16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian

October 25, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Substack was a decade and a half beyond the horizon of the cultural imagination. The infant universe of social media was filled with the primordial matter of MySpace. I was a college student still shaken with the disorientation of landing alone in America at the tail end of my teens, a world apart from my native Bulgaria, still baffled by the foreignness of fitted sheets, brunch, and “How are you?” as a greeting rather than a question. I was also living through my first episode of severe depression and weaving, without knowing it, my own lifeline to survival out of what remains the best material I know: wonder.

Once a week, I dispatched my ledger of curiosity — a brief digest of interesting, inspiring, or plainly wondrous things I had encountered on the internet, at the library, or in the city, from exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese woodblocks to a fascinating new neuroscience study to arresting graffiti on the side of a warehouse.

It was sweet, at first, when my friends kept asking to add their girlfriends or parents to the list, who in turn asked to add their own friends, until it exceeded the time I had for such administration.

I had the obvious idea to make a website of it, so that anyone who wanted to read could just visit it without any demands on my time. The only trouble was that I didn’t know how to make a website. (Blogging platforms as we now know them were not a thing, and even the rudimentary options that existed required some HTML proficiency.) We have a way of not always knowing whether the hard way is the easiest way or vice versa. In addition to my full college course load and the four jobs I was working to pay for it, I decided to take a night class and learn to code — it seemed the simplest solution for maximal self-reliance. I calculated that if I replaced two meals a day with canned tuna and oatmeal — the white label brand from the local grocery store in West Philly — in a few weeks I could pay for the coding class. And so I did. A crude website was born, ugly as a newborn aardvark.

Eventually, when email newsletter delivery services became available and affordable to my bootstrapped budget, the website got a newsletter, coming full circle. To this day, it goes out weekly, carrying into a far vaster digital universe a spare selection of the writings I publish on the website throughout the week.

In those early years, working my banal day jobs hostage to my visa and the demands of my metabolism, not once did it occur to me that this labor of love would become both the pulse-beat of my life and the sole source of my livelihood. And yet, in a baffling blur of time and chance — the anthropocentric term for which is luck — the seven friends somehow became several million readers without much effort on my behalf beyond the daily habit of showing up for the blank page. (There is, of course, nothing singular or surprising about this — Earth carves canyons into rock with nothing more than a steadfast stream. Somehow we keep forgetting that human nature is but a fractal of nature itself.)

Several years in, I thought it would be a good exercise to reflect on what I was learning about life in the course of composing The Marginalian, which was always a form of composing myself. Starting at year seven, I began a sort of public diary of learnings — never revising those of the previous years, only adding some newly gleaned understanding with each completed orbit, the way our present selves are always a Russian nesting doll containing and growing out of the irrevisible selves we have been.

And now, at year sixteen, here they all are, dating back to the beginning.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.

12. Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.

14. Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.

Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.

Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.

Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.

Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.

I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

In Major Shift, Gates Foundation Will Plow Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Into Improving Math Education Nationally

October 19, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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Detail of a man dusting a blackboard - stock photo

By Alex Daniels OCTOBER 19, 2022 The Chronicle of Philanthropy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will spend more than $1 billion on a sweeping national plan to improve math education over the next four years. Its goal: to help students succeed in school and land well-paying jobs when they graduate, given research that shows the connection between strong math skills and career success.

Gates, which has long drawn controversy over its education work, is making a major shift in focus, one that will result in cuts in grants to other subjects like reading, writing, and the arts.

The increased focus on math comes after the pandemic “wreaked havoc” on learning in secondary schools and widened the gaps based on race in student performance, with math scores among Black students falling more sharply than declines among white students, according to Bob Hughes, director of the Gates Foundation’s elementary and secondary education grant-making program.

Gates made the switch because it sees better math instruction in earlier grades as a key to helping students succeed in school and beyond. Students who pass an introductory course on algebra by 9th grade are twice as likely to graduate from high school and go to college, Hughes said.

The problem, he said, is for many students, math is not presented as a crucial, captivating subject.

“Too many students don’t have access to math instruction in classrooms where they receive critical resources to help them see the joy in learning math and believe that they can become math people as they grow older,” he said.

After Common Core

The new plan is the second major shift in education funding Gates has made in recent years. After spending hundreds of millions of dollars to promote common-core standards, a set of national educational goals for students at each grade level, the foundation in 2018 backtracked. Acknowledging criticism that the approach didn’t allow individual schools flexibility, Gates developed a new plan that created networks of schools facing similar challenges. Educators in each of those networks could test teaching and coursework innovations and make adaptations as they saw fit, rather than adhere to a set of nationwide standards.

In 2020, Gates held a more than $10 million competition to identify new approaches to teaching algebra. Those grants, and discussions Gates staff held over the past two years with teachers, parents, school administrators, curriculum experts, and others helped formulate the foundation’s new approach.

Gates will provide grants to prepare teachers better for teaching math and to curriculum companies and nonprofits to develop higher-quality teaching materials. The foundation will also support research into math education and make grants to help high-school math courses prepare students for college and the workplace.

A big problem with math as it is taught today is that students learn in isolation and can feel crushed when they get the wrong answer to a problem, says Shalinee Sharma, co-founder of Zearn, an educational nonprofit and Gates grantee who, with Hughes, spoke with reporters this week. Zearn uses computer-based lessons that incorporate a lot of visuals to keep students interested and provides feedback on progress to help teachers tailor lessons for individual students. A new approach in which students work in teams to solve problems, she said, can turn all students into “math kids.”

“When all kids are math kids, making mistakes will be OK,” she said. ” It won’t be embarrassing. In fact, making mistakes will be considered normal and an essential part of math learning.”

Focus on Blacks and Hispanics

Gates has committed to the approach for a decade but has only made final spending plans for the next four years, when it will plow $1.1 billion into math. That’s the same amount it spent on its entire elementary and secondary education program for the past four years, during which only 40 percent was devoted to improving math instruction.

Initially the foundation will direct grants to assist students in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. The states were picked, Hughes said, because Gates has experience working with school districts in those states and because of their large share of the nation’s Black and Latino students.

As Gates “hunkers down” on math, it will end its support for language arts, such as reading and writing, Hughes said. The change in approach likely means the end of support, once current grants run their scheduled course, for many education nonprofits.

In addition to cutting grants on language arts, the foundation will no longer distribute funds to organizations that advance social and emotional learning. But the foundation said research it has supported on students’ well-being will be incorporated into the focus on math. Another grants program dedicated to supporting students with disabilities at charter schools will continue through 2023.

Gates is in contact with several foundations that might be willing to pick up some of the slack, Hughes said, citing discussions with the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

A deep dive by Gates into math could help educators nationwide, Julie Mikuta, co-president of Schusterman wrote in an email. Mikuta said reading and writing in the early grades will be a larger grant-making focus at Schusterman.

“As part of our broader grant making to strengthen teacher and student learning, we are increasingly prioritizing K-8 literacy,” she wrote. “With the Gates Foundation focusing on mathematics, we are working in complementary ways, including investing in our shared belief that teachers deserve access to high-quality instructional materials and great professional learning that help them provide students with engaging and meaningful learning.”

In recent years, many larger U.S. foundations have funneled money to improve civics education, said Amber Northern, senior vice president for research at the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, citing the Carnegie Corporation and Hewlett Foundation as prominent examples. But, she said, there are relatively few foundations that devote significant sums to improve math education. While the amount of money Gates is investing is significant, what matters more is that its decision to focus on math may influence others to do the same, she said.

“Lots of foundations want to come together and leverage their impact by joining with other foundations,” she said. “This is an awareness call for other foundations to come on board.”

The Gates shift is not the first time American education experts have expressed a need to focus on math. In the late 1950s, after the launch of Sputnik, educators called for a new vigor in math instruction to keep up with the country’s Soviet adversaries during the Cold War, said Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System- and How to Fix It.

While math is important, Wexler said, only a small percentage of students go on to use math in their daily lives, but every student is a member of society and needs other skills to become positive contributors to society. For a democracy to function, she said, people need basic literacy, the ability to read newspaper articles critically, and knowledge of how public policy is made.

Math instruction is important, she said, but “the knowledge that goes into understanding a newspaper and following current events is going to be much more crucial in enabling those students to carry out their responsibilities as citizens.”

“What we really need to do is spend more time on things like history and geography because we are graduating students from high school who don’t know things like the difference between a city and a state and who cannot find the United States on a map of the world,” she said.

Hughes said other skills are important but that the foundation felt it could have the biggest impact focusing on math. If taught properly, he said, math courses can connect students to real-life problems in need of a solution and keep them engaged as students, and eventually citizens.

“When kids start to feel alienated in middle school, it’s frequently the math course that drives them away,” he said.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.FOUNDATION GIVING

Alex Daniels Before joining the Chronicle in 2013, Alex covered Congress and national politics for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He covered the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and reported extensively about Walmart Stores for the Little Rock paper.

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/in-major-shift-gates-foundation-will-plow-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-into-improving-math-education-nationally?cid=gen_sign_in

Mental Health Is Political

October 17, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Danielle Carr

Dr. Carr is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A. Sept. 20, 2022

What if the cure for our current mental health crisis is not more mental health care?

The mental health toll of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the subject of extensive commentary in the United States, much of it focused on the sharp increase in demand for mental health services now swamping the nation’s health care capacities. The resulting difficulty in finding care has been invoked widely as justification for a variety of proposed solutions, such as digital health and teletherapy services provided by profit-driven start-ups and a proposed mental health plan that the Biden administration unveiled this year.

But are we really in a mental health crisis? A crisis that affects mental health is not the same thing as a crisis of mental health. To be sure, symptoms of crisis abound. But in order to come up with effective solutions, we first have to ask: a crisis of what?

Some social scientists have a term, “reification,” for the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world. Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.

Once we begin to ask questions about medicalization, the entire framing of the mental health toll of the Covid crisis — an “epidemic” of mental illness, as various publications have called it, rather than a political crisis with medical effects — begins to seem inadequate.

Of course, nobody can deny that there has been an increase in mental and emotional distress. To take two of the most common diagnoses, a study published in 2021 in The Lancet estimated that the pandemic had caused an additional 53.2 million cases of major depressive disorder and 76.2 million cases of anxiety disorder globally.

Let’s think about this. Increased incidences of psychological distress in the face of objectively distressing circumstances are hardly surprising. As a coalition of 18 prominent mental health scholars wrote in a 2020 paper in The Lancet: “Predictions of a ‘tsunami’ of mental health problems as a consequence” of Covid and the lockdown “are overstated; feelings of anxiety and sadness are entirely normal reactions to difficult circumstances, not symptoms of poor mental health.”

Things get even less surprising when you look more closely at the data: If you bracket the (entirely predictable) spike in psychological distress among health care workers (a fact that itself only reinforces the idea that the major causal vectors in play here are structural), the most relevant predictors of mental health are indexes of economic security. Of course, it’s not simply a question of the numbers on your bank statement — although that is a major predictor of outcomes — but of whether you live in a society where the social fabric has been destroyed.

Before we go further, let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that mental illnesses are fake, or somehow nonbiological. Pointing out the medicalization of social and political problems does not mean denying that such problems produce real biological conditions; it means asking serious questions about what is causing those conditions. If someone is driving through a crowd, running people over, the smart move is not to declare an epidemic of people suffering from Got Run Over by a Car Syndrome and go searching for the underlying biological mechanism that must be causing it. You have to treat the very real suffering that is happening in the bodies of the people affected, obviously, but the key point is this: You’re going to have to stop the guy running over people with the car.

This principle is what some health researchers mean by the idea that there are social determinants of health: that effective long-term solutions for many medicalized problems require nonmedical — this is to say, political — means. We all readily acknowledge that for diseases with a very clear biological basis like diabetes and hypertension, an individual’s body is only part of the causal reality of the disease. Treating the root cause of the “epidemic” of diabetes effectively, for example, would happen at the level of serious infrastructural changes to the available diet and activity levels of a population, not by slinging medications or pouring funding into clinics that help people make better choices in supermarkets filled with unregulated, unhealthy food. You’ve got to stop the guy running over people with the car.

But if the public health consensus around diabetes has shifted somewhat in response to what we know, it’s been remarkably hard to achieve the same when it comes to mental health.

Psychiatric sciences have long acknowledged the fact that stress is causally implicated in an enormous range of mental disorders, referring to the “stress-diathesis model” of mental illness. That model incorporates the well-documented fact that chronic stressors (like poverty, political violence and discrimination) intensify the chance that an individual will develop disorders from depression to schizophrenia.

The causal relationship may be even more direct. Remarkably, all throughout decades of research on mood disorders, scientists doing animal studies had to create animal models of anxiety and depression — that is, animals that showed behaviors that looked like human anxiety and depression — by subjecting them to weeks or months of chronic stress. Zap animals with unpredictable and painful shocks they can’t escape, force them to survive barely survivable conditions for long enough, put them in social situations where they are chronically brutalized by those higher up in the social hierarchy, and just like that, the animals will consistently start behaving in a way that looks like human psychopathology.

This doesn’t mean that all psychiatric symptoms are caused by stress, but it does mean that a whole lot of them almost certainly are. There is increasingly strong evidence for the idea that chronic elevation of stress hormones has downstream effects on the neural architecture of the brain’s cognitive and emotional circuits. The exact relationship between different types of stress and any given cluster of psychiatric symptoms remains unclear — why do some people react to stress by becoming depressed, while others become impulsive or enraged? — indicating that whatever causal mechanism exists is mediated by a variety of genetic and social conditions. But the implications of the research are very clear: When it comes to mental health, the best treatment for the biological conditions underlying many symptoms might be ensuring that more people can live less stressful lives.

And here is the core of the problem: Medicalizing mental health doesn’t work very well if your goal is to address the underlying cause of population-level increases in mental and emotional distress. It does, however, work really well if you’re trying to come up with a solution that everybody in power can agree on, so that the people in power can show they’re doing something about the problem. Unfortunately, the solution that everyone can agree on is not going to work.

Everyone agrees, for instance, that it would be good to reduce the high rate of diabetes plaguing the United States. But once we begin to de-medicalize it, diabetes starts to look like a biological problem arising from political problems: transportation infrastructure that keeps people sedentary in cars, food insecurity that makes a racialized underclass dependent on cheap and empty calories, the power of corporate lobbies to defang regulations, and so on. These are problems that people do not agree on how to solve, in part because some are materially benefiting from this state of affairs. This is to say, these are political problems, and solving them will mean taking on the groups of people who benefit from the status quo.

That the status quo is once again benefiting the usual suspects is all too obvious in the booming market of venture-capital-backed mental health tech start-ups that promise to solve the crisis through a gig economy model for psychiatric care — a model that has been criticized for selling psychiatric medication irresponsibly, with little accountability.

But even publicly funded solutions risk falling into the trap of medicalizing a problem and failing to address the deeper structural causes of the crisis. President Biden’s plan for mental health, for instance, makes many genuflections to the language of “community” and “behavioral health.” A section outlining a plan for “creating healthy environments” makes a great show of saying the right things, including: “We cannot transform mental health solely through the health care system. We must also address the determinants of behavioral health, invest in community services and foster a culture and environment that broadly promotes mental wellness and recovery.”

But then the plan goes on to focus on several proposals aimed at regulating social media platforms — a strange target that seems relevant only in a downstream way from major infrastructural determinants of health, like wealth inequality and public services — until you remember that it’s one of the few policy goals that both Democrats and Republicans share.

Sure, parts of the proposal do seem to offer genuinely needed care. For instance, a provision to establish scores of behavioral health clinics that can offer subsidized substance use treatment like methadone tapering is an exigently needed — if depressingly belated — response to the phenomenon of mass opiate addiction pushed by corporations like Purdue Pharma and Walgreens.

But even though much of the proposal seems to have been drafted with the opioid addiction crisis in mind, the billboard-size implications of this so-called epidemic seem to have failed to register. It is hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of political conditions undergoing the reification switch into a medicalized epidemic than what everyone now knows happened: The despair of the postindustrial underclass was methodically and intentionally milked by pharmaceutical companies for all it was worth. It was so obvious that at last even a political establishment that remains largely indifferent to the poor eventually had to get around to sort of doing something.

And yet when the plan addresses suicide, it focuses on crisis intervention — as if suicide were a kind of unfortunate natural occurrence, like lightning strikes, rather than an expression of the fact that growing numbers of people are becoming convinced that the current state of affairs gives them no reason to hope for a life they’d want to live.

The proposal’s primary plan to address the so-called epidemic of suicide has been the rebranding of a national suicide hotline that will encourage callers on the brink of killing themselves to refrain from doing so, and which may or may not connect them to resources like three cognitive behavioral therapy sessions (most likely conducted through teletherapy) that insurance companies will be required to cover for their customers — depending on what the state in which the caller resides has decided about funding.

It’s not so much that the hotline is a bad idea; it’s that the sheer scale of failure to comprehend the political reality that it displays, the utter inability to register how profoundly the “suicide epidemic” indicts the status quo, is ultimately more terrifying than outright indifference. It’s worth recalling that in the 2016 presidential election, even though Hillary Clinton had a “suicide prevention” campaign plank, communities most affected by so-called deaths of despair voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, who addressed, however disingenuously, their economic situation and promised to bring back jobs.

Solving the mental health crisis, then, will require fighting for people to have secure access to things that buffer them from chronic stress: housing, food security, education, child care, job security, the right to organize for more humane workplaces and substantive action on the imminent climate apocalypse.

A fight for mental health waged only on the terms of access to psychiatric care does not only risk bolstering justifications for profiteering invoked by start-ups eager to capitalize on the widespread effects of grief, anxiety and despair. It also risks pathologizing the very emotions we are going to need to harness for their political power to get real solutions.

Danielle Carr is an assistant professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A. She is working on a book about the history of neuroscience.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/us-mental-health-politics.html

The Minister for Exams

October 13, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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The Minister for Exams (Paul Trewartha) - L'Alternativa Hall

When I was a child I sat an exam.
This test was so simple
There was no way I could fail.
Question 1. Describe the taste of the Moon.

It tastes like Creation I wrote,
it has the flavour of starlight.

Question 2. What colour is Love?

Love is the colour of the water a man
lost in the desert finds, I wrote.

Question 3. Why do snowflakes melt?

I wrote, they melt because they fall
on to the warm tongue of God.

There were other questions.
They were as simple.
I described the grief of Adam when he was expelled from Eden.
I wrote down the exact weight of an elephant’s dream

Yet today, many years later,
For my living I sweep the streets
or clean out the toilets of the fat hotels.

Why? Because constantly I failed my exams.
Why? Well, let me set a test.

Question 1. How large is a child’s imagination?
Question 2. How shallow is the soul of the Minister for exams?

copyright © Brian Patten 1996, used by permission of the author

Montgomery audit finds school system lacking clear approach to anti-racism

October 11, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Nicole Asbury October 11, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. EDT Washington Post

Students of color in Montgomery County have a less satisfactory experience within the school system compared to their White peers, according to results of a months-long audit released Tuesday.

The results proved the initial theory held by administrators about differences in experiences, and also found that the school system lacks “a clear systemwide comprehensive approach to anti-racism.”Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.

The findings were scheduled to be shared with the county’s school board Tuesday.

The school system initiated its anti-racist audit earlier this year, after years of planning. It follows a trend of school systems across the country who have re-examined their curriculums and policies in an effort to address systemic bias and be more inclusive toward students of color following a racial reckoning after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.

Montgomery County schools’ anti-racist audit to examine its curriculums

Montgomery County — a liberal, racially diverse D.C. suburb — has traditionally sought out measures that would make its policies more inclusive to students of color. After Floyd’s death, students of color across the district began making social media accounts — such as like Black At Whitman, Black At Wheaton and Black At Rockville ― that documented regular racism they experienced at county schools.The school system alsobegan planning for the broader systemwide audit. The school system approved a social studies framework in June that would expose fourth- and fifth-graders to more American history — particularly Black history — at a younger age.

The audit initiative was led by Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight, the first Black woman to lead the large school system.

“This is not one person’s problem … this is something we should all own collectively,” she said about the audit results during a media briefing this week. She pointed to fifth grade academic data that showed Black students and Hispanic/Latino students were disproportionately less proficient in reading and math compared to Asian and White students.

“When I took this seat [as superintendent], I said that I think of the 161,000 students in the system as I do my own son,” McKnight said. “If I were to look at the predictors of that data, he would be grouped into one of those groups where the data does not look positive. That concerns me, it upsets me, and it makes it not OK.”

The audit was conducted by Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, a Bethesda-based nonprofit which received a $454,860 contract in November 2020. It reviewed six key areas: workplace diversity, school culture, work conditions, curriculums, community engagement and equity of access. Parents, staff members and students were surveyed earlier this year about their experience with the school system. There were over 130,000 responses.

For Black Americans, teaching about systemic racism is more urgent than ever

The audit found the school system had many elements to eliminate racial disparities among students, staff and families, but the implementation of policies varied school by school, “suggesting that the system is currently fragmented,” according to the report. Through stakeholder groups sessions, it found there was a lack of coordination in the central office, distrust that the school system wouldn’t be honest about the audit results, and a “culture where there is a ‘cost’ to speaking up and power dynamics that stifle honest dialogue.”

The nonprofit recommended that the district make a clear action plan for tackling its next steps. A draft action plan will be released in January for community input. A final report will be issued in March. It also recommended the school district continually collect data, build more relational trust, “equity-centered capacity building” and accountability for racial equity work.

This story will be updated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/11/montgomery-schools-antiracist-audit/

Meeting the Mental Health Challenge in School and at Home

October 10, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By Eilene Zimmerman NYT Oct 6th 2022

From kindergarten through college, educators are experimenting with ways to ease the stress students are facing — not only from the pandemic, but from life itself.

Last year, Leticia Guerrero-Castaneda’s 11-year-old son, Isaiah, was struggling. He was in the fifth grade when the pandemic shutdown occurred, and his reaction was to shut himself down; he became pathologically afraid of germs and contamination.

“He wouldn’t come out of his room and became afraid of touching anything,” Ms. Guerrero-Castaneda recalled.

That led to depression and anxiety, which affected not only Isaiah, but his family. By the time he returned to the classroom, Isaiah was in seventh grade and, like many students, was experiencing behavior problems.

Seeking help, Ms. Guerrero-Castaneda attended two workshops run by CHAMP (Community Health Action Mental Perseverance) last spring at Norma Cooms Elementary School in Pasadena, Calif. Parents there wrote narratives of their experiences related to events that impacted their families — like Covid and school shootings — and processed those experiences with other parents.

“We came to see we were not alone,” Ms. Guerrero-Castaneda said. “We learned different coping mechanisms and were told not to ignore our feelings or our kids’ feelings. Most of us were worried about how our children will be affected in the long run. And there was a sense of great comfort in being able to talk about it with other parents.”

CHAMP was created by three faculty members at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena: Camille Huggins and Cassandra Peel, professors of social work, and Giovanni Hortua, an adjunct professor of history and Latin American studies. Dr. Huggins said the workshops provided parents a tool kit for coping with grief and loss, for themselves and their children.

“This is a self-care exercise that gets them to reflect on their experience, to analyze and make sense of it,” she said.More from Learning To Improve Students’ Mental Health, Schools Take a Team ApproachOct. 6, 2022 Community Schools Offer More Than Just TeachingOct. 6, 2022

Ms. Guerrero-Castaneda guided her son toward individual therapy and is emotionally supporting him as he works his way through his fears. “He started journaling and drawing as a way to express what he’s feeling,” she said. “And little by little, things are improving.”

CHAMP is one of many innovative programs and strategies schools nationwide have put in place to help students, many of whom are struggling with the toll the last two-and-a-half years has taken on their mental health. That toll has been cumulative, because distress among young people has been rising for a decade.

In 2019, the C.D.C. reported that the percentage of high school students with persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness was nearly 40 percent, up from 26 percent in 2009, and almost 20 percent of students in 2019 had seriously considered suicide. Two years later, in 2021, 44 percent of high schoolers were feeling sad or hopeless. And suicide is now the second leading cause of death among children 10- to 14-years-old.

“The pandemic really just turned up the volume on a soundtrack that was already playing,” said Amber Childs, a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. That soundtrack, she said, includes “racism, discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. youth, a lack of gender-affirming care, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, school shootings, climate change.

“The pandemic happened among a groundswell of issues. And then you have children seeing adults at war with one another on social media and in the news,” Dr. Childs said. “I’ve had teenagers say, ‘Where are all the grown-ups? If they are fighting and can’t solve this, what does it mean for us?’ That can be terrifying for a kid.”

College students are also struggling. Emotional stress is one of the top reasons students consider dropping out of college, according to a report released in April from Gallup-Lumina, a private foundation that advocates for equity in higher education. Colleges and universities have lost nearly 1.3 million students since the pandemic began, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

The Connection Project, developed by Joseph Allen, a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at the University of Virginia, helps ease difficult developmental transitions, like the one from high school to college, and guides students toward forming authentic, meaningful friendships. (The high school version is known as the Teen Connection Project.) The program grew out of a study Dr. Allen conducted that followed 184 13-year-olds in Charlottesville, Va., for 25 years to learn about the friendships and social connections they formed.

The research showed that deep, early friendships enhanced a teen’s sense of belonging and reduced loneliness and depression, both in high school, college and beyond. The teen project consists of semester long weekly meetings of about eight to 10 students led by two trained and supervised student facilitators (in high schools, facilitators are trained adults).

“We know over the last 10 years that rates of loneliness and depression among young people has gone up more than 60 percent,” Dr. Allen said; data from a randomized trial of the Teen Connection Project published in May showed a reduction in loneliness and depressive symptoms. The project’s groups use specially designed exercises to help students connect with each other across social groups in a short period of time.

The program was developed in conjunction with Wyman, an organization based in St. Louis that develops evidence-based programs for teens. It’s now in seven high schools and the University of Virginia, where it began in 2018 as Hoos Connected and served 27 students; this year about 1,000 will participate.

Megan Turner, 21, a Hoos Connected facilitator and former group member, said Hoos Connected helped a great deal with her transition from high school to college. “For the first time I was surrounded by people where I felt I could share when I wasn’t doing well, and I received a lot of empathy and kindness.”

True North, a program at Boston College, began as a class for students participating in internships and evolved into a campuswide initiative. It was developed by Belle Liang, a clinical psychologist and psychology professor at the college, and Tim Klein, a licensed clinical social worker and lecturer there. True North’s structured exercises and discussions guide students toward determining their core values, skills, character strengths and the contribution they want to make in the world and connects that to life after college.

Dr. Liang’s research has shown that when students feel a sense of purpose in their work, they are buffered against academic and social stress. She and Mr. Klein are co-authors of the book, “How To Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career and Beyond.”

The TRAILS (Transforming Research into Action to Improve the Lives of Students) program trains educators and school counselors to support students in grades K-12 by equipping them with coping skills to use when they feel anxious, stressed and depressed. That’s important because mental health crises have been rising for younger students, yet schools can’t find enough clinicians to help them.

TRAILS started as a program within the University of Michigan’s psychiatry department and the Eisenberg Family Depression Center. It grew so fast during Covid that in May it became an independent fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center, a nonprofit that supports social change. TRAILS’ social and emotional learning curriculum focuses on teaching children how to recognize what they are feeling and strategies for coping.

“Kids usually sleep, listen to music and spend time on their phones, none of which, the evidence shows, makes them feel better,” said Elizabeth Koschmann, a psychologist and founder and executive director of TRAILS. Instead, students are taught skills grounded in cognitive behavioral and mindfulness practices, like reframing how they think about a situation or recognizing and stopping negative feelings and thoughts about themselves.

The program also offers professional development and coaching, a suicide risk management protocol and a library of resources teachers and counselors can use when working with students. About 750 schools have partnerships with TRAILS and about 8,000 teachers nationwide use its social and emotional learning curriculum. Materials in the program’s resource library are free for school mental health professionals and pulled from its website 2,500 times each day during the school year.

Students living in rural areas face significant challenges accessing mental health services, according to the Rural Health Information Hub, a national clearinghouse for information on rural health issues. Rural communities often lack local psychologists, psychiatrists or social workers and suicide among youth has historically been highest in rural areas.

The Rural Behavioral Health Institute, a nonprofit established in 2020, aims to reduce youth suicide in rural regions, starting with Montana, where young people commit suicide at more than twice the rate of young people nationwide, according to data from the Center for Children Families, and Workforce Development at the University of Montana.

In March 2021, the institute piloted its Screening Linked to Care program in one Montana high school to identify students at risk for suicide, quickly evaluate them and refer them to care. Janet Lindow, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Kansas Medical Center and executive director of the institute, has been a suicide researcher for six years.

“It used to be unheard-of to have a kid below age 12 being suicidal, but it is now not uncommon to have 10- and 11-year-olds,” she said.

This year, the program will offer psychiatric services, case management to help families connect to mental health providers and virtual group therapy for students in different schools with the same mental health needs. The institute screened 41 students in the 2020-21 academic year; last year, its program screened more than 1,000 children at 10 schools in five Montana counties. About 10 percent were identified as having a high risk of suicide, and about one-third needed mental health services.

Screening is critical because children who are suicidal are less likely to ask for help than other children and when they do, they usually ask a peer, Dr. Lindow said. “And their peers don’t know what to do.”

Many schools across the country have less formal approaches to helping students. Cumberland County School district in Fayetteville, N.C., created “calm corners” and “reset rooms” in every kindergarten through fifth-grade classroom with items like beanbag chairs, large pillows, art activities and fidget toys, which can help with focus and ease anxiety.

Reset rooms for sixth through 12th graders have an area where students can write in journals using prompts on the wall, punching bags, adult coloring books, Silly Putty, even illustrated instructions for breathing exercises and yoga (and yoga mats).

Dyann Wilson, who counsels sixth- through eighth-grade students at Brabham Middle School, part of Willis Independent School District in Willis, Texas, helps students build virtual “reflection rooms,” which they can visit when they feel their emotions are starting to affect their behavior.

“Students add things that make them feel better, calmer or ground them, like inspirational quotes, art, and links to music and games,” Ms. Wilson said, adding that these coping skills are crucial. “If we don’t help kids find proper ways to manage their emotions, we fail them.”

Eilene Zimmerman is a regular contributor to The New York Times and a former columnist for the Sunday Business section. She is the author of the book “Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy” and a clinical social worker in Southern California.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/students-mental-health.html

Living In White Spaces: Suburbia’s Hidden Histories

October 10, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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By David S. Rotenstein from the Metropole
THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE URBAN HISTORY ASSOCIATION

In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. In 1939 Scandiffio’s parents bought a home in the Northwood Park subdivision. Laid out three years earlier, Northwood Park’s 198 original homesites had racially restrictive deed covenants. Mario Scandiffio was a pediatrician and Pauline Scandiffio had been a nightclub singer and federal employee. Their first child, Frank, was born in 1943, and Ann was born in 1944.

When I interviewed Ann Scandiffio in 2009, she recalled very little about Walker: her first name, the name that she and her brother called Walker (“Sha”), and some of the things that Walker did for her. Until 2022, when the National Archives and Records Administration released the 1950 census, Lucille Walker’s story was a dead end. With the new census information, I learned her last name and a few more biographical details—that she was 40 years old in 1940 and a divorced Tennessee native.[1]

**Lucille Walker and Ann Scandiffio.** Undated color slide taken by Pauline Scandiffio, courtesy of Ann Scandiffio.

The new information wasn’t much, but it was enough to tease additional details from Ann Scandiffio. Now 78, Scandiffio recalled Walker’s trips with the family to a vacation home and a few details about Walker’s personal life. She also recalled the tense last meeting her family had with Walker in a Washington hotel shortly after the Scandiffios had moved to Florida.

Over the next decade, my research on suburban gentrification and erasure exposed me to more stories about the Black women who cleaned homes and who helped to raise generations of middle- and upper-class white children. In my oral histories with whites who had moved into suburbia and the African Americans who lived in rural hamlets on suburban margins, I began looking for the stories of these women. Historians of Black suburbanization and Black communities affected by white suburbanization have noted the parallel work worlds of men and women in these spaces.[2] The women’s stories are not easy to find, but they exist.

Many twentieth-century American residential subdivisions were segregated. Most of those were neighborhoods where racially restrictive deed covenants enforced ethnic and racial homogeneity. Others were conceived by Blacks to create communities free from white surveillance and violence.[3] The covenant-restricted subdivisions were mini-sundown towns—white spaces where Blacks could not live unless they were employed by white homeowners. The Black women and men who worked and who slept in these homes are mostly invisible in the histories of suburbia. This post explores the research potential of looking for Black history in white spaces.

White Spaces and Black Spaces

The Black space and the white space are very different products of segregation that have outlived Jim Crow. “White spaces vary in kind, but their most visible and distinctive feature is their overwhelming presence of white people and their absence of black people,” wrote sociologist Elijah Anderson.[4] Residential subdivisions became white spaces through the creation of a white spatial imaginary—spaces defined by exclusion where the exchange value of housing becomes a dominant principle.[5] Whites go to great lengths to protect their investments in identity and wealth, erecting real and symbolic barriers to exclude Blacks and others considered non-white by virtue of race and religion. Place attachment and the blurred divisions demarcating domesticity and work spaces (use values) are subordinated in suburban America, where the value of land supersedes all else.[6]

Few instruments have better reinforced white spaces than racially restrictive deed covenants. Deed covenants comprised an essential link in an exclusionary chain blocking Blacks from white spaces. They were the cornerstone of sundown suburbs, sundown towns’ carefully planned kin.[7] Until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they were unenforceable in 1948, racially restrictive deed covenants enforced housing segregation beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century.[8] Housing segregation, in turn, contributed to an array of inequities, from uneven access to education and employment to the loss of intergenerational wealth.[9] The segregated subdivision was segregated housing’s cornerstone and the ultimate white space.

Black spaces emerged in resistance to white spaces. They are not the residential neighborhoods kept white by racially restrictive deed covenants. They are not the parks and recreational spaces where Blacks were excluded. They are not businesses that didn’t take Black money or forced Black people to go to balconies, side windows, and back doors. Black spaces are those that are bound by mutual cooperation where the residents converted segregation into congregation. Though they were established on the margins of white society and were frequently stigmatized, these spaces and places became resilient and proud communities.[10]

Black Meccas like Atlanta and Harlem are well-known Black spaces. The thousands of Black towns, like the Freedom Colonies in Texas or such cities as Eatonville, Florida, and Mound Bayou, Mississippi, are also Black spaces. And then there are the Black suburbs—former Reconstruction-era hamlets and neighborhoods and intentionally planned communities—that are also Black spaces.[11] Collectively, these places comprise a “Black Map” of North America that is a guide to how historians may be able to surface stories of the Black experience inside such white spaces as sundown suburbs.

Living In

In her oral history of Black domestic workers in urban neighborhoods of Washington, DC, historian Elizabeth Clark-Lewis explored the mostly hidden world of white households and the Black social infrastructure upon which they depended. Clark divided the African American domestic workers into two classes: those who lived in and those who lived out.[12] The women who lived in were the exceptions to legally enforced rules prohibiting non-whites, Jews, and others from owning or renting properties in the neighborhoods where they worked.

**Racially restrictive deed covenant filed in Montgomery County, Maryland, June 16, 1947.** Montgomery County Land Records, Deed Book vol. 1082, p. 247.

Many racially restrictive deed covenants explicitly excluded Blacks and Jews. The earliest known covenant filed for Silver Spring, Maryland, prohibited selling or renting “to any person of African descent.”[13]

Others were more expansive, prohibiting “negroes or any person of negro blood…or to any person of the Semitic Race blood or origin… [including] Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Persians and Syrians.”[14]

Frequently, the covenants included the provision, “this paragraph shall not be held to exclude partial occupancy of the premises by domestic servants.”

These “domestic servants” are the statistical anomalies in historical census data, skewing residential subdivisions that had 100 percent white ownership and tenancy by including small numbers of non-white residents.

Lucille Walker’s story had attuned me to the potential for recovering additional information about the Black workers living in rigidly segregated spaces typically identified as white. By 2022, however, I had collected many more accounts of the African Americans who worked in suburban white homes. And, I learned that I wasn’t the only one looking for this type of information. Barbara Bray also grew up in Silver Spring. Her father worked for the federal government and her mother was an acclaimed artist.

Bray’s parents, Erwin and Rosalie Ritz, moved from a Washington apartment to a suburban, brick, Cape Cod cottage in 1953. Built in 1937 in a subdivision platted a decade earlier, the Ritz home’s first deed had a racial covenant attached to it, binding owners to “never sell, lease, rent, transfer or convey unto any Negro or Colored person.”[15] Though unenforceable since the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer U.S Supreme Court case, the subdivision and its neighbors remained segregated until the 1960s.

“We lived in a Jewish community on Seminole Avenue and everyone was family there,” Bray explained in a 2022 interview. Her family had moved to one of several subdivisions near a country club that had been owned by a Jewish developer. The developer, Abraham Kay, also created several subdivisions. His club and subdivisions removed the barriers to Jews, but continued to exclude Blacks.

The Ritzes lived on Seminole until 1958, when the family moved to a larger house in another subdivision about four miles away. They lived in that home for six years. Two African American women worked for the family, cleaning house and helping to raise Bray and her sisters. Their names were Pearl and Lavinia. “I just don’t know why we never knew their last names. We never did,” Bray said.

Restrictive covenant contained in the original deed for the Ritz home from the developer to the property’s first owner, Aug. 5, 1937. All subsequent deeds, including the one to the Ritz family, enforced earlier covenants. Montgomery County Land Records, Deed Book vol. 676, p. 170.

Pearl lived with them and then Lavinia only came to the house during the day: “Pearl had a room in our first house on Seminole Street and she did everything for us.”

Unlike the Scandiffios, whose family photo collection includes prints and slides of Lucille Walker with the family, there are no corresponding photos documenting the Ritzes and the women who worked in their homes. Rosalie Ritz did, however, paint Lavinia’s portrait.

“It is on my wall. It’s five-by-six or something. It’s long and narrow,” Bray said. “We all loved Lavinia. We didn’t ever have a picture of Pearl.”

The painting and the memories of the two women stuck with Bray. For many years she had suspected that the suburbs where she grew up were different. At her high school in the 1960s, she recalled only one Black student in a student body of thousands.

“It’s like you’re kind of in, I don’t know like a cult…everyone is white around you. Everyone and there’s one Black person,” Bray explained. “And then I remembered when I think about it going home and there’s this beautiful Black woman taking care of me but I don’t know where she lives.”

Bray wrote about her memories in a 2021 blog post titled “Bearing Witness to Racism from a Privileged Perspective.” She was able to contextualize her memories after reading some of my work on Silver Spring as a sundown suburb. I found her 2021 blog post and reached out to ask her about it and her experiences growing up in white space.

“I was doing some research and I came across your work and that’s when I went, ‘Oh my God.’ I kind of knew before because of what happened to my parents, where they could live,” Bray said. The all-white schools, the all-white neighborhoods, and the antisemitism her family experienced all came into focus. “I didn’t understand how I was able to live in a Jewish community in Silver Spring.”

The Ritz family was among an embryonic Jewish community that moved to Silver Spring after World War II. The Jews who moved there navigated a suburban ecosystem defined by Jim Crow racism and deeply embedded antisemitism. Bray recalled the family home being vandalized. Around the same time, a newly established synagogue nearby experienced similar violence. White skin was just one part of a sort of multi-factor authentication system for full acceptance in sundown suburbs.

Labor Sheds

Ann Scandiffio thinks that Lucille Walker lived in Washington, DC. Barbara Bray believes that Lavinia lived in Lyttonsville. Located west of Silver Spring, Lyttonsville was a rural hamlet that grew up around a farmstead that a free Black man, Samuel Lytton, bought in 1853. Silver Spring absorbed Lyttonsville in the twentieth century. After Lytton died in 1893 and his heirs lost their property, a Washington real estate investor carved up the land. Stores, churches, and more homes appeared in the years bracketing the turn of the twentieth century.

Lyttonsville’s men farmed and they worked for government and private employers in surrounding Montgomery County and the District of Columbia. Work could be gotten at the nearby “National Park Seminary” and the Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital Annex. A local lumber and coal yard also employed many Lyttonsville men. Others became sanitation workers and a few opened their own businesses.

Many Lyttonsville women who worked outside of their homes became domestics. Some walked across the Talbot Avenue Bridge to spend their days cooking, cleaning, and caring for children in suburban white homes. Others lived-in.[16]

Black towns—hamlets, enclaves, and small cities—like Lyttonsville were extractive resources for white cities and suburbs. Whites exploited these Black spaces and their people. Whether through environmental racism (dumping, pollution, expulsive zoning), land theft, or labor, whites in neighboring communities preyed on Black communities to fulfill essential needs.[17] Women like Lucille Walker, Lavinia, and Pearl were integral parts of the sundown suburb’s racially segregated and liminal ecosystem.

Opportunities in Liminal Spaces

The Black women and men who ended up living in white spaces by virtue of their employment occupied a sort of liminal space between two worlds—white households and Black social infrastructure—first explored by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis in her oral history of early twentieth century Black domestic servants.[18] Beyond the urban neighborhoods in Clark-Lewis’s work there existed an even more complicated social and economic network in the suburbs.

Women left their husbands and families at one home and lived as exceptions in such legally defined white spaces as Northwood Park. They checked their individual identities at the white home thresholds. In their Black spaces, they were wives, mothers, aunts, and entrepreneurs. Inside the white homes where they worked, they became “domestic servants,” captive to a system that denied them access to education and economic opportunities outside of housework.

**Lucille Walker and with Ann and Frank Scandiffio inside the Scandiffio family kitchen, Silver Spring, Maryland.** Undated photograph taken by Pauline Scandiffio, courtesy of Ann Scandiffio.

The white children raised in these homes have memories dulled by time and limited by the knowledge accessible to toddlers and adolescents. They are imperfect but nonetheless important keys to a larger vault of information on the power relations, paternalism, and racism that also occupied the homes.

There is much to learn from the women and men who lived in America’s segregated suburbs. Historians need to find their stories and tell them before it’s too late, before the last memories of living in liminal spaces are lost. We need the stories that these people and their children can still tell us to construct a more complete picture of American suburbs.

More states are allowing children to take mental health days

October 5, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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More states are allowing children to take mental health days

By Andrea Atkins October 2, 2022 at 7:24 a.m. EDT Washington Post

With child mental health problems on the rise in the past few years, a growing number of states have adopted laws that let students take an excused absence if they feel anxious, depressed or need a day to “recharge.”

A dozen states already have measures in place that allow kids to take off for mental health and not just physical health reasons. A handful of others* are considering making similar changes to school absentee rules.

The move is a recognition of a disquieting trend: In December 2021, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory declaring a mental health crisis for American children, citing “an alarming number” of young people struggling with “feelings of helplessness, depression, and thoughts of suicide.” Between March and October 2020, the height of the pandemic, the percentage of children visiting the emergency room for mental health issues rose 24 percent for children ages 5 to 11 and 31 percent for children ages 12 to 17, according to the Children’s Hospital Association.

In 2020, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the second leading cause of death among teens, a 31 percent rise over 2019

Christine M. Nicholson, a clinical child psychologist in Kirkland, Wash., who sees many children with mental health struggles, said she supports this effort to allow mental health days. She said kids sometimes need to skip school, go for a hike, see a movie or even stay home and bake a cake or watch a movie.

“I think mental health has to be appreciated as much as physical health,” she said. “Kids are having a tough time, and they need a break.”

“The pandemic, with its isolation, didn’t help,” said California state Sen. Anthony Portantino, a Democrat who introduced a bill that was signed into law in 2021. The bill does not specify how many days a year a child can take. Portantino, whose brother Michael took his own life in 2010 at age 52, said he hopes other families can avoid the tragedy his family suffered: “The pandemic exacerbated the need, but if it can hasten the fix, then that is something positive.”

New school mental health days? How parents can make them work for kids.

Proponents of such measures say they are long overdue and can help de-stigmatize mental health in the eyes of parents and children. So far, Washington, California, Illinois, Maine, Virginia, Colorado, Oregon, Connecticut, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Kentucky provide mental health days.

“If nothing else, it makes a huge statement that mental health matters as much as physical health,” said Mike Winder, a Republican Utah state representative who sponsored a bill that became law in 2021. Winder introduced the bill after conversations with his daughter who suffered her own mental health issues. “This policy is communicating from the highest levels that it’s okay to take care of your mental health,” he said of the bill, which does not limit the number of days a child can take.

But how does taking a “mental health day,” which Americans traditionally have construed as a “winkwink, nudge-nudge” excuse for playing hooky, improve mental health?

“When students are feeling physically unwell, there is a universal understanding that they should stay home and they should take time to feel better,” said Barb Solish, director of Youth and Young Adult Initiatives for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which supports the use of mental health days.

“School policies that recognize mental health as an acceptable reason for absence can help students take the time they need to care for themselves and restore their health,” Solish said. “Practically speaking, if you have a fever, you’re not paying attention in class, right? You’re not learning the lesson. If you’re feeling overwhelming anxiety, you’re not learning either.”

In states that have adopted them, the policies vary, although in all cases, parents must sign a note excusing their child. Some place limits on the number of days off a child can claim — for instance, in Connecticut, students can have two days per year and they may not be consecutive — while others, such as California, do not.

As with all absences, missed schoolwork is expected to be made up. But the policies do not dictate how the days off may be used — whether for staying in bed or attending therapy appointments or something else. Some suggest that could engender abuse. Portantino bristles at the idea.

“We don’t question that a parent would like Johnny to stay home because he has a cold. That’s the exact reason we have to have this bill. That’s a stigma we have to correct. We’re not making a distinction between physical and mental health. If your child is sick, your child is sick,” he said.

Most of the laws passed or introduced require that a parent provide the same kind of excuse note that a physical illness would require.

Some worry that providing mental health days isn’t the right approach to this crisis.

In the National Review, Daniel Buck, editor in chief of Chalkboard Review, a newsletter focusing on education, wrote that school mental health days “could alleviate immediate distress but facilitate habits that only worsen anxiety and depression in the long run.” He suggested that they would teach kids avoidance rather than how to deal with the real issues that plague them, such as too much social media. “By popularizing mental-health days, we are encouraging our students to allow the world to dictate their emotions in place of teaching self-regulation and emotional control,” he writes.

Instead, he suggests, “What if we built resilience back into our schools? What if we trained students in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and habits of virtue in Aristotle such that they can face the inevitable difficulties of life? And these would include habits of emotional awareness such as regular reflection, discussions with loved ones, or planned, appropriately timed days of rest.”

Solish said there is a fine line between taking a day off to feel better or missing school to avoid a test you haven’t studied for. That’s why it’s important for parents to get to the bottom of why a child might ask for time off. And, she added, if a child is asking for or taking an abundance of these days off, that can be a signal something is wrong, and indicates a need for professional help.

Solish said, “We’re not going to solve the youth mental health crisis with a few mental health days. But it’s a great starting point.”

Why tween girls especially are struggling so much

Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute in New York who studies mental health services in high-need school districts around the country, agreed.

Days off will help, he said, but “there are too few [mental health] providers, too few online resources, too few school counselors trying to serve too many students and far too little information given to educators about how to support kids.” Of the more than 100,000 clinical psychologists working in the United States, only 4,000 are child and adolescent clinicians, according to a 2022 report by the American Psychological Association. “School psychologists are also in short supply, leaving kids without enough support at school,” the report said.

Jack Ramirez, 19, of Spring Township, Pa., said he believes mental health days could literally be a lifesaver for many young people.

He had urged Pennsylvania state Sen. Judith Schwank (D) to introduce a mental health days bill in 2020, when he was an intern in her office the summer before his senior year of high school. He was still reeling, he said, from the suicide of a classmate a few months earlier. Maybe if that student had felt he could stay home to take care of his mental health, Ramirez thought at the time, he would still be alive.

The measure, which would provide two excused mental health days per semester, is still in committee in the Pennsylvania state Senate.

“This is not a bill to skip school,” said Ramirez, now a sophomore at Rutgers University in New Jersey who has dealt with his own feelings of isolation and anxiety. “High school students are feeling isolated, they feel the pressure of grades. They are competing against each other. It’s getting really scary, and we don’t pay enough attention. … If we want to start saving lives and start talking about solutions, pressing pause on a lot of these things we face is so important.”

Make the most of a ‘mental health’ day

Should you encourage your children to take an occasional step back from their miniature rat race? And if you do, is there a way to make the most of it?

“There’s no perfect way to take a mental health day,” said Barb Solish, director of Youth and Young Adult Initiatives for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “But it does help to be intentional.”

Here are some of Solish’s tips for reaping the most benefit from a “mental health day”:

Listen to your child: Ask open-ended questions about their relationships and experiences and about why they think they need a day off. Then let them talk.

Make it meaningful: Try to avoid catching up on school work or getting lost in social media. “Those are stressors for kids,” Solish said.

Pursue calming activities: Take a walk, bake, draw, get lost in nature. “Whatever brings your kid back to center is a good thing to do,” said Solish, adding that you don’t want to overschedule the day, because that will be stressful in its own way. Should parents allow kids to indulge in video games, television or other screen time? “Nothing is really off limits,” Solish said. “You just want to make sure you’re being really thoughtful about what is going to help.”

Ease up on the feelings talk: “You don’t have to push kids to talk about their feelings all day,” Solish said. You can talk about how important it is to take care of your mental health.

Know when you need more help: If your child is showing increased irritability, sleeplessness, a depressed mood, low motivation or is regularly asking to stay home from school, you may need help from a mental health professional, said Dave Anderson, a clinical psychologist with the Child Mind Institute in New York. Contact a pediatrician, school counselor or your family doctor to find a recommendation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/10/02/student-mental-health-days/

Experts say schools could recover pandemic losses by 2028. What then?

October 4, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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Doing better than before the pandemic would require more effort than we seem capable of giving

Perspective by Jay Mathews Washington Post Oct 2nd 2022

When will the U.S. education system return to the learning levels of 2019? One headline summed up the problem this way: “Two Decades of Growth Wiped Out by Two Years of Pandemic.”

People who have been studying our schools for decades are cautious when answering my question. Some say reading and math averages could rebound by 2028, but they admit many children will never get everything they missed.

The experts have their own question: How willing are we to invest the effort and money needed to improve the learning of children whose families are at the bottom of the income scale? Giving students more time to learn and better-trained teachers appears to work. But many students didn’t have such help before the pandemic. How can we expect them to get it now?

Diane Ravitch is our best education historian and best-known writer about schools. She said: “My hunch is that the downward slide in test scores can be overcome, not quickly, but in less time than the time stolen by the pandemic. … My hope is that students will make up for lost time in a year or two if they have experienced teachers and stability — no school closures or disruptions.”

Perspective | Disadvantaged kids hurt by keeping pandemic’s relaxed teaching style

That’s a big if. Education policy guru Chester E. Finn Jr.’s latest book assesses the national tests we use to measure progress in learning. He, too, offers a mix of hope and fear about the future. “Based on what we know today, history suggests that gains equivalent to the pandemic losses could be seen in as little as four or six years after 2022, but the more common pace of change in both directions is glacial,” he said. “I worry especially about reading, which has seen the fewest gains over the long haul.”

Some experts are optimistic. “This year’s NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores should be the bottom in terms of pandemic effects,” said Tom Loveless, author and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Barring another pandemic or Great Recession, I expect NAEP scores to return to 2019 levels within two NAEP cycles, by 2026.”

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, noted that focusing on exam results ignores harm to children too young to be tested. “Not only do we have to consider the serious negative consequences of the pandemic and school closures on kids who were school-age during 2020-22, but also how the crisis impacted children ages 0 to 5,” he said. “There’s some evidence that many of those kids suffered developmental delays and missed out on high-quality child care and preschool experiences, meaning they will come into school further behind as well.”

Tying shoes, opening bottles: Pandemic kids lack basic life skills

Harvard University education expert Paul E. Peterson said the best studies of school closings in the past reveal lasting damage. In Austria and Switzerland, little touched by World War II except for the closing of schools, researchers found that “those who lost years of schooling never recovered, judging by earnings received in adulthood,” Peterson said.

Karin Chenoweth, author of the books “Schools That Succeed” and “Districts That Succeed,” mentioned an important fact left out of the debate: “The ironic part of all the doomsaying panic about how the pandemic erased two decades of progress is that hardly anyone noticed that we had made such progress while we were making it.”

Recovering from the catastrophe, she said, requires recognition that progress in the recent past came “in large part because for the first time, schools were expected to teach all children, not just some. Many educators took that charge seriously and really ramped up the amount children in their charge learned.” Will that happen now?

Some experts emphasized that huge gaps in the public education system existed before the pandemic hit. “In 2019, just 15 percent of Black eighth-graders were at or above reading proficiency,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder and chief executive of the Success Academy charter schools in New York City. “Low-income children of color deserve better, much better. First, schools should stop lowering standards and dumbing down curriculum.”

Successful programs train teachers to encourage students and earn their trust, rather than just make demands. Thuan Nguyen, chief executive of the nation’s largest college preparatory program, Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), said that “we can collectively decide how long it will take to recover from the impact of the pandemic” by embracing the fact that “the best way … to accelerate learning is through relationships.” Nguyen said the bond between students and teachers is crucial: “There is nothing as powerful as having someone who believes in you and cares about you.”

Public education is facing a crisis of epic proportions

Kinnari Patel-Smyth is acting chief executive and president of the KIPP Foundation, which oversees the nation’s largest charter school network. “Moving forward in this recovery means that federal and state politicians need to prioritize educational spending, at least for another decade,” she said. “It means we need to work harder to ensure every child is a strong reader. It means we need to address the trauma caused by this pandemic and the inequities in this country.”

There are many other suggestions for reform. Unfortunately we did not get very far with most of them before the pandemic. It is unlikely we will do better when our principal emphasis is just getting back to where we were.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/10/02/pandemic-learning-loss-recovery/

Student absenteeism skyrocketed in the pandemic as test scores plunged

October 4, 2022 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized

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The rate of missing students appears to have doubled

By Donna St. George Washington Post September 29th 2022

Chronic absenteeism in public schools surged during the pandemic, which experts say helps explain a historic plunge in student test scores.

At least 10.1 million students were chronically absent during 2020-2021, the first full academic year of the pandemic, according to federal data analyzed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit Attendance Works. That’s 25 percent more than the typical 8 million chronically absent students each year.

But early data from a handful of states during the pandemic’s second full school year shows that absenteeism may have dramatically worsened. Rates will probably double, compared with the pre-pandemic year, researchers said — an “alarming” increase. And that has clearly driven down test scores, they said.

“If kids are getting less instruction, or less-consistent instruction, you’re going to learn less and you’re going to be able to answer fewer questions on the tests,” said Robert Balfanz, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University and director of its Everyone Graduates Center.

Already, four states — Connecticut, Ohio, Virginia and a subset of California — have posted figures for 2021-2022 that show the doubling that he and others predict. National data for that year has not yet been released, but researchers said data from school systems in other states showed similar spikes.

The soaring rate of chronic absenteeism converges with striking declines in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called “the nation’s report card.” Federal officials called the stark declines “historic” when they were released.

Test scores in elementary school math dropped seven points, marking a first-ever fall, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years. The results, made public Sept. 1, were the first nationally representative comparison of student achievement from just before the pandemic with that two years later. Students who took the test were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade.

How the pandemic is reshaping education

Students are considered chronically absent when they miss more than 10 percent of school days for any reason — unexcused or excused absences, or suspensions — which research links to serious consequences: They are less likely to read on grade level by third grade, and more likely to score lower on standardized tests and get suspended in middle school. They are at greater risk of dropping out of high school.

Researchers also created a state-by-state comparison, showing a wide range of chronic absenteeism. The highest rates, of more than 30 percent statewide, were reported in Kentucky, Arizona, Nevada, Rhode Island, Oregon and New Mexico.

Zeroing in on even one state is sobering, Balfanz said. In Kentucky, an extra 116,537 students were chronically absent in 2020-2021, compared with the pre-pandemic year of 2018-2019, with 118,795 students swelling to 235,332. “This is a lot of kids missing a month or more of school,” he said.

Cheryl Horn, a kindergarten teacher in Maryland, said she saw the problem in her classroom last school year. Three of her 12 students were repeatedly absent — making it harder for them to get to know the routine, build bonds with their peers and teacher, and stay up to date on learning. “When you miss one concept and the next concept is building on it, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle,” she said. “You’re always catching up.”

Many students with low NAEP scores reported more technology difficulties or other challenges during months of virtual and hybrid instruction during the pandemic. Lower-performing students as a group had less access to a computer all of the time, a quiet place to work some of the time, and daily or near-daily support from a teacher.

Those setbacks, in turn, also affected attendance, said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, which worked with Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes, a senior research associate at the Johns Hopkins center. “If you don’t have a computer, you can’t show up,” she said. “If you don’t have internet, you can’t show up.”

Especially during the pandemic, chronic absenteeism has been extremely underreported, Chang said. States and school systems shifted definitions of student attendance in major ways — particularly when classes were held remotely. In 2020-2021, Connecticut required students to spend half the day in a range of learning activities to be counted as present, while Alaska considered remote learning like a correspondence course, so students did not have to log on.

Teachers around the country have also said that even if students signed on, it was hard to tell if they were really listening because so many turned off their computer cameras.

During the second full year of the pandemic, other problems had an effect. Many students were out at the beginning of the year and just after the holiday break because of covid surges and quarantines. Teacher and staff shortages also were rampant.

Chang urged school systems to closely monitor student attendance, and to intervene with students who miss more than two days a month. “They need extra outreach and support,” she said, to avoid experiencing the worst effects of missing school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/29/student-absenteeism-pandemic-attendance/

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Posts by Paul Costello1

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More states are allowing children to take mental health days

More states are allowing children to take mental health days

Make the most of a ‘mental health’ day

Experts say schools could recover pandemic losses by 2028. What then?

Doing better than before the pandemic would require more effort than we seem capable of giving

Student absenteeism skyrocketed in the pandemic as test scores plunged

The rate of missing students appears to have doubled

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