M/H

Increasingly, Internet Activism Helps Shiutter Abusive ‘Troubled Teen’ Boot Camps #108By Maia SzalavitzTuesday, April 5, 2011 From TIME Magazine

Vocabulary to know before you read:avowed derogatory

substantiate punitive

stymie archive

jeering adverse

corroborate aversive

coercive missive

For the last 40 years, teens with drug problems, learning disabilities and other behavioral issues have been sent to residential facilities to endure "tough love" techniques that are widely known to include methods of outright physical and psychological abuse.

Whether labeled as boot camps, emotional-growth schools, behavior modification programs or wilderness programs, these organizations have operated without federal oversight, and state regulation of the schools ranges from lax to nonexistent. Now, however, individual critics of the programs are using the Internet to find each other and mobilize, and are bringing change.

Consider the Elan School, in Poland, Maine, which has long been known for its extreme practices. On April 1, Elan shut its doors after four decades in operation, blaming negative publicity online for recent declines in enrollment. "The school has been the target of harsh

and false attacks spread over the Internet with the avowed purpose of forcing the school to close," Sharon Terry, Elan's executive director, told the Lewiston Maine Sun Journal. The paper reported:

Despite several recent investigations conducted by the Maine Department of Education that Terry said have vindicated the school, "the school has, unfortunately, been unable to survive the damage."

Elan is just the most recent in a growing list of victories for opponents of tough residential programs for troubled teens. In the last three years, some 40 other private institutions like Elan have closed, and others have been condemned by state investigations, as activism online — mostly led by survivors of such programs and their parents — has increased.

Last month, the Oregon Department of Human Services released its report on the August 2009 death of Sergey Blashchishena, a 16-year-old student at the Sagewalk wilderness program in Bend, Ore., which was run by Aspen Education, the largest chain of behavioral health centers for teenagers in the U.S. Blashchishena died of heatstroke on his first day at the program after being made to hike in 89-degree weather, carrying a backpack that exceeded the weight standard for adult infantrymen. He was not given medical aid when he began to show signs of heat exhaustion.

Online activists widely posted stories about Blashchisena's death and encouraged former program participants to send information to investigators. The state's final report substantiates findings of neglect against the program and two of its staff members.

Also in 2009, an investigation by TIME found that girls at another Aspen program in Oregon, Mount Bachelor Academy, were being forced to do lap dances and other inappropriate sexual acts as part of “therapy.” A state investigation of the school would later confirm that "sexualized role play in front of staff and peers, requiring students to say derogatory phrases about themselves in front of staff and peers" and "requiring students to reenact past physical abuse in front of staff and peers" did occur, and that the practices were "punitive, humiliating, degrading and traumatizing."

In this case, again, Facebook groups, websites and email lists allowed program survivors and their parents to find one other; they uncovered information about earlier state investigations into Mount Bachelor that had been stymied by lack of access to victims, and they were able to pool new information to help current investigators see the pattern of abuse.

Both Aspen programs are now closed, and just last month the group announced the closure of five more programs as well as the consolidation of another three around the country. In a press release, Aspen blamed the economy, saying, "This transition reflects the reduced demand for therapeutic schools and programs in today's economy."

While it's certain that the economic downturn has contributed to the programs' financial troubles — tuition can cost $6,000 a month or more, over several months to years —

activism online has also clearly played a significant role. The Elan School was simply the first to cite Internet activity as a direct cause of its closure.

“This movement couldn't have happened without the Internet," says Kathryn Whitehead, founder of CAFETY, the Community Alliance For the Safe and Ethical Treatment of Youth, and a former student at another abusive program that recently closed. "The Internet has been absolutely critical because survivors are spread out across the U.S. They get sent to a program and then they have to go home. When you connect to other program survivors, you recognize that this is a large-scale problem, not an individual program's problem. That has been critical in bringing people together. It's an incredibly effective organizing tool."

What's more, unlike in the heyday of troubled-teen programs, the Internet now allows the instantaneous sharing of information about the current and past goings-on at the schools; in previous eras, those details were scattered in the archives of local newspapers or government files.

When activists looked up local newspaper accounts of the Elan School from 1975, for instance, they found that psychologists who visited Elan had been quoted as saying it was "bizarre and degrading" and that "the whole concept of the program seems to be a brain-washing technique."

Elan was among the most notorious of the country's emotional-growth schools. It was there, in the late 1970s, that Michael Skakel, cousin to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., allegedly confessed to the 1975 murder of his 15-year-old neighbor in Greenwich, Conn., Martha Moxley — a crime for which Skakel remains incarcerated. Skakel's parents had enrolled the boy at Elan to treat an alcohol problem after he was arrested for drunk driving in 1978, several years after the murder.

But what is less known are the techniques commonly used to prompt such confessions at Elan — tactics that were employed at the school for decades, according to former students, often with knowledge of state authorities.

Take “the ring,” for instance. In this disciplinary tactic, two students are encircled by a ring of their peers, their arms tightly meshed to prevent escape. Dozens of students and staff members congregate around the ring to spectate, packed into a bare room not much bigger than a studio apartment. At the only exit to the outdoors, which opens directly to the Maine woods, a teenage sentry is stationed. Sentries guard interior doors as well.

One of the student “boxers” inside the ring has been designated to “fight on the side of good.” He's there as a representative of the school. The other has been labeled as the bad guy: he is there to accept punishment for breaking one of the school's many strict rules.

As the match gets underway, the ring of teens, typically aged 13 to 18, participates by hitting, pinching or trying to trip the bad guy; maltreating him is not only not encouraged, it's the point. Refusing to participate in jeering or bullying is suspect, and teens who stay quiet risk becoming victims themselves.

Between one-minute rounds, the victim is taunted by spectators and denied water and crowd support. Until he surrenders and accepts whatever label or rule he had rebelled against, fresh opponents are brought in to break him. When he does finally break, the damage is both physical — he's typically bruised and bloodied — and mental. Similar “rings” were also held for girls.

And that's only one example tough love, Elan style. Such accounts of torture and neglect date back to the 1970s, and many came to light as part of the sensational Skakel murder trial in 2002. Witnesses describe kids being systematically slammed against every wall of an entire dormitory. They detail grueling days of sleep deprivation, beatings and psychological humiliation. Students were consistently left in charge of other teens, and instructed to beat them if they did not comply with orders.

Based primarily on testimony from Elan classmates, who said they heard Skakel confess to killing Moxley, the Kennedy cousin was convicted. At Elan, Skakel was made to wear a sign for weeks saying “Confront Me About Why I Killed My Friend,” and he is said to have confessed to the murder only after a session in the ring. Confessions gained by the police through methods similar to those used at Elan are illegal. “Basically, they tried to erase you,” said one woman who attended Elan from 2002 to 2004.

Jeff Wimbelton led the online charge to close Elan. (The name is a pseudonym; for professional reasons, Wimbelton does not wish to be identified.) Now in his 20s, he attended the school in the early 2000s, having been sent there following an arrest for running away from home.

Wimbelton says he witnessed the brutality of the ring at least 20 times during the two years he was enrolled at Elan, and was himself made to fight “on the side of good.”

Although the state of Maine was aware that this violent ritual was being conducted at the school, it did little more than encourage Elan to stop voluntarily. Yellow Light Breen, a spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education, told the Sun Journal in 2002 that:

...his department was aware of the “ring” treatment at Elan and that it was a “real issue” 10 to 12 years ago. “We pressed them pretty hard and they agreed not to do it,” he says. “We were certainly led to believe it ceased several years ago.”

Also, he added, in the last year, the DOE has banned the use of restraints and so-called "adverses,” like being hit, pinched or being subject to loud noises.

Wimbelton says that despite Elan's claims that the ring was stopped in 2000, he saw a ring session as late as 2001. Other former students corroborate his story.

In 2007, the continued use of so-called aversive therapies despite a lack of evidence of their effectiveness — and despite significant evidence of their harms — spurred me to write an op-ed piece about Elan for the New York Times. At the time, Elan was one of two

out-of-state programs using punitive treatment at which New York State youth with conditions like autism, learning disabilities or behavior problems were eligible to receive state-funded treatment.

My piece prompted a state investigation. As the Sun Journal reported:

David Connerty-Marin, spokesman for the Maine Department of Education, said the agency has “investigated Elan a number of times based on reports of abuse and other deficiencies, and never found any evidence.” He said that New York officials also have investigated, and never found evidence of abuse at the Poland school.

But that's not what New York State officials told me. In a letter to Elan following the investigation prompted by my Times op-ed, regulators said that Elan used “sleep deprivation,” excessive isolation and restraint, and “coercive and confrontational” counseling that was conducted by untrained students, who often used foul language. They asked that these "health and safety" issues be resolved within seven days.

It's not clear why Maine's investigators failed for decades to find abuse at the school, while New York's officials saw disturbing treatment during their first visit. It could be because Maine announces its inspections in advance, while New York sends investigators to programs unannounced.

Wimbelton was inspired to act after reading media reports about the 2007 investigation of Elan and the later comments of recent graduates. One woman wrote in the comments section below my Huffington Post article about the investigation that her nephew had committed suicide after being enrolled at Elan. Another woman who had attended the school from 2005 to 2008 commented there that she was "traumatized."

"Reading that comment, it was like a fuse went off in my brain,” says Wimbelton, who had assumed that Elan had reformed its ways since he had attended. “I thought, I can't believe this is still going on. I have to do something to stop it.”

He waged an online war using every weapon he could think of: Facebook pages, tumblr blogs, websites and other social media. When Wimbelton posted about Elan on Reddit, the post received thousands of votes and generated enormous traffic. He encouraged others to post their stories too. People responded, posting and cross-linked their missives enough so that anti-Elan sites soon began to rise to the top of Google's search results, offering parents a very different view of the program than that on the school's own website.

Wimbelton even looked up the local media's coverage of school sports, which listed the names of Elan athletes. With a little online sleuthing, Wimbleton was able to find the names of the parents of the kids; he called them to try to warn them about what went on at the school. Upon hearing Wimbelton's story and reading the links he sent, the parents of four such children decided to withdraw their enrollment, he says.

"The fantastic thing about the Internet has been that individuals can post their own

personal experiences — it's not a one-sided marketing tool,” says Whitehead.

Elan insists that it has done nothing wrong, and that the 40 years worth of stories from dozens of teens has misrepresented its curriculum. Indeed, there are some former students who thank the school for its tough tactics, crediting them for saving their lives. But since there has never been a controlled study of the program's methods, it's impossible to know whether they could possibly be broadly effective.

"It's surreal,” Wimbleton says of the school's closure. "There were times I thought it was a lost cause. How in God's name was that allowed to go on for so long?"

"It's fantastic news,” says Whitehead. But she notes that about 400 private, unregulated programs still operate, locking down teens and using harsh, humiliating and confrontational approaches as therapy. Legislation to regulate these programs passed the House following GAO investigations and Congressional hearings in 2007 and 2008, but the bill is still awaiting introduction into the Senate and passage of new regulations appears unlikely.

Questions:1. According to the article, New York conducts unannounced investigations of schools, while Maine conducts announced investigations. What is significant about this difference in method, and which is better? 2. Schools and programs like Elan promise to help troubled children develop into responsible adults. What kinds of people do you think their methods will produce?3. How has the internet (and former students’ use of it) influenced Elan?

E/M

Has Work Got You Burning the Midnight Oil? It Could Be Bad for Your Heart #109By Meredith MelnickTuesday, April 05, 2011From TIME Magazine

Vocabulary to know before you read:threshold culprit

metabolic sedentary

The benefits of gainful employment are many, but working hard may have a downside: an increased risk of heart attack.

A new study found that people who worked 11 hours or more a day were 67% more likely to have a heart attack or die of one over an average 12 years of follow-up, compared with people who worked standard seven- or eight-hour days.

The study followed more than 7,000 British civil service workers aged 39 to 62 who originally signed up

between 1991 and 1993. At the start of the study, none of the participants had heart disease. Researchers screened the group for heart disease every five years until 2004, and also consulted hospital data and registries to track rates of heart attack and death. By the end of the study, 29 participants had died of heart disease and 163 had had heart attacks.

The 11-hour mark appeared to be key. Those who worked relatively long days — up to 10 hours a day — were not at significantly higher heart risk than those who worked less. But once workers crossed the 11-hour threshold, their heart disease risk went up.

What the researchers also wanted to know was whether adding information about people's work hours would help improve the accuracy of standard heart disease risk calculations — which categorize people into low, moderate or high risk over 10 years — based on traditional risk factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and smoking. This risk

calculation is known as the Framingham risk score.

Indeed, adding work hours to the calculation improved prediction by nearly 5%. The Boston Globe's Daily Dose blog reported:

Some 124 "low-risk” participants out of the 6,400 were re-classified as “moderate-risk” — defined as having a 5-year heart attack risk of 5 to 10 percent — when their long work hours were combined with their Framingham risk score. Interestingly, 85 of the nearly 400 moderate-risk folks who were also included in the study were re-classified as low-risk once their eight-hour-long workdays were factored in.

Why long work hours are associated with an increase in heart risk isn't clear. It could be that working long days isn't a risk factor in itself, but a marker for other things that increase risk: for instance, high-stress types who are already at increased risk for heart disease may simply work longer than other people. The study's authors theorized that chronic stress may be a culprit, since stress affects metabolic function and can lead to depression and sleep problems — all of which are associated with increased risks of heart disease and heart attacks.

Of course, there's also the issue of sedentary office work. In a study published in January in the European Heart Journal, researchers found that prolonged bouts of sitting — practiced by legions of office workers — led to increased risks of two major heart disease indicators: larger waist size and higher levels of blood fats. That was true even in people who exercised regularly outside of work hours.

What does that mean for you? Remember to get up and stretch or take a lap around the office once in a while, if you're slogging long days at work. Even these small changes in behavior can lower your health risks, the authors of the January study found.

Also, try to punch out a little earlier than you otherwise would. That means putting down the BlackBerry at home and not checking email from the plane. It's not worth the heartache.

Questions:1. Does this article surprise you? Or are the results self-evident?2. What are the implications for heart health of sedentary office work?3. What proposed solutions does the article offer to address this potential problem?

E

Low Graduation Rates: It’s Not Just Student-Athletes #110By Andrew J. RotherhamThursday, April 07, 2011From TIME Magazine

Vocabulary to know before you read:mobility begrudge

When the University of Connecticut beat Butler on Monday night to win the NCAA championship, they brought down the curtain on an unusually exciting men's college basketball tournament. But one aspect of the tournament was entirely predictable: The handwringing about the low-graduation rates for many basketball programs. While graduation rates for student athletes are improving, poor outcomes remain a serious problem. In this year's tournament, only 42 of the 68 teams graduated at least 60 percent of their players, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. The winning Connecticut Huskies have a 31 percent graduation rate for basketball players.

The attention to low-graduation rates among some athletic programs should not distract us from the more systemic problem of low graduation rates for college students overall. President Obama has challenged us to "win the future" in part by improving college completion and more students are going to college now than did a few decades ago. Unfortunately only about 57 percent complete a degree within six years. Among those choosing two-year colleges the completion rate is only about 30 percent. Most stunning are gaps in completion by income. In 1972 thirty-eight percent of high-income Americans earned a bachelor's degree by age 24. Now, 82 percent do. Among low-income students, however, that figure was 7 percent in 1972 and it's 8 percent now.

Of course, college is not for everyone and there are plenty of worthy and fulfilling pursuits that do not require a college education. But as research by Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution illustrates, college does remain the most powerful way to increase class

mobility in this country. Overall, low-income students who go to college are very unlikely to remain low-income, while those who don't will struggle mightily to do better than their parents economically.

While college athletic programs have their share of problems, they also offer some ideas about how to improve college completion—especially among those who are the first in their families to attend college. While the low-graduation rates for some basketball and football programs grab headlines, actually student athletes graduate at higher rates than students in general—at the University of Connecticut, athletes have an 83 percent graduation rate. More telling, colleges know how to support athletes in order to keep them academically eligible to play intercollegiate sports for the four years they can under NCAA rules.

How? The stereotype is that athletes just take easy classes, if they show up at all. And while some of that goes on, the more instructive reality is that athletes enjoy a much different level of support than your average student. They often live in special dormitories, eat in special dining halls, have special study centers and tutors, and receive counseling and financial advice to help them navigate college life.

So what happens when colleges start to do some of those things for at-risk students? Not surprisingly you see better results. Middlebury College in Vermont, for instance, pays special attention to at-risk students and bucks the curve. The highly successful Posse Foundation incorporates these ideas in its efforts to help diverse students succeed in college. Trinity College in Washington, D.C., makes helping such students a core part of its mission. Trinity's President Patricia McGuire told me that her school uses what they call “intrusive advising” to ensure that students are not falling through the cracks. Trinity also intensively supports students in the first year and provides not only financial aid, as most schools do, but financial counseling as well. It's not just small schools that can do this—Florida State, for instance, takes steps to help prospective students as early as middle school.

Still, in general students are much more likely to see this kind of support if they happen to excel at one sport or another. Most college presidents, meanwhile, act as though they're powerless to really help at-risk students succeed. They're not. Despite the problems, a look at what is working in athletic programs around the country offers some promising practices that could be used more generally. Don't begrudge athletes for getting extra, they earn it with the time they put in. Let's just give some of the same support to more students who would also benefit from it, even if the closest they come to college sports is a ticket window.

Questions:1. Why do athletes receive more support during college than other students?2. How are some colleges and universities helping at-risk students?3. In the closing of the article, Rotherham states, “Don’t begrudge atheletes for getting extra, they earn it with the time they put in.” Do you think that this is accurate and/or fair? Explain.

M/H

Why Google Isn’t the New Microsoft #111By Harry McCrackenThursday, April 07, 2011From TIME Magazine

Vocabulary to know before you read:complainant lobbyoutfit stridentproprietor repercussionsbehemoth cloutflush scuttlebutt

Last week, the European Commission — which is investigating whether Google's search engine violates European antitrust law — received a formal letter of complaint from an interested party. The complainant charged Google with "a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping anyone else from creating a competitive alternative." It accused the company of hurting consumers by refusing to open up services such as YouTube to other search engines, said that its practices were "disconcerting" and "troubling," and called on European officials to step in and clamp down.

The outfit lobbying the EC wasn't some strident consumer-affairs group. It was Microsoft, the proprietor of Bing, the second-biggest search engine — and a company that knows thing or two about anti-competitive behavior and the legal repercussions thereof.

After all, in 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Microsoft over its bundling

of Internet Explorer with Windows, saying that it gave it an unreasonable advantage over other browser makers such as Netscape. A judge initially ruled that the software behemoth should be split into two companies; it eventually avoided that fate but did agree to operate under restrictions designed to give its rivals a fighting chance.

Seeing Microsoft play the role of 97-pound weakling shows how things have changed since

the nineties, when it was a musclebound terror that kicked sand in the faces of other tech companies at will. But it's far from the only player questioning Google's recent behavior. For example, Google Books suffered a massive setback last month when a federal judge rejected the settlement Google had reached with publishers to permit selling of twelve million scanned e-books as anti-competitive. Three states are reportedly poised to launch antitrust probes. Rumor even has it that the federal government may launch an investigation as soon as it can figure out whether the Justice Department or the FTC should be doing the investigating.

It's true that certain things about Google's position on the Web are reminiscent of the clout Microsoft wielded back when the computing universe revolved around desktop PCs. Google's share of the U.S. search market stands at a daunting 65 percent; most of the rest is taken up by Bing and by Bing-powered results at Yahoo. (In Europe, estimates of Google's share start at 85 percent and go up from there, which may help explain why officials there have a head start on their U.S. counterparts on probing the company.)

A Google that wasn't absurdly flush with cash from search-engine ads couldn't enter new fields willy-nilly — from office suites to next-generation broadband to self-driving cars — without fretting over their immediate profit potential. That's similar to the way that Microsoft's twin cash cows, Windows and Office, have long funded the company's battles on other fronts against less prosperous competitors.

And some of the recent scuttlebutt about Google does involve tactics that sound a tad Microsoftian. Bloomberg Businessweek, for instance, recently reported that the company was obstructing Verizon's plans for phones that run Google's Android operating system but swap out Google's search engine for Bing. If true, that's curious considering that Google reminds the world at every possible opportunity that Android is open-source software that hardware makers can — allegedly — customize as they see fit.

Overall, though, Google's current dominance has little of the reign-of-terror feel I associate with Microsoft's, um, heyday. When I did a self-audit of my Google usage, I found that I use ten of the company's services every day, and another nine multiple times a week. But I use them because I like them. More important, I don't feel trapped. In every instance, multiple solid alternatives from other companies are just a few clicks away. Usually at no charge.

That's nothing like the bad old days of Microsoft's ubermonopoly over PC operating systems, browsers, and office suites. Back then, important applications ran only on Windows, major sites required IE, and the documents that your pals created in Office might or might not open up properly in suites such as WordPerfect and StarOffice. All of that made it tough to opt out of Bill Gates' world even if you preferred not to be part of it.

Again and again, Google has proven that it's not very good at turning its commanding position in search into success elsewhere. It said that a service called Wave was the future of communications; so few people bought that idea that Wave died within months. Buzz, its answer to Twitter, hasn't amounted to much. And for all of Google's might, it's clearly been rattled by the rise of Facebook, a site that already matters at least as much to millions of

people as any search engine.

How things have played out with Microsoft in recent years also gives me hope: Its fading power has had less to do with government intervention than with consumer preferences. When Mozilla came up with a better browser in Firefox, millions of people dumped Internet Explorer. The arrival of Apple's iPhone led to the market for the suddenly-antiquated Windows Mobile collapsing. Similarly, the iPad was an instant blockbuster even though Microsoft had spent a decade failing to convince the masses that Tablet PCs were the computers of the future.

Consumers, in other words, tend to be pretty good at figuring out what's good for consumers. I trust their take on Google and its competitors more than that of any government agency. And the great democratizing power of the Internet puts them in an excellent position to call the shots.

Questions:1. Why is Google being investigated in Europe?2. McCracken compares Google’s current practices to Microsoft’s practices in the nineties. How are the two companies compared, and how is each company portrayed by the author?3. Describe Google’s reputation according to the article’s author. Do you agree with his assessment?