What do puppies and cats, bred as pets, have to do with raising chickens or pigs for consumption?

Minnesota Legislature to take up Puppy Mills again House File 388, House File 702

Here are bills that have been a long time in the making. No animal deserves to be abused. As it stands Minnesota laws do not protect cats and dogs in puppy and cat mills.

Picture Credits: Animal Folks Minnesota

Please call you Minnesota Legislators to Support the Following Bills

( H.F. 702/ S.F. 462)

Information for H. F. No. 702 - 2011 - 2012 Regular Session

Short Description: Dog and cat breeder licensing and inspection provided.

(H.F. 388 / S. F. 384)

Information for H. F. No. 388 - 2011 - 2012 Regular Session

Short Description: Dog and cat breeder standards of care provided, fees established, rulemaking authorized, criminal penalties provided, and money appropriated.

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Eden Prairie School Redistricting: parents leap from concern over school proximity issue to hiring desegregation lawyers

The Eden Prairie School Board’s Plan:

• The plan moves about 1,100 students to open a new school, move fifth- and sixth-graders into different elementary schools, and balance schools' enrollments socioeconomically and by capacity.
  
  
• The stated objection: Parents don’t want children bused outside their neighborhood.
  
  
• The illogical response: Parents enrolling their children at other schools outside the district which would require their children to be bused even further away from home. Why would parents want their children to go even further away from home on a bus if their objection was based on busing outside of their neighborhood? Read more…

Startribune: “Eden Prairie group upset at shift of 1,100 kids enlist lawyer who has battled desegregation”

• Initially the contention over school redistricting appeared to be about increased distance to new schools and having to change schools. But once the school board voted to support the redistricting. the arguments from parents changed as the Startribune headline above reveals. The objection to the redistricting seems to have a lot more to do with parents being unwilling to go along with balancing the schools socioeconomically.
  
  
• Parents continue to assert they want to keep the neighborhood schools the way they are; they don’t want to bus children across town. Then why are they willing to bus their children even farther, completely out of the district in order to do what? It’s counterintuitive. Their initial complaint was followed by the threat of leaving the district once the board voted, next they elevated the threat with the possibility of a law suit.
  
  
• Another intriguing fact is none of the parents who have led the fight against the school changes and enlisted a legal team have identified themselves. There is no mention of who they are in the Startribune article?
  Read more…
  
  
• If school choice is a means to bypass integration, parents certainly have the choice to do that.
  
  
• The Eden Prairie parents threatening a highly expensive and protracted legal remedy to maintain neighborhood schools as they are, do not represent the majority of families. Eden Prairie schools currently do not represent the new socioeconomic mix of the community.

At Look at School Choices

Charter Schools: have they lived up to integration?

The Civil Rights Project finds that they have not lived up to that initial hopeful promise of integrating across boundary lines. In fact, we found that students of every race, but particularly black students, are much more likely to be enrolled in what we define as racially isolated minority schools. Those are charter schools that are 90 to 100 percent students of color.  
Read more…

School Choices - Magnet Schools have diversity as an explicit purpose

Magnet schools are different from private or parochial schools in that they remain part of the public school system. They differ from Charter schools in that they remain part of the public school system bureaucratically. Many Magnet schools still help increase diversity within the public school system and help families volunteer for desegregation. But over the last 20 years or so, some Magnet schools have taken on a more competitive aspect in that they can only fill 10-20% of the students that apply to attend school on their campuses. The current role of Magnet schools, therefore, can often promote academic opportunity and excellence over their regular counterparts. Magnet schools often attract “gifted” students who score well in tests and receive good grades (about 1/3 of all Magnet schools use selection criteria to decide who they’ll invite to enroll for that year).

Magnet schools have three distinguishing characteristics:

• Distinctive curriculum or instructional approach
  
  
• Attract students from outside an assigned neighborhood attendance zone
  
  
• Have diversity as an explicit purpose  Read more…

School Choices - Private Schools have been found to segregate enrollment

The most significant finding in the 2002 Civil Rights Project report is that segregation levels are quite high among private schools, particularly among Catholic and other religious private schools, where the levels of segregation are often equal or greater than levels of segregation among public schools.

In their models, the strongest predictor of white private school enrollment is the proportion of black students in the area.

Other recent research from The Civil Rights Project has shown strong academic and adult life benefits of education in racially diverse schools. They recommend that the leaders of the nation's religious and secular private schools examine these patterns and the isolation of their significant minority enrollments as well as the serious segregation of white students and consider recruitment and transportation policies that could produce more diverse educational experiences for students of all racial and ethnic groups. Read more…

Racial integration in schools has been pursued to provide students with the experience of interacting with people who are different from them as an important educational goal in its own right. Our hope is that this proximity will help students learn about different kinds of people and become more tolerant of those differences. Read more…