Campaign News

Truthout - March 2, 2015, by Dean Baker - There is an enormous amount of political debate over various pieces of legislation that are supposed to be massive job killers. For example, Republicans lambasted President Obama’s increase in taxes on the wealthy back in 2013 as a job killer. They endlessly have condemned the Affordable Care Act as a jobs killer. The same is true of proposals to raise the minimum wage.

While there is great concern in Washington over these and other imaginary job killers, the Federal Reserve Board is openly mapping out an actual job killing strategy and drawing almost no attention at all for it. The Fed’s job killing strategy centers on its plan to start raising interest rates, which is generally expected to begin at some point this year.

The Fed’s plans to raise interest rates are rarely spoken of as hurting employment, but job-killing is really at the center of the story. The rationale for raising interest rates is that inflation could begin to pick up and start to exceed the Fed’s current 2.0 percent target, if the Fed doesn’t slow the economy with higher interest rates.

Higher interest rates slow the economy by discouraging people from borrowing to buy homes or cars. They will also have some effect in discouraging businesses from investing. With reduced demand from these sectors, businesses will hire fewer workers. This will weaken the labor market, which means workers have less bargaining power. If workers have less bargaining power, they will be less well-situated to get pay increases. And if wages are not rising there will be less inflationary pressure in the economy.

The potential impact of Fed rate hikes on jobs is large. Suppose the Fed raises interest rates enough to shave 0.2 percentage points off the growth rate, say pushing growth for the year down from 2.4 percent to 2.2 percent. If we assume employment growth drops roughly in proportion to GDP growth, this would imply a reduction in the rate of job growth of almost 10 percent. If the economy would have otherwise created 2.4 million jobs over the course of the year, the Fed’s rate hikes would have cost the economy more than 200,000 jobs in this scenario.

For comparison purposes, we are having a big fight over the Keystone pipeline. The proponents of the pipeline point to the jobs created by building a pipeline as an important justification, even if the oil being pumped through the pipeline may cause enormous damage to the environment. According to the State Department’s analysis, building the pipeline would create 21,000 for two years. This pipeline related jobs gain has been widely touted in the media and is supposed to make it difficult for many members of Congress to go along with President Obama in opposing Keystone.

Yet, the Fed can easily destroy ten times as many jobs with a set of interest rate hikes this year with its actions passing largely unnoticed. In fact, the impact of Fed interest rate hikes on jobs can easily be far larger than this 200,000 number. If the Fed decides that the unemployment rate should not fall below a certain level (5.4 percent is a number is often used), then it could be costing the economy millions of jobs if the economy could actually sustain a considerably lower level of unemployment as it did in the late 1990s.

To be clear, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen and her colleagues on the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) that determines interest rates are not evil people sitting around figuring out how to ruin the lives of American workers. The Fed has a legal mandate to control inflation, in addition to its mandate to sustain high levels of unemployment. If they raise interest rates it will be because they fear inflationary pressures will build if they let the economy continue to grow and unemployment to fall.

But this is inevitably a judgment call. The call is based on both their assessment of the risk of inflation and also the relative harm from higher rates of inflation as opposed to higher rates of unemployment. It is likely that the members of the FOMC, who largely come from the financial industry, are much more concerned about inflation than the population as a whole. They are also likely to be less concerned about unemployment. These are people who tend to read about unemployment in the data, not to see it themselves or among their friends and family members.

This is why it is important that the public be paying attention to the Fed’s interest rate policies and let them know how they feel about raising interest rates to kill jobs. The Center for Popular Democracy has organized an impressive grassroots campaign around the Fed’s interest rate policies. Those who don’t want to see the government deliberately trying to kill jobs might want to join in.Source

The original concept of charter schools emerged nationally more than two decades ago and was intended to support community efforts to open up education. Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers union, lauded the charter idea in 1988 as way to propel social mobility for working class kids and to give teachers more decision-making power.

“There was a sense from the start that they would develop models for the broader system,” John Rogers tells Capital & Main. Rogers, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. He adds that charter schools were to be laboratories where parents and educators would work together to craft the best possible learning environment and to serve as engines of innovation and social equity.

But critics of today’s market-based charter movement say monied interests have turned those learning labs into models for capital capture in the Golden State and beyond–“the charter school gravy train,” as Forbes describes it. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed and, like most privately run businesses, the schools prefer to avoid transparency in their operations. This often has brought negative publicity to the schools – last month the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the principal of El Camino Real Charter High School charged more than $100,000 in expenses to his school-issued credit card, many of them for personal use.

See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Charter School Series

“Information belongs to the public,” says Daniel Losen, who conducts law and policy research on education equality issues. “To the extent that you think choice should benefit parents—good choices are made with good information.” Losen co-authored a March, 2016 report about charter schools’ disciplinary policies, produced by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into expanding America’s privately-run charter school system over the past two decades, including $3.3 billion in federal funds alone, reports an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy. California has the nation’s largest number of charter schools, with most of them located in Los Angeles County. But in an age when words like “accountability” and “transparency” dominate political discourse, the financial mechanics of charters receive less oversight and scrutiny than the average public school bake sale.

Charter schools were originally intended to support community efforts to open up education.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools candidly spells out the Golden State’s laissez faire rules of the game on its website: “California law provides that charter schools are automatically exempt from most laws governing school districts.”

The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has explicitly opposed state legislation that would clearly define the existing transparency laws and codes for charter schools — standards charters can now avoid despite their use of public funds.

“Charters don’t have to disclose budgets,” says Jackie Goldberg, a long-time Los Angeles school teacher and former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board president, who also served in the California State Assembly. “Once a charter is written, it’s not subject to the Brown or the Public Records acts.”

The CCSA opposes several bills currently progressing through the state legislature that would bring charter school transparency requirements into line with those expected of public schools. One measure spells out the expectation that charters would follow the same standards as public schools when it comes to the Public Records Act that guarantees access to public records; CCSA argues that most charter schools already voluntarily comply—so the law is therefore unnecessary.

Below are several of areas of concern often cited by charter school critics.

Open Meetings

California public schools are required to follow the Ralph M. Brown Act that requires regular meetings with notices posted in advance, along with public testimony and the availability of agendas and minutes. Open meetings guarantee the right of local parents, teachers and taxpayers to participate in discussions about policy, funding, disciplinary standards—all the heated issues that arise in local schools or that go before school boards.

The finances of charter schools receive less oversight than the average public school bake sale.

But a group called the Charter Schools Development Center provides advice and wiggle room to attorneys representing charter schools on Brown Act requirements. Charters are frequently run by a nonprofit whose board members are chosen and named by previous board members. The CSDC’s Guide to the Brown Act pointedly raises the question of whether governing structures fit the profile of “local legislative bodies” required to comply with the Brown Act and recommends charter school boards “cover their bases” and follow at least the spirit, if not the precise requirements, of the Brown Act.

Disciplinary Protocols and “Counseling Out”

The California Education Code stipulates that a public school student undergoing the drastic disciplinary measure of expulsion is entitled to a due process hearing that includes district administrators and the principal, and allows the student and parents to present arguments and information.

That doesn’t apply to California charter schools, according to a 2013 state Court of Appeals ruling that holds charters can “dismiss” a student without due process. The ruling differentiates between expulsion and dismissal. Following a dismissal, a student is then sent back to the public school system. (The UCLA report that Daniel Losen co-authored found national suspension rates at charter schools were 16 percent higher than those of public schools.)

Charter schools depend on their reputations for teaching students who hit high test-score marks. The practice known as “counseling out” is used to winnow out difficult students, and extends beyond California—the New York Times has detailed incidents in a high-achieving charter school in Brooklyn.

Counseling out can happen for a variety of reasons, not just disciplinary. Jackie Goldberg says she personally witnessed a counseling out session at a South Los Angeles charter, where a student’s mother was simply told by a school staff member that her son was better off finding “a school that meets his needs.”

Public schools, on the other hand, cannot “counsel out” challenging students.

Conflicts of interest

Public school governments are required to follow California Government Code 1090, which states that officials can’t vote on issues or contracts wherein they have a vested interest. Charter decision-makers are not subject to the conflict-of-interest code.

Veteran educators and administrators interviewed by Capital & Main have expressed deep concern about the disparities between transparency requirements for public schools and publicly funded charter schools.

Most California charters are run by educational management organizations (EMOs), which are described by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado as “private entities [that] may not be subject to the same financial or other document/records disclosure laws that apply to state-operated entities and public officials.”

Steve Zimmer, the current LAUSD school board president and a former high school teacher and counselor, has been critical of the lack of oversight of charter funding.

“You don’t have to go through a procurement process, you don’t have to follow labor standards,” he says. “This is playing out on a multiplicity of levels.”

Audits are not routinely required in the California charter system. It was only in 2006—some 14 years after California became the second state in the nation to pass legislation to create charter schools—that the state Charter Schools Act was amended to allow local school officials to request a state audit of a charter school’s financial transactions when they suspect something is amiss.

It took a state audit—triggered by a request from the Los Angeles County Office of Education—to uncover $2.6 million in payments that went to Kendra Okonkwo, the founder of Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists charter school, and to her close family members—with no oversight from the governing board of the nonprofit running the South Los Angeles school.

Another audit uncovered an Oakland charter school founder directing $3.8 million to companies he owned. American Indian Model Schools founder Ben Chavis is presently under IRS and FBI investigations related to his dealings with the school district.

More recently, a San Jose Mercury News investigation of California Virtual Academies, an online charter school chain run by the Virginia-based, publicly traded company K12 Inc., found that not even half of its enrollees graduated with a high school diploma and even fewer—almost none—were qualified to attend a California state university. The online chain, launched by former Goldman Sachs banker Ronald Packard, with seed money from Larry Ellison, cofounder of tech giant Oracle, and former junk bond purveyor Michael Milken, has collected more than $310 million in state funds over a dozen years. (An April 12 statement from K12 Inc. criticized the investigation as incomplete.)

A study commissioned by the Center for Popular Democracy calculates the lack of oversight has cost California $81 million.

Jason Mandell, Director of Advocacy Communications at the California Charter Schools Association, says that charter school opacity is changing. “There’s an increasingly thorough review process. If a charter school isn’t meeting standards, the charter can be shut down. When you know you’re going to be scrutinized and people are watching, you better perform. [Charters] have more autonomy in exchange for greater accountability.”

Last year, however, Governor Jerry Brown, himself a charter school founder, passed on a chance to tighten that accountability. He vetoed a bill approved by both houses of the legislature that would have made it explicit that schools should be subject to the Brown and Public Records acts.

David Tokofsky, a former member of the LAUSD Board of Education who has also worked for a charter school operator, cautions that the push for charter schools has been framed in terms of “education reform,” although the movement behind these schools, he says, is really one for deregulation of financial oversight and management.

“Deregulation was supposed to be about curriculum,” Tokofsky says, allowing teachers and parents more freedom to craft education and programs to fit the students. “It has become deregulation about every aspect of the school.”

“We know,” he adds, “when deregulated banks fail; we know when deregulated airplane doors fail. Do we know when deregulated schools are hurting your kids?”

By Bobbi Murray

Source

You can help. Donate so organizers can hire peace monitors to protect their meeting spaces. The Center for Popular Democracy has agreed to raise the money on their behalf all proceeds from this Crowdrise will go to support Alaska Grassroots Alliance.

Read the full article here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 5, 2014

Contact: Hugh Baran, 646-200-5331, hugh.baran@berlinrosen.com

 

Center for Popular Democracy FOILs SUNY-Albany’s Rockefeller Institute Over Debunked Scaffold Safety Law “Study"

FOIL Probes Debunked Industry-Funded Study That Rockefeller Institute Director Called "Really Just Awful”

Freedom of Information Request Seeks Original RFP & Other Communications with Front Group That Spent $82,800 Commissioning the Research

ALBANY — The Center for Popular Democracy announced this morning it has filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request with SUNY-Albany’s Rockefeller Institute over their now-debunked study of the Scaffold Safety Law, as first reported in today’s Albany Times-Union. 

The FOIL comes after Institute Director Thomas L. Gais recanted its study last week, telling The Chronicle of HIgher Education that the now-debunked study suffers from "really big weaknesses," that "he considers the report as not officially a product of his institute,” and that a key section is "just really awful” — yet insisting no bias influenced the report’s findings. Days later, the Institute released a statement insisting that, "The funder did not attempt to influence the development of the research design, collection or analysis of data at any time during the study."

CPD’s FOIL aims to force transparency about the creation of the original Rockefeller report. Read the full FOIL request here.

"When industry funds bogus research in hopes of undercutting New York's critical worker health and safety laws, the public needs to know” said Connie Razza,  Director of Strategic Research at the Center for Popular Democracy. "We take very seriously the fact that industry dollars were used to finance a 'study' that puts forward the incredible assertion that New York's scaffold law, which protects workers working at a height, actually causes worker injuries. The Center for Popular Democracy and New York Committee on Occupational Safety & Health already issued one report that shreds the credibility of the Rockefeller Institute study.  We are now turning our sights on the money trail that financed this bogus work.  Industry should not be allowed to try to buy credibility from institutions like SUNY.”  

Specifically, the FOIL seeks the following documents related to the Institute’s now-debunked study, The Cost of Labor Law 240 on New York’s Economy and Public Infrastructure: 

All documents received by the Rockefeller Institute from the New York Civil Justice Institute (or the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of Nw York) in connection with a request for proposal for a research study on New York Labor Law Section 240 (the “RFP”). 

All documents submitted by the Rockefeller Institute to the New York Civil Justice Institute (or the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York) in response to the RFP.

All other written and electronic communications between the Rockefeller Institute and the New York Civil Justice Institute (or the Lawsuit Reform Alliance), since the beginning of 2013, pertaining to New York Labor Law Section 240. 

The Cost of Labor Law 240 on New York’s Economy and Public Infrastructure was released last month by the Rockefeller Institute at SUNY-Albany, commissioned by an $82,800 check from the "New York Civil Justice Institute," a front-group whose address is the same as the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, which has worked for years to weaken laws that make it possible for people to assert rights against abusive or negligent landlords, employers, and other business interests. The LRA itself has frequently been criticized as being a front group for the construction industry and other corporate interests. 

The Scaffold Safety Law is a critical safety protection for construction workers, who are increasingly Latino and immigrant. In fact, an earlier review of construction site accidents by the Center for Popular Democracy, published in an October 2013 report entitled "Fatal Inequality," starkly illustrated how important the Scaffold Law is because of the ongoing rates of injury in construction in New York, and notably, how the risks are disproportionately borne by immigrant workers and workers of color: 

In 60% of those fatalities, the worker was Latino and/or immigrant, disproportionately high for their participation in construction work.

In New York City, 74% of fatal falls involved Latino and/or immigrant workers.

CPD & NYCOSH also released a new one-pager last month explaining how the Scaffold Safety Law works. Read it here.

ABOUT THE SCAFFOLD SAFETY COALITION

The Center for Popular Democracy is a proud partner in the newly launched Scaffold Safety Coalition. The Scaffold Safety Coalition is a diverse group of workers, advocates and organizations committed to protecting construction workers in New York State, creating a unified front in the fight to defend New York’s Scaffold Safety Law from industry-backed efforts to gut the law. On behalf of more than 1.5 million New Yorkers, the coalition has also pledged to push for increased enforcement of New York’s construction safety standards. More information and a full list of partners in the Scaffold Safety Coalition is available at the coalition website: www.scaffoldsafetylaw.org. 

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR POPULAR DEMOCRACY 

The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda. More information is available at CPD’s website: www.populardemocracy.org.