NESRI

NESRI's New Blog

2008-02-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

Please visit our new blog!

What Does Burger King Have to do with Modern Day Slavery in U.S. Agriculture?

2007-12-17T13:07:00.000-08:00

Read latest posting by Catherine Albisa, NESRI Executive Director on Burger King's complicity in modern day slavery. See http://www.dmiblog.com/

What about Human Rights for the Holidays Instead?

2007-12-07T14:34:00.000-08:00

This holiday season over 4600 units of public housing will be demolished in New Orleans. Simultaneously, almost a thousand people will be summarily thrown out of the cramped FEMA trailers they have called home since the storm. If I didn’t know better, I would think HUD and FEMA were extremely well coordinated in their cruelty. But we have all learned from the storm that they can’t coordinate at all, so this must be one of those tragic coincidences that emerge to sharply remind us what a degraded state we have reached when it comes to social justice.

How is it that these government agencies can freely throw poor families into the street and demolish their homes without any way to effectively stop them? In fact, how is it that after two years in our resource rich country these families are not back in adequate and safe homes, with accompanying support to get over the trauma of the storm and put their lives back together?

There are no protections against these abuses that push poor communities out of their homes, schools, jobs, healthcare and ultimately to the outer margins of society where people are treated as disposable, without legitimate needs and desires or real potential. Economic and social rights are concepts we desperately need to imbed in our policy framework to break this degrading dynamic of handouts – meager support afforded without dignity or respect – and push outs.

Affordable and adequate housing is part of the foundation of human dignity, freedom and equality. No person can truly be free if they are deprived of these essentials and, in a very real sense, cast out of society. How can we bear to see children doing homework in shelters? History will not be kind to us, knowing we had the resources and we had even collectively recognized, through the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, that these rights were fundamental.

Don’t let the year end without reaching out to the public housing community in New Orleans and asking what can be done to walk in solidarity with them. These demolitions and evictions are imminent – therefore our actions must be imminent as well. For more information on what you can do to help, e-mail tiffany@nesri.org. Defend and protect the human right to housing today!

Housing as a Human Right

2007-11-26T11:07:00.000-08:00

Joe Lamport explores the growing movement to promote a human right to housing in the United States. He interviews a range of activists who explain that their goal is to create the foundation for a new movement – a human rights movement in the United States.

NESRI, Executive Director Cathy Albisa is quoted as saying: “Developing and using new advocacy tools is always a difficult and challenging piece of work,” Albisa wrote. “But when our existing frameworks and standards are failing brutally to protect basic needs, it is imperative to look for new approaches that can move us socially in new directions….When one considers the seismic shifts in how we define equality at key points in the last few centuries, though, it is clear that the evolution of rights is not only possible, but necessary.”

Housing as a Human Right
by Joe Lamport, Gotham Gazette
November 26, 2007

The New York City’s affordable housing crisis has brought housing advocates together to seek political solutions to what is commonly seen as an economic problem: There is not enough housing to meet the demand; consequently the price of housing – rent – has skyrocketed. But advocates in some other cities are finding more ammunition for their efforts: They are citing international treaties that oblige governments to respect a human right to adequate housing. Their efforts could lead to a national movement that would bring housing advocates – and other human rights advocates – together in a new and more powerful way, they assert.

Property Rights and Housing Rights

The idea that housing is a human right is hardly new, but it is not nearly as developed as the concept of property rights. Property rights remain the basis for most law in the United States, continuing a long legal tradition that stretches back to ancient Rome.

Probably every school kid learns that in order to vote in the early colonies, a man (and only men) had to own property. In New York, the significance of property rights is obvious as soon as you look at the state’s laws: Between the city and the state, there are volumes of laws that apply to real estate, with power based on ownership. Much other law, too, derives from the premise that someone’s property has been damaged or stolen.

A human rights paradigm, on the other hand, centers on the idea that the simple fact of being alive qualifies a person for certain protections. While this idea has existed for thousands of years, it is not as inculcated in our laws as property rights are.

In this country, some rights, such freedom of speech, extend to everyone. “The way our history has unfolded in the U.S., there has been a very deliberate march toward what are called civil and political rights – the right to free assembly, most that are enshrined in the constitution – and less about rights that have to do with living a life that is free of poverty," said Ejim Dike, director of the Urban Justice Center’s human rights project.
As a result, the idea that housing is a human right to be protected and promoted draws a lot of confused expressions.

“It is a kind of startling concept for our society,” said Michael McKee, director of Tenants PAC, a statewide tenants lobbying group. “Housing is seen as a commodity to buy, sell and get rich off of.”

The closest the United States has come to a right to adequate housing may have been in the 1949 Housing Act, which called for “the realization as soon as feasible of a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family.”

A New Tactic

Frustration at what they see as government inaction, particularly at the federal level, on the housing problem has led housing advocates to embrace the human rights approach.

“There’s really no excuse for homelessness or living in inadequate housing in this country,” said Bret Thiele, coordinator of the economic, social and cultural rights litigation program at the Centre on Human Rights and Evictions. “It’s political will, it’s political decisions that lead to people being homeless and poor.”

The right to adequate housing, according to Thiele, means that government must ensure people have housing that is habitable, affordable, located appropriately (not in polluted areas or too far from schools or other important services) and accessible for people with physical disabilities or other conditions. People should not be not subject to arbitrary eviction, harassment or other threats.

“All too often in the U.S., economic and social issues are seen as charity work,” Thiele said. “Human rights language says these are obligations the government has to make sure are respected. That really shifts the paradigm. It’s no longer the poor asking for something; it’s the poor demanding that the government meet its obligations.”

Dike echoed Thiele’s comments. “The government has an obligation to make sure that everyone has access to adequate housing,” Dike said. “Right now what we depend on is the political will or the charity of whoever is in power. We depend on the legislative process, which is good, but at the end of the day we cannot take a case to court to demand safe and affordable housing.”

Rights Without Laws

Many believe that a right is virtually meaningless if no law exists to protect it. International treaties may oblige governments to respect the human right to adequate housing, but very few laws actually exist to insure that.

The 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, while not legally binding, calls for a right to adequate housing. The United States signed the declaration and has signed and ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. While the covenant dos not explicitly set out a right to adequate housing, it does contain rights relevant to it. The United States has also signed – but not ratified – the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

“The United States has a poor record of ratifying and a poor track record of implementing” human rights treaties, Thiele said.

Housing advocates trying to use the human rights approach assert that the United States is sufficiently obliged, under international law, to respect the human right to adequate housing. What that actually means remains unclear – but is becoming clearer around the world, around the country and, gradually, in New York City.

In Scotland, France and South Africa, laws now assert that the people have a right to adequate housing. In 2003, Scottish lawmakers passed a homeless act creating an “immediate right” to adequate housing, and French lawmakers established a similar law in 2007. The right is even more explicitly codified in South Africa.

In Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Minneapolis, to name a few cities, housing advocates are using human rights as a framework for their efforts. In their work with homeless people, activists are noting violations and, in their lobbying activities, they are pushing for local laws to establish a right to adequate housing.

Rights and Violations in New York

Housing advocates in New York City are not widely using a human rights approach. Some are not aware of the approach; others see it as impractical – at least for now.

(Vincent Villano, who works for the organization I work for, has studied the human rights approach closely and has been advocating its use in a variety of ways. he provided me with a broad variety of materials on the issue.)

New York City and the state do have comprehensive human rights laws. With regard to housing, these measures generally get cited only when people discuss laws that prohibit discrimination based on race, ethnicity, citizenship status and the like. A human right to adequate housing goes beyond addressing such rampant discrimination.

According to Cathy Albisa of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative it would extend to security of tenure for renters and owners, affordability and the adequacy of the home, including its structure and location. “These concepts are not sufficiently present in our development of policy to mitigate the insecurity that the market can create for housing,” she wrote in an email.

New York State does have laws that promote or protect the right to adequate housing. Two laws stand out: the 1975 warranty of habitability, which requires that an apartment be free of hazardous conditions and generally livable before a landlord can collect rent, and rent regulation laws, which guarantee a tenant a variety of protections, including an automatic lease renewal. That particular provision protects tenants from arbitrary eviction and harassment – at least on paper. And in 1997 the New York City Aids Housing Network successfully lobbied City Council to pass legislation that establishes the right for people with HIV and AIDS.

Further applying a human rights approach to housing in New York City would reveal that the city and state governments are not fulfilling the right to adequate housing – and in some respects violate that right.

“Tenants have no rights in apartments that are not regulated,” said McKee. “This is a big problem. They have no right to tenure, for example. And that makes it very hard for them to complain about repair problems or service problems …. The landlord will simply not renew the lease if they complain.”

The city and state fall short in a number of areas:

Affordability
Housing that is not handicap or otherwise accessible
The persistence of pollution in parts of the city that lead to high rates of asthma
Repeated housing code violations and the failure to compel landlords to address such violations
The loss of rent regulated apartments and the existence of other unregulated units, which leaves many tenants open to arbitrary evictions and harassment.

The state and city governments have attempted to address some of these issues. Last week, for example, the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced efforts to go after the city's worst landlords and get them to repair their properties. And Mayor Michael Bloomberg has launched an effort to build more affordable homes in the city.

Such programs, though, remain subject to the vagaries of politics. Currently, there is no guarantee that the government will act to ensure that decisions on housing "ensure security and affordability,” Albisa said. Instead, she continued, "We have policies that are at odds with each other.”

Establishing a human right to decent housing would create a framework that would outlast the coming and goings of various mayors and governors and strengthen the push for programs to provide adequate housing.

Using a human rights approach, advocates working on these issues could assert at tenant meetings and in discussions with policy makers that the city’s failures to address them adequately are human rights violations. The language alone carries a force unknown in the current discussions of these problems.

Putting Idea into Action

For now, advocates are trying to learn what the human rights approach means and how it could be applied in their efforts. “It’s a very interesting idea and suggests a number of possibilities,” McKee said. “But I don’t know what it’s going to take to get it to a level where people take it seriously. There’s an old chant that housing is a human right. But I don’t know if people really believe it in the sense that they think it’ll really fly.”

In conjunction with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, the Centre on Human Rights and Evictions trains housing advocates to use a human rights approach in various aspects of their work, from organizing tenants to lobbying for legislation to filing lawsuits when the right to adequate housing is violated. A training workshop for New York City advocates is expected in 2008, Thiele said.

Advocates are seeing signs that the approach is gaining momentum, even if its full use is years off .

“Developing and using new advocacy tools is always a difficult and challenging piece of work,” Albisa wrote. “But when our existing frameworks and standards are failing brutally to protect basic needs, it is imperative to look for new approaches that can move us socially in new directions….When one considers the seismic shifts in how we define equality at key points in the last few centuries, though, it is clear that the evolution of rights is not only possible, but necessary.”

Thiele said progress has been made since his organization began working on the issue in 2003. “What we’re trying to do is create a movement, much like the Civil Rights movement of the '40s, '50s and '60s," he said. "It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.

Human rights activism goes local

2007-11-07T10:12:00.000-08:00

One compelling sign that people in the U.S. very much want to "bring human rights home" is the range of local and community driven efforts across the country. Below is a commentary from Eugene, Oregon. Citizens in Eugene have begun a conversation on how to reclaim human rights for ourselves! We can't wait to see how it goes!

Guest Viewpoint

Published: Tuesday, November 6, 2007

As schoolchildren, we were taught that all people are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We learned that it is a government’s responsibility to secure these rights for those whose consent is needed to govern. The Declaration of Independence has inspired human rights advocates for generations.

The concept of inalienable human rights was later enshrined in one of the world’s most historically important international agreements: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States played a major role in crafting this document, approved by United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The declaration identified basic human rights which nations — capitalist and socialist, affluent and impoverished — agreed were fundamental to human dignity. Social and economic rights were granted equal importance with civil and political rights.

Since 1948, many major human rights treaties have come into force, ratified by nations around the world (see www.ohchr.org/english/law/index.htm). Some provide for comprehensive protections of vulnerable populations, including women, people of color, children, people with disabilities, indigenous groups and migrant workers and their families.

Others require that governments take positive steps to realize the right of all people to work, adequate wages, fair working conditions, education, health care, food, clothing, shelter, social security and an adequate standard of living. When governments ensure such human rights, people’s quality of life is improved and their opportunities to develop the full range of their capabilities are enhanced.

While the United States regularly condemns human rights violations elsewhere, in recent years its own human rights record has been subject to criticism. For example, critics have raised alleged U.S. human rights abuses abroad in connection with the war on terror.

Critics have also begun focusing on the U.S. government’s domestic human rights record. How, they ask, can the U.S. call upon other nations to support the social and economic human rights contained in the universal declaration (as President Bush did in a Sept. 25 speech at the United Nations), while providing so little support for these rights at home?

Why, in the United States, are poverty, hunger, homelessness, discrimination, lack of access to health care, educational inequalities, unemployment and jobs that fail to pay a living wage not defined and treated as important human rights problems that government at all levels must act to eliminate? Such conditions are considered violations of universal human rights in other nations, but not here.

Unlike many other nations, the United States lacks a national “human rights culture” that stresses the importance and value of universal human rights. And the dynamics of partisan politics in Washington, D.C., do not currently favor a critical examination of U.S. domestic problems through a human rights lens.

Such federal gridlock need not preclude action at lower levels of government. Global warming provides a helpful illustration. Top U.S. officials have been slow to acknowledge scientific evidence of a global warming problem. Many municipalities have forged ahead with solutions on their own and now lead by example.

A similar situation is developing with regard to the desire to “bring human rights home” to the United States. From Seattle to San Francisco, from Chicago to New York, municipalities have adopted or are contemplating the incorporation of international human rights standards in their operations. Such standards call for governments to be proactive, collaborative, transparent and accountable for showing progress when it comes to addressing human rights issues affecting members of the local community.

These developments have not gone unnoticed by Eugene’s Human Rights Commission. One of the commission’s goals is “ensuring that human rights are a central part of every city program.” With City Council approval, the commission recently placed the Human Rights City Project on its work plan (visit www.humanrightscity .com). Its purpose is to explore ways in which Eugene can infuse international human rights standards across city government operations.

The result may be a proposal to revise the existing Eugene human rights ordinance so as to enrich and expand the city’s human rights activities, make the city more proactive in addressing human rights issues, and create new partnerships to systematically identify local human rights problems and fashion solutions.

In order to open a conversation on these topics, the Human Rights Commission is presenting a symposium — “Bringing Human Rights Home: Implementing International Human Rights in the United States” — from 9 a.m. to noon Friday in Room 175 of the UO’s Knight Law Center, 1515 Agate St. The public is invited. For more information, call 682-5177.

The Need for a Radical Revolution of Values

2007-10-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for an Economic Bill of Rights that included recognition of the “right of every family to a decent home.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes a human right to housing, as does the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Yet, this fundamental human right is being eroded throughout our nation, particularly with respect to poor and working class communities. Nowhere is this denial of the basic human right to housing best illustrated than in the current fight for public housing taking place in New Orleans.

Despite the severe shortage of affordable housing for low-income residents of New Orleans, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on September 21, 2007 approved a plan by the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) to raze four public housing complexes (constituting a reported total of 4,500 units) and redevelop them as mixed-income housing. The developments targeted for tear-downs are C.J. Peete, St. Bernard, B.W. Cooper and Lafitte. The demolition work is expected to begin in the next two or three months.

Local, state and national organizations have decried this decision and the onslaught against public housing that is taking place across the nation. Community leaders in cities such as Miami, New York, Chicago, Oakland and New Orleans are on the frontlines of this battle. Additionally, organizations such as the Right to the City Alliance, National Law Center for Housing Rights and a host of local, community-based organizations are uniting efforts to combat this collective affront to public and low-income housing.

Efforts to destroy public housing across the nation can not be divorced from gentrification and its ill effects on the economically marginalized and disadvantaged. Hurricane Katrina provided an opportunity for the permanent displacement of poor and working class families and an opening for market forces to determine the future of New Orleans. After Katrina, Congressman Richard Baker (Baton Rouge) remarked: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Such sentiments are the driving force behind the policies and tactics to rebuilding in New Orleans and have been utterly devastating on the lives of Katrina survivors.

New Orleans is the test study for these practices. As a public housing tenant organizer with the Concerned Citizens of Greater Harlem recently commented: “New Orleans is the blueprint for what will happen to poor and low income communities across the country.” What is taking place in New Orleans must be viewed as an extreme manifestation of tactics against poor and low-income housing tenants throughout the nation.

We must continue collective mobilization to ensure that the human right to housing is respected and guaranteed to all citizens of the United States, regardless of their socio-economic background.

Below is an article written by Loyola Law Professor Bill Quigley on the proposed demolition. He represents public housing tenants in New Orleans. Bill calls for a radical revolution of values -- we echo his call.

Published on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
HUD Demolitions Draw Noose Tighter Around New Orleans
by Bill Quigley

Odessa Lewis is 62 years old. When I saw her last week, she was crying because she is being evicted. A long-time resident of the Lafitte public housing apartments, since Katrina she has been locked out of her apartment and forced to live in a 240 square foot FEMA trailer. Ms. Lewis has asked repeatedly to be allowed to return to her apartment to clean and fix it up so she can move back in. She even offered to do all the work herself and with friends at no cost. The government continually refused to allow her to return. Now she is being evicted from her trailer and fears she will become homeless because there is no place for working people, especially African American working and poor people, to live in New Orleans. Ms. Lewis is a strong woman who has worked her whole life. But the stress of being locked out of her apartment, living in a FEMA trailer and the possibility of being homeless brought out the tears. Thousands of other mothers andgrandmothers are in the same situation.

Renting is so hard in part because there is a noose closing around the housing opportunities of New Orleans African American renters displaced by Katrina. They have been openly and directly targeted by public and private actions designed to keep them away. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) just added their weight to the attack by approving the demolition of 2966 apartments in New Orleans.
Despite telling a federal judge for the last year and a half that approvals of public housing demolition applications take about 100 working days to evaluate, HUD approved the plan to demolish nearly 3000 apartments one day after the complete application was filed. HUD says the 3000 apartments are scheduled to be replaced in a few years with up to 744 public housing eligible apartments and a few hundred subsidized apartments.
Unfortunately, HUD’s actions are consistent with other governmental attacks on African American renters.

After Katrina, St. Bernard Parish, a 93% white adjoining suburb, enacted a law prohibiting home owners from renting their property to anyone who is not a blood relative. Jefferson Parish, another majority white adjoining suburb, unanimously passed an ordinance prohibiting the construction of any subsidized housing. The sponsoring legislator condemned poor people as “lazy,” “ignorant” and “leeches on society” - specifically hoping to guard against former residents of New Orleans public housing. Across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans, the chief law enforcement officer of St. Tammany Parish, Sheriff Jack Strain, complained openly about the post-Katrina presence of “thugs and trash from New Orleans” and announced that people with dreadlocks or “chee wee hairstyles” could “expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy.”
HUD’s actions are also bolstered by pervasive racial discrimination in the private market as well. The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center has documented widespread racial discrimination in the metro New Orleans rental market and in the states surrounding the gulf coast.

HUD told a federal judge a few days “the average time [for the process of reviewing applications for demolition] is 100 days.” They did suggest that the process could be expedited in the case of New Orleans. So it was. Instead of reviewing the details of demolishing 3000 apartments and considering the law and facts and the administrative record for 100 days, HUD expedited the process to one day.

HUD and the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO, which HUD has been running for years) argued passionately that residents displaced from public housing (referred to once in their argument as ‘refugees’) are financially “better off” than they were before. This echoes the Barbara Bush comment of September 5, 2005 when she said, viewing the overwhelmingly African American crowd of thousands of people living on cots in the Astrodome, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this - (she chuckles slightly) this is working very well for them.”

HUD announced approval of demolition of 2966 units of public housing in New Orleans - 896 apartments at Lafitte, 521 at C.J. Peete, 1158 at B.W. Cooper, and 1391 at St. Bernard. A few buildings on each site will be retained for historical preservation purposes.
New Orleans had a severe affordable housing crisis before Katrina when HANO housed over 5000 families. There was a waiting list of 8000 families trying to get in. HUD and HANO together did such a poor job of administering the agency that there were about 2000 more empty apartments that had been scheduled for major repairs for years.

The continuing deceptions by HUD and HANO have been shameless. Since Katrina, HUD has continued to act out both sides of a charade that the local housing authority is making decisions and HUD is waiting on local actions. Yet, the decision to demolish was announced by the Secretary of HUD in DC over a year ago. But in the year since then, HUD has continued to tell a federal judge that any legal challenge to demolitions was premature because HANO had not even submitted an application to HUD for their careful 100 day evaluation. This is while a HUD employee runs the agency, commuting back and forth to DC each week. HANO even announced they would have 2000 apartments ready for people in August of 2006 - a deadline not met even in September 2007. HANO later announced to the public that they had a list of 250 apartments ready for people to return only to admit in writing weeks later that no such list existed - nor were the phantom apartments ready.The list of untruths goes on.

HUD would not agree to delay the demolition of the 3000 apartments until Congress finished reviewing legislation that would give residents the right to return and participate in the process of determining what kind of affordable housing should be in place in New Orleans.
And so HUD’s actions help further restrict the opportunities for African American renters in New Orleans. Adjoining white suburbs do not want African American renters back. HUD does not want them back. The local federal judge has refused to stop the demolitions.
But the mothers and grandmothers and their families and friends are still determined to return and resist demolition. One sign at a recent public housing rally summed it up. “We will not allow the community we built to be rebuilt without us.”

Odessa Lewis, despite her tears, said she is not giving up. She and other public housing residents promise “we did not come this far to be turned back now. We will do whatever is necessary to protect our homes.” Thousands of African American mothers and grandmothers are the ones directly targeted by HUD’s actions.

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., said “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society…When profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” We can add sexism to the list, particularly in the fight for the right of public housing residents to return.

The fight of Ms. Lewis and others on the gulf coast shows how much we need a radical revolution of values.

Obama Introduces Positive Behavior Support Bill for Schools

2007-10-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

Senator Obama, Durbin and Representative Phil Hare, all from Illinois, introduced a bill that would direct resources to positive behavior support (PBS) policies in schools. NESRI has been actively advocating for PBS policies as a necessary tool to protect student's human right to dignity and education in public schools.

Students must be supported, through PBS and similar policies, in developing conflict resolution and other skills necessary to learn and thrive both in school and in broader society. It is a core responsibility of schools to ensure social-emotional development. Children simply do not learn as much or as well unless schools do so. Additionally, there is a crisis of degrading treatment and abusive disciplines in schools across the country that stems from punitive approaches towards what is often typical behavior for children. NESRI’s report, Deprived of Dignity, documents this crisis and promotes PBS as one of the cures for this serious social ill.

See press release below.

Obama, Durbin, Hare Introduce Bill to Improve Student Behavior in Schools

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Amy Brundage (Obama), Christina Mulka (Durbin), or Tim Schlittner (Hare)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Barack Obama (D-IL) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Representative Phil Hare (D-IL) today introduced the Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act (H.R. 3407, S. 2111), which directs resources to innovative programs designed to teach positive behavior as a way to improve school climate and make it easier for students to learn. Positive Behavior Support (PBS) programs define and support appropriate behaviors by explicitly teaching students about good behavior and including it as part of the curriculum.

PBS programs have resulted in improved school climate and more time spent on learning. For example, at Lincoln Elementary School in Chicago Heights, the number of students sent to an administrator’s office for fighting dropped by half over the course of a year. At Springfield High School in Springfield, out-of-school suspensions decreased by 38%, allowing students to learn more by reclaiming 180 school days that would otherwise have been lost to suspensions. At Mark Twain Primary School in Kankakee, disciplinary referrals decreased dramatically, from 268 before PBS compared to 38 last year; at the same time, ISAT reading and math scores are at an all-time high.

“America’s teachers deserve our long term commitment so that they can provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed,” said Senator Obama. “Positive Behavior Support programs have proven successful in Illinois and throughout the country. They teach good behavior and reduce the need for discipline in the classroom, in turn allowing more time for teachers to teach. We must expand these innovative programs to teach our students about positive behavior. Let's give our teachers this additional tool to support their teaching, and let’s give our children the benefit of high expectations and supports for good behavior. These programs would not only strengthen our schools, but would bolster our nation’s competitiveness by providing the best possible learning environments for our next generation of leaders.”

“When students act out, the classroom environment is damaged making it more difficult for students to learn and teachers to teach,” said Durbin. “Good behavior is a skill that can be learned and should be taught. Unfortunately, in many cases, children do not receive this lesson at home. Illinois is one state that has developed a system to address this problem in the classroom. These Positive Support Behavior programs can serve as a national model to improve student behavior. The bill that Senator Obama, Congressman Hare and I are introducing today will give teachers the resources they need to improve their classroom environment and allow more time for academic instruction.”

“The old formula of attempting to yield good behavior and academic performance by threatening students with detention or other punishment has run its course,” Hare said. “The PBS approach rewards students for doing the right thing while recognizing that success in school is contagious. My visit to Monmouth-Roseville Junior High in February convinced me that many students in PBS programs are motivating each other to reach new heights. As a member of the Education and Labor Committee, I felt compelled to introduce the Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act. I look forward to working with Senator Obama and the Illinois PBIS Network to ensure this bill is included in the soon to be reauthorized No Child Left Behind law.”

In PBS schools, the adults act together to set common expectations, not just for learning, but for the behaviors that support learning. In any given school, the problem might be a general lack of discipline, too much bullying, or a loss of instructional time due to suspensions. Schools can address any of these problems, using proven practices, supported by a collaborative network of researchers, schools, and teachers, along with universities and resource centers that work with over 6,700 schools in 38 states. More than 700 schools in Illinois already use PBS.
“Illinois leads the nation in implementing school-wide PBIS with over 700 schools in 179 districts supported by the Illinois PBIS Network,” said Lucille Eber, Ed.D., State Director of the IL PBIS Network. “These schools are experiencing decreases in discipline problems, increases in academic achievement, and improved measures of school safety. Additionally, schools that achieve full implementation show greater capacity for success with students who have more serious behavioral/learning needs. More importantly, we have seen these results increase and sustain over the past nine years in Illinois schools.”

Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act:

To support PBS efforts, the Positive Behavior for Effective Schools Act amends Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to make PBS an allowable use of funds, and proposes an Office of Specialized Instructional Support Services. More specifically, the Act:

Provides flexibility for use of Title I funds. State agencies may use these funds to provide technical assistance and support to schools as they implement PBS. Schools may use funds to improve school climate and academic achievement.
Amends the needs assessments for use of Title II funds, so that they may take into account improvement of school climate in awarding subgrants for professional development.
Amends the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities provision to include support for programs, such as PBS, that improve school climate and reduce discipline problems.
Amends school counseling provisions, to ensure that applications for grants should include information on the need for behavioral intervention services, such as PBS.
Amends the Department of Education Organization Act, to establish an Office of Specialized Instructional Support Services. This office would coordinate the federal role in supporting counselors, school social workers, and others, who help teachers by providing academic and behavioral support for students.
This legislation is supported by the American School Counselor Association, The Arc of the United States, National Association of State Directors of Special Education, and 23 other organizations.

The Detail of the Pattern is the Movement

2007-10-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

I’ve borrowed the title of this post from Dorothy Q. Thomas, who borrowed it from T.S. Elliot. Dorothy is a contributing author to a publication being launched this December, “Bringing Human Rights Home: From Civil Rights to Human Rights.” This is part of a three volume series chronicling the nascent, but growing, movement for human rights in the United States, and Dorothy has contributed a chapter “Against American Supremacy: Rebuilding a Culture of Respect for Human Rights in the United States.” The opening comment in the sub-section “The Detail of the Pattern is in the Movement” is:

So much is happening at once in contemporary human rights work that is can be difficult to discern the movement’s overall shape or even its actual existence. The fact that it does not yet entirely cohere, however, does not mean that it isn’t there. In fact, it’s popping up everywhere....

Her comment came immediately to mind as I received an update from a listserve that keeps activists apprised of the growing support for the Campaign for Fair Food being spearheaded by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers “CIW” (in collaboration with the Alliance for Fair Food). The CIW, a constituency based organization of farmworkers in Immokalee Florida, has successfully persuaded two large multi-nationals, McDonalds and Yum!Brands Inc. to take responsibility for human rights abuses, including sub-poverty wages, in their supply chain. These two corporations have entered into agreements with the CIW to ensure that the growers from whom these corporations purchase tomatoes increase wages and prevent forced labor and other abuses in their fields.

The listserve message that caught my attention went out to the Alliance for Fair Food (AFF). The AFF consists of CIW allies and was founded by several of CIW’s core partners, including the Student-Farmworker Alliance, the Presbyterian Church and NESRI. The message let us know that that yet another anti-war group had endorsed the Alliance for Fair Food. If you have not been involved with this campaign, the first thing that might come to mind is why would a peace group focused on our activities abroad be thinking about farmworkers in Florida? But that question was far from my mind. I’ve gotten used to something that is extraordinary about the CIW campaign -- its ability to get beyond “issue silos” and reach out to an ever increasing range of people of conscience concerned with human rights and dignity.

CIW uses multiple strategies to reach people, but its core message is profoundly about human rights. It is one grounded in fundamental values and the notion that all of us are entitled to the same basic rights, including freedom from slavery and poverty as well as the right to dignity and participation in the decision-making that determines the quality of your life.

Human rights activists consistently say that one of the greatest values of human rights is that it provides an overarching umbrella for all of us concerned with social justice to understand and support each others issues. This is an important detail in the pattern that is the movement, and the CIW’s stellar success in this arena, is a strong argument for continued movement building through approaches emphasizing fundamental human rights.

See information about the upcoming publication of “Bringing Human Rights Home”

See information about the CIW

Human Right to Housing Videoconference training!

2007-10-12T07:50:00.001-07:00

NATIONAL FORUM ON THE

HUMAN RIGHT TO HOUSING

Nationwide Videoconference

Monday, November 5, 2007
11 AM - 5 PM EDT

Training Locations:
Washington, DC; Chicago; New Orleans;
Minneapolis; Los Angeles

Click here to register or learn more about this training.

A national conversation between local advocates using human rights strategies to protect and promote the right to housing

Sponsored By:

National Law Center on
Homelessness & Poverty

Centre on Housing
Rights and Evictions

Co-sponsors:

Advocates for Environmental Human Rights; Beyond Shelter; Chicago Coalition for the Homeless; Chicago Coalition to Protect Public Housing; National Alliance to End Homelessness; National Coalition for the Homeless; National Economic and Social Rights Initiative; National Health Care for the Homeless Council; Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless; US Human Rights Network; Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights; University of Minnesota Human Rights Center;Midwest Coalition for Human Rights; Heartland Alliance for Human Rights & Human Needs; St. Stephens Human Services

These training are available through generous support from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the U.S. Human Rights Fund, and Holland & Knight LLP.

There are Better Ways

2007-10-10T14:29:00.001-07:00

Today, the NYCLU released a press release about human rights abuses in our public schools committed by safety agents and police officers. The release follows day long hearings held by the City Council on the over-policing of public schools.

This human rights crisis in our public schools fuels the schoolhouse to jailhouse pipeline that destroys so many of our children. The debate, whether surrounding the Jena 6 or focusing on broad issues of criminalizing youth, needs to begin at what happens in our schools. The criminalization of youth begins with the denial of their fundamental right to education. The human rights framework recognizes how these rights are linked and interdependent, and provides an important critical lens to address this crisis.

As Liz Sullivan states in her quote below "There are better ways" and human rights approaches help us get there. Please read this important release below!

Students, Educators and Advocates Call for an End to Aggressive, Excessive Police Presence in NYC Public Schools

October 10, 2007 --

Echoing testimony given during day-long City Council hearings on the over-policing of New York City’s public schools, students and educators today gathered at City Hall and described their experiences coping with inadequately trained, overly aggressive NYPD personnel.

Both inside and outside council chambers, students and advocates from across the city denounced the hostile environment created by an excessive police presence in schools, appealed for accountability and oversight in school safety matters and offered alternative approaches to unchecked policing in city classrooms.

Biko Edwards, a former Samuel J. Tilden High School student, was slammed into a brick wall, sprayed in the eyes with Mace and arrested last January for being in the hallway without a pass. He endured more than 28 hours in police custody and suffered injuries requiring emergency treatment because he had missed the bell while speaking to his math teacher after class.

“Why are they arresting school kids while they’re in school?,” Edwards asked. “Tensions between students, teachers, principals and school safety agents wouldn’t be as bad if school safety agents listened to students a lot more and pushed them around a lot less.”

Since taking control of school safety in 1998, the NYPD has assigned more than 5,000 school safety agents and at least 200 armed police officers to the city’s public schools. This massive presence would make the NYPD’s school safety division the fifth largest police force in the country – larger than Washington DC, Detroit, Boston or Las Vegas.

Many youth advocates say the over-policing of their schools often puts students at risk. As documented in the NYCLU’s recent Criminalizing the Classroom report, students say that school safety agents often abuse their authority, act belligerently and disrespectfully, and provoke students into confrontations.

There is no effective mechanism to hold school safety agents accountable for this misconduct, and the lack of oversight of police personnel in schools allows abuse to occur unchecked. Even with no effective process to report misconduct, the NYPD received more than 2,700 complaints since 2002 about police abuse in schools.

“Children have the right to learn in a safe environment, but making schools feel like jails promotes neither learning nor safety,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “When police personnel are not adequately trained to work in schools, they too often extend their authority beyond issues of safety and become hostile and even violent enforcers of cell phone prohibitions, dress codes and food bans. Being late to class or writing on your desk is never a criminal act, but our kids are getting arrested for it. The City Council must act quickly to address the over-policing of city schools.”

The excessive police presence coupled with the general prison-like environment – every day, more than 93,000 New York City school children pass through a gauntlet of metal detectors, bag searches and pat downs – means that children’s education often suffers. Quinn James, a student organizer for the Urban Youth Collaborative, goes through metal detectors and is scanned by school safety agents every day as he enters high school.

“My school feels like a jail cell, which leads me to believe that the mayor, chancellor and police commissioner don't think I can be a successful student,” James said. “My daily experience with police in schools is having a negative impact on my learning. I am constantly disrespected. I want and deserve to learn in a safe and respectful school environment.”

There are alternatives to over-policing. The Student Safety Coalition – an umbrella group that includes Advocates for Children, Correctional Association, Make the Road New York, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, the NYCLU, Teachers Unite and the Urban Youth Collaborative – urges the City Council to:

* Pass the School Safety Act. This act would provide accountability, transparency and oversight by expanding the jurisdiction of the Civilian Complaint Review Board to accept complaints about school safety agents, creating a formal investigation and complaint process. The School Safety Act would also require quarterly reports by the Department of Education and the NYPD on school safety matters.

* Commission a study on successful school safety models, such as those initiated by Progress High School, Urban Assembly School for Careers and Sports, and the Julia Richman Education Complex, that have eliminated metal detectors and reduced the number and role of school safety agents.

* Invest money and resources in proven alternatives to policing that focus on prevention instead of punishment, such as conflict resolution and intervention training for school staff, classroom management training for teachers, guidance counseling, peer mediation and parental and community involvement programs.

“New York City has fallen behind other major school districts, like Chicago and Los Angeles, which have begun to embrace alternative disciplinary policies that guarantee students’ right to education and dignity in school,” said Liz Sullivan, education program director at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI). “There are better ways.”

A Human Right to Health

2007-10-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

A Human Right To Health
by Alan Jenkins, re-posted from TomPaine.com
October 09, 2007

Alan Jenkins is Executive Director of The Opportunity Agenda, a communications, research, and advocacy organization with the mission of building the national will to expand opportunity in America.

News coverage of President Bush's recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly has focused on his announcement of economic and political sanctions against Myanmar. But the real news about the president's speech is that he chose as a central theme the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he described as "a landmark achievement in the history of human liberty." In particular, the president focused on Article 25 of the Declaration, which provides in part that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."

The president's focus on Article 25 was remarkable for at least two reasons. First, although the United States played an important role in crafting the Universal Declaration almost 60 years ago, our government has, since the time of the Cold War, distanced itself from the economic and social rights embodied in Article 25, at times denying that they are rights at all. And second, less than two weeks after delivering the speech, Bush vetoed legislation that would have expanded the popular State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) to cover more of America's 9 million uninsured kids.

The world's nations adopted the Universal Declaration in 1948 after the Great Depression, World War II, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Eleanor Roosevelt was a driving force behind the document as a member of the United Nations' Human Rights Commission. And the final product reflects FDR's vision of an "Economic Bill of Rights" for America that included "the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." The Declaration reflects America's tradition of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the American people's embrace of fairness, dignity, and opportunity for all.

Bush invoked Article 25 to praise U.S. efforts to fight hunger, AIDS and malaria in Africa, noting that deaths of people from malaria, "the vast majority of them children under the age of 5 years old," are unnecessary because "the disease is preventable and treatable." This is true, and should continue to be an important U.S. and global priority.

But the president was silent about the 18,000 Americans who, according to the Institute of Medicine, die every year of preventable or treatable diseases because they lack health insurance. When it comes to uninsured children, working families bear the greatest burden: In 2005, more than 69 percent of uninsured children in the United States lived with either one or two full-time workers. For these and other American families, Article 25's guarantee of a "right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family" is illusory.

The president said he vetoed the child health bill because it was too expensive and would lead to government-run health care. But that fundamentally misunderstands what a human right is. Recognizing a human right to health care, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does, means prioritizing fulfillment of that right over other objectives. And paying for it. To be sure, a country's financial resources are relevant to the calculus; poor countries are expected to move incrementally towards satisfaction of the right when they cannot fulfill it immediately—a notion called "progressive realization." But rich countries like the United States have the means and the responsibility to provide quality health care to everyone within their borders—today. With U.S. spending on the war in Iraq topping $200 million a day, it's both unseemly and inaccurate to suggest that the cost of satisfying the right to health care is too high.

Acknowledging the human right to health care does not resolve whether the government should be the chief provider of health insurance for Americans. But it does make government responsible for ensuring that all Americans have access to health care. The vast majority of Americans believe in that obligation as well. As The New York Times recently reported, "a majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it."

Fulfilling Article 25 of the Universal Declaration in America will require more than expanding SCHIP. To meet human rights standards, our health care system must be universal, affordable and equitable. It must include all Americans and address existing disparities in health care based on race, gender, income and other aspects of what we look like or where we come from.

Human rights are about ending repression in Myanmar and malaria in Africa, but also about dignity, fairness and opportunity here at home. As Eleanor Roosevelt explained almost six decades ago:

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home — so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

The Slippery Rhetoric of Rights

2007-10-06T04:06:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I noted that President Bush claimed to support rights abroad, including the right to health, food, and a decent standard of living, in a talk before the UN General Assembly, but failed to mention rights here at home even once. Given the deficiencies, from a rights perspective, in our trade policy, foreign policy and the support we provide to international finance institutional policies that undercut basic rights, such purported international support is actually of course a bit dubious. Paired with recent brutal decisions, like vetoing expanding health care insurance to scores of children without basic care and callous comments about the emergency rooms providing as much care a person may need, our the current administration's position on economic and social rights is abundantly clear-- international rhetoric aside. But it would be a mistake to ascribe the severe reluctance to address basic rights solely to this administration.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of listening to an extraordinary presentation by Professor Carol Anderson, author of "Eyes off the Prize." What makes Professor Anderson so unique is a combination of rigorous scholarship and analysis, with a drop dead straightforwardness and keenly funny presentational style. Carol has researched the history of human rights in the United States. She traces how the NAACP committed itself to ensuring that the founding UN documents dealt not only with race discrimination, but also with fundamental economic and social rights, and how visionary civil rights leaders understood that without protection in both those arenas African-Americans would never achieve equality in our country. She also details the severe backlash the NAACP's position engendered and its ultimate retreat from this strategy.

Finally, Carol traces the slippery rhetoric of rights, and how governments can distort rights notions to surreal proportions. One of my favorite examples from her talk yesterday was how, after agreeing to standards which protected minorities against discrimination during the Jim Crow era, the United States concluded (somehow with a straight face) that there were no minorities in our country. First, the government claimed that "national minorities" only meant minorities from another country, with a a distinct language and culture. Then, it concluded that since all possible minority groups (including African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans, etc...) all actually wanted to be "Americans" and adopt American culture, there were no minorities here. Government is not the only guilty party of such manipulations. Corporate actors also provide far too many examples of these not so subtle attacks on rights.

Only a vigorous and widespread civil society response pushing for concrete commitments to human rights can provide the necessary counter-weight to these efforts. When we only have a rhetoric of rights, and not actual rights, with clear standards and enforcement mechanisms and structures, that rhetoric can become slippery indeed and serve interests that were clearly not intended. When it comes to economic and social rights in the United States, in particular, we have much work to do. The Opportunity Agenda recently collected polling data which shows that the overwhelming percentage of people in the United States support human rights, with high levels of support for rights such as health and education. But we remain at the rhetorical level for these rights. When politicians, again with a straight face, can argue that putting metal detectors and armed officers in severely overcrowded and under-resourced schools is about the right to education and emergency rooms demonstrate that we have a right to health, we know we have fallen into the realm of the slippery rhetoric of rights. We need to move into the solid footing of rights commitments, with clear standards and enforcement, and leave mere rhetoric behind.

How should activists respond to President Bush's speech before the General Assembly? Do we try to hold him to his word? Ignore it because it appears bereft of authenticity? And how do we break the dynamic where the United States government claims the human rights mantle on the global stage, while refusing to protect the rights of its own people? Or do we work locally until every municipality in this country becomes a center for commitment to the full range of human rights hoping that such a groundswell will impact our national leaders?

I look forward to your thoughts!

President supports rights abroad, not at home.

2007-10-04T15:00:00.000-07:00

“Sixty years ago, representatives from 16 nations gathered to begin deliberations on a new international bill of rights. The document they produced is called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- and it stands as a landmark achievement in the history of human liberty. It opens by recognizing "the inherent dignity" and the "equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family" as "the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world." And as we gather for this 62nd General Assembly, the standards of the Declaration must guide our work in this world. “

These words were spoken just last week on September 25, 2007 by none other that George W. Bush. It was an eight page speech he read before the General Assembly at the United Nations. He went on to say that “when millions of children starve to death or perish from a mosquito bite, we're not doing our duty in the world. When whole societies are cut off from the prosperity of the global economy, we're all worse off. Changing these underlying conditions is what the Declaration calls the work of "larger freedom" -- and it must be the work of every nation in this assembly.”

Sounds far more FDR than G.W. Bush, and given the relentless opposition to economic and social rights by the United States on the global stage, it was a stunning surprise that Mr. President also stated that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the[ir] health and well-being…”

What was less surprising was that every example President Bush put forward of economic and social rights violations involved countries other than the United States. He emphasized the obligation to eliminate hunger, but failed to reference the over 3 million Americans, mostly children, that suffer from hunger every year, and the millions more that face food insecurity. He discussed the human right to education, but failed to recognize the large number of youth being pushed out of our schools through degrading treatment and abusive discipline and subsequently fed into the “school to prison pipeline.”

He discussed the “underlying conditions” that must be addressed to do the work of “larger freedom” but made no commitment to change those conditions for those living within U.S. borders struggling far too hard to hold on to their modest homes, their meager health insurance, and their low paying jobs.

The United States is rightly seeking to reclaim leadership on the international stage, but has precious little capital to do so at this moment. A scenario where the U.S. government becomes a force for the protection of economic and social rights might present a dramatically and improved global landscape. But such leadership must be authentic, and the United States cannot seek to lead the world while leaving its own people behind.

NESRI seeks to bring these ideals home, where in fact they were first inspired by FDR’s four freedom’s speech. Indeed, economic and social rights are a home grown set of ideals that, if implemented, would protect families and individual from insecurity, illness, and destitution. They would also ensure that each member of society was able to access fair opportunities and reach their full potential.

NESRI believes that social movements are our greatest hope for the protection of economic and social rights and the only through which we can effectively build these rights into our political and legal culture. We welcome your commentary on our approach!

Jena 6

2007-10-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

NESRI is exploring ways to support the Jena 6 and efforts to address the school to prison pipeline using human rights. Mistreatment in the classroom, extreme discipline, and criminalization of schools has created a crises, often described as "push-out" that excludes large numbers of children from poor and marganalized communities from learning and pushes them towards the prison system. (for more info see Deprived of Dignity.

Below is a commentary by Cathy Albisa, NESRI's Executive Director on this issue.

NESRI allies and supporters have come together under a shared vision based on recognition and respect for the fundamental human rights of all people. This vision is diametrically opposed to an educational environment that allows the toxic fruit of discrimination to go unchecked and that sees as one of its core function to punish and not teach.

To date, the United States has rejected the vision offered by human rights. Our children are paying the price for that incomprehensible rejection. Consequently, children across the country are subjected to degrading school environments that make learning impossible, and schools regularly diverge from their mission to teach and nurture by inappropriately and unnecessarily bringing the criminal justice system into our schools. To further the damage, studies and human rights documentations show that children are targeted for these punitive approaches based on race.

There are many Jenas in the United States where children are degraded in the classroom, in disciplinary proceedings and in their interactions with the criminal justice system. In the case of Jena, the specific abusive and threatening gesture in the form of nooses came from fellow students, but the environment and standards of acceptable behavior are always set by the school – specifically by the adults that are charged with the well-being and development of all the children in the school.

Around the country, it is often these very adults who commit abuses. My organization, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, in partnership with community organizations such as CADRE in LA and the Urban Youth Collaborative in New York, documented degrading treatment of youth in schools. We found that teachers regularly made comments such as:

“Are you stupid or something?
“You’re too stupid you can’t learn”
“You dress sloppy”
“You stink”
“You look like an animal”
“Don’t you take a shower?”

All too often, in fact, in most cases, these comments are directed a youth of color. Indeed, teachers and principals have said to students that they would “end up in the ghetto like everyone else in their neighborhood.” According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in 2005, 11% of students of all students and 15% of African American ages 12-18 students reported being targets of hate-related words in a 6 month period, and 7% said the words were related to race.

A related phenomena, is systemic unfair punishment and denial of education through discipline. Across the country, suspensions and expulsions are often given for relatively minor infractions, and these are suspensions are unduly long and severe in their scope. As in the case of degrading treatment in the class room, discipline is clearly administered, as study after study reflect, in a racially biased manner. While I can’t speak to the details of the broader environment in Jena High School, we do know that in the state of Louisiana in 2004, African American students made up 46.7% of the student population, but almost 75% of expulsions.

We also know that it is in these environments where children are neither nurtured nor protected that conflict is a chronic disease. Extreme and punitive disciplinary policies tend to be the norm, and criminalizing the school culture a typical tactic. We have heard reports that the local District Attorney came to Jena High School and told students he could end their life with the stroke of a pen. In schools elsewhere, police roam the hallways intervening and controlling school matters, such as simple tardiness for class, within a criminal framework. Children are mistreated, pressured, threatened and then when they respond – as adolescents typically do with inappropriate behaviors – they are severely punished.

Many children face such educational losses as a result of these tactics as to almost eliminate any possibility of graduating from high school and continuing their education. This is a phenomenon that many community organizers refer to as push-out, where degrading treatment and abusive discipline literally pushes children out of school. And this push-out phenomenon is a human rights crisis in our education system.

Yet, we know that the right to education is deeply valued in American society, as it is within the international human rights standards and principles. And at the center of the human right to education lies the principle of human dignity. It is common sense that children cannot learn unless they are treated with respect and dignity. It is difficult enough for adults to function in hostile environments, it is unconscionable that we would put our children in such environments and expect them to learn. .

How would a human rights vision, if vigorously implemented, transform our schools? The Convention on the Rights of the Child, a human rights treaty ratified by every country in the world except the United States and Somalia, clearly requires that schools be child friendly and that be consistent in all respects with the dignity of the child. This convention also defines the aims of education as the full development of each child’s potential, respect for human rights, and the preparation for a responsible life in a free society in the spirit of peace, understanding and tolerance. We have not even set these as educational goals in our country.

The human rights documents also speak to the purpose of discipline, focusing on positive support and the use of discipline as an opportunity to learn conflict resolution and other essential social skills. Discipline in schools, under a human rights vision, is part of education and presents an educational opportunity. It should not be punitive. Indeed, the relevant documents all state that extreme measures such as the arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall only be used as measures of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.

The case here in Jena, Louisiana is a case study for everything gone wrong, and a reflection of a severe crisis we face across the country. The school failed to take effective measures to combat prejudices that lead to racial discrimination when the nooses appeared, as required by the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Once the school failed to take those measures, conflict inevitably deepened and once fights broke out among adolescent students, the school once again failed to take the opportunity to teach conflict resolution skills and address the underlying issue of racial discrimination. Instead, it immediately brought in the criminal justice system threatening severe and punitive measures, which it ultimately imposed on these six young men.

The result is that the entire student body has lost an educational opportunity, and faces a poorer educational environment. The six young men have faced a brutal denial of the right to education over that last year, and the extreme reactions of Louisiana officials have called into question their legitimacy and credibility both in the arenas of education and justice.

Can we re-vision the events from the perspective of human rights? Because human rights are fundamentally about recognizing that every person is part of the human family, and therefore a valued part of their community, one model very consonant with human rights is known as restorative justice. Rather than viewing misbehavior by students as an act against school authorities, restorative justice models define misbehavior as an act against the entire community. Accountability and discipline involve taking responsibility for one’s behavior and repairing the harm resulting from those behaviors. Students and the school community are directly involved and play a key role in responses. As one teacher in New York City stated the process “validates students as thinkers and decision-makers, and reinforces the idea that they have a voice and stake in their communities.” Researchers at Skidmore College found that schools that implemented restorative justice saw suspension/expulsion drop 25-30% after two years of such programs.

But restorative justice models make the most sense when there is also in place positive support for student behavior. The positive behavior support model for discipline is a school-wide approach to developing positive student behavior where:

Schools define expectations for student behavior
Schools then teach those expectations and support students in learning the skills to meet these them in a predictable environment where all adults provide consistent reinforcers for that behavior.
Appropriate behaviors are acknowledged.
Behavioral errors are corrected proactively.
Individual student support systems are integrated with school-wide discipline systems.

So back to Jena High School – imagine if expectations for student behavior were clearly defined and defined in a way consistent with human rights standards. The very notion of “white tree” would have been unacceptable. And it would have been imminently clear that menacing gestures such as hanging nooses would not be tolerated, not just by the school authorities, but by the entire school community.

Let us say that despite best efforts, however, those nooses still appeared. Using restorative justice approaches it would have been considered an offense against the entire school community. The students involved with the initial hanging of the nooses would have been obligated to engage the key stakeholders impacted by the incident, specifically the African-American students, and to take responsibility for their actions directly before their peers. Such engagement would have been geared to creating understanding and reaching consensus by the school community on how to repair the damage. One can imagine outcomes such as undoing racism workshops in the school, further study by the perpetrators of the history of lynching and key aspects of the civil right movement and Black history, all of which would – if positive behavior support models were in place – be accompanied by ongoing counseling for all impacted parties. This would not exclude the options of suspensions or even expulsions depending on the circumstances, but those options alone are unlikely to restore peace to the community.

Such a process described above is geared towards accountability but also reconciliation and community building. If fights had still followed the events, they also would have been viewed in context and dealt with as a community matter. It is unlikely we would be where we are today.

The challenge we face here in Jena and elsewhere is transforming our schools from places with punitive and degrading environments to places where human dignity is at the center of all policy and practice, and all students are nurtured and supported in their full development.

The students known as the Jena six have suffered grave injustice and human rights violations. The one positive outcome is that so many people have shown support for the Jena 6 and their families to let them know we will not stand silent in the face of these events. This incident has galvanized a large number of people who care about the human right to education, and are committed to struggle to defend it. We have powerful values and tools to do so, and to counter the punitive and degrading environments in our schools. Our challenge now is to figure out how can we make this a turning point to move away from human degradation in schools and towards human development, human rights and human dignity.

For more info see Deprived of Dignity.

Please share your thoughts with us! What is the way forward? How can we best transform our schools to places where fundamental respect for human rights is at the core of all learning and every child realizes his or her human right to a quality education?

WELCOME!

2007-10-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

Welcome to NESRI's new blog!

We hope you enjoyed our last listserv announcement. We hope to use this blog to ask for your feedback on our work and generate dialogue on how to advance economic and social rights in the United States!

Please feel free to share your thoughts with us!

For more info about us visit our website.