NEWSEDUCATION EQUALITY

Hey everyone! It's William from Change.org. I wanted to pass on this message from Stef Gray about the amazing progress her campaign against Sallie Mae's "unemployment penalty" is making. Read on:

Whoa! Sallie Mae just blinked!

Today, only a couple of hours after I delivered 77,000 petition signatures from Change.org users to Sallie Mae’s front door, the company issued a statement saying that it would start applying its $50 per loan forbearance fee to customers’ loan balances instead of simply pocketing the cash. They’re obviously hearing your voices loud and clear!

I want to recognize how big Sallie Mae’s shift is. Previously, the company had called this fee a “good faith deposit”, even though it wasn’t a deposit at all! After so many people doubted Sallie Mae could be moved even a little bit, this policy change certainly comes as welcome news.

But it still isn’t enough, and my campaign isn’t over. Their move today does nothing to help borrowers like me, who graduated into the worst job market for new grads since World War II. The unemployed, the underemployed, and others facing economic hardship have no extra money to pay this onerous penalty.

The fact is, there’s still no reason Sallie Mae should be charging its private loan customers this fee when it’s not charged to their federal loan customers. The United States federal government doesn’t think people need to leave a “good-faith deposit” when requesting a forbearance for financial hardship -- why does Sallie Mae think this is necessary?

In fact, there are lots of questions Sallie Mae needs to publicly answer:

• Instead of this half-measure, why doesn’t Sallie Mae go all the way to remove this onerous burden from its worst-off borrowers?
• Does Sallie Mae still earn interest off the fees until they're released to borrowers?
• More importantly, do they get to continue counting the fees as cash on their financial books until the fee is applied to the loans?
• The Associated Press reports that their new policy will be retroactive to January 1 of this year. Why not make it retroactive to when they began charging this fee? This doesn’t give me back the $300 I’ve already paid!
• Why doesn’t Sallie Mae offer any forms of consolidation or income-based repayment to its student debtors?

It’s obvious to me that Sallie Mae isn’t at all serious about providing relief to distressed borrowers. Thankfully, there’s more you can do to push Sallie Mae to do the right thing:

• You can call Sallie Mae spokeswoman Patricia Christel at (302) 283-4076 and tell her you want them to drop their unemployment penalty. Here’s a sample script you can use:My name is _____, and I’m calling because Sallie Mae needs to go all the way to help distressed borrowers. Drop the unemployment penalty now!
• You can post a message to their Facebook Wall- here’s a sample message you can use:I won’t be fooled by Sallie Mae’s financial tricks and half-measures. If you’re serious about helping distressed borrowers like Stef Gray, you need to offer a real solution. Drop your unemployment penalty NOW! http://t.co/fiFCxMdG
• You can also call them out on Twitter! Just post this message:No more tricks! If @SallieMae is serious about helping distressed borrowers, they’ll drop the unemployment penalty NOW! http://chn.ge/SallieMae

I understand that my student debt is my responsibility. It’s a debt I want to pay back. But when my mom told me that education was the key to my future, neither of us knew the game was so rigged against borrowers like me. No student considering college, or who’s in college now, should be duped into using Sallie Mae’s private financial products.

-- Stef Gray

There are numerous things for low-income elementary and middle school kids in southeast Washington, DC to do at the City Gate Merrick Center after-school program.

They can unwind with a basketball game or musical chairs, enjoy a wholesome snack in a safe atmosphere, volunteer at an assisted-living center, talk to college students about college life and how important it is to stay in school, or even play a game of 'Math Bingo', which was shown in a recent study to improve the math proficiency of 94 percent of participants by 50 percent or more.

But lately, the options for these kids have changed, after the Merrick Center had to close because DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education has failed to pay CityGate the $60,000 it was promised a year ago as well as an additional $15,000 more recently.

Over on the Education blog this week, writer Carol Scott explained how the federal Pell Grant program, which currently helps over 9 million college students pay for their education, is currently facing a $5.7 billion funding gap. The expected cuts could result in drops of $845 per student annually -- and, with the impending expiration of the $2,500 American Opportunity Tax Credit program, it all adds up to a loss of about $3,345 per year -- about $13,000 over the course of a student's undergraduate education.

Why do we care about this issue over at Poverty in America? Because the people affected by the proposed cuts are the United States' low- to middle-income families. The education gap in this country will only widen if we stop providing support to families who couldn't otherwise afford college. College graduates can make $1 million more over the course of a career than they could with just a high school degree, experience lower rates of unemployment, are more likely to have a successful marriage -- all ways to break cycles of poverty, even those that have persisted for generations.

Watch out, mothers — you may start receiving homework assignments from your kids' schoolteachers. A new study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) finds that when children are young, the "most critical factor" to their academic success is not income level, ethnicity, or even school demographics. It's their mothers' reading level.

As kids grow older and start spending more time outside the home, other factors take precedence; "neighborhood income," for example, "was the most important factor for children ages 8 to 17." But for kids under 8, the fact remains: mom's book smarts are crucial to performing well in kindergarten and beyond.

"The findings indicate that programs to improve maternal literacy skills may provide an effective means to overcome the disparity in academic achievement between children in poor and affluent neighborhoods," explained Dr. Rebecca Clark, chief of the Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

I tend to agree. To this day, I still can't figure out how my parents paid the rent when I was young. My dad worked full-time as a teacher — not the most lucrative profession, I assure you — and my mom stayed home to watch whichever of her four kids had yet to brave the new world of elementary school. On the weekends, we didn't go shopping to pass the time, and we certainly didn't frequent amusement parks. No, we went to the library, where my mom pored over books and quietly read their lilting text aloud to her eager audience of children. And lo and behold, I did just fine in school.

Earlier this month, we reported how poverty has reached into the suburbs more than ever before. It's going to take a while for a lot of folks to recognize the ways that poverty is spreading from urban and rural areas into the seemingly untouchable suburbs, but at least one West Chicago county has already begun taking measures to protect children affected by poverty sprawl.

The Chicago Tribune reports that a DuPage County preschool specifically designed to accommodate at-risk suburban children from six weeks to 5-years-old will be built using funding from private foundations. Only a decade ago, one child per classroom might come to kindergarten a bit behind developmentally, needing help with some basic skills like the ability to count or name letters. Today, that number has increased to nearly one in four, largely due to poverty that affects low-income families, teen parents and immigrant parents who can't help their children with basic English skills. With the rising poverty rate affecting families in all sorts of locations and living situations, this trend is likely to get worse before it gets better.

The DuPage County school may end up based on a Naperville preschool that opened its door this year to more than 40 at-risk children, whose attendance was funded by a grant. But the problem in West Chicago is unique due to the factory jobs available. More and more immigrants families settle in the area to work at processing plants like the General Mills facility. Naperville, by contrast, is thought to be a more affluent area where — at least until recently — the percentage of at-risk kids enrolled in preschool was manageable both in terms of funding and teacher availability.

For-profit colleges have been in the news for months due to their sketchy recruitment tactics and abysmally low post-graduation job placement statistics. In June, the Washington Post reported that for-profit colleges had tuition rates that were more than six times as expensive as public universities. Worse, for-profit institutions like American University have forged partnerships with Walmart to entice low- and median-income applicants to enter their shamefully expensive programs — with no guarantee of post-graduation employment.

Tell Congress to rein in for-profit colleges today!

Back in August, I wrote about a report from the Government Accountability Office that provided evidence that for-profit colleges made deceptive claims to prospective applicants and encouraged students to take on unmanageable debt to pay inflated tuition costs. The Florida attorney general's office is already conducting a civil investigation into for-profit colleges, and it's not hard to believe other states will follow suit. Can you believe that they don't like all this negative press?

As pressure has mounted against them, for-profit colleges have been increasing their own lobbying efforts to help keep their $7 billion industry afloat. Afraid to lose valuable federal funding, which accounts for nearly one-fourth of their income, they've done everything from holding rallies to hiring expensive lawyers and lobbyists. If the new federal proposals pass, for-profit schools could end up being held accountable for graduates' debt, relative to their employment status. Cutting off federal aid to for-profit programs would also effectively put many of these schools out of business.

Yesterday saw the launch of Kindergarten to College, America's first publicly-funded college savings program. Over the next three years, about 1,200 San Francisco kindergartners will get new trust accounts from Citibank with an initial $50 deposit of city funds. Students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch will get $100.

Going forward, organizers hope that non-profits and corporations will provide matching donations for money the families manage to save. For the first year, the great local non-profit EARN will match the first $100 that all families save this year; it will match $100 savings from low-income families only in future years. The San Francisco Foundation will make additional matches if parents go to financial education classes and make routine deposits.

The idea is that students who already have a college fund will be more likely to matriculate — seven times more likely, according to one study. City officials urge families to commit to depositing even $5 a month.

Many of the children who receive the accounts will be the first in their family to have one, since half of San Francisco's black and Hispanic population lack a savings account.

Mayor Gavin Newsom presented a similar idea, the Baby Savings Bond, in his inaugural address in 2008. He says he cribbed it from then-Sen. Hillary Clinton. "No one else in the country is doing this," he says. "We are not just saying every child can go to college. We are now providing families with the financial tools necessary to make this a reality."

The Nation just announced the winners of its annual essay contest, in which high school and college students were charged with producing first-person accounts of "how their education has been compromised by budget cuts and tuition hikes." That shouldn't be too hard, since costs are being passed on to students at every grade level, from kindergartners being asked to bring garbage bags for the classroom to college students strapped with loans they can't repay.

The winners, Amanda Lewan of Michigan State University and Melissa Parnagian of Old Bridge High School in New Jersey, can speak to budget cuts better than any pundit and they argue eloquently for more investment in education.

Lewan writes about being the daughter of a public school janitor always taking pay cuts and a university employee who just earned her bachelor's degree but is still lagging behind her coworkers. Her mother filed for bankruptcy and her father fears his position will be handed over to a cheaper outside agency. Still, she writes, "So far we have been lucky."

"Last summer I faced the same feeling of helplessness my parents deal with every day," she writes in her winning essay. "In Michigan the Promise Scholarship was awarded to students who did well on state examinations, providing funds throughout their undergraduate years based on their academic achievements. It was a promise to help students who performed well in school. Facing devastating financial burdens, the state broke its promise. My scholarship was pulled away from me a month before tuition was due."

If her parents break their financial promises, bill collectors come calling. If the state breaks its financial promise to help hard-working students finish college, nothing happens. Lewan had to work more and socialize less to pay tuition. This fall she will be attending graduate school in Detroit. She wants to become a professor for community college students.

One of the largest post-secondary education corporations in America is trying to trick us into opposing stricter regulations on for-profit colleges. Furious about the U.S. Department of Education's recent "gainful employment" proposal, which is meant to reign in the fraudulent practices of for-profit schools the nation over by cutting off aid to places that load students with debt but don't lead to decent-paying jobs, Corinthian Colleges, Inc. has launched an audacious counter-campaign. It claims that "up to a million students would lose access to educational opportunities" if the proposal were adopted.

Don't let Corinthian's scare tactics fool you. The only research referenced on the corporation's (admittedly hip) campaign site, MyCareerCounts.org, was conducted by the Parthenon Group. Never heard of Parthenon? Neither had I. A little background research, though, revealed the company to be none other than a consulting firm, specializing in "leading for-profit companies operating in the education space." So much for Parthenon's so-called "independent analysis."

Not up-to-date on the national scandal over for-profit colleges? Here's the short version: in early August, an investigative report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) detailed the deceptive techniques that 15 for-profit colleges — virtually every school that undercover GAO officials visited — used when interacting with prospective students. Not only did admissions officers and financial aid reps consistently lie to students about their prospects of finding good-paying jobs post-graduation, but they even encouraged students to cheat on their federal student aid forms. The end goal of these fraudulent practices? To ratchet up school enrollment numbers and maintain the steady flow of federal financial aid dollars into school coffers.

I recently wrote about parents who are being asked to pay for their kids' school supplies — and by that, I mean well beyond the standard scissors and glue. Students are being asked to bring Clorox wipes and garbage bags to school as budgets around the country are slashed. The burden is being passed on to families, who are, of course, also struggling in the recession. Can it get much worse?

All signs point to yes. Alyssa Battistoni at Salon writes that making families pay for their children's classroom supplies may only be the beginning of a trend towards privatization in public schools. Bus schedules have been cut, forcing some parents to take time off from work to drop off their kids at public school. Schools are even acting in ways similar to the public sector by not rehiring recently fired teachers but instead sitting on the funds to avoid budget shortfalls in the future. Instead of looking out for the kids, the schools are looking out for themselves.

Moreover, Battistoni reports that government-funded agencies and services like fire departments and police squads are underfunded, forcing everything from slower response times to forest fires to warrant backlogs. She even points to a recent story that some towns are shutting off street lights to conserve energy and funding. I don't know about you, but street lights are one of the only things that make me feel safe when I walk alone late at night. How's that not also a direct assault on the well-being of women and their children?