Campaign News

National Catholic Reporter - December 17, 2013, by Megan Fincher - Impoverished immigrants facing deportation in New York City can now have court-appointed counsel on their side for the first time in this nation's history.

Noncitizens of the United States facing deportation -- such as green card holders, refugees, victims of trafficking, and those living in the country illegally -- have no constitutional right to representation. The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, a pilot program funded by a $500,000 investment from the city, is trying to change that.

"New York City has a tradition of welcoming immigrants. Its economics are driven by immigrants. Investing in immigrant families in New York City is our starting point," Brittny Saunders told NCR. Saunders is a senior staff attorney for immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group working with the Family Unity project.

For the next year, the project will provide pro bono legal services to an estimated 20 percent of indigent noncitizens facing deportation at the Varick Street Immigration Court in New York City, according to Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan, nonprofit center for justice policy and practice.

"The current state of affairs is creating real harm, really devastating immigrant families in New York City," Saunders explained.

Paula Shulman, second-year law student at Cardozo School of Law, agrees: "The New York Immigrant Family Unity Project is very aptly named. Detentions and deportations tear families apart every day."

The idea to create the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project came out of the 2010 New York Immigrant Representation Study, initiated by Judge Robert Katzmann of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The study examined trends in New York City immigration courts from 2000 to 2010. During that decade, 60 percent of detained immigrants in New York City were without counsel, and subsequently, only 3 percent of that group won their case. In comparison, immigrants who were represented and released from detention or never detained experienced a 74 percent success rate.

With the support of legal nonprofits, research groups, and ultimately the city itself, the study went "from an academic model to a living, breathing program" via the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project Nov. 6, Saunders said.

"For the first time ever, anywhere in this country and our legal system, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who would otherwise be unable to afford an attorney have access to attorneys who can present the legal issues and handle them expeditiously," Shulman, who works at Cardozo's Immigration Justice Clinic, wrote to NCR in an email.

Saunders explained that immigrant families are often "mixed status," meaning citizens, permanent legal residents and undocumented persons can make up a single family.

"One study from 2005-2010 showed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested parents of 13,500 children in New York City alone," Saunders said. "More than half of those children lost at least one parent to a final order of deportation."

But what happens when primary caregivers are sentenced to deportation whose children are U.S. citizens? "If there's no other caregiver in place, children are thrust into the foster care system," Saunders said.

Shulman explained that the project is also fighting unnecessary detentions "because it can be the family breadwinner or the single mom who is held in a facility, unable to see his or her loved ones, let alone support or provide for his or her family."

Immigration detention is unlike criminal detention, because it is not "based on risk of danger to the community," and determining who gets sent to immigration detention and what bond is set is "haphazard and divorced from clear risk assessment," Shulman said.

"One of the many goals of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project is to reduce detention time for individuals eligible for release so they can return to their families, their jobs, and their communities."

Saunders noted that in its first weeks, the project is "not just creating benefits for individuals who receive counsel, but it's also creating real benefits for the courts and the systems themselves. It's been really impressively seamless."

"We see what is happening in New York as the beginning of a change that could happen all across the country," Shulman said. "We support and anticipate replication of the model and the pilot. In fact, we have already received inquiries from five other states."

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This year was supposed to be a good one for America’s workers. After all, nearly 12 million workers won higher wages in 2016, the result of sustained and coordinated efforts around the country. There’s a catch though: if these wages aren’t enforced, American workers will never even see them.

And despite widespread support, state and local lawmakers and business communities have already begun threatening to not comply with the wage hikes. In Maine, Governor Paul LePage ordered his administration to stop enforcing a minimum wage hike that 60 percent of his state’s residents voted for, telling employers who violate the law that they would be off the hook.

At the other end of the country in Flagstaff, Arizona, 54 percent of city residents backed a $15 minimum wage in elections last year, but business groups are fighting to move enforcement from a local authority to a state commission, which would likely delay the processing of claims. The state as a whole has backed higher wages, approving a proposition to raise the state’s minimum to $12 by 2020 last year.

In the face of such attacks at the city and state level, it’s imperative to have a federal Labor Department committed to ensuring that workers aren’t cheated out of their wages - wages not only earned through hard work but also guaranteed by law.

This won’t be the case if Andy Puzder becomes Labor Secretary. As chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, Puzder consistently flouted basic labor standards.

Puzder, whose confirmation hearing has already been put off multiple times, could easily fail to enforce the wage increases that prevailed in referendums throughout the country, and he’s likely to put even the existing protections we have in jeopardy - including the minimum wage, which currently stands at a paltry $7.25.

It’s the proverbial fox guarding the hen house, a term that we seem to be asserting with every cabinet appointee, but that rings even more true with Puzder.

Just last week, CKE Restaurants was hit with nearly two dozen charges of stealing wages. Multiple workers said they had worked for weeks without seeing a paycheck. One was only paid after he stopped coming to work in protest.

CKE has also come under fire for paying employees with pre-paid debit cards that incur fees on certain ATMs, in effect shorting employees their full paycheck.

If Puzder runs the Labor Department like he runs his company, these kinds of abuses will be allowed to flourish nationwide – and workers will lose one of their most important outlets for addressing their concerns.

For working Americans, it could be a disaster of epic proportions

And CKE is far from the only chain that regularly skirts labor laws. In fact, wage theft runs rampant across the restaurant industry, as well as retail and other low-paying service jobs. A National Employment Law Project study found that more than two-thirds of low-wage workers in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles had experienced wage theft in the previous workweek. The Economic Policy Institute in 2014 calculated that wage theft cost Americans as much as $50 billion every year

Some states, realizing the scope of the problem, have taken steps to improve oversight in recent years. In New York, 2010 workers won the strongest protections against wage theft in the country. After passage of a significantly higher minimum wage last year, Governor Cuomo followed up with a 200-person task force to ensure wages are being paid.

Yet state action can only do so much. The Department of Labor sets standards for wage enforcement around the country and is the front-line agency for filing many wage theft cases. A 2009 Government Accountability Office report found that weak oversight during the Bush years had left thousands of workers stranded with nowhere to turn.

We have made too much progress to turn back now. Taking the teeth out of oversight hurts workers and hurts the overall economy. Members of Congress need to make clear that Puzder’s persistent record of wage theft disqualifies him from the job of Labor Secretary – and, if Puzder is confirmed, states must show that they are willing to stand up for workers on their own.

By JoEllen Chernow

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More than 60 organizations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have released a series of demands on Monday, including for reparations.

The list of six platform demands is aimed at furthering their goals as the presidential campaign heads into the homestretch.

The release of the six demands comes a few days before the second anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which set off months of protests and led to a national conversation about police killings of blacks.

As part of the effort, the groups are demanding, among other things, reparations for what they say are past and continuing harms to African-Americans, an end to the death penalty, legislation to acknowledge the effects of slavery, as well as investments in education initiatives, mental health services and jobs programs.

“We wanted to intervene in this current political moment where there is all this amazing and inspiring work that is resisting state violence and corporate power,” said M. Adams, co-executive director of Freedom Inc., a nonprofit group based in Madison, Wis., which focuses on violence within and against low-income communities of color.

The list comes right after the Republicans and Democrats held their respective national conventions, and as the general election fight is heating up, with the two nominees, Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton, now crisscrossing the nation campaigning. But the coalition will not be endorsing any presidential candidate.

Marbre Stahly-Butts, who is part of the leadership team of the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, which worked on the demands, said: “On both sides of aisle, the candidates have really failed to address the demands and the concerns of our people. So this was less about this specific political moment and this election, and more about how do we actually start to plant and cultivate the seeds of transformation of this country that go beyond individual candidates.”

The groups worked on creating the demands for a year before making their demands known on Monday. They now plan to start local campaigns aimed at pushing for changes in law enforcement and community programs in cities across the country.

“We seek radical transformation, not reactionary reform,” Michaela Brown, communications director of Baltimore Bloc, another participating group, said in a statement. “As the 2016 election continues, this platform provides us with a way to intervene with an agenda that resists state and corporate power, an opportunity to implement policies that truly value the safety and humanity of black lives, and an overall means to hold elected leaders accountable.”

By YAMICHE ALCINDOR

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The Washington Post - October 5, 2014, by Valerie Strauss - Charter school advocates didn’t like it recently when Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform issued a report calling for the strengthening of charter oversight and authorization. While noting that many charters work hard to “meet the needs of their students,” the report said that “the lack of effective oversight means too many cases of fraud and abuse, too little attention to equity, and no guarantee of academic innovation or excellence.” It provided some common-sense recommendations, including an innocuous call for the establishment of minimum qualifications for charter school treasurers. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, not surprisingly, bashed the report.

Meanwhile, a new report was just issued by three groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and ACTION United — that found major fraud and mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s charter schools. It found:

Charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania school children since 1997. Yet every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. While the state has complex, multi-layered systems of oversight of the charter system, this history of financial fraud makes it clear that these systems are not effectively detecting or preventing fraud. Indeed, the vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media exposés, not by the state’s oversight agencies.

The great New York Times writer Michael Powell recently wrote a column detailing what can go wrong with a charter school when there is little or no oversight; in this case, he explores the sickening mess surrounding Prime Time Prep in Texas, created by Deion Sanders, a Hall of Fame cornerback and National Football League commentator.

Yes, there are many fine charter schools. But seriously bad news about many others keeps coming, and concerns are rising as the number of charters overall is increasing. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says that in 2013-2014, 2.57 million students were enrolled in more than 6,000 public charter schools nationwide, with nearly 2,000 new charter schools opening in the past five years.

Here’s a piece about what’s going on in the charter world by Jeff Bryant, who is the director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He owns a marketing and communications consultancy in Chapel Hill, N.C., and has written extensively about public education policy. A version of this appeared in Salon.

By Jeff Bryant

When former President Bill Clinton recently meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”

A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance. But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.

In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.

But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.

Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for many students, their families, and their communities.

Charter Schools As Takeover Operations

The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.

After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions.”

In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.

Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of students in the New Orleans Recovery all-charter Recovery District is obtainable only by “jukin the stats” or, as the NPR reporter put it, through “a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice.” As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek a year ago, “the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.”

Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. Education Secretary Arne Duncan once even said that he thinks “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina” because it wrecked the previous low-functioning school system and brought about the rise of charter schools in the Recovery District. So some school districts that have not had a Katrina are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.

School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).

The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.

The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.

The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.

None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s bets for our kids.”

What’s important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures academically, as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going by the name Jersey Jazzman stated on his personal blog. Looking at how the districts’ students perform on state assessments, he found that academic performance levels were “pretty much where you’d expect them to be” based on the fact that “most of York’s schools have student populations where 80 percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage,” and variations in student test score performance almost always correlate strongly with students’ financial conditions.  He concluded that what was happening to York schools more represents a “long con” in which tax cuts and claims of “budgetary poverty” have prompted a rapacious state government to “declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures … pick at the bones of a decimated school system.”

The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in Dialogue, “It’s the same story that played out in Detroit, Flint, and Philadelphia where these ‘chief recovery officers’ or ‘emergency managers’ have all made the same recommendation: to hand over the cities’ public schools to the highest private bidder.”

Then, hiding behind pledges to do “what’s best for kids,” these operators too often do anything but.

Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues

York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their state have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since 1997.

The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was released by three groups, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.

Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors –just in Pennsylvania – include an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.

What’s even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents, every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.

Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation.

The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year that exposed $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud, waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate how charter school fraud is spreading.

What’s happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter operators being considered for that takeover – Mosaica Education, Inc., and Charter Schools USA – have particularly troubling track records.

According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, “complications soon followed.” After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit, and when Mosaica realized they weren’t making a profit within two years, they pulled up stakes and went in search of other targets.

As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report from the Florida League of Women Voters produced earlier this year found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a construction company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every year.

In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch, Charter USA’s construction company bought a former Verizon call center for $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the front door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.

No wonder York citizens are concerned.

What Happened To Charter School Accountability?

Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more “accountable” to the public are turning out to be anything but.

As an article for The Nation recently observed, “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque.”

The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.”

Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources.

In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.”

This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label.

If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what’s required, Noguera concluded is “greater transparency and collaboration with public schools.”

Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.

This report, “Public Accountability for Charter Schools,” published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, “recommends changes to state charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to the communities served,” according to the organization’s press release.

According to the report, these recommendations are the product of “a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders” from Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and other cities, who have “first-hand experience and years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to assess impact.”

These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.

For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of Open Records in Pennsylvania, “testified that her office had received 239 appeals in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters.” In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management Company, “takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually … yet has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own schools for detailed financial reports.” In Philadelphia, the report authors found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available “only one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf club in the Philadelphia suburbs.” In New York City, where charter schools are co-located in public school buildings, “public school parents have complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours, and earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the co-located charter school.” The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, which documented public school classrooms “with peeling paint and insufficient resources” made to co-locate with charters that have “new computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks.”

The Annenberg report’s policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of “standards:”

Traditional school districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure a coordinated approach that serves all children.

School governance should be representative and transparent.

Charter schools should ensure equal access to interested students and prohibit practices that discourage enrollment or disproportionately push-out enrolled students.

Charter school discipline policy should be fair and transparent.

All students deserve equitable and adequate school facilities. Districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure facility arrangements do not disadvantage students in either sector.

Online charter schools should be better regulated for quality, transparency and the protection of student data.

Monitoring and oversight of charter schools are critical to protect the public interest; they should be strong and fully state funded.

Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That organization’s response cites “remarkable results” as an excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry loves to crow about, the facts are those results really aren’t there.

Charter Accountability Now

Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out of the corners of the “black box” the industry uses to protect itself, the charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality.

Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on a publicity terror with a national campaign claiming to tell “The Truth About Charters” and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia and New York City.

But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.

There’s little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw deal. The deal is off.

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