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Standardized Tests Fill K-12 Schools. What Purpose Do They Serve?
No full textTesting is prevalent in K-12 public education in the U.S. It is crucial to know the context of state and national assessments to understand what is happening in schools
Eviction Crisis Not Averted: Challenging Disparate Impact in the Search for Housing Stability During the Virginia Rent Relief Program\u27s Epilogue
Get PDFHistorically, the Commonwealth of Virginia has experienced some of the highest eviction rates in the county, containing five of the top ten U.S. cities with the highest eviction rates. After experiencing scrutiny in the national news due to these rates, the Commonwealth enacted legislation which provided increased tenant protections and distributed the highest percentage of rental assistance funds in the country. It was once thought that the Virginia Rent Relief Program (“RRP”) could be the solution to the eviction crisis, but now that the Program has ended, Virginia is once again experiencing an eviction crisis. Though thousands of households received RRP rental assistance to catch up on rent arrearages and avoid eviction, many tenants are still being forced to search for new housing because their landlords are refusing to renew their leases.
In a difficult housing market, these tenants can face eviction if they do not vacate by the end of their lease term. This practice has a disproportionate impact on minority communities, as most households that received assistance from RRP were households of color. This article evaluates the disparate impact standard in the context of tenant-screening policies and applies the disparate impact standard to the context of lease nonrenewal, arguing that tenants can establish a prima facie case of disparate impact to invalidate this discriminatory nonrenewal practice. However, recognizing the obstacles to initiating disparate impact litigation, this article explores other approaches for tenants, and the legal practitioners who advocate for them, to contend with tenant-screening policies and ease the burdens they may encounter when searching for new housing in the post-RRP era
Individual Funding: A Policy Solution to Family Abuse in Rural Areas Impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic
Get PDFIntimate partner violence is an issue in the United States experienced bymore than one in three women. This article addresses the topic of intimatepartner violence and the factors contributing to the perpetuation of abuse. Itfocuses on how these factors manifest in rural areas and in the context of theCOVID-19 pandemic, which increased isolation and economic abuse. Thisarticle explores policies currently used to combat intimate partner violencein these contexts. The current acts, including the Victims of Crime Act(VOCA), the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA), and theViolence Against Women Act (VAWA), expressly prohibit the allotment ofmonetary entities directly, requiring victims to connect with government-funded programs to receive aid in the form of funding. This article proposesdistributing individual, unrestricted funding to the victim rather than throughan agency receiving funding from other government sources
Foreword: Toward a New Compact With Rural America
Get PDFThe interpretation of United States laws and policies, and the extent to which they obstruct or support rural places and people to take advantage of opportunity, are at the nexus of our nation’s ability to reweave the social fabric and create a new compact between its rural areas and the rest of the country. It requires recognizing our interdependencies, our mutual interests, and our shared humanity. The Articles contained herein get us started—it is incumbent that we build on these contributions to take their ideas forward and provoke new and constructive policy debates
Rural Bashing
Get PDFAnti-rural sentiment is expressed in the United States in three major threads. The first is a narrative about the political structure of our representative democracy—an assertion that rural people are over-represented thanks to the structural features of the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College. Because rural residents are less than a fifth of the U.S. population, complaints about this situation are often framed as “minority rule.”
The second thread is related to the first: rural people and their communities get more than their fair share from federal government coffers. The argument, often expressed in terms of “subsidies,” is that rural places enjoy disproportionate government investments, especially from the federal government, in forms such as social safety net payments, infrastructure investments, and payments associated with the Farm Bill. These investments are said not to be justified by the relatively low amount of taxes rural folks pay and their small populations. Some see these investments as a function of earmarks and pork-barrel politics attributable to outsized small-state power in the U.S. Senate. Implicit in this line of thinking is that urban America does not get enough return on its investment in rural America. It may even evince a lack of awareness that rural and urban are interdependent and that urban folks do enjoy—even rely upon the fruits of rural labor.
The third thread, which emerges from the other two, is a culture of annoyance, even disdain, directed by metropolitan dwellers at rural people, their cultural trappings, and their intelligence. This contempt for rural people seems to envision and target an imagined caricature of working-class and illiberal White Americans; it tends to merge negative associations of working-class Whites with rurality in a “hillbilly” or “redneck” stereotype.19 Such contempt effectively “other[s]” rural folks, marginalizing them from mainstream society as manifested in urban norms.
All three of these phenomena fuel an impulse to dismiss rural needs and penalize rural residents. This unfortunate framing necessarily overlooks the complex realities of rural life, as well as the nuances of rural power and powerlessness. Among other goals, we seek in this Article to re-complicate the situation of rural people as a step toward rural-urban détente, even collaboration. Our task is not to rebut every criticism of rural populations and lifestyles. It is, rather, to document the extreme animus and call attention to how it undermines the wellbeing of communities along the rural-urban continuum. We are deeply concerned that rural bashing hinders coalition building that could solve problems afflicting both urban and rural places
Pressures to Comply or Defy: How Social Values Influence Perceptions of Healthcare Workers as Villains
Get PDFDuring the Covid-19 pandemic, politicians, the media, and the public labeled frontline workers as heroes. The goal of this article is to examine how certain aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic—such as the nature of the Covid-19 virus, coupled with insufficient governmental and institutional responses—created a situation where it became possible for people to characterize healthcare workers as villains. This approach to medical professionals is rather novel in heroism studies and social sciences. A qualitative review of available data sources provided evidence that frontline healthcare workers were perceived negatively. Experiencing a lack of cooperation from patients and their families, healthcare personnel were forced to deal with institutional constraints that exacerbated these conflicts. Variables that could influence being villainized included the social value orientation and political persuasion of perceivers, as well as structural factors related to the transmission of effective and accurate information, including biased mass media presentations and genuine uncertainty from scientific sources
Prison Housing Policies for Transgender, Non-binary, Gender-non-conforming, and Intersex People: Restorative Ways to Address the Gender Binary in the United States Prison System
Get PDF“[I]t was the end of the last quarter of 2019 where I was able to drop the lawsuit against the correctional officer who had sexually harmed me when I knew . . . that the carceral state is not the way for me to find healing . . . . I was not going to seek my transformation and restoration through this system.”
Each year, rhetoric and legislation attacking transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming and intersex individuals seemingly grows louder. Many political institutions in the United States perpetuate and enable the oppression of these individuals, one of which is the United States prison system. In the quotation above, Dominique Morgan, the Executive Director of Black and Pink, a prison abolitionist organization, describes her process of coming to terms with the harms she experienced in prison as a transgender woman. Morgan, originally charged with murder, lived eighteen months in solitary confinement, six of those on death row.
This quotation from Morgan not only illustrates how the prison system failed to ensure her safety (as a person convicted of a crime), but it also expresses her reckoning with the failure of the justice system to provide her with a process through which she could heal (as someone who survived a crime). Morgan’s story represents just one of the dangers people face in prisons, especially the vulnerability often heightened for people historically marginalized by society.
Transgender, non-binary, gender-non-conforming, and intersex (“TNGI”) individuals experience violence, sexual assault, social stigmatization, and discrimination from society and, in particular, the United States prison system. Despite some efforts to make housing in prisons safer for TNGI people, the system still fails to protect them.
TNGI people face harms in prison that cisgender people do not because of the “hyper-gendered” structure of the prison system. For example, prison staff often misgender TNGI people, and prison housing policies regularly result in placing TNGI people in prisons according to their sex at birth instead of their gender identity. In addition, TNGI people are ten times more likely to be sexually assaulted in prison than the general prison population.
This Comment seeks to center the experiences of TNGI people living in prisons to shed light on the harms they incur from the United States prison system. Because of the gendered structure of the prison system, TNGI people face additional harms that cisgender prisoners do not experience, and the reforms to prison housing policies have failed to fully address the root of the problem. Restorative justice, through mechanisms used in place of prisons as well as through values-based policymaking, can better account for TNGI people’s well-being by breaking away from the gender binary in prisons and focusing on the diversity of human experiences and methods of relationship-building.
Part I seeks to illuminate the experiences of TNGI people in the United States and, more specifically, in prison. I also introduce the current prison housing policies and practices in the United States. In Part II, I provide a preview of restorative justice, which will be combined with the theories in Part III to form the rest of the argument.
The first section of Part III introduces theories concerning the gendered structure of prisons and how this perpetuates the gender binary. I then expand upon these theories and apply them to the experiences of TNGI people in prison. Next, I explain how the theory of relational restorative justice can help move past the gender binary in prisons and create a more equitable response to wrong-doings. Last, I discuss the current movements concerning prison housing reform and explain why these are lacking