Chicago Teachers Want to Transform Their City into a ‘System of Care’—Will Dems Go Along?

Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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Headbutting and friction continue in the battle of big ideas vs. entrenched leadership.

There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.

He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.

That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption.

Nowhere has that neoliberal agenda been more controversial than in Chicago, where Democratic political leaders such as Duncan and the city’s former Democratic mayors, including Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, imposed deeply unpopular policies largely driven by budget austerity, business narrowmindedness, complicated financial deals with Wall Street banks, and the privatization of public assets.

In the city’s newest political flare-up, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are engaged in a contentious contract negotiation in which the union has called for a progressive agenda that not only includes pay increases for teachers and school staff but also steps to mitigate climate change, end the gender pay gap for CPS employees, eliminate homelessness for families of CPS students, provide paid parental leave for CPS employees, and aid new immigrant families.

So far, negotiations over pay have drawn the most media attention. The union has asked “for a 9 percent pay increase,” Chalkbeat reported in August 2024. The CPS CEO Pedro Martinez appeared poised to offer raises of “between 4 percent and 5 percent,” according to WBEZ. However, CTU stated in its September 9 contract negotiations update that CPS has yet to address about 50 percent of the union’s proposals.

CPS’s resistance is especially frustrating to progressive advocates in Chicago who’ve been advocating for strengthening the public schools system since at least the 1990s. Despite their success, the hurdles these advocates continue to face have left them frustrated.

Over the decades of their activism, CTU and public school advocates fought for and won previous contracts that resulted in reduced class sizes, salary increases for teachers and school staff, funding for more social workers, nurses and librarians in schools, and a commitment from the district to fund and pilot the community schools approach.

CTU and its supporters doggedly opposed and finally toppled adversarial mayors to elect one of their own in Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former school teacher and CTU organizer. They advocated and pushed through progressive policies such as enacting a moratorium on new charter schools, transitioning school governance from mayoral control to an elected school board, and “ending student-based budgeting” that formed the basis of the city’s school choice agenda.

While Chicago teachers were successfully making progressive change in Chicago, Democrats took control of the Illinois state legislature, and with the election of J.B. Pritzker in 2018, elected one of the nation’s most progressive governors, although he has rejected calls for the state to help make up the budget shortfall for CPS.

Despite these wins, Chicago teachers and public school advocates find themselves in the same position they’ve long been in—butting heads with an entrenched leadership status quo, created largely by Democrats.

What’s at stake is enormous for Chicago but also important to the Democratic Party nationally as it attempts to remake itself into the party that now claims to care the most about workers and families.

‘Good Enough’ Schools

What’s stymieing negotiations between CTU and the district, according to Chalkbeat and other media outlets, is that the union’s “demands come as the district and city face budget deficits, with no clear path to securing extra funding for schools.”

Martinez has claimed that CTU’s contract proposals would “result in a deficit of at least $2.9 billion for the 2025-26 school year,” WBEZ reported, leading to “a hole more than five times the current projection and growing as large as $4 billion by 2028.”

And although the state increased funding for CPS in 2024 by $25.8 million, Chalkbeat reported, that’s still “$1 billion short of what the state’s formula considers adequate funding.”

Yet not everyone agrees that money is the issue.

According to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, who Our Schools interviewed, “The push and pull you’re seeing in CTU’s negotiations with the district is mostly indicative of a years-long struggle to remake the district into a system of care.”

“It’s about challenging an education system that, from the beginning, was designed to be just good enough,” she said. “‘Good enough’ meant [providing] workers for the business elites who wanted the district to operate as a system to train future workers for their factories and stockyards. But ‘good enough’ doesn’t really work for [today’s] families.”

Remaking schools into better systems of care was not on the agenda when Chicago leaders closed Englewood and scores of other Chicago schools. Those schools were closed due to “underperformance” (although displaced students often fared even worse in their new schools) and financial inefficiency (which was also not alleviated by school closures).

Davis Gates conceded that what her union is asking for will cost the city and the state a lot more money. But she expressed frustration with how any political regime that claims to care about the well-being of families and children’s academic success could not come up with money to address the adverse conditions that Chicago families often face.

“My experience teaching social studies… clarified that the work I did in the classroom as a teacher was only a percentage of what was needed for students to have a full opportunity to access high-quality education,” she told Our Schools. “For instance, we have 20,000 students in our district who are unhoused. This creates many challenges for how we educate them when they spent the night in a car, a shelter, or couch surfing with relatives or friends. Being unhoused also creates social and emotional challenges for students.”

When questioned about the need to spend more money on innovations like community schools, she pointed to Cameron Magnet School of the Arts, an elementary school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. When an influx of about 100 migrant students suddenly enrolled in the school, Cameron could respond more effectively because it was reorganized and funded to operate as a community school.

In a system of care, Davis Gates said, “You have a restorative justice coordinator in every school. You have librarians, nurses, and social workers in every school.”

‘They Fired All of Us, Even the Lunch Ladies’

Davis Gates began her teaching career in 2004 at Englewood High School and was in her second year when Duncan announced the school would be shut down and replaced by smaller schools, a neoliberal policy fad that many big-city school districts fell for at the time.

Jackson Potter, current vice president of CTU, started teaching at Englewood in 2002 and told Our Schools what it was like to have Englewood shut down.

“It was extraordinarily traumatic for our families,” he recalled. “Duncan called our school a ‘cultural failure,’ which was deeply felt as an insult by the entire community. Yes, Englewood was a school with problems. But Duncan inflicted deep trauma on teachers and students.”

“The mantra at the time was all about low test scores and graduation rates. As a new teacher it struck me as absurd,” he said. “So you’re saying I caused this, and you’re blaming these veteran Black teachers? And these were incredible teachers with deep roots in the community who knew our families and knew just what to do when one of our students was in a crisis.”

“The years of disinvestment our school had endured, the economic dislocation of our community, and the racial disparities of the city, all of that was discounted,” he said. “So they fired all of us, even the lunch ladies.”

Like Davis Gates, Potter said that in the current union contract negotiations, “Money is a piece of the puzzle but not the whole issue.” He brought up examples where CTU has collaborated with the district to acquire additional funding from federal and state sources, including a federal grant of $20 million for electric buses. “But we always have to push for it,” he said.

Potter told of how CTU proposed, as a cost-saving measure, for the district to change its teacher evaluation cycle from every two to three years. Due to its limited staff, the district already fails to evaluate some 2,000 teachers each year, Potter explained, so why not stretch the limited number of evaluators over a longer period? “But they won’t agree to that,” he added.

He also questioned why CPS has never applied for grants given out by the state’s Illinois Shines program for retrofitting public school buildings with solar panels.

“It’s not just lack of funds. It’s obstinance,” he said.

Potter agrees that more recently there’s been a turning away from some of the past school reform ideas that drove CPS policymaking. But he questions why staff positions created during the reform era are still there, such as an Office of Portfolio Management, a reference to a neoliberal approach in which school leaders run school districts as if they were Wall Street managers overseeing a portfolio of investments.

“A lot of resistance has hardened over decades, and we’re trying to create a new pathway forward. But that’s going to mean the city has to take on local power brokers, big banks, and powerful opponents in state government,” he said.

Both Sides Are Right

Which side is right in this back-and-forth on funding between CTU and the district? “Both,” said Ralph Martire in an interview with Our Schools.

Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank that analyzes public policy through a social and economic justice lens. He also served on the legislatively established Professional Review Panel that was charged with monitoring the implementation of Illinois’s evidence-based funding (EBF) formula for the state’s K-12 public schools.

“In 2017, Illinois went from the worst to the best in education funding by enacting EBF,” he said.

According to Martire, EBF identifies a funding adequacy target for every school based on 27 research-based targets that include factors like the presence of students from low-income households, the percentage of students who are English language speakers, and school staffing levels.

“The priorities CPS is pushing for in its contract negotiation are all good,” he said. “In fact, many are the very things that EBF prioritizes in its funding formula. And there’s no doubt that the state’s funding of CPS is not adequate even as defined by the EBF model.”

“But under current circumstances, it would be really tough for CPS to come up with the necessary funding to support [all of the union’s priorities]” he said. “Unless the state makes a big jump in funding, it’s hard to see how the district gets out of this situation.”

What’s preventing that “big jump,” according to Martire, is that both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois don’t have a graduated income tax. Every tax and fee that governments have available, he explained, are regressive except for two: a graduated income tax and an inheritance tax. But when Illinois voters had the chance to change the state’s income tax from a flat rate to a graduated tax in 2020, they rejected it.

“Illinois taxation is still mostly overreliant on local property wealth,” Martire said. Consequently, “growth in funding is not keeping pace with public needs.”

Cassie Creswell, executive director and president of Illinois Families for Public Schools, generally agrees with Martire’s assessment.

“[CPS’s] fundamental fiscal situation, created by decades of privatization on top of under-resourcing its schools, isn’t truly in the CPS board or CTU’s hands,” she wrote in an email to Our Schools. “Illinois’s structural deficit means we are underfunding all of our social and human services, and until we have the ability to levy a graduated income tax at the state level, I’m not optimistic about [CPS’s] finances, and, as a result, [the district’s] ability to make the resources available that CPS students need and deserve.”

Yet, despite the fiscal difficulty of paying for the schools “CPS students need and deserve,” to use Creswell’s words, there are other political dynamics at play as well.

Paul Zavitkovsky former CPS principal and retired EdD program leadership coach for the Center for Urban Education Leadership told Our Schools it’s not clear to him why CTU isn’t finding common ground with the current CPS board.

Since 2019, there have been new CPS board appointees and central office staff hires who would embrace greater collaboration with teachers, according to Zavitkovsky. “They are working hard to redress problems of assessments that weren’t working. They’ve recognized that sanctions alone aren’t helpful.”

He doesn’t disagree that what the teachers are asking for would make positive contributions to student achievements and create much greater academic gains than seen during the neoliberal reform agenda.

But he wonders if CTU isn’t trying to push a political advantage.

“CTU has had lots of good reasons to be adversarial,” he said. “Perhaps they believe they’ve been beaten up for so long that it’s time to make the best of what advantage they have.”

‘A Philosophical Problem’

Arne Duncan once bragged about what he did to Englewood High School.

In 2011, New York City math teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein caught Duncan at a national conference of Teach for America—a private, nonprofit that flourished, in part, because of policies Duncan enacted as secretary of education—saying that one of the charter schools that had replaced Englewood had produced better results with the “same children.” As Rubinstein explained, that wasn’t really true because the charter, Urban Prep, cleverly manipulated its student enrollment and graduation statistics to make itself look better.

Since 2022, at least, CPS has been trying to shut down two campuses of Urban Prep due to “allegations” that the school had “mismanaged finances and failed to comply with special education laws, as well as accusations that the school’s founder, Tim King, sexually abused a now-former student,” Chalkbeat reported in 2023. Another article by Chalkbeat in 2024 said that a state appellate court allowed the closure to proceed.

Another school that replaced Englewood, TEAM Englewood, was shut down by the district in 2018 after years of losing students and funding.

It’s not at all clear that the current acrimony between CPS and the union resembles a political grudge match, as Zavitkovsky suggested. But what’s obvious is that Democratic lawmakers, both nationally and in Chicago, who claim the party is pivoting to a policy agenda driven by care rather than political calculation will need to prove that the party’s past isn’t a prologue.

Martire, for one, expressed deep frustration with the situation Democratic leaders have put themselves into, calling it “a philosophical problem.”

“Chicago has a fiscal crisis that conservatives had the brilliance to create,” he said. They understood, according to him, that once government institutions have inadequate capacity to pay for things, they will have inadequate outcomes. But paying for improvements is always a problem because tax increases are unpopular.

So they steadfastly fought any tax increases, realizing that eventually cutting off money would rob government systems of the capacity to produce desirable outcomes, make institutions like public schools dysfunctional, and help convince people that pouring more money into them was wasteful.

Conservatives played the long game Martire described so well that even Democrats, like Duncan, started calling public schools “cultural failures.”

“So now,” Martire said, “neither Illinois nor CPS currently has the financial capacity to do the job of educating students.”

This isn’t to say that campaigning to raise everyone’s taxes would be a winning political strategy.

But should Democrats want to make good on their new promise to be a champion for families and working people, patching up the party’s tattered relationship with organized teachers seems like a good idea, and Chicago is a great place to start.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Charles Edward Miller / Wikimedia Commons

Political Collapse: Lessons From Fallen Empires

Click here to read the article on Popular Archaeology.

By Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, and Lane F. Fargher-Navarro

Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an unexpected historical pattern. This revelation was not evident before these sudden collapses as all four polities had demonstrated forms of governance that persisted for centuries, had been among the wealthiest and best-governed polities of their eras, and had embraced policies fostering inclusiveness and egalitarianism that engendered strong support from the majority of their citizens.

We could not identify any exogenous causal factors for the collapses—such as drought, epidemic, or conquest by a more powerful foe (three of the four eventually were conquered, but only after their governments were considerably weakened)—adding to our confusion about what led to these major political transformations.

To understand the reasons for the political breakdowns, we decided to revisit an earlier article in which we had posited an answer to this question when it became increasingly clear to us that the conflictive political culture of the contemporary U.S. presents striking parallels with what we had discovered. We aim to reexamine our article to bring a comparative perspective on historically well-known episodes of collapse, their causes, and negative outcomes, and to alert U.S. citizens of the potential dangers we face, so we can highlight the need to take urgent corrective actions. We begin by referring to recent works by political scientists and anthropologists that provided theoretical context for our arguments.

Collective Action Theory Expands Our Understanding of Governance

In all four instances, collapse followed quickly after the leaders of these polities inexplicably and suddenly abandoned principles and practices that had successfully underpinned state-building and social stability. Their actions initiated a cascading series of events that brought a rapid decline in many aspects of society, which extended beyond the government. But why would the actions of just a few people have such severe consequences for otherwise endurable and well-organized polities?

We identified a plausible answer to this question when we considered collapse from the vantage of recently developed theories of human cooperation developed by political economists Margaret Levi and Elinor Ostrom, along with several others. The cooperation ideas intrigued us because they potentially laid down a pathway to evaluate traditional claims that state-building did not result from cooperation in premodern times, but from the actions of the autocratic elite who coercively gained dominion over subservient and easily mystified subaltern subjects. A reliance on coercion was foundational for the traditional Western understanding that the rise of democracy in Classical Athens 2,600 years ago was an exceptional event that set Western (“Occidental”) political history on a separate and democratic track, sharply different from the “Oriental” autocracies. But is this entrenched presumption correct?

Humans as ‘Contingent Cooperators’

The most salient feature of collective action theory separating it from the Orientalist tradition is that it does not presume mystified subaltern subjects nor coercive leadership. The theory hypothesizes that both ruling authorities and subjects are thoughtful social actors (“contingent cooperators”) who will agree to limit their selfish actions when they perceive that the actions of others are consistent with mutual benefit (“contingent mutuality”).

Our recent work in this regard has supported the hypothesis as applied to state formation. What we have found is that subjects are more likely to gain confidence in governing authorities and the policies and practices of a government based on the degree to which the leadership willingly provides elements of what is called “good government” (or “good governance”).

Good governance includes the degree to which leadership will accept limits on its power, is willing to develop the governing capacity to identify and punish official corruption, is willing to provide citizens access to an impartial judiciary, and is prepared to implement equitable taxation, to open up access to positions of governing authority without favoritism, and to provide public goods beneficial to all households.

A key aspect of good governance is that if its benefits foster citizen confidence and compliance with obligations, its practices and principles must be judiciously adhered to, and good governance benefits must be made available across the realm without favoritism. We discovered that in instances where mutual benefit and good governance are key, state-builders and citizens recognized that impartiality was threatened when a leader’s power, or the state itself, was religiously sacralized. The same threat was felt when the state gained legitimacy and fiscal benefit by associating or controlling a particular religious institution (analogous to the contemporary concept of separation of church and state).

The population of Renaissance Venice, for example, was largely Catholic, yet featured considerable cultural diversity while also depending on trade relations with merchants who belonged to diverse cultures and religions. Correspondingly, strict rules prohibited affiliations of the leadership and their immediate family members with any religious institution. In South Asia, the Mughal Emperor Akbar instituted a strong program for governing in a diverse region that mandated religious neutrality of the state and encouraged reasoned dialogues between religious and political leaders. The Roman and Ming leaderships certified their legitimacy to govern, not as religiously sanctified beings, but as leaders whose actions were expected to benefit society. The policy of the Ming Dynasty also emphasized the need for neutrality in its dealings with the three main religions of its time.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Premodern States

We coded the good governance attributes across a worldwide sample of 30 premodern polities, and subsequent archaeological work by us and others has provided additional pertinent data. We also considered other variables that we hypothesized might enrich our understanding of the causes and consequences of mutual benefit and good governance; for example, we coded for demographic trends, which are population growth/loss, material standard of living of households, and the frequency of political struggles and organized opposition to state policies and practices. We also coded the relative severity of social, demographic, and agricultural changes after the collapse of the four polities.

Was Western Political History Really Unique?

Armed with a new theory, good governance measures to evaluate it, and a vast array of descriptive studies available from ethnographic, historical, and archaeological sources, we dwelled on the question: Was Western political history really unique? We know that coercive and autocratic states did exist in the past, as they still do today, but were there also experiments in state-building, outside of Western history, which were based on contingent mutual benefit and good governance, and were they similar to democracy? The coding of good governance variables yielded a surprising answer to this question as we were able to identify such experiments.

Although there is considerable variation in the details of governance across these cases, we identified forms of governing outside of Western history in which the central force guiding political change was contingent on the bond of obligation between governing authorities and subjects rather than on coercion. Further, in such cases, we also found that mutual benefit and good governance brought numerous advantageous downstream consequences for their respective populations.

For example, compared with the more autocratic and coercive states, the collectively organized polities were more politically stable, in part because public safety was greatly enhanced, there were far fewer episodes of anti-state movements (although disgruntled elites often would militate against the more egalitarian and inclusive policies), and there was a reduction in the frequency of internal conflicts between ethnic groups or religious groups.

As a result of these outcomes, resulting in part from the fact that states organized based on mutual benefit and good governance, citizens were provided with opportunities to engage in cooperative social interactions and alignments that could bridge social, cultural, and economic cleavages. Good governance, for one, was a fertile ground for commercial growth in the form of marketplace economies that provided new opportunities and increased living standards for buyers and sellers irrespective of wealth, patrimony, or rural-urban setting. Marketplace economies grew alongside other institutional outcomes, including open recruitment to positions of governing authority, which provided entirely new pathways to social mobility for the public. Well-organized and more livable cities, which were easy to navigate, also enhanced possibilities for commingling, cooperative interactions, and bridged social alignments weakening the likelihood of antagonism between different groups.

The collective action theory is an action-oriented framework that focuses on the idea that diverse webs of cooperative action in society are engendered by the palpable social actions of persons who want to realize collective benefits. In relation to leadership, this requires a display of commitment to carrying out the necessary and often challenging work of good governance.

Patterns of Stability and Collapse: Three Counterintuitive Discoveries

To confirm that premodern governments could, in some respects, display features that we associate with contemporary democracy was itself a surprise, but we discovered other unanticipated aspects of premodern governance:

Endurability: Despite the obvious advantages in cases where we see a focus on mutual benefit and good governance, their focal periods (the period when a particular set of policies and principles remained stable) were only slightly longer, at 166 years on average, compared to the more autocratic polities with focal periods of 152 years, a difference that is not statistically significant. In addition, polities built more strongly around mutual benefit occurred relatively infrequently (only 27 percent of our sample had consistently high scores for good governance). This shows that despite the advantages of mutual benefit and good governance, they have been difficult to build and sustain in the long run.

Collapse Patterns: Further, while providing many more benefits to their citizens compared to autocratic polities, states that organized to achieve good governance also had more of a collapse pattern than polities that scored lower on good governance. That pattern includes the emergence of damaging factional struggles for power, the loss of fiscal viability of the state, and even food shortages and demographic decline.

Collapse in the case of autocracies brought less serious consequences because, lacking much in the way of governance, groups such as neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and rural communities were already organized at the local level to respond to hazards. Yet, this fragmented form of adaptation was itself problematic, precluding coordinated responses to, for example, urban fires, lawlessness, or the actions of wealthy entrepreneurs who, lacking any opposition from a well-organized authority, were in a position to distort fair marketplace pricing.

Initiating Collapse: Earlier we mentioned the separation of religion and state because, although violating its premise was not the only misstep exhibited by the respective leaderships, it was among the most damaging. In Ming China, collapse followed the actions of leaders of the mid-16th century, including the Chia-ching Emperor, who became so obsessed with Daoist ceremonies and alchemy that he neglected his duties; his successor, the Wanli Emperor, turned his attention to gaining personal wealth, a violation of long-standing prohibitions. In the case of the Mughals, the fourth emperor, convinced by Muslim leaders, abandoned religious neutrality, even taxing Hindus more than Muslims and permitting the destruction of new temples. The Roman Emperor Commodus lacked interest in governing and became an avid performer as a gladiator. He identified himself with the god Hercules. Following his failed reign, the empire devolved into a chaotic and corrupt system in which, as the historian Ramsay MacMullen concluded, “relationships involving anything other than the wish for material possession had no chance to develop.”

The case of Venice is particularly troubling in light of what has transpired in recent years in the U.S. Although the Venetian government possessed the institutional capacity to impeach leaders, when Doge Giovanni Cornaro and his family broke the religious neutrality and other rules, for example, as a result of his son accepting the position of Bishop of Bergamo, the governing council refused to impeach him. This action, regarded by many inside and outside of the government as a violation of long-standing rules, was not corrected, and the governing council’s response to criticism was to double down on its authority. These moves, according to the historian John Norwich made the council ever more unpopular both with the citizens and other organs of government and precipitated a rapid unwinding of the societal threads that had, for centuries, underpinned inclusive forms of cooperation and devotion to a governing system that aimed to realize the common good.

It is important to note that these polities had developed the governing capacity to productively address various expressions of social malfeasance, including administrative corruption and shirking and free riding among citizens that could challenge the confidence of people in each other and the government. Yet, when it was the leadership that turned away from meeting expectations—including diligence in sustaining a system of governance and maintaining its religious neutrality—all the governments in question illustrated a key vulnerability: they lacked the institutional capacity to punish leadership displaying self-serving acts contrary to the pursuit of societal benefit.

Moral Collapse and Its Relevance to Contemporary U.S. Politics

Like the societies we have discussed, the original charters of the U.S. government featured mutual moral obligations between governing authorities and citizens at their core and specified key governing precepts, including the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, inclusion, checks and balances on the concentration of power, and the separation of church and state. Over more than two centuries, these principles, although sometimes opposed, have largely been followed. But now they face serious challenges from the presumptive leadership of the Republican Party and influential governing bodies including the Supreme Court.

These challengers reject the notions of inclusiveness and lawfulness embedded in the original charters in a way that does not align with what the majority of American citizens believe and would like to preserve. In particular, challengers deviate from broad sensibilities both when they show strong support for the idea that white nationalist ideologies and religious fundamentalism should serve as the religious foundation for our governing practices and principles, and when they assert their belief that violence is an acceptable means to achieve political goals in the face of opposition.

We hope that our discussion of historical cases is a reminder that mutual benefit and good governance succeed or fail based on the choices of contingently cooperative citizens. Contingency implies that, as in Venice and the other cases we pointed out, the loss of citizen confidence in the leadership can trigger an unexpected unwinding of the societal threads that underpin inclusive forms of cooperation and devotion to a governing system designed to realize common good.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Richard E. Blanton is professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University.

Gary M. Feinman is a MacArthur Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.

Stephen A. Kowalewski is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Georgia.

Lane F. Fargher-Navarro is the director of research at the Past Foundation, Ohio State University.

Click here to read the article on Popular Archaeology.

Photo Credit: Thomas Cole / Wikimedia Commons

How Sustainable Next-Gen Materials Can Create a More Ethical Consumer Market

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

The nascent industry of next-gen materials is set to dethrone unsustainable animal-based materials.

By Elaine Siu

Next-generation (“next-gen”) materials are innovative alternatives to traditional petrochemical and animal-based materials like leather, silk, down, fur, wool, and exotic skins. They aim to replace animal-based materials and significantly reduce environmental impacts and animal welfare concerns.

Next-gen materials replicate the performance of their animal-based counterparts by using biomimicry approaches while being more sustainable.

The Six Main Input Categories of Next-Gen Materials

The rise of innovation companies has led to several types of next-gen material being available in the market. These high-performance materials tend to vary from one another. For instance, mushroom leather produced by one company will differ from others; each innovator follows their own specialized approach.

To simplify the diverse landscape of formulation and processing approaches for next-gen materials, MII categorizes next-gen innovation into six “main input” categories:

  1. Plant-derived: Next-gen materials derived from plant matter, including fungi (fruiting body) and algae inputs.
  2. Mycelium: Materials utilizing the root-like structure of fungal species called mycelium. It is distinguished from the plant-derived category by its rich activity in next-gen innovation.
  3. Cultivated animal cells: Materials grown from animal cell constructs in laboratory tissue engineering approaches.
  4. Microbe-derived: Materials produced through cellular engineering approaches like cell culture or fermentation processes to create proteins and biopolymers.
  5. Recycled material: Materials utilizing recycled plastic or textile feedstock as the primary input.
  6. Blend: Materials made by combining components not well captured by any of the above categories.

State of the Industry

The fourth State of the Industry report by the Material Innovation Initiative (MII), where I serve as an adviser, highlights the importance of next-gen materials in transitioning away from unsustainable practices in material production.

The report provides insights into the progress made by the next-gen industry in 2023. It further details the key stakeholders and the challenges posed by the industry while spotlighting the “rising stars.”

Companies in the Next-Gen Materials Industry

As of the start of 2024, there are 144 “innovators,” or companies developing next-gen materials. The majority (92 companies) worked on biomimicry of animal leather and exotic skins. Twenty-four worked on biomimicry of silk, 16 on wool, 14 on down, and eight on fur.

Some companies work on more than one material. The U.S. had the most innovators at 44; other countries had between one and 13, according to the MII report. The vast majority of innovators’ main focus is next-gen materials. Also, some larger corporations have a next-gen material product as part of their diverse offerings. For example, Volvo has developed its next-gen leather, Nordico (with a blend input). The company aims to use this material in 25 percent of its new cars by 2025, comprising “recycled and bio-based content.”

More than half of all innovators used a plant-derived source as their primary input for their material, according to the MII report. The remaining half was divided between microbe-derived, mycelium, recycled materials, and blends, with cultivated animal cells forming the smallest input category at around 4 percent.

The feedstock, inputs, and technologies used to create a material affect not only the look, feel, and properties of the finished product but also—crucially in this industry of innovation—the time and cost it will take to reach commercial manufacturing scale.

Many innovators chose to stay in stealth mode until they were ready to launch. No new companies were created in 2023, but 29 that existed previously in stealth mode publicly disclosed their activities.

Due to their high market value, silk, fur, and exotic skins may appeal to early-stage innovators. Unlike commodity markets, these high-value product targets could lead to faster price parity. For instance, while polyester yarn costs around $1/kg, raw silk averages around $55/kg. These underserved product categories lack competition, making them attractive to innovators and investors seeking entry into the next-gen materials industry.

Investment in Next-Gen Materials

Investors play an essential role in the next-generation materials industry by funding research, development, and growth.

In 2021, there was an unprecedented spike in capital invested in next-gen materials companies, followed by a sharp decrease in 2022. An upward momentum returned in 2023, with just more than $500 million raised in 36 publicly disclosed deals.

Despite a global decline in venture capital funding and deal count in 2023, funding for next-gen materials companies increased. The industry experienced a 10 percent rise in investment funding, indicating higher investments than the general market. This is a positive sign for such a nascent industry.

The total investment figure of more than $500 million excludes significant investments made internally by companies in developing next-gen materials. Such internal investments are important as they reflect the expertise and resources of the companies. Gucciʼs capital investment in their Demetra next-gen leather exemplifies this trend, leveraging the companyʼs reputation, expertise in high-quality leather, and available resources to drive innovation in the next-gen materials industry.

Industry Brands’ Involvement in the Next-Gen Materials Market

Industry brands are established companies in fashion, automotive, and home goods that are the biggest buyers and users of materials. Although consumer preference has driven brands in these industries toward more sustainable practices over the years, material innovators seldom have a direct relationship with consumers. The success of transitioning from animal-based materials to next-gen materials largely depends on the ability of innovators and industry brands to work together.

Industry brands can play vital roles in the next-gen material innovation ecosystem, including funding internal and external initiatives, switching to next-gen materials as their raw materials, and collaborating with startups to create new products. These actions help accelerate commercialization and scale-up production of next-gen materials to replace conventional products.

Top-tier industry brands like Nike, IKEA, and Volvo are driving demand for next-gen materials due to pressure from consumers and regulations to improve sustainability and reduce the environmental impact of their products. Regulations such as the EUʼs corporate sustainability due diligence directive, Franceʼs AGEC law, and the New York Fashion Act replace voluntary supervisory systems with mandatory targets and consequences for non-compliance. This regulatory landscape and consumer sentiment are driving the shift toward next-gen materials in various industries.

Next-Gen Materials and the ‘Hype Cycle’ of Innovation

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of the stages in the life cycle of a technology. It depicts the typical progression of innovation from “overenthusiasm” toward a period of “disillusionment” and then to “eventual productivity.”

High expectations and low maturity lead to the “Trough of Disillusionment,” where interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. However, investments may continue if the product is improved to satisfy early adopters.

The Hype Cycle consists of five key phases that describe the life cycle of new technologies and the challenges and opportunities they may encounter along the way:

  1. Innovation Trigger: Potential technological breakthroughs that spark initial interest but often have no usable products and unproven commercial viability.
  2. Peak of Inflated Expectations: This is characterized by early success stories, which generate hype, but failures also occur.
  3. Trough of Disillusionment: This period is characterized by declining interest as experiments fail, leading to shakeouts or failures among technology producers.
  4. Slope of Enlightenment: This occurs when there is an understanding of the technology’s increasing benefits, with second- and third-generation products emerging.
  5. Plateau of Productivity: This is a function of mainstream adoption, which begins with clearly defined criteria for assessing provider viability and broader market applicability.

The innovation trigger for next-gen materials began in 2018 when many startups received their first round of venture capital funding. The peak of inflated expectations began around 2020, with next-gen materials becoming a trend in business, industry, and fashion publications. Companies capitalized on this by using buzzwords like “next-gen materials” and “apple/cactus/mushroom leather.” Investment spiked in 2021, reaching $980 million, a significant increase from previous years.

After 2022, the industry has undoubtedly been in the trough of disillusionment signaled by a sharp decline in investment, exacerbated by the pandemic’s unprecedented disruption of various facets of business, from supply chains to funding availability. Early success stories were repeated, and the market soon became impatient with the lack of scaled production and availability of innovative materials. There was negative press as a result, and the innovation was discredited for not living up to the early, overinflated expectations of being the “perfectly sustainable” solution to the grand challenges faced by the fashion industry.

However, despite these challenges, innovation has continued, with companies working to improve products based on feedback, addressing scaling challenges, and exploring new markets.

The length of the trough of disillusionment is one of the most variable parts of the hype cycle. And yet, the industry’s progress to the next phase may be closer than expected. At the end of 2023, there was an upward trend in investments in the next-gen materials industry. This reflects progress with the hope that next-gen materials continue to be more widely adopted by leading brands to ensure a more sustainable future.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Claudia Erixon, communications and development assistant at Material Innovation Initiative, provided research.

Elaine Siu is an adviser at Material Innovation Initiative (MII), where she previously served as the chief innovation officer. She has also served as the managing director of Good Food Institute APAC and is the author of the book Your Next 40,000 Hours. Siu advises startups, corporations, and investors on strategies and industry insights, particularly on harnessing the power of technology and market forces to shift the world away from industrial animal agriculture. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Elke Wetzig / Wikimedia Commons

Can Vice-Presidential Pick Tim Walz Make Democrats the Education Party Again?

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Harris’s decision to choose a teacher as her running mate creates an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party’s image for public schools.

In choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not only picked a progressive governor and a Midwestern populist to lead the party’s national ticket but she also may have signaled that the Democratic Party is ready to take back its reputation as the education party.

Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

The “historic” education spending Walz approved included a $5.5 billion increase over the next four years, a substantial raise to the state’s per-pupil funding formula, and an increase in funding for full-service community schools consisting of $7.5 million for two years and then $5 million per year in the future. Community schools practice a holistic education approach that entails attending to the non-academic needs of students and families, including access to technology, social services, physical and mental health care, adult education, and after-school and summer programs.

It’s also telling that in picking Walz to be her running mate Harris rejected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who prominent centrist Democrats claimed was Harris’s “best chance” of wooing political moderates in an election that is expected to be a close race to the finish.

But Shapiro had set off alarms among public school advocates. In a letter sent in July 2024 to the Harris campaign, which was picked up by numerous media outlets, more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned against selecting Shapiro because of his support for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

The letter stated that Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the right-wing manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that is expected to provide a blueprint for a new Trump administration and “includes measures to funnel federal education funds directly to families through education savings accounts,” stated WITF.

“Through Project 2025,” the letter further read, “[conservatives] have made it abundantly clear the end goal of gutting public education and privatizing what is left via irresponsible voucher systems like those in Florida and Arizona.”

“Walz has pretty much been the best governor on education in Minnesota in decades,” wrote Sarah Lahm in an email to Our Schools. Lahm is a veteran education journalist based in the state and an Our Schools contributing writer. Choosing Walz to be the nominee “is good news,” she said, “especially compared to Shapiro and his school choice record.”

No doubt, in selecting a running mate, the Harris team weighed numerous issues, but the fact that opposition to school vouchers came to the fore is unusual in Democratic political circles where education is often not considered to be an important national issue.

When Democrats Were the Education Party

The last time the Democratic Party had a former K-12 school teacher running for vice president was in 1960, and the candidate was Lyndon Johnson. Although most experts insist that vice presidents have little influence on federal policies, Johnson ultimately became president and was instrumental in pushing through the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 that is still, in its current version called Every Student Succeeds Act, and is the blueprint for federal education policy today.

The Democratic Party burnished its reputation as the education party in 1979 when then-Democratic President Jimmy Carter approved legislation to create the U.S. Department of Education as a Cabinet-level entity.

In 2004, Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute wrote, “Historically, Democrats have enjoyed a substantial advantage over the Republicans on education due to their support for education spending and their decades-old alliance with unions and public employees.”

But that advantage began to erode in the late 1980s, Hess and Kelly contended, due to “Reaganite critiques of liberalism and expensive social programs.” Democrats responded to those attacks by “seek[ing] a more moderate course on domestic policies, including education,” they noted, and by late 2002, when Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, popular opinion on which party was best on education was nearly split.

Nevertheless, Democrats seemed to have regained the advantage by 2012 when polling by Pew Research Center found, “By about two-to-one (53 percent to 27 percent), more [voters] say Democrats can do a better job improving the education system in the country.”

But the Democrats’ resurgence as the favored party for education didn’t last, and when Pew surveyed voters again in 2014, the party had only a 4 percent advantage over Republicans in handling education.

“Taken as a whole, the data suggest that Democrats are struggling more on education than at any other time in the past two decades,” Hess wrote in 2022 when he again examined which party had the best education cred.

The Democratic party’s declining reputation for supporting public schools did not mean Republicans were gaining much favorability, Hess found, but “Democrats have been losing voters’ confidence for a half-decade, and that decline has become noticeably steeper over the past two years,” he wrote, noting that nearly one in five voters didn’t trust either party.

Also in 2022, a poll of voters in key battleground states conducted by Hart Research for the American Federation of Teachers found 39 percent of voters trusted Republicans compared to 38 percent who showed confidence in the Democrats on education issues. Another poll conducted the same year by Democrats for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for privatizing schools with charters and vouchers, found a more lopsided Republican advantage, with 47 percent saying they trusted Republicans “to handle education” and 43 percent saying they trusted Democrats.

What Happened?

Republicans would have you believe that the source for the shift in popular approval on education policy away from Democrats was due to mask mandates that Democratic government officials supported during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another narrative that right-wing operatives like to spin is that when the pandemic forced students to shift to remote learning, parents saw firsthand that their children were being instructed in so-called leftist ideology and “Democratic indoctrination.”

Although many media outlets have reported these narratives as factual, they really aren’t.

First, surveys of parents during the pandemic years found that they were mostly supportive of how schools responded to the situation, and when schools went back to face-to-face learning, parents remained satisfied with the schools.

Also, as the above survey data from Pew in 2014 show, voters started to sour on the Democratic Party’s education politics before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Without a doubt, the Democratic Party’s declining popularity related to education has something to do with the policies the party supported or failed to support. During the years that Pew was tracking the party’s declining reputation on education issues, the Obama presidential administration’s education agenda and his ham-handed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were so disastrous that Congress was spurred to rewrite ESEA to rein in some of the federal government’s powers to shape local education policies.

Further, during President Trump’s administration, while Republicans coalesced around so-called school choice policies that give parents taxpayer funds to pull their kids out of public schools, the Democratic Party countered with, well, basically nothing.

It bears noting that when Joe Biden ran for president, he did not continue with the education policies of the Obama administration, and his administration, likely at the urging of the strong public school advocacy of First Lady Jill Biden, returned to a relatively safe narrative of education as an essential “investment.” But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand the party could hang its hat on.

Having Tim Walz on the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign is an opportunity to change that.

‘Sitting on the Edge of Our Seats’

Based on his accomplishments in Minnesota, Walz has demonstrated his inclination to back education policies that matter most. He also eschews policy gimmicks that have been favored by both parties.

In his 2007 interview with Education Week, Walz criticized NCLB as a “bureaucratic nightmare” and said “the application of it [had] very little impact on real student achievement.”

As governor, he has “stood firmly against school voucher programs,” according to the Baltimore Sun, and opposed Minnesota’s Republican-controlled Senate that wanted to create education savings accounts that give parents taxpayer money to pull their children out of public schools and use other education options.

With Walz now elevated to a vice-presidential nominee, public education advocates and policy experts are “sitting on the edge of our seats to see the policy implications of a teacher as the vice president of the United States of America,” wrote education professor Phelton Moss in an August 2024 op-ed for Education Week. “A Harris-Walz administration could be a historic next phase in education policy,” he wrote.

Of course, it’s still early in the long presidential campaign season to say whether or not education becomes a prominent issue. A Harris-Walz victory is far from being assured, and vice presidents often have little influence over policy directions in a presidential administration.

But Harris’s decision to choose Walz as her running mate creates an opportunity to overhaul the outdated education policies of the Democratic Party establishment and remake the party’s image of being a genuine hero for public schools and children.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Office of Governor Walz & Lt. Governor Flanagan / Flickr

Take the New Grand Tour in Costa Rica

Irina Matuzava of the Human Bridges project has assembled the Costa Rica map and information portal for our New Grand Tour project, published on the Observatory. It’s our prototype for an accessible global data set for visitors and global audiences to learn more, and find ways to travel and connect with guides who visit human prehistory and ecology sites. Soon you’ll see the map expand to South Africa, France, Peru and Indonesia.

The New Grand Tour is an initiative of the Human Bridges project. We aim to increase awareness and circulation of discoveries in the social sciences, human origins, archaeology, and related disciplines. 

Currently, we are developing an exciting new project to encourage travelers to visit prehistoric sites, museums, and ecological hotspots around the world. The New Grand Tour is an initiative of the Human Bridges project. We are working to expand global public consciousness of new research and discovery in the field of human origins, archaeology, and related disciplines. 

You can read a general overview of the New Grand Tour, or watch Peter Coyote’s narrated documentary here, on the Observatory.

Observatory Special Report on How Investors Are Exploiting Public Education

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

For-profit operators and their investors use complex business arrangements and networks of related companies to enrich themselves and do little to improve education.

Ever since charter schools were created in the 1990s, there’s been a persistent question1 of whether or not the schools introduce an element of profit-making into the public education sector. In statutory law, legislatures have generally ruled that charter schools must be operated as nonprofits. In fact, only one state,2 Arizona, technically allows for-profit organizations to be licensed to run charter schools. Yet, the charter school industry has proven to be an innovator in developing business arrangements in which third-party and related organizations profit handsomely off a nonprofit charter.

One such entryway for profit-making enterprises to exploit charter schools, according to an in-depth examination conducted by Our Schools in 2021, occurs when for-profit charter school operators partner with private investors intent on turning quick profits from public dollars meant for educating children.

Our Schools examined the relationship between Pansophic Learning, owner of the Accel Schools chain of for-profit charter schools, and Safanad Limited, a private equity firm, originating in the Middle East, with extensive investment holdings in K–12 education, senior living, and other public sector-related enterprises.

What Our Schools found was that for-profit businesses like Pansophic Learning are providing entryways for wealthy investors from abroad to flood the U.S. with money to buy up struggling taxpayer-funded enterprises and put into place elaborate business schemes and networks of interrelated companies that hide their profiteering while doing little to improve the quality of services to the public.

A request for comment regarding Pansophic’s relationship with Safanad and the partnership’s potential for conflicts of interest that was left as a press inquiry at the Pansophic website did not receive a reply.

The combination of for-profit operators backed by private equity has become prevalent in other publicly funded sectors that have traditionally been operated by federal and/or state governments or nonprofit organizations. And the results have not been beneficial to the public or the individuals the publicly funded system was intended to serve.

For example, in the government-funded prison system, “The involvement of private equity firms, which manage large investment portfolios, presents a conflict between the financial and social goals of some investors,” reported Prison Legal News in 2019, citing two studies—one from the nonprofit Worth Rises, which advocates for “dismantling the prison industry,” and the other from the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers’ union.

Another analysis, by the ACLU, found that for-profit prison operators backed by private investors are more apt to create profit for their investors by maintaining high rates of incarceration, which results in significantly higher social and fiscal costs to the public.

Our Schools found that this combination of for-profit entrepreneurs backed by private investors is having a similarly corrosive impact in the charter school industry.

Ron Packard and K12 Inc.

The genesis of Accel Schools goes back to 2014, when Education Week reported that Ron Packard, the former CEO of K12 Inc., had formed a new education enterprise called Pansophic Learning. K12 Inc., which changed its name to Stride Inc. in 2020, was then, and as of this writing still is, the largest for-profit charter school operator in the U.S.

Packard, a former Goldman Sachs executive who specialized in mergers and acquisitions, departed K12 Inc., which he founded, at a time when the company was besieged with negative publicity.

In 2011, K12 Inc. was the subject of a scathing story in the New York Times revealing that “only a third” of the students enrolled in its online charter schools “achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation,” while the company employed multiple ways to “squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload, and lowering standards.”

The withering critique, which ran on the newspaper’s front page, “caused” the publicly traded company’s stock price “to drop precipitously,” Education Week reported in 2012, and prompted a shareholder to file a federal lawsuit accusing K12 Inc. executives, including Packard, of “misleading investors with false student-performance claims.”

More negative publicity came in 2013 when Politico reported K12 Inc. was one among many online charter schools that “posts dismal scores on math, writing, and science tests and mediocre scores on reading.” Another blow came that year when influential hedge fund manager and charter school proponent Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, betting the company would fail.

In 2014, K12 Inc. became the target of yet another lawsuit accusing the company of “misleading investors by putting forward overly positive public statements… only later to reveal that it had missed key operational and financial targets,” Education Week reported. The lawsuit also charged Packard, whose relationship to the company had become unclear, of selling off his own stock before revealing the negative financials, and, thus, earning a windfall of $6.4 million before the stock price plunged.

But as Packard disengaged from one troubled education enterprise, he started another with a financial partner that would provide the capital to quickly scale up.

As Education Week reported in 2014, Packard’s new company, Pansophic Learning, included a partnership with a holding company, Safanad Education, a subsidiary of Safanad Limited, a New York- and Dubai-based real estate and investment firm. Packard and Safanad spent an unknown sum to purchase part of K12 Inc.’s assets, mostly in higher education, and acquire an international brick-and-mortar private school. The two entrepreneurs were “on the hunt for acquisitions,” according to Education Week.

A Charter School Shopping Spree

Initially, Packard and Pansophic Learning kept a low profile until, in 2016, a visit by then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump drew attention to a Cleveland, Ohio, brick-and-mortar charter school “that usually escapes notice,” reported the Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper.

According to the Plain Dealer, the school, the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, was one of 27 schools in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio that had been recently acquired by Accel Schools, a new for-profit network of charter schools owned and operated by Pansophic Learning.

Packard is listed as the CEO of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools. Two other C-suite executives of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools are COO Maria Szalay and CTO Eric Waller. Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools also have street addresses within 5 minutes’ walking distance of each other in McLean, Virginia.

Prior to the news about Trump visiting its school, Accel Schools had been “amassing an education empire” in Ohio, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

Among its acquisitions were, in 2014, the “troubled K-8 schools” of White Hat Management, which had previously been, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio’s largest charter school chain. In 2018, Accel Schools purchased White Hat’s last remaining online charter school as well.

In 2015, Accel Schools also acquired the assets of another financially struggling charter management firm, Mosaica Education, and bought Cleveland-based I Can Schools, which, Packard told the Plain Dealer, were also “struggling financially.”

The charter school shopping spree Accel Schools went on undoubtedly benefited from the financial support of Safanad.

“We are fortunate to partner with Safanad,” Packard is quoted saying in Safanad’s official announcement of its partnership with Pansophic Learning in 2014. “Safanad’s extensive resources will allow us to pursue opportunities of all sizes,” he said.

The Bahamdan Connection

According to the firm’s website, Safanad’s founder and CEO is Kamal Bahamdan, a Saudi national. Kamal Bahamdan “was the CEO of the Bahamdan [investment Group],” according to his profile.

Kamal Bahamdan’s current relationship with the Bahamdan Investment Group is unclear, but the Bahamdan firm maintains a controlling interest in Safanad. According to its SEC filings brochure, Safanad is “controlled by Bahamdan Investment Group and KB Group Holdings Ltd.” KB Group Holdings Ltd., according to Safanad’s SEC filing form, is owned by the Bahamdan Investment Group.

The Bahamdan Investment Group is a Saudi-based investment firm founded by Salem Bahamdan, Kamal Bahamdan’s father, according to ZoomInfo. Kamal Bahamdan is the grandson of Abdullah Bahamdan, according to Wikipedia.

In numerous online profiles, Abdullah Salem Bahamdan (also Abdullah S. Bahamdan, Abdullah Salim Bahamdan, and Abdullah Bahamdan) is described as a “seasoned banker” and one of “the Middle East’s most prominent and influential financiers.”

Abdullah Bahamdan also spent more than 50 years as the chairman of “Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, the largest lender in the Arab world,” according to Institutional Investor. National Commercial Bank (NCB), which merged with Samba Financial Group in 2021 to form Saudi National Bank (SNB), was established in 1953 by royal decree, according to the SNB website, with the Saudi government as its major shareholder.

Despite its close relationship to the Saudi government, NCB was one among 16 financial institutions that were fined by the Saudi Monetary Authority in 2019 “for violating principles of responsible finance,” according to Reuters. “[T]he violations were related to exceeding debt burdens imposed on people in proportion to their monthly income.”

In 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department settled a lawsuit with NCB accusing the bank of violating U.S. sanctions against Syria and Sudan between November 2011 to August 2014.

The bank and Abdullah Bahamdan have been the subjects of at least two lawsuits accusing them of financing terrorist groups, which may have been part of what prompted the Saudi government to, in 2017, “crack down on corruption” in its banking industry, Reuters reported.

Perhaps as a result of the crackdown, SNB, as of 2019, claimed on its website that it “developed a Bank-wide Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorist Financing Policy.”

Mixing Charter School Investments With Subpar Senior Care

Aside from its investments in Pansophic Learning, Safanad has made some of its biggest commercial real estate deals in the health care sector, principally in senior care facilities, including assisted living, independent living, memory care, and nursing homes, frequently called skilled nursing facilities.

Senior Housing News reported that Safanad teamed up with investment firm Formation Capital, an Atlanta-based health-care-focused private investment company, to purchase 36 senior care facilities in 2011, and, in 2012, the partners spent $750 million to acquire 68 more nursing homes located in East Coast states. The acquisitions made the two investment firms “one of the United States’ largest standalone skilled nursing portfolios,” according to Senior Housing News, with “more than $1 billion worth of senior care assets in the U.S.”

In 2013, the same two investment firms purchased a “36-property senior housing portfolio for approximately $400 million,” reported Senior Housing News, and in 2014, the two firms struck another deal to buy “14 skilled nursing facilities in the mid-Atlantic for about $150 million,” according to Senior Housing News.

The deals Safanad and Formation Capital struck to acquire senior care facilities are strikingly similar to the business transactions Safanad conducted with Pansophic Learning in the charter school sector, principally, buying up financially struggling service businesses that receive large amounts of public funding—in the case of the senior care sector, from Medicare and Medicaid—and that also happen to include significant holdings of real estate.

The nursing home and senior living facilities industry was struggling financially before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. Facilities had been cutting corners for years, skating by with too few staff, due to stagnating wages, and sometimes hiring unskilled workers instead of highly trained personnel.

COVID-19 simply revealed an industry that was already “broken,” reported NBC News, citing “low pay, high turnover, and tough working conditions” as chronic problems in the senior care facilities industry.

Yet the growing presence of private equity investors in the senior care industry has done little to help the industry and appears to have done mostly harm.

A 2020 study3 found that private equity ownership of nursing homes and other kinds of senior living facilities increased costs to the public by 19 percent while shortening the lifespans of patients.

Patients in facilities with substantial private equity backing tended to have less access to nurses, declining mobility, and greater use of antipsychotic medications, the study found. Consequently, “private equity ownership increases short-term mortality by 10 percent,” the authors claimed, “which implies about 21,000 lives lost due to private equity ownership over our sample period.”

As with the for-profit prison industry, many of the problems posed by private investment firms in the senior care industry, according to the study, can be sourced to “high-powered for-profit incentives… [being] misaligned with the social goals of quality care at a reasonable cost.”

The study distinguished private equity for-profit ownership from “generic” for-profit ownership because “private equity ownership confers distinct incentives to quickly and substantially increase the value of their portfolio firms.” It is this form of intense, high-powered profit-maximizing incentives, the authors asserted, “that characterize[s] private equity… [and could lead to] detrimental implications for consumer welfare.”

Investor-driven senior care facilities were especially hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2020 article in the New York Times reported.

“Decades of ownership by private equity and other private investment firms left many nursing homes with staggering bills and razor-thin margins,” according to the article.

“The toll of putting profits first started to show when the outbreak began,” the article continued. “[S]ome for-profit homes were particularly ill equipped and understaffed, which undercut their ability to contain the spread of the coronavirus.”

Among the for-profit operators that appear to have fared poorly in the pandemic is Consulate Health Care, one of the providers that were snapped up by Safanad and Formation Capital in 2014, according to Senior Housing News. In a 2020 report, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project listed Formation Capital as the owner of Consulate Health Care.

Nursing homes operated by Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital have been hotspots for COVID-19 outbreaks, according to numerous news reports from Florida and Virginia. The high incidence of outbreaks prompted, in part, a U.S. House committee to launch an investigation into the country’s five largest for-profit nursing home companies, including Consulate Health Care, Politico reported in 2020.

‘Creative Ways to Wring Profits’

As the New York Times reported in 2020, while senior care facilities often struggle financially, their private equity-backed owners have “found creative ways to wring profits out of them.”

Some of these creative ways include charging their operators “hefty management and consulting fees”; buying the real estate from the operators and then leasing the buildings back to the operators, while upping the rents; and pushing their operators to buy products and services from companies that are controlled by the investors.4

The real estate plays these firms pull off are particularly lucrative, the New York Times noted, because the buildings are often “more valuable than the businesses themselves.”

A 2018 article in the Naples Daily News described how these arrangements work in Consulate Health Care facilities owned by Formation Capital, the state’s largest provider.

Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital both operate a network of other related businesses—including “real estate, management, rehabilitation and other companies”—that they use as subcontractors for the nursing homes they own.

So when “[t]axpayer money flows to Consulate nursing homes,” the article explained, some of the money also goes to subcontractors that are related to the owners, Consulate Health Care and its controlling company, Formation Capital. “[A]nd profits earned go to the chain’s owner, the Atlanta-based private equity firm Formation Capital,” the article stated.

One of the Consulate Health Care nursing homes highlighted in the article pays its owner and management fees to two Consulate companies and also pays its lease payments and rehabilitation service fees to providers that are both related to Formation Capital.

“In each case,” the article said, “the money flows back to Formation Capital and its wealthy investors,” which include Safanad.

Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools operate similar business arrangements that help their organizations maximize their profits, according to a 2021 report by the Network for Public Education (NPE).[2]

Much in the same way Consulate Health Care facilities and Formation Capital push their nursing homes into contracts with their other related businesses, Accel and Pansophic use “a complex web of corporations,” according to NPE, to “control the operations of the school and in doing so, steer business to their related services.”

The report highlighted Accel-managed Broadway Academy, in Cleveland, a charter school previously owned by White Hat Management, according to the Accel Schools contract with the school.

Under the “fees” section in the terms of that contract—originally with for-profit management company Chippewa Community School, LLC, which is now a subsidiary of Accel Schools Ohio LLC—the school, referred to in the contract as the corporation, pays the operator (Accel, by way of its subsidiary Chippewa Community School, LLC) 96 percent of the school’s monthly qualified gross revenue, which is the per-pupil revenue the school receives from the state. In return, Accel is the sole source to provide the school with school staffing and professional development, school management and consulting, textbooks, equipment, technology, student recruitment, building payments, maintenance, custodial service, security, and capital improvements.

In other words, there’s nothing that stops Accel or Pansophic from creating yet more subsidiaries and other related companies that can do business with Broadway Academy. According to the contract, Accel can subcontract services “without the [Broadway Academy] Board’s approval,” and property purchased by Accel “shall remain… [Accel’s] sole property.”

According to NPE, these kinds of contracts, known as “sweeps,” are commonplace in the for-profit charter school industry.

“Sweeps contracts give for-profits the authority to run all school services in exchange for all or nearly all of the school’s revenue,” said the NPE report.

Taxpayer funding for the Broadway Academy that isn’t swept up by Accel’s continuing fee must be deposited into a “Student Enrichment Fund” for “educational services in the areas of student cultural activities[,] … supplemental tutoring services[,] and other programs.” Accel has sole authority to “propose uses for such funds,” and 85 percent “of all Student Enrichment Funds not spent during the fiscal year in which they are received shall be paid over to [Accel].”

While Accel’s contract with Broadway Academy doesn’t include real estate, the authors of the NPE report searched the database of Ohio charter school contracts, called “community schools documents,” and found that “Global School Properties Ohio, LLC holds the leases for many Accel charter schools. The… [landlord] is at the same 1650 Tysons Blvd. address in McLean, Virginia, as Pansophic [Learning].”

Profiting From D- and F-Rated Schools

School choice and charter school advocates are often quick to defend for-profit charter companies and their private investors, arguing that they are “sector agnostic”5 about who owns and operates a school and care only about the school’s “results.”

But what constitutes good results in education is a much-debated topic,6 and studies about the results of for-profit charter schools have found mixed results at best.

A 2017 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attend for-profit charter schools have weaker growth in math than they would have in a district public school and similar growth in reading.7 Students in nonprofit charter schools experienced stronger academic growth in both subjects than their peers enrolled in for-profit charters. The differences were “significant,” according to the study.

Also in 2017, Chalkbeat reported, “studies comparing for-profit schools to nonprofits and traditional public schools in the same area don’t find consistent differences in performance, as measured by test scores.”

None of these studies examined the performance of Accel Schools or the impact of private equity in the for-profit charter industry.

Nevertheless, an ongoing investigation by Our Schools has revealed charter schools operated by for-profit operators like Accel Schools cycle struggling charter schools through a series of private entities that, in turn, strip the schools of resources, run them at bare-bones costs, and reap whatever assets that remain before handing the schools off to the next private operator, or shutting them down completely. The result is charter operators and their investors may achieve the results they want, while the children caught up in this investor-driven enterprise often have their education significantly disrupted, or even permanently impaired, perhaps with lifelong impact.

References

  1. Network for Public Education, “Do Charter Schools Profit From Educating Students?” (April 2021).
  2. Network for Public Education, “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain” (July 2021).
  3. Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta; NYU Stern School of Business; “Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes”​​ (2020).
  4. Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Robert Gebeloff; New York Times; “Push for Profits Left Nursing Homes Struggling to Provide Care” (May 7, 2020).
  5. Nicole Stelle Garnet, Notre Dame Law School, “Sector Agnosticism and the Coming Transformation of Education Law” (April 2017).
  6. W. James Popham, ASCD, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality” (1999).
  7. James L. Woodworth et al, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), “Charter Management Organizations” (2017).

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: jonathan mcintosh / Flickr

Facing a Surge in Wildfires, the U.S. Government Turned to Native Wisdom and Advanced Archaeology

Click here to read the article on Popular Archaeology.

Collaborative efforts between forest agencies and Indigenous communities are improving wildfire management by combining oral histories with long-term archaeological datasets, demonstrating the value of integrating an understanding of the past into solutions for a better future.

By Irina Matuzava

After a sharp increase in uncontrollable wildfires across the northern U.S. and Canada in recent decades, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Forest Service have been open to new approaches and ways to address the inherent weaknesses of their bureaucracies. Due to their lack of historical understanding of past fire management methods, they turned to archaeologists, who have collected information on more than 10,000 years of human activity. For their approach, these government agencies studied the perspectives and wisdom of Indigenous peoples offered through shared oral histories.

Outreach and deliberations by federal officials led to the creation of the People, Fire, and Pines working group in 2018. The working group was formed with support from the Coalition of Archaeological Synthesis (CfAS).

Thanks to the advances in technology and the accumulation of an increasingly detailed global data set of human history, modern archaeology has more usable information for government and society than in decades past. CfAS, one of the leading early drivers of this approach, helped the working group conduct two workshops in 2018 and 2019. These workshops attempted to bridge a gap between Western and Indigenous perspectives to create a more holistic understanding of human fire use in North America since the most recent ice age. The participants of the workshops studied the Indigenous knowledge of the Border Lakes region, developed across the millennia of living on and with the land, along with archaeological and tree-ring data gathered by researchers from red pine forests in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) and the Great Lakes region.

The first workshop reached out to members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the Bois Forte Band of Lake Chippewa, focusing on “Indigenous fire stewardship” and the “Western concepts of wilderness.” The second workshop was held at the Lac La Croix First Nation Reserve and delved further into the discussion on ways to propel collaborative efforts. The workshops, along with other outputs from the group, including museum exhibits, documentaries, and peer-reviewed papers, have helped reshape the perspectives surrounding Indigenous fire stewardship and the damaging effects of settler groups, who actively disrupted the long-standing relationships between people and their environment.

In a 2020 paper, People, Fire, and Pines project organizer Evan Larson, a dendrochronologist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, along with two University of Minnesota researchers, analyzed tree-ring data from 500 years of red pine forest growth in the BWCAW of northern Minnesota. This research began with a focus on the scars left behind by forest fires and co-occurring cultural modification of bark removal for medicinal and utilitarian purposes, and it later broadened to include the historical relationship between people and fire. Though the Indigenous peoples fundamentally changed and shaped these landscapes with fire for centuries, the Western population, who later moved into these lands, designated culturally relevant landscapes as “wilderness” and inaccurately defined these areas as “untrammeled by man,” under the Wilderness Act of 1964. In fact, humans have shaped the region of northern Minnesota for thousands of years through fire and forest management practices.

The research conducted in the BWCAW and facilitated through CfAS support continues to expand the understanding of Indigenous fire stewardship through the Wisconsin Sea Grant-funded project Nimaawanji’idimin giiwitaashkodeng. The “Fire, blueberries and treaty rights” episode of the podcast, “The Water We Swim In,” offers a glimpse into the story that emerged from this work. In the episode, members of Nimaawanji’idimin giiwitaashkodeng, which translates to, “We are gathering around the fire,” share their experiences with cultural fire use and gathering blueberries among the pine trees. In the context of paleoecological and archaeological data, the ecological evidence of past surface fire activity obtained from the study confirms that the BWCAW was periodically burned to achieve forest conditions that were more desirable to the Border Lakes Anishinaabeg community and are linked to the resilience and ecological health of pine forests throughout the region.

Many other North American ecosystems burned periodically as well—sometimes through forest fires started by lightning strikes, but more often through intentional fires set by Native American communities. More than a mere tool for survival and achieving agricultural goals, fire became integral to and deeply rooted within the culture of Indigenous groups. For example, the Ojibwe of the Great Lakes region regarded fire as a sacred force, identifying more than 700 uses for it. The Ojibwe spirit of fire, Oshkigin, was a symbol of renewal and transformation.

Fire is one of our most ancient and important tools for human modification of local environments. Prescribed burning or controlled burning, when used responsibly, is particularly valuable in forest management. For instance, one of the ways in which managed fire benefits the ecology and ecosystem health of forests is that burning unwanted vegetation from the forest floor allows for new seeds to germinate, which increases variability in the type and height of plants growing.

Red pine forests, like those found in the Border Lakes area, especially benefit from this use of fire as their seeds require exposed soil to grow. Moreover, a greater balance between woody and grassy/herbaceous plants improves food availability for livestock, wildlife, and pollinators. Clearing dead or dry vegetation in this manner also allows for fire-dependent species and important food sources to grow, such as the blueberry in the Great Lakes region. Blueberries used to proliferate in the region due to fire-based interventions from the Ojibwe community, who cleared patches of the forest floor and made them conducive to berry bush growth. In addition, reducing the amount of dry vegetation on forest floors also limits the potential severity of future wildfires by minimizing the available fuels.

The arrival of European settlers to the North American continent, however, brought about a turning point in the relationship between people and fire. While North American Indigenous groups viewed fire as a great assistance to landscape management, the Europeans only saw it as a destructive force that needed to be avoided at all costs, and this led them to implement policies that suppressed all fire. The shift in attitude within the continent and suppression of Indigenous culture caused a significant loss in traditional fire knowledge and practices, leading to ecological consequences and large wildfires. As a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Melonee Montano, mentioned in the podcast episode “Fire, blueberries and treaty rights,” the land has “literally been waiting” for fire and fire-based intervention.

By studying material cultural resources, such as evidence of bark collection and forest fires left behind in the form of scars on trees, archaeological researchers gain insight into past societies and the environments people lived in during those times. In the case of wildfires, a better understanding of past human involvement in shaping local landscapes can help prevent catastrophic fires in the future.

Collaboration between researchers, forest management agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service, and descendant communities creates an opportunity to reassess current practices and policies surrounding wilderness management. Since the formation of the People, Fire, and Pines group, fire management plans have been revised in partnership with the Lac La Croix First Nation to include prescribed fire in the Quetico Provincial Park of Ontario, Canada, where “[t]hese fires are important in allowing the regeneration of red and white pine and maintaining their presence on the landscape.” Burn plans for the Cloquet Forestry Center in Minnesota were also changed to include cultural fire use through a collaboration between the University of Minnesota and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. This initiative was funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Since the change in burn plans, multiple successful prescribed fires have been conducted by Ojibwe firefighters in the Cloquet Forestry Center.

The resurgence of cultural fire practices, stemming from the initiatives started by the People, Fire, and Pines project, underlines the value of combining Indigenous and archaeological knowledge. By reclaiming controlled burns and implementing centuries-old fire practices to support effective forest management today, the relationship between people and their surrounding environments can be reestablished. This restoration will not only benefit all parties in the Border Lakes region and beyond but will also increase forest ecosystem diversity and resilience to fires, offering a hopeful future for forest management in a changing climate.

The success of these initiatives sets a precedent for other institutions, which may benefit from a similar collaborative approach by the sharing of temporal data among researchers, archaeologists, and descendent communities. Organizations, such as CfAS, have begun to change the context of archaeological research by fostering collaboration across multiple institutions and disciplines.

Analyzing prehistoric data to better understand the root causes of modern issues that originated in the greater global past, like human contributions to climate change, conflict, and disease, can be used to facilitate solutions to current issues and avoid greater ones in the future.

Click here to read the article on Popular Archaeology.

Irina Matuzava is a contributor to the Human Bridges project.

Photo Credit: mypubliclands / Flickr

Congrats to April M. Short, IMI Fellow and Contributor to the Emmy Award-Winning “Covenant of the Salmon People”

Covenant of the Salmon People just won a NW Emmy for Best Documentary (Cultural/Historical). The film was directed by Shane Anderson of Swiftwater Films and IMI’s own Local Peace Economy fellow, April M. Short, was a contributor to the project.

Covenant of the Salmon People is a 60-minute film that focuses of the Nez Perce Tribe. They are the oldest documented civilization in North America and they have a historical, cultural, and spiritual bond with the local Chinook salmon, which is now a threatened species. Dam construction is one of the main impediments to the tribe’s fight to save the fish population and restore the lower Snake River.

This film beautiful illustrates the invaluable work of environmental activism, as you can see from the trailer below.

Congratulations to the team for their phenomenal work.

If you are interested in learning more about the tribe’s environmental efforts, please check out their Salmon Orca Project. Visit the Covenant of the Salmon People website for more details about the award-winning film or you can watch the feature on PBS streaming.

1,3-Dichloropropene: The Dangerous, Sweet-Smelling Pesticide You’ve Never Heard Of

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Regulatory loopholes allow more than 30 million pounds of a cancer-causing pesticide to be sprayed on U.S. crops.

By Caroline Cox

California regulators were stunned by their air monitor results in April 1990. Concentrations of a cancer-causing pesticide at schools in Merced County were so high that regulators immediately stopped any use of that pesticide in California. It’s a chemical with an unwieldy name, 1,3-dichloropropene, that you may have never heard about. But there are many reasons why you should be concerned about its use.

The pesticide, also referred to as 1,3-D, is still a problem three decades after I first wrote about it in 1992, when the detection of high levels of 1,3-D in the air of a junior high school led to serious concerns.

The use of 1,3-D in California was suspended from 1990 to 1995 but continued in the rest of the country. Since then, its use has come back with a vengeance. About 34 million pounds are used annually in the United States; about one-third is used in California. The use of 1,3-D is concentrated in the southeastern U.S., central California, and the potato-growing areas of Washington and Idaho. It is mainly used to kill nematodes, symphylans, and wireworms and control some plant diseases.

In California, the heaviest use of 1,3-D is for preparing fields to grow almonds, strawberries, sweet potatoes, grapes, and carrots. Nationally, potatoes accounted for about half of all 1,3-D used between 2014 and 2018, according to a 2020 United States Environmental Protection Agency report.

1,3-D is manufactured by just one company in the U.S., Dow Chemical, and is often sold under the brand name Telone.

Regulatory Loophole

The story of how and why regulators have allowed 1,3-D’s use to continue and even increase is a complicated one that involves politics, economics, and corporate power. For example, in 2002, California opened a regulatory loophole that allowed 1,3-D use to increase, leading to “unfettered 1,3-D access as its use spread to populated areas near schools, homes and businesses,” wrote Bernice Yeung, Kendall Taggart, and Andy Donohue in 2014 in Reveal.

“The loophole also expanded a key market for Dow, allowing it to sell millions more pounds of chemicals across a state that provides the U.S. with nearly half of all its fruits, vegetables, and nuts,” the article in Reveal added. Yet in 2016, limits on 1,3-D use in California increased again.

In 2022, the Office of the Inspector General at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that “EPA did not adhere to standard operating procedures and requirements for the 1,3-Dichloropropene, or 1,3-D, pesticide cancer-assessment process, which undermines public confidence in and the transparency of the Agency’s scientific approaches to prevent unreasonable impacts on human health.”

In other words, the agency did not do its job. This is in stark contrast to the European Union, where 1,3-D use is not approved.

Elaborating on the extensive use of the pesticide, the inspector general also stated that “1,3-D is one of the top three soil fumigants used in the United States.”

1,3-D Causes Air Pollution

1,3-D typically is applied as a liquid that is injected into the soil. It quickly becomes a gas, moves through the soil, and escapes into the atmosphere.

California is the only state that regularly monitors 1,3-D in the air around agricultural communities, but the few results that have been obtained are extremely concerning. Weekly air monitoring data that began to be recorded in 2011 and has continued as of May 2024 is available from four towns (Oxnard, Santa Maria, Shafter, and Watsonville) where the air monitors are located at schools.

In 2022, about one-third of the samples collected from these air monitors contained 1,3-D. Over the entire sampling period, the average 1,3-D concentration at the four schools was between .09 and .46 ppb. According to my calculations, this is double the safety level set by California’s scientists at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) at the least contaminated school site and 10 times the safety level at the most contaminated school site.

1,3-D is classified as a hazardous air pollutant under the Clean Air Act and is also designated a toxic air contaminant in California. Regulators in California who modeled high detections of 1,3-D between 2017 and 2020 have found that 1,3-D can drift for more than 3 miles from where it is applied.

Clear Evidence of Significant Health Hazards of 1,3-D

Cancer

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified 1,3-D as a cancer-causing chemical (“possibly carcinogenic to humans”) in 1987. In 1989, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) evaluated 1,3-D and concluded that it was “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” California made a similar classification in 1989. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health calls 1,3-D a carcinogen.

In a 2021 review, California’s OEHHA summarized laboratory studies conducted on rats and mice in the 1980s and 1990s, showing that exposure to 1,3-D caused tumors or cancer in multiple organs: lungs, tear glands, bladder, and breasts.

Asthma and Other Breathing Problems

Regulatory agencies recognize that 1,3-D irritates the lungs. The European Chemicals Agency states that 1,3-D is “harmful if inhaled” and “may cause respiratory irritation.”

The HHS concludes that the “[i]nhalation of dichloropropenes may cause respiratory effects such as irritation, chest pain, and cough.” California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR) states, “Acute or short-term inhalation exposure to high concentrations of 1,3-D results in upper respiratory symptoms in humans, including chest tightness, irritated and watery eyes, dizziness and runny nose.” Researchers at the University of California, Merced, found that tiny increases in the amounts of 1,3-D in the air (0.01 parts per billion, or ppb) increased the odds of emergency room visits for asthma from 2005 to 2011.

Genetic Damage

As with cancer, evidence that 1,3-D can cause genetic damage has been available for decades. In 1987, WHO reported that 1,3-D caused genetic damage in mice, bacteria, and laboratory-grown cells from several mammals.

In 2021, California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment compiled studies of genetic damage and found evidence of it in mice, rats, bacteria, fruit flies, and laboratory-grown cells from hamsters and rats.

Environmental Injustice

California is the easiest place to evaluate environmental justice issues related to pesticides because this information is more readily available there than in other states. When I combined California’s pesticide use data for 2021 with demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2020, I found clear evidence that race and income play an important role in determining who is exposed to 1,3-D.

Of the 10 counties with the highest 1,3-D use, eight were above the state average for the percent of families living in poverty, nine had median incomes less than the state average, and eight were majority Hispanic/Latinx. The bottom line is that people who live in the areas where 1,3-D is widely used are likely to be low-income and Latinx. While the same detailed data is unavailable for the rest of the country, finding similar patterns would not be surprising if such information were provided.

And there’s more to the story in California. The state has set two different safety levels for exposure to 1,3-D. One was set by the CDPR, and the other by OEHHA. Both agencies set a safety level that is supposed to limit exposures to 1,3-D according to what they believe will only cause one cancer case per 100,000 people exposed.

CDPR’s number, focused on people who live near 1,3-D applications, is set at an average air concentration of 0.56 ppb. OEHHA’s number, which applies to everyone in California and is based on health-protective science, is an average air concentration of 0.04 ppb.

As a result, people who live in agricultural areas, likely to be low-income and Latinx, can be exposed to 14 times more 1,3-D than other Californians.

Climate Change Concerns

Dow in Freeport, Texas, manufactures 1,3-D at the largest chemical plant in the Americas. The plant was built to take advantage of natural gas wells close by. I have not come across an accounting of 1,3-D’s carbon footprint, but given that it is made from natural gas, I assume that the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process is likely to be significant. Millions of pounds of this chemical are transported thousands of miles using gasoline or diesel power, adding to the carbon footprint. Finally, the application equipment used for 1,3-D is typically diesel-powered.

Crops grown without 1,3-D and other fumigants can actually reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A good example comes from research done in California almond orchards in August 2021. The scientists who conducted the study, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, compared conventional almond orchards (commonly treated with 1,3-D) with regenerative, certified organic orchards that do not use 1,3-D or similar pesticides. The study found that organic orchards had 30 percent more carbon in their soil than conventional orchards and, therefore, helped in removing that carbon from the atmosphere and prevented climate change.

You Can Make a Difference

Like many people in the U.S., I live in a county where 1,3-D use is rare, or even zero. No crops grown near me use 1,3-D. But I also consciously choose to avoid eating food that harms people growing or harvesting such crops or those living near fields where they are grown. Fortunately, it’s easy to make a difference. I buy certified organic food as much as possible, especially potatoes and almonds.

Buying organic products is increasingly becoming a popular choice in the U.S., with more than 80 percent of Americans purchasing some organics in 2016, according to a study by the Organic Trade Association. Accessibility to affordable organics is also getting better. More and more standard supermarkets carry organics. In many states, SNAP benefits (food stamps) are doubled for fruits and vegetables, making it easier for SNAP customers to buy organics. Farmers markets, food coops, and community-supported agriculture are other options. The more we buy organic food, the less 1,3-D will be used.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Caroline Cox is a retired pesticide scientist. She was a staff scientist at the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides from 1990 to 2006 and a research director and senior scientist at the Center for Environmental Health from 2006 to 2020. She is a contributor to the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Austin Valley / Wikimedia Commons

Understanding Zoonotic Diseases: How Humans Get Sick From Other Animals

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

The growing emergence of diseases from animals suggests that we need to rethink our reliance on animals as a food source.

By Vicky Bond

Human and animal health are closely linked, with many diseases shared between them. As our world becomes more developed and interconnected, the proximity between wild animals and humans is shrinking, increasing the risk of disease transmission. At the same time, humans are growing increasingly dependent on animals as a source of food.

The emergence of new diseases is an unfortunate byproduct of these trends. According to the World Health Organization, most of the newly discovered diseases in humans—about 75 percent—have originated in animals in the last three decades. Scientists call these kinds of diseases “zoonotic.”

As humans navigate the growing risk of zoonotic diseases, it is essential to understand how reversing our dependence on meat, dairy, and other animal products can help have a positive impact on our health and that of the planet, while ensuring a better life for the animals.

What Is a Zoonotic Disease?

A zoonotic disease is a disease that transfers from an animal population to humans. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, zoonotic diseases are caused by germs such as bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. Many different types of zoonotic diseases cause human illnesses that range from mild to life-threatening in severity.

It is estimated that six out of ten known infectious diseases that have been reported globally have spread between animals and humans, according to the World Health Organization—and zoonoses are only becoming more frequent.

What Causes Zoonoses?

Humans worldwide live near wild and domesticated animals, largely thanks to our food system’s reliance on industrial animal agriculture. As we navigate the challenges posed by this “unsustainable agricultural intensification”—that is “[destroying] the natural buffers that protect humans from viruses circulating among wildlife,” according to the United Nations—health experts say it has become crucial to understand how zoonotic diseases can spread.

Direct Contact

Diseases can pass from animals to humans who come in direct contact with them by touching an infected animal, for example, or being bitten by one. Zoonotic diseases usually spread through direct contact with an infected animalʼs bodily fluids, such as urine, blood, saliva, feces, or mucus.

Indirect Contact

Humans can also become infected in an animalʼs habitat or living quarters. For example, zoonoses can spread to a human while cleaning out an aquarium or chicken coop or while handling a petʼs food and water dishes. On industrial chicken farms, birds live in squalid conditions with the floor drenched in urine and feces, leading to the ideal conditions for animals to get sick.

Vector-Borne

In epidemiology, a “vector” usually refers to insects, arachnids, and other small organisms that spread an infection from one host to another.

An infected tick, for instance, can attach to a human and transmit Lymes disease. This is also why mosquito bites can potentially cause severe illnesses like the Zika virus, malaria, and yellow fever.

Foodborne

Foodborne diseases, or food poisoning, can be caused by eating raw or undercooked animal products. Eggs and chicken are among the most common sources of food poisoning. Salmonella and campylobacter—from raw eggs and chicken—are common zoonotic diseases. Chickens are among the most widely farmed land animals in the U.S. and worldwide. The U.S. raised more than 9 billion chickens for meat in 2020 alone.

Waterborne

Consuming water contaminated with harmful bacteria can cause illness in humans. For example, lakes, rivers, and streams contaminated with animal waste might have elevated levels of E. coli bacteria—found in the fecal matter of warm-blooded animals.

  1. coli contamination is one reason why factory farms can have devastating impacts on neighboring water bodies. If ingested by humans, the contaminated water can cause anything from minor stomach discomfort to serious health problems or even death.

How Do Zoonotic Diseases Spread Between Animals and People?

There are many ways for zoonotic diseases to spread between animals and people. However, public health researchers have found a common thread through many of the primary drivers of zoonotic diseases. Namely, factory farming and the consumption of animals around the world are sharply driving up the risks that could cause the next significant outbreak.

Farming and Ranching

By a conservative estimate, the agricultural industry has been responsible for around half of all new zoonotic diseases since 1940, according to a November 2022 paper in Science Advances. Epidemiologists say that percentage is probably higher. Nearly every aspect of intensive animal farming contributes to conditions ideal for spreading disease—overly stressed animals, who often live in sordid conditions and are crowded into tight spaces with one another, regularly come into contact with human workers.

Intensive animal farming creates a perfect storm for spreading zoonotic disease.

Wildlife Trade

In addition to animal agriculture, both the legal and illegal wildlife trade—which refers to the global commerce of non-domesticated animals and plants—are serious drivers of zoonotic disease.

A 2021 study published in Current Biology found that more than 25 percent of the mammals in the wildlife trade host 75 percent of all known zoonotic diseases. Because the complex process of transporting these animals results in “upward of 1 billion direct and indirect contacts among wildlife, animals, and domestic animals,” the studyʼs lead author, K. Nagaraju Shivaprakash, concluded that “[W]ildlife trade… is [conceivably] a significant factor in the global spread of zoonotic and emerging infectious diseases.”

Animal Captivity

Holding animals in captivity and exploiting them for human entertainment poses many ethical and moral problems. Animals in captivity also pose public health risks. Petting zoos and other animal exhibits where humans can directly touch captive animals are particularly concerning. Between 1990 and 2000, more than 25 zoonotic outbreaks were linked to animal exhibits, according to 2007 figures provided by the CDC.

Insect Vectors

There are more than a billion insects for every human on Earth. While these tiny beings are essential to our survival, some can also carry deadly diseases.

Ticks, fleas, and female mosquitoes (male mosquitoes don’t bite) can cause various illnesses, most of which are now treatable. However, one of the worst pandemics in history, the Black Plague, has been traced back to infected fleas.

Deforestation and Habitat Destruction

Deforestation and habitat destruction—primarily driven by the agriculture industry—pose serious environmental risks. When wild animals see their habitats destroyed, they have no choice but to uproot and search for a new home. As they make these journeys, they are more likely to “bump into” other animals, increasing the chances for a once-contained disease to spill over to another population.

Climate Change

For reasons similar to habitat destruction, scientists say climate change is already increasing the chances of humans experiencing more frequent zoonotic pandemics. “Using recent estimates of the rate of increase in disease emergence from zoonotic reservoirs associated with environmental change, we estimate that the yearly probability of occurrence of extreme epidemics can increase up to threefold in the coming decades,” warns a 2021 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Animal agriculture contributes more global greenhouse gas emissions than the transportation sector.

The resulting extreme heat at the equator caused by global warming has many species racing toward the poles for more hospitable climates. This has prompted once-remote animal species to travel great distances, likely increasing their chances of contact with humans and other animals and potentially spreading disease.

Contaminated Food and Water

Food or water that has been contaminated by a bacterium, virus, or parasite leads to tens of millions of annual food poisoning cases and more than 1,000 deaths in the United States alone, according to the CDC.

Norovirus is the leading cause of foodborne illness-related deaths in the U.S. After that, salmonella, C. perfringens, and campylobacter are the next most fatal pathogens. “Campylobacteriosis is the most commonly reported gastrointestinal disease” in the European Union, with more than 129,000 cases reported in 2021, which is a 5.6 percent increase compared to 2020.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control found that chickens and chicken meat accounted for roughly 20 to 30 percent of these human infection cases.

How Are Zoonoses Classified?

Public health experts classify zoonoses by their root cause. In other words, the disease pathogen could be a bacterium, a virus, or something else.

Bacterial Zoonoses

Bacterial zoonoses are diseases caused by single-cell microorganisms found almost everywhere on Earth and inside the human body. Most bacteria are harmless or even helpful, and relatively few cause disease.

Viral Zoonoses

Viral zoonoses are diseases caused by viruses, which are infectious microbes made up of DNA or RNA surrounded by a “protein coat.” They can infect humans, other animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria.

Parasitic Zoonoses

Parasitic zoonoses are diseases caused by parasites that attach themselves to or are found inside a hostʼs body. Parasitic diseases can spread from animals to humans through the consumption of raw or undercooked meat or by consuming food or water contaminated by an infected animalʼs stool.

Fungal Zoonoses

Fungal zoonoses are diseases caused by fungi, spore-producing organisms such as molds, yeasts, and mushrooms. Fungi can cause topical infections on a person’s body (such as skin rashes and brittle nails) or inside the body (such as infections of the lungs or bloodstream).

Rickettsial Zoonoses

Rickettsial zoonoses are diseases caused by an unusual type of bacteria that can live only inside the cells of other organisms. Rickettsial infections are usually transmitted to humans through bites from vectors such as ticks, lice, fleas, and mites.

Chlamydial Zoonoses

Chlamydial zoonoses are diseases caused by a family of bacteria called chlamydiae, one of the most common infectious agents affecting humans. One type of the bacteria is frequently transmitted in people as a sexually transmitted infection—and is often referred to colloquially as chlamydia. Another version, however, affects domesticated birds and can spread to humans when handling their birds or cleaning out their cages.

Mycoplasma Zoonoses

Mycoplasma zoonoses are diseases caused by an atypical family of bacteria that are harder to kill through antibiotics. Mycoplasma pneumoniae can infect the human respiratory system—a mild form of pneumonia is often called “walking pneumonia”—and spreads through tiny droplets from coughs and sneezes. There have also been reported cases of this sort of bacteria spreading from animals to humans.

Protozoal Zoonoses

Protozoal zoonoses are diseases caused by protozoal parasites and often spread from companion animals to their owners. Many humans are protected from these types of diseases by strong immune systems. However, immunocompromised pet caretakers are at a much higher risk.

Acellular Non-Viral Pathogenic Zoonoses

Acellular non-viral pathogenic zoonoses refer to diseases caused by very unusual and not well-understood pathogens, such as prion, a misfolded protein. Prion is believed to be the cause of neurological disorders such as mad cow disease and similar diseases affecting the brains of humans.

Zoonotic Disease Examples

Avian Influenza

Avian influenza, or bird flu, is a viral disease that primarily affects wild waterfowl and domesticated poultry. As of April 10, 2024, more than 85 million poultry have been affected by a bird flu outbreak, the majority of which were egg-laying hens raised in cramped cages. While it has infected humans in rare cases, given the ongoing, severe outbreak in both wild and domestic bird populations, public health experts are concerned about more potential spillover events in the near future.

Due to the sheer number of birds we factory farm, we are dramatically increasing this risk. Keeping birds in closed confines, filthy conditions, and continually stressed is the perfect environment for bird flu to flourish.

Salmonellosis

Salmonellosis is caused by an infection from salmonella bacteria, which live in the digestive tracts of birds and other animals. Humans risk infection if they do not practice good hand-washing habits and consume raw eggs, unpasteurized dairy products, or undercooked meat.

Psittacosis

Humans can contract psittacosis from infected pet birds, such as parrots and cockatiels, or domesticated poultry, such as chickens and turkeys. The illness is usually quite mild and relatively brief in humans.

Rabies

Rabies is a viral disease that can affect any mammal but is most associated with bats, raccoons, skunks, foxes, and dogs. Rabies is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected animal. The infection affects the central nervous system and is nearly always fatal once symptoms are present.

Cat Scratch Disease

Cat scratch disease is a bacterial infection. It can spread to humans when a cat licks an open wound or scratches a person deep enough to break the skin. The infection can cause redness around the site of the wound, swollen glands, and flu-like symptoms. While the symptoms are usually mild, in rare cases, the infection can become serious if it spreads to other organs.

Malaria

Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that spreads to humans through mosquito bites. If it is left untreated, malaria can be fatal, especially in children under five. The disease is most commonly found in countries near the equator, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

Zika Virus

Mosquito bites are the most common cause of the Zika virus. However, it can also be passed from a pregnant mother to her child or through sexual contact. The virusʼ symptoms usually include mild rash and illness. However, it can cause serious congenital disorders in newborns.

Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne zoonoses in the U.S. It is caused by infected blacklegged tick bites. While relatively easily treatable, if left untreated, Lyme disease can result in prolonged pain, stiffness, and swelling, as well as memory problems and difficulty concentrating.

Bubonic Plague

Responsible for the most infamous pandemic in history—known as the Black Plague or Black Death—the bubonic plague still crops up in some cases worldwide. However, outbreaks of this bacteria-borne zoonotic disease can be controlled with antibiotics.

Swine Flu

Also known as the H1N1 flu, swine flu is caused by an influenza virus that began infecting humans in 2009, causing a pandemic in humans, pigs, and birds. Pigs with swine flu may develop symptoms ranging from fever, coughing, and sneezing to depression and a lack of appetite. Humans can get sick from being near pigs on farms or at county fairs.

COVID-19

Scientists agree the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a nonhuman animal. However, there is yet to be a definitive conclusion about the source. According to WHO, the leading theory is that the COVID-19 virus originated in bats and spread to humans via another animal.

Who Is at Risk of Zoonotic Diseases?

As the far-reaching effects of COVID-19 have taught us, no one is immune from getting a zoonotic disease. However, various risk factors can put certain people at higher risk of infection than others.

According to the CDC, children under five, adults more than 65 years old, those with weakened immune systems, and pregnant women are at heightened risk of serious illness from zoonotic diseases.

What Can You Do to Protect Yourself from Zoonotic Diseases?

Animals are all around us, whether they are buzzing around us outdoors, wandering through our backyards, or even living inside our homes. This means there is always a chance of a bacterium, virus, or other pathogen jumping from an infected animal to one of us.

The CDC has laid out a practical list of ways to protect ourselves from preventable zoonotic diseases:

  • Wash your hands after touching animals or animal products. Soap and running water for 20 seconds is one of the most effective ways to stop the spread of germs. If soap and water arenʼt available, using a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60 percent alcohol is the next best thing.
  • Avoid tick, flea, and mosquito bites outdoors by wearing bug spray and long-sleeved clothing and paying attention to CDC health warnings in your area.
  • If you have companion animals in your home, educate yourself about what diseases typically affect them and how to keep them healthy.
  • Be wary of animal exhibits and petting zoos.

However, the rise of industrial animal agriculture over the 20th century has transformed our food system into one in which thousands of animals are packed into dense, unclean living quarters—creating conditions ripe for disease. While taking individual precautions to avoid contracting zoonoses is essential, the threat remains high unless we collectively change our relationship with nonhuman animals.

Preventing Zoonotic Disease Globally

Public health experts agree that the world needs to address the primary root cause of emerging zoonotic diseases: animal consumption. A 2022 research article in the journal Science Advances explains that changing how we raise animals for meat is insufficient to stem the accelerated rise in these diseases.

Intensive agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, which drives the global spread of disease. To further increase productivity, animals are increasingly kept in more intensive systems, but this process involves confining animals—and their waste—together into tight spaces. Not only is this inhumane, but in such large numbers and under so much stress, it also greases the wheels for the spread of disease.

Research shows that slowing the spread of zoonotic diseases will require reducing global reliance on animal products as a food source while accelerating forest conservation efforts worldwide.

Ending Intensive Animal Agriculture

Much work remains to end intensive animal agriculture and make the world a safer place for humans and nonhuman animals.

We must hold corporations and elected officials accountable for how their actions affect nonhuman animals’ well-being and public health. Governments must stop subsidizing animal agriculture and instead support more sustainable farming practices.

More awareness is also required to educate people about the atrocities inflicted on animals to support intensive farming and to highlight the overall environmental and health benefits of moving toward a plant-based diet.

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Vicky Bond is a veterinary surgeon, animal welfare scientist, and the president of The Humane League, a global nonprofit organization working to end the abuse of animals raised for food through institutional and individual change. She is a contributor to the Observatory. Follow her on Twitter @vickybond_THL.

Photo Credit: Matthew T Rader / Wikimedia Commons