The Senate Budget Committee approved its budget resolution yesterday (March 9), laying out a budget and tax framework for annual federal spending.

Republicans in charge said this budget plan is good for the country -- it offers tax cuts to keep the economy going strong, spending cuts and promises to cut the deficit in half by 2009.

Democrats argued this budget is bad for the country. They charged the Republicans' budget plan would actually add more than $3 trillion dollars to the national debt over the next five years, a consequence hidden by excluding major expenses like funding the war in Iraq and fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax. They also charged that it spends the nation's resources in tax cuts for the wealthy while failing to protect vital programs that serve the common good.

In a largely symbolic gesture, Democrats offered amendments that would pay for an additional $16 billion in discretionary spending and $125 billion in mandatory spending over five years by raising taxes on the wealthy and closing corporate tax loopholes. They also tried, and failed, to strip out a $3 billion reconciliation provision that would allow a bill authorizing drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The budget resolution now goes to the full Senate for approval.

The Washington Post is reporting that thousands of people rallied yesterday in opposition to legislative efforts to stop the flow of undocumented workers across our border with Mexico. I’m pretty sure the numbers reported are correct. It seemed like the crowds I walked through last evening on my way to a class at the Botanic Garden were pretty large -- lots of families, lots of children and young people.

I thought it was interesting that this rally was being held on the very same day the Pew Hispanic Center released its report entitled, “Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.” This nonpartisan think tank took a look at data from the last Census, the March 2005 Current Population Survey and the monthly Current Population Surveys through January 2006. The findings should not be surprising – the Pew Center estimates that there are now between 11.5 and 12 million “unauthorized migrants” in the United States.

I can just hear the groans – “unauthorized migrants?” The struggle around language to describe people who are here living and working without benefit of citizenship has always hit close to home for me. My mother wasn’t naturalized until I was 18 years old, so I grew up cringing when I heard her being described as an “illegal alien,” as if she were someone who dropped in from another planet. Then we got the politically-correct term, “undocumented workers.” So I guess the Pew Hispanic Center is trying new terminology.

Whatever we call this group of people, one thing is clear, both from what I saw yesterday on the Capitol grounds and the Pew findings – children and families make up a large percentage of this country’s unauthorized, undocumented, and illegal population. Pew reports that there are 6.6 million families in this country in which either the head of the family or the spouse are unauthorized. And 64 percent of the children in these families are American citizens by birth.

Congress is mulling over constructing a fence at our southern border and how best to penalize social service workers who work to help the undocumented with basic human needs. This is indeed a hot button issue these days.

On March 22nd, I’ll be moderating an online chat about
education issues faced by immigrants and the DREAM Act. I hope you’ll log on.

Every school day, all around the country, nearly 8 million students are watching Channel One's daily public affairs program, a 12-minute mix of news, features and advertisements.

Did I say watching? It might be more accurate to say, "existing in the same general vicinity as," or "dimly aware of." It turns out many of these students are paying even less attention to Channel One than they are to their parents' suggestions about what to wear to the next mixer.

I find this very comforting. Channel One, owned by Primedia, has weaseled its way into our educational institutions by offering schools free satellite dishes and television sets. To get the goodies, schools have to promise to air the morning show on 90 percent of school days. Each show has about 10 minutes of news and 2 minutes of advertisements. It's an arrangement that is easy to deplore, and has generated a lot of hand-wringing about selling out a captive audience of teens to the purveyors of fast food, video games, and other empty calories of consumerism.

But a new study from Washington State in the current issue of Pediatrics reveals that while Channel One is marginally more effective at shilling products to our kids than informing them about the key issues of the day, its performance on both fronts is pretty dismal -- with students remembering only about 11 percent of the ads and 13 percent of the news stories that aired during a week.

As one high school student explained, "When Channel One is on, I do my homework or I talk with my friends." In other words, this multi-tasking generation is nobody's captive audience.

Affluent families and many middle-class families save a lot of money by following the advice of the accountants they hire to do their tax returns. But many low-income families can't afford their own tax accountant.

As tax day approaches, we all can do a better job of informing low-wage families about how they can make sure they're getting all they're due.

First of all, tell low-wage families to stay away from the "Rapid Refunds" or "Fast Money" racket--tax preparers that offer high-interest refund anticipation loans as a quick fix for a family's finances. The Children's Defense Fund says people who filed taxes in 2004 lost more than $900 million from tax refunds nationwide because tax preparers sold them refund anticipation loans with high interest rates.

If you're an employer, you can get the Corporate Voices for Working Families 2006 Employer Guide to let your low-wage employees know about federal programs that provide tax credits and assistance with health care, food, and home heating costs.

If you're a city official, there's a National League of Cities toolkit to help you conduct outreach campaigns to connect residents with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and other federal and state benefits.

If you work in a nonprofit agency, use your connections to your community to let people know about the EITC and other tax benefits they might be eligible for.

In a paper provocatively titled "Does Television Rot Your Brain?", two University of Chicago economists present what they call "strong evidence against the prevailing wisdom that childhood television viewing causes harm to cognitive or educational development."

Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro looked at children's test scores from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, a period when television was rapidly being introduced across the country. Because some communities weren't wired for television right away, they were able to compare how children in homes with televisions performed compared to those without televisions. They found no negative effects, and some positive effects, on test scores.

I love this study, but probably for all the wrong reasons. It's truly beyond me how one can compare the impact on a growing young brain of singing along with the Mouseketeers (Em-Eye-Cee...See you real soon! Kay-Ee-Why...Why? Because we like you...) to that of watching grown people eat insects (Fear Factor). So I leave that to the Phd's.

Instead, jumping nimbly over the abstruse discussions of "controlling for area fixed effects", "within-area, cross-cohort variation in television exposure," and "observable covariates of exam performance," my attention is grabbed by an admirably simple chart on the very last page of this 51-page paper, listing the top five television programs watched by kids, 1953 and 2003.

The boob tube sure has changed in 50 years.

Topping the charts in 1953: I Love Lucy. In 2003: The Simpsons. Hmm. Would you rather have Little Ricky or Homer Simpson over for a sleepover? Number two in 1953: Superman. In 2003: American Idol. Superpowers in tights, vs uneven talents in the spotlights... Numbers three, four and five in 1953: The Red Buttons Show, Dragnet (you go, Joe Friday!), and The Roy Rogers Show. In 2003: Malcolm in the Middle, Fear Factor, and Survivor, Amazon.

Gentzkow and Shapiro argue that this list shows that "the popular children's shows of 2003 do not seem obviously less cognitively demanding than those of 1953." But they sure are different. The humor is meaner. Humiliation is big. And who knows what the impact of all that ersatz reality is going to be on this group of kids as they try to make sense of the world. Will it breed healthy skepticism or cynicism, help them dream big and take chances or convince them that it's all rigged? We'll have to wait and see.

Trickle-down theorists argue that cutting taxes for the rich will make everyone else richer. If it were true, the pace of tax cuts since 2001 should have made us all millionaires!

Trickle-downers also argue that holding the line on taxes will make America's economy more competitive and stronger. But here too the theory doesn't meet the real world test. More tax cuts will burden our economy with more debt. Despite spending cuts in vital social services in the budget they just approved, Congress is still going to have to raise the official debt limit, again, to $9 trillion by mid-March.

Yet Congressional leaders are still wedded to their trickle-down theory. They are working now on a budget plan for the coming year that expands tax cuts for the top-income households while setting "caps" that will squeeze investments in education, Head Start, child care, and job training-- the very kinds of investments we need to keep our competitive edge. If they have their way we could see cuts in vital domestic programs as large as 13 percent by 2011.

The House of Representatives has postponed a March 2 vote on the "National Uniformity for Food Act" (H.R.4167) until next week. Food safety advocates say this bill would not set national food safety standards that raise the bar but would eliminate key food safety measures in the states, like those that protect Californians against chemicals causing birth defects. H.R. 4167 would also limit states' ability to enact new food-safety laws in areas where the federal government has not acted, like mercury levels in fish.

Update March 9: The bill passed the House on a 283-139 vote on March 8.

It's hard to say an intriguing piece of research is being ignored by the media when it generates a story in that paragon of the MSM, The New York Times. Still, I was surprised by what seemed to me to be a rather paltry number of news stories covering recent findings from a large-scale, government-funded, peer-reviewed study showing that public school students score as well or better than their peers in private, religious and charter schools in math.

Is it because findings like those of Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski of the University of Illinois just don't fit our hypothesis of how the world works, so we discount them?

The Lubienskis compared how 340,000 students in 4th and 8th grades in 13,000 schools -- regular public, public charter, and private -- did on the math portion of the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Just looking at the raw scores, the private school students seemed to do better. But using sophisticated statistical techniques to adjust for out-of-school factors such as income, the researchers found that in fact, public school students outperformed or held their own with peers in other types of schools.

Obviously, how kids do on one test on one day is not a comprehensive measure of effective education. But given the pounding our public schools are taking in the media, it is pretty heartening news for those who believe true public schools are getting something of a bad rap. So I expected a bit more noise when the study came out in late January. I'm still waiting.

This is a critical week for advocates trying to make sure families get the assistance they need to pay their heating bills. Congressional reporters say Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has decided to resolve a dispute over spending for flood insurance and home heating subsidies by considering the two issues together later this week.

Update: The Senate passed the LIHEAP assistance bill and sent it to the House on March 7.

"Most of you probably have seen the print ads or commercials for Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. I think what they are trying to do is great,
and, unfortunately, necessary. "

This is from my daughter-in-law, who treats people with eating disorders in a center outside Chicago.

"The statistics on how poorly girls view their physical appearance is really disturbing, and bringing awareness to this awesome.

"I was at a conference for eating disorders yesterday and had the pleasure to hear from one of the adult models who was in the
print ads for Dove. She was quite inspirational and courageous. She shared some responses she has gotten from girls/women/mother's and it is
really encouraging. Self-esteem is so interrelated to eating disorders I feel anything we can do to support girls/women accepting themselves is
powerful.

"I have to say I was shocked by the new research that is coming out on children and adolescents with eating disorders (and this doesn't
have to mean full blown anorexia or bulimia, they often start with negative self-esteem/body image and starting to be conscious of food
choices). Almost 50% of girls 9-16 are on a diet (and believe or not, 20% of boys!).

"In our program alone we are starting to see more patients as young as 7, and have increasing numbers in the 12-14 age range. It is
really sad and we all can help build people's self-esteem and acceptance. T

"This isn't a cure, but it is an excellent place to start.
Please check out Dove's website and donate/get a t-shirt/increase your own awareness/spread the word/whatever!"