According to the Department of Education’s NAEP Data Explorer, which produces charts and figures that analyze National Assessment of Educational Progress scores along hundreds of variables, there is no statistical difference in the 2009 results that compare non-eligible fourth-grade large-city and national scores for math and reading.

Non-eligible refers to the student population that relies on free and reduced school lunches, a leading indicator of lower-economic status. The eligibility requirement is set at(PDF) 185 percent of the federal poverty line, or a household income of $40,793 for a family of four.

However, when comparing total scores, the national results are much higher, generally due to the larger concentration of low-income students in America’s largest cities.

Countrywide, the percentage of students living in households that qualify for the subsidized lunch program is 65.3 percent according to 2010 U.S. Dept. of Agriculture data. For cities likes New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, figures jump significantly.

A spokesperson with Chicago Public Schools, which includes charter, neighborhood and struggling ‘turnaround’ schools, told The American Independent 86 percent of the system’s pupils qualify for the lunch program. A representative from Los Angeles Unified School District told TAI 79 percent of the roughly 700,000 pupils in the system qualify. New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest public school system, ranges between 87 percent for fourth-graders and 79 percent for eighth-graders.

With poverty serving as an underlying condition for lower test scores in urban areas, the push for programs that address matters outside the classroom would be apparent. But while many high-profile in-school reforms have taken place, there’s a relative dearth of tackling poverty as it pertains to education.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told an audience at the Center for American Progress last week that “we’ll never have a society where every family has everything they need.” Klein of NYC wrote in an Atlantic article the mantra that education cannot be improved until poverty is fixed “lets the school system off the hook.”

NAEP scores demonstrate large cities are competitive with the rest of the country in educating its students that are, at least by the government’s definition, out of the lower rungs of poverty. What stands urban schools apart, however, is the poverty. And with  President Obama’s signature education policy prescription, Race to the Top (RTTT), placing greater emphasis on in-school matters, public recourse for addressing the obvious effects of poverty on child academic performance are hard to find.

This despite a large-scale study at the University of Minnesota determining a child’s exposure to pre-K academic instruction increases the likelihood of high school graduation, college completion, avoiding incarceration and finding a well-paying job. Separately, an Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report that examined over 20 countries concluded (PDF) socioeconomic factors outside the classroom are the most significant variable in a student’s success.

Lila Rose, who at age 15 founded the anti-abortion group Live Action, has made secret videotapes of her visits to Planned Parenthood clinics. During a California series in 2007, she told clinic workers she was minor who had been sexually active with a 23-year-old man, presumably the father of the non-existent child she claimed to carry. The videos were wildly circulated in anti-abortion and anti-Planned Parenthood circles because the California workers did not report the incident to law enforcement.

More recently Rose filmed a sting operation in which anti-abortion activists posed as sex traffickers seeking information about disease testing for underage Asian girls, mimicking a similar tactic utilized by James O’Keefe, another conservative videographer, when he posed as a pimp and approached ACORN staff members. O’Keefe was later arrested for tampering with office phones in U.S. Sen. Mary Landreiu‘s (D-Louisiana) office.

Although Rose’s undercover videos initially prompted Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to say he would launch an investigation, he later acknowledged that no investigation could take place since there were no actual victims of abuse. In addition, at least 11 Planned Parenthood clinics involved in Rose’s sting operation did report the incidents to law enforcement before Live Action released the videos.

For her efforts, Rose earned $50,000 in 2008 from the Gerard Health Foundation, which promotes abstinence-only education and anti-abortion actions.

In 2009, she was also named a “Young Leader” by the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion nonprofit organization. Earlier this month, as a part of the Susan B. Anthony’s List “Women Speak Out: Defund Planned Parenthood” bus tour, Rose made stops in Des Moines and Davenport. The focus of the bus tour was to convince lawmakers to vote with U.S. Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana) to remove all taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that federal law already prohibits use of taxpayer funds for abortion services. (The trip through Iowa targeted Democratic U.S. Reps. Leonard Boswell and Bruce Braley, but, despite traveling through the 2nd District, skipped Dave Loebsack.)

According to event information being circulated by Iowa Right to Life, Rose “has brought to light Planned Parenthood’s willingness to accept donations to exterminate minority populations; their willingness to leave statutory rape unreported; and most recently, Planned Parenthood’s willingness to aid pimps in sex trafficking.”

The organization’s “Spring Fling” is slated for April 28 at the Holiday Inn on Fleur Dr. in Des Moines.

The rough edited video of an apparently criminally floundering New Jersey Planned Parenthood staffer posted today on Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment right-wing politics blogsite. The video is the work of Live Action Films led by pro-life activist Lila Rose. The video closely follows the pattern set by Breitbart and James O’Keefe in their debunked and illegal ACORN-sting videos, where the heavily edited footage appears to show a prostitute and pimp receiving advice on how to run their business from the low-income housing and voter-registration group staffers.

The video:

Live Action reportedly sent activists posing as sex traffickers into 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in six states this month– Virginia, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Arizona. When the pretend sex-traffickers began arriving at the clinics this month, Planned Parenthood filed a report with Attorney General Eric Holder and the FBI, which launched an investigation. The FBI found no multi-state child prostitution ring. In its own dogging around, Planned Parenthood likewise found no sex ring but only links to Rose and Live Action.

As in the ACORN case, the video caught by Live Action would appear to be fairly damning and has already provided pro-life groups with plenty of ammunition against Planned Parenthood. Yet the country has learned much in the years since Breitbart pushed the hoax ACORN video into the mainstream mediasphere to such great effect.

After lawmakers and members of the media tried and convicted ACORN of grave wrongdoing according to the lightning-fast cable news schedule, evidence related to the ACORN videos was presented to judges working according to schedules and rules of evidence established by the law. Judges presented with the unedited footage came to a conclusion opposite the one rushed into by politicians and cable commentators. ACORN did nothing illegal. The tapes backed by Breitbart and edited by disgraced activist James O’Keefe, they said, were videotape patchworks sewed together into lies. Indeed, judges on the east coast and the west coast suggested that, if there were any criminal wrongdoing captured in the tapes, it was on the part of O’Keefe, who had likely at least violated wiretapping laws.

O’Keefe was subsequently arrested for breaking into Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in New Orleans, where he was again attempting to produce a hoax video. Breitbart was condemned for pushing the phony ACORN story and also for pushing an egregiously edited and defamatory video of U.S. Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, a black woman who Breitbart made to seem an anti-white racist and who was fired as a result. Sherrod was no racist, a fact the full footage of the video Breitbart cut up and patched together to condemn her proved beyond a doubt.

In the Sherrod case, Breitbart was targeting the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, making the argument that the NAACP is racist.

This latest video targeting Planned Parenthood, underlines a pattern: Breitbart-promoted undercover video “exposés” target organizations established to provide service to minority groups and the poor.

Live Action and Lila Rose have tried repeatedly to discredit Planned Parenthood, its videos thus far lauded by pro-life activists and dismissed by the larger public and media.

Planned Parenthood spokespeople told the AP that its management is investigating whether the New Jersey clinic employee in the latest video may have violated Planned Parenthood policies. The group will certainly have to ask for the full unedited video footage to make that decision.

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Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has taken over for Sanders in parts of the filibuster. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) — a more centrist senator who voted for the tax cuts in 2001 — joined in and made it a colloquy.

This continues. Watch it here.

“There’s nothing new to report at this time,” Landrieu spokeswoman Ellie Atkins said in an email.

Landrieu placed a hold on Lew’s nomination in September, citing the Obama administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium, which she argued would kill thousands of jobs and further damage the Gulf coast economy. The administration lifted the moratorium last month, but Landrieu has said she will wait to lift the hold until she has time to review the administration’s efforts to review permits.

Landrieu, other Gulf coast lawmakers and the oil industry have raised questions about the amount of time it will take for drilling to resume once the moratorium is lifted, fearing long delays to approve permits.

He traces the oil spill narrative roughly like this: Outcry about the environmental effects of the spill turned into concerns about the moratorium on drilling, which, when the moratorium was lifted, turned into everybody moving on to something else.

At first, it seemed like an inevitability that the oil spill would become a major issue in the midterm elections. And in some cases it was — Grimm points to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s early Senate campaign rhetoric on the environmental impacts of the spill, and I’ve written before about how Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) zeroed in on the drilling moratorium.

But oil spill rhetoric has faded significantly for a number of reasons. The first is time. It’s been more than six months since the spill, and the incident rarely gets front-page billing these days. The second, as Grimm points out, is the administration’s decision to overturn the moratorium. The decision took some of the wind out of arguments that the administration was destroying the Gulf economy, though Sens. Vitter and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) have both raised concerns that new drilling rules will slow the pace of new drilling.

The third is a little more complicated. On the one hand, many Democrats seem reluctant to make the oil spill an election issue, because in doing so, they would have to acknowledge one embarrassing little detail: The Senate has failed to pass an oil spill response bill. On the other hand, many Republicans would have to reconcile their support for expanded offshore drilling with the obvious safety concerns. At the end of the day, it’s a thorny issue for both sides of the aisle.

After the midterms, once our elected officials trek back to D.C. to do the less glamorous job of legislating, the big question is this: How will Congress deal with offshore drilling? Right now, it’s unclear. The momentum to pass an oil spill response bill is gone, and with it go the prospects that we’ll see stand-alone legislation on the issue. While it could come up in the lame-duck session, it seems more likely that oil spill response provisions will make their way into a broader energy bill next year that will focus on low-hanging fruit issues like electric vehicles and efficiency, possibly paired with a renewable energy standard. Of course, the outcome of the midterm elections will likely determine the lame-duck agenda.

Just how stringent oil spill response provisions will be depends largely on the outcome of behind-the-scenes liability negotiations between, among others, Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who would prefer unlimited liability on any company responsible for a spill, and Sens. Landrieu and Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who are trying to devise a mechanism by which companies can pool their liability in the event of a large disaster.

Michael Bromwich, head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

The Obama administration announced today it is lifting the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that was imposed in the aftermath of the BP oil spill. But Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave few details about how soon drilling would resume in the Gulf.

Salazar said he believes it is “appropriate” to allow drilling again in the Gulf now that the Interior Department has reviewed offshore drilling safety and issued new rules on the practice. But he noted that drilling will be allowed only for “those operators to clear the higher bar that we have set.”

[Environment1] Salazar and Michael Bromwich — head of the newly formed Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — said they could not give a clear timeline for when drilling would resume, noting that oil companies must first comply with the new standards.

“I don’t think any of us siting here today knows which of the operators have begun implementing those requirements,” Bromwich said, adding that anybody who offers a time frame is “just guessing.” Salazar, pressed by reporters on the question, said, “We will soon have deepwater drilling resume in the Gulf.”

Already, though, the oil industry is raising concerns about the potential pace of drilling application approvals. The American Petroleum Institute, the powerful oil industry trade group, said it was concerned a “de facto moratorium” would remain in place because the Interior Department doesn’t have adequate resources to process applications.

API President Jack Gerard said in a statement, “Without additional resources and a serious commitment by the government to process and approve permits and other requirements expeditiously, the moratorium will give way to a de facto moratorium, which will continue to cripple the already hard-hit Gulf region and cost more than 175,000 American jobs a year.”

API spokeswoman Cathy Landry says most companies “have all the requirements in place” already and will be turning in their applications for drilling quickly. In all, 36 rigs were affected by the moratorium.

It’s not just the oil industry that’s worried about the move; Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who placed a hold on President Obama’s nominee to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, Jack Lew, until the moratorium was lifted, said in a statement that she would wait to lift the hold until she has time to review the administration’s efforts to review permits. Landrieu and other Gulf coast lawmakers have raised questions about the amount of time it will take for drilling to resume once the moratorium is lifted.

“I am not going to release my hold on Jack Lew,” Landrieu said in the statement. “Instead, I will take this time to look closely at how BOEM is handling the issuing of permits and whether or not drilling activity in both shallow and deep water is resuming. When Congress reconvenes for the lame duck session next month, I will have had several weeks to evaluate if today’s lifting of the moratorium is actually putting people back to work.”

Bromwich said BOEM has “ramped up” the allocation of resources for processing offshore drilling applications in the Gulf, adding 20 additional people for the task. He said it should only take “a day or two” to conduct the additional inspections required by the new safety rules.

Still, he admitted that submitting and processing applications will likely require time. “What’s going to slow them down to some extent is the time that applicants are going to take … as well as the time that our people are going to take to make sure that the applications are compliant,” Bromwich said.

The drilling ban is a direct response to the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and resulting oil spill, which dumped 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

The moratorium was imposed in May and then reissued in July, after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a June decision by a federal judge to overturn the ban, arguing that the Obama administration did not offer adequate justification. The moratorium was slated to end on Nov. 30, and today’s announcement means the administration is ending it more than a month early.

Gulf Coast lawmakers have aggressively opposed the moratorium, arguing that it will result in lost jobs and undue economic hardship in the region. But a report released by the Obama administration in September says that the impact of the moratorium was not as great as expected because deepwater drillers have not fired many of their employees. The Department of Commerce report says in total the moratorium will result in the temporary loss of 8,000 to 12,000 jobs in the Gulf. Many of the jobs will come back once the moratorium is lifted. Small businesses will be impacted the most, the report says.

The Interior Department issued late last month two new offshore drilling rules, on drilling and workplace safety. Bromwich delivered to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar early this month a report on the moratorium. After reviewing the report, Salazar said he decided to lift the ban.

In order to receive approval from the department, drillers will have to meet new safety standards for cementing wells and preventing blow-outs as well as prove they will be able to respond to a worst-case oil spill.

The moratorium was imposed in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, which dumped 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The administration has issued new offshore drilling rules as a result of the spill, and Michael Bromwich, head of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is putting the finishing touches on a report on the moratorium that will determine when and how the administration will lift the drilling ban.

Gulf Coast lawmakers are vehemently opposed to the moratorium, arguing that it adds an additional layer of economic hardship on the already-hurting region. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) put a hold on Jack Lew, President Obama’s nominee to head the White House Office of Management and Budget over the moratorium.

The administration has said that drilling will not immediately resume after the moratorium is lifted as companies will need to comply with new drilling rules. Calls to the White House and the Interior Department were not immediately returned.

Salazar, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center Scholars, said the moratorium was “vital to protect the Gulf coast.” He acknowledged the criticism of the moratorium (Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is blocking the administration’s nominee for head of the Office of Management and Budget until the moratorium is overturned), but he said the moratorium is important to determine how best to remake the offshore drilling industry to ensure safety is prioritized.

“We will only lift the moratorium when I, as Secretary of the Interior, am comfortable that we have significantly reduced” the risks associated with drilling, he said, while acknowledging that “we still need” oil and natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico.

Landrieu, who has been a vehement opponent of the drilling ban, has come under fire this week from many in her own party — including Senate Democrats and administration officials — over the hold on Jack Lew, the OMB nominee. But, in a floor speech today, she said she won’t budge.

My hold on Mr. Lew’s nomination will remain for the same reason it was placed originally: the Administration has not acted to lift its ill-conceived moratoria on offshore drilling that are having such a devastating impact on working people and small businesses throughout the Gulf Coast.[...]

The Administration seems to believe that no new exploration should be allowed to proceed until every single offshore operation is in compliance with 100 percent of the revised rules, which aren’t even final.  That is an unworkable framework and an unreasonable standard.

Landrieu’s hold comes as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is expected this week to release new rules on offshore drilling that will likely determine the fate of the moratorium. But the hold puts the administration in a difficult position. Even though administration officials have said they expect to end the moratorium early, they likely don’t want to be seen as giving in to Landrieu’s demands.