Or they won't be allowed back to public school. 

Via the New York Times:

"Judge Nichols had sent letters this week to the homes of more than 800 households with children in public schools, strongly recommending that the children be immunized Saturday at the courthouse, where health department workers had set up tables to process paperwork and give shots, or that parents prove that the children had already been immunized in accordance with state law."

As I reported in an earlier post, Shaquanda Cotton, the 15-year-old who was sentenced to 7 years in juvenile prison for pushing a teacher's aide (which caused no documented injury), and who had no previous criminal record, was freed today by Texas officials.

This is of course a great victory, but Shaquanda was one of thousands of youth locked up in the Texas prison system.  The only reason that she was freed was due to activist civil rights organizations taking up her cause, leading to widespread media coverage.  Upon review of her file, other appalling things were also revealed--such as the fact that Shaquanda had her sentence extended for having an extra pair of socks in her room, deemed "contraband."

The important question is, how many other youth have similar situations, given extreme sentences for minor offenses, who are penalized for insignificant reasons while in custody, who are abused by prison guards, but who don't have national media's attention on their individual case?  How many other Shaquanda Cottons are out there??

Probably a hell of a lot.

It is well-known that incarcerated juvenile girls are absolutely the most vulnerable population to be held in custody—they are targets of sexual abuse, exploitation, violence, much less likely to have adequate educational, medical and pyschological care.  For 15-year-old Shaquanda Cotton of Paris, Texas, her vulnerability as an adolescent girl in a detention facility is something she faces every single day.  Shaquanda was sentenced to 7 years in a prison for juveniles, to be locked up until her 21st birthday.  Her crime?  Pushing a hall monitor at school. 

According to Shaquanda, her mother, the NAACP, and other community activists, the judge who sentenced Shaquanda also sentenced another 14-year-old girl to probation earlier in the year—for the crime of burning her family’s house down.  Oh yes, one more thing:  Shaquanda is Black, and the girl who committed arson is white.

Only 35 percent of American high school seniors are "proficient" readers, down from 40 percent in 1992. And almost one-third of our students, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress survey, lack even the basic reading skills necessary to determine the cost of a train ticket at a certain time listed in a brochure. Hilariously enough, six years after the passage of the mother of all failed, unfunded mandates, No Child Left Behind, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is quoted in the New York Times article claiming that--hey!!!--the poor results just prove the Bush administration's standards-based education policies were right all along. But what good are standards if we aren't doing anything real to give students the tools to meet them? You know, like actually providing states with the funding and programmatic supports to enact NCLB's requirements, such as putting a high-quality teacher with a subject specific degree in every classroom. Oof. I feel like I've been angry about this forevers and evers.

ANYWAY, it all makes me despair on an issue Ezra brought up earlier this week about health literacy. With so many Americans reading at an elementary school level, how can we expect them to navigate the HMO nightmare? Or to understand directions enclosed with their prescriptions? Or to know what a "hysterectomy" is when they might need one?

At times like this I remember how very much in our political and social system must be boiled down to improving public education. And for all those who say we should focus on income inequality instead of education reform (since social capital determines academic success), I say we just don't have the luxury of waiting -- we need to improve our schools now. I'd like to see just one presidential candidate thinking and talking big on this issue.