Verbatim Mac



Early College High School AffirmativeMuch love--Chuck Brandon and Matthew Hernandez1ACPlan TextThe United States federal government should substantially increase its funding and regulation of secondary education in the United States by fully funding all early college high school programs. This plan will be enforced through any or all federal judicial, legislative or administrative means necessary.The Advantage is Public EducationFunding for ECHS is low nowDOE 15Department of Education. "Fact Sheet: Department Of Education Launches Experiment To Provide Federal Pell Grant Funds To High School Students Taking College Courses For Credit | U.S. Department Of Education." . N.p., 10/30/2015. Web. 9 July 2017.Earning a college degree is an increasingly important step towards entering the middle class. By 2020, approximately 35 percent of job openings will require at least a bachelor's degree, and another 30 percent will require at least an associate's degree or some college.?[?1??]?However, many high school students—especially those from low-income backgrounds—lack access to the rigorous coursework and support services that help prepare students for success in college. Today, the?Department of Education is announcing the launch of an experiment that will expand access to college coursework for?high school students from low-income backgrounds. For the first time, high school students will have the opportunity to access Federal Pell Grants to take college courses through dual enrollment. Dual enrollment, in which students enroll in postsecondary coursework while also enrolled in high school, is a promising approach to improve academic outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds. "A postsecondary education is one of the most important investments students can make in their future. Yet the cost of this investment is higher than ever, creating a barrier to access for some students, particularly those from low-income families," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "We look forward to partnering with institutions to help students prepare to succeed in college." Next week, the Department will release a?Federal Register?Notice?inviting postsecondary institutions, in partnership with public secondary schools or local education agencies, to apply to participate in the dual enrollment experiment. The Department will invest up to $20 million in the 2016-17 award year, benefiting up to 10,000 students from low-income backgrounds across the country. Scenario One is Social HierarchiesPublic education is a prerequisite to dual credit programs that promote higher education and equality—the plan’s funding mechanism reinvigorates early college programsDeSantis 13[Nick; Reporter for The Chronicle for Higher Education; Early-College High Schools benefit Students, Study finds; ; Accessed on 6/9/17 by MH]Students who attend early-college high schools, which offer students a chance to earn credit toward a college degree while they finish high school, are more likely than are their peers to graduate, enroll in college, and earn an associate degree, concludes a?study?released on Wednesday by the American Institutes for Research. The study examined 10 schools that were part of the Early College High School Initiative, which was?created?by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2002 and was designed to keep students, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, from dropping out of high school and to give them better opportunities to succeed in college. It found that 86 percent of students in early-college high schools graduated, compared with 81 percent of their peers. It also found that college enrollment among early-college students outpaced such enrollment in the study’s comparison group, especially at two-year institutions: 59 percent of early-college students enrolled at two-year institutions, compared with 38 percent of the comparison group. The study also found that 54 percent of early-college students enrolled at four-year institutions, compared with 47 percent of their peers. And the study found that early-college students were significantly more likely than were their peers in the comparison group to earn college degrees, though almost all were associate degrees.The prison industrial complex is utilized for the thriving of whiteness off of the minority placing marginalized students at the forefront of educational discriminationBlack 6/10[Derek; Professor of Law at The University of South Carolina; Newsweek; Education in America has deep Flaws—And that’s why Racial Segregation is on the Rise; ; Accessed on 6/10/17 by MH]The education system in Alabama, like in so many?other states, is rigged against a large percentage of families and communities: Those with less money tend to get a worse education. Until these states reform their overall education funding systems, the inequalities and inadequacies that they produce will continue to fuel current racial motivations. The lawsuit in Gardendale was a poor vehicle for fixing Alabama’s education system: The state’s overall education system was not on trial. The only issue before the court was a racially motivated district line in one small community. But our small communities are connected to larger education systems. In my view, we cannot fix those systems by way of more individual choice, charters, vouchers or school district secessions. The fact is, educational funding is?down across the board, when compared to a decade ago. If we want all students to have a decent shot at better education, we need to?recommit to statewide systems of public education. Only then will our base fears and racial biases begin to?fade into the background.Charter schools and vouchers do not check—Lack of oversight permits disciplinary action targeting students of colorDavid Love 2016[David Love; Author and Writer for The Atlanta Black Star; NAACP Sounds the Alarm on Charter Schools, Warns of Racist Discipline Policies, Segregation, Lack of Oversight and Accountability; ; Accessed on 6/10/17 by MH]“There is a built-in competition that is dangerous for a district educating children of color,” DeJarnatt said of the free-market charter model, as well as the issue of racial segregation.? “There are a number of charter schools that are over 70 percent white” in a city such as Philadelphia, according to the law professor. ?This, in a city which is majority people of color and only 35 percent white, according to the U.S. Census.? Philadelphia is a useful location to study the issue of charter schools, DeJarnatt has found in her research, as it ranks third in the nation in the number of students enrolled in charter schools (62,000). Moreover, the draconian “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” policies that have shaped the American criminal justice system have their counterparts in the charter schools.? Although these institutions are publicly funded, and are allowed to raise other revenue, they are privately managed.? Charter administrators are autonomous and free from regulation, and allowed to develop methods of discipline with complete discretion, free from accountability. “One thing that is very important and very fraught is the pedagogy in ‘no excuses.’? There is no excuse for kids not to succeed; poverty is an excuse — which sounds like a good thing,” DeJarnatt noted.? “The relationship to broken windows is a pedagogy that is teacher-controlled. They say there is no tolerance for any deviation at all,” she added. “Even though the rhetoric is a rhetoric of choice, they have no personal autonomy at all,” DeJarnatt said. “In a lot of these schools the boards are almost all white. They tend to be very white-dominated institutions running pedagogies that are pretty restrictive of children of color,” she noted, adding that in such environments, it amounts to white people demanding that Black students shut up. In her article “Charting School Discipline,” which she co-wrote with Kerrin Wolf and Mary Kate Kalinich in the Winter 2016 edition of?The Urban Lawyer,?DeJarnatt wrote that charter schools maintain a rigid discipline, in which children may be punished for behavior considered “disruptive, disrespectful, or disobedient, and the principal is expected to recommend for expulsion any student who engages in ‘immoral conduct.’… At least 28 schools provide for expulsion for chronic failure to wear the uniform properly, including one that specifically mentions having an untucked shirt.” Further, students face discipline for “misbehavior” as inconsequential as folding their arms in defiance.? In some cases, children are not allowed to talk in the hallways, based on the argument that students must learn and nothing can detract from the learning process. “It is obvious that the harsher discipline is concentrated in the charters,” Duvall-Flynn said, offering that charter students are kicked out of school and returned to the public school setting, where there is due process. ?Further, while punishment may be levied on public school children, rarely are they told they cannot return. “Charter schools often tell the student, ‘You cannot come to school’— and that is about as harsh as discipline can get,” she said. Ultimately, the NAACP leader points to racism as a reason for the promotion of charter schools, and the inequities they create. “The increase in the nonwhite population has created in the white power structure a dissonance they are uncomfortable with because it threatens white superiority. There is a pushing and shoving, a manipulation of the law,” Duvall-Flynn said. “You cannot maintain racial superiority if you allow everyone to excel.? Because you never know where genius is and it may rise.? You cannot maintain a system of racial superiority and claim racial intellectual superiority if all the kids get all the resources they need and access to learning,” she added.?“You are taking these parents’ tax dollars and using it to hurt their children.”Racism necessitates genocide and multiple forms of oppression. Katz 97 - Katheryn Katz, Professor of Law, 1997, "The Clonal Child: Procreative Liberty and Asexual Reproduction," It is undeniable that throughout human history dominant and oppressive groups have committed unspeakable wrongs against those viewed as inferior. Once a person (or a people) has been characterized as sub-human, there appears to have been no limit to the cruelty that was or will be visited upon him. For example, in almost all wars, hatred towards the enemy was inspired to justify the killing and wounding by separating the enemy from the human race, by casting them as unworthy of human status. This same rationalization has supported: genocide, chattel slavery, racial segregation, economic exploitation, caste and class systems, coerced sterilization of social misfits and undesirables, unprincipled medical experimentation, the subjugation of women, and the social Darwinists' theory justifying indifference to the poverty and misery of others.These hierarchies that have been formulated create structural scenarios for communicable diseases and intolerable living conditionsDavis 14[Josh; Writer for Grassroots Economic Organizing; How Hierarchy is Actually Bad for your Health; ; Accessed on 6/10/17 by MH]What many cooperators have known intuitively for a long time, now turns out to have empirical, scientific grounding: hierarchy is bad for your health (unless you happen to be on the top). Actually, that formulation might be a little too broad. It’s not hierarchy?per se?that seems to lead to stressed-out, unhealthy individuals – it’s the felt lack of control over one’s life and environment that generally accompanies having a low position in the hierarchy. The more stratified and rigid the hierarchy one finds oneself in, the more stress that results from not feeling in control of one’s situation, and the worse one’s overall health and life expectancy?[1].? Stress by itself can actually be invigorating – like the stress of exercise or of watching a scary movie – but when combined with a feeling of helplessness, it becomes an overwhelmingly negative experience. And, of course, in rigid hierarchies, powerlessness is not just a feeling – it is a reality.? Many of us who do not work in the cooperative field are familiar with suffering the consequences of decisions in which we have had no say, and of not having control over the results of our efforts and ideas.? The very structure of our non-cooperative workplaces all but guarantees the majority of us will suffer the same negative health effects documented by doctors Sapolsky and Marmot. In order to avoid these deleterious effects, our hierarchies – if we’re going to have them at all – need to be relatively flat and provide a maximum of voice and agency for the individuals involved. In short, they need to be a organized like a co-op. Those of us who have spent time toiling in the depths of rigid hierarchies – whether they be at work, in the home, or in society at large – know from experience the damage that living with constant stress and anxiety can produce, both psychologically and physiologically. Those of us who have been lucky enough to live and work in cooperative situations, where cooperative values predominate, know also how good such a situation can make us feel – even when the inevitable difficulties arise.This creates disposable populations that are subject to environmental inequality and sustains hierarchal developments under the guise of educational discriminationNixon ‘9 [Rob, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “NEOLIBERALISM, SLOW VIOLENCE, AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL PICARESQUE”, MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 55 number 3, Fall 2009, ] The picaresque proves uncannily effective at dramatizing another critical dimension to the environmentalism of the urban poor—their relationship to time. Like the picaro, the environmentally embattled slum dwellers are hell-bent on immediate survival, improvising from day to day, from hour to hour. Their temporal element is "now o'clock" (Animal's 185), their lives subject to the ?ckle tyranny of the eternal today. Yet collectively, the city's environmentally af?icted are bound in complex ways to past and future through the metamorphoses wrought by toxicity, the pursuit of social justice, and their collective relationship to apocalyptic time. The environmental picaresque of Animal's People pivots on two apocalypses: the horrors of "that night" (1) when the interminable narrative of poisoning began and the certainty that, over the long haul, as the activist Zafar insists, the poor possess "the power of zero" (214). 18 Global geopolitics may, in the short term, be skewed against them, but time is on their side: the Kampani has everything to fear from those with nothing to lose. Animal insists as much in the novel's closing lines: "All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us" (366). Animal's ?nal words echo uncannily the end of Mike Davis's non-?ctional Planet of the Slums, the most arresting socio-political account of the contemporary neoliberal shantytown world from which, implicitly, the contemporary picaro emerges. "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression," Davis warns, "its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side" (206). Re?ecting on Hurricane Katrina, Michael Eric Dyson writes memorably of "the color of disaster" as integral to the "neoliberal neglect" that has plagued American politics for over twenty years (23). In keeping with Dyson's stance, we can refuse the unsustainable divide between human disasters (like Bhopal and Chernobyl) and natural ones (like Katrina), dissociating ourselves, for example, from ex-President George W. Bush's insistence that "the storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort" (qtd. In Weinberg 3). 19 Discrimination predates disaster: in failures to maintain protective structures, failures at pre-emergency hazard mitigation, failures to maintain infrastructure, failures to organize evacuation plans for those who lack private transport, all of which make the poor and racial minorities disproportionately vulnerable to catastrophe. As investigative Indian reporters writing for publications like the Hindustan Times and Statesmen were quick to reveal, the Union Carbide disaster was preceded by a long history of structural neglect and a reckless ?outing of elementary safety measures. 20 If we project Dyson's national "color of disaster" onto a transnational screen, his phrase can be seen—like Animal's ?nal words—to point backward to global crimes of environmental racism (that treat certain communities as more expendable than others) and forward as a global portent. The poor of the world are the uncontainable color of a future that cannot be held in check. Yet there is another way to read that future, as a wager—however idealistic—to those in power to embrace the project of more equitable risk distribution, within the nation and beyond. The South African writer, Njabulo Ndebele, puts this case most forcefully: We are all familiar with the global sanctity of the white body. Wherever the white body is violated in the world, severe retributions follow somehow for the perpetrators if they are non-white, regardless of the social status of the white body. The white body is inviolable, and that inviolability is in direct proportion to the vulnerability of the black body. This leads me to think that if South African whiteness is a bene?ciary of the protectiveness assured by international whiteness, it has an opportunity to write a new chapter in world history. . . . Putting itself at risk, it will have to declare that it is home now, sharing in the vulnerability of other compatriot bodies. South African whiteness will declare that its dignity is inseparable from the dignity of black bodies. (137) Three points are worth underscoring here. First, international whiteness provides a second shield for national whiteness, a protective dynamic that has profound consequences for the way slow violence has unfolded across the global stage in a neoliberal age. Second, and relatedly, the internal distance between the inviolable body and the vulnerable body is widened by being routed through international circuits of power. Third, implicit in Ndebele's racial narrative of violation and retribution is the kind of environmental narrative that Sinha's novel tells, whereby a corporate bastion of white power deploys a battery of distancing strategies (temporal, legalistic, geographical, scienti?c, and euphemistic) in the long duree between the initial catastrophe and the aftermath. Through this battery of attritional, dissociative mechanisms the transnational company strives to wear down the environmental justice campaigns that seek compensation, remediation, and restored health and dignity. Under cover of a variety of temporal orders, the company can hope that public memory and demands for restitution will slowly seep out of sight, vanishing into the sands of time. 21 Yet the open-ended politics of catastrophic procrastination do not operate in isolation within the corporate realm. What of the roles of the state and science? If Ndebele exhorts the state to "jealously and vigorously protect all bodies within its borders and beyond," he acknowledges this has seldom been the case (137). 22 In Khaufpur, the Chief Minister and the Minister for Poison Affairs, their palms well greased with bribes, provide local cover for the American Kampani while going through the motions of taking seriously the concerns of exposed locals. The role of science is more complex. In Khaufpur—as in Bhopal— the transnational corporation withheld from the af?icted community details about the chemical composition of the insecticides it was producing at the site, profoundly weakening remedial prospects by denying those exposed precise scienti?c information. Small wonder that, when an American doctor arrives to open a free clinic in Khaufpur, local activists mounted a boycott, viewing her as an agent of tendentious Kampani science—science whose long-term remit is to generate a circular narrative that will con?rm the larger narrative of corporate self-exculpation or, at the very least, oil the machinery of doubt. From this skeptical perspective, the scienti?c process, like the legal one, provides further temporal camou?age, ostensibly uncovering what happened while deferring and occluding any decisive, actionable narrative. Terror Time and Shadow Kingdoms Khaufpur, translated from the Urdu, means "city of terror" ("The Accidental Activist"). The city's poorest denizens inhabit a different terror time from the terror time projected by the Kampani. When the slum-dwellers rise up non-violently to protest the Kampani's inaction, the Kampani, invoking the fallback international rhetoric of terrorism, demands that the protestors be tried in the very Indian courts it has been evading. Back in America, the Kampani engages in corporate anti-terrorist exercises, staging mock abductions and executions of their employees by Khaufpuri "terrorists" (Animal's 283). Khaufpuris, by contrast, face a clear and present danger of an environmental kind: an immanent and imminent terror, faceless yet physically intimate, percolating through the penumbral time of the aftermath which is also the suspended time of the illimitable in-between. We all inhabit multiple temporal orders that often co-exist in frictional states, shifting and sliding like tectonic plates. The predominance—and our awareness of—some temporal orders as opposed to others are shaped by where and how we live. We need to ask how directly, how forcefully a given community is impacted by the cycles of sun and moon, by ebbing and ?owing tides, by shifts in the seasons, stars, and planets, by the arrivals and departures of migratory life, and by climate change in ways that are cross-hatched with the migratory cycles of transnational capital, electoral cycles (local, national, and foreign), digital time, and the dictates of sweatshop time. Sinha hints at, for example, the unpredictable interface between digital and seasonal time when Animal discovers the "internest" on a computer (92). We can gloss his malapropism as fusing different ecologies of time: the "internest" is, after all, where images go to breed. Animal's People exposes the uneven timelines, the multiple speeds, of environmental terror: the initial toxic event that kills thousands instantly; the fatal ?re that erupts years later when the deserted but still-polluted factory reignites; the contaminants that continue to leach into the communal bloodstream; and the monsoon season that each year washes abandoned chemicals into the aquifers, repoisoning wells and producing new cycles of deferred casualties. Thus the initial air-borne terror morphs into a water-borne terror that acquires its own seasonal rhythms of heightened risk. 23 Ordinarily, rural subsistence communities—"ecosystem people"— are attuned (and vulnerable) to different ecologies of time from those that impact the lives of the urban poor. 24 This is not to suggest that ecosystem people possess some romantic, timeless organic bond to the pulse of nature, but rather to acknowledge that their often precarious conditions of survival depend on different combinations of temporal awareness. However, both rural and urban communities share a vulnerability to the vagaries, the haunting uncertainties, of what Ulrich Beck depicts as a "shadow kingdom": Threats from civilization are bringing about a kind of new "shadow kingdom," comparable to the realm of the gods and demons in antiquity, which is hidden behind the visible world and threatens human life on their Earth. People no longer correspond today with spirits residing in things but ?nd themselves exposed to "radiation," ingest "toxic levels," and are pursued into their very dreams by the anxiety of a "nuclear holocaust" . . . Dangerous, hostile substances lie concealed behind the harmless facades. Everything must be viewed with a double gaze, and can only be correctly understood and judged through this doubling. The world of the visible must be investigated, relativized with respect to a second reality, only existent in thought and concealed in the world. (72) In Beck's depiction this imperceptible shadow kingdom is spatially recessed behind "harmless facades." But his spatial trope warrants a temporal gloss as well: beyond the optical fa?ade of immediate peril what demons lurk in the penumbral realms of the long duree? What forces distract or discourage us from maintaining the double gaze across time? And what forces—imaginative, scienti?c, and activist—can help us extend the temporal horizons of our gaze not just retrospectively but prospectively as well? How, in other words, do we subject that shadow kingdom to a temporal optic that might allow us to see—and foresee—the lineaments of slow terror behind the fa?ade of sudden spectacle? We need to question here Beck's assumption that "people no longer correspond today with spirits residing in things," that, in other words, the divine and demonic shadow kingdom "of antiquity" has been superseded by the modern shadow kingdom of toxic and radiological hazards. This sequential narrative of threat does not adequately convey the persistent vitality of the numinous within modernity. For the majority of our planet's people (and this is something Sinha brings to life) the two kingdoms of toxic threat and spiritual threat interpenetrate and blend, creating a hybrid world of technonuminous fears. Sinha and Carson: Leakages and Corporate Evaporations Animal's People gives focus to the environmental politics of permeation and duration. Leakages suffuse the novel: gas leakages and category leakages, porous borders and permeable membranes, the living who are semi-dead and the dead who are living specters. 25 What, the novel asks across a variety of fronts, are the boundaries of identity? Where do identities part or merge? How much change must an entity (an individual, a community, a corporation) undergo before it can assume the name of categorical difference, drawing a line across time? On the subject of bounded and porous identities, it is worth noting one aspect of the Union Carbide story that Sinha, for whatever reasons, declined to enfold into his novel. In 2001, Union Carbide disappeared through that act of corporate necromancy known as the merger. Dow Chemical bought out Union Carbide; the name indelibly associated with disaster evaporated, further confounding the quest in Bhopal for environmental justice, compensation, remediation, and redress. Dow Chemical deployed this nominal vanishing act, this corporate shape shifting, as a rationale for disclaiming responsibility for a disaster committed by a now-extinct corporation. 26 If, with Chernobyl, the environmental fallout outlasted the empire responsible, with Union Carbide, the fallout outlasted the transnational company responsible. Thus Soviet imperial fracture and American corporate merger both effectively circumvented or of?oaded historical culpability for the continued slow violence of delayed effects. The evaporation of Union Carbide exempli?es the gap between the relative immobility of environmentally af?icted populations and the mobility (in time and space) afforded transnational corporations. What the extinct company leaves behind is ongoing proof of the excellent durability of its products; as Animal notes sardonically, the Kampani clearly concocted "wonderful poisons . . . so good it's impossible to get rid of them, after all these years they're still doing their work" (Animal's 306). The factory may have been abandoned, but the invisible poisons remain dynamic, industrious, and alive—full time workers round the clock. The far less resilient biota, however, express themselves primarily through the sensuality of absence: "Listen, how quiet," Animal observes as he wanders the factory grounds. "No bird song. No hoppers in the grass. No bee hum. Insects can't survive here" (185). Sinha's rhetorical strategy here—his summoning of ecological carnage through negative presence—echoes "La Belle Dame sans Merci" which Rachel Carson chose as the epigraph to Silent Spring: "The sedge is wither'd from the lake, / And no birds sing." Sinha's approach calls to mind, too, Carson's use of negative presence in the controversial "Fable for Tomorrow" that launches Silent Spring, where she evokes the plight of a devastated community. In a once harmonious American heartland town (dubbed "Green Meadows" in an early draft) "There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? . . . The hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. . . . The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit" (Carson 2–3). Both writers give the absence wrought by toxicity a sensory density; in so doing they strike a complex temporal note, inducing in us, through blended elegy and apocalypse, lamentation and premonition, a double gaze, backward in time to loss and forward to as-yet-unrealized-threats. Through this double gaze they restage environmental time, asserting its broad parameters against the myopic, fevered immediacy that governs the society of the catastrophe-as-spectacle. The blighted community Carson depicts in "A Fable for Tomorrow" did not exist in its entirety, although all the component disasters Carson fed into her composite, ?ctionalized portrait had occurred at some point somewhere in America. By clustering these scattered micro-disasters into a single imaginary community, she sought to counter the dissociative thinking encouraged by the temporal and spatial dispersion of environmental violence, acts which in isolation would pass beneath the radar of the newsworthy. Like Carson, Sinha has clearly grappled with the imaginative dilemmas posed by the diffusion of slow violence across environmental time. But his response is differently in?ected, given that all the disasters he summons to mind had indeed been concentrated in a single community. The problem he tackled, moreover, was one Carson never addressed directly: how, through the mechanisms of globalization, environmental racism, and class discrimination, some af?icted communities are afforded more visibility—and more access to remediation—than others. This discriminatory distribution of environmental visibility—intranationally and transnationally—lies at the heart of Sinha's ?ctional endeavor. Forty-?ve years ago, Carson protested that the scattershot victims of "herbicides" and "pesticides" ought to be recognized as victims of indiscriminate "biocides" instead (8). Sinha develops this idea of biocidal risk in terms redolent of Carson: one old woman, bent double by the poisons, upbraids the Kampani lawyer thus: "you told us you were making medicine for the ?elds. You were making poisons to kill insects, but you killed us instead. I would like to ask, was there ever much difference, to you?" (Animal's 306). Yet Sinha departs from Carson in representing "pesticides" as both indiscriminate and discriminatory: their killing power exceeds their targeted task of eliminating troublesome insects, but they do discriminate in the unadvertised sense of saddling the local and global poor with the highest burden of risk. Thus, by implication, the biocidal assault on human life is unevenly universal. Extraordinary Events, Ordinary Forgettings Looking back at Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bhopal, Petryna laments how "many persons who have survived these largescale technological disasters have been caught in a long-term and vicious bureaucratic cycle in which they carry the burden of proof of their physical damage while experiencing the risk of being delegitimated in legal, welfare, and medical institutional contexts" (216). Such people, above all the illiterate poor, are thrust into a labyrinth of self-fashioning as they seek to ?t their bodily stories to the story lines that dangle hope of recognition, possibly, though elusively, even recompense. In so doing, the poor face the double challenge of invisibility and amnesia: numerically they may constitute the majority, but they remain on the margins in terms of visibility and of?cial memory. From an environmental perspective, this marginality is perpetuated, in part, by what Davis terms "the dialectic of ordinary disaster," whereby a calamity is incorporated into history and rendered forgettably ordinary precisely because the burden of risk falls unequally on the unsheltered poor ("Los Angeles" 227). Such disasters are readily dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing them as accidental, random, and unforeseeable acts of God, without regard for the precautionary measures that might have prevented the catastrophe or have mitigated its effects. At stake here is the role of neoliberal globalization in exacerbating both uneven economic development and the uneven development of of?cial memory. What we witness is a kind of fatal bigotry that operates through the spatializing of time, by of?oading risk onto "backward" communities that are barely visible in the of?cial media. Contemporary global politics, then, must be recognized "as a struggle for crude, material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) as a battle for the control over appearances" (Boal 31). That battle over spectacle becomes especially decisive for public memory—and for the foresight with which public policy can motivate and execute precautionary measures—when it comes to the attritional casualties claimed, as at Bhopal, by the forces of slow violence. Scenario Two is InnovationGlobal warming is accelerating at rates that far exceed current US innovation capabilitiesHladky 6/4[Gregory; reporter for the Courant covering the environment, agriculture, food-related issues and their political connections; Connecticut Faces Changes from Global Warming Regardless of Trump Climate Change Decision; ; Accessed on 7/3/17 by MH]Studies have repeatedly documented what most scientists believe are the growing impacts that climate change is having on Connecticut, it's marine environment, our landscape and the people and animals who live here. The?overwhelming consensus among climate experts?in Connecticut and around the world is that global warming is happening and that human activity is — at the very least — making it worse. Their fear is that, unless more is done to curb pollution, the long-term effects of climate change could be even more devastating than what is now predicted. In his speech this week announcing that he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement,?President Trump argued?that even if all the goals in the agreement were met it would cut global temperatures by only "two-tenths of one degree by 2100." While most climate scientists acknowledge that climate change can't be completely reversed, they insist any reduction or limitation in global warming can have major benefits. "Anything we can do needs to be done," Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at?Yale University's school of forestry and environmental studies, said Friday. "Even small temperature changes can be measured in lives." It is uncertain exactly how President Trump's decision to withdraw from the climate change accords will play out, but he already has proposed cutting federal funding for environmental programs in Long Island Sound and is easing anti-pollution regulations over various industries. He argues that those changes will help the U.S. economy. Marlon said most people in Connecticut and around the U.S. "have a real hard time" coming to grips with what climate change will mean in their lives. "Fundamentally, people think climate change is really serious for other people far away from them," she said, or they think those higher temperatures, rising seas and bigger storms will only affect people "in the next century."Early college high schools are key to science and technology studiesDOE 2011[Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education; College and Career Readiness; ; Accessed on 7/3/17 by MH]Early college high schools (ECHS) are a proven model for preparing students, especially low-income, minority, and first-generation college-goers, for postsecondary education. They provide students with a college experience and an opportunity to get a head start on earning college credits while still in high school. Given the state's need for highly skilled workers in STEM areas, Districts have been encouraged to consider developing ECHS that motivate and prepare students to explore STEM career pathways while still enrolled in high school and to pursue STEM majors in college. ECHS are designed to result in higher rates of college going for students currently underrepresented in higher education and to build an accelerated route linking secondary education with postsecondary educational opportunities. These schools are developed through agreements between high schools and postsecondary institutions. Competitive planning and implementation grants through Race to the Top (RTTT) have been provided to the Boston Public Schools, Marlborough Public Schools, Quaboag Regional School District, Randolph Public Schools, Southeastern Regional Vocational Technical School, and Worcester Public Schools to support their efforts over a four-year period. Technical assistance on program development and implementation will be provided by Jobs for the Future (JFF) and a more coordinated effort from an Early College Designs panel will assist districts in developing policies to encourage early college experiences and dual enrollment. Several districts are also using local Race to the Top funds for Early College initiatives. It is anticipated that successful implementation will lead to improvements in student achievement in STEM subjects and increased enrollment in STEM college majors, especially for low-income, minority, and first-generation college students.These technological developments are key to finding new solutions to global warming and CO2 emissionsBrooks 15[David; Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; The Green Tech Solution; The New York Times; ; Accessed on 6/27/17 by MH]Look at what you’re already doing, he countered. The U.S. has the fastest rate of reduction of CO2?emissions of any major nation on earth, back to pre-1996 levels. That’s in part because of fracking. Natural gas is replacing coal, and natural gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide. The larger lesson is that innovation is the key. Green energy will beat dirty energy only when it makes technical and economic sense. Hamilton reminded me that he often used government money to stoke innovation. Manzi and Wehner suggest that one of our great national science labs could work on geoengineering problems to remove CO2?from the atmosphere. Another could investigate cogeneration and small-scale energy reduction systems. We could increase funding on battery and smart-grid research. If we move to mainly solar power, we’ll need much more efficient national transmission methods. Maybe there’s a partial answer in increased vegetation. Hamilton pointed out that when America was just a bunch of scraggly colonies, he was already envisioning it as a great world power. He used government to incite, arouse, energize and stir up great enterprise. The global warming problem can be addressed, ineffectively, by global communiqués. Or, with the right government boost, it presents an opportunity to arouse and incite entrepreneurs, innovators and investors and foment a new technological revolution. Sometimes like your country you got to be young, scrappy and hungry and not throw away your shot.Co2 leads to weeds – tanks agricultureZiska 2007[Lewis Ziska, PhD, Principal investigator at United States Department of AgricultureAgricultural Research Service Alternate Crop and Systems Lab. “Climate change impact on weeds” ]Weeds have a greater genetic diversity than crops. Consequently, if a resource (light, water, nutrients or carbon dioxide) changes within the environment, it is more likely that weeds will show a greater growth and reproductive response. It can be argued that many weed species have the C4 photosynthetic pathway and therefore will show a smaller response to atmospheric CO2 relative to C3 crops. However, this argument does not consider the range of available C3 and C4 weeds present in any agronomic environment. That is, at present, the U.S. has a total of 46 major crops; but, over 410 “troublesome” weed species (both C3 and C4) associated with those crops (Bridges 1992). Hence, if a C4 weed species does not respond, it is likely that a C3 weed species will. In addition, many growers recognize that the worst weeds for a given crop are similar in growth habit or photosynthetic pathway; indeed, they are often the same uncultivated or “wild” species, e.g. oat and wild oat, sorghum and shattercane, rice and red rice. To date, for all weed/crop competition studies where the photosynthetic pathway is the same, weed growth is favored as CO2 is increased (Table 1, Ziska and Runion, In Press). In addition to agronomic weeds, there is an additional category of plants that are considered “noxious” or “invasive” weeds. These are plants, usually non-native whose introduction results in wide-spread economic or environmental consequences (e.g. kudzu). Many of these weeds reproduce by vegetative means (roots, stolons, etc.) and recent evidence indicates that as a group, these weeds may show a strong response to recent increases in atmospheric CO2 (Ziska and George 2004). How rising CO2 would contribute to the success of these weeds in situ however, is still unclear. Overall, the data that are available on the response of weeds and changes in weed ecology are limited. Additional details, particularly with respect to interactions with other environmental variables (e.g. nutrient availability, precipitation and temperature) are also needed. This will collapse civilization --- causes disease spread, terrorism, and economic collapseBrown, 9 --- founder of both the WorldWatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute (May 2009, Lester R., Scientific American, “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” Ebsco)The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. For many years I have studied global agricultural, population, environmental and economic trends and their interactions. The combined effects of those trends and the political tensions they generate point to the breakdown of governments and societies. Yet I, too, have resisted the idea that food shortages could bring down not only individual governments but also our global civilization.? Even a cursory look at the vital signs of our current world order lends unwelcome support to my conclusion. world grain production has fallen short of consumption, As demand for food rises faster than supplies are growing, the resulting food-price inflation puts severe stress on the governments of countries already teetering on the edge of chaos. Unable to buy grain or grow their own, hungry people take to the streets. if the food situation continues to deteriorate, entire nations will break down at an ever increasing rate. We have entered a new era in geopolitics. In the 20th century the main threat to international security was superpower conflict; today it is failing states. It is not the concentration of power but its absence that puts us at risk.? States fail when national governments can no longer provide personal security, food security Failing states are of international concern because they are a source of terrorists, drugs, weapons and refugees, threatening political stability everywhere. Our global civilization depends on a functioning network of politically healthy nation-states to control the spread of infectious disease, to manage the international monetary system, to control international terrorism and to reach scores of other common goals. If the system for controlling infectious diseases--such as polio, SARS or avian flu--breaks down, humanity will be in trouble. Once states fail, no one assumes responsibility for their debt to outside lenders. If enough states disintegrate, their fall will threaten the stability of global civilization itself.Contention 2 is SolvencyEarly college programs cater to the most marginalized sectors of society—the plan checks state-sponsored discriminationBidwell 14[Allie; Staff Writer for US News; Early Colleges Expand Access for Minority, Low-Income Students; ; Accessed on 6/9/17 by MH]Early college students who subsequently enrolled in college were also less likely (18 percent versus 22 percent) to need developmental education, which can cost colleges?billions of dollars annually. Attending an early college high school also appeared to have a significantly stronger impact on college degree attainment for women, racial and ethnic minorities and low-income students than it did for men, nonminority students and non-low-income students.?[MORE: A College Degree Equals Longer Single Life With No Kids, Study Says] Nearly one-quarter of female students who attended early colleges earned a college degree within the study period, compared with 1 percent of female comparison students. Likewise, 65 percent of racial and ethnic minority students who attended early colleges earned a college degree, compared with 1 percent of comparison students.? "This initiative?challenges long-held assumptions about who can be successful in college and when," the report says. "By?combining two systems, secondary and postsecondary, it provides a different way of?thinking about the role, and potential, of college."Early college high schools gratify marginalized students through inclusive methods of providing college education concurrent to high schoolBerger et al. 13[Andrea; Project director for American Institutes for Research; Lori-Turk Biakci—Deputy Project Director; Michael Garat—Principal Investigator; Mengli Song, Joel Knudson, Clarisse Haxton, Kristina Zeiser, Gur Hoshen, Jennifer Ford, Jennifer Stephan; Early College, Early Success—Early College High School Initiative Impact Study; ; accessed on 6/10/17 by MH]Gender: The Early College impact on college degree attainment was significantly stronger for females than for males. Female Early College students were approximately 19 times more likely to receive a college degree than female comparison students (22.8 percent vs. 1.2 percent).32 Male Early College students were approximately 7 times more likely to obtain a college degree than male comparison students (21.7 percent vs. 2.9 percent). Race: The Early College impact on college degree attainment was significantly stronger for minority than for white students. Among minority students, Early College students were 29 times more likely to obtain a college degree than comparison students (26.5 percent vs. 0.9 percent). Among white students, Early College students were approximately 8 times more likely to obtain a college degree than comparison students (22.8 percent vs. 2.8 percent). Income: The Early College impact on college degree attainment was significantly stronger for low-income students. Specifically, low-income Early College students were approximately 25 times more likely than low-income comparison students to obtain a college degree (19.7 percent vs. 0.8 percent). In contrast, higher income Early College students were approximately 7 times more likely to obtain a degree than higher income comparison students (24.5 percent vs. 3.4 percent). What do these findings tell us about the impact of Early Colleges during and after high school? The results from this study suggest that the impact of Early Colleges occurred primarily during the high school years—it is in this timeframe that the magnitude of the group differences was the largest, and where enrollment and degree attainment results were consistently statistically significant. After high school, significant differences continued to exist in four-year college enrollment and degree attainment. The reader may be tempted to conclude from these findings that Early Colleges provide limited benefit after high school. However, the more important interpretation may be that Early Colleges provided students with an edge over the comparison students during high school, and the edge persisted even after high school. A complete understanding of how long the Early College impact persists would require tracking degree attainment and workforce outcomes over a more extended time period. Although questions about the long-term impact of Early Colleges remain, the available evidence strongly indicates that Early College students complete college ahead of their comparison group peers. Even if comparison students were to catch up over time, Early Colleges offer the benefit of acceleration. Students who earn degrees earlier have the opportunity to enter the workforce earlier and potentially realize additional lifetime earnings. At the same time, earning a college degree while in high school can save money for students and their families, as Early Colleges often cover most, if not all, of the college costs incurred during high school (AIR & SRI, 2008).Early college partnerships with corporations grant students with career-specific coursework that is utilized for earlier tech careers—that solves innovationMunguia 15[Hayley; Data Reporter for FiveThirtyEight; ; Early College High Schools are off to a Promising Start; Accessed on 6/25/17 by MH]P-TECH — a collaboration between New York City’s education department, the City University of New York and IBM — is a six-year school that allows students to earn both a high school degree and either an associate degree or two years of college credit. Students are paired with corporate mentors, and the best-performing graduates are offered a job at IBM. The school is part of a larger trend in high school education that aims to be more intent about preparing students for college or a career straight out of high school. P-TECH in particular has gotten a lot of attention since its opening in 2011, including a?shoutout?in President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address and his?visit?to the school later that year. The school is particularly notable for having a student body that is 96 percent black and Hispanic, groups that have traditionally lagged behind in getting postsecondary degrees and technology jobs. Eighty percent of its students receive free or reduced-price lunch, according to IBM’s data. Theoretically, these schools help boost college and career readiness by exposing students to the technology skills necessary for each while they’re still in high school. But how effective are they? Since P-TECH’s first class of alumni is fresh off the graduation stage (two years early, no less), we’re only now starting to be able to determine how well the school can achieve its goals.2AC Case ExtensionsSocial HierarchiesPrivate schools have zero oversight and the Trump administration dooms marginalized sectors of society—only the plan solvesKamenetz 16[Anya; Lead Education blogger for NPR; Questions of Race and Charter Schools divides Education Reformers; ; Accessed on 6/25/17 by MH]The NAACP also backed a moratorium on charter school expansion in a?preliminary resolution?over the summer. It cited "weak oversight" of privately managed charters, instances of mismanagement of public funds, "exclusionary discipline" and "increased segregation" as a result of the expansion of charter schools. Then, this month, the?Black Alliance for Educational Options, a pro-charter group, and the?National Alliance for Public Charter Schools?launched a campaign called ChartersWork to push back against the moratorium. Some education leaders are rushing to embrace the newly frank conversation about the racial impact of education reforms. Others are caught awkwardly in the middle. And some — especially conservative — reformers feel alienated. "We're watching the old NCLB/Race to the Top coalition come apart, and we'll see what will come out the other side," says Rick Hess, director of the education policy center at the American Enterprise Institute.Poverty’s association with geography place marginalized families at the heart of environmental racism—only education and job growth can prevent these atrocitiesKay and Katz 2012[Jane Kay and Cheryl Katz; Scientists and Reporters for The Scientific American; ; Pollution, Poverty, and People of Color: Living with Industry; Accessed on 6/25/17 by MH]Low-income residents seeking affordable homes end up sharing a fence line with a refinery and a cluster of other polluting businesses. They may save money on shelter, but they pay the price in health, researchers say. Decades of toxic emissions from industries -- as well as lung-penetrating diesel particles spewed by truck routes and rail lines running next door to neighborhoods -- may be taking a toll on residents’ health. The people of Richmond, particularly African Americans, are at significantly higher risk of dying from heart disease and strokes and more likely to go to hospitals for asthma than other county residents. Health experts say their environment likely is playing a major role. While most coastal cities breathe ocean breezes mixed with traffic exhaust, people in north and central Richmond are exposed to a greater array of contaminants, many of them at higher concentrations. Included are benzene, mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that have been linked to cancer, reproductive problems and neurological effects. People can’t escape the fumes indoors, either. One study showed that some of the industrial pollutants are inside Richmond homes. It's the triple whammy of race, poverty and environment converging nationwide to create communities near pollution sources where nobody else wants to live. Black leaders from the Civil Rights Movement called the phenomenon environmental racism, and beginning in the early 1980s, they documented the pattern at North Carolina’s Warren County PCBs landfill, Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," Chicago's South Side, Tennessee’s Dickson County, Houston's Sunnyside garbage dump and other places across the country. About 56 percent of the nine million Americans who live in neighborhoods within three kilometers of large commercial hazardous waste facilities are people of color, according to a landmark, 2007 environmental justice report by the United Church of Christ. In California, it’s 81 percent. Poverty rates in these neighborhoods are 1.5 times higher than elsewhere.Private Schools reinform social hierarchies—LGBT+ students’ needs are ignored and their existence is nullifiedRios 6/7[Edwin; Reporter for Mother Jones; ; Betsy Devos Once Again Stumbles when Asked about LGBT Discrimination at Private Schools; Accessed on 6/25/17 by MH]At a tense Senate hearing Tuesday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wouldn’t commit to stripping federal funding from?private schools that discriminate?on the basis of sexual orientation, saying it was an issue for?“Congress and the courts to settle.” “On areas where the law is unsettled,” she?said, “this department is not going to be issuing decrees.” DeVos’?comments echoed what she said in a House hearing in May, when?she notably?refused?to say whether federal dollars would be pulled from schools that discriminate against LGBT students.?She said at the time?that states and local communities would be “best equipped to make decisions and framework on behalf of their students.”? But DeVos’ argument?didn’t satisfy Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who argued?Wednesday?that federal civil rights laws that protect LGBT students can be “somewhat foggy.” Federal laws protect students from being discriminated against based on race, color, national origin, disability, and gender, but the courts have yet to decide whether those protections explicitly include LGBT students.? In response, DeVos repeated a line she used throughout the hearing:?that schools receiving federal funding needed to follow the law. She then added?that when federal law is unsettled, it’s left to Congress and the Supreme Court to decide where LGBT students fall under civil rights protections.Society should forget race in order to realize equality of allHutchinson 2 – (Darren L. Professor of Constitutional Law, Remedies, Race and the Law, and Civil Rights Seminar at the University of Florida Levin College of Law “Progressive Race Blindness?: Individual Identity, Group Politics, and Reform” 6-2002 scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&context=facultypub , cayla_)Because they subscribe to constructivist theories of race, advocates of progressive race blindness contend that race does not have an inevitable existence. On the contrary, race is a concept that society can discard. Robinson challenges the normalization of racial identity. He contends that race consciousness provides life support for the racial category. Robinson argues that "[i]f we do not constantly and consciously meditate on it, race cannot exist. Unfortunately, we fuel this social construct with our mental kindling and intellectual logs."2° Christi Cunningham urges persons of color to "mourn" racial subjugation by setting aside race as a component of their personal identities.2" She contends that persons of color can and should "let die our malignant proxies for [community]," such as racial identity, and recreate identity on nonartificial grounds.22 Richard Ford makes a similar claim as Cunningham's-that race should be disaggregated from identity and culture. He argues that [olne can consistently support group consciousness for the sake of antisubordination politics while remaining skeptical of the coherence of group culture or culture-as-traditions and ambivalent or even hostile to traditionalism and the idea that the norms and practices of any group should be preserved from pressure to change. 23 Paul Gilroy exhibits a strong faith in the ability of society to transcend race. His excitement stems from the scientific discrediting of the naturalness of race. Gilroy argues that the term race linguistically implies a natural differentiation among individuals that masks a deepening crisis in racial categorization brought about by constructivist understandings of identity: [Race] stands outside of, and in opposition to, most attempts to render it secondary to the overwhelming sameness that overdetermines social relationships between people and continually betrays the tragic predicaments of their common species life. The undervalued power of this crushingly obvious, almost banal human sameness, so close and basically invariant that it regularly passes unremarked upon, also confirms that the crisis of raciological reasoning presents an important opportunity where it points toward the possibility of leaving "race" behind, of setting aside its disabling use as we move out of the time in which it could have been expected to make sense. 24 The import of social construction theories for the proponents of progressive race blindness is clear: Because human interaction and agency, rather than biology, create and re-create race, humans can dismantle and set aside their usage of racial categorization.A2: Colorblindness BadOur provision of access to college-level courses allows students to embrace diversity that may not be inherently present within high school curriculum. Early college students have more meaningful electives such as race relations, critical race theory, Africa studies, and multiculturalism that gives students the ability to embrace diversity as opposed to seeing each other as the same—their argument calls for the entire collapse of diversity. The aff is promoting the inclusion of students of color to nullify colorblindness and to reify the cultural importance of students in public education.InnovationIBM growth and partnerships are key to developing programs that degrade Chinese air pollution—it’s try or dieLufkin 15[Bryan; Staff Writer for Gizmodo and covers technology and environmental stories; IBM’s Watson could Hold the Key to Fighting Beijing’s Brutal Pollution; ; Accessed on 6/26/17 by MH] According to?MIT Technology Review, IBM’s rolling out a plan that predicts when and where Beijing’s pollution levels will be the worst, 72 hours ahead of time. How’s this helpful? Think of it as a next-gen?air quality forecast. Pollution levels, on a more micro level within a city, can vary widely. IBM’s new project, called Green Horizon, combines pre-collected city data with abilities to learn over time and predict repeated patterns. This helps the city make extremely specific calls, like temporarily capping the amount of cars on the streets in areas predicted to be hit hard, MIT says. See, one of the main challenges for AI developers is getting the system (a computer program, a robot, whatever) to automatically adjust to changing situations, just like a human can. It’s called “adaptive machine learning.” In this case, the system (which uses the same language and statistical processing abilities as Watson) takes massive amounts of complex data from the past, and makes specific suggestions for the future—days in advance. IBM says the Green Horizon is 30 percent more precise than current pollution-tracking models. The Chinese capital has long struggled with sky-high levels of air pollution. But the country’s doing good, too: It’s championed maglev trains for?over a decade, and its behemoth solar panel market?straight up eclipses?the rest of the world’s. In the first four months of 2015, China’s coal use?plummeted?8 percent. Still, China remains Earth’s largest emissions-spewing country, with the US sitting at number two. IBM says it wants to take the Green Horizon tech elsewhere in China, and to other pollutive countries, as well. First, Watson conquered Ken Jennings; maybe in the future, it’ll conquer terrible air quality worldwide.IBM’s partnerships are key to integrating students’ understandings of technological innovationSzczerba 5/31[Robert; CEO of X Tech Ventures and Contributor to Forbes; From Aging to Autism, IBM is Eliminating Barriers to Technology; ; Accessed on 6/25/17 by MH]The?IBM Accessibility Research?group seeks to reduce or eliminate barriers to technology. Their efforts are focused on creating solutions that help individuals?with disabilities (both physical and cognitive), the growing aging population, novice technology users, and people?with language, learning and literacy challenges. Their goal is to enable?people of all ages and abilities to live more independent, productive and meaningful lives through better access to technology. IBM actually has a rich history of?workforce diversity and technology innovation for people with disabilities for more than 100 years. In 1914, IBM hired its first disabled employee, 76 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. In the 1940s the company hired and trained people with disabilities to replace military workers during World War II. They also provided accommodations for them as well as returning disabled veterans, three decades before the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Some early accessibility innovations include a Braille printer, a talking typewriter, and one of the first commercially viable screen readers. Dr. Ruoyi Zhou, Director of Accessibility Research at IBM, explained “the organization was created in 1999 with the mandate to help integrate accessibility more formally across IBM’s product portfolio to help comply with government accessibility requirements.” Today, their research is focused on three primary areas:Warming collapses the planetGriffin ’15 (David; 4/14/15; Claremont Philosophy Professor, citing diversity of climatologists; CNN, “The climate is ruined. So can civilization even survive?” )Although most of us worry about other things, climate scientists have become increasingly worried about the survival of civilization. For example, Lonnie Thompson, who received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2010, said that virtually all climatologists "are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization." Informed journalists share this concern. The climate crisis "threatens the survival of our civilization," said Pulitzer Prize-winner Ross Gelbspan. Mark Hertsgaard agrees, saying that the continuation of global warming "would create planetary conditions all but certain to end civilization as we know it." These scientists and journalists, moreover, are worried not only about the distant future but about the condition of the planet for their own children and grandchildren. James Hansen, often considered the world's leading climate scientist, entitled his book "Storms of My Grandchildren." The threat to civilization comes primarily from the increase of the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, due largely to the burning of fossil fuels. Before the rise of the industrial age, CO2 constituted only 275 ppm (parts per million) of the atmosphere. But it is now above 400 and rising about 2.5 ppm per year. Because of the CO2 increase, the planet's average temperature has increased 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although this increase may not seem much, it has already brought about serious changes. The idea that we will be safe from "dangerous climate change" if we do not exceed a temperature rise of 2C (3.6F) has been widely accepted. But many informed people have rejected this assumption. In the opinion of journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben, "the one degree we've raised the temperature already has melted the Arctic, so we're fools to find out what two will do." His warning is supported by James Hansen, who declared that "a target of two degrees (Celsius) is actually a prescription for long-term disaster." The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas has made the planet warmer than it had been since the rise of civilization 10,000 years ago. Civilization was made possible by the emergence about 12,000 years ago of the "Holocene" epoch, which turned out to be the Goldilocks zone - not too hot, not too cold. But now, says physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, "We are catapulting ourselves way out of the Holocene." This catapult is dangerous, because we have no evidence civilization can long survive with significantly higher temperatures. And yet, the world is on a trajectory that would lead to an increase of 4C (7F) in this century. In the opinion of many scientists and the World Bank, this could happen as early as the 2060s. What would "a 4C world" be like? According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (at the University of East Anglia), "during New York's summer heat waves the warmest days would be around 10-12C (18-21.6F) hotter [than today's]." Moreover, he has said, above an increase of 4C only about 10% of the human population will survive. Believe it or not, some scientists consider Anderson overly optimistic. The main reason for pessimism is the fear that the planet's temperature may be close to a tipping point that would initiate a "low-end runaway greenhouse," involving "out-of-control amplifying feedbacks." This condition would result, says Hansen, if all fossil fuels are burned (which is the intention of all fossil-fuel corporations and many governments). This result "would make most of the planet uninhabitable by humans." Moreover, many scientists believe that runaway global warming could occur much more quickly, because the rising temperature caused by CO2 could release massive amounts of methane (CH4), which is, during its first 20 years, 86 times more powerful than CO2. Warmer weather induces this release from carbon that has been stored in methane hydrates, in which enormous amounts of carbon -- four times as much as that emitted from fossil fuels since 1850 -- has been frozen in the Arctic's permafrost. And yet now the Arctic's temperature is warmer than it had been for 120,000 years -- in other words, more than 10 times longer than civilization has existed. According to Joe Romm, a physicist who created the Climate Progress website, methane release from thawing permafrost in the Arctic "is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle." The amplifying feedback works like this: The warmer temperature releases millions of tons of methane, which then further raise the temperature, which in turn releases more methane. The resulting threat of runaway global warming may not be merely theoretical. Scientists have long been convinced that methane was central to the fastest period of global warming in geological history, which occurred 55 million years ago. Now a group of scientists have accumulated evidence that methane was also central to the greatest extinction of life thus far: the end-Permian extinction about 252 million years ago. Worse yet, whereas it was previously thought that significant amounts of permafrost would not melt, releasing its methane, until the planet's temperature has risen several degrees Celsius, recent studies indicate that a rise of 1.5 degrees would be enough to start the melting. What can be done then? Given the failure of political leaders to deal with the CO2 problem, it is now too late to prevent terrible developments. But it may -- just may -- be possible to keep global warming from bringing about the destruction of civilization. To have a chance, we must, as Hansen says, do everything possible to "keep climate close to the Holocene range" -- which means, mobilize the whole world to replace dirty energy with clean as soon as possible.IBM-sponsored programs promote cybersecurity studies Monegain 5/30[Bernie; Editor-At-Large for Healthcare IT News and Women in Health IT; IBM reveals DIY 'new collar jobs' that hospitals can apply to cybersecurity staffing; ; Accessed on 6/25/17 by MH]The vision is to build a regional cybersecurity ecosystem, IBM said. Hospital executives should partner with workforce development organizations, participate in schools’ cybersecurity curriculum discussions, provide internships and externships, even work with middle schools to create interest in cybersecurity as a career.? As hospitals start hiring more security professionals it’s also important to build a robust support program for them. IBM said that should include mentorships, shadowing, rotational assignments, all opportunities to explore what aspects of cybersecurity they enjoy and at which they are most likely to succeed.? The last step IBM suggested is concentrating on upskilling for talent retention. Keeping employees engaged via classes, certifications and conferences, for instance, requires some investment but it benefits both staffers and hospitals alike because cybersecurity demands frequent updating of skill sets.? “If you want to change who you pursue to help address your skills gap, start building your own new collar approach,” IBM said. “At a minimum, make it one component of your overall strategy to build and maintain your cybersecurity workforce.”Cyberattacks will escalate Nolan, 15 Andrew Nolan, Legislative Attorney at the Congressional Research Service, former Trial Attorney at the United States Department of Justice, holds a J.D. from George Washington University, 2015 (“Cybersecurity and Information Sharing: Legal Challenges and Solutions,” CRS Report to Congress, March 16th, Available Online at , Accessed 07-05-2015, p. 1-3)The high profile cyberattacks of 2014 and early 2015 appear to be indicative of a broader trend: the frequency and ferocity of cyberattacks are increasing,11 posing grave threats to the national interests of the United States. Indeed, the attacks on Target, eBay, Home Depot, J.P. Morgan-Chase, Sony Pictures, and Anthem were only a few of the many publicly disclosed cyberattacks perpetrated in 2014 and 2105.12 Experts suggest that hundreds of thousands of other entities may have suffered similar incidents during the same period,13 with one survey indicating that 43% of firms in the United States had experienced a data breach in the past year.14 Moreover, just as the cyberattacks of 2013—which included incidents involving companies like the New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft15—were eclipsed by those that occurred in 2014,16 the consensus view is that 2015 and beyond will witness more frequent and more sophisticated cyber incidents.17 To the extent that its expected rise outpaces any corresponding rise in the ability to defend against such attacks, the result could be troubling news for countless businesses that rely more and more on computers in all aspects of their operations, as the economic losses resulting from a single cyberattack can be extremely costly.18 And the resulting effects of a cyberattack can have effects beyond a single company’s bottom line. As “nations are becoming ever more dependent on information and information technology,”19 the threat posed by any one cyberattack [end page 2] can have “devastating collateral and cascading effects across a wide range of physical, economic and social systems.”20 With reports that foreign nations—such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—may be using cyberspace as a new front to wage war,21 fears abound that a cyberattack could be used to shut down the nation’s electrical grid,22 hijack a commercial airliner,23 or even launch a nuclear weapon with a single keystroke.24 In short, the potential exists that the United States could suffer a “cyber Pearl Harbor,” an attack that would “cause physical destruction and loss of life”25 and expose—in the words of one prominent cybersecurity expert—“vulnerabilities of staggering proportions.”26SolvencyTech innovation is the only option—try or dieSmeloff 6/10[Ed; Head of Vote Solar’s Regulatory Team; Curtailing Clean Energy Threatens Innovation and National Security; The Hill; ; Accessed on 6/28/2017 by MH]The world is entering an era of energy abundance. The declining costs of renewable energy are unleashing new opportunities for growth and economic development across the globe. As Secretary Perry heard at the G7 summit, global greenhouse gas emissions have been flat for three years in a row, led by declines in the U.S. and China. There is now an opportunity for him and other energy policymakers to bend the curve further downward. Of course, there are still important challenges associated with the integration of more renewable energy in the grid. California is turning these challenges into solutions. Using solar and wind power plants to improve the operational performance of the grid is one solution. Another is to stimulate investment in responsive demand and storage through new wholesale market price patterns. A third is to improve weather forecasting to better manage supply variability. ? We encourage Secretary Perry to lead the way to an energy transition to greater efficiency and resiliency. He should look toward California as a model. There, he’ll find support for creating an energy future that is more secure, more reliable and draws on one of America’s greatest resources — innovation.The aff’s inclusive orientation in the field of public education pushes against the discrimination of the status quo and heightened private school techniquesBrown and Gabriel 5/24[Emma and Danielle; Editors for The Chicago Tribune; Betsy DeVos won’t say whether she will Withhold Federal Funds from Private Schools that Discriminate; ; Accessed on 6/28/17 by MH]Education Secretary Betsy DeVos refused to say Wednesday whether she would block private schools that discriminate against LGBT students from receiving federal dollars, explaining that she believes states should have the flexibility to design voucher programs and that parents should be able to choose schools that best fit their children's needs. DeVos returned frequently to the theme of what she called a need for more local control in her first appearance before Congress since her rocky confirmation hearing in January. Fielding questions from members of a House Appropriations subcommittee, she said that states should decide how to address chronic absenteeism, mental health issues and suicide risks among students and that states should also decide whether children taking vouchers are protected by federal special-education law. Researchers have found that many states allow religious schools that receive taxpayer-funded vouchers to deny admission to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students or children with LGBT parents. Asked by Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., whether she could think of any circumstance in which the federal government should step in to stop federal dollars from going to private schools that discriminate against certain groups of students, DeVos did not directly answer. "We have to do something different than continuing a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach," DeVos said. Democrats immediately criticized DeVos' philosophy, saying the nation's top education official must be willing to defend children against discrimination by institutions that get federal money. "To take the federal government's responsibility out of that is just appalling and sad," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif. DeVos pushed back against the notion that the Education Department would be abdicating its authority. "I am not in any way suggesting that students should not be protected," she said. Liz Hill, a DeVos spokeswoman, said later Wednesday that panel members had asked questions about a voucher program that doesn't exist yet and about topics not covered under federal law. "There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the Federal and State roles in education. When States design programs, and when schools implement them, it is incumbent on them to adhere to Federal law," Hill said in an email. "The Department of Education can and will intervene when Federal law is broken." DeVos traveled to Capitol Hill to defend a spending plan that has drawn criticism from both ends of the political spectrum. President Donald Trump has proposed slashing $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, including after-school programs, teacher training, and career and technical education, and reinvesting $1.4 billion of the savings into promoting his top education priority: school choice, including $250 million for vouchers to help students attend private and religious schools. The administration is also seeking far-reaching changes to student aid programs, including the elimination of subsidized loans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness and a halving of the federal work-study program that helps college students earn money to support themselves while in school. In her opening remarks Wednesday, DeVos said that while the size of the proposed cuts to K-12 and student financial programs "may sound alarming for some," the president's budget proposal reflects a push to return more decision-making power to states and more educational choice to parents. "We cannot allow any parent to feel as if their child is trapped in a school that is not meeting their needs," DeVos said. Democrats predictably attacked the administration's budget proposal as an effort to undermine public schools and low-income students' ability to attend college. "This budget reflects the views of an administration filled with people who frankly never had to worry about how they were going to pay for their children going to college," said Rep. Nita Lowey, N.Y., the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. "And yet I'm most upset that this budget would undermine our public education system and the working families who depend on them." Several Republicans praised DeVos, particularly for her push to expand school choice. "I've always made known my preference for giving parents the choice of where to send their students, because in the end the parents are the taxpayers. The parents are the ones who probably know best," said Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md. But GOP members also displayed their share of skepticism about the administration's proposed cuts. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairman of the education subcommittee, questioned the proposal to dramatically cut college financial aid programs such as work-study and college-access programs for low-income students. "Frankly, I will advise you," Cole said, "I have a different point of view." Another key Republican, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, N.J., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, emphasized that it is members of Congress and not the president who hold the power of the purse and will ultimately design the federal budget. Declaring "awe" for special-education teachers' hard work, Frelinghuysen also questioned whether the administration had proposed adequate funding for students with disabilities. DeVos seemed open to devoting more money, calling it a "matter for robust conversation." A 1975 federal special-education law promised that Congress would pay 40 percent of the cost of providing additional services to students with disabilities. Lawmakers have never come close and in 2017 are footing only about 15 percent of the cost. The Trump administration is proposing to hold funding at that level. Critics said they are hopeful that Congress will reject many of Trump's ideas, as lawmakers did this month when they reached a bipartisan deal to fund the government through September. But even in that scenario, Trump's proposal creates damaging uncertainty for school districts and students seeking to pay for college, said John King, who served as President Barack Obama's education secretary and now helms the nonprofit group Education Trust. "The administration has framed the conversation as a conversation about cuts rather than a conversation about investment," King said. "We should be talking about investing more." While the administration's proposed cuts have been embraced by fiscal conservatives who argue that Education Department programs need to be trimmed or eliminated, some conservatives are also troubled by the administration's proposal to invest new money in school choice, saying that represents an unwelcome expansion of the federal footprint in education.Early colleges solve the lack of specialization in sophisticated manufacturingMalanga 6/23[Steven; George M. Yeager Fellow at the Manhattan Institute?and senior editor at?City Journal; Will the Rebirth of Vocational Education bring back ‘Good Jobs’?; Investor’s Business Daily; ; Accessed on 6/29/2017 by MH]Businesses formerly reluctant to partner with educators are now fashioning bold ideas. In 2010 IBM went to education officials in New York City and at the City University of New York with a proposal to create Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH, a six-year career and technical program that combines high school with two years of college to ready students for entry-level technology jobs. The participants build robots, learn computer coding, and study network systems. ?IBM promises students who succeed that they will get priority treatment for jobs. The model is spreading. Already, some 60 similar schools are running in six states with the help of 250 business partners. The new generation of career and technical schools has started to change the educational script. According to one 2014 study, the high school graduation rate for students concentrating in career and technical training was 93%, compared with an overall graduation rate of 80%. Philanthropy is getting on board, too. The Gates Foundation, for example, has given crucial support to institutions like Charlotte's Olympic Community of Schools and the California-based High Tech High Learning network. A number of groups, including the Joyce Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation, have joined with major employers like Target, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penney to set up 100,000 new internships and apprentice positions within the next two years. Despite such successes, quality career and technical training still reaches too few American students. Blame deep-seated institutional obstacles that have to change. States need to change certification requirements so that those with technical skills can teach in public schools. Local educators must coordinate with area businesses to tailor their career schools and academies to a region's needs. Washington can help by promoting better training and more cooperation between business, labor and schools. President Trump made a good start last week when he directed the Labor Department to streamline regulations to make it easier for businesses to offer apprenticeships. Rather than completely disappearing, middle-income work is transforming. Workers need to be prepared for this latest revolution — and the way to do it is becoming clearer.Early College Improves Graduation Rates. Especially among minorities, low income and femalesSmith, 13 (Brian Statewide education and courts reporter for MLive) July 1 “Early college' high schools improve high school and college graduation rates, study shows”Students who attend "early college" high schools where they can earn both high school and college credit are more likely to earn a college degree than students in traditional high schools, a new study from the American Institute of Research indicates. The study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, examined student performance in competitive-enrollment early college high schools across the country. Michigan has 17 early college programs across the state. In an early college high school program, students take five years of classes rather than the traditional four and can earn an associate's degree, a technical certification or up to 60 hours of college credit which transfers to other institutions. Students enrolled in early college programs were more likely to graduate from high school than traditional students, with 86 percent of early college students graduating from high school. The study found that students in early college programs were still more likely than traditional students in their age group to be enrolled in college even after the traditional students had graduated from high school. Minority and low-income students were much more likely to obtain college degrees than their traditional school counterparts, as were female students. Overall, one in five early college high school students graduated high school with an associate's degree or higher, according to the study.Wolfe et al, 2016 (Ndiaye, Mamadou; Wolfe, Rebecca E. Feb 2016 “Early College Can Boost College Success Rates for Low-Income, First-Generation Students” Phi Delta Kappan, v97 n5 p32- Early college high school models are designed to encourage and assist traditionally underrepresented groups of students- low income, Latino, and African-American- to persist in and graduate from high school while earning college credit. Some of the models target high school dropouts, with the aim of helping them acquire the education and training that could lead to better outcomes. The authors review and discuss several such early college designs. By locating in or near a college campus, early colleges first introduce, gradually expose, and then immerse students in the college experience. These models have garnered support from the philanthropic community, which has helped the early college models spread and grow.Closes Achievement Gap among hispanicsBeall, 2017Beall, Kristen AnnProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, “Early College High School: Closing the Latino Achievement Gap” population of United States Latino students is growing at a rapid rate but their academic achievement lags behind white and Asian students. This issue has significant consequences for the nation's economy, as the job market continues to demand more education and better skills. Early College High School programs have the potential to improve educational outcomes for underserved students by combining comprehensive high school curricula with supported postsecondary dual enrollment opportunities. Through a combination of student focus groups, staff interviews, observations, and document review, this qualitative study explored how secondary and postsecondary institutions can work together to create comprehensive dual enrollment programs that lead to increased academic achievement for Latino students. The study relied on the social cognitive career framework and Early College High School programs' theory of change to identify critical cultural and structural supports that resonate specifically with Latino students. The research focused on 12th grade Latino students and staff at two Early College High Schools in Central California. Findings revealed that Early College High School programs embrace a robust core curriculum, serving to remediate academic skills while also preparing students for rigorous postsecondary coursework. Programmatic structures collaboratively respond to student needs while providing supported postsecondary experiences, encouraging improved self-efficacy, changed outcome expectations, and expanded personal goals. Multilayered teacher supports also resonate with Latino students in Early College High School programs, as illustrated by program-wide college-going cultures that include high expectations and trusted relationships. Finally, Early College High Schools support highly enculturated families fostering increased levels of college knowledge and engagement. The findings show that Early College High School programs can offer Latino students a pathway for postsecondary access and improved levels of academic achievement.Solves for at risk studentsDessoff 11Allen, Oct. 2011 District Administration, v47 n9 p74-76, 78, 80 Oct 2011For at-risk students who stand little chance of going to college, or even finishing high school, a growing number of districts have found a solution: Give them an early start in college while they still are in high school. The early college high school (ECHS) movement that began with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 10 years ago has grown from a handful of schools to at least 230 schools now, serving more than 50,000 students in 28 states. An ECHS strategy, which combines high school and college-level instruction, reduces dropout rates and improves academic achievement levels while also boosting students' chances of graduating from school and finding jobs. About 86 percent of early college high school graduates in 2009 went on to some form of postsecondary education, according to Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based nonprofit that is spearheading a national Early College High School Initiative.Reduces gap for Inner City students. Rochford, 2014Joseph A. “Proof of Progress: The First Six Graduating Classes of Canton Early College High School” Stark Education Partnership 2005, when the Canton City Schools (CCS), Stark State College (SSC), the Canton Professional Educators Association (CPEA), and the Stark Education Partnership (SEP) came together to establish Canton's Early College High School (CECHS), the percentage of the city's young adults with some college or an associate degree was 33%. CECHS affords students an opportunity to earn both a diploma and an associate degree during their high school career. In 2005, with only 12.5% of its adults (today it's 13.2%) with a bachelor's degree or higher and 81% of its students in poverty, Canton's poorest neighborhoods needed a compelling example that college is possible. From the onset, CECHS was envisioned not just as a school, but as a culture-shifting community "proof-point" that impoverished inner city students can be successful with college-level work. By CECHS's eighth year of operation in 2013, (the latest figure available) the percentage of young adults with some college or higher had increased to 57%. This report provides key indicators of success for students, such as: graduating high school on time; graduating with college credit; and graduating with an associate degree. Further success indicators include: not one, but two degrees; and beyond early college high school--which means pursuing additional college degrees or serving in the military. The report emphasizes the benefits to the students and their communities should they earn more degrees.Early college improves overall quality of educationEdmunds et al, 2013Edmunds, Julie A.; Willse, John; Arshavsky, Nina; Dallas, AndrewTeachers College Record, v115 n7 2013 ‘Mandated Engagement: The Impact of Early College High Schools” Early college high schools, small schools that blur the line between high school and college, have been obtaining very strong results. This paper uses the frame of student engagement to posit an explanation for the success of these schools. Purpose: This paper examines the impact of early college high schools on indicators and facilitators of engagement in the ninth-grade. The paper also looks at how early college students perceive these facilitators of engagement. Participants: The main sample for this study includes students who applied to an early college high school and went through a lottery process. Student who were accepted through the lottery are the treatment students and those who were not accepted form the control group. Intervention: Early colleges are small schools, often located on college campuses that aim to provide a rigorous course of study with the goal of ensuring that all students graduate with a high school diploma and two years of university transfer credit or an associate's degree. Serving students in grades 9-12 (or 13), the schools are targeted at students who typically are under-represented in college. Data Collection and Analysis: The study uses administrative data submitted to the North Carolina Department of Instruction, including suspensions and attendance data. The study team also administered an original survey to treatment and control students that included scales on indicators and facilitators of engagement. Both the administrative and survey data were analyzed using multiple regression. Finally, the study team collected qualitative data from interviews with early college students. Results: Early college students had better attendance, lower suspensions, and higher levels of engagement than control students. Compared to the control students, early college students also reported higher levels of all of the facilitators of engagement examined, including better relationships with teachers, more rigorous and relevant instruction, more academic and affective support, and higher expectations. Conclusions: Students in early colleges experienced overall higher levels of engagement on a variety of dimensions. The qualitative data suggest that early colleges make concerted and purposeful efforts to engage students in school. These efforts seem to almost require that students are active participants in school; in other words, early colleges can be seen as essentially "mandating?engagement”.A2: CircumventionZero link – the version of the plan we wrote is designed to guarantee passage and enforcement of the plans through any one or all necessary legislative, judicial and executive action We get permanent fiat – any other interpretation turns debate from a “should” question to a “will question”. Neg would always win and we’d also learn a lot less. We still solve perception. Independently, plan’s language makes circumvention far tougher. Executive fiat checks-- we could use only an xo to implement as part of normal means. Judicial fiat checks-- we could use the supreme court to guarantee compliance. Congress checks-- if necessary we can use congressional action to guarantee enforcement Plan restores strong language – that’s sufficient to end circumvention.Circumvention argument Illegitimate-Fiat allows implementation otherwise all affirmatives lose on inherencyPhillips 16 —— Scott, national Assistant debate coach at the Meadows School-Las Vegas) (Top speaker at the Tournament of Champions and CFL National Champion. While debating for Emory University, Scott won ADA nationals, the University of Kentucky Round Robin, Harvard University, Northwestern University and West Georgia. He is a former debate coach at Pace Academy, Notre Dame High School and The Potomac School. Scott has previously worked at the Emory National Debate Institute. He is a co-founder of The 3NR, a collaborative blog) “Trumps Case” HS IMPACT, November 16) The question ultimately becomes “does the affirmative get to fiat implementation?” which we all know is 90% of policy making. Well, if they can’t we are back where we started- every aff loses due to inherency.Think about it this way- would you consider it legitimate if the 2AC grouped 10 solvency based disads and said “the plan won’t be implemented-circumvention”? Probably not. So why is it legitimate when the neg does it? It isn’t.2AC Off CaseFederalism DANon-UQ – Trumps Immigration policy increasing federal control and decreases state’s rightsIsrael, 17 (Josh Senior investigative reporter for Think Progress)Feb 23, 2017 “Trump’s White House is for ‘states’ rights,’ except when it’s against?them” At Thursday’s White House daily press briefing, Sean Spicer criticized Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) for telling school superintendents and law enforcement officials in his state that they?did not need to?take it upon themselves to enforce federal immigration policies, even if Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security asks them to aid his crackdown on undocumented immigrants.“The idea that Governor Malloy would not want the law followed, as enacted by Congress or by the Connecticut legislature in any fashion, seems to be concerning, right? Whether you’re a governor or mayor or the president, laws are passed in this country and we expect people and our lawmakers and law enforcement agencies to follow and adhere to the laws as passed by the appropriate level of government, It’s troubling that that’s the message he would send to his people and to other governors, because we are a nation of laws,” noting that this includes Connecticut laws and federal legislation. Federal immigration laws are the purview of the federal government and states have?absolutely no constitutional obligation?to?enforce them.”No proven states solution. Federal oversight is keyJacob 2017Jacob, Brian A. Nonresident Senior Fellow - Economic Studies, Center on Children and Families. “How The U.S. Department Of Education Can Foster Education Reform In The Era Of Trump And ESSA”. Brookings Institute, 02 Feb 2017. Web. 13 June 2017.The current administration has vowed to leave education matters up to the states, continuing a movement started with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which dramatically limited the federal government’s role in school accountability. While greater local control certainly has some benefits, it risks exacerbating the massive disparities in educational performance across states that already exists. In 2015, there was almost a 30 percentile point difference in 4th?grade math proficiency rates between the top and bottom states, only some of which can be explained by state-level social and economic factors. The massive disparity in progress is perhaps even more disturbing. Between 2003 and 2015, student proficiency rates grew by over 40 percent in some states, while remaining flat or even declining in other states. The Department of Education (DoED) should take steps to highlight these disparities by identifying the lowest performing states and providing information on the status and progress of all states on a variety of educational metrics. The DoED might also provide modest funding and technical assistance to help demographically similar states work together to improve their public education systems. On the campaign trail, President Trump often called for giving more discretion over education policy to states and localities, critiquing Common Core and what he viewed as other instances of federal overreach. In her recent confirmation hearing, President Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary—Betsy DeVos—repeatedly argued for leaving education matters up to the states. And this desire for local control is not limited to the current administration. In 2015, Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) with strong bipartisan support. This legislation replaced the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) system of school accountability with a more narrowly tailored and flexible approach to school reform. Instead of requiring all schools to meet annual performance targets, ESSA requires states to focus on a small set of low-performing schools and gives them considerable latitude to design the interventions they deem appropriate. In discussing ESSA, chair of the Senate Education Committee Lamar Alexander claimed, “The department was in effect acting as a national school board for the 42 states with waivers—100,000 schools. The states were doing fine until the federal government stuck its nose into it…So it was important to get the balls back in the hands of the people who really should have it.”[i] But the evidence suggests that not?all?states are doing fine. Indeed, there are massive disparities across states in terms of current student performance, and these differences are not merely a factor of the social and economic conditions in the state. All states have been actively engaged in efforts to turnaround failing schools, but the effectiveness of such efforts has varied dramatically across jurisdictions. Public education will (and should) always be driven predominantly by local actors—teachers, administrators, school board members, and state legislators. Even under NCLB, states and districts had a mostly unfettered ability to run schools as they saw fit. But with autonomy comes the potential for greater disparity, as more capable, focused, and well-resourced states pull even further ahead of those with less capacity, fewer resources, and greater political dysfunction. The Department of Education (DoED) should take steps to highlight these disparities by identifying the lowest performing states and providing information on the status and progress of all states on a variety of educational metrics. The DoED might also provide modest funding and technical assistance to help demographically similar states work together to improve their public education systems. ARE STATES DOING FINE ON THEIR OWN? Consider student achievement as measured by the National Assessment of Education Progress. While 4th?and 8th?graders as a whole have made modest progress in math and reading since the passage of NCLB, these improvements have flattened in recent years. And, more importantly, there are vast differences by state. Figure 1 shows a scatterplot of proficiency rates in 4th?grade reading and 8th?grade math as an example. At the top, states like Massachusetts boast nearly 50 percent of students meeting the rigorous NAEP proficiency standard. At the bottom, we see cases like New Mexico where less than 23 percent of 4th?graders were proficient in reading and Louisiana and Alabama where only 18 percent of 8th?graders demonstrated proficiency in mathematics. Are these differences we saw above merely a reflection of poverty or other factors beyond the immediate control of the state? No. In a 2015 report, Matthew Chingos at the Urban Institute finds that demographically similar students vary dramatically in their NAEP scores depending on which state they live in.[ii]?At the state level, one can calculate the proficiency rate one would expect to see in a state given factors such as state size, population density, median household income, and unemployment rates. Figure 2 plots these predicted proficiency rates against a state’s actual proficiency rates.[iii]?The 45-degree line reflects the point at which a state’s actual proficiency exactly matches its predicted proficiency. States above the line are doing better than expected based on their social and economic conditions; states below the line are doing worse than predicted. We see, for example, that Massachusetts is not only a high-achieving state, but is scoring substantially higher than what one would expect even after accounting for the relative affluence of the state. At the other end of the achievement spectrum, despite its low overall performance, Mississippi is “beating the odds” given its extremely high levels of poverty. In contrast, Maryland, Michigan, and West Virginia are all scoring significantly lower than predicted based on the social and economic conditions in these states. How about growth over time? Perhaps states are steadily improving despite their low overall proficiency rates? Figure 3 shows the?change?in proficiency rates between 2003 and 2015 alongside the 2015 proficiency rate. The figure is split into four groups. The states in the top right quadrant are those who experienced above average growth?and?above average performance. This set of highly successful states includes Kentucky, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, among others. States in the bottom left quadrant experienced below average growth and below average proficiency. These states—including Michigan, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Alaska—are clearly struggling. HAVE STATE- AND DISTRICT-LED REFORM EFFORTS BEEN SUCCESSFUL? In recent years, there have been a series of state- and district-led initiatives to turn around failing schools. How have these efforts fared? Research to date confirms that turnaround efforts result in dramatically different outcomes depending on the context. A newly released study finds that, on average, schools implementing federally funded but locally controlled interventions realized no achievement gains relative to comparison schools.[iv]?However, there is good evidence that school turnarounds in Massachusetts have been quite successful, perhaps not surprising given the state’s well-regarded accountability system, its generous support of public education, and its highly professional state department of education.[v]?On the other hand, turnaround efforts in Michigan, North Carolina, and Rhode Island have been mostly ineffective according to the latest research.[vi] Even the most comprehensive turnaround efforts show mixed effects. As part of the state’s Race to the Top grant, Tennessee implemented a number of school turnarounds, all of which involved a change in school leadership and a substantial turnover of teachers. But only a modest subset of turnarounds—those led by large districts and that involved substantial additional resources—experienced any significant achievement gains.[vii] Many states have used external operators—mostly charter management organizations (CMOs)—to manage failing schools. In New Orleans, this approach has been quite successful according to recent research.[viii]?On the other hand, the same approach had no positive impact on student performance when implemented in Philadelphia or Tennessee.[ix] What explains the notable lack of progress in some states? Are the leaders in those states lazy or actively trying to stand in the way of improving public schools? Probably not. Many actors play a role in forming and implementing education policy at the state level—the State Board of Education, the state legislators, teacher associations, governors, and officials in the Department of Education. Each of these actors have their own set of interests and priorities. In the absence of a strong external force, there may not be an incentive for these actors to work together and focus on issues directly relevant to academic achievement. Consider a few of the “education” issues that occupied state legislatures last year. In 2016, nineteen states considered legislation to restrict school bathroom access on the basis of one’s sex assigned at birth. While North Carolina is the only state to have enacted such legislation thus far, the issue of bathroom use by transgender students occupied considerable time in many state houses.[x]?For the past several years, states have passed legislation intended to separate themselves from Common Core assessments. In addition to defunding the assessments and issuing requests for newly designed exams, some states have “creatively reinterpreted” disappointing results, papering over the glaring skill deficits the exams were intended to highlight.[xi]?Teacher associations, for their part, continue to push back against teacher evaluation systems that focus on objective measures of student achievement and provide any meaningful differentiation between teachers. While all states pay lip service to the importance of education, budget allocations often do not match the rhetoric. In fact, a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that most states are spending less on K-12 education than before the Great Recession.[xii]?With the pressure of federal accountability removed by the passage of ESSA, states may feel even less need to adequately fund public education. WHAT CAN THE FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DO? The dramatic variation in student performance across states raises the concern that many children will suffer in coming years as states and districts assume greater responsibility for monitoring and intervening in failing schools. Given the current political climate and the limited discretionary resources available to the Secretary of Education, it is unrealistic to imagine that the DoED would play an active role in state-level school reform efforts. However, the DoED can serve an important role simply by highlighting some of these disparities. The department can identify the lowest performing states, and provide biennial information on the progress of these states, both in terms of what reforms they have implemented as well as the change in various outcomes. Indeed, the DoED could provide easily digestible measures of academic performance for all states. This type of “name and shame” strategy has a long tradition. As Justice Louis Brandeis once remarked, “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” And provision of information on state-level performance is well within the department’s broad federal oversight role. Table 1 lists the bottom 10 states based on several difference measures of academic performance. In all cases, the data comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).[xiii]?I present these not as a definitive assessment of which states?should?be on a federal watch list. There are many different criteria one might use to judge a state’s academic performance and then many technical nuances about how to create various metrics. The table below provides one initial attempt at creating such a list. The proficiency rates in columns 1 and 2 are based on 4th?and 8th?grade math and reading exams in 2015. The list in column 3 comes from the Urban Institute report mentioned above. It ranks states based on 2013 NAEP scale scores, which means that it leverages the performance of extremely low and extremely high scoring students more than the proficiency rate measures. Column 4 ranks states according to the improvement (or lack thereof) made in proficiency rates from 2003 to 2015. Appendix Table 1 provides the underlying scores for each state on each of the measures. (Please see the downloadable PDF for the Appendix.) While the states vary somewhat across the columns, it is clear that several states stand out as having particularly weak performance as measured by the NAEP. Several poor, and historically low-performing states such as Alabama and West Virginia appear multiple times. But we also see historically higher-achieving states that have made little progress over the past decade, including Connecticut. My home state, Michigan, makes the bottom 10 list on all 4 measures, and ranks dead last in terms of proficiency growth since 2003. CONCLUSION In states that have been successful in improving public education, one or more groups have brought the different factions together and/or provided the political muscle to break through the roadblocks that often stymie reform. In some cases, this has been the business community; in other cases, a strong governor. In states that, for one reason or another, do not seem to be able to focus on education policy designed to actually improve academic achievement, the DoED can serve this role. By shining a spotlight on states with particularly low student performance, the department can bring attention to the struggles facing public education in these states. The literature on school accountability suggests that this visibility alone can put pressure on educational actors to reform.[xiv]?The hope is that a state’s presence on the list galvanizes various stakeholders to come together to work on a common objective. If DoED is inclined to go beyond merely providing information but still stay well within the umbrella of state and local control, it might look to support interstate compacts by which small groups of states with similar demographics work together with money and TA from ED to improve.[xv] We shouldn’t kid ourselves. No watch list—no matter how well designed or implemented—will lead to dramatic changes overnight. Massachusetts did not become a leader in public K-12 education with any single action, but rather through a concerted effort by many actors over a number of years.[xvi]?But this is one step that the DoED could take to help children who will be left behind as states assume even more control of public education. St Sates don’t have the fundingLeachman et al 2016Leachman, Michael et al. "Most States Have Cut School Funding, And Some Continue Cutting". Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 25 Jan 2016. states provide less support per student for elementary and secondary schools — in some cases, much less — than before the Great Recession, our survey of state budget documents over the last three months finds.? Worse, some states are?still?cutting eight years after the recession took hold.? Our country’s future depends crucially on the quality of its schools, yet rather than raising K-12 funding to support proven reforms such as hiring and retaining excellent teachers, reducing class sizes, and expanding access to high-quality early education, many states have headed in the opposite direction.?These cuts weaken schools’ capacity to develop the intelligence and creativity of the next generation of workers and entrepreneurs.?Our survey, the most up-to-date data available on state and local funding for schools, indicates that, after adjusting for inflation:At least 31 states provided less state funding per student in the 2014 school year (that is, the school year ending in 2014) than in the 2008 school year, before the recession took hold.? In at least 15 states, the cuts exceeded 10 percent.In at least 18 states,?local?government funding per student fell over the same period.? In at least 27 states, local funding rose, but those increases rarely made up for cuts in state support.? Total local funding nationally ― for the states where comparable data exist?―?declined?between 2008 and 2014, adding to the damage from state funding cuts.While data on total school funding in the?current?school year (2016) is not yet available, at least 25 states are still providing less “general” or “formula” funding ― the primary form of state funding for schools ― per student than in 2008.? In seven states, the cuts exceed 10 percent.Most states raised “general” funding per student slightly this year, but 12 states imposed new cuts, even as the national economy continues to improve.? Some of these states, including Oklahoma, Arizona, and Wisconsin, already were among the deepest-cutting states since the recession hit.?Local school districts can’t make up the shortfall. This negatively impacts low-income schools in rural and urban areas. Leachman et al 2016Leachman, Michael et al. "Most States Have Cut School Funding, And Some Continue Cutting". Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 25 Jan 2016. common sense suggests, money matters for educational outcomes.? For instance, poor children who attend better-funded schools are more likely to complete high school and have higher earnings and lower poverty rates in adulthood.[1] States cut funding for K-12 education — and a range of other areas, including higher education, health care, and human services — as a result of the 2007-09 recession, which sharply reduced state revenue.? Emergency fiscal aid from the federal government helped prevent even deeper cuts but ran out before the economy recovered, and states chose to address their budget shortfalls disproportionately through spending cuts rather than a more balanced mix of service cuts and revenue increases.? Some states have worsened their revenue shortfalls by cutting taxes. Restoring school funding should be an urgent priority.? Steep state-level K-12 spending cuts have serious consequences. Weakening a key funding source for school districts.? Some 46 percent of K-12 spending nationally comes from state funds (the share varies by state).[2]??Cuts at the state level force local school districts to scale back educational services, raise more local revenue to cover the gap, or both.? And because property values fell sharply after the recession hit, it’s been particularly difficult for local school districts to raise significant additional revenue through local property taxes without raising tax rates, a politically challenging task even in good times.Slowing the economy’s recovery from the recession.??School districts began cutting teachers and other employees in mid-2008 when the first round of budget cuts took effect, federal employment data show.? By mid-2012, local school districts had cut 351,000 jobs. ?Since then they’ve restored some of the jobs but still are down 297,000 jobs compared with 2008.[3]? These job losses reduced the purchasing power of workers’ families, weakening overall economic consumption and thus slowing the recovery.Impeding reforms widely acknowledged to boost student achievement.? Many states and school districts have identified as a priority reforms that would prepare children better for the future, such as improving teacher quality, reducing class sizes, and increasing student learning time.? Deep funding cuts hamper their ability to implement many of these reforms.? For example, while the number of public K-12 teachers and other school workers has fallen by 297,000 since 2008, the number of students has?risen?by about 804,000.? At a time when producing workers with high-level technical and analytical skills is increasingly important to a country’s prosperity, large cuts in funding for basic education could cause lasting harm.These trends are very concerning to the country’s future prospects.? The health of the nation’s economy and our quality of life will depend crucially on the creativity and intellectual capacity of our people.? If we neglect our schools, we diminish our future.State Funding Fell Sharply, and Local Funding Didn’t Make Up the DifferenceK-12 schools in every state rely heavily on state aid.? On average, some 46 percent of school revenues in the United States come from state funds.? Local governments provide another 45 percent; the rest comes from the federal government.? (See Figure 1.)States typically distribute most of their funding through a formula that allocates money to school districts.? Each state uses its own formula. ?Many states, for instance, target at least some funds to districts with greater student need (e.g., more students from low-income families) and less ability to raise funds from property taxes and other local revenues, although typically this targeting doesn’t fully equalize educational spending across wealthy and poor school districts.[4]?In addition to this “general” or “formula” funding, states also typically provide revenue for other, more specific purposes, such as bus transportation, contributions to school employee pension plans, and teacher training.? States vary in what they include in their general funding formula and what they fund outside the formula.Because schools rely so heavily on state aid, cuts to state funding (especially formula funding) generally force local school districts to scale back educational services, raise more revenue to cover the gap, or both.?When the Great Recession hit, however, property values fell sharply, making it hard for school districts to raise local property taxes — schools’ primary local funding source — without raising rates, which is politically challenging even in good times.? Raising rates was particularly difficult in the midst of a severe recession with steep declines in housing values in many areas.?Federalism reduces local control --- strong national power strengthens itCross ‘02(Frank, Former NDT Champ and Prof Law – U Texas Law, Cardozo Law Review, November, Lexis)The evidence is overwhelming that federalism reduces localism. These robust findings survive the application of different independent variables, different measures of local expenditure, and different national samples. Thus, the interposition of sovereign state governments may reduce the central government's absolute role, but it will also significantly reduce the role of local government, which is the key to decentralized decisionmaking. 270 This finding is not an artifact of the particular time period chosen. Other OECD evidence "for four different time periods ... indicates that unitary countries spent about 60 percent more money at the municipal level than did federal countries." 271 Stephen Calabresi has dismissed the decentralization of unitary systems as merely "a matter of temporary national legislative grace." 272 Vicki Jackson notes that, without judicially-enforced federalism, the national government might "simply reorganize the political boundaries" of the states. 273 While this is technically true, in a formalistic sense, it has no pragmatic materiality. The virtues of decentralization are associated with actual decentralization, not constitutional guarantees. Institutional pragmatic pressures may be far more important than paper guarantees in ensuring decentralization. 274 Jackson concedes that it is unlikely that the national government would in fact abolish the states but claims that "the belief that it cannot happen (under the present Constitution) in broad ways frames a host of other understandings." 275 Surely this is overly formalistic; understandings are framed by real-world circumstances, not by admittedly unrealistic hypotheticals. If the national government faces compelling democratic pressure to delegate, such pressure may be far more significant than any formalistic legal paper guarantees. Moreover, true decentralization, to local governments, in a federal system is merely a matter of temporary state legislative grace. Neither unitary nor federal systems truly [*51] guarantee much real decentralization, but the circumstances of unitary systems conduce to a greater overall level of decentralization. Indeed, the international evidence suggests that federalism and decentralization function at cross purposes. 276This internal link turns their impactCross ‘02(Frank, Former NDT Champ and Prof Law – U Texas Law, Cardozo Law Review, November, Lexis)Federalism is a structural feature of the American political system. The federal system in this nation will not disappear in light of evidence that it is inferior to a more unitary system. 317 If federalism is only a "historical artifact," 318 though, it hardly offers grounds for its vigorous enforcement by the Supreme Court or other institutions. 319 The relevant issue regards what we shall make of this historical artifact and how it might be adapted, within the bounds of the Constitution, for the benefit of the nation. The benefits of decentralization not only fail to justify an expansive defense of states' rights, they affirmatively counsel against such an interpretation of the constitution. As more power is transferred from the national government to the states, so will authority be drawn from localities to the more centralized states and governmental quality and societal welfare will suffer. Fortunately, it appears unlikely that the Supreme Court will substantially reinvigorate American federalism. 320 Historically, "the less politically significant the issue, the greater the Court's insistence on the virtues of federalism." 321 The structural features of the Court make it unlikely that federalism jurisprudence will ever become too aggressive. 322 On the margin, however, the current Court clearly intends to strengthen state sovereignty and limit the discretion of the federal government in favor of that of the states. Those decisions have been defended and justified as prudential ones, preserving the virtues of decentralized decisionmaking. This defense is grounded in speculation and symbolism, though, and lacks truth. We have a federal system in this nation, for better or worse. Despite its federalism, the United States is a relatively [*59] decentralized nation, with reasonably good governance and no severe corruption problem. Our beneficial situation cannot plausibly be attributed to our federal system itself, though, given the empirical evidence. Consequently, the mere pious invocation of federalism and its values of decentralization and good governance, which has become common among academic commentators and even judges, provides no real support for any particular decisions in support of states' rights. Rather, any such decisions about federalism, whether judicial, legislative, or executive, should be grounded in a pragmatic assessment of their consequences. Dedication to preservation and empowerment of state sovereignty, in its own intrinsic right, is insupportable, and the presumption should be to the contrary.Executive Order CPPIC TheoryPics are bad and a voting issue for fairness and education: 1. Unpredictable- the neg could PIC out of small portions of the aff that are impossible for the aff to research before the debate 2. Aff Ground- the PIC uses the 1AC as offense against the affirmative, destroying clash. 3. Encourages vague plan texts- hurts neg ability to generate offense4. Prevents debate on best policy option- focuses debate on small parts instead of the big picture5. Not competitive- PICs are only textually competitive not functionally competitive which creates a bad standard for debate.CP ProperPerm do the counterplan—the plan includes mandates that utilize any combination of the federal government necessary to garner offense. This is not textually competitivePerm do both—CP is the affThe counterplan fails—only Congress has the constitutional authority to provide funds to education—sanctuary cities disprove Trump’s power with Executive Orders and empirics prove—Obama could have just passed Healthcare on his ownFoley 17[Elizabeth; Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law; Trump Can’t Withhold Funds from Sanctuary Cities; The New York Times; ; Accessed on 6/30/2017 by MH]First, if Congress wants to place conditions on states’ receipt of federal funds, it must do so “unambiguously,” enabling states to make a knowing decision, cognizant of the consequences of their choice to accept federal funds. While the United States Department of Justice, in the waning days of the Obama administration, notified recipients of two federal law enforcement grants that the grants were conditioned on compliance with Section 1373, this notification was not imposed by Congress. An executive branch guidance document cannot substitute, constitutionally, for an unambiguous condition imposed by Congress. Second, there must be a reasonable relationship between the condition imposed and the federal purpose for spending the money. In South Dakota, for example, the court upheld a federal law that withheld 10 percent of federal highway funds if states refused to raise their drinking age to 21. The court found a reasonable relationship, since “one of the main purposes” for highway funds is “safe interstate travel,” and raising the drinking age could conceivably further this goal. Congress likewise could condition the receipt of law-enforcement-related grants on compliance with Section 1373, but it has not yet done so. Because one purpose law enforcement grants is the improvement of the safety of campuses and communities, Congress could conclude that sharing information about detained, undocumented immigrants could improve safety in those places, meeting the reasonable relationship requirement. While some argue that sharing information with the I.N.S. will decrease the safety of communities by discouraging undocumented immigrants from reporting crimes, Congress is not required constitutionally to resolve this broader debate. A closer constitutional call, however, is whether Congress could withhold other federal grants, unrelated to law enforcement. It seems doubtful, for example, that conditioning receipt of Medicaid funds on compliance with Section 1373 would pass constitutional muster, since Medicaid funds are expended to improve individual health rather than broader community safety. If Congress wanted to withhold funds beyond law enforcement grants, therefore, it should lay the groundwork for such a logical connection with Section 1373. The constitutional power to attach strings to federal funds belongs to Congress, not the president. If Congress wants to withhold federal grants from sanctuary cities that violate Section 1373, it may do so within certain limits established by the Supreme Court. Now that President Trump’s executive order has been enjoined, the next — and only constitutionally sustainable — move is up to Congress.Congressional backlash to executive orders weakens the presidentPosner 2K [Michael, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and Adjunct Professor at the Weill Medical College in New York “Blocking the Presidential Power Play” National Journal, Jan 1, ]Some legal experts counsel Congress to be careful not to usurp legitimate presidential power. One expert urging caution is Douglas Cox, a lawyer who was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department during the Bush Administration. "When a President overreaches and uses executive orders to invade or supersede the legislative powers of Congress, Congress may be sufficiently provoked to consider an across-the-board approach to rein in those abuses," he told the House Rules subcommittee. "Although that reaction is understandable, Congress must be careful to understand the extent to which executive orders are a necessary adjunct of the President's constitutional duties," Cox added. "At all times, Congress has ample legislative and political means to respond to abusive or lawless executive orders, and thus Congress should resist the temptation to pursue more sweeping, more draconian, and more questionable responses."Spending DALink turn—spending is key to early college high school innovation and preventing racist policies from prioritizing privileged students in educationWong 5/23[Alia; Associate Education Editor for The Atlantic; Trump’s Education Budget Takes Aim at the Working Class; ; Accessed on 7/2/17 by MH]Many of the spending goals outlined in Donald Trump’s?proposed education budget?reflect his campaign rhetoric. The president, who has long called for reducing the federal government’s role in schools and universities, wants to cut the Education Department’s funding by $9 billion, or 13 percent of?the budget approved by Congress last month. The few areas that would see a boost pertain to?school choice, an idea that Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have repeatedly touted as a top priority. In the White House’s spending proposal, hundreds of millions of the dollars would go toward charter-school and voucher initiatives, while another $1 billion in grants would encourage states to adopt school-choice policies. But other aspects of Trump’s funding plan fly in the face of his past statements on education, raising confusion about his priorities. He wants to cut state grants for career and technical education (CTE), for example, by $166 million, and nearly halve funding for the roughly $1 billion federal work-study program. Both CTE and work-study are education models that enjoy broad bipartisan support and are particularly palatable to Republicans and the?white, working-class voters?who clinched Trump’s election. Tellingly, there’s little consensus between Trump’s spending proposal and the bipartisan appropriations bill?unveiled?by Congress earlier this month.Politics DANon-Unique—Trump has already destroyed available political capital on education reformWeingarten 2017 [( Randi May 03, 201 american labor leader, attorney, and educator. president of the American Federation of Teachers and a member of the AFL-CIO. former president of the United Federation of Teachers.) “Betsy Devos and Donald Trump Are Dismantling Public Education” ] A recent poll by?Harvard and?Politico?showed that while parents want good public school choices to meet the individual needs of their kids, they do not want those choices pit against one another or used to drain money from other public schools. In other words, the DeVos/Trump agenda is wildly out of step with what Americans want for their kids. It’s what I saw when I took DeVos to visit public schools in Van Wert, Ohio, last month. This is an area that voted more than 70 percent for Trump, but people there love and invest in their public schools — from a strong early childhood program, to robust robotics and other strategies that engage kids in powerful learning, to a community school that helps the kids most at risk of dropping out stay on a path to graduation. It’s what I saw at the Community Health Academy of the Heights in New York City where the school provides a full-service community health clinic, in-school social workers, a food pantry, parent resource center, and other services for parents and kids. And it’s what I saw this week at Rock Island Elementary School in Broward County, Fla., where kids participate in robotics programs after school, where there is a library in every classroom and a guided reading room where kids can build their literacy skills. The great things happening in these schools are all funded by federal dollars and threatened by the Trump/DeVos budget.Many of those who?voted for Trump?did so because they believed he would keep his promise to stand up for working people and create jobs. They didn’t vote to dismantle public education and with it the promise and potential it offers their children. Now, the person who ran on jobs and the economy seems intent on crushing one of the most important institutions we have to meet the demands of a changing economy, enable opportunity and propel our nation forward. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from?Trump’s first 100 days.No Internal link-Education fights are inevitableHess and Hamilton 5/7/17 (Frederick and Kelsey, Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book “Letters to a Young Education Reformer.” Kelsey Hamilton is a research assistant at AEI), “School choice is popular, but GOP must face down its image problem,” The Hill, it comes to education, President Trump has declared his intention to aggressively promote school choice.While his support for charter schooling and school vouchers has drawn the most attention, Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have also moved on other fronts. Trump has pushed to shrink the Education Department’s footprint via an?executive order?targeted at instances “where the Federal Government has unlawfully overstepped state and local control,” proposed more than $9 billion in cuts to the education budget, tempered Obama regulations targeting?for-profit universities, and rescinded Obama’s civil rights directive stipulating expansive accommodations for transgender students. Reaction to Trump’s proposals has been predictably mixed. The New York Times editorial board declared that the budget drawback would “impose pain for pain’s sake,” and critics on the left and right?lambasted the tax credit scholarship program?for funneling public school funds into private schools and increasing the federal role in education, respectively. As Trump presses forward with his education agenda and seeks to rally Republicans to his banner, an important question is how much support he can expect from the public. The public will undoubtedly support some Trump education policies — for instance, when it comes to school choice, the annual 2016 Education Next poll reported that?51 percent of the general public supports charter schools?and just 28 percent oppose them. Support for this or that policy, however, may prove less significant than baseline trust in (or distrust of) Republican proposals on schooling. Given that, how has the public tended to view Republicans and Democrats when it comes to schooling? To answer, we turned to the polls. We searched various forms of the question “Which political party does a better job handling education issues?” using the online database of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, a respected repository of opinion survey results. We included the results of surveys that asked consistently about this topic for over a decade or more. The results depicted a significant, sustained Democratic advantage when the public was asked which party it trusted with schools. Pew News Interest asked, “Which party could do a better job of improving our education?” and Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup asked, “In your opinion, which of the two major political parties is more interested in improving public education in this country — the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” Combining the two sets of similar results painted a pretty clear picture. In 1999, the Democrats had the largest lead at 23 percentage points. After 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency and championed the No Child Left Behind Act, the gap steadily narrowed. It hovered between a 7 and 11 point Democratic advantage until 2008, when it inflated to 17 points during?Barack Obama’s election. This surge in support moderated during Obama’s term, falling to a two-decade low of five percentage points in 2014, before bouncing back to 12 points in 2015 — the last year this question was asked by either poll. The Winston Group conducted the third poll that met our criteria, a survey that asked, “Which party do you have more confidence in to handle the issue of education, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” The Democrats also led every time the question was asked, and always by at least 7 points. What’s the upshot? First, when it comes to schools, it’s clear that the public has consistently trusted the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party in recent decades. This means that Trump is likely to be working uphill when it comes to education. Second, this situation may change with time. School choice is relatively popular with the general public. If the public views the Democrats as opposing federal efforts to expand school choice, this may work in Trump’s favor ?—and could potentially hurt Democrats on the issue. ?????? Finally, the Democratic advantage has moved in accord with presidential elections. Under Bush, the gap between Democrats and Republicans narrowed substantially. During Obama’s 2008 win, the Democratic lead skyrocketed. Only time will tell how Trump’s presidency may affect the public opinion of the parties on education.No Link- The public will support Dems over Trump on educationHess and Hamilton 5/7/17 (Frederick and Kelsey, Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book “Letters to a Young Education Reformer.” Kelsey Hamilton is a research assistant at AEI), “School choice is popular, but GOP must face down its image problem,” The Hill, it comes to education, President Trump has declared his intention to aggressively promote school choice.Given that, how has the public tended to view Republicans and Democrats when it comes to schooling? To answer, we turned to the polls.We searched various forms of the question “Which political party does a better job handling education issues?” using the online database of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, a respected repository of opinion survey results. We included the results of surveys that asked consistently about this topic for over a decade or more.The results depicted a significant, sustained Democratic advantage when the public was asked which party it trusted with schools. Pew News Interest asked, “Which party could do a better job of improving our education?” and Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup asked, “In your opinion, which of the two major political parties is more interested in improving public education in this country — the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?” Combining the two sets of similar results painted a pretty clear picture.In 1999, the Democrats had the largest lead at 23 percentage points. After 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency and championed the No Child Left Behind Act, the gap steadily narrowed. It hovered between a 7 and 11 point Democratic advantage until 2008, when it inflated to 17 points during?Barack Obama’s election. This surge in support moderated during Obama’s term, falling to a two-decade low of five percentage points in 2014, before bouncing back to 12 points in 2015 — the last year this question was asked by either poll.The Winston Group conducted the third poll that met our criteria, a survey that asked, “Which party do you have more confidence in to handle the issue of education, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party?” The Democrats also led every time the question was asked, and always by at least 7 points.What’s the upshot? First, when it comes to schools, it’s clear that the public has consistently trusted the Democratic Party more than the Republican Party in recent decades. This means that Trump is likely to be working uphill when it comes to education.School choice thumps TrumpBryant 2017 [( Jeff, June 29,2017 associate fellow at Campaign for America's Future and editor of the recently launched?Education Opportunity Network,?a project of the Institute for America’s Future, in partnership with the?Opportunity to Learn Campaign..) “Trump is Vulnerable on Education, Do Demorcrasts Care? ” ] Voters Want Increased Spending, Not Choice A?new survey of Republican and Democratic voters?by Hart Research, for the American Federation of Teachers, finds that a clear majority of voters are not in agreement with the education agenda Trump and DeVos are prescribing for the country.While Trump and DeVos push for a retreat in federal spending on education and a redirection of funds from public schools to privately operated charter schools and voucher-funded private schools, the vast majority of Democrats and a clear plurality of Republicans want to do the exact opposite. Delving into specific survey results, Casey Quinlan at?Think Progress?writes, “a significant number of Republicans and Trump voters” are opposed to the Trump administration’s education budget cuts, especially the cuts to services benefiting students with disabilities and school serving low-income kids.“Public education is a priority for voters, and fully half of all voters identify education as the part of the federal budget for which they would most strongly oppose cuts,” write survey authors Geoff Garin and Guy Molyneux in their report of the findings.“Only a quarter of Republican voters say the federal government is overspending on public education,” they report, while 42 percent of Republicans believe the federal government spends too little. Large majorities of both Democratic voters (83 percent) and independent voters (55 percent) say? federal spending on public education is insufficient.On the issue of redirecting public money to charters and vouchers, clear majorities of voters of all stripes don’t want to see public school supports sacrificed for the sake of more “choice.” For Trump and DeVos to take money from programs for high-poverty schools and redirect the money to charter schools and voucher programs is especially objectionable to all voters. Seventy-six percent say that priority is unacceptable.The survey’s findings overwhelmingly lead to the conclusion that Democrats should distance themselves from Trump’s education agenda for the same reasons they should separate from Republican extremism on healthcare and the economy: It makes good political sense.In an analysis of the recent Democratic party primary for Virginia governor, Rachel Levy notes, in her post at?The Progressive,?that the opposing candidates’ stands on public education may have made a crucial difference in the race. That’s good news for public schools, and bad news for candidates who are at odds with voters on the issues. Republicans have achieved great success behind their drumbeat of an end to government. But they’ve yet to experience, for the most part, how that agenda bears out?when it starts doing serious damage to local schools in the rural and suburban communities they represent. Those consequences, along with the unpopular education agenda of the Trump administration, may make Republican incumbents more vulnerable than they’ve been in decades.Democrats, on the other hand, say government works, but only when it’s focused on the interests of?We The People, rather than just the wealthy and powerful. Democratic candidates can back that sort of talk up by, among other things, supporting our local public schools.KLink turn—our first advantage collapses biopolitical structures best—the white flight Trump administration has only reinforced social hierarchies that the aff claims to rupture through an inclusive means of education.Perm do both—the alternative is not mutually exclusive to the affThe alternative cedes the political and will be circumvented—only a policy change to the status quo produces meaningful change… the aff also solves betterHawks 15[Amanda; Writer for The Human Condition; Education and Social Structure; ; Accessed on 7/2/17 by MH]Until roughly the industrial revolution, school was for elites. High school has only been universal in US since around 1900. It's odd to argue that universal execution is designed to perpetuate the underclass; this has more traditionally been done by not educating. Education (or anything else) can never make everyone an elite, but of the levers that are accessible to policy, it does seem like one of the more plausible ways to increase social mobility. One problem with this program is that in countries with historic class inequality, lower classes have culturally differentiated, and to some degree reject the norm of the ruling elite. Current hand wringing about US primary and secondary education is not about any deterioration in education, it's about increased expectations. Both “other countries have higher scores, and that shouldn't be”, and also a good intention to raise all students up to the level that would enable them to go to college, which is now seen as a minimum credential for a good job. In contrast, many aspects of the system are largely unchanged from the pre-1900 era, when higher education was overtly elitist. While the desire to insure that “no child is left behind” is commendable, the particular methods (frequent standardized tests, grading teachers and schools) are a huge experiment that isn't founded on science or any actual understanding of how education works. This isn't because reformers are ignorant about how the current system works (though that may also be true), but because nobody really understands how the institutions of education are currently contributing to overall good (see?puzzles.) These efforts largely take the current curriculum for granted, yet necessarily also trivialize it because of the limitations of testing. It is indeed a moral failing that we for years largely ignored the fate of children from poor neighborhoods, and local government was perhaps somewhat complicit in not holding students to higher standards, but simply blaming schools and teachers isn't going to solve the problem, and may indeed make it worse. These schools are now highly motivated to improve test results, but given the loose coupling between curriculum and whatever the actual function of education is, this may not help.NegativeCaseSocial HierarchiesColorblindness only reifies the white power and silences racism Lopez, 2003 (Gerardo [Professor of Political Science], "The (Racially Neutral) Politics of Education: A Critical Race Theory Perspective", Educational Administration Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 1 (February 2003) 68-94, 6/28, eaq.content/39/1/68.full.pdf) // cjh Racism, in other words, has been reduced to broad generalizations about? another group based on the color of their skin. It has become an individual? construction as opposed to a social and/or civilizational construct (Scheurich &? Young, 1997; Young & Laible, 2000). In this regard, racism is not necessarily? connected to the larger “distribution of jobs, power, prestige, and wealth”? (Crenshaw et al., 1995, p. xiv) but is viewed as deviant behaviors and/or attitudes? in an otherwise neutral world. The belief that colorblindness will eliminate? racism is not only shortsighted but reinforces the notion that racism is a? personal—as opposed to systemic—issue (Matsuda, 1996; McCarthy &? Crichlow, 1993; Scheurich & Young, 1997; Tatum, 1997; Valdes, Culp, &? Harris, 2002; Williams, 1995b).? By ignoring this broader sociological web of power in which racism functions,? individuals can readily equate White racism with Black nationalism.? This slippage only serves to protect the idea of a neutral social order by moving? the focus away from the barriers and inequities that exist in society and? refocusing it on the “ignorant” individual(s). As a result, the collective frustrations? of people of color and/or Black nationalist groups are simply seen as? irrational—their struggle and plight to end racism are, in effect, reduced to a? deviant form of “reverse” racism (see also Solorzano & Yosso, 2001;? Villalpando, in press). This slippage only maintains racism firmly in place by? ignoring or downplaying the role of White racism in the larger social order.? To be certain, racism has never waned in society; it has merely been manifested? in different forms. However, the discourse on racism has shifted? through time, such that overt and/or blatant acts of hate (e.g., name calling,? López / CRITICAL RACE THEORY 69? Downloaded from eaq. at UNIV CALIFORNIA BERKELEY LIB on June 26, 2015? lynching, hate crimes, etc.) have only been identified as being racist? (Crenshaw, 2002; Hayman & Levit, 2002). This focus on explicit acts has? ignored the subtle, hidden, and often insidious forms of racism that operate at? a deeper, more systemic level. When racism becomes “invisible,” individuals? begin to think that it is merely a thing of the past and/or only connected to the? specific act. Rarely is racism seen as something that is always present in society? and in our daily lives (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995a; Delgado &? Stefancic, 2001; Valdes et al., 2002).Colorblind policy locks in white supremacy – justifies status quo inequality – it must be challengedDavis et al 15- researcher of social justice leadership at University of Texas with the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Texas (Bradley W. Davis , Mark A. Gooden, and Donna J. Micheaux, “Color-Blind Leadership: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of the ISLLC and ELCC Standards”, , p. 7) Additionally, Delgado and Stefancic (2001) argue that the system of White supre macy5 serves important purposes that outline how race-based outcomes emerge, often as an unconscious result of how individuals think about race. Moreover, the inherent subtlety that comes from being ordinary makes White racism harder to detect, and therefore more difficult to address. Incidentally, the impact of the unearthed White racism is difficult to measure. Thus, concepts of color blindness or formal definitions of equality, which insist on treating all people equally, facilitate hiding White racism in plain sight. Thus, White takes on the appearance of being normal, natural, and fair, as it operates in the background in activities like policy construction. Color blindness s stifles deeper reflections about inequity and precludes interrogations of White privilege or conversations about equalizing outcomes. In the case of education, color blindness precludes recognition and repair of racial opportunity gaps. Thus, like those CRT scholars who argue that concepts of neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy must be challenged, we contend that educators must start to question why these concepts hinder the reduction of systemic inequities.The law fails to bring about positive racial change – it must be rejectedChang 93 – (Robert S. Seattle University Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality “Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space” California Law Review, Vol. 81, No. 5 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1241+1243-1323 , cayla_)The Critical Legal Studies movement emerged in order to examine the ways in which the law reinforces hierarchical social relations. Critical Legal Scholars draw from several political and intellectual movements, including Marxism, Legal Realism, poststructuralism, and postmodemism. Critical Legal Scholars contend that legal doctrine is indeterminate, contradictory, and partial to privileged classes. Far from being a site of abstract and neutral reasoning, law, Critical Legal Scholars contend, is ideological and political. Critical Legal Scholars also argue that the law invokes imposing images and technical language in order to mystify its audiences and to convince them that legal arrangements are natural and inevitable. Critical Legal Scholars often target legal rights in their critiques. Critical Legal Scholars believe that rights are malleable and that they alienate individuals from one another and induce a false consciousness among oppressed people who, believing they are truly protected by rights, do not actively resist their oppression. Several, though not all, Critical Legal Scholars trash rights and argue that progressives should stress informality over the structure of rights; rights simply reify law and nurture the illusion of law's naturalness. Postmodemism leads Critical Legal Scholars to question reliance upon law as a vehicle for achieving justice. Critical Legal Scholars conclude that rights are part of an oppressive social regime and that progressive scholars should forcefully deconstruct their seemingly natural status. 85 Critical Race Theorists share Critical Legal Scholars' skepticism toward law's purported neutrality. They accept Critical Legal Scholars' indeterminacy thesis, believe that the law reinforces hierarchical social relations, and concur with the notion that the law is a limited, perhaps even improper, instrument for pursuing equality. Yet, Critical Race Theorists do not share the Critical Legal Scholars' desire to move beyond a rights structure. Although they concede that rights are malleable and socially constructed, they are also aware of the importance of rights in the struggle for racial justice. Several Critical Race Theorists contributed to a symposium in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 6 in which they criticized Critical Legal Scholars for failing to recognize the importance of rights for communities of color. Although they acknowledge the limitations of rights talk, Critical Race Theorists also believe that rights play a vital role in antiracism. Patricia Williams, for example, eloquently conveys the simultaneous mistrust of and reliance upon rights by blacks: To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true; yet it is also true that blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before. We held onto them, put the hope of them into our wombs, and mothered them-not just the notion of them. We nurtured rights and gave rights life. And this was not the dry process of reification, from which life is drained and reality fades as the cement of conceptual determinism hardens roundbut its opposite. This was the resurrection of life from 400-year-old ashes; the parthenogenesis of unfertilized hope.87 Critical Race Theorists, therefore, embrace both a postmodernist skepticism toward the efficacy, neutrality, and inevitability of law and a concomitant modernist reliance upon law and enlightened reasoning as sources of antiracist resistance. 88 In a thoughtful account of the divide between Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Studies, Angela Harris argues that the task for Critical Race Theorists is to "live in the conflict between modernism and postmodernism."' 9 Harris offers a healthy resolution to the apparent internal contradiction of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theorists cannot completely reject postmodernism, because "the old optimistic faith in reason, truth, blind justice, and neutrality, have not brought us to racial justice, but have rather left us 'stirring the ashes."' 90 Nevertheless, a wholesale commitment to postmodernism (and complete rejection of modernist principles) is undesirable because "faith in reason and truth and belief in the essential freedom of rational subjects have enabled people of color to survive and resist subordination."91 Both postmodernism and modernism offer strategic advantages for antiracist theory. Rather than seeking to resolve its internal conflict, Critical Race Theory should seek to "inhabit that very tension."92The aff addresses the wrong issue—private and public schools are environments that racism is necessitatedAnderson 2016[Melinda; Contributing Writer for The Atlantic; How the Stress of Racism Affects Learning; ; Accessed on 6/28/17 by MH]A?recent study?from Northwestern University corroborates Agostini’s experience, suggesting that the stress of racial discrimination may partly explain the persistent gaps in academic performance between some nonwhite students, mainly black and Latino youth, and their white counterparts. The team of researchers found that the physiological response to race-based stressors—be it perceived racial prejudice, or the drive to outperform negative stereotypes—leads the body to pump out more stress hormones in adolescents from traditionally marginalized groups. This biological reaction to race-based stress is compounded by the psychological response to discrimination or the coping mechanisms youngsters develop to lessen the distress. What emerges is a picture of black and Latino students whose concentration, motivation, and, ultimately, learning is impaired by unintended and overt racism. Emma Adam, a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern and the study’s senior author, said?prior research?had established racial differences in levels of cortisol—a hormone that increases when the body is stressed—between black and white youth, and linked this to the impact of discrimination. In the current research review, she and her co-authors set out to connect the dots. “We had observed these [dissimilarities] and knew that sleep and stress hormones have strong implications for cognition … we also knew that there was a strong racial gap in academic attainment.” Two sources of stress encountered by black and Latino students and examined in the report are perceived discrimination—the perception that you will be treated differently or unfairly because of your race—and stereotype threat, the stress of confirming negative expectations about your racial or ethnic group. According to the paper, among this population of students, perceived discrimination from teachers was “related to lower grades, less academic motivation … and less persistence when encountering an academic challenge.” The study also found that the anxiety surrounding the stereotype of academic inferiority undermined students performing academic tasks.InnovationNon-Unique- Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Summit means the point of no return on climate change has been passedShear 6/1[Michael; White House Correspondent for The New York Times; Trump will Withdraw U.S. from Paris Climate Agreement; ; Accessed on 6/29/17 by MH]President Trump announced on Thursday that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord, weakening efforts to combat?global warming?and embracing isolationist voices in his White House who argued that the agreement was a pernicious threat to the economy and American sovereignty. In a speech from the Rose Garden, Mr. Trump said the landmark 2015 pact imposed wildly unfair environmental standards on American businesses and workers. He vowed to stand with the people of the United States against what he called a “draconian” international deal. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the president said, drawing support from members of his Republican Party but widespread condemnation from political leaders, business executives and environmentalists around the globe. Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the agreement for environmental action signed by 195 nations is a remarkable rebuke to heads of state, climate activists, corporate executives and members of the president’s own staff, who all failed to change his mind with an intense, last-minute lobbying blitz. The Paris agreement was intended to bind the world community into battling rising temperatures in concert, and the departure of the Earth’s second-largest polluter is a major blow. Mr. Trump said he wanted to negotiate a better deal for the United States, and the administration said he had placed calls to the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Canada to personally explain his decision. A statement from the White House press secretary said the president “reassured the leaders that America remains committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to robust efforts to protect the environment.” But within minutes of the president’s remarks, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement saying that the Paris climate accord was “irreversible” and could not be renegotiated.Non-Unique—Hacking is up now and nuclear reactors have already been breachedSheth 2017[Sonam; Reporter for Business Insider, Graduated from Rutgers University with a major in Economics and minor in Political Science; Hackers Breached a US Nuclear Power Plant’s Network, and it could be a ‘Big Danger’; ; Accessed on 6/29/17 by MH]Unidentified hackers recently breached at least one US nuclear power plant and the situation is being investigated by federal officials, sources familiar with the matter?told ABC News?on Wednesday. The name and location of the plant have not been released, but cyberattacks have affected "multiple nuclear power generation sites this year," according to E&E News, which was the?first to report the story. It is not yet clear who launched the attack and whether it is connected to a?global cyberattack that crippled [harmed] several countries and corporations beginning on Tuesday. The breach was contained to the business-associated side of the plant, officials said. So far, little information has come out about the origins of the hack, code named "Nuclear 17,"?but evidence indicates that the attack was not serious enough to prompt alerts from the public safety systems at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the International Atomic Energy Agency, E&E reported. The information available thus far indicates that nuclear safety?is not immediately at direct risk. But cybersecurity experts say that now that hackers have infiltrated the system, nuclear safety could be at risk down the road.?The aff aims to satisfy capitalism's urge for limitless growth - causes exploitation, destruction of democracies, and destroys value to life while trying to stave off the inevitable collapseClark 12 (Richard, OpEd News, 8/28/12, republished by WPF 4/3/14, " How and Why Is Global Corporate Capitalism Obsolete?", )What lies at the heart of this insanity? It is this: Commanding an implacable and steady increase of top-tier individual and corporate wealth is the core principle of global corporate capitalism. Meanwhile, recognition of any social concern, or relationship-to-the-natural-world, that transcends the goal of increasing capital accumulation for the few, does not occur. Why not? It's because it is extrinsic to the system, and must therefore be ignored.? Four critical problems must then be recognized:? Dependence on growth: Global corporate capitalism relies on limitless growth -- but the natural resources essential to wealth production are finite, i.e. limited. Super-exploitation of resources is exhausting those resources and destroying the ecosystems with which they are associated, thereby jeopardizing human survival as well as that of other species.? Propensity to war: Since the only goal of the power elite is to accumulate (rather than more fairly distribute) wealth, the limited and shrinking resources that are essential to producing that wealth must and will be fought over, and will be owned and controlled by the winners. For this reason, high-tech, super-deadly warfare becomes inevitable. Intrinsic & growing inequity, and the consequently inevitable disappearance of democracy: Without any constraining outside force or internalized principle of social equity, capital accumulation leads almost exclusively to ever more accumulation by the few, which is to say that ever larger amounts of capital are thereby concentrated in ever fewer hands. Problem is, democracies are corruptible: so this ever greater concentration of wealth allows the purchase of the legal and political representation it needs to get laws passed that facilitate the further accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of the moneyed and powerful few. This means that as the concentration of wealth increases, democracy is degraded and ultimately destroyed.? Ironically, extreme capital accumulation is actually unproductive of real happiness: Human happiness and wellbeing are demonstrably and empirically tied to factors other than capital accumulation. The extreme poverty that results, for some, from this lopsided accumulation, is clearly unproductive of happiness; but after a certain point of accumulation, so is wealth itself unproductive of ever more happiness. This happens just as soon as wealth goes past a relatively modest level. This is not speculation: Through much study and gathering of data, sociologists have found that happiness, contentment and human fulfillment are most widespread in those societies where:? a) there are guarantees that basic needs will be met for all,? b) wealth is more equitably distributed, and? c) bonds between people and the natural environment remain stronger than the desire to accumulate wealth.? SolvencyFirst is circumvention—Betsy DeVos’ policies prevent the aff from ever happening—no funding and all public education would fail without government regulation—this is evidence from the 1ACArmstrong 5/24[Mark; Founder of LongReads and Reporter for WordPress; Betsy DeVos’s Cynical Defense of the Trump Education Budget Cuts; ; Accessed on 6/9/17 by MH]Early in Betsy DeVos’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday we got to see how the Education Secretary can magically turn less money into “more latitude.” In her?opening remarks to a House Appropriations subcommittee, DeVos, argued that the budget — which proposes cutting Department of Education programs by more than $10 billion — represents a rethinking of the role of the federal government in education, giving states and communities greater control and freedom in how they serve students and families. DeVos’s “control and freedom” narrative includes a proposed $250 million for school vouchers, which diverts money to private and religious schools.? Early in the testimony, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) asked DeVos why she wants to slash funding for teachers’ professional development: “They have either hit all the benchmarks, or they are doing so poorly there’s no need to invest in them.” Which category, DeLauro asked, do these teachers fall into? DeVos demurred, saying the program funding was not substantial enough to make a real impact, and that states and local agencies are better suited for these programs “as they have great latitude with how to designate other funding sources.”?You see, by cutting funding, it’s freeing for the states! DeLauro summed up the situation quite plainly: “You can’t do more with less. You do less with less.” The?Washington Post?has?outlined the full list of proposed education cuts, including initiatives for after-school programs, special education, and college financial aid and work-study programs: The documents obtained by the Post — dated May 23, the day the president’s budget is expected to be released — outline the rest of the cuts, including a $15 million program that provides child care for low-income parents in college; a $27 million arts education program; two programs targeting Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students, totaling $65 million; two international education and foreign language programs, $72 million; a $12 million program for gifted students; and $12 million for Special Olympics education programs. Other programs would not be eliminated entirely, but would be cut significantly. Those include grants to states for career and technical education, which would lose $168 million, down 15 percent compared to current funding; adult basic literacy instruction, which would lose $96 million (down 16 percent); and Promise Neighborhoods, an Obama-era initiative meant to build networks of support for children in needy communities, which would lose $13 million (down 18 percent). ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download