About Mary Turck
News Day, written by Mary Turck, analyzes, summarizes, links to, and comments on reports from news media around the world, with particular attention to immigration, education, and journalism. Fragments, also written by Mary Turck, has fiction, poetry and some creative non-fiction.
Mary Turck edited TC Daily Planet, www.tcdailyplanet.net, from 2007-2014, and edited the award-winning Connection to the Americas and AMERICAS.ORG, in its pre-2008 version. She is also a recovering attorney and the author of many books for young people (and a few for adults), mostly focusing on historical and social issues.
May 15, 2016 · 8:54 am
2012: Fatuma Sankos arrived in Dadaab two months ago with her two small sons – Abass Hassan and Mohamed Hassan. She lives in a tiny shelter made from sticks, cardboard and plastic bags. She has not yet been formally registered in the camp so is not able to get food rations and depends on other refugees for food, and aid agencies for water. Photo: Jo Harrison/Oxfam, published under Creative Commons license
Kenya announced last week that it will close all of its refugee camps, forcing more than 600,000 refugees to return to the violence they fled in their home countries of Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and other nearby countries. That’s terrible, but the United States is in no position to criticize Kenya. In secret memos uncovered last week, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ordered a 30-day “surge” of arrests of immigrant mothers and children to return them to the violence they fled in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Continue reading →
May 10, 2016 · 2:21 pm
Six years ago Congress did something right. They said that high-poverty schools could skip the individual child-by-child means testing and just feed all the kids free breakfast and lunch. That saved hundreds of thousands of dollars previously spent on processing eligibility forms, as well as thousands of hours of teacher and parent time. More importantly, when everybody can eat for free, nobody has to feel singled out as “that poor kid getting a free lunch.” Free, in-school breakfasts increase the number of kids starting the day ready to learn. Now that the program is succeeding, Republicans in Congress want to roll it back.
Continue reading →
May 7, 2016 · 9:28 pm
Texas, leading the nation as always, granted a child care license to a jail on April 29. It’s a special, private jail, an immigration detention center in Karnes City run by the private, for-profit GEO Group. The Texas license comes in response to a federal judge’s order that migrant children must be released from detention centers because it’s against the law to hold kids in unlicensed facilities. (A few days after the license was issues, a Texas judge blocked, at least temporarily, a second license for another immigration jail and set a hearing on the licenses for May 13.) Continue reading →
Filed under children, human rights, immigration
Tagged as CCA, for-profit prisons, Geo Group, immigration, immigration detention, immigration jail, Karnes detention facility, refugees, Texas
May 2, 2016 · 2:51 pm
I devour school news — probably far more of it than is good for my mental health. Several recent stories seem especially worth noting:
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Filed under education, race, St. Paul Notes
Tagged as bootstrapping, discipline, education, Galtier School, grit, no excuses, race, school funding, schools, soft skills, SPPS, St. Paul
April 26, 2016 · 9:44 pm
In Lake Wobegon, all the children are above average, and that’s pretty much the Minnesota motto for everything. We have above average biking cities, above average hipster neighborhoods, and above average funding for public education. Oops — scratch education off the list. NPR’s School Money series just popped that civic pride balloon. Continue reading →
April 26, 2016 · 10:44 am
The Hechinger Report’s three-part series on teacher education programs offers fascinating glimpses inside three classrooms, alongside appalling pictures of first-year teachers’ home lives. Meghan Sanchez has abandoned her teacher training program’s emphasis on ” 100 percent compliance with directions 100 percent of the time” as unrealistic for wiggly 4-year-olds who can’t always sit “criss-cross-applesauce” on command. Michael Duklewski has switched from correcting his middle-schoolers’ negative behavior to pointing out positive behavior, and finds that “I’m just happier, because I’m saying good things all the time instead of harping on bad things.” Amit Reddy engages his eighth-grade science students in pouring liquids into a beaker to determine their density, but worries about the lagging grades of his “chatty” after-lunch class section. And all three of the featured first-year teachers get up before 6 a.m. and collapse into bed at night after working 12-15 hour days. They have little or no time for family life of their own.
Continue reading →
April 22, 2016 · 2:04 pm
A Syrian migrant holds a young girl in his arms upon arriving on a dinghy to the Greek island of Kos, Greece.(EPA/Yannis Kolesidis) (Photo courtesy of Freedom House.
One year ago, I wrote “At least seven hundred people, maybe 900 or more, were on the 70-foot ship that sank in the Mediterranean on Sunday. Almost all of them died.” Last week, it happened again. Another boat packed with refugees capsized and sank, drowning hundreds of refugees. Continue reading →
April 12, 2016 · 8:33 pm
Diving Deeper: Understanding Disparities between Black and White Residents in the Twin Cities Region (Met Council), p. 7
A new report from the Met Council takes a deep dive into statistics, juggling 10 different demographic factors (e.g. age, education, immigration) to isolate one variable: race. The report finds that “underlying demographic differences cannot explain away our region’s disparities in employment, income, and homeownership between Black and White residents.” One factor can explain the differences: continuing institutional and structural racism, which is maintained and supported by conscious and unconscious personal racism. Continue reading →
April 12, 2016 · 12:04 pm
I remember meeting Bertha Oliva in Tegucigalpa in the late 1980s, the wall outside her small office tagged with graffiti death threats, gunshots in the night bringing an unnatural stillness to the city center, silencing even the dogs and roosters. Decades of human rights defense later, Bertha Oliva told Congress last week that death squads are back in Honduras. Death squads, like the one that kidnapped her husband back in the 1980s. Death squads, like the ones that threatened her and the Committee for the Relatives of the Disappeared throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Continue reading →
April 8, 2016 · 11:31 am
Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman delivered the official story on March 30, along with piles of documents and videos available on his website. According to the official story, a complete investigation resulted in no charges because it’s tough to charge a police officer with anything and there just wasn’t enough evidence. Several people have poked giant holes in Freeman’s presentation, including his misstatements of evidence, his dismissing the importance of eyewitness testimony, his over-statement of the reliability and meaning of forensic evidence, and his use of language and rhetoric that dehumanized and denigrated Jamar Clark. Continue reading →
Mary Turck