Only 2% of 12,000 high school seniors could answer a simple question about the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision—“and that’s no surprise,” finds a new comprehensive study by the Southern Poverty Law Center on the state of civil rights education in all fifty states plus the District of Columbia.

In November, 2011, the PEW Economic Mobility Project, together with the Russell Sage Foundation and the Sutton Truse, released a study of ten countries and how socioeconomic advantage, as measured by parents' education, is transmitted over the course of one's life.  The select key findings are:

In a November 22, 2011 releaso, Citizens for Tax Justice outlined how the deficit reduction "Super Committee" was undone by the excessive devotion to tax cuts and the inability to wean themselves from the Bush tax cuts that have contributed substantially to the current federal deficit and accumulated debt.  See "Super Committee" Undone by Devotion to Tax Cuts here.

On November 17, 2011, the Department of Homeland Security issued long-awaited guidelines for ICE enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers on implementation of prosecutorial discretion priorities outlined in a June 17 memorandum from John Morton, the Director of ICE.  The guidance consists of a memo  from Peter Vincent, the ICE Principal Legal Advisor, another

Fr. Ted Arroyo, S.J., the Alabama Associate and founding executive director for JSRI, describes the work of JSRI, how Alabama’s HB 56 impacts the lives of undocumented immigrants in Alabama, and his work opposing the law in a National Jesuit News podcast posted November 15, 2011.

by Fred Kammer, SJ

In the month since the release of the Vatican document or “Note” on global financial systems,¹ responses have ranged from praise as “extraordinary”² [Professor Steve Schneck, Board Member of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good] to effective dismissal as coming “from the lower echelons of the Roman Curia”³  [George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center]. 

By Sue Weishar, Ph.D.

By Alex Mikulich, Ph.D.

We live in a moment of economic, social, moral, and spiritual impasse. Wondrous technological achievements fail to assuage our possessive individualism, fail to end extreme poverty, fail to cultivate life-giving connections between the rich and poor peoples of the earth, and fail to nurture our universal rootedness in the earth’s ecosystems.

The report Under Attack: Texas’ Middle Class and the Opportunity Crisis, co-published by Center for Public Policy Priorities and national policy center Demos, examines how stagnant wages, falling union participation, the lack of good jobs and health benefits, and the rising cost of a college education are all squeezing the Texas middle class. As the report indicates, “The American Dream means working hard to learn, earn, save, and build assets so that our families are financially secure.

The idea that children will grow up to be better off than their parents is a central component of the American Dream, and sustains American optimism. However, Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking up from the American Dream finds that a middle-class upbringing does not guarantee the same status over the course of a lifetime.  A third of Americans raised in the middle class—defined here as those between the 30th and 70th percentiles of the income distribution—fall out of the middle as adults.