the Justice Department said “thousands” of inaccurate diagnoses were not deleted. According to the lawsuit, a finance executive calculated that eliminating the inaccurate diagnoses would reduce the company’s 2017 earnings from reviewing medical charts by $86 million, or 72 percent.
  • Some of the companies took steps to ensure the extra diagnoses didn’t lead to expensive care. In an October 2021 lawsuit, the Justice Department estimated that Kaiser earned $1 billion between 2009 and 2018 from additional diagnoses, including roughly 100,000 findings of aortic atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. But the plan stopped automatically enrolling those patients in a heart attack prevention program because doctors would be forced to follow up on too many people, the lawsuit said.
  • Kaiser, which both runs a health plan and provides medical care, is often seen as a model system. But its control over providers gave it additional leverage to demand additional diagnoses from the doctors themselves, according to the lawsuit.
  • At meetings with supervisors, he was instructed to find additional conditions worth tens of millions of dollars. “It was an actual agenda item and how could we get this,” Dr. Taylor said.
  • Last year, the inspector general’s office noted that one company “stood out” for collecting 40 percent of all Medicare Advantage’s payments from chart reviews and home assessments despite serving only 22 percent of the program’s beneficiaries. It recommended Medicare pay extra attention to the company, which it did not name, but the enrollment figure matched UnitedHealth’s.
  • Even before the first lawsuits were filed, regulators and government watchdogs could see the number of profitable diagnoses escalating. But Medicare has done little to tamp down overcharging.
  • Several experts, including Medicare’s advisory commission, have recommended reducing all the plans’ payments.
  • Congress has ordered several rounds of cuts and gave C.M.S. the power to make additional reductions if the plans continued to overbill. The agency has not exercised that power.
  • The agency does periodically audit insurers by looking at a few hundred of their customers’ cases. But insurers are fined for billing mistakes found only in those specific patients. A rule proposed during the Trump administration to extrapolate the fines to the rest of the plan’s customers has not been finalized.
  • Ted Doolittle, who served as a senior official for the agency’s Center for Program Integrity from 2011 to 2014, said officials at Medicare seemed uninterested in confronting the industry over these practices. “It was clear that there was some resistance coming from inside” the agency, he said. “There was foot dragging.”
  • few analysts expect major legislative or regulatory changes to the program.
  • “Medicare Advantage overpayments are a political third rail,” said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, a former hospital and insurance executive and a former top regulator at Medicare, in an email. “The big health care plans know it’s wrong, and they know how to fix it, but they’re making too much money to stop. Their C.E.O.s should come to the table with Medicare as they did for the Affordable Care Act, end the coding frenzy, and let providers focus on better care, not more dollars for plans.”
Javier E

A Steep Slide in Law School Enrollment Accelerates - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dealbook.nytimes.com/...lls-to-lowest-level-since-1987

law school enrollment

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Enrollment numbers of first-year law students have sunk to levels not seen since 1973, when there were 53 fewer law schools in the United States,
  • Fewer people are taking the admissions test and applying to law school, according to recent data from the Law School Admission Council. The number of test takers was 8.1 percent lower than a year ago, and about 50 percent below the same test period in 2009, according to council figures.
  • The total enrollment, the association reported, is the lowest since 1987, when there were only 175 accredited law schools.
James Flanagan

Enrollment In Obamacare's Federal Exchange, So Far, May Only Be In 'Single Digits' - Fo... - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...so-far-is-in-the-single-digits

shared by James Flanagan on 04 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • On October 1, Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges went live. Most of the exchange websites crashed on the first day, a development that led some of the law’s supporters to conclude that there was overwhelming demand for Obamacare’s insurance products.
  • . “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one anonymous insurance industry official to the Washington Post. “We are talking single digits.”
  • Covered California, that state’s subsidized insurance exchange, initially claimed that its website had received 5 million hits on October 1. They later had to revise that number down 87 percent, to 645,000. KUSI-TV in San Diego is reporting that not one policy has yet been sold on the California exchange.
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  • . For example, the drop-down boxes for security questions aren’t working, which shouldn’t be a traffic-related problem
  • A new study from the American Action Forum that looks at healthy 30-year-old men finds that underlying premiums for those individuals will increase by an average of 260 percent
  • In a sense, the AAF study is more relevant to the problem at hand. Obamacare makes healthy people pay more for insurance in order to subsidize sicker people. It makes younger people pay more to subsidize older people. It makes men pay more to subsidize women. It makes everyone pay more to cover benefits, taxes, and fees that consumers might not ordinarily want.
grayton downing

BBC News - Democrats lament Obamacare rollout glitches - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-us-canada-24647561

democrats news obamacare obama politics

shared by grayton downing on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • President Barack Obama's Democratic allies have begun voicing frustration with widespread problems with aspects of his signature healthcare law
  • House Democrats have complained that technical issues with an insurance enrolment website had overshadowed the law's current and future benefits.
  • The health law, known formally as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and informally as Obamacare, was passed in 2010 and is Mr Obama's foremost domestic policy initiative.
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  • Mr Obama and the law's supporters say it will eventually reshape America's costly and inefficient healthcare industry and provide insurance to most of the estimated 46 million Americans who lack it.
  • The sites, known as exchanges, opened on 1 October. The White House aims to enrol as many as seven million people through the exchanges by the 31 March end of the enrolment period.
  • The Republicans, who have opposed the law from the beginning and have sought to undermine it at every turn, are now calling for the rollout to be delayed and for deadlines for enrolment to be pushed back. The Republicans have also loudly demanded an investigation into the exchanges' shortcomings.
  • "It is our job to hold them accountable, and when it comes to Obamacare clearly there is a lot to hold accountable," House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Wednesday.
  • "The president needs to man up, find out who was responsible, and fire them," Minnesota Congressman Richard Nolan said. "You don't get many second chances to get a good first impression."
anonymous

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, CMS Head, Vows To Improve Access To Health Care : Shots - Healt... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-new-head-of-medicare-medicaid

shared by anonymous on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The new head of the federal agency that oversees health benefits for nearly 150 million Americans and $1 trillion in federal spending said in one of her first interviews that her top priorities will be broadening insurance coverage and ensuring health equity.
  • "We've seen through the pandemic what happens when people don't have health insurance and how important it is," said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who was confirmed by the Senate to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on May 25 and sworn in on May 27.
  • That approach is an abrupt switch from the Trump administration, which pushed the agency to do what it could to help repeal the Affordable Care Act and scale back the Medicaid program, the federal-state program for people with low incomes.
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  • she is not surprised at the robust increase in the number of people enrolling in ACA insurance since President Biden reopened enrollment in January. As of last month, the administration says, more than 1 million people had signed up.
  • "Over the last couple of years, I've worked with a lot of the state-based marketplaces and we could see the difference in enrollment when the states were actively pushing coverage," Brooks-LaSure said. A former congressional and Obama administration health staffer, she most recently worked as managing director at the consulting firm Manatt Health.
  • Brooks-LaSure also suggested that the Biden administration would support efforts in Congress to ensure coverage for the millions of Americans who fall into what's come to be called the Medicaid gap. Those are people in the dozen states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act who earn too little to qualify for ACA marketplace coverage.
  • Brooks-LaSure said she would prefer that states use the additional incentive funding provided in the recent American Rescue Plan toward expanding their Medicaid programs "because, ideally, states are able to craft policies in their own states; they're closest to the ground."
  • Last year's economic downturn — and the resulting drop in tax revenue from employees' paycheck withholdings — is likely to accelerate the date when Medicare's hospital insurance program will not be able to cover all of its bills.
  • Democrats in Congress are looking at both lowering Medicare's eligibility age and adding benefits the program now lacks, including dental, hearing and vision coverage.
  • "I hope that we, when we are looking at solvency, really focus on making sure we keep the Medicare program robust," said Brooks-LaSure. "And that may mean some changes that strengthen the program."
Javier E

Is the Ivy League Fair to Asian Americans? - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...266538

university admissions race culture Asian-American prejudice

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard's 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent."
  • The last 20 years have brought a huge rise in the number of Asians winning top academic awards in our high schools or being named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists. It seems quite suspicious that none of trends have been reflected in their increased enrollment at Harvard and other top Ivy League universities.
  • As I see it, we know that even well-intentioned people regularly rationalize discriminatory behavior, that society as a whole is often horrified at its own bygone race-based policies, and that race is so fluid in our multi-ethnic society that no one can adequately conceive of all the ways it is changing; knowing these things, prudence dictates acceptance of the fact that humans aren't equipped to fairly take race into consideration. At various times in history, doing so has nevertheless been a necessity. We're lucky that it isn't a necessity now, and that class-based affirmative action would effectively target the most needy racial minorities in a race-blind way. 
Javier E

Opinion | Bidencare Is a Really Big Deal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-biden-obamacare.html

obamacare biden politics policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • President Biden has made Obamacare an even bigger deal, in a way that is improving life for millions of Americans.
  • The Biden administration just announced that 21 million people have enrolled for coverage through the A.C.A.’s health insurance marketplaces, up from around 12 million on the eve of the pandemic. America still doesn’t have the universal coverage that is standard in other wealthy nations, but some states, including Massachusetts and New York, have gotten close.
  • And this gain, unlike some of the other good things happening, is all on Biden, who both restored aid to people seeking health coverage and enhanced a key aspect of the system.
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  • Biden, as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, largely resolved these problems, reducing maximum premium payments (net of subsidies) and eliminating the cliff at 400 percent. The result is to make health insurance coverage substantially more affordable, especially for middle-income Americans who previously earned too much to be eligible for subsidies. Hence the surge in marketplace enrollments.
Javier E

A Son of Football Calls His Mother - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...football-calls-his-mother.html

football sports injuries brain injjury culture

shared by Javier E on 27 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • These articles are important, & I'm glad the Times is bringing this issue to awareness. However, the hyper focus on football alone creates a misperception that only football is dangerous & risky. That is simply not true. Parents here who pat themselves on the back for not enrolling their child in football - or in leveling charges of child abuse on those who do - are the same parents who enroll their child in: lacrosse, ice hockey, cheerleading, competitive soccer, skiing, ice skating, wrestling, & many other sports that have very high risks of brain injury as well. I realize some of the spotlight is on football because of all the money involved, but I have to wonder if it's also because football is filled with African American & lower income parents.It's definitely disgusting how college football uses their players like meat, risking players' health & reaping millions. By the time they're at NFL level, it can be egregious. But let's not lose sight of the risks in so many competitive sports. My friend's daughter actually broke her neck because of the style of dance where you whip your head all over (most competitive hip hop). When I taught high school, the worst concussions I saw were girls basketball & wrestling. Wrestling had the highest concussion rate, far over football. And they were treated less.The bigger issue is our culture, which awards so much $ in scholarships & extracts so more $ for those who risk nothing. And all for sports. Not learning. Sports.
Javier E

Billionaires' Row and Welfare Lines - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...res-row-and-welfare-lines.html

inequality economic benefit crisis US

shared by Javier E on 26 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The stock market is hitting record highs.
  • Bank profits have reached their highest levels in years.
  • in August, “Sales of homes priced at more than $1 million jumped an average 37 percent in 2013’s first half from a year earlier to the highest level since 2007,
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  • “In 2012, real median household income was 8.3 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.”
  • Forbes’s list of the world’s billionaires has added more than 200 names since 2012 and is now at 1,426. The United States once again leads the list, with 442 billionaires.
  • Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide — one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 — are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, “adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.
  • developers are turning 57th Street in Manhattan into “Billionaires’ Row,” with apartments selling for north of $90 million each.
  • “During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent.”
  • “The 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled by U.S. preschools and K-12 schools in the 2011-2012 school year is the highest number on record, and a 10 percent increase over the previous school year. The number of homeless children in public schools has increased 72 percent since the beginning of the recession.”
  • “These new poverty estimates released on Sept. 19, 2013, suggest that child poverty plateaued in the aftermath of the Great Recession, but there is no evidence of any reduction in child poverty even as we enter the fourth year of ‘recovery.’ ”
  • the number of households living on $2 or less in income per person per day in a given month increased from about 636,000 in 1996 to about 1.46 million households in early 2011, a percentage growth of 130 percent.”
  • “Cash assistance benefits for the nation’s poorest families with children fell again in purchasing power in 2013 and are now at least 20 percent below their 1996 levels in 37 states, after adjusting for inflation.”
  • The number of Americans now enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is near record highs, and yet both houses of Congress have passed bills to cut funding to the program. The Senate measure would cut about $4 billion, while the House measure would cut roughly ten times as much, dropping millions of Americans from the program.
Javier E

High School Football Inc. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...high-school-football-inc.html

football high school sports

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Their assuredness is as bold as the company behind the school: IMG, the global sports management conglomerate that has helped propel the competitive leap that high school football has made beyond the traditional community team.
  • convention is being challenged by a more professional model at the highest levels as top players urgently pursue college scholarships, training becomes more specialized, big business opens its wallet, school choice expands, and schools seek to market themselves through sports, some for financial survival.
  • Increasingly, prep football talent is being consolidated on powerful public, private, parochial, charter and magnet school teams. And recruiting to those schools is widespread in one guise or another.
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  • IMG is at the forefront. It is trying to enhance its academy brand with football, perhaps the most visible sport. And it is applying a business model to the gridiron that has long been profitable for tennis and has expanded to golf, soccer, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, and track and field. The academy has nearly 1,000 students from more than 80 countries enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade and postgraduation. About half the students are international.
  • Although it is private, IMG Academy has received more than $7 million from the Florida state budget over the past two years, according to news accounts. An additional $2 million was pledged by lawmakers in June but was then vetoed by Gov. Rick Scott.
  • The full cost of tuition and boarding for a year of football at IMG Academy is $70,800, although need-based financial assistance is available. School officials would not provide specific figures, but they said that payments by families could range from tens of thousands of dollars to a competition fee (between $3,750 and $4,500) to nothing.
  • IMG bought the academy in 1987, and it now covers more than 500 acres. Football began in 2013 as part of a $197 million campus expansion. Games are played in a 5,000-seat stadium outfitted with suites and a jumbo video screen. Digital screens depict each player’s name and face on his locker. Some N.F.L. players train there in the off-season, as do college players preparing for the pro draft.
  • The school, 45 miles south of Tampa, recruits football players from around the country, offering high-performance training, college preparatory courses, coaches with N.F.L. playing experience, facilities that resemble a small college more than a high school, and a chance to play a national schedule and on national television on ESPN against some of the country’s highest-rated teams.
  • “We run a business,” said Chip McCarthy, a co-managing director of IMG Academy. “We call it sales and marketing. Some people call it recruiting. We’re promoting our program. If you look at any private school that emphasizes sports, they’re typically doing it to promote their school. A lot are trying to survive. You’re not going to curtail that.”
  • Many high school football coaches and officials are closely following IMG Academy, wondering whether it portends the growth of similar academies or superleagues featuring top teams.
  • “I’m 50-50 split,” said John Wilkinson, the coach at Cocoa High School, who faced IMG Academy last week and said he would do it again. “They’re high school kids, just like us. We’re playing a football game. The other 50 percent thinks the competitive advantage they have is kind of alarming, if they’re allowed to recruit. But it is what it is.”
  • Other officials express fear that football might follow the path of high school basketball, which many feel has been corrupted by so-called diploma mills and the heavy influence of club teams and recruiting middlemen.
  • Mickey McCarty, who has coached three state championship teams at Neville High School in Monroe, La., and who lost a senior receiver to IMG Academy days before fall practice began, said the academy seemed less a traditional football team than a showcase for individual talent.
  • “It sounds to me like they’re playing for self, to be promoted and recruited, which takes away everything we stand for,” McCarty said.
  • Academy officials said that 186 athletes from IMG’s 2015 graduating class were playing various college sports, including six at Ivy League universities and four at service academies. Academics and athletics are intended to simulate the college experience with dormitory living, alternate-day classes, block scheduling and a focus on time management.
  • “I came here assuming it was going to be easy, it’s just going to be a football school, but I learned within the first week I was completely wrong,” said Kjetil Cline, 17, a senior receiver from Minnesota who plans to play football at the United States Military Academy. “That really opened my eyes about what college would be like, and I think it’s really prepared me for going to West Point and being able to handle that.”
  • “Academy teams, while they may be good teams and give great educations, it’s not something that we really believe in or would promote or espouse in any way. We think the high school experience is best served by the student-athlete who lives at home with his family and is part of his school, family and community.”
  • The players at IMG and their families consider that approach to be antiquated. For Patterson, a quarterback who won state championships the previous two seasons at a high school in Louisiana, IMG Academy is serving as a finishing school.
  • Patterson said he transferred to IMG in June to work on his speed, strength and conditioning. He plans to graduate in December, enroll for the spring semester at the University of Mississippi and challenge for the starting quarterback position there next fall as a freshman.“It’s definitely a professional decision,” he said.
  • teve Walsh, IMG Academy’s director of football, and Rich Bartel, the offensive coordinator, both played quarterback in the N.F.L. There are also sports psychologists, strength coaches and speed coaches to assist Patterson. He has at his disposal a 10,000-square-foot weight room; a sports science center to aid with hydration and nutrition; a biomechanics center; a vision lab, or “mind gym,” to enhance perceptual and cognitive skills; and a hospital for special surgery and sports rehabilitation should he be injured.
  • When IMG Academy played in Texas this month, it trained at Texas Christian University, and Wright, the Ascenders’ coach, said, “We’re thinking, ‘Hey, our practice fields are maybe a little bit better.’ ”
  • At the top levels of high school football, some teams routinely travel to play teams in other states. Games are frequently broadcast on regional or national cable channels. Some players are offered college scholarships as early as eighth grade.
  • “It’s all driven by money, and you can’t beat money,” said John Bachman Sr., who coached Patterson to state titles the past two seasons at Calvary Baptist Academy in Shreveport, La. As a freshman, Patterson played at a high school in Texas.
  • Even so, he added, “I don’t think anything’s ever going to take the place of the local public high school or private school that pours itself into the kid, and it’s a family atmosphere and it’s about the team and sacrifice and so on.”
  • Sean Patterson Sr., Shea’s father, said, “If your son’s a great musician, you want to send him to Juilliard,” adding that for Shea, IMG Academy “is the spot” for polishing his football skills for college.
Javier E

Generation Later, Poor Are Still Rare at Elite Colleges - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-poor-to-elite-colleges.html

university admission aid costs

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • critics contend that on the whole, elite colleges are too worried about harming their finances and rankings to match their rhetoric about wanting economic diversity with action.
  • “A lot of it is just about money, because each additional low-income student you enroll costs you a lot in financial aid,” said Michael N. Bastedo, director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. “No one is going to talk openly and say, ‘Oh, we’re not making low-income students a priority.’ But enrollment management is so sophisticated that they know pretty clearly how much each student would cost.”
  • The rankings published by U.S. News and World Report, and others, also play a major role. The rankings reward spending on facilities and faculty, but most pay little or no attention to financial aid and diversity.
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  • Sustaining one poor student who needs $45,000 a year in aid requires $1 million in endowment devoted to that purpose; 100 of them require $100 million. Only the wealthiest schools can do that, and build new laboratories, renovate dining halls, provide small classes and bid for top professors.
  • College presidents are under constant pressure to meet budgets, improve graduation rates and move up in the rankings,” Dr. Carnevale said. “The easiest way to do it is to climb upstream economically — get students whose parents can pay more.”
  • A big part of that climb has been the rise of “merit aid,” price breaks offered to desirable students regardless of their parents’ wealth. A few dozen top schools give no merit aid, but they are the exception. Historically, American colleges gave far more need-based aid, but it is outweighed today by merit aid.
  • In 2006, at the 82 schools rated “most competitive” by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, 14 percent of American undergraduates came from the poorer half of the nation’s families, according to researchers at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University who analyzed data from federal surveys. That was unchanged from 1982.
  • What distinguishes those who apply to elite schools is not family income or their parents’ level of education, according to a groundbreaking study published last year, but location. Exposure to just a few high-achieving peers or attending a high school with just a few teachers or recent alumni who went to highly selective colleges makes a huge difference in where low-income students apply.
  • Cost remains a barrier, but so does perception, he said, adding, “It’s a psychology and sociology thing, as well as a pricing thing.”
  • Public colleges remain less expensive, but in an era of declining state support, their prices have risen faster than those of private colleges, and they vary widely from state to state. Private colleges have sharply increased financial aid since the turn of the century, so that the average net price that families really pay has barely changed over the last decade, adjusted for inflation — and for low-income students, it has actually dropped.
  • even top private colleges with similar sticker prices differ enormously in net prices, related to how wealthy they are, so a family can find that an elite education is either dauntingly expensive or surprisingly affordable. In 2011-12, net prices paid by families with incomes under $48,000 averaged less than $4,000 at Harvard, which has the nation’s largest endowment, for example, and more than $27,000 at New York University, according to data compiled by the Department of Education.
Emilio Ergueta

Remembering 9/11: A warrior's unexpected gift to America - Global Public Square - CNN.c... - 0 views

globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/...-an-unexpected-gift-to-america

gift america cnn US history crisis

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • s America looked inward in the days, weeks and months after September 11, 2001, others around the world made extraordinary gestures toward the United States.  28We were all so focused on ourselves – understandably so – that many probably missed the fact that Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami condemned the attacks, that Ireland and Israel held full national days of mourning, that the Afghan Taliban told “American children [that] Afghanistan feels your pain”.
  • You are even less likely to have heard what could be one of the most touching reactions of all.  This is the story of how a destitute Kenyan boy turned Stanford student rallied his Masai tribe to offer its most precious gift to America in its time of need.
  • According to Kimeli, his family (or lack thereof) was so destitute that his Masai tribe didn’t even consider them people – they were sub-human. Moreover, nobody that Kimeli knew from his tribe had gone to high school, let alone college or medical school.
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  • same elders who had once considered Kimeli to be sub-human had done a complete reversal.  Kimeli says his people were now were so impressed by what he had achieved that he was not only considered human again, they were invested in helping him achieve his goals.  They raised $5,000 for him
  • Kimeli enrolled at the University of Oregon in 1996.  A few years later, Kimeli heard about Stanford University (after Chelsea Clinton enrolled there) and decided after seeing the school that that was where he belonged
  • So, on a trip back home in May of 2002, he asked to meet with the elders of his tribe. 28  28First, Kimeli told them of the horrors he had witnessed in New York.  Many of Kimeli’s people had never even heard of 9/11.  They couldn’t even fathom buildings that tall and most people in the village had never seen a plane except way high up in the sky.
  • He wanted to buy a cow (something this formerly homeless boy had never been able to do) and turn right around and give that cow to America. In Kimeli’s tradition, a cow is the most precious property one can own.  And it is believed to bring great comfort to its owner.  As one elder told a reporter, a cow is a “handkerchief to wipe away tears”.
  • On June 3rd, 2002, U.S. charges d’affairs William Brencick travelled to Enoosaen to formally accept the cows.  He says it took him more than half-a-day to get there - a flight and then a long drive over treacherous terrain.  But after he heard Kimeli’s story, he wanted to go.
  • Four years later, on the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, all was made right.  Then-U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger traveled to Enoosaen to cement a deal for Kimeli’s tribe to take care of “America’s” herd in perpetuity.  And, as a way of saying thanks, the Ambassador announced the establishment of a scholarship for 14 boys and girls in the village to go to local school
maddieireland334

There's nothing wrong with grade inflation - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-wrong-with-grade-inflation

Education US college grades inflation opinion

shared by maddieireland334 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • By the early ’90s, so long as one had the good sense to major in the humanities — all bets were off in the STEM fields — it was nearly impossible to get a final grade below a B-minus at an elite college.
  • According to a 2012 study, the average college GPA, which in the 1930s was a C-plus, had risen to a B at public universities and a B-plus at private schools. At Duke, Pomona and Harvard, D’s and F’s combine for just 2 percent of all grades
  • Some blame students’ consumer mentality, a few see a correlation with small class sizes (departments with falling enrollments want to keep students happy), and many cite a general loss of rigor in a touchy-feely age. 
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  • According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects. Yale and Harvard, while making noises about grade inflation, have never instituted tough rules to stem it.
  • Overall, graded students are less interested in the topic at hand and — and, for obvious, common-sense reasons — more inclined to pick the easiest possible task when given the chance.
  • Grades should motivate certain students: those afraid of the stigma of a bad grade or those ambitious, by temperament or conditioning, to succeed in measurable ways.
  • Although recent research on the effects of grades is limited, several studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s measured how students related to a task or a class when it was graded compared to when it was ungraded.
  • Our goal should be ending the centrality of grades altogether. For years, I feared that a world of only A’s would mean the end of meaningful grades; today, I’m certain of it. But what’s so bad about that?
  • Yes, the student who gets a 100 on a calculus exam probably grasps the material better than the student with a 60 — but only if she retains the knowledge, which grades can’t show.
  • We need to move to a post-grading world. Maybe that means a world where there are no grades — or one where, if they remain, we rely more on better kinds of evaluation.
  • According to a 2012 study by the Chronicle of Higher Education, GPA was seventh out of eight factors employers considered in hiring, behind internships, extracurricular activities and previous employment.
  • To top humanities PhD programs, letters of reference and writing samples matter more than overall GPA (although students are surely expected to have received good grades in their intended areas of study).
  • Right now, students end up being evaluated twice: once with an inflated and meaningless letter grade, then again by teachers asked to write letters of recommendation.
  • They said employers want a GPA of 3.0 or even 3.5. But again, that standard would include almost every Harvard student — which suggests that GPAs serve not to validate students from elite schools but to keep out those from less-prestigious schools and large public universities, where grades are less inflated. Grades at community colleges “have actually dropped” over the years, according to Stuart Rojstaczer, a co-author of the 2012 grade-inflation study.
  • That means we have two systems: one for students at elite schools, who get jobs based on references, prestige and connections, and another for students everywhere else, who had better maintain a 3.0.
  • Students can compare evaluations from different classes, too, “read across all of them, see what they need improvement on.” And when they graduate, they — and employers or grad-school admission offices — get far more than a printed page of grades.
  • The trouble is that, while it’s relatively easy for smaller colleges to go grade-free, with their low student-to-teacher ratios, it’s tough for professors at larger schools, who must evaluate more students, more quickly, with fewer resources.
  • teaching five classes for poverty wages can’t write substantial term-end comments, so grades are a necessity if they want to give any feedback at all.
  • perhaps the small, progressive colleges can inspire other schools to follow, as they have in, say, abolishing the SAT as an admissions requirement
  • It would mean hiring more teachers and paying them better (which schools should do anyway). And if transcripts become more textured, graduate-school admission offices and employers will have to devote more resources to reading them, and to getting to know applicants through interviews and letters of reference
  • When I think about getting rid of grades, I think of happier students, with whom I have more open, democratic relationships.
  • Even in my Yale classrooms filled with overachievers, most of whom want to learn for the sake of learning, some respond well to the clarity of a grade.
Javier E

'U.S. Workers Only': Companies Hesitate to Hire Foreign M.B.A. Students - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...eign-m-b-a-students-1533124800

immigration international students MBA

shared by Javier E on 02 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • If he could do all over again, he said, he wouldn’t choose a school in the U.S.
  • “It was really, really difficult,” said Mr. Asif, who sent out more than 1,000 job applications in recent months and said he repeatedly got the message in interviews with companies and from job postings that his lack of permanent work authorization was a hurdle. “If I could go back, I would choose another country which offers more stability.”
  • The tougher hiring climate for foreign workers is having, in turn, a chilling effect on international applications to U.S. universities. For the first time in over a decade, foreign applications to two-year M.B.A. programs were down last year at the vast majority of U.S. schools, and fell 5.8% nationwide, according to GMAC.
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  • That decline is on track to continue this fall, after the nation’s business programs received 13% fewer GMAT score reports from foreign applicants for the coming academic years
  • Meanwhile, the data show business schools in Europe and Canada, such as Insead in France and the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, have seen an uptick in applications from international students.
  • At Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, international enrollment fell 40% last year, to just 24 students in the Class of 2019, the school said. At Columbia University and University of Georgia business schools, officials said international enrollment was down 14% and 32%, respectively.
Javier E

'Roma' is a start. But we 'Whitexicans' still need to reckon with our 'muchachas.' - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...need-reckon-with-our-muchachas

mexico

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • It’s a lie we tell ourselves as a society to avoid thinking that this shouldn’t be an informal no-benefits job. They don’t want or need to be “adopted,” to paraphrase a woman in a recent video on Al Jazeera’s Spanish network; what they need is to have their rights respected.
  • Domestic workers interviewed for the AJ+ en Español video were asked to describe their worst employer experiences. They cited things such as being forced to sleep on the living room floor or having water poured in their ears if they woke up late. It was also not unusual for patrons to force them to eat elsewhere.
  • It was only last month that the Mexican Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for employers to opt out of enrolling them in the social security system. The court has given the government three years to create a new system for Mexico’s more than 2 million domestic workers — housekeepers, gardeners, cooks and drivers, 9 out of 10 of whom are women. Under the new requirement, employers must enroll them in social security and they would also have access to the public health system.
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  • This movie is an emotional reflection of our current reality. Every theme has a contemporary equivalent: absent male figures and the effects of abandonment; invisible women; a hegemonic state; marked underdevelopment; the exploitation of marginal groups and an ever-present threat of violence.
Javier E

Can a 'No Excuses' Charter Teach Students to Think for Themselves? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-to-think-for-themselves.html

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Several years ago, Achievement First, a charter school network serving primarily low-income black and Hispanic students, got an unpleasant wake-up call: Its students had done well on tests, but fewer than a third of its high school graduates were earning college degrees on time. That was better than the 14 percent national college completion rate for students from low-income backgrounds, but it was far below the network’s hopes.
  • Was the schools’ highly structured, disciplined approach to behavior and learning giving students the tools they needed to succeed at the next level?
  • “There is a real dilemma confronting ‘no excuses’ charter networks as they shift their instructional model to encourage deeper learning,” Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education, said in an email. Their focus on discipline, he said, “can undermine the autonomy and student voice so critical to developing independent thinkers.”
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  • “One said, ‘In college you have to teach yourself more than half the content on your own,’” Ms. Toll said. That is very different from what is required in high school, she said, “and that sort of led to the whole concept of self-directed learning.”
  • For much of the day, each classroom is split in two, with one teacher working more traditionally with half of the students while a second teacher supervises students wearing noise-cancelling headphones and working on their own on laptops.
  • Mr. Cuban said he was particularly impressed with the way that Summit schools asked students to set goals for themselves.
  • But he added that he thought the impact of online teaching tools depended on how they were implemented and that the ultimate test, for both Summit and for Achievement First, would be what happens to college graduation rates.
  • the team came to believe that Achievement First students were not sufficiently engaged in school. The expeditions, also borrowed from Summit, are intended to spark passions and inspire long-term ambitions.
  • Achievement First’s Greenfield model also emphasizes setting goals. Twice a week students meet with a teacher, referred to as a “goal coach,” to go over their progress in different areas and set goals for the week.
  • Twice a week, students participate in what the network calls “circles” — a structure borrowed from the social-emotional curriculum of another charter network, Valor Collegiate Academies, in Nashville.
  • Mr. Samouha said that one of the surprising discoveries in his team’s interviews with alumni who had dropped out of college was that, in some cases, their parents had actually encouraged them to drop out, because they didn’t like seeing them struggle and didn’t know that such difficulties were normal and surmountable. He said the Greenfield team traced that back to the network having not made the parents full partners in their children’s schooling.
  • So in the Greenfield model, parent-teacher conferences are student-led, and attended by the members of a student’s “dream team,” which includes parents or other caregivers, as well as other mentors, like older siblings, pastors, coaches or family friends.
  • “We’re not going to solve this through a weekly parent seminar on challenges your child will face in college,” Mr. Samouha said. “We’re going to solve it by literally building an experience where parents are at the table with teachers and students.”
  • The network’s ultimate goal is to raise its college completion rate to 75 percent, and it says among its more recent classes about half of graduates are on track to finish college.
Javier E

Taxi Driver Suicides Are a Warning to All of Us - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...561926

taxi labor low-income driver

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • As of 2016, 91 percent of the city’s professional drivers were immigrants, many of whom hail from the world’s poorest countries. Half of all drivers of non-app-based for-hire vehicles, traditionally the most lucrative slice of the market, hail from the Dominican Republic. Almost a quarter of taxi drivers, meanwhile, are originally from Bangladesh.
  • n an interview with Vincent Barone of am New York, Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, insisted that something must be done about the resulting labor glut: “We now have a saturation of tens of thousands of workers, even after working 10-, 12-, 14-hour shifts, [who] are talking about hunger and poverty, and that’s not acceptable.”
  • Usually, the notion that new low-skill immigrants represent competition for those who already live among us is airily dismissed on the grounds that the labor market is dynamic, and so too are low-skill workers.
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  • When faced with new competition, New York City’s immigrant drivers are supposed to learn new skills—they’re supposed to enroll in their local coding academy at night, or enroll in master’s programs in social-media marketing or food-truck management—and allow newcomers to take their place on the bottom rung. But what if climbing the ladder isn’t quite as easy as it sounds?
  • One of the reasons younger Americans are so optimistic about immigration, I suspect, is that many of us are the children of newcomers who, in earlier eras, were fortunate enough to make the transition from working-class service jobs to jobs that offered a bit more pay, status, and stability
  • To allow for the possibility that low-skill immigration has different implications today, when the prospects for upward mobility among low-skill workers are almost universally acknowledged to be bleaker than in years past, before a cavalcade of social and technological changes greatly reduced their power, seems almost sacrilegious. It smacks of dishonoring one’s parents or grandparents. And so piety wins out
  • We badly want to believe that we still live in a non-zero-sum nation, in which good-paying jobs for low-skill workers are abundant, and opportunities for advancement are always just around the corner
  • And all this is unfolding at a moment when the labor market is the tightest it has been since the turn of the century, and before the potential of labor-displacing automation is close to being fully realized.
  • What we are seeing in certain corners of New York City is not a story pitting scrappy immigrants against hateful nativists who resent their rivals for being culturally different or for the color of their skin. It is more like a desperate contest between people who are trying and failing to escape the pull of American poverty and others for whom American poverty still feels like deliverance from something much worse
  • This story does not compute for those who worship at the altar of Emma Lazarus, and who congratulate themselves for tipping their immigrant drivers generously or, better still, who deign to praise them for their marvelous work ethic. What they won’t do is stop to consider that we as a country are creating a new underclass for their convenience, and that the desperation of this new underclass might one day cause serious ructions that they won’t be able to ignore.
brookegoodman

US coronavirus stimulus checks: are you eligible and how much will you get? | World new... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-stimulus-all-you-need-to-know

crisis us

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The US has agreed on a $2tn stimulus package, the largest economic stimulus in US history, in response to the economic impacts of Covid-19. While corporations will be the biggest recipients of the bailout, some of that money will be paid directly to Americans hit by the pandemic.
  • Congress will spend about $250bn for checks up to $1,200 per person that will go directly to taxpayers.
  • To be eligible for the full amount, a person’s most recently filed tax return must show that they made $75,000 or under. For couples, who can receive a maximum of $2,400, the cutoff is $150,000.
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  • If a person makes above $99,000, or a couple makes above $198,000, no check will be given.
  • This is not the first time the government has sent checks to Americans. The federal government gave up to $300 in 2001 and $600 in 2008 to taxpayers who met a certain income bracket to similarly stimulate the economy.
  • The length and amount of compensation varies from state to state. A majority of states providing a maximum of 26 weeks of compensation, while average weekly compensation ranges from 20% of a person’s wage to just over 50%.
  • Not in this bill. Earlier last week, Donald Trump signed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, a bill worth about $100bn meant to expand paid sick leave and emergency paid leave, but it came with major loopholes. Companies with over 500 employees were not mentioned in the bill, while companies with under 50 employees can apply for exemptions.
  • Again, not in this bill. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act included a measure that mandated all Covid-19 testing is free, but treatment for any symptoms (there is currently no cure for the illness) still comes at a cost. A few states have reopened enrollment for their health insurance programs to allow those concerned about costs to enroll, but there are still stories of people getting bills for as much as $34,000 to cover treatment of the virus’ symptoms.
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