Articles – Page 6

Closing the Preschool Gap at Home

By the time kindergarten starts, wealthy kids already have a major head start over their low-income peers. A novel program hopes to change that.

We are sitting in the cheerful, cluttered kitchen of Adriana Fuentes, a self-described Army wife and mom who lives in Woodlawn Village, a military housing complex near Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

Fuentes is holding two paper finger puppets mounted on popsicle sticks, one with a sad face and one with a smiling one. She’s pretending to be her four-year-old son, Santana, as part of a role-playing exercise aimed at helping her teach her son about emotions.

“How did you feel when you scraped your knee?” asks Brenda Richards, a home visitor for Fairfax County Public Schools who’s playing “mom.” Fuentes holds up the frowning puppet, matching her own expression to the puppet’s. Richards asks another question, and this time Fuentes holds up the smiling one. The thirty-something Fuentes is wearing a Batman logo T-shirt and a practical ponytail – standard weekday wear for a busy mom. She’s outgoing, enthusiastic and plays her part with gusto. “What would be a patient face?” Fuentes asks Richards. “We talk about that a lot when he doesn’t get his way.”

For months, Richards has been a weekly visitor to Fuentes’s home, which Fuentes shares with her husband and children – four-year-old Santana, two-year-old Gabriela, and two teenagers. Richards typically comes during Gabriela’s naptime, but Gabby is awake today. She plays in the adjoining family room while Paw Patrol plays on the flatscreen TV. A big pile of moldable pink kinetic sand sits in a cookie sheet on the kitchen table, along with spoons and a small plastic shovel. Big wooden letters spelling “E-A-T” adorn the kitchen wall.

Richards works for the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program, a national home visiting initiative for low-income families that’s been offered in Fairfax County for more than a decade. A mom herself, Richards will visit half a dozen other homes this week, walking her clients through a tightly-scripted curriculum provided by the program, offering moral support and parenting advice. “What I love about my job is being a wife and mother and being able to support other mothers,” she said.

Richards pulls out a big plastic box she takes on all of her visits. The box is like Mary Poppins’ magical carpet bag, except it’s filled with props for this week’s activities, rather than a birdcage and a hat stand. On the agenda this week: making homemade “Play-doh” out of flour and salt, learning about gravity and recognizing shapes. Fuentes pretends to measure out salt and flour while Richards continues to play “mom.” “How does the salt feel?” Richards asks. “Rough,” Fuentes responds. “And how does the flour feel?” “Soft,” Fuentes replies.

Richards opens a container of pre-made clay to demonstrate math activities using the dough. They practice cutting the dough into two pieces, then four. “I wouldn’t have thought to do any of this,” said Fuentes, holding a plastic knife. “I wouldn’t know how to teach him.”

Like many of the roughly 285 families in Fairfax County served by HIPPY, the Fuenteses had initially applied for Head Start, whose waitlist in Fairfax County is 6 to 12 months long. Of the roughly 10,000 kindergarteners who started school in Fairfax County public schools this year, just 4,000 had preschool experience through state or federally supported programs, said Renee LaHuffman-Jackson, coordinator of the Office of Professional Learning and Family Engagement for Fairfax County Public Schools.

It’s an enormous gap that the county is hoping HIPPY can help fill, by teaching parents to ready their children for school, especially if traditional preschool options aren’t available. And it’s a concern that’s become increasingly urgent as the academic demands on students’ increase. “Kindergarten is what first grade used to be,” said Elisabeth Bruzon, HIPPY program leader for Fairfax County.

More broadly, programs like HIPPY could play an important role in shrinking academic achievement gaps between wealthier kids and poorer ones. While substandard schools, inadequate funding and indifferent politicians are all to blame for this inequality, growing evidence suggests the disparities also begin at home, with big differences in the kinds of resources and experiences kids get from their parents, depending on family income. Programs like HIPPY seek to level the home field — by teaching parents to be their kids’ first teachers — and evidence shows these efforts work. In the face of growing worries about inequality’s impacts, these programs could help create the opportunities low-income kids need.

Continued reading at Washington Monthly

How cash bail keeps the poor in jail

Inability to pay bail is often the only reason a pretrial defendant stays behind bars.

Via the Atlantic and Washington Monthly

The row house on Cecil Avenue was just like any other in the rough-and-tumble East Baltimore neighborhood where Rafiq Shaw lives. But one chilly day in December 2015, he had the bad luck to be walking by right as the police were getting ready for a raid.

“All out of the blue a bunch of police cars pulled up and grabbed me,” Shaw told me in September. “They threw me to the wall and put cuffs on me.” The officers insisted he had come out of the house, which Shaw just as vehemently denied. “They thought I was someone else,” he said. “That’s what they thought the whole time. They called a name out that wasn’t me.”

Shaw is a tall, heavyset, 31-year-old black man with a booming voice and an easy smile. He told his story almost cheerfully, emphasizing the absurdity of the harrowing situation he was describing.

Over his protests, Shaw continued, the police dragged him into the house, where a woman inside told the officers she had no idea who he was. The officers pushed him onto a couch and went through his pockets, finding the keys to his mother’s car, parked nearby.

Later, at his trial, in August 2016, officers would testify that Shaw consented to a search of the car. (Shaw told me he didn’t.) They also claimed to smell marijuana, although the doors were shut and the windows were up. Shaw’s attorney, Maryland public defender Angela Oetting, said that’s a claim Baltimore cops often use to justify searches of her clients.

The police did not, in fact, find marijuana in the car. But they did claim to find a gun, stashed in the glove compartment. It was a discovery that stunned Shaw, who said he has never owned a gun. “And this was my mom’s car,” he added. He was arrested and charged with two offenses: illegal possession of a handgun and possession of a handgun in a vehicle on a public road, punishable by up to three years in prison.

Police had no evidence, such as fingerprints, to prove the gun was Shaw’s. He didn’t even have a key to the glove compartment; the cops had to smash it open. After less than a half-hour of deliberation, the jury found Shaw innocent on both counts.

But Shaw is still paying for the crime he never committed. He’s on the hook for the $10,000 his family agreed to pay the bail bondsman who got him out of jail two days after his arrest. In Maryland, as in the many other jurisdictions that rely on private bondsmen and a money bail system, bail arrangements are private contracts, unrelated to court outcomes. Innocent, guilty, or charges dropped—as often is the case—the bondsman still collects his fee. “It’s crazy,” Shaw said. But it’s the inevitable result of a privatized pretrial system dependent on a commercial bail-bond industry.

Continue reading at the Atlantic

Minority Retort

In the era of Trump, congressional Democrats should practice “strategic co-opposition.”

Via Washington Monthly

As President Donald Trump takes office and a new Congress dawns, Democrats face what seems to be an insurmountable strategic disadvantage. As the minority party in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, they lack all the traditional tools for keeping an executive in check: no committee chairmanships, no subpoena power, and no control over the legislative agenda.

But Democrats should still take heart: they’ve been here before and won.

In the fall of 2004, Democrats were also pinned to the mat and flailing. President George W. Bush had just eked out a second-term win, edging out John Kerry. The race came down to a single state—Ohio—and a margin of just 136,000 votes. By the time a devastated Kerry conceded the race to Bush, Republicans had also strengthened their hold on the Senate by four seats—to a fifty-five-member majority—and bolstered their control of the House, outnumbering Democrats 232 to 203.

For an emboldened GOP, the new monopoly on Washington was a golden opportunity to pursue a long-cherished conservative priority: privatizing Social Security. “Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account,” said Bush in his 2004 State of the Union address. Privatization became the top priority of the second-term agenda for Bush, who tasked advisers Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman with crafting a strategy to steamroll the Democratic minority.

But by the summer of 2005, Bush’s grand plan was in tatters. In February, just 35 percent of Americans approved of his handling of Social Security, down from 49 percent at the start of his first term in 2001. In March, Republican pollster Glenn Bolger found that 58 percent of Americans were against the proposed “private accounts.” That fall, the Bush plan died ignominiously. And in 2006, Democrats won back the House and the Senate, upsetting twelve years of GOP domination.

Bush’s Social Security plan did not crash and burn on its own. It was Democrats who steered that plane. As Amy Sullivan chronicled in these pages in May 2006 (“Not as Lame as You Think”), “Day after day, Democrats launched coordinated attacks on Bush’s ‘risky’ proposal. Without a single Democrat willing to sign on and give a bipartisan veneer of credibility, the private accounts plan slowly came to be seen by voters for what it was: another piece of GOP flimflam.”

In 2005, congressional Democrats were burdened with perceptions of being weak, feckless, and disorganized. No one today would say the same of incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the wiliest and most aggressive strategists on Capitol Hill, or of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, now battle hardened after so many years playing defense. Whatever outrages Trump might propose, Democrats in Congress can and do have the wherewithal to mount an effective resistance.

The real questions are how often and when.

Contemplating the unique dangers posed by Donald Trump, and remembering the way Barack Obama was treated by the Republicans for the past eight years, many on the left are calling, understandably, for a strategy of pure and total opposition—anything else smacks of Vichy-like collaboration. But that approach is impractical and, in the long run, self-destructive. Rather, the right approach is one of “strategic co-opposition”—an art that Republicans have, in fact, perfected and that Democrats would do well to mimic.

Continue reading at Washington Monthly

How the Internet wrecked college admissions

The ease of applying to dozens of schools with just one click is problematic for students—and universities.

Via the Atlantic and Washington Monthly

Over the last decade, the internet has made it much easier for students to apply to college, especially thanks to services like the “Common App.” For the nearly 700 schools now part of the Common Application—the nation’s leading standardized online college-application portal—students can browse by name, state, or region, by the type of institution (public or private), and by whether it’s co-ed or single-sex. Clicking on a college takes students to a brief profile of the school and then an invitation: “Ready to apply?”

And now that students can apply to more colleges with the click of a few buttons, they are doing exactly that. In 2013, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC), 32 percent of college freshmen applied to seven or more colleges—up 10 percentage points from 2008. Almost all of this growth has been online. In the 2015-16 admissions cycle, over 920,000 students used the Common App, more than double the number in 2008–09.

On the one hand, the internet has been good news for college access. Officials at the Common App, for example, say 31 percent of the college applicants who used the portal in 2015–16 were first-generation students. Students and their families are also now smarter consumers of what’s likely to be among the biggest ticket items they will ever buy: a college education. The internet has also been great news for college marketing departments, which can now reach many more students—and more cheaply—than they could via old-fashioned snail mail.

But the growing piles of applications are also causing problems—both for colleges and for students. While schools might welcome the rush of national exposure from a broader pool of prospects, they also increasingly face the problem of sorting out qualified, serious applicants—students who not only have the right academic chops but would actually enroll if accepted—from the scrum. And so long as the sheer volume of applications continues to rise, the odds of colleges’ guessing wrong rise too—which, in fact, is what’s happening, with dire consequences.

Continue reading at the Atlantic

Would a public option improve Obamacare?

Adding a government-run plan to Obamacare marketplaces could be less contentious today than it was six years ago. The bigger question is if it will work.

Via Washington Monthly

Aseries of recent developments show Democrats reviving their interest in a government-run “public option” for Obamacare.

In a much-discussed article for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), President Barack Obama endorsed the addition of a public option to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), while Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton separately stated her support for a widely-available government-run health plan. Clinton also endorsed the idea of letting younger Americans enroll in Medicare starting at age 55, a position echoed in the 2016 Democratic Party platform.

The question of a public option was among the more fractious debates in 2010 when the ACA was first considered – one that almost derailed the entire legislation. While advocates argued a government-run plan would help keep premiums low, critics argued it would kill competition, not enhance it. Ultimately, the opponents won.

A renewed discussion of a public option could be less contentious this time around – particularly if it’s offered as a “fallback” in places where the ACA marketplaces are thin and private plans are struggling. This approach is what Obama suggested in JAMA. “[B]ased on experience with the ACA, I think Congress should revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers in areas of the country where competition is limited,” Obama wrote. “Adding a public plan in such areas would strengthen the Marketplace approach, giving consumers more affordable options while also creating savings for the federal government.” In particular, Obama proposed a public option in places that now have fewer than three private plans for participants to choose from – roughly 12% of the country.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), as many as 664 counties could have just one issuer participating in the ACA marketplaces in 2017, up from 225 counties currently. “Increasingly, there are regions, particularly in rural areas, where there are only one or two options, which isn’t sufficient for effective competition,” says Larry Levitt, Senior Vice President at KFF. In April, for example, insurance giant UnitedHealth Group announced it was dropping out of Obamacare in all but a handful of places because it was losing money – a projected $650 million this year.

In underserved areas like these, the introduction of a public plan might be less of a threat to private insurers as well as a boon to consumers. “On the face of it, one benefit of [a public option] is that people will have a choice of plans no matter where you live, which is not the case currently,” says JoAnn Volk, a Senior Research Fellow and Project Director at the Georgetown University Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

A “fallback” public option also already exists under Medicare’s coverage of prescription drugs (“Part D”), which means Congress is no stranger to the concept. Under current law, Medicare has the authority to offer a government-run option where no prescription drug coverage options exist – although it has yet to exercise that power. As Obama noted in JAMA, Republicans supported the idea of a fallback in Medicare Part D, though they bitterly opposed one in the ACA.

But if the potential arguments in favor of a fallback public option are its limited geographical scope; its benefits to areas where choices are currently limited or non-existent; and the precedent set by Medicare Part D, a host of thorny details still remain. In fact, the same issues that defeated the public option the first time – such as the proper use of the government’s market power – are still potential minefields that could derail a public plan:

How would a public option be funded?

“It’s not cheap to start an insurance company, which in effect is what a public option would be,” says Kaiser’s Levitt. “One of the challenges of a public option – assuming the Treasury would not be there to back it up – is how to create startup money to provide reserves so it can sustain any potential losses.”

The lack of sufficient reserves is what’s currently dooming the nonprofit health insurance “co-ops” authorized under the ACA as a compromise alternative to the public option. Of the 23 co-ops created, two-thirds have already failed, and the rest are in precarious financial condition. Any public option would require a substantial initial investment, plus plenty of reserves for absorbing losses until it can be self-sustaining.

Will doctors and hospitals participate?

A second concern is how a public option would assemble its networks of doctors and hospitals to provide care – and how much it would pay them. If the plan doesn’t reimburse health care providers enough, they’ll have no incentive to join, and that means trouble attracting customers. “All health insurance is local,” says Georgetown’s Volk. “If I don’t have access to the doctors I want, it’s not going to be a viable plan for me.”

On the flip side, higher reimbursement rates could also mean higher premiums – also unattractive to potential consumers. “The challenge of putting together a network is sort of a chicken and egg problem,” Volk says. “You want to be able to show providers that if they negotiate a certain rate with you, you’ll be able to steer a lot of patients to them to make it worth their while in volume. On the other hand, if you’re starting a plan and don’t have the patients, it’s a little hard to get a contract.”

The issues around creating provider networks and setting reimbursement rates could be especially acute in rural areas – the same places where private insurers are now struggling to survive. “The underlying health care market isn’t very competitive in rural areas,” says Kaiser’s Levitt. “There just aren’t very many doctors or hospitals. It’s very hard for insurers to create a narrower low-cost network of providers and be able to translate that into low premiums.”

Would a public option win over consumers?

A third concern is whether enough Americans would find a public option appealing to sustain it financially.

One advantage a public option could have in comparison to a private plan is lower premiums. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimates that a public option could potentially charge premiums that are 7% to 8% lower than that of private insurers, largely due to lower administrative costs. But this estimate also assumes that a public option wouldn’t have to spend much money marketing to find and woo consumers. Many private plans, for example, pay insurance brokers to help them recruit enrollees. If a public option needs to do the same, its expenses will also rise. Moreover, premiums might not be the only thing that matters to consumers in choosing a health plan.

“We don’t have a lot of analogies to a government competing head to head with a private company delivering the same product,” says Levitt. “I don’t think we know how consumers would behave. Would they see the government plan as somehow lower quality because it’s not a private sector product? Or would people feel better, safer, being insured by a government plan that’s not driven by profits?”

***

Details such as these become especially salient – and far more controversial – if Congress were to consider a broadly available public option in every marketplace, rather than only as a fallback. On the one hand, too weak a plan could be ineffectual. “[I]f a public option is simply another health insurer, albeit run by the government… we shouldn’t expect such an option to have much impact,” said Michael Morrisey, who heads the department of health policy and management at Texas A&M University, in an email.

Morrissey, who also authored a report published by RAND and the Brookings Institution on the current state of ACA marketplace competition, said that unless a public option has some “comparative advantage” over private competitors, “it would probably be unsuccessful.”

That comparative advantage, for example, could take the form of subsidies from the Treasury to keep it solvent if it faces heavy claims, or the power to compel providers to join its network or accept its rates. “You could get very heavy-handed with the rules,” says Georgetown’s Volk.

But the exercise of governmental power to compel networks or set rates could also end up disrupting the markets where competition among private insurers is already currently robust. While some markets are seeing fewer choices, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says the average consumer still sees an average of 10 insurers in their state, up from 8 in 2014. Moreover, roughly 20 million people have gained coverage since the launch of Obamacare, lowering the uninsured rate from 16% in 2010 to 9.1% in 2015.

“For most Americans in most places, the Marketplaces are working,” wrote Obama in JAMA. In markets like these, a public plan that’s too aggressive could drive out private insurers and reduce the choices consumers currently have – thereby undermining a central achievement of Obamacare.

Proponents of a public option disappointed by its initial exclusion from the ACA may cheer the new progressive consensus in its favor. Nevertheless, advocates face a host of crucial decisions. Chief among these: How to design a public option that won’t also jeopardize what’s already the most significant health reform the country has seen.

Continue reading at Washington Monthly

Could at-large districts solve Washington’s gridlock?

An institution beset by partisan polarization might benefit from an influx of moderates.

Via the Atlantic and Democracy Journal

By sheer strength of numbers, ideologically moderate Americans should be the most potent force in politics. Since at least 1980, self-identified moderates have outnumbered both liberals and conservatives in presidential exit polls, comprising 41 percent of voters in 2012. Moderates are also a plurality in 25 states, according to 2014 data from Gallup.

Yet this moderate strength seems nowhere evident in Congress. Among House Democrats, the moderate Blue Dog and New Democratic coalitions have shrunk by nearly half since 2010. And among Republicans, the Tea Party’s ascendance has purged most of the GOP’s few remaining moderates. Congressional polarization today, say political scientists Christopher Hare, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, is at its worst since Reconstruction.

One key step toward reversing this polarization is to replenish the stable of moderates in Congress. Moderates can bridge divides, encourage bipartisanship, and check ideological excesses. And given the vast pools of moderate voters, Congress should have more moderates than it does now to reflect the share of moderates in the electorate. The current political system, however, effectively disenfranchises moderate voters.

There’s one solution that can help reverse that dismal trend: creating more at-large seats in the House of Representatives. If every state with more than two representatives allocated just one seat to an at-large member (while also redrawing its remaining seats), moderates in those states could better exercise their plurality strength as they do in other statewide elections, such as those for the Senate and the White House. And while the remaining geographically determined districts would become somewhat larger as a result, this system would also grant each voter two representatives in the House: one from the voter’s district, and one from the voter’s state.

Continue reading at the Atlantic

Lettuce Pray

A consolidated food industry brings you salad and chicken nuggets cheaper—and spreads deadly food-borne pathogens farther.

Via Washington Monthly

In the summer of 2006, consumers across the country began falling sick from a particularly nasty strain of Escherichia coli bacteria, known as 0157:H7. Not all E. coli bacteria are dangerous, but 0157:H7 belongs to the Shiga toxin-producing group of pathogens (known as STEC), which can cause severe, and sometimes fatal, illness. By early October, 199 people in twenty-six states had fallen ill, resulting in 102 hospitalizations and thirty-one cases of kidney failure. Three people died, including a two-year-old boy in Utah.

Government investigators eventually traced the bacteria to fresh spinach harvested from four fields in California’s Monterey and San Benito counties and processed by Natural Selection Foods, one of the nation’s biggest producers of bagged mixed salad. Though a relatively small amount of greens was involved—just one day’s worth of production—the tainted spinach made its way into seven different packing lines and thousands of bags of salad mix processed at one of the company’s two central facilities. It was sold under such well-known brands as Trader Joe’s, Earthbound Farm, and Natural Selection; 15,660 pounds were sold under the label Dole Baby Spinach. The spinach even made it overseas to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Iceland, as well as to Canada and Mexico.

Apart from the irony—a quintessential health food causes a deadly national outbreak of illness—the 2006 spinach scare was something of a watershed moment for so-called multistate food outbreaks, which began to pick up in tempo around that time.

That same year, seventy-one people in five states were sickened by food from Taco Bell, and 183 people in twenty-one states suffered infections from Salmonella bacteria on tomatoes. Over the next five years, the number of multistate outbreaks per year more than doubled, from thirteen in 2006 to twenty-nine in 2010, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Many of these outbreaks were headline-grabbing national food scares involving trusted brands and popular foods: Veggie Booty (salmonella, 2007); Kroger’s ground beef (E. coli, 2008); Nestlé Toll House Cookie Dough (E. coli, 2009); eggs (salmonella, 2010); cantaloupes (involving the Listeria bacteria, 2011); sprouts (E. coli, 2012); Foster Farms frozen chicken (salmonella, 2013); caramel apples (listeria, 2014); Blue Bell ice cream (listeria, 2015); and cucumbers (salmonella, 2013, 2014, and 2015). In the fall of 2015, at least fifty-two people in nine states fell ill after eating at Chipotle restaurants, the paragon of “healthful” fast-casual food. From 2010 to 2014, the CDC reported 120 total multistate outbreaks, or an average of twenty-four per year. By comparison, from 1973 to 1980, the median annual number of multistate outbreaks was just 2.5.

While some of the rise in reported outbreaks is due to better detection—the CDC now uses sophisticated DNA fingerprinting of pathogens and a national system called PulseNet to identify outbreaks—a growing coterie of researchers, as well as the CDC, say that modern industrial food processing is also to blame. According to the CDC’s website, “Changing patterns in global food production … combined with increasing integration and consolidation of agriculture and food production can result in a contaminated food rapidly causing a geographically widespread outbreak.”

In other words, the same hyperefficient distribution system that brings you convenient and affordable salad greens and all the chicken nuggets you can eat can just as efficiently deliver E. coli, salmonella, and other dangerous bugs to your plate. Moreover, today’s industrialized food production processes carry other public health risks. Antibiotic use, for example, which is still endemic in so-called factory farming, is contributing to the rise of drug-resistant super-germs. And the reliance on monoculture—the cultivation of a single species to help standardize production—is leading to a potentially dangerous lack of biodiversity. “Consolidation has eliminated redundancies in the food system in the name of efficiency,” says Mary Hendrickson, assistant professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “But redundancies help protect us.” Today’s industrial food system has brought American consumers a wealth of affordable and convenient foods, but this benefit may come with a price that’s not listed on our grocery bills: food that’s not only the blandly uniform product of a few mega-sized producers, processors, and retailers but also isn’t as safe as we think it is.

Continue reading at Washington Monthly

Why You Can’t Afford to Retire

Expanding Social Security isn’t enough to ensure middle-class retirement security.

Surveys find that barely 1 in 5 Americans are confident of their ability to support a comfortable retirement – and unfortunately for good reason.

In 2014, according to the Federal Reserve, 31 percent of working Americans reported having “no retirement savings or pension whatsoever.”

Many Americans think of savings as a matter of willpower and personal behavior – much like dieting and exercise. It’s one reason why the worsening state of Americans’ retirement security – now approaching crisis proportions – has yet to emerge as an issue that demands extensive government intervention.

In truth, the nation’s retirement savings crisis is as much a problem of public policy as it is about how Americans manage money. Families face massive structural barriers that no amount of personal financial discipline can overcome. Among the reasons retirement is increasingly unaffordable:

1. One in three Americans lacks access to an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan.

Research finds that people are more likely to save for retirement if they’re enrolled in an employer-sponsored retirement plan (and especially if enrollment is by default). Yet in March 2015, just 49 percent of Americans working in private-sector jobs were participating in an employer-provided retirement plan such as a 401(k), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

One major problem is lack of access. The workers most likely to be offered an employer-sponsored plan work for large firms (those employing 500 people or more). But the majority of Americans work in smaller companies, including more than a third who work in firms with 100 or fewer employees. Because of administrative burdens and other costs, far fewer of these smaller firms offer retirement benefits to their workers.

Continued at the Washington Monthly…

Why cities need smart water

The next frontier in sustainability: reducing water loss.

Americans waste nearly six billion gallons of fresh water a day – and that’s before it even reaches their homes.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology estimates that between 14 to 18 percentof our nation’s water supply is lost through leaks, breaks, faulty meters and generally inefficient, aging infrastructure. Drought-stricken California, for example, loses as much as 228 billion gallons a year this way, according to the Los Angeles Daily News, and sometimes in spectacular fashion. In July 2014, 20 million gallons of water gushed through the UCLA campus after a nearly century-old water main burst under Sunset Boulevard. According to news reports, it took city officials nearly four hours to fix the break while buildings and garages flooded and at least five people needed rescue.

Replacing the nation’s water infrastructure is both unlikely and unaffordable, but the world of big data might have a better answer: “smart water.” By using information technology to make water utilities more efficient, cities can stop leaks, save water and better target their investments in infrastructure.

Continued at the Washington Monthly…

By the time kindergarten starts, wealthy kids already have a major head start over their low-income peers. A novel program hopes to change that.

Inability to pay bail is often the only reason a pretrial defendant stays behind bars.

The ease of applying to dozens of schools with just one click is problematic for students—and universities.

Adding a government-run plan to Obamacare marketplaces could be less contentious today than it was six years ago. The bigger question is if it will work.

An institution beset by partisan polarization might benefit from an influx of moderates.

A consolidated food industry brings you salad and chicken nuggets cheaper—and spreads deadly food-borne pathogens farther.

Expanding Social Security isn’t enough to ensure middle-class retirement security.

Nationally, guns outnumber both cars and people.

The next frontier in sustainability: reducing water loss.