Many Mass Shooters Have A History Of Domestic Violence

Many Mass Shooters Have A History Of Domestic Violence
by thecatalystsforchange
By Peter Aldhous | BuzzFeed News Reporter

“Many mass shootings involve family members. Women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to be killed if their partner owns a gun. But no one knows whether abusive partners are at a higher risk of shooting unrelated people.”

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The Catalysts for Change

By Peter Aldhous | BuzzFeed News Reporter

“Many mass shootings involve family members. Women in abusive relationships are five times more likely to be killed if their partner owns a gun. But no one knows whether abusive partners are at a higher risk of shooting unrelated people.”

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Educating Ourselves About Betsy DeVos—Three Essential Articles

janresseger

Tim Alberta’s profile of Betsy DeVos at POLITICO Magazine humanizes the Secretary of Education. I encourage you to read it, but only if you also read two other recent articles—Lily Eskelsen Garcia’s piece on public education’s real purpose (that Betsy DeVos doesn’t understand)—and Jack Schneider’s analysis of what Betsy DeVos fails to grasp about why the marketplace cannot improve education.

Alberta traveled with DeVos on her beginning-of-school tour in September and has interviewed her on several occasions. He describes two principles on which DeVos has, “fought and funded a generation’s worth of education wars… that parents should be free to send their children wherever they choose, and that tax dollars should follow those students to their new schools.”  He explains that DeVos believes bureaucracy in the Department of Education “smothers creativity, blocks innovation, and slows change to a glacial pace.”

He tells us that DeVos blames her poor performance…

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Constitutional Protection of Equity and Adequacy: A New Frame for Testing Charters and Vouchers

janresseger

Last week, at the Education Law Prof Blog, Derek Black, a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, posted a short summary of his new paper to be published soon in the Cornell Law Review. The paper presents new and, I hope, promising thinking about legally challenging charter schools and private school tuition voucher programs under the fifty state constitutions.

Black is an academic, not a litigator, and he is realistic. He devotes the last section of his paper to some of the challenges that will likely arise if his ideas become the basis for actual litigation. Nonetheless, given the failure of previous attempts to challenge school privatization, Black argues for significant reframing: “The question now is whether the constitutional debate over school choice can be reframed from one premised on an all-or-nothing approach to a more nuanced one that relates to how choice programs…

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Ohio’s Legislative Democrats Challenge ECOT’s Claims in Amicus Brief Filed with Ohio Supreme Court

janresseger

At the end of last week, explains Jim Siegel of the Columbus Dispatch, all nine Democrats serving in the Ohio Senate along with 30 of the 33 House Democrats signed an amicus brief urging the Ohio Supreme Court to find for the state and against the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), the state’s biggest charter school. ECOT has been challenging the state all year to let it collect state per-pupil funding without documenting that students are actually attending school.

The Ohio Department of Education has been trying to claw back $60 million over-paid to ECOT for the 2015-16 school year and another $19 million for 2016-17.  ECOT has continued to claim that state law does not require the school to document that students are actually logged in for 920 hours each year—working with the curriculum the school provides—but merely that the school provides the curriculum to the students…

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The West MI Policy Forum’s ongoing war against the public sector

Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

The West Michigan Policy Forum (WMPF) has only been around since 2008, yet its impact has been tremendous in terms of influencing state policy that attacks working people and benefits the capitalist class.

A creation of the of the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, the has used its lobbying power over the past decade to promote neoliberal economic policies and austerity measures. The WMPF has been relentless in its war on working people, public sector employees, unions, public education and the privatization of government.

Since their founding, the WMPF has reduced the business tax in Michigan, pushed through Right to Work legislation, further privatized public education, diminished the power of local governments and taken away public teacher pensions.

Now the WMPF wants to eliminate public sector employee pensions, pensions that government employees fought for decades ago and pensions that those same employees are hoping to retire on.

Recently, the…

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