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Posts by Paul Costello1

How the battle for democracy will be fought — and won

By the Editorial Board.  Washington Post Dec 22nd 2023

In September last year, three days after widespread protests broke out across Iran over the death of a young woman detained for not fully covering her hair with a hijab, the authorities blocked the internet.

Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old from Iran’s Kurdistan province, had been visiting Tehran with her family when the morality police arrested her. Her family says she was beaten in jail, and she died in a hospital on Sept. 16. Around the country, people took to the streets, led by women demanding the right to dress as they chose.

The government cut off internet access in parts of Kurdistan, Tehran and elsewhere, according to NetBlocks, which tracks internet outages. Iran’s theocratic rulers apparently intended to keep demonstrators in the dark about protests spreading in neighboring towns and cities. Both WhatsApp and Instagram were shut down.

But a little-known channel helped millions of Iranians stay in the know. A nongovernmental organization in Los Angeles, NetFreedom Pioneers, had created a method to bypass the internet entirely and broadcast files — text, audio or video — from commercial satellites to anyone with a receiver dish. It is called Toosheh, or Knapsack. The group collected photos and news reports from social media platforms and elsewhere, uploaded them to a satellite and then down to homes in blacked-out Iran. The news was easily shareable on a flash drive.

Toosheh, founded by an Iranian émigré, brought fresh and uncensored information into a censored country, offering a ray of hope in the struggle between forces of dictatorship and democracy.

For more than a decade and a half, autocracy has been steadily advancing around the globe. Dictators routinely arrest their foes, including those demanding basic rights such as freedom of expression. But they have modernized their methods, taking control of the internet and using it to broadcast disinformation while censoring the truth. They have forced independent media to close and aimed surveillance at social media and the people who use it. They have created firewalls and imposed internet shutdowns. Freedom House found in its latest annual survey of political rights and civil liberties that democracy has been in decline for 17 years — and one of the biggest drivers has been attacks on freedom of expression.

But there are ways to confront the forces of authoritarianism, especially on the information battlefield, where the future of democracy may be decided for millions of people. The stakes are enormous: Will open societies thrive and grow, or will more of the globe fall under the sway of dictatorships such as the one in China, where information manipulation is the norm and surveillance technology watches over everyone, all the time?

Breaking through the firewalls



What makes Toosheh effective is its simplicity. It uses existing technology and current set-top boxes and commercial satellite receivers. Although Iran’s government has tried to prohibit ownership of satellite dishes, the ban is barely enforced, and they have proliferated. Evan Firoozi, executive director of NetFreedom Pioneers, estimated that Toosheh has reached 10 percent of the households in Iran, which has a population of about 90 million.


Every day, Toosheh recipients can download 1.2 gigabytes of data an hour for up to four hours. The files are scrambled but reassembled on arrival into their native formats, such as videos, photos or texts, transferrable directly to a flash drive. The system requires nothing new — the satellites are already in position, and NetFreedom Pioneers can be up and running in any part of the world in less than 24 hours. It is rapidly scalable. While Iran has tried periodically to jam the satellite signals in some places, it hasn’t been able to block the transmissions entirely or permanently.

“One of the main reasons for the protests to spread around the country is that people are hearing that other people are protesting,” Mr. Firoozi told us. “So they get the courage to go out and start protesting.” Toosheh delivers straight news so people can see what is happening elsewhere. The project could be used for closed societies outside Iran, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, as well as for populations caught in wars or natural disasters.

Another promising approach is known as internet circumvention, allowing people online to pierce firewalls, evade censorship and gain free access to independent information from around the globe. Not long ago, circumvention techniques, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), which create a separate, protected tunnel through the internet, were a niche technology with an uneven record. Now they have improved, and the number of users has exploded.

From 2012 to 2019, Radio Free Asia nurtured an in-house pilot program, the Open Technology Fund, to find ways to evade censorship and surveillance for both its audiences and its journalists. In 2019, the effort was spun out into an independent nonprofit, with congressional funding of $40 million this year, working to bolster circumvention tools and protect the security and privacy of users. Previously, users looked to circumvention tools only when there was a crisis — there would be a spike, then usage would settle back down. “In the last two years, that has completely changed,” Laura Cunningham, the fund’s director, told us. The circumvention tools, apps such as Psiphon and Lantern, have become an everyday reality. As many as 1 in 4 adults in Iran are using them. Worldwide, the number of average monthly users of the circumvention tools supported by the Open Technology Fund has soared from 9 million to 40 million.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty saw demand for its coverage soar, about half of it from Russia and half from Ukraine. (The organization suspended operations inside Russia following years of pressure from the government, relocating staff to Prague and elsewhere.) To avoid censorship or interference from Moscow, the Open Technology Fund scrambled in a matter of months to build a system of mirror sites that would allow users in Russia to seamlessly access the RFE/RL news stories from social media without using a complex VPN. The sites are essentially reproductions, and users from within Russia can get to them unimpeded when they click on short URLs. They are now in place for 342 websites of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, assuring that such outlets as Voice of America and RFE/RL can continue to reach audiences in closed societies. The mirrors remove the burden from the user, making circumvention much easier for millions of readers and viewers.

Helping protesters see one another

In China’s authoritarian system, the knowledge of protests — what happened, where and when — is prohibited information. The government stopped publishing data about “mass incidents” more than a decade ago, and independent researchers who collected it have been arrested. China fears contagion: If people find out others are protesting, they might be inspired to follow. There are many protests in China, but the censors go to great effort to scrub them from news and social media, especially when they start to get shared.

All through the summer and early autumn last year, protests took place against China’s rigid “zero covid” policy, which imposed draconian lockdowns. Then, on Nov. 24, came a fire in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region in western China that is home to a persecuted minority, the ethnic Uyghurs. Around 8 p.m., a high-rise residential building erupted in flames. With the area locked down for covid, at least 10 people — and maybe as many as 44 — were killed, trapped in the building. The blaze deepened the anger in the country.

Two days later, students at a university in Nanjing began holding up blank sheets of paper, a protest tactic to evade censorship or arrest while also mocking it. The white-paper protests spread to other universities, and then demonstrations broke out in major cities. Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor found 75 protest events that week. Social media posts, protest signs and other images spread online faster than China’s censors could scrub them; people learned about others’ grievances, protests and dissent.

A month earlier, a courageous dissident, Peng Lifa, had hung protest banners from the Sitong Bridge in Beijing just as the Communist Party was convening for its congress held every five years. He criticized zero-covid policies and demanded political reform, including the ouster of President Xi Jinping. After the Urumqi fire, in demonstrations in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, protesters invoked language from Mr. Peng’s banner, including “We don’t want lockdowns, we want to eat.” The result was a decentralized movement — people were communicating indirectly through signs and slogans.

China’s security services rounded up students in the white-paper protests. But it was too late. The movement had rattled China’s leadership. On Dec. 7, Mr. Xi abruptly reversed the zero-covid policy.

A key takeaway: Seeing people actively protest inspires others who share their dissatisfaction. Making this happen is a goal of the China Dissent Monitor, a project that Freedom House started last year. Using artificial intelligence and other methods, it harvests and preserves information about dissent from multiple sources before Chinese censors erase it and charts the events in a database, creating an open record. While it is still difficult to get the information disseminated inside China, the group is trying different channels, including VPNs. The China Dissent Monitor has also built a gallery of photos and videos of demonstrations inside the country, a kind of Instagram of Chinese protest that is a powerful tool to show China’s people the breadth of activism — just what the government wants to hide.

During the white-paper protests, Li Ying, a Chinese artist in his 30s living in Italy, known as “Teacher Li,” had a huge impact. Out of reach of China’s censors, he collected protest information and images sent to him on Twitter, then broadcast them in a stream of reports in real time, becoming a singular point of contact for those who wanted to know what was happening. Through Mr. Li, the protesters were able to “see” one another. Although Twitter is blocked in China by the Great Firewall, people on the mainland can access it through VPNs. According to the Wall Street Journal, his posts from late November to mid-December last year had more than 1.3 billion views, a brilliant example of circumvention at work.

Mr. Li wrote an open letter to the Chinese authorities in the early days of the protests, saying he had received death threats and insisting they back off. “I’m not afraid of you anymore,” he wrote. “Don’t try to silence me.” He warned he would be replaced by others if anything happened to him.

Toward a new playbook

While these efforts are pushing back against autocracy, democracies need to do far more.

Russia and China, friends “without limits,” often assert that democracy has run its course, that it is incapable of governing, that authoritarian models work better. President Vladimir Putin of Russia told a conservative audience recently that the ideas of the United States have become “decrepit” and added, “We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous for others.” Both Russia and China have launched fusillades of disinformation intended to confuse people, besmirch democracy and subvert it from within. For example, Facebook announced recently that it had removed 4,789 fake accounts based in China that were impersonating Americans and intended to create chaos in the lead-up to next year’s U.S. presidential election. The illiberal regimes are at war with the democracies on the battlefield of information and ideas. The democracies are taking a battering — and need to respond.

Sanctions are slow and don’t often result in change. For instance, the United States in August sanctioned 101 officials in Belarus for falsifying results of the 2020 election there, including visa bans on judges who sentenced people to prison for social media posts. But the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, went right on arresting people and imprisoning them.

The United States has a well-established set of programs to advance democracy, overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy. They provide training in independent media, draft laws, bolster civil society and encourage free elections around the world. There’s also important work in journalism from the outlets under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, such as Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America, which are designed to offer straight news and information and thus contribute to advancing democratic ideals. They are essential. But the existing U.S. government democracy effort, about $3 billion a year, less than four-tenths of a percent of the defense budget, is grossly under-resourced compared with the investments made by Russia and China.

It has long been true that the strongest argument for democracy around the world is the example of the United States. But the showcase is no longer enough. Powerful dictatorships that rely on deceit and manipulation are using new tools and technologies. Democracies need new thinking to respond.

One place to start is to build an uninhibited rebuttal of the narrative offered by dictatorships. A counternarrative must assert the basic values and ideals of democracy in a way that is credible and persuasive. The world’s democracies should create a system to fight back that can speak plainly and consistently about the inherent advantages of democratic systems, while admitting the imperfections, and use creative ways to illuminate the flaws and depredations of authoritarian regimes.

This will require hard work by the Biden administration, Congress and democratic allies around the world. It must go beyond summits and talking.Perhaps there is a model in the way that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reimagined problem-solving in global public health. Or perhaps existing U.S. organizations — such as Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Agency for Global Media — and similar groups here and abroad can, together, build a renewed campaign. It will require a major boost in resources. It must speak with absolute clarity; foreign audiences will be sensitive to spin and put off by clumsy sloganeering.

The mission is no less than explaining to the world why freedom matters to everyone, every day.

Authoritarian regimes often suffer brain drain. Open societies should leverage this for a renewed battle for democracy, taking advantage of talent spread around the world. Diasporas are rich with knowledge and should be brought into the effort.

Another idea is to focus more urgently on countries that are sliding backward but have not yet fallen entirely into dictatorship. It makes sense to catch them sooner rather than later. Remember the shining moment when Sudan’s population seemed headed for a democratic opening after the overthrow of dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir? Could more have been done to save Sudan’s future for democracy before it fell into civil war? Often there is a fragile and rapidly closing window for action.

These are a few ideas, but the most important message is that autocracy is on the march in today’s world, and democracy must confront this profound threat.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/21/autocracy-democracy-internet-circumvention/

7 life lessons I’ll rely on this new year

By Steven Petrow.  Washington Post January 8th 2024

Before I slammed the door on 2023 — good riddance! — I took some time to reflect on it. Specifically, what useful lessons, insights and practices can I pack up and carry into the new year to help live with more balance, resilience, even joy?L

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that next year will bring its own roadblocks and detours, turns and twists.

Here’s hoping some of the items in my baggage will help you navigate the 366 days of 2024. (Yep, it’s a leap year.)1

Connection is key

You know that saying, “It’s not the destination but the journey”? Over the summer, I heard a friend update it to, “It’s not the destination or the journey, but the companionship.”

I don’t think this friend knew the work of the early 20th-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who coined the term “collective effervescence,” believing that group activities excite and unify us. If Durkheim were alive today, I’m certain he’d point to a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or Cher concert as the perfect example. Next best: Plan a dance party, or join a choral group or a sports team.2

Kindness is contagious

We take it as a given that bad behavior easily goes viral — just look at “copycat” crimes or mob mentality. Why can’t we make good behavior spread just as fast?

Katty Huertas/The PostStart 2024 with practical tips and smart solutions for your health, technology, travel, food, money, home and more. Easy wins, good habits, better living. Elevate your daily life with expertise from The Washington Post. Find it all here.End of carousel

According to Jamil Zaki, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, it’s certainly possible. “We find that people imitate not only the particulars of positive actions, but also the spirit underlying them,” he wrote in Scientific American several years ago.“This implies … that kindness itself is contagious, and that … it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.”

For instance, he found that people made larger charitable gifts when they believed people around them were contributing generously than when they thought those others were stingy.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

Even when people cannot afford to donate, he learned “an individual’s kindness can nonetheless trigger people to spread positivity in other ways.” So consider paying for the next person’s coffee or meal in the drive-through, or offer to help a neighbor with snow shoveling or taking out the trash.3

Gratitude is powerful

While gratitude has become a well-worn buzzword these days, study after study shows how it improves our lives. Psychologist and author Robert Emmons wrote: “Gratitude gives us that connection. It gives us that sense of transcendence, the sense of celebration, but also the awareness of the finiteness of life.” Fortunately, Emmons’s approach doesn’t require a high bar, as he recommends keeping a gratitude journal — a simple notebook — to regularly record the things for which we’re grateful. At one point I feared I’d have nothing to be grateful for, given a year in which my parents died and I separated from my husband. But I did have things. And writing them down in a gratitude journal helped me, and may do the same for you, science says.4

Vulnerability is hard but worth it

Steven Overly, 35, experienced sudden hearing loss two years ago. At first the reporter and podcast host feared for his ability to work and socialize. But he found that talking about his disability and then writing about it had two surprising benefits. “I found … a sense of purpose in what I had done, that making myself vulnerable and sharing this experience has actually helped people in a very direct way.” In “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead,” researcher and writer Brené Brown wrote: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity.”5

Silence speaks volumes

Hush! You might actually hear someone. So many people have told me they don’t feel seen or heard — it’s a veritable “epidemic of invisibility.” I understand the pain caused by feeling unimportant or left out, leading to hurt and anger, because I’ve experienced it, too. So how do we begin to change these feelings of invisibility? Start listening, and I don’t mean pretending to listen. According to the U.S. Institute of Peace, “active listening is a way of listening and responding to another person that improves mutual understanding.” In practice, it starts with making eye contact and focusing on the other person; leaning in or nodding to let them know you’re paying attention; and allowing the other person to finish before you respond or, worse, interrupt.6

Doing nothing is challenging but rewarding

The practice of “doing nothing” has been popularized by several recent books, one of which is “Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing” by Olga Mecking. The Dutch word “niksen” is “doing nothing on purpose, without a purpose.” It’s different from self-care activities like yoga, breadmaking or volunteering, all of which have an ostensible goal and require doing something. Mecking argues that doing nothing resists the pressure many of us feel to schedule our days for maximum productivity. In Canada, meditation teacher and author Jeff Warren leads a weekly online group called the Do Nothing Project, which brings together a couple hundred souls “doing not much together.” I thought doing nothing would make me nuts; after two years, it’s helped me find inner calm and equanimity. Try letting your mind wander. (If you want to do this at home, go to jeffwarren.org and scroll to the middle of the page.)7

Joy is everywhere

Last month I finished writing a book about my search for joy in stormy times. One of the biggest aha moments was the discovery of just how many different kinds of joy exist. It’s more than the ecstatic “bursting with joy” notion we tend to think of. There’s serene joy, sexual joy, even schadenfreude (the sneaky joy found in another person’s misfortune). Joy also goes by many names, including delight, exuberance, pleasure, peace, contentedness, amusement, wonder and relief. It surrounds us, and lives within us. Open your heart, and choose it when you see it.

So as I pack up that ragged duffel bag labeled “2023” and prepare to toss it into history, I’ll be plucking these few precious lessons out first to take with me in my shiny new spinner bag named “2024.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/01/08/life-lessons-gratitude-connection-joy/?utm_campaign=wp_the_optimist&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_optimist

Living with Our Pandemic Trade-Offs


A boy throwing away a face mask in a garbage can already cluttered with masks.

 Dhruv Khullar September 18, 2022 New Yorker

Isaiah Berlin, the twentieth-century philosopher, spent much of his life arguing that we can’t have it all. In any weighty societal matter, worthwhile values invariably clash: liberty and equality, justice and mercy, impartiality and love. Such collisions, Berlin wrote, are “an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life,” and realizing some ends “must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.” But he also argued that we can soften the impact of this “value pluralism.” Our aim should be to “maintain a precarious equilibrium that will prevent the occurrence of desperate situations, of intolerable choices—that is the first requirement for a decent society.”

During the pandemic, few issues have crystallized the trade-offs we face as the disruptions to education have. This month, more than a million children returned to New York City’s public schools. They joined students around the country who, for the first time since 2019, started the school year without major covid restrictions: no universal mask mandates, physical-distancing protocols, compulsory quarantines, or remote learning. But they are among a cohort that has experienced historic losses in educational achievement. According to data from the Department of Education, reading scores for the nation’s nine-year-olds declined this year by the largest margin in three decades; their math scores dropped for the first time on record. These findings are especially troubling in light of research showing that third-grade competencies have a pivotal influence on life outcomes, such as the likelihood of graduating from high school, the risk of being incarcerated, and the ability to earn a living wage.

Some of this decline was unavoidable—the result of a once-in-a-century virus. But our choices mattered. In the spring of 2020, nearly all American schools switched to remote learning, in an attempt to mitigate the worst of desperate situations—overrun hospitals, rationed ventilators, mass death. Since then, however, there’s been wide variation in how long and how frequently schools shut their doors. The result is clear: the more time students spent remote, the more their education suffered. According to an analysis from Harvard, the American In­stitutes for Research, and NWEA, children in “high-­poverty schools” who spent most of 2021 learning remotely lost more than half a year’s worth of instruction. The effects were most devastating for Black and Hispanic children and for those who were already struggling academically.

This was a trade-off we chose—mortgaging the quality of education in an effort to protect parents, teachers, communities, and (to a lesser extent) children themselves from the coronavirus. Now the U.S. seems to have arrived at another judgment: the value of normalcy exceeds that of caution. “covid no longer controls our lives,” President Joe Biden said this month, and most Americans agree. In a recent poll exploring which of fifteen issues voters feel are most important ahead of the midterm elections, the coronavirus ranked fifteenth. Even among Americans who identify as “very liberal”—the most covid-cautious political demographic—worries about the coronavirus have plummeted. Last week, Governor Kathy Hochul allowed New York’s covid-19 state of emergency to expire. (Connecticut and Rhode Island are the only states in the Northeast with ongoing emergency declarations.)

Part of this shift reflects a genuine reduction in the virus’s toll. With vaccines, boosters, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and more than eighty per cent of Americans having been infected, covid’s case-fatality rate has fallen significantly, and I.C.U.s once overflowing with coronavirus patients now care for a pre-pandemic variety of illnesses. But much of it simply reflects the passage of time—a once novel threat fading into the background.

Owing to a lack of congressional funding and a desire to move past the “acute emergency phase,” the Biden Administration is taking a less central role in managing the pandemic. It recently paused a program that sent out free coronavirus tests, and soon it will stop paying for vaccines and treatments. Instead, these products will be purchased by insurers, who will pass the cost on to consumers through higher premiums; people without coverage will have to purchase the products on their own. covid will become just another of the many diseases that afflict Americans—a circumstance that says more about our social and political choices than about our medical reality. The U.S. continues to suffer more than two thousand covid deaths a week; it records more than sixty thousand new cases every day, and these represent a fraction of the true number of infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half the country has high or moderate levels of viral spread, and many experts anticipate another covid surge this winter, possibly alongside a brutal influenza outbreak. (Australia, which often acts as a bellwether for the U.S., just had its worst flu season in five years.) Meanwhile, it’s increasingly evident that infections can have lasting health and economic effects: by one estimate, covid-related illnesses have reduced the U.S. labor force by half a million people. And many elderly and immunocompromised people remain at risk for serious illness, even after immunization.

Last month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized a redesign of covid vaccines. The new “bivalent” boosters target both the original strain and the hyper-contagious Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. The updated shots should, theoretically, offer better protection against the versions of the virus currently circulating, but because they were authorized on the basis of data in mice, instead of in humans—a decision prioritizing speed over certainty—it’s unclear how much benefit they will provide in the real world. The White House signalled that, going forward, Americans will probably need only an annual booster that takes aim at the variant du jour; that recommendation, though, seems based less on rigorous data than on a wish to assuage a weary public.

For much of the pandemic, covid discourse assumed a stark political polarity. Conservatives advanced arguments rooted in freedom and autonomy; liberals focussed on health equity and communal well-being. For better or worse, the two camps seem to have coalesced around a shared understanding: the coronavirus is here to stay, and it’s up to individuals to decide how to live with it. But, still, there are no universal truths. The value pluralism that Isaiah Berlin identified in societies is now roiling within individuals. On some days, at some events, for some people, the risks feel worth it. In other moments, they don’t. These internal tensions are inescapable—part and parcel of our own precarious equilibriums. ♦

Published in the print edition of the September 26, 2022, issue, with the headline “Pandemic Choices.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/26/living-with-our-pandemic-trade-offs

Has School Become Optional?

A silhouette of a kid sitting on a desk revealing two people walking.

By Alec MacGillis January 8, 2024 The New Yorker

On a cold, clear weekday morning in early December, Shepria Johnson pulled up to a small house in Ecorse, Michigan, in an S.U.V. with a decal on the driver’s door which read “Student Wholeness Team.” She looked at an app on her phone. It was her third of ten visits that morning, and she was there to check on a girl and a boy, eleven and nine, who had missed enough days of school to put them on a list of “chronically absent” students at Grandport Academy, in Ecorse, an industrial suburb of Detroit.

In case there was no one home, Johnson wrote the students’ names on a form letter and addressed the envelope to “the parent of Jisaiah and King.” She wrote “parent,” avoiding the plural as she had seen schools do. “If it’s a one-parent household, that might get touchy.”

There was someone home. Kuanticka Prude opened the door; behind her were some of her eight children. Cats darted up and down the front steps, which were garlanded with Christmas decorations. Johnson introduced herself and said that she was concerned about Jisaiah’s and King’s attendance and wanted to see if there was anything the family needed to help them get to school.

“This is King,” Prude said, gesturing to a slender boy with wary eyes, “and this is Jisaiah”—a girl with her hair in thick side buns. Prude, a friendly thirty-two-year-old with multiple nose and lip studs, said she had woken the two up that morning, but they had gone back to bed, assuming she would be at her job, as a security guard at the Fillmore Detroit entertainment venue. By the time she discovered that they hadn’t left for school, it seemed too late to send them. She had set up a nanny cam to see what was going on at the house when she was away, she said, but the cats had chewed it up. She hadn’t been aware until recently how many days they had missed; she had noticed some attempted calls from their school but hadn’t realized what they were about.

“I tell them, ‘Y’all are going to get me in trouble for this,’ ” she told Johnson.

“This is not anything like truancy. We come from a place of support,” Johnson said, in her characteristically upbeat tone. “But, yes, it could lead to that, if they’re not in school, so we want to make sure they understand.”

Back in the S.U.V., Johnson’s composure briefly fell away. “Wow, they are too little to be skipping,” she said under her breath.

Johnson is part of an increasingly popular approach to combatting truancy: she makes home visits to learn why children are missing school and then works with families and schools to get them back on track. She oversees a team of six people in southeastern Michigan who are employed by a Baltimore company called Concentric Educational Solutions, which has contracts with seven small school districts in the Detroit area. Since 2021, she has been driving back and forth across the Downriver towns southwest of the city, a vast expanse of dollar stores, pot dispensaries, and manufacturing plants—some active, some abandoned. She passes the Marathon refinery, the Great Lakes Steel Works, and the giant Ford Rouge Complex, where this fall she could see the picket line of the United Auto Workers strike.

The strike ended. The crisis that Johnson was dealing with, on the other hand, seemed never-ending. Absenteeism has long been a problem in the Detroit area, as in other places with high poverty rates, but since the coronavirus pandemic it has worsened dramatically. Nationwide, the rate of chronic absenteeism—defined as missing at least ten per cent of school days, or eighteen in a year—nearly doubled between 2018-19 and 2021-22, to twenty-eight per cent of students, according to data compiled for the Associated Press by Thomas Dee, a professor of education at Stanford. Michigan’s rate was thirty-nine per cent, the third highest among states. States that have reported data for the most recent school year showed only minimal improvement; some cities have rates of more than forty per cent.

Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people in recent years, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health—exacerbated by social isolation—and elevated youth violence and car thefts, some occurring during school hours. But schools are using relatively little of the billions of dollars that they received in federal pandemic-recovery funds to address absenteeism. The issue has also attracted surprisingly little attention from leaders, elected or otherwise, and education coverage in the national media has focussed heavily on culture-war fights.

This void created an opportunity for a fledgling company like Concentric. Founded in 2010, by David Heiber, a former school administrator, the company grew slowly. It had only about twenty employees before covid ignited the business. Concentric now has more than a hundred employees, and it recently received a five-million-dollar investment from a social-venture-capital firm to fuel expansion.

“Right place, right time, right pandemic,” Heiber told me sardonically.

Kuanticka Prude had her first child when she was thirteen, so she finished her education at the city’s maternity academy. Before that, though, she’d liked going to school. “It was fun! Who wanted to be at home and listen to your mom complain all day?” she told me, when I spoke with her after Johnson’s visit. “But, then, we didn’t have covid and cities being shut down.”

During the pandemic, Detroit’s public schools, where her kids were enrolled at the time, remained closed to in-person instruction for nearly a year. “They did school online. I hated it,” she said. “They took it as a joke most of the time, playing in class, because they felt like they were at home and they could do that.” After the family moved to Ecorse, last summer, the mind-set lingered. “They got too comfortable at home,” she said.

This is a dynamic that Johnson has repeatedly encountered. When classes were virtual, students would log on some days, and some days they wouldn’t. The world did not end. For parents, it might seem easier that way. No dragging kids out of bed before daybreak. No wrestling them into proper clothes. No getting them to the bus stop as one’s own work waited. “You were able to just do the things you needed to do,” Johnson said. “Everybody was comfortable. It was, ‘I can go to my computer, my baby is in my room on the computer. We’re good.’ ”

After that hiatus, relearning old behaviors was hard. “If I were a child, and I could stay at home on my computer, in my room, and play with my little toys on the side, pick up the game for your break or lunchtime, how hard is it to sit in a school building for seven hours?” she said. “It takes us to help build those habits, and I don’t think just one person can do it alone.”

Some parents, unimpressed by what instruction consisted of during remote learning, didn’t see missing school as that consequential. Some simply liked having their kids around. “You’re dealing with a different generation here. This is a parent generation that plays video games with their children,” Steven McGhee, the superintendent of the Harper Woods district, another Concentric client near Detroit, said. “When we were kids, we were out of the house and at school. There was no option. This became optional.”

Even before covid, some students in the Detroit area had been able to choose online-only learning as an offering from public or charter schools. Since the pandemic, many schools have made it easier for students to try to catch up from missed days with online material.

The spectrum from in-person to virtual to nothing at all can get pretty fuzzy. One early afternoon, I saw an eight-year-old boy with headphones on standing outside a house in Ecorse, playing a video game on a tablet. His mother had died of a heroin overdose two years earlier, and his father said that he had enrolled his son in an online academy, because their housing situation was uncertain. Usually, there were three hours of instruction daily, he said, but the Wi-Fi hadn’t been working properly. “He’s done for the day,” his father said.

Families faced other hurdles as well. One student’s father had died a month earlier, and in the previous six months two of his grandparents had also died; his mother was suffering from heart disease that prevented her from working, and she could no longer afford school clothes. Johnson alerted the student’s principal, who had a special fund for such needs.

The mother of a middle-school girl had been in a car crash; when a Concentric employee visited, the mother had trouble even coming to the door, and she explained that she couldn’t get her daughter to school anymore. A high-school boy had moved in with his grandmother, but he was sleeping on the porch for lack of a bed; Concentric bought him one. A superintendent purchased a washer and dryer after hearing from Concentric that some students weren’t coming to school because they didn’t have any clean clothes. “Once you have these conversations, you know that there are real-life events that happen, there are real-life circumstances, where they’re just not able,” Johnson said.

Still, there were circumstances in which negligence did seem to be an issue. Johnson, who is thirty-four and has three kids, could feel her natural sympathy being tested: “I’ve had a parent tell me, ‘Well, hey, she wasn’t there because of my life problems.’ I get it, but you can’t just leave a student out of school because you have issues.”

Sometimes parents asked Johnson if she was a truant officer, and she would reply, “No, I’m a professional student advocate,” which was what Concentric called its outreach workers. “If you’re a truant officer, they’re defensive,” she told me. “They automatically assume you’re here to get them in trouble.”

Within the U.S., the concept of mandatory schooling can be traced to the seventeenth century, when the Puritans of Massachusetts positioned it as fundamental to Christian society, but this tenet was challenged by the Industrial Revolution, as children went to work in the mills. After Massachusetts instituted compulsory-schooling policies in the eighteen-forties and fifties, enforcement was spotty. But, in 1873, the state passed a law requiring attendance between the ages of eight and twelve, for at least twenty weeks a year. The law was enforced by agents of the school committee—truant officers—with fines of up to five dollars per week. Sixteen years later, the age range was expanded to fourteen, and a year after that the required term became thirty weeks a year. W. E. B. Du Bois, reflecting on his upbringing in western Massachusetts in the eighteen-seventies and eighties, emphasized his school routine. “I was brought up from earliest years with the idea of regular attendance at school,” he wrote. “This was partly because the schools of Great Barrington were near at hand, simple but good, well-taught, and truant laws were enforced.”

By the 1890-91 school year, more than two hundred of Massachusetts’s three hundred and fifty-one towns had an average daily attendance of ninety per cent, and only eleven were below eighty per cent. During the following decades, mandatory schooling spread nationwide. William Reese, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, found that just six per cent of adolescents were in high school in 1890 but that by 1930 half of them were. By 1950, attendance was so universal that those who weren’t in school were called dropouts. “By the early twentieth century, the truth is that you’re supposed to be in school, and, in the long reach of history, that’s a remarkable fact,” Reese told me. “It became a universal norm. Other European nations sort of caught up eventually, but America was in the vanguard of this.”

Cities often employed truant officers, who roamed the streets searching for children to corral, and repeat offenders risked being brought to juvenile court. But in recent decades many areas have moved away from legal remedies, following a general shift toward less punitive juvenile justice. In addition, experts—citing psychology literature and evidence from states that still meted out consequences—argued that threats were unlikely to be effective. “Punitive rather than positive is not the best approach,” Michael Gottfried, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, said.

Enforcement of state truancy laws has grown rarer. In August, Missouri’s highest court affirmed the sentencing of two parents to at least a week in jail for their young children’s absences, but most of the movement has been in the other direction. In 2019, for instance, New Mexico removed the role of district attorneys in enforcing attendance. (The state, which had some of the longest school closures, saw its chronic absenteeism rates more than double after the pandemic, to forty per cent, the second-highest rate among states, after Alaska.)

The case of Kamala Harris is instructive. As the San Francisco district attorney in the mid-two-thousands, she made headlines for prosecuting parents of extremely truant students. “I believe that a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime,” Harris said, during her run for state attorney general, in 2010. “So, I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.” During that campaign, she pushed for a statewide law that made it a misdemeanor for parents if their kids were chronically absent, punishable by a fine of up to two thousand dollars or a year in jail. In 2013, the state amended the law, giving school principals more leeway to excuse absences.

When Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President, she received heavy criticism for her efforts. She expressed contrition, saying that she had hoped the law would simply prod districts to offer more resources to aid truant students. “My regret is that I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, D.A.s have criminalized the parents,” she said. “And I regret that that has happened.”

In recent years, however, efforts to fight absenteeism have tended to involve nudges, not threats. In 2015, Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist at Harvard, co-founded EveryDay Labs, which sent letters and text messages to families with reminders about the importance of school, and statistics about how their children’s attendance compared with classmates’. Parents could also respond to a chatbot about challenges that they were facing in getting their kids to school. The company was hired by some fifty school districts, but its approach was most effective with milder cases of absenteeism, less so with more severe ones.

David Heiber, Concentric’s founder, is an advocate of direct intervention, perhaps because he wishes he had received it when he was young. Heiber, who is forty-seven, was brought up in Delaware by his maternal grandparents. He had some contact with his mother, a white woman who suffered from alcoholism, but he did not know his father, who was Black, until he was an adult. His grandfather, whom he called Dad, was a truck driver, and he and Heiber’s grandmother—Mom—provided him with a stable middle-class upbringing. In high school, he was a track star who attracted scholarship offers.

In his senior year, his grandfather had a fatal heart attack while Christmas shopping. Heiber went back to school just two days later and, receiving no social-work support—although a gym teacher let him play Ping-Pong for hours on end—he “spun out of control,” he told me. He was expelled from school, convicted of burglary, and sentenced to some five years in prison. While he was incarcerated, his grandmother died of cancer. “I just decided, Something has to happen,” he said. “I got to do something.”

He earned his G.E.D. behind bars and a judge released him after twenty-seven months, on the condition that he enroll in college. He attended Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania, and got a job teaching high school in Baltimore, which he did for a year before taking an administrative position at a different local high school. But, in 2006, he faced one set of misdemeanor charges related to a breakup, which were later dropped, and another set, he told me, for his role interceding in a fight between students at a high school in Washington, D.C., which he had been visiting as an observer. That case resulted in four years of probation. “It was a rough period,” Heiber said. “Very few people go in a straight trajectory.”

In 2007, he moved to Washington, D.C., to become the director of student services for a small group of charter schools. One day, Heiber and some colleagues were wondering what to do about truant students, and it occurred to him that one lived just across the street from the school. He suggested going to the student’s home. There, his grandmother said that he was attending a different school. For Heiber, it was an epiphany: to get the right information, you needed to go to students’ homes, both to show families that the system cared about them and to gain a better understanding of what was keeping the students away—unreliable transportation, depression, lack of clothes, or myriad other factors. “There was a list of maybe two hundred or so, and we just thought, Ask them questions,” he said.

Heiber came to realize that there was an art to conducting visits in ways that didn’t make families feel judged. In one home, a cockroach fell onto his shoulder, and he managed to keep himself from recoiling, “because it would have made the whole conversation go different,” he said.

In 2010, he was approached by the NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy looking to invest in Black entrepreneurs. He received a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to help create Concentric, with the initial aim of advising districts on how to improve home visits by teachers. But it became apparent that many districts were having trouble getting teachers to do home visits at all and, instead, were interested in having Concentric do them.

Heiber embraced the new mission, becoming an evangelist for what he saw as an underappreciated aspect of the education system. Most school systems “pay the least amount of money for the most important job,” he said. “I’m not saying that teaching is not a very important job. But they got to be in school to be taught.”

His initial contracts were primarily in Detroit. He met several administrators in the school system there, mostly Black men roughly his own age, who then left to lead districts in the city’s working-class inner suburbs. They hired Concentric and recommended it to others in the region.

The frequent travel to Detroit was a strain on Heiber and his family, as was the scramble for new clients. He incurred bills for unpaid taxes and home improvements, leading to court proceedings in Prince George’s County, a Maryland suburb of Washington where he lived. Then came the post-pandemic boom, with new business in Maryland districts. Contracts ranged from fifty thousand dollars for home visits in a small district to several million dollars for home visits, plus mentoring and tutoring, in some large ones. In 2021 and 2022, Concentric hired dozens of employees, many of them young Black college graduates. It gave them two weeks of training, which included instruction as basic as how to knock on doors. “I tell everyone, ‘Knock a little harder, but don’t knock like the police,’ ” a Concentric manager said. The job mostly paid on an hourly basis, as much as thirty-five dollars per hour. The “professional student advocates” dressed well, in black polo shirts with the company logo or, sometimes, in suits. “I didn’t want people to go into a building and not know that they were our P.S.A.s,” Heiber said.

The company’s rapid expansion, with revenue reaching eight million dollars last academic year, brought growing pains. Some employees went weeks without getting paid, as income from new contracts arrived too late for payroll, and the company had to turn to lenders, several of whom later filed suit for nonpayment. (Most of the legal actions against Concentric and Heiber have been settled.)

Concentric’s growth only accelerated as the new school year began. For many districts, tracking down missing students was existential. Several million children had left public schools for private and parochial ones or for homeschooling; several hundred thousand were simply unaccounted for. With fewer students, some districts faced teacher layoffs and school closures.

To bring more order to the expansion, Heiber hired experienced managers. In early October came an announcement that a firm called New Markets Venture Partners was investing five million dollars in Concentric.

One of the firm’s partners, who was in charge of the investment, told Heiber that Concentric was worth fifteen million dollars. The federal pandemic funding that some districts were using to pay Concentric would fade in 2024, but many districts were using state money, which would continue. “He thinks we could be a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar business in five to seven years,” Heiber said.

Every few weeks, Concentric received a fresh list of absent kids from each district, often about fifty names. Shepria Johnson’s list brought her to tiny bungalows, ramshackle apartments, and public-housing complexes. Sometimes she arrived at homes that appeared abandoned. “I pull up and am, like, No way, nobody lives here,” she said. “And I would knock on the door, and I see people peeking out, and I think, Oh, my God, someone does live here.”

She was able to stave off demoralization by feeling a purpose far greater than she’d had at her previous jobs—she’d worked as a manager at a shoe store and at a Verizon store, while making efforts to complete her college degree. “You don’t know what you’ll go and see, but if you’re not doing it then you can’t help,” she said. “It doesn’t make me sad anymore, it’s just, ‘How can I help?’ ”

She took pride in her ability to get parents to open up to her. “They go off of your energy. If you’re at the door, and you’re upset with me, I’m not going to get upset with you,” she said. “We should all consider the person on the other side of the door. We know what we’re trying to do—we’re trying to make a difference—but they don’t know that when we’re knocking at the door.”

The conversation was only the first half of the job; next was relaying what information she had learned to school officials or to Concentric employees stationed at schools. A mother in a mobile-home park said that her son, who was in high school, needed tutoring; another mother said that her son was always late to school because he hated algebra, his first period, and suggested changing his schedule. Even when Johnson found an address uninhabited, with nothing but a can of air freshener visible in the empty living room, she considered it useful, because it alerted the school that it needed updated contact information for a student.

These sorts of home visits are so new that there has been little chance to assess them. A Johns Hopkins University evaluation of Concentric in the Baltimore school district—its largest contract—during the 2021-22 school year reported that a majority of home visits found nobody there. The evaluators struggled to judge the impact even of the visits that did reach family members, because there was no attendance data from the pandemic year of 2020-21 to compare the new numbers with.

The Johns Hopkins study found, however, that school administrators praised the company’s efforts. Superintendents in Michigan echoed this praise. “The number of companies that pledge or promise to address inequities or deficits that are experienced in urban schools—it’s exhausting,” Derrick Coleman, the superintendent of Michigan’s River Rouge school district, told me. But Concentric, he said, is “able to go into places that many educators are reluctant to go into, for safety reasons, and make families feel comfortable. They create psychological safety to share whatever those challenges are. And that then gives us data and information to make adjustments.”

Connecticut, which has launched a home-visit initiative in fifteen districts, has taken a slightly different approach: outreach workers call ahead to schedule visits with families, which can last longer than an hour. A study found that the program—which is carried out by school employees or community members and which has cost twenty-four million dollars—resulted in an increase in attendance of fifteen to twenty per cent among middle and high schoolers nine months after the first visit.

But Johnson preferred arriving unscheduled, believing that it gave her a clearer picture of the household context. “When you’re on the spot, you have the pure parent,” she said. “If you schedule it, they’re prepared, they already know why you’re coming, they already know their story, but you’re not getting the raw reason.”

On a couple of occasions, visits by members of Michigan’s Concentric team uncovered situations so troubling that they prompted calls to child-protective services. More often, the team found a different recourse. Michigan is one of the few states that still enforce legal repercussions for truancy: a school police officer or administrator or a Concentric P.S.A. can send a JC 01 form to the prosecutor’s office for Wayne County, where most of the Concentric districts are.

If the prosecutor’s office finds sufficient evidence, it typically offers students who are ten or older a diversion program—the chance to improve attendance and have their records wiped clean. If that fails, students may be brought before a judge. (Cases of younger kids are referred to the adult division, and charges may be brought against their parents.)

Shepria Johnson photographed by Brittany Greeson.

Johnson, her colleagues, and the superintendents in the Concentric districts in Wayne County all said that the JC 01 forms have been a valuable tool in the most extreme cases—sometimes the court would even threaten to block parents’ welfare payments. “It was very powerful,” Josha Talison, the superintendent in Ecorse, said.

But during the pandemic, the superintendents said, the process broke down—it took much longer to hear from the prosecutor’s office about forms that had been filed. “When the pandemic started, they just stopped doing it,” Talison told me. Stiles Simmons, his counterpart in the Westwood district, which is nearby, told me the same. “The courthouse pretty much shut down,” he said. “And then there was a backlog.”

(Robert Heimbuch, the chief of the juvenile division at the prosecutor’s office, said that his team had continued to handle JC 01 forms, shifting meetings and hearings to Zoom, but that some steps in the process might have taken longer. He didn’t know if referrals for chronically absent students had fallen off, because JC 01s were filed for all manner of juvenile-delinquency cases, and his office did not keep a tally of how many were for truancy.)

After a morning of home visits with Johnson, I met with Sarah Lenhoff, a professor of education policy at Wayne State University, who started studying absenteeism in 2016. She joined a coalition to tackle the problem in Detroit and became convinced that the crisis is now so severe that it requires a greater response. “We’re thinking about school attendance all wrong,” she said. “It’s societal.”

Several of the Wayne County superintendents working with Concentric agreed. “The issue of chronic absenteeism is much broader than what the school and its partners can handle,” Simmons said. “There needs to be something else done.” It was a compelling argument: throughout the country, local and state government officials, school boards, and others had decided that it was in the public interest to close school buildings for a year or more, and now it was going to take a group effort to rebuild the norms. The issue couldn’t be left to individual schools or districts—or to a single company.

Society, as a whole, needed to reinforce—as it had in Massachusetts more than a century ago—the importance of school. It was where children awakened to the world’s opportunities, where they learned how to be productive citizens, and, for some, where they found a daily routine and regular meals.

Instead, as Lenhoff noted, families often got the opposite message. Inadequate infrastructure had led Detroit to cancel school for several days last year, because of excessive heat. Schools had also closed in the face of forecasts of snow which brought no actual snow. Districts get penalized by the state’s funding formula if attendance drops below seventy-five per cent on any day, and so they may close schools when they fear that too few kids will show up. “If you have that happen often enough, it does erode your feeling that the system is there for us, and not just when it’s convenient for them,” Lenhoff said.

One day, shortly after noon, I encountered several fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys who had recently arrived from Latin America and were walking a dog in the quiet streets of River Rouge. But they weren’t playing hooky. School had been closed that day, owing to plumbing problems.

A short drive away, a middle-school girl was playing in a front yard, while her older sister and some of her friends, in their late teens and early twenties, were hanging out in a nearby car, one with a baby on her lap. The younger sister was also not missing school: it had been only a half day in her district, to allow for professional-development courses.

Asked why absenteeism had increased, the young women didn’t hesitate. “That’s what the corona did,” Serenity, who is twenty-one, told me. Now “they’re sending the kids back to school, and they don’t want to no more. They want to stay home and play on their computers.”

When December arrived, the weather became another obstacle: leaving home was even less appealing when it was dark and cold out. One mother told Johnson that her son had been missing school because she hadn’t been able to buy him a winter jacket.

Another mother told Johnson that she had just been crying on the toilet: her rent had doubled, so she wasn’t going to be able to afford Christmas presents for her kids. The rent increase had forced her to pick up a second job, at a fast-food restaurant, which had disrupted her school drop-off and pickup routines. Johnson alerted the children’s school and suggested that it put the family on its list for gift donations.

In Ecorse, Kuanticka Prude was worried about money, too. She had less coming in now than a year earlier, when she had been working a second job, at a Wendy’s. The reason her nanny cam wasn’t working, she told me, was not the cats, as she had said to Johnson, but because she couldn’t afford the monthly payments.

But she told me that she might quit her security job, too, to better monitor the schooling of her kids, who also included a girl in ninth grade, twin girls about to turn eight (who were in special-education programs), and a four-year-old girl in preschool. “I’m going to get it together,” she said. With Jisaiah and King, “it’s going to take me to sit them down and talk to them really good and let them know, to understand what they’re doing and causing. Because this is not a game or a joke. Not only can you get people in trouble but you need an education.”

The next morning, it was just getting light as Jisaiah and King were scheduled to bring their little sister two blocks away for her preschool bus. A cat pawed at the front door, as if to remind them. And then they emerged. They were a few minutes late, which meant that King needed to wave at the bus as Jisaiah hustled her sister down the sidewalk, a hand on her shoulder. Then Prude’s mother emerged to load the two of them and their older sister into her car. On this day, they were going to make it. ♦


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/has-school-become-optional?_sp=e4da7158-16f1-4501-84eb-b83a6f37692d.1704829345282

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.Published in the print edition of the January 15, 2024, issue, with the headline “Showing Up.”

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Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica, most recently published “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.”

Why Does Everyone Feel So Insecure All the Time?

A photo illustration shows an egg perched atop a pane of glass against a very dark background.

By Astra Taylor

Since 2020, the richest 1 percent has captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth globally — almost twice as much money as the rest of the world’s population. At the beginning of last year, it was estimated that 10 billionaire men possessed six times as much wealth as the poorest three billion people on Earth. In the United States, the richest 10 percent of households own more than 70 percent of the country’s assets.

Such statistics are appalling. They have also become familiar. Since it was catapulted onto the national stage more than a decade ago by Occupy Wall Street, “inequality” has been a frequent topic of conversation in American political life. It helped animate Bernie Sanders’s influential campaigns, reshaped academic scholarship, shifted public policy, and continues to galvanize protest. And yet, however important focusing on the inequality crisis has been, it has also proven insufficient.

If we want to understand contemporary economic life, we need a more expansive framework. We need to think about insecurity. Where inequality encourages us to look up and down, to note extremes of indigence and opulence, insecurity encourages us to look sideways and recognize potentially powerful commonalities.

If inequality can be captured in statistics, insecurity requires talking about feelings: It is, to borrow a phrase from feminism, personal as well as political. Economic issues, I’ve come to realize, are also emotional ones: the spike of shame when a bill collector calls, the adrenaline when the rent or mortgage is due, the foreboding when you think about retirement.

And unlike inequality, insecurity is more than a binary of haves and have-nots. Its universality reveals the degree to which unnecessary suffering is widespread — even among those who appear to be doing well. We are all, to varying degrees, overwhelmed and apprehensive, fearful of what the future might have in store. We are on guard, anxious, incomplete and exposed to risk. To cope, we scramble and strive, shoring ourselves up against potential threats. We work hard, shop hard, hustle, get credentialed, scrimp and save, invest, diet, self-medicate, meditate, exercise, exfoliate.

And yet security, for the most part, eludes us. That’s because the main mechanisms by which we are told to gain security for ourselves — making money, buying property, earning degrees, saving for retirement — often involve being invested in systems that rarely provide the stability we crave. The stock in our 401(k), if we are lucky enough to have one, all too often supports industries that poison the planet; the tech company we work for undermines democracy; the rising price of the home we own makes it harder for others to stay housed.

Of course, living with uncertainty and risk is nothing new. How should mortal creatures who have spent our long evolution struggling to survive feel but insecure? The precarious and unpredictable nature of life is what helped inspire the ancient Stoics to counsel equanimity and Buddhist thinkers to develop the concept of Zen. A kind of existential insecurity is indelible to being human. It stems from being dependent on others for survival; from being vulnerable to physical and psychological illness and wounding and the looming fact of death. It is a kind of insecurity we can never wholly escape or armor ourselves against, try as we might.

But existential insecurity is not my focus here. The ways we structure our societies could make us more secure; the way we structure it now makes us less so. I call this “manufactured insecurity.” Where existential insecurity is an inherent feature of our being — and something I believe we need to accept and learn from — manufactured insecurity facilitates exploitation and profit by waging a near constant assault on our self-esteem and well-being. In different ways, political philosophers, economists and advertising executives have pointed out how our economic system capitalizes on the insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all insecure by design. Only by reckoning with how deep manufactured insecurity runs will it become possible to envision something different.

Manufactured insecurity is far from inevitable, and yet it is intensifying. The same developments that have supercharged inequality in recent decades — including the deregulation of finance and business and the decline of the welfare state — have heightened insecurity and left no one, wealthy or working class, unscathed. While the relatively privileged seek ways to shield themselves from risk — and even turn periodic shocks to their advantage — the fact is they’ve rigged a game that can’t be won, one that keeps them stressed and scrambling, and breathing the same smoke-tinged air as the rest of us. Which means they, too, have much to gain from rewriting its rules, including reimagining what new forms of security might entail.

For most of my life, it had never occurred to me to fret over the fat in my cheeks. I’d hardly heard the words “buccal fat,” much less thought of it as something that I could or should worry about, until I saw buccal fat described in The Guardianas a “fresh source of insecurity to carry into the new year.” Maybe you read the same article — or maybe you discovered that you were supposed to be insecure about something else: the way you part your hair; the fit of your jeans; the make of your car; the size of your home or the way it is decorated.

As the British political theorist Mark Neocleous has noted, the modern word “insecurity”entered the English lexicon in the 17th century, just as our market-driven society was coming into being. Capitalism thrives on bad feelings. Discontented people buy more stuff — an insight the old American trade magazine “Printers’ Ink”stated bluntly in 1930: “Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.” It’s hard to imagine any advertising or marketing department telling us that we’re actually OK, and that it is the world, not us, that needs changing. All the while, manufactured insecurity encourages us to amass money and objects as surrogates for the kinds of security that cannot actually be commodified — connection, meaning, purpose, contentment, safety, self-esteem, dignity and respect — but which can only truly be found in community with others.

Part of the insidious and overwhelming power of insecurity is that, unlike inequality, it is subjective. Sentiments, or how real people actually feel, rarely map rationally onto statistics; you do not have to be at rock bottom to feel insecure, because insecurity results as much from expectation as from deprivation. Unlike inequality, which offers a snapshot of the distribution of wealth at a certain moment in time, insecurity spans the present and future, anticipating what may come next.

This is why insecurity affects people on every rung of the economic ladder, even if its harshest edge is predictably reserved for those at the bottom. Recent years have produced an abundance of scholarship demonstrating the negative effects of inequality on health and happiness across the board. Rising inequality, and the insecurity it causes, correlates with higher rates of physical illness, depression, anxiety, drug abuse and addiction. Living in a highly competitive, consumerist society makes everyone more status-conscious, stressed out and sick.

The philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote about the “fear of losing” and how wealth itself becomes a source of worry. Assets must be guarded and grown, after all, lest fortunes be diminished or lost. “When insecurity reaches a certain point, the fear of losing prevents us from enjoying what we possess already. The care of preserving condemns us to a thousand sad and painful precautions, which yet are always liable to fail of their end,” he wrote in “Theory of Legislation,” published in 1802.

Bentham was referring to money and objects, which can be ported away by thieves, but he could also have been talking about status, which is impossible to steal yet is never secure. In a world of economic extremes, even the most prosperous are afraid of losing rank, of falling in both net worth and self-worth. It is this insecurity that keeps them grasping ever upward.

These people are suffering from what economists call “fractal inequality.” But to those trapped inside the fractal’s vertiginous snare, the overwhelming sensation is one of insecurity. The person who is in debt looks to the person with zero dollars, who looks to the person who has $50,000, who looks to the person who has six figures, who looks to the person who has half a million dollars, who looks to the person who has a million dollars in the bank, who looks to the person with twice as many assets. And on and on.

The dysphoria of feeling you don’t have enough, even when you objectively have a lot, is not simply a spontaneous reaction to seeing others with more, a kind of lizard-brained lust, but rather the consequence of living in an insecure and risk-filled world in which there are no upper or lower limits on wealth and poverty. Left unchecked — or, rather, untaxed — the fractal’s spiral never ends, as Silicon Valley’s parade of billionaires jockeying for fame and dominance makes clear.

Afew years ago, my sister was working at a hip Brooklyn cafe. The place has a vintage and vaguely Parisian aesthetic, retro and low-tech. There were, of course, regulars, including a medievalist who liked to chat. On a slow day, a barista on duty was exchanging pleasantries with the medievalist when her phone rang: The owner was watching the security camera from his laptop and told her to stop being so talkative. When I asked my sister how many cameras were installed in the small space, she identified at least eight, and said there might be more. The charming cafe was, in fact, a panopticon — the boss able to tune in any time from anywhere and see from nearly every angle. Even when all they wanted to do was show a bit of kindness and community to a local eccentric, the workers were perpetually worried about being fired. The security cameras hadn’t been installed to make the staff safer; they were there to make them feel insecure about holding on to their jobs.

It’s not just baristas. From “pickers” at Amazon warehouses to grocery store clerks to radiologists to well-paid software engineers, workers are increasingly surveilled, tracked and ranked — and made to feel like the rug could be pulled out from under them at any moment.

This manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate and care for one another. What the economist John Kenneth Galbraith called “the nerve-racking problem of insecurity” is, he argued, a feature inherent to our competitive economic system, one that takes the form of “episodic unemployment for the worker” on the one side, and “occasional insolvency for the farmer or businessman” on the other. “Along with the carrot of pecuniary reward,” he wrote, “must go the stick of personal economic disaster.”

The mere fear of job loss causes ill health, and losing your job or experiencing unwanted unemployment, scholars have shown, increases the risk of death. Here the problem is not necessarily poverty in absolute terms, but the insecurity that comes from instability and the threat of downward mobility and loss of status, a threat now omnipresent.

Today, people might have the same blue- or white-collar jobs their parents or grandparents had before them — academic, office clerk, factory worker, janitor, driver, delivery person — but they are so often now adjuncts, gig workers or temps employed by a private contractor, with few prospects for promotion or improvement in their job benefits, should they have any.

But even if you manage to ascend the professional ranks, you cannot afford to rest. In the United States today, all it takes is a devastating enough crisis to reduce the once fortunate to a state of precarity or poverty: Business could suddenly drop; a job could be automated or offshored; the stock in a retirement account could crash; home values could plummet; a family member could be diagnosed with a serious illness (something that, in the United States, can eviscerate the economic security of a middle-class household overnight); a storm could wreak havoc; another, more deadly pandemic could hit. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 1989 study of the psychology of the middle class, dubbed the condition “fear of falling.” But today, the middle feels more precarious than ever, and everyone is afraid of what lies below.

These stresses don’t excuse behavior like spying on employees, but they can help us understand what propels it. Constant insecurity helps keep us in line, while the conventional methods of achieving security fail us.

History, including recent history, shows that hard times, or even the mere anticipation of them — the feeling of being economically insecure and anticipating the worst, whether or not those fears are objectively justified — can increase the appeal of racism and xenophobia.

Across the world, the far right has gained ground by speaking directly to atomized and isolated people’s anxieties, and by offering scapegoats: immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Black people, trans people, women seeking abortions. Too often, insecurity fuels the embrace of social hierarchy and domination. What more tempting solution to a discomfiting sense of insecurity than donning a mask of superiority and invincibility? Thus some people denounce “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces” while taking shelter behind bigotry, puffing themselves up by mocking fragility and denying their own vulnerability. In these cases, it’s not enough to point out that such individuals are often more privileged or better off than others — to emphasize inequality. Insecurity is about feelings as much as facts.

Instead we need to seek to channel insecurity in constructive ways. Indignation at the way our current system manufactures and exploits our fears and anxieties can help strengthen existing movements and coalesce new ones, uniting powerful — and expanding — coalitions that can fight for collective forms of security based in care and concern rather than desperation and distress.

My own experience as a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors, showed me how economic insecurity can inspire people to organize for redistributive policies and an expanded welfare state. Inspired by the feminist consciousness-raising circles of the 1970s, we often host what we call debtors’ assemblies: forums where people share their financial woes. Without fail, some people cry. They also find life-changing strength and camaraderie. In these sessions, insecurity becomes a gateway, how participants understand themselves and the wider world.

Under such conditions, economic insecurity can become a motor for renewing and improving our society. That’s what happened in the wake of the Great Depression, when trade unionists, unemployed people, socialists, liberal reformers and visionary politicians highlighted insecurity as a central component of laissez-faire capitalism and mobilized to remedy it. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced insecurity as “one of the most fearsome evils of our economic system” and invoked “security” as the justification for the New Deal that would form the foundation of the American welfare state.

For the last 50 years, this web of security-enhancing social policies has been shrinking. Then came Covid-19. As a result of a sudden increase in federal income support, millions of people — my sister among them — were materially secure enough to leave jobs where they had felt disrespected, abused, unhappy, bored, underpaid or unable to advance, leading to a historic “quit rate.” For a time, the insecurity induced by the threat of job loss was greatly diminished. Some central banks stepped in to raise interest rates, which weakened the bargaining position of labor, ostensibly so the banks could target inflation, while politicians shut down the pandemic assistance programs — some cited cost, but it seemed the real reason was that the programs gave workers too much power. The material security they provided was a threat to our insecurity-dependent status quo.

Rather than something to pathologize, I want us to see insecurity as an opportunity. We all need protection from life’s hazards, natural or human-made. The simple acceptance of our mutual vulnerability — of the fact that we all need and deserve care throughout our lives — has potentially transformative implications. When we spur people on with insecurity because we expect the worst from them, we create a vicious cycle that stokes desperation and division while facilitating the kind of cutthroat competition and consumption that has brought our fragile planet to a catastrophic brink. When we extend trust and support to others, we improve everyone’s security — including our own.

Not only would reweaving the social safety net go a long way toward reducing the stress and strain that ails so many of us today, but also, a baseline of material security might enable us to face our existential insecurity with compassion and even curiosity.

Insecurity, after all, is what makes us human, and it is also what allows us to connect and change. “Nothing in Nature ‘becomes itself’ without being vulnerable,” writes the physician Gabor Maté in “The Myth of Normal.” “The mightiest tree’s growth requires soft and supple shoots, just as the hardest-shelled crustacean must first molt and become soft.” There is no growth, he observes, without emotional vulnerability.

The same also applies to societies. Recognizing our shared existential insecurity, and understanding how it is currently used against us, can be a first step toward forging solidarity. Solidarity, in the end, is one of the most important forms of security we can possess — the security of confronting our shared predicament as humans on this planet in crisis, together.

Article

Teachers, students protest suspension of educators who shared pro-Palestinian views

By Nicole Asbury December 20, 2023 at 1:08 a.m. EST Washington Post

Students and educators in a protest Tuesday evening called on Montgomery County Public Schools to reinstate teachers who were placed on administrative leave for sharing pro-Palestinian sentiments.

About 50 people rallied by the entrance to the Carver Educational Services Center in Rockville, which houses the county board of education, while a meeting was taking place inside. They chanted, “Reinstate our teachers now.”F

After an hour of listening to speakers, organizers walked over to the building’s front doors and chanted, “B-O-E, you can’t hide.” Some of them started booing and blowing whistles as they slammed their fists against the building’s front doors.

Several school systems across the country have struggled to figure out how to respond to teachers and students who want to talk or raise awareness about the Israel-Gaza war as they are also experiencing a rise in hate incidents targeting Jewish and Muslim students. The Montgomery school system — Maryland’s largest, with about 160,000 students — placed one teacher on administrative leave for writing in her work email signature: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The teacher has since filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that alleged discrimination and is receiving legal support from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. At least three others have been suspended for posts made on their personal social media accounts.

Schools shut down some students, teachers who comment on the Gaza war

The posts have varied in nature. In one account, screenshots show a teacher at Tilden Middle School in Bethesda falsely stating that the attack at a music festival on Oct. 7 was a hoax. A different teacher at Takoma Park Middle School who was placed on leave reshared a post that read: “A shout out to bus operators at Dulles who refused to transport Zionists to the pro Israel rally. Their solidarity with the victims of Israeli genocide should be commended.”

Organizers for Tuesday’s demonstration argued that the school system’s disciplinary action violated the teachers’ First Amendment rights. They say the school system didn’t give the teachers a chance to explain themselves.

“It’s definitely unlawful,” said Becca Rothstein, a Jewish teacher in Montgomery County who helped organize Tuesday’s protest. “They just put these teachers on leave without really an explanation of saying why.”

Originally the protest was intended to ask for the reinstatement of Angela Wolf, the Takoma Park Middle School teacher, said Rothstein, who knows Wolf personally. But as organizers saw reports of more teachers on leave, they expanded their call.

Wolf was at the rally but declined to comment.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

Montgomery County Public Schools spokeswoman Celia Fischer confirmed that four employees are under investigation and were placed on administrative leave as a part of the process. She referred to the school system’s guidelines on digital communication, which instructs employees not to engage in “any conduct that is rude, disrespectful, uses vulgar language, racial slurs, or includes materials that are inflammatory, libelous, slanderous, or constitute cyberbullying, harassment or intimidation of others.”

School board members and Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight were scheduled to meet inside with student leaders to discuss mental health, school safety, athletics and other topics on Tuesday. Several Montgomery County Police Department vehicles were in the parking lot, and two school security staff monitored the protest from inside the building.

A teacher wrote a Palestinian rallying cry in her email. She’s on leave.

The rally was mostly peaceful. Some of the signs in the crowd said, “Stop criminalizing dissent,” and “MCPS stand by your staff.” A former student of Wolf’s, Khaliah Deya, spoke at the rally and characterized Wolf as “an anti-racist educator.” She added that Wolf was “de facto censored on false charges of antisemitism.”

Deya, 22, said that she drove from Baltimore to show support for Wolf, who was one of her middle school teachers. She said some of the social media posts from Wolf were “taken out of context.”

“Yes, she is a teacher, but she is a human being first,” Deya said. “She has her own personal opinions and expressions. … To judge her so harshly for voicing her own personal opinion on her own personal page, I think, is completely disrespectful.”

Last week, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington issued a statement that supported the school system’s decision to place the four teachers on administrative leave.

“While it is true that public officials, including teachers, may express opinions on public issues when speaking in a private capacity, that right is limited to those cases in which the speech does not interfere with official duties,” the organization said. They added that the teachers’ actions were “well-known, insidious anti-Semitic messages” that “cast doubt on their fitness to teach.”

Rothstein said the suspensions send a troubling message to students that is “anti-education.”

“Our students see what’s going on on their phones,” she said. “They’re confused why their teachers are being taken out of the classroom for saying something.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/20/montgomery-protest-teacher-suspensions-palestinian-israel-gaza/

The 5 absolute truths I’ve learned in 10 years as a parenting editor

Perspective by Amy Joyce Staff writerDecember 19, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST Washington Post

hen I started editing On Parenting about a decade ago, I knew we had to cover parenting in a very real way. Parents felt alone, that they weren’t sure how to do this. Essentially, I felt that caregivers wanted what I wanted: to learn and to be understood.

Thankfully, it seemed to fill a need, and On Parenting took off. What a fun time we’ve had.

This piece marks the end of my tenure not just with On Parenting, but my 28 years at The Washington Post. I was fortunate enough to do many interesting things as a writer, reporter and editor. But by far, my favorite was parenting — the beat I cared about the most.

How lucky I’ve been to learn how to be a parent in a way few people can: by reporting stories, editing essays, talking to amazing minds, experts, academics and, of course, other parents. I wanted to understand it all.

But here’s the thing about parenting: We will never understand it all. Nor will we do everything right, not even close. I know that’s not possible, especially in a country where child care is unaffordable, where there is no universal paid leave for new parents, where health care is impossibly expensive and where people are discriminated against when they are pregnant and when they become mothers.

And yet, we continue to try to understand.

So what have I learned? Here are the five absolute parenting truths I leaned as my sons grew from babies into teens, and as I grew from the new mom and On Parenting editor into, well, me.

Boundaries are good, and your influence matters

“If there’s anything we’ve confirmed over and over in the research literature is that children thrive when they have both warmth and structure,” Lisa Damour, author of “Untangled” and the “Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” told me recently.

People say children will see how far they can go and we must “nip it in the bud.” It’s true that they push the limits — begging for another cookie, staying out past curfew, playing on devices too long. The key, though, is not to “nip” anything, but to have a loving relationship so you can say “You know you can only have one” or “You’re past your time limit, turn it off.”

These boundaries and structure aren’t always clear immediately. But when you take the time to truly know your children, you will better know what they need. (Bedtimes, for instance, have always been pretty defined in my house because we know our boys need their sleep or they don’t function well.)

Not only have boundaries and rules changed as my children have, but so have we as parents. Damour once told me she had to learn not to take anything too personally. “One of the challenges of raising teenagers is it is their job to seek independence, which often means pushing us away,” Damour says. “And it’s the job of the parents to not take this as a personal rejection, to recognize this as a sign of healthy development.” Because a teen who is prickly one minute is often seeking our comfort the next, she says. And if we’re holding a grudge, we’ll miss out on being able to support them when they need it.

As much as children push back, they are comforted to know those rules are there, that “things will not be allowed to spin out of control,” Damour says. Recently, I found myself apologizing for holding strong on some rules I can’t recall now — maybe it was the no phones in bedrooms line we drew. My older son stopped and said, “It’s okay Mom, you’re the parent.” It doesn’t always go that smoothly, but if ever there was a moment where I understood what he needed, it was then. Thanks for that reminder, kid.

Kindness and empathy are learned

One of the most-read stories we’ve had at On Parenting published in July 2014: “Are you raising nice kids? A Harvard psychologist gives 5 ways to raise them to be kind.”

The subject of that piece, Richard Weissbourd, director of the Making Caring Common Project at Harvard, suggests that we forget to (or simply don’t) prioritize caring for others. In his research, 80 percent of youths interviewedsaid their parents were more concerned with their achievement or happiness than whether they cared for others.

Children are not born understanding how to help their community. They need parents to model that for them: being kind to strangers, to bus drivers and to wait staff; asking your small children who they were kind to today and why. Piece by piece, you are helping them build their moral fabric.

“It’s about having the motivation to care about other people,” Weissbourd said to me recently. “But it’s also about having the skills to listen to other people.”

How to help children find awe, our most undervalued emotion

Let them learn for themselves

I remember watching my son grasp a plastic shape with his chubby baby fingers and try to force it into the wrong hole. It was so hard to sit on my hands and not do it for him. And yet when I did just watch and encourage him, he twisted it and pushed it until he found what worked. That shape sorter is a rite of baby passage. That urge to help a little too much is a part of parenthood.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

There have been times, of course, where I was impatient and couldn’t keep my hands off, assuming I was showing my sons how to do it better. Or maybe I wanted to swoop in because I hated to see them struggle — with school, with friends, with teachers, with disappointment. But I also have had to learn this is exactly how they learn to live, to cope and to thrive.

As Jessica Lahey, author of “The Gift of Failure,” said to me recently: “Do I want them to be able to do it perfectly today, the way I want it done? Or do I want them to be able to just do it themselves next time?”

That helicopter parent thing is real, and it is detrimental. When we get too involved, “we just obliterate any possible obstacle that stands in a kid’s way and you don’t develop the confidence you can handle hard things,” says Ned Johnson, co-author of “The Self-Driven Child.” “When we go and put on our cape and rescue our kids, we feel relieved and they do. But we deprive them of feeling like superheroes of their own lives.”

I was the parenting editor during the college admissions scandal, when it was discovered that parents had cheated and paid to get their children into colleges. That phrase “helicopter parenting” became synonymous with the scandal. Don’t be the helicopter parents. Be the cheerleader. Be the place for your children to fail safely. After all, if you put that triangle in the right hole for your baby, what is gained? A box with some shapes inside and a bored kid who can’t figure it out.

Connection is the key

I first heard about Meghan Leahy at a moms group I attended when my boys were little. Someone said they had a “parent coach” who changed their family’s life. What did she do that was so magical, we asked. This mother laughed a little and said: “Pretty much showed me why I needed to hug my kids more.”

I went on to hire Meghan as our parenting advice columnist. And that hugging advice is a bedrock of her parenting philosophy. It’s not just about hugs — what she wants us to know is that everything comes down to our connection with our kids. “I don’t know why we’re here on Earth,” she said to me recently, “but we are, and we’re built to connect.”

We parents can spend a lot of time actively not connecting with our kids — I need to get this done, I need to get that done, I have to focus on this other thing, Leahy says. And so when a child looks to be “misbehaving,” we should “shift our focus to ‘My child is trying to connect with me,’” she says.

I recall a time when I was struggling with two small boys, a job, a sick parent, a life. Meghan suggested taking a few minutes to stop what I was doing and look them in the eye, play a game, be silly together. It worked. Whining mostly stopped, we came to love those moments, and I still had time to get all the things done.

When life feels a little off the rails with the teens in my house now, I stop to think about how we’re connecting. Often, I realize we haven’t had a moment in a while. But here’s the thing: I’m not sports obsessed, they’re beyond sporty. I love art, pottery, going on hikes. They … are the opposite. So I have to find a way in. Sometimes that means me sitting near them as they tell me about this crazy video they just watched. We connect in our own ways, and I’ve learned to look for the opportunities to do that, rather than waiting for them to magically appear. And in the meantime, I’ve built this relationship with some really amazing teens.

It goes too fast

I was once told to “love every minute” by an older man while I was wrangling two toddlers in a hardware store. I looked up, after jimmying one of the boys into the shopping cart and begging the other to hold my hand, and, well, you can imagine what I wanted to tell that man at the time. And here I am, years later, remembering every detail of that fuzzy blue hat on my boy, the innocent trust they had in their mother, saying it went too fast.

So here is my advice: Write it down. Take pictures. Notice things in the moment — like when they put their head on your shoulder. When they say something wise. When they do something kind. When they are funny. And when they want to talk to you, try to give them that minute. When they beg you to sit with them at bedtime and you’re exhausted? Give them the time.

Because it does go fast. That’s why you look at photos of them on your phone at night after they are finally asleep. That’s why you already miss them and they still live in your house. That’s why you tear up when you give their outgrown Halloween costume away.

I guess this is what I really learned, while raising two boys: I learned about these two people who live in my house, who grew up with a mother who was a parenting editor, who sometimes hated that I knew “so much,” and who are their very own, self-propelled, amazing individuals. Despite me, despite the very little I know.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2023/12/19/five-truths-about-parenting/

Homelessness is at a record high in America. Volunteerism is declining.

Perspective by Petula DvorakColumnist December 21, 2023 at 12:16 p.m. EST Washington Post

A sharp rise in the number of people unhoused for the first time drove the uptick. Meanwhile, fewer Americans are stepping up to help.

He traced the letters of his name with his finger in the night air: “I -B-A-N-E-Z.”

Rafael Ibanez, 54, has been repeating his name, spelling it out, for government bureaucrats for at least two months, since the backpack containing all his identification papers was stolen.F

He’s on his makeshift front porch, a scavenged folding chair next to his shelter, garbage bags hung on crisscrossing ropes. Across the street, little girls in glittery blue dresses were giddy at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House for opening night of the Disney musical “Frozen.”

One city, two worlds in the nation’s capital.

Ibanez is part of one of the fastest-growing populations in America – the homeless.

Last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released its Annual Homeless Assessment Report showing that 12 percent more people were experiencing homelessness this year compared to last. And the number — about 650,000 — is the highest ever since they’ve been keeping count.

“Homelessness is solvable and should not exist in the United States,” said HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge.

Indeed. And yet here we are, a calamity that is entirely man-made.

Ibanez worked as a landscaper and construction worker in Arizona for decades,he said, then work dried up and he followed a family member north, where he hoped jobs would be easier and more abundant.

His backpack and identity papers were stolen when he was in Manhattan. So he came to D.C., as many do, in the belief that proximity to the federal government will ensure they’ll get assistance and benefits quicker.

A decent number of the folks in D.C.’s tent villages are like him. Veterans who want their benefits, immigrants who want to become citizens and folks whose Social Security benefits were janked up believe their answers lie in the nation’s capital.

The numbers in D.C. are also rising, with an 11.6 percent increase this year over last, according to the D.C. government. There are about 5,000 people without a home in the nation’s capital.

This was the case with one unforgettable woman I met in 2016, Wanda Witter.

After battling Social Security for years, hauling three suitcases stuffed with paperwork to prove her case, the then 80-year-old woman who was homeless until the week we met got one of the biggest I-told-you-so’s that a person can hope for.

‘I wasn’t crazy’: A homeless woman’s long war to prove the feds owed her big bucks

The government admitted the mistake and deposited $99,999.00 in her Sun Trust bank account. She got a cute apartment.

Ibanez has been living outside the Kennedy Center for two months now. He said it’s the first time he’s lived rough,and it’s getting colder. He believes that if he could just get someone in the federal government to believe who he is, he can come inside, too. But the visits to offices haven’t helped.

There are facts of his story I’m missing and I’m sure many are hard.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

But there he was this week, among a small tent city of the forgotten, trying to stay warm, eat and get someone to acknowledge his existence so he can file for food stamps and housing benefits.

This is getting more difficult in America – and notably in D.C. – because the nonprofits that step in to help people, which have long been underfunded and understaffed, are running up against a deepening challenge: a nationwide decline in volunteers.

The number of Americans who raised their hands to volunteer in the United States dropped about 7 percentage points between September 2020 and September 2021, to the lowest it’s been since do-gooders work has been tracked in the early 2000s, according to a January report released by the Census Bureau and AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism.

“There have always been organizations that have struggled to find volunteers, but it’s now it’s a huge problem,” Nathan Dietz, research director at the Do Good Institute in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, who co-wrote a study released last month exploring factors influencing volunteering and charitable giving in the United States, told my colleague Joe Heim.

Plus, these remaining folks who help the homeless are being flooded because of this sad fact in the yearly count — the steep increase in homeless Americans is largely made up of folks who are unhoused for the first time in their lives.

It’s a domino effect — it’s hard to buy a house, so the renter market is flooded and rents are growing.

“Millions of households are now priced out of homeownership, grappling with housing cost burdens, or lacking shelter altogether, including a disproportionate share of people of color,” according to a report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

These aren’t just the folks battling mental illness or addictions, as former president and current candidate Donald Trump would like you to believe as he tromps through America with dictatorial declarations of mass roundups and arrests of the homeless and immigrants.

Between fiscal years 2021 and 2022, the number of people who became newly homeless increased by 25 percent, according to HUD data.

“This rise in first-time homelessness is likely attributable to a combination of factors, including but not limited to, the recent changes in the rental housing market and the winding down of pandemic protections and programs focused on preventing evictions and housing loss,” the HUD announcement said.

These are folks thrown to the curb because the rent is simply too darn high.

The eviction protections that helped renters during the pandemic are gone. And the people already on the edge before covid paralyzed the nation are falling off, according to the Harvard report.

Ibanez wishes he could pay rent again.

For now, he gets takeout boxes that diners leaving Georgetown restaurants give him. Some of the folks who rack their rental bikes next to his encampment give him their coats or blankets. He’s seeing more of this now, close to the holidays.

“People are good to me,” he said. “They try.”

Not hard enough.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/21/homelessness-rising-dc-volunteers/

Montgomery and Prince George’s school enrollment lags pre-pandemic total

By Nicole Asbury

Maryland’s two largest school systems both have about 3 percent fewer students this fall than they did before the coronavirus pandemic, according to enrollment data made public this week.

Montgomery County Public Schools counted 160,770 students on Sept. 30. That was almost unchanged from last year’s total and about 4,500 fewer than the enrollment in fall 2019.Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.

Prince George’s County Public Schools reported 131,390 students, spokeswoman Meghan Gebreselassie said Wednesday. That, too, was nearly the same as the fall 2022 head count, and it was about 4,600 students fewer than the 2019 enrollment.

The pandemic shuttered schools around the country in early 2020 and forced students to attend classes remotely, causing massive disruptions and enrollment drops. Statewide, Maryland schools lost more than 18,000 students in fall 2020.

This week’s data shows that enrollment in Maryland’s two most populous counties has not yet recovered.

The Maryland Department of Planning had projected in an August report that statewide enrollment would increase through 2024a trend fueled in part by recovery from the pandemic and immigration.

Elsewhere in the Washington region, some schools are already bouncing back. In October, preliminary counts totaled more than 98,000 students in D.C. traditional public and charter schools, which outpaced pre-pandemictotals.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

The numbers from Prince George’s and Montgomery aren’t final. The Maryland State Department of Education expects to release a full enrollment report in January.

D.C. releases ‘highest ever’ school enrollment figures

Before the pandemic, Maryland officials expected public schools would expand. A 2019 state planning report projected seven years of enrollment growth, with most gains from 2019 to 2022. At the time, state officials projected Montgomery schools would have about 163,900 students and Prince George’sabout 133,400 by the 2023-24 school year. Neither system has reached those numbers.

Montgomery school officials attribute the decline to “significant impacts from the pandemic,” spokesman Chris Cram said. Some families enrolled children in private schools. Some teach them at home. Others moved out of the county.

During a Montgomery school board session Tuesday, county schools Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight acknowledged the setback the school system experienced during the pandemic after several years of growth. She added that officials expect enrollment to “move and change as the school year goes along.”

“We are a very mobile county,” she said. “Our students don’t fit into this perfect space of coming in and enrolling in MCPS by Sept. 30.”

Seth Adams, associate superintendent of facilities management, said the system projects enrollment to reach 167,000 by 2029. But he said a decline in births will slow kindergarten enrollment over the next few years.

Maryland colleges are trying to shake tepid enrollment. Results are mixed.

Montgomeryschools reported about 56,700 students identified as Hispanic this fall, the largest ethnic group in the system. About 38,400 of the county’s students are non-Hispanic White, about 34,700 are African American, and about 22,000 are Asian American.

Prince George’sschools did not immediately provide demographic breakdowns.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/11/02/montgomery-prince-georges-school-enrollment-lags-pre-pandemic-total/

Being 13

Addi and a friend are in the backseat of a car. Addi is holding an iPhone, showing it to her friend, and laughing.

By Jessica Bennett Sept. 20, 2023 New York Times

As eighth grade began, Anna was worried that she wasn’t very popular because her parents wouldn’t let her on Snapchat. London had a tough couple of days; she had been sent to the principal’s office for lashing out at a girl who had been mean to her by sending a text impersonating a boy that girl liked. And when Addi’s school had a lockdown later in the year, she spent the evening decompressing with her sister, reenacting a TikTok sketch — her mind far from the flashing police lights that had reflected in the windows.

Anna, London and Addi — three girls from three states, who, at 13, were legally able to join social media, and whose cellphones were always close at hand.

I started following them a year ago, after they responded to an open call for teenagers who’d let a reporter into their lives and phones. With their parents’ permission, they each wrote weekly diaries and recorded voice memos about their days (except when they were grounded). The girls’ last names have been withheld to protect their privacy, but all of the images and text messages you see here are real.

I wanted to put a face to the alarmingheadlinesabout teensandsocial media — in particular, girls. And to understand one tension: What happens when girls’ self-confidence, which has been shown to drop right around this age, intersects with the thing that seems to be obviously contributing to their struggle?

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/20/well/family/13-year-old-girls-social-media-self-esteem.html