With the Bill of Rights as its starting point, the ACLU is a principled organization that guides us in rationalizing our relationships with each other and with the state. 
Common Dreams has an important article on the new National Resolution for Ending School Pushout. Too many children – students from poor commmunities, students of color – face punitive, zero-tolerance school environments that dramatically increase the likelihood of students dropping out of school.
Robert C. Koehler writes in Common Dreams:
Issue(s): Children's Rights, Criminal Justice ReformOur military, political and cultural thrust reaches every corner of the globe. We’re the world’s only superpower. And we’re feeding our own children — a shocking percentage of them, at any rate — into a sort of Darwinian meat grinder of low expectations, zero tolerance and fend-for-yourself hopelessness.
This is our school system in much of Poverty America: an ill-funded, desperate and deteriorating bureaucracy of bad ideas and entrenched disrespect for everyone — especially those who care. When I was an outside writing consultant, some years ago, at several high schools on the West Side of Chicago, I saw first-hand the us-vs.-them mentality that prevailed, as though the schools were colonial outposts in these low-income neighborhoods, run by an occupying army.
