Dallas Morning News. June 20, 2024.
Editorial: Mental health program for Texas cops goes statewide
The Blue Chip program can get officers the help they need.
Law enforcement officers across the United States are more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It’s a reality that we must work to change. A newly expanded mental health program can improve the picture in Texas.
The Texas Blue Chip Program allows law enforcement officers to redeem specially designed poker chips for free, confidential counseling or mental health services. The program originated in North Texas and is being expanded statewide by the Dallas-based Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute and its partners.
Officers can use a physical or virtual chip to find a participating care provider without going through insurance or officer wellness programs. Anonymity is important. Some officers may not seek help if others can find out about it.
If participants are near a brick-and-mortar care provider, they can go in person, but telehealth services are available also, said Meadows senior vice president B.J. Wagner. That’s particularly important in rural parts of Texas, where there might not be a provider with the right experience.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. June 21, 2024.
Editorial: Test scores show Texas schools are on fire. Parents, what will you do about it?
If a hitter in baseball is successful in a third of his attempts, he’s a superstar. In most of the rest of life, reaching a goal less than half the time is cause for major change.
When it comes to Texas public schools, though, we accept failure over and over again. The latest State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness results show miserable performances in reading and math, yet they were met with a shrug.
The STAAR results, statewide and in local districts, reinforce that there’s a four-alarm fire in our schools. And it’s not just in big urban districts. Do parents smell the smoke? Are they ready to grab a bucket and fight it?
A sampling of the scores reveals more hotspots than we can address. One of the most crucial is third-grade reading, and results are stagnant. Just 46% statewide meet grade-level standards. In Fort Worth ISD, it’s a nightmarish 33%. In later grades, slightly more than half of children statewide make the grade. In Fort Worth, it actually gets worse: By eighth grade, a little over 1 in 5 students read at the required level.
The picture is better in the suburbs, but not by much. Just 38% of third-graders in the Crowley and Arlington districts hit the mark. Wealthier districts do better, with majorities of students approaching grade level. But even in Northwest ISD, where families are flocking, just a little over half reach grade level, for example.
Math scores, by the way, are even worse.
Years of struggle, compounded by the setbacks from the COVID pandemic, have left us somewhat numb to these figures. But it can’t continue.
The STAAR is not perfect. Many teachers, students and families detest the importance attached to it by the state and the resulting focus on teaching to the test. No one exam tells you anything, and test anxiety is a real impediment for many students.
Directionally, though, the results are unmistakable. Many parents may not really even know it because of factors such as grade inflation and schools’ efforts to disguise their failures.
School districts “need to be more transparent,” said Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, founder of Parent Shield Fort Worth, which aims to give parents information and tools to demand better of their children’s schools. “We all know report cards are not giving the full picture of where schools stand.”
When news of the STAAR scores broke, Dorsey-Hollins said, “my phone was blowing up” with parents asking for help finding their children’s results. “That lets me know schools are not providing access” to the information.
WHAT CAN TEXAS DO TO IMPROVE ITS PUBLIC SCHOOLS?
It’s going to take a jolt to get schools moving in the right direction. The conversation about Texas education has bogged down to one focused entirely on parental choice and state funding of public schools.
We maintain that both sides are right, to an extent. Texas families will benefit from a limited program that sets up education savings accounts for private-school tuition, tutoring or other expenses, given the diversity of their needs. But let’s recognize that school choice is no panacea. An overwhelming share of children will remain in Texas public schools.
And those schools require more funding, especially when retaining the best teachers is harder in an inflationary era. The vast majority of any school district’s expenses go toward salaries and benefits, and we know that good teachers are a huge factor in student achievement. But we can’t pour money into the same failing systems and programs. The state must demand better accountability and commitment to raising reading and math skills.
We’ve done this before: In the early 1980s, business legend Ross Perot led a commission that proposed vast changes to education policy, and the Legislature signed on. Texas raised teacher salaries, demanded tests for certification and even limited kids’ athletic participation — “no pass, no play” — to demand better from students and schools.
In the George W. Bush era, we began to take measuring school performance seriously. Inevitably, that system led to excesses and exhaustion with testing, and it was dialed back.
Can we muster that kind of will and focus again?
HOW PARENTS CAN DEMAND BETTER FOR THEIR KIDS
Even if our institutions begin to move at high levels, it’ll take a grassroots effort, too.
“It’s a huge disconnect with what parents think and what is the actual standings of our children’s schools,” Dorsey-Hollins said. “When parents know, they act, so that’s why we’re really pushing the district to give us this information. … We have the most stake in the game because these are our children.”
Dorsey-Hollins said that her group is pushing for broader and earlier pre-kindergarten enrollment and wants district officials to ensure that teachers adhere to science-based techniques for teaching reading.
At the individual level, parents should consider asking for a conference with their child’s teacher and inquire about available resources to help them specifically, including possible evaluation for issues such as dyslexia, she said.
“There’s instances where this just is not the right school or fit for your child, and maybe you need to look into finding a different school option,” Dorsey-Hollins added.
Waiting on elected leaders, from the school board to the Capitol, isn’t working. We need them to do better for all Texas children.
Only pressure from parents, business leaders, voters and taxpayers will force them to move.
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Houston Chronicle. June 19, 2024.
Editorial: Deepfake nudes and AI porn torment teens. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is fighting back.
Volleyball practice. Bible study. The English essay due next week. These are the things that once occupied 14-year-old Elliston Berry’s mind.
Then came Ellis’ rude awakening. One fall morning last year at her home outside of Fort Worth, she woke up to a flurry of missed calls and texts from her friends that sent her heart racing: Had she seen the nude photo of her circulating on Snapchat?
Ellis had never taken a naked photo of herself, much less sent one. But that didn’t matter.
A benign cruise photo she had posted on her private Instagram had been enough for a classmate to feed into a “nudification” tool — an app that, armed with artificial intelligence, can strip a person’s clothes and create a realistic explicit image in seconds. With the same ease, the classmate, a 15-year-old boy, allegedly created several Snapchat accounts to befriend classmates and then bombarded them with fake nudes of Ellis and six of her friends.
“On Oct. 7, 2023 our lives were forever changed,” Anna McAdams, Ellis’ mom, tearfully testified to the Texas Senate Committee on Criminal Justice earlier this month. “My daughter’s innocence was shattered and her eyes were opened to the reality of how cruel a person can be.”
As if parents didn’t have enough to worry about, now it’s malicious “deepfakes” — videos, photos or audio digitally altered with AI. While often associated with fake photos and videos aimed at candidates vying for public office, more than 95% of deepfakes online are pornographic and 99% target women or girls. Very few are published with consent.
More often than not, deepfake porn targets celebrities, including Taylor Swift and, more recently, Houston’s own Megan Thee Stallion. Federal and state laws failed these celebrities, and they’ve failed to protect children, who have far less power, from being traumatized by this technology.
Last session, the Legislature passed at least three bills addressing the issue, including House Bill 2700, which expanded the definition of child pornography to encompass visual material that uses an actual child’s image, including content created using AI. But the law doesn’t go far enough and we’re glad to see that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has charged senators with closing loopholes.
While Ellis worries whether, each time she applies to college or to a job, these nude photos will come back to haunt her, the classmate who targeted her and her friends will never have to worry about a permanent record.
When her family reached out to the school and the sheriff’s office for help, at first they were told that, because the cyberbully was a minor, they couldn’t reveal his identity. It wasn’t until Anna McAdams filed a Title IX complaint that they found out who he was.
Even then, “the school was ill-equipped and law enforcement didn’t know what to do,” McAdams testified. She says the 15-year-old boy received in-school suspension, and then his parents transferred him to another school. The sheriff’s office charged him with distribution of harmful material to a minor, a Class A misdemeanor, but he was let off on probation, according to McAdams.
“At 18, his case will be expunged,” she said. “No one will ever know what he did.”
The case has inspired U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, to introduce a bipartisan bill on Tuesday this week called the TAKE IT DOWN Act. The bill treats the online world as interstate commerce, making it a criminal offense to publish or threaten to publish nonconsensual intimate images depicting real people, including computer-generated images, on social media. Cruz’s office explained that the penalty — three years of jail time if the victim is a minor or two years if they’re an adult — would apply to both adults and minors who commit the offense.
The bill, if passed, would send a more powerful warning to kids considering creating or publishing nonconsensual deepfakes. More importantly, it will also give victims a message of hope — a way out from having those images follow them in perpetuity.
Cruz, who is also among the 70 senators co-sponsoring a comprehensive reform bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, included in the new bill a provision requiring websites to take down those nonconsensual images within 48 hours of a victim requesting it. For McAdams, persuading Snapchat to remove the images had been like screaming into a void.
“Right now, if you happen to be a big, famous star like Taylor Swift, you can get the images pulled down,” Cruz told the editorial board this week. “But if you’re just a Texas teenager, Big Tech’s answer is typically ‘go jump in a lake.’”
One phone call from Cruz’s office was all it took for Snapchat to finally scrub the photos last week, but it shouldn’t take congressional pressure for victims to get relief from an explicit photo published without their say.
Parents don’t have to wait for regulations to catch up to technology to get informed about the issue and start sounding the alarm in local school communities. Invite your kids to a frank conversation about deepfakes. Extend that conversation to your school board. McAdams told us her daughter’s high school still doesn’t have a specific AI deepfake policy in place, despite at least three incidents. We understand that schools are often too under resourced and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of potential online harms to pay sufficient attention to cases of AI misuse.
But urge your schools to heed Ellis’ warning: It can happen to anyone. Using something as benign as a LinkedIn headshot, a bad actor can upend your life. Without stronger laws, there’s nothing to stop him.
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San Antonio Express-News. June 21, 2024.
Editorial: Heed surgeon general’s warning. Place labels on social media.
We see them everywhere, teenagers cocooned in their own private universes, oblivious to the sights and sounds around them. The adolescents embody a curious paradox, isolated among crowds, their earbuds a gateway to a world that directs them inward.
Teenagers average almost five hours a day online, and health officials worry about the negative impact on their mental health. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy addressed the “defining public health challenge of our time” in a recent opinion piece for the New York Times.
“Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?” Murthy wrote.
With more than 95% of our kids using social media, the question has become profoundly relevant. The negative effects may be less visible than the perils associated with liquor or cigarettes, but they are no less insidious.
Murthy equated the danger to road hazards or contaminated food. He proposed tobacco-style warning labels on social media apps, advising parents of the peril to their children. The dangers, apparent for years, have grown into a crisis. Young consumers describe a dynamic eerily similar to the addictions of drinkers and smokers.
Murthy cannot unilaterally impose the warning labels, which would require congressional approval. Neither chamber has introduced such legislation, although the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing exploring the impact of social media on young people earlier this year. The New York Times piece represents the most urgent effort in a campaign that began years ago.
If the use of social media resulted in nothing worse than wasting time, it might seem benign. But the impact is far more disturbing. Research shows that teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media face more mental health problems, doubling their risk of depression.
“It’s no longer the culture for people to talk to each other,” Murthy said during a conference on the mental health crisis last month.
In a 2018 Pew Research Center poll, teens said social media platforms exacerbate already prevalent problems, including body shaming and rumor spreading.
One of the more ironic aspects of the findings is that despite this awareness, adolescents continue to access social media. The apparent paradox demonstrates the wicked nature of addiction.
“These harms are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency or accountability,” Murthy wrote.
In his book, “The Anxious Generation,” published earlier this year, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt struggled to pinpoint the reasons for the problems, but he makes a compelling case that the rise in anguish in teens coincides with the adoption of smartphones.
“What is happening to us?” he asked. “How is technology changing us? The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.”
If the “degradation” afflicts all age levels, it is all the more apparent among our youth.
They lack the discipline, the self-control, of adults, making them more susceptible to the allure of social media. The vulnerability is all the more heartbreaking for teens burdened by the angst of forging an identity on their journey to adulthood.
“I think it’s essential that parents know what we now know, which is that there are significant harms associated with social media use,” Murthy told CNN.
Acknowledging the benefits of social media, he said the negatives outweigh the positives.
“For too many children, social media use is compromising their sleep and valuable in-person time with family and friends,” Murthy said.
Warning labels would not eliminate the problem — the surgeon general proposes phone-free zones in schools — but awareness is a key weapon in the assault against any problem.
Similar labels on tobacco products, instituted in 1965, led to a steady decline in cigarette smoking over the years. Health officials hope for similar results with social media; parents should do the same.
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AIM Media Texas. June 22, 2024.
Editorial: Keeping families together, regardless of their status, should always be a priority
Two weeks after establishing perhaps the most restrictive refugee policies in our nation’s history, President Joe Biden has about-faced and announced more compassionate, and reasonable policies regarding undocumented immigrants.
This late in his presidential term and in the final months of a neck-and-neck reelection campaign with Donald Trump, there’s little doubt that Biden’s action is a purely political move. However, it’s a welcome step toward doing what’s right as a humanitarian matter.
Biden on Tuesday announced an executive order that allows undocumented residents who have been married to U.S. citizens and lived in this country for 10 years to apply for legal residency without having to leave the country. Non-citizen children of such couples also could seek legal status.
Essentially, it’s an extension of the “parole in place” policy that has been in place for more than a decade.
Currently, people seeking residency visas to leave the country and apply through their countries’ embassies of consulates.
Immigration experts estimate more than 1.1 million undocumented residents are married to U.S. citizens, and administration officials say about half of them could benefit from the change, which would protect them from deportation and enable them to work while their applications are being processed.
Biden’s announcement came on the 12th anniversary of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and also enables DACA residents to secure longer-term work visas than those they can get now. This would give foreign-born residents who came here as children more stability and security.
Administration officials say they hope to start taking applications by the end of the summer.
Many immigrants and advocates are applauding the change, but it’s best not to get one’s hopes up. Opponents of the new policy, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, already have promised legal challenges, and an injunction issued upon such a lawsuit could push implementation past the November election. Donald Trump already has promised that “Joe Biden’s illegal amnesty plan will be ripped up and thrown out on the very first day what we’re back in office.”
Still, the new policy is welcome; it should have been composed sooner.
Applicants under the new policy surely will be vetted like all other visa applicants. It’s reasonable to assume that those who have lived here 10 years without violating any laws have proven that they likely already are contributing to their communities and will continue to do so.
More importantly, before Trump first took office our stated immigration policy placed a premium on keeping families together. Biden’s announcement is a worthwhile move back toward that preference of not disrupting families and the communities in which they live, work and contribute, both socially and economically.
We can certainly question Biden’s motives in a tight race that could hinge on voters’ opinions on immigration policy. Regardless, this is the right thing to do. It’s a shame that respect for the immigrants who built this country, and the families that are our country’s core, didn’t seem to be such a priority earlier in his administration.
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