American white pelicans in flight
The Trump administration has announced a position on protecting migratory birds that is a drastic pullback from policies in force for the past 100 years.
In 1916, amid the chaos of World War I, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and King George V of Great Britain signed the Migratory Bird Treaty. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) wrote the treaty into U.S. law two years later. These measures protected more than 1,100 migratory bird species by making it illegal to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill or sell live or dead birds, feathers, eggs and nests, except as allowed by permit or regulated hunting.
This bold move was prompted by the decimation of bird populations across North America. Some 5 million birds, especially waterbirds like egrets and herons, were dying yearly to provide feathers to adorn hats, and the passenger pigeon had just gone extinct. Fearing that other species would meet the same fate, national leaders took action.
Now the […]
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Students at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Ariz., learn from 25-year-old biology textbooks.
Credit: Frank Eager
Broken laptops, books held together with duct tape, an art teacher who makes watercolors by soaking old markers.
Teacher protests have spread rapidly from West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona in recent months. We invited America’s public school educators to show us the conditions that a decade of budget cuts has wrought in their schools.
We heard from 4,200 teachers. Here is a selection of the submissions, condensed and edited for clarity.
Michelle Gibbar, teacher at Rio Rico High School
Salary: $43,000 for 20 years of experience
Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $500+
I have 148 students this year. The district skipped textbook adoption for the high school English department, leaving us with 10-year-old […]
Credit: Ismael F. Armendariz Jr.
It was the strike heard ‘round the country.
West Virginia’s public school teachers had endured years of low pay, inadequate insurance, giant class sizes, and increasingly unlivable conditions—including attempts to force them to record private details of their health daily on a wellness app. Their governor, billionaire coal baron Jim Justice, pledged to allow them no more than an annual 1% raise—effectively a pay cut considering inflation—in a state where teacher salaries ranked 48th lowest out of 50 states. In February 2018, they finally revolted: In a tense, four-day work stoppage, they managed to wrest a 5% pay increase from the state. Teachers in Oklahoma and Kentucky have now revolted in similar protests.
If the story turns out the way the Jim Justices desire, the children of a first-world country will henceforth be groomed for a third-world life.
Gordon Lafer, Associate Professor at […]
Credit: Geri Lavrov
Every two years, education-policy wonks gear up for what has become a time-honored ritual: the release of the Nation’s Report Card. Officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, the data reflect the results of reading and math tests administered to a sample of students across the country. Experts generally consider the tests rigorous and highly reliable—and the scores basically stagnant.
Math scores have been flat since 2009 and reading scores since 1998, with just a third or so of students performing at a level the NAEP defines as “proficient.” Performance gaps between lower-income students and their more affluent peers, among other demographic discrepancies, have remained stubbornly wide.
Among the likely culprits for the stalled progress in math scores: a misalignment between what the NAEP tests and what state standards require teachers to cover at specific grade levels. But what’s the reason for the utter lack of progress in reading scores?
On Tuesday, a panel of experts in Washington, D.C., convened by the federally appointed officials who […]
Credit: Ggamies/Shutterstock
The California-based nonprofit Factory Farming Awareness Coalition has a simple mission: to educate people about what really happens on factory farms. Why is this necessary? Most Americans think farm animals are treated well, despite the fact that 99% of animal products come from factory farms. And factory farming, in addition to being extremely cruel to animals, is a leading driver of global warming, deforestation, species extinction, water waste, and pollution.
FFAC executive director Katie Cantrell founded the organization in 2010, shortly after graduating from UC Berkeley. She’d read the book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer’s gripping exploration into why we eat some animals and not others, and she was inspired to expose the truth about factory farming.
Cantrell hopes to raise awareness, not just about the cruelty inherent in raising animals industrially, but the often-overlooked social justice, environmental and public health impacts of factory farming. Since its inception, FFAC has delivered highly visual, compelling, and even life-changing presentations (see for yourself) to more than 75,000 people in schools and businesses, including Stanford, Google and Tesla, convincing many to embrace a […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
