Updated Aug. 3; see previous 74 interviews, including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan and U.S. Senator and education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander.

Sen. Tom Harkin, the liberal stalwart who represented Iowa in the House and Senate for a combined 40 years, came to a sad if predictable conclusion during his congressional career: Education is not a priority in America.

And that lack of focus has real consequences, he said, with the quality of a child’s education boiling down to the luck of which family he happens to be born into.

“Is that sort of a national statement of ours?” he asked rhetorically in an interview with 蜜桃影视. “Is that what people want to campaign on? Is that what a president wants to stand for?”

Harkin served on the funding and bill-writing committees covering education for nearly his entire career in the Senate, serving as chairman of both. Under Harkin’s tenure at the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Congress passed long-overdue reauthorizations of bills governing federal child care subsidies and workforce training programs, and his committee released a blockbuster report on .

The HELP Committee under his leadership twice approved , but Harkin couldn’t get floor time to consider the bills in the full Senate. Unlike the Every Student Succeeds Act, Harkin’s proposals kept large parts of the NCLB federal accountability apparatus in place.

Harkin — compelled by the experiences of his late brother Frank, who was deaf — has long focused on issues surrounding disability. He wrote several smaller bills aimed at expanding the rights of students and others with disabilities and was the author of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.

In the year and a half since his retirement from Congress, his main project has been organizing the inaugural . The conference, Dec. 8 and 9 in Washington, D.C., will bring together disability advocates, educators, employers and others to discuss how to better provide productive, dignified work to people with disabilities.
 

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

蜜桃影视: What do you think of the Every Student Succeeds Act?

Harkin: Overall, I give it a positive. I have concerns that, in fact, we are going back to where we were before and leaving it up to states and local education agencies to sort of self-correct and to make sure that students who have been underserved in the past are adequately served with qualified teachers and that they are included in all aspects of educational opportunities. That was the good thing about No Child Left Behind.
 

I was involved in No Child Left Behind, and I remember being at the White House … when [President] George Bush was there and we had agreed, basically I thought, agreed upon a funding stream for No Child Left Behind … The idea was there was going to be a funding stream for No Child Left Behind. That never materialized. We kept falling further and further behind. The hammer on No Child Left Behind stayed there, but the states and local education agencies were not given the resources … The Bush Administration reneged on the funding. We got wrapped up in the war and all that kind of stuff. We just never could get adequate funding for No Child Left Behind. A lot of people say NCLB was a failure. Well, it was a failure because we never funded it, adequately enough, more than anything else. 

The good thing, the really good thing about No Child Left Behind was that every subgroup had to be distinguished and subgroups have to be identified, and [there was] accountability for every subgroup. What we found was, even with the funding restrictions in No Child Left Behind, kids with disabilities were being included more and more, as a subgroup, and schools were held accountable. We found that the graduation rate … between 2002 and 2013, the national high school graduation rate increased from 47 percent to 62 percent for kids with disabilities. Now by God, that’s something that I like …

The good thing about this new bill, and I credit Sen. (Patty) Murray for doing this, is that it keeps this subgroup accountability. Therefore parents and communities are able to tell how well students are doing, especially students with disabilities and students living in poverty. To me, that was just essential and something that I insisted on in our bill when we passed it a couple years ago. You know we passed it out of our committee twice, but I could never get it on the floor … (I wanted) to go to the floor, but I wanted to see the House come up with a bipartisan bill like we did. I got Republican votes, even though some of them said they might want to try to amend it on the floor, I said, ‘That’s fine, that’s part of the process.’ But the House insisted on having a purely partisan bill. And therefore we never got to the floor. I credit Sen. (Lamar) Alexander and Sen. Murray for getting that done this year.

I am concerned, as I said, I’m concerned about LEAs (local education authorities, i.e. districts and school boards) now going back to where we were before, that there’s so much flexibility in there on how states determine how to intervene. We can identify the subgroups, but how are they going to intervene on this? And how’s the funding going to come to make sure that students with disabilities and others, high-need students, have the adequate resources, in order to succeed in (post)-secondary education? That’s my biggest concern.

Was your concern about funding about Title I or some separate NCLB-specific program?
 

There needs to be more Title I funding, and the Title I funding needs to be directed …

We had a problem with Title I money in the past and how it was distributed, and we changed it so it focused more Title I money on schools that were underperforming in high-poverty areas, for example … I’m just hopeful that this new law doesn’t backtrack on that. I’m afraid it might, in terms of the quote, flexibility, that states are given. And states are just as tight with their money in education as the federal government.

May I make a statement right up front here? It had become clear to me after 30 years on the Senate education committee … that education is simply not a priority in the United States of America, and it is not a priority in our states. It’s just not. It comes after everything else. It comes after you get your budgets for everything else, then you think about education. It is not a priority. People think it is, they say it is, but it’s simply not.

You look at Title I money and the money that the states are putting in, and a lot of times that money is skewed away from what it’s intended to do. And that’s what concerns me about this, quote, flexibility …

Local school boards have discriminated against poor kids and kids with disabilities for years, for decades. It was the well-placed schools that seemed to get all the money and all the resources. We tried to change that with Title I.

As you know, in America, our system of funding for elementary and secondary education is based on property taxes … Why is it that the quality of any American child’s education be determined by where that child lives? Why? I’ve been talking about this for years. If you’re lucky enough to be born to a wealthy or even an upper-middle income family and live in a great area, you’ve got a great school. If you’re unlucky enough to be born to a poor parent or a single parent and you’re in the inner city or a low-income rural area in Appalachia, well, you simply don’t have good schools. Is that sort of a national statement of ours? Is that what people want to campaign on? Is that what a president wants to stand for? …

Well, if you don’t, then you can’t just leave it up to local education agencies and local governments in states to fill that in, because this is based on property taxes. Some states do have equalization formulas in their budgets … but it never quite gets to the point of really thorough support and quite frankly, and here I’m going off a little bit, it’s not just a matter of equalization at this point. Some poor areas and some students in those areas, in rural areas, inner cities, need more aid. They need even more resources, i.e. money, to hire better teachers and have better schools and better equipment and better technology in order to move them up …  

It’s not just a matter of saying it. I read recently some state said they were going to make sure, I think it was New Jersey, that every student in the state gets the same … and they say well that’s fair. No it’s not fair. And so that’s why I’m coming full circle on this bill …

We’re going back to that old system, we’re going to leave it to the states and local communities, to make these decisions. We were there before and we saw what it got us. The one good thing about this bill is we still have accountability for the subgroups, they’ve got to be identified in how well they’re doing, and to me that is that bright spot in that piece of legislation.

There was something else in that bill that Patty Murray got, and that was early child education, it encourages states and LEAs to use Title I for early childhood programming. As long as that money is really targeted towards the low-income families and kids in poor areas, that could be a great boost, as long as that money’s not diluted in the way it has been in the past.

Would it be safe to assume you support the department’s proposed Title I funding regulations?

Without a doubt. Yes, of course. Again, I think I’m hearing from the other side ‘the national school board,’ here we go, trying to impose. No. We’re trying to solve a problem that’s been there for a long time and which we tried to solve with No Child Left Behind, and that was to redirect resources to areas that need it the most … Everything I’ve heard and read, this is the proper way to go, yes.

We’re overdue for a reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. What are you looking for the next time that comes up?

… Basically I can’t even call up a friend of mine, a senator that I know, to say here’s how I feel, here’s what I think, even though I’m not representing a company.  prohibit members of Congress from lobbying their former colleagues for two years after leaving office.] It’s really quite strict. I haven’t been able to do that, but in January I will be.

I hope that by next year we’ll see some movement on a reauthorization of IDEA. … Basically what needs to be done is more inclusion of kids with disabilities in mainstream education. I want the IDEA also to take what we did in the WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) bill (requiring states to set aside 15 percent of a certain pot of money to help students with disabilities transition into the workforce) …

I want to see IDEA also incorporate that into the new bill, not something separate and apart, but being part of IDEA. Just again, more inclusion, more accountability, more focus on assistance and support services for teachers in school …

You  very early in the primary. Why?

I’ve known her for so long. I served with her on the education committee in the Senate, and I just know how well she works with others. She listens and absorbs things and can find common ground, and I think we sorely need that in the future. I agree with President Obama that she’s better prepared to be president than anyone in the last 100 years … That’s why I supported her.

And, of course, she’s long been a supporter of early childhood education, also one of your priorities.

… Back in the late ‘80s, first under Reagan and Bush there was this committee … This board was made up of all these big, high CEOs of all these companies. It started because President Reagan said he wanted to have a group of business people look at education in America and what we needed to do … He didn’t want a lot of pointy-headed liberals and people like that, he wanted business people who were successful to tell us what we needed to do in education …

After three or four years of hearings and examining education, their executive summary stated that we must understand that education begins at birth and the preparation for education begins before birth. The whole little book they put out was on how we have to focus on early childhood education, how we have to focus on maternal and child health care … and that was 1990.

I’ve been waving that book ever since. I think six years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned another study … And guess what, here it is almost 20 years later, they said the same thing. Here’s the business community of America saying we’ve got to put more money into early childhood education. The business community, they get that, but we’ve never been able to get it through the thick heads of policymakers and governors …

We’ve got to put a lot more into early childhood education. I’ll lay you a bottom line, there won’t be an extra nickel for it. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? They’ll say you should do all this stuff but no one wants to pay for it because education simply is not a priority.

There hasn’t been a lot of discussion of K-12 education during this presidential campaign. To what do you attribute that? 

Education simply is not a priority among the people of America, and not a priority among the leadership of America, I mean political leadership. It’s just not. You give a lot of verbiage to it … and then we get down into battles … (and) you lose the big picture of how much money are we actually putting into education and what kind of priority do we make it so that our teachers are the best.

You go to Scandinavian countries, like I have, and to actually get into college and to get into a teacher prep … you have to graduate from high school at the top of your class. You can’t just have a C average. They won’t let you in to become a teacher. This country, hey, you’ve got a D average, they’ll let you in. Why don’t we start moving in that direction? If you are an A student, we’re going to pay for your college, you can become a teacher … we pay for everything and then we give them higher pay.

If you pay teachers the same equivalent that we’re paying people to write programs for computers and if you set qualifications high for teachers and make sure that they have a respectful place in our community. I grew up in a small town, 150 people, in Cumming, Iowa … I remember at an early age, Mary Powers and Mae Lynch, they were sort of the people we looked up to, they were the teachers, the people you want to emulate. They were highly respected as part of our community.

Why aren’t the candidates for president talking about it? Because it’s not a priority.

There’s a split in the Democratic party on education, between education reformers and teachers unions. Is that a new phenomenon?

It’s new in that teachers unions have become more prominent in the last 20 years I guess you’d say. I understand the teachers unions. I understand why a lot of them feel besieged … We’re asking teachers to do things in schools that we’ve never asked them to do before and that is to solve the problems that kids bring to school …

We know, we have the data, we know that the best teaching environment in say elementary school in early grades is like one teacher for a maximum, I think it’s 15 maybe or 12 (students). Heck, I’ve been to elementary schools where you get one teacher for 20, 25 kids. I understand the unions are trying to protect these teachers who are put upon to do a better job and they’re not given the resources to do that. I understand that dynamic.

It all comes back to how we’re going to fund education and whether or not we’re going to change the structure of a classroom. To me, no child in elementary school, at least in the first six grades, ought to be in a class of more than maybe even a dozen students. Period …

I’m very respectful of teachers unions, I can understand why they get so frustrated, and I can understand why there’s a clash between, say, local governments or state governments on a lot of issues …

Is it a problem for Democrats going forward? No. I think as a progressive, as a liberal, I say define the problem. We’ve defined the problem. We know classes are overcrowded. We know the best learning environment is a few kids in a classroom … OK, let’s do it. Well, that costs money and especially if you’re going to do it for low-income kids. Well, nobody wants to spend the money to do it.

Who would you recommend be appointed the next secretary of education, either a specific individual or a type of person?

I wouldn’t say a person, but I would say someone who is bold enough to really take to the American people what needs to be done and what the cost is and why we need to do it and maybe even work collaboratively, of course, with the president and with Congress to find the sort of funding streams that are needed to do this.

This is not some dark magic. We’ve got plenty of data, we know what needs to be done. I know there are those that still say the federal government shouldn’t do it, it should be the state and local governments. To a certain extent I don’t have a problem with that, so long as there is an overriding federal course of intervention for states and local communities that can’t do it or won’t do it, that drag their feet.

School boards tend to be very powerful and more often than not they’re made up of people that come from well-heeled families. Single mothers and others who are working day and night don’t generally run for school board. We need some oversight to make sure we’re not skewing the money away from low-income, high-need areas. We need a secretary of education that will do some new bold thinking and throw some things out there for people to think about …

We have in this country, a long time ago, way back, Abraham Lincoln’s time, even before, we decided that the federal government was going to be involved in higher ed (through land-grant universities.)

It wasn’t until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that the federal government ever said elementary and secondary education is a national concern. Think about that, 200 years later we finally said, this is a national concern. So it’s only been in the last 40 years that we’ve dribbled along, looking at elementary and secondary education as a national concern.

I think we need now one more step, we need a secretary of education and a president who will say, OK, we went from higher ed as a national concern, and then we said elementary and secondary education is a national concern, now early childhood should be a national concern and focus on that.

That’s what I want to see in a secretary of education, someone who will just keep harping on a national priority. If you think education is a priority, you’re mistaken, and how do we make this a national propriety for state governments, local governments and the federal government. ]]> /article/74-interview-sen-tom-harkin-on-endorsing-clinton-early-and-why-hes-wary-of-essa/feed/ 0 /article/what-philadelphias-schools-chief-hopes-to-hear-from-the-visiting-democrats-on-education/ /article/what-philadelphias-schools-chief-hopes-to-hear-from-the-visiting-democrats-on-education/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

This originally appeared as part of 蜜桃影视’s Democratic National Convention Live Blog, which was produced in partnership with . See our full DNC archive.

Philadelphia School Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. wants Hillary Clinton to tell Democrats to check their heads. To say to the country, in her speech accepting the party’s nomination on Thursday, that low expectations are a tragedy we can’t afford. It’s what he tells people everyday.

And given the fractures in America’s body politic this year, given the success of a presidential campaign that intoxicates voters on the idea of lost hopes, that makes disappointment a badge of honor, his concern seems sensible — if vague and better aimed at the other party’s divisive leader.

But Hite, who recently completed his fourth year as superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, has children in mind. Poor children, in a city where 90 percent of the 130,000 district school students qualified for lunch assistance before the district began giving all children free lunch two years ago. (Full disclosure: I once worked for the district)

Philadelphia may surprise visiting delegates who don’t know it, or know it only from the movies. The gritty, working-class streets that Rocky Balboa memorialized in dirty sweats and black Chuck Taylors four decades ago are mostly gone. Center City, the downtown, is prosperous and energized; the jewel-like Old City, townhouse-lined squares that look like postcards turned real, and industrial and hardscrabble areas lately gentrified and culture-infused — all witness the city’s 21st-century renaissance.

The convention’s guidebooks sends Democrats to “5 Great Philly Coffee Spots,” on tours around the National Constitution Center and Liberty Bell and the city’s many museums, and recommends three “most instagramable spots (sic).”

None of these will take visitors near the north and west precincts where the city’s very large poor population lives. Philadelphia remains the poorest of the nation’s ten largest cities. was $34,207, nearly one-third less than the national figure of $50,502. Even as Democrat rally around a vision for a better future this week, there are no easy answers for the nearly 40 percent of Philadelphia children who are poor, or the roughly 12 percent of residents who are deeply poor — families of three earning $10,000 or less. About 60,000 Philadelphia children live in deeply poor families.

Hite adheres to the reform precept that a student who doesn’t thrive has been failed by her school. He comes by the idea honestly: after a football career at Virginia Tech, he became a teacher, then principal, and quickly rose up the education ladder, landing in Prince George’s County, Maryland, first as deputy to reformist district head (and later Los Angeles schools chief) John Deasy, then succeeding Deasy as the top man.

Like Deasy, he attended the Broad Academy, a kind of West Point for education reform executives, but when he arrived in Philadelphia, summer 2012, to a massive budget crisis — precipitated as in other struggling districts by years of state funding cuts and gross inequities, charter growth, benefit costs, and years of fiscal mismanagement in the district — keeping school system open trumped policy.

Dozens of school closures, along with layoffs and austere budgets (Northeast High School had an extracurricular budget of $14,000, about $5 per student for the school year), have kept the district pulse beating, but Philadelphia remains riven by conflicts between charter proponents who want much faster growth and a community of educators and electeds that believes charters are yanking dollars from the poorest students’ hands (the state’s charter funding law punishes the district). “I would never advocate for one sector over the other when that sector cannot respond to the needs of all children,” .

The district’s budget and charter difficulties are exacerbated by perennially unfriendly state Republicans, while its unilateral efforts to reduce health costs in the teachers contract has alienated labor supporters in one of the nation’s strongest union towns. And the consequences and debate about the state’s 2001 takeover of the District — Hite reports to a joint state/city board — continue to grow, 15 years later.

Attacked on the right and left, though almost universally liked — his hail-fellow-well-met manner and probity, and a courtliness that manifests in part in a seemingly endless closet of well turned-out suits and shirts — Hite has become a new type of school leader: the non-ideological radical, urgent, open to any solution that works, doubtful about real progress without a national change in culture.

He spoke with 蜜桃影视 last week from his office in Philadelphia.

蜜桃影视: Why do you think there’s been almost no mention of education in the campaign?

Superintendent Hite: I’ve actually been talking about the absence of education conversation… Everyone watching what has actually happened over the last eight years maybe see it as too complex, too hard, and filled with political strife. I think that’s why you only hear the more general things that people think about as reform, like charter schools and choice. People feel like that’s the only safe place to be.

Although Hillary was booed when she mentioned charters to the National Education Association.

You’re right. What’s missing in this whole conversation is quality: how do we create high-quality schools irrespective of sector. And I do think the whole notion of choice and charters as the only solution [reflects], or speaks to, the type of disillusionment that we’re seeing with banks, Wall Street, government. You think of school districts — they think of bureaucracies.

It feels like the desire not to deal with complex things complexly has seeped into education more than it had five or ten years ago. Donald Trump shows everyday that a lot of people don’t want to think about actual solutions to life problems; they want magical thinking. Do you see that in the schools?

More people see that the work is hard. Charters that have begun taking on some of the most challenging areas in the city and more challenging and more at-risk populations — they’re either not meeting the academic outcomes that they agreed to or they’re handing them back to us. Young Scholars has handed back two charters to us. We have made recommendations to non-renew four other ones… So we made a recommendation [to close] four and two others have handed it back over. And then we approved still a third for this year and the people said we can’t do it, we don’t have the capacity to do this. So people are recognizing that this work is hard and this work is complex and challenging and it doesn’t happen overnight. And has not been happening overnight with even a charter.

Philadelphia, like almost every big city in the country, has been killed over the last few years in terms of funding. Do you have thoughts about how the country can fund public schools more effectively?

We’re still 800 million dollars down from where we would be if in fact there weren’t state cuts in funding for four years [ former Governor Tom Corbett cut school budget for four consecutive years]. And so even with additional revenue we’re still down 800 million dollars. If you think about revenues, you have to think two ways on this. One, the monies that are available for us to educate children — the revenues are always going to be a challenge because these costs are escalating, and the costs of running schools are escalating And then we have think just as they’re thinking at the national level with respect to all the federal monies that have some pretty stringent requirements associated with them — provide some flexibility for use of that money differently.

I still say we have to make the same investments in education around research that we do with the military or with medicine, and we don’t do that. We try a lot of stuff, the stuff doesn’t work, and then we cycle back through it a decade later adding a new wrinkle without the level of research. We need an NIH for education. I think that the department (of education) or the federal government should think about what is working and take a more empirical look at the data associated with it.

The other thing is, there has to be dedicated revenues streams for this stuff. Education has always been a target, and just as costs escalate to do everything else costs have escalated in education. I’m not just suggesting that we all need air conditioned climates, because school districts have to rethink how we do our work as well. How to pay labor, pensions, benefits, all of those institutional structures that cause costs to increase are very problematic for districts and those are fixed costs that have to get off the table first.

There’s some kind of disconnect between what people say they believe and the way political priorities have been constructed.

I’ll add a point to that. I’m not so sure if it’s a disconnect or the intent to dismantle. You could dismantle structures or systems in multiple ways. One is attacking them like a frontal attack. Another is creating a structure that disperses resources to multiple places and then systems are left to figure out how they’ll manage their legacy costs (costs of programs initiated by previous administrations).

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi calls and want to bring a group of congressional leaders to see two Philadelphia schools in action. Which would you choose and why?

I would take them to a school that has looked at itself, said we’re not working for children, and redesigned itself. I would take them to a PA school [Promise Academy, a district turnaround model] in North Philadelphia that has redesigned itself. It remains a school district school. They are seeing outcomes now that are very different.  

That’s for K-8. And then I would take them to an inquiry-based school that’s open to all children… the Workshop School. I would take them to the Workshop School because I’m pretty sure they would be amazed at the problems that children are working to solve. Or create solutions for. And the type of children that they serve.

They’re not a special admit (magnet). They take on all children, any children that are interested in that kind of school, and the children are doing incredible stuff.

For years schools didn’t do inquiry with poor kids because educators thought poor kids couldn’t do it, and it turns out that’s totally wrong.

Right.

If you could insert an idea into Hillary Clinton’s speech on Thursday, what would you have her say?

If I had to insert something into her speech I would say: here in Philadelphia, just like every other place in the country, children need high-quality, great schools close to where they live, irrespective of zip code, irrespective of income, irrespective of nationality, or gender identification, they need high-quality options close to where they live.

How could she help make that happen? What are your biggest needs: teacher training, classrooms resources, community engagement?

We need a mindset change. We need a mindset change around the ability of all children to achieve at high levels. We need everyone to have the belief in all children… We need that. We need sustaining corporate revenue because we need to insure that we can support the investments we’re making in schools this year five years from now. So that it’s not this thing of investing and then subtracting and then every three years you have to insert trauma into the equation because you’re laying off people, closing stuff, reducing stuff, eliminating stuff. Recurring sources of revenue become extremely important for us to continue our investment to provide school districts with what they need. ]]> /article/what-philadelphias-schools-chief-hopes-to-hear-from-the-visiting-democrats-on-education/feed/ 0 /article/dissent-in-the-ranks-aft-rushes-to-endorse-hillary-clinton-then-endures-online-backlash/ Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000 The American Federation for Teachers came out swinging on behalf of Hillary Clinton on Saturday, with a for the Democratic presidential nomination that hailed Clinton as a 鈥渢ested leader who shares our values, is supported by our members, and is prepared for a tough fight on behalf of students, families and communities.鈥� She鈥檚 a Senator who 鈥渇ought for education funding and workers’ rights and defended public service workers who came to our nation’s defense on Sept. 11鈥�, the AFT said, and a public school alum who 鈥渂elieves in the promise of public education.鈥� (Read )

Here鈥檚 the memo from our pollster鈥擧art Research, one of top firms in US鈥攐n their findings of our member poll

鈥� Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

But the AFT鈥檚 online following was not completely satisfied. Consider these comments from its Facebook page, slamming the endorsement:

Similarly, a stream of frustrated reactions from educators started circulating on Twitter:

. Hillary needs to say where she stands on testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, charters & Common Core.

鈥� Carol Burris (@carolburris)

Hillary Clinton lost my support when she said “helps you organize your whole education system”

鈥� Anthony Cody (@AnthonyCody)

Did Hillary give a specific education platform? What is her position on testing, evals, charters, CC?

鈥� Chris Cerrone (@Stoptesting15)

Shame on AFT. If you support anybody, it should be

鈥� Tim Farley (@tfarley1969)

“Long campaigns allows us to fully vet candidates, consider all options, engage allies & opponents…oh, whatever!”

鈥� Andy Smarick (@smarick)

Exactly who did the poll before endorsing Hillary? The Kardashians?

鈥� lacetothetop (@lacetothetop)

Don’t hold your breath. That obviously wasn’t a prerequisite.Another AFT backstab.

鈥� Elizabeth Lynch (@AJMGrandma)

. can stand with . I鈥檓 standing with the kids.

鈥� Jeb Bush (@JebBush)

Meanwhile, on , here’s a Monday morning shapshot of where the petition stands: 

Photo: Change.org screenshot

Hillary Clinton photo by Getty Images