DCentric

Good morning, DCentric readers, and I hope all of you are thoroughly enjoying D.C. services while you still can. Here are your tasty morning bytes:

Many D.C. agencies would close under federal shutdown, mayor says If it happens, don’t count on having your trash collected, your car inspected or being able to go to the library. Oh, what’s that, you don’t have the luxury of having your own computer with a high-speed connection? Some services that would continue to operate include the school system, emergency medical services, medicaid and food stamps. “[Mayor] Gray sharply lamented the fact that the federal government’s shutdown would affect the District, whose budget is mostly composed of locally raised funds. ‘This is not an abstraction,’ he said. ‘This is a concrete example of what it means to be treated as a second-class citizen.’” (The Washington Post)

7 Shot, 4 Dead After Violent Night in D.C. Really sad news from Northwest, Northeast and Southeast: a string of shootings and stabbings last night leave seven injured and four dead. “Police have not connected the incidents, no arrests have been made and there is very little suspect information.” (NBC4)

It Really Is Better Now For Blacks A reminder: things were really a lot worse 100 years ago than they are now. “… over the past couple of weeks, we have heard some grim takes on the fact that so many black people have moved back to the South over the past 10 years. Walter Russell Mead blogs that the North was unable to provide us a haven, while the University of Pennsylvania’s Thomas Sugrue is unhappy that blacks leaving Detroit are moving to the less tony inner-ring suburbs rather than the opulent ones. To me, what’s significant is that black people can move, period.” (The Root)

Report: Apartment Vacancy Drops Across Country And here in D.C., the vacancy rate is even lower than the national average, and high-end new apartment construction continues. “The Delta report stated that DC-proper vacancy levels for Class A and B apartments were at 3.8 percent at the end of 2010, and that the market was even tighter in submarkets like Columbia Heights/Shaw where vacancy was at 2.8 percent.” (UrbanTurf)

On Teachers Calling Kids “Future Criminals” and the School to Prison Pipeline A thorough look at last week’s story about a New Jersey teacher being put on administrative leave after calling her six-year-old students “future criminals,” including why it’s such a big deal. “Teachers are often unjustly blamed for the failures of an overburdened and underfunded system.  However, let’s not pretend that all students are on a level and equal playing field, or that racism and perception of a student’s background can’t play a role in how we describe, view, or treat these kids.” (Racialicious)

Obama Takes Aim at Inequality in Education Election season is just around the corner, and President Obama has begun reminding potential voters of his priorities. “Describing education and education equality as the ‘civil rights issue of our time,’ President Obama called Wednesday for a renewed effort to eliminate the achievement gap between African-American students and others. ‘Too many of our kids are dropping out of schools,’ Mr. Obama told a mostly black audience in the ballroom of the Sheraton New York Hotel in Manhattan. ‘That’s not a white, black or brown problem. That’s everybody’s problem.’” (The New York Times)