Civil Rights News: Racial Achievement Gap, Poorest County in U.S., GOP Budget Slashes Health Care

Closing the Achievement Gap Without Widening a Racial One
New York Times

Michael Winerip features an unsung hero of the education debate: Dr. Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard professor who specializes in the growing racial achievement gap in America’s education system. He says that while the gap is predicated on economics, with minorities continually overrepresented among the nation’s poorest, there are important social dimensions to the achievement gap which also deserve attention. He particularly emphasizes the role of families in promoting educational development, saying “I don’t want to be another one of those people lecturing black parents, I tell them we in the black community — we — need to build stronger intellectual lives at home.”

Ziebach County, South Dakota: America’s Poorest County
Huffington Post

Nomaan Merchant profiles the small community of Ziebach County, S.D., America’s single poorest county. Not coincidentally, the county is predominantly inhabited by the residents of an impoverished Native American reservation, who struggle to survive in an area where basic necessities are scarce, local economies are dead, and little external aide is available.
Eileen Briggs, a leader in the Cherokee River Sioux tribe that inhabits Ziebach County, commented on the community’s desperate situation: “Many, many people make these grand generalizations about our communities and poverty and ‘Why don’t people just do something, and how come they can’t?’ It’s much more complicated than that.”

House GOP Targets Health Care Funding
Politico

The House Republican spending bill aims to significantly cut back funding for health care programs across the nation. Medicare and Medicaid, as well as community health centers and National Institutes of Health will suffer heavy cuts. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called it “an irresponsible spending bill that threatens job and economic growth, hampers our global competitiveness and harms the people hurting most: working families and the middle class.”

Compiled by Hayley Lennon and Alice Thompson