Between the Lines: Charter Schools, A Better Education for Some at a Cost to Others
Five students are suing the state for a better education — for some.
In September, five anonymous students filed a suit against the state in Suffolk County Superior...
Five students are suing the state for a better education — for some.
In September, five anonymous students filed a suit against the state in Suffolk County Superior Court alleging the cap on the number of charter schools in Massachusetts unfairly denies them their right to a quality education. The students had entered charter lotteries, but failed to win coveted spots in one of the public-ish schools. Instead, the students say, they were assigned to attend schools in their home districts that had been deemed “underperforming” by the state.
Since No Child Left Behind, school reform has been more concerned with helping some children find ways out of the traditional public school system than improving education for everyone. Charter schools are a symptom of this escapist philosophy, which is unfortunate because the idea of a charter school education is a good one.
Typically founded by nonprofits and members of the community, charter schools often concentrate education around one subject. Locally, these concentrations include the arts, social justice, and Mandarin. Students enroll in charters through a blind lottery that anyone can enter. Placing students in schools that encourage their passions is excellent education. And it produces some positive results. For example, in 2013, Credo, an independent education research firm, analyzed the impact charter schools have had on Massachusetts. In math and reading, researchers found that charter school students perform better in the subjects compared to those in traditional public schools.
The problem with charter schools is the education provided comes at the cost of traditional public schools. Charter schools are publicly funded, but work independently of a hometown district. Last year in Massachusetts, participating school districts paid charter schools $369.7 million to educate students. Charters receive per-student fees from sending districts — money that would otherwise stay in the home school’s till. Children fleeing an underperforming school district take money with them that is needed to improve the local education system.
I’m not proposing students be forced to attend failing schools. A student should have the choice to attend the school that best fits her educational needs. I am asking the state’s politicians to take a hard look at how charters are managed, funded, and how students are enrolled – because the current system is inadequate. Earlier this month, Gov. Charlie Baker proposed a bill that would increase the number of charter schools in the state. The bill would permit 12 new or expanded charter schools each year in districts performing in the bottom 25 percent on standardized tests. Massachusetts already has 81 charter schools with a waiting list of 37,000 students. A bill to expand the cap on charter schools in the state passed the House last year, but floundered in the Senate.
Here’s what needs to happen with charters:
Improve special education and non-native English speaker recruitment: While charters typically serve about the same number of low-income students — and more students of color — as traditional public school systems, they enroll far fewer non-native English speakers and students with special education needs. The Credo audit found that in traditional Massachusetts public schools that send children to charters, 17 percent of students received special education services, whereas in charter schools this population made up 12 percent of the student body. Traditional public schools had 10 percent English language learners in the student body, while charters had 6 percent.
Submit to School Committee authority: Charters don’t play by the same rules as traditional public schools. The schools aren’t subject to the authority of an elected school committee and have a legal pass around some of the state’s educational and special education requirements.
There’s good reason for more oversight. Private management of charter schools. A new report claims more than $200 million in fraud and wasted taxpayer funds has been lost to the charter school sector (“The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities To Waste, Fraud, And Abuse” by Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy). It’s hard to say whether this same kind of scandal could occur in Massachusetts. Charter schools need to, at the very least, be subject to more public scrutiny and submit to the budgeting and policy authority of a local, elected school committee.
Analyze funding strategy: Charter schools should not be succeeding at the cost of the education of students in underperforming districts. Something must be done that will allow students to pick the education that is best for them without penalizing struggling schools.
The student plantiffs suing for their right to attend charter schools say the state charter cap unfairly denies their right to a quality education, but that right cannot come at the cost of the rest of Massachusetts’ students.•
Source: Valley Advocate
Watch the video for Death Cab For Cutie's new anti-Donald Trump song Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/death-cab-for-cutie/97016#EkDo9zizovyxV1uy.99
Watch the video for Death Cab For Cutie's new anti-Donald Trump song Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/death-cab-for-cutie/97016#EkDo9zizovyxV1uy.99
Death Cab For Cutie have released a new anti-Donald Trump song.
The track, 'Million Dollar Loan', is one of 30 tracks being released over the next 30 days in the...
Death Cab For Cutie have released a new anti-Donald Trump song.
The track, 'Million Dollar Loan', is one of 30 tracks being released over the next 30 days in the final run in to the US Presidential election. Watch the video below.
Other artists who will feature on the anti-Trump '30 Days, 30 Songs' compilation, include My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Aimee Mann and Thao Nguyen. A previously unreleased live track by R.E.M will also feature.
"Lyrically, 'Million Dollar Loan' deals with a particularly tone deaf moment in Donald Trump's ascent to the Republican nomination,” said Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. "While campaigning in New Hampshire last year, he attempted to cast himself as a self-made man by claiming he built his fortune with just a 'small loan of a million dollars' from his father. Not only has this statement been proven to be wildly untrue, he was so flippant about it. It truly disgusted me.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honour and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape or form represents what this country truly stands for. He is beneath us."
You can purchase 'Million Dollar Loan' here. All of 30 Days’ proceeds will go to the Center for Popular Democracy and their efforts toward Universal Voter Registration in America.
Earlier today (October 10), the music world reacted to the second US Presidential town hall debate with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
By DAMIAN JONES
Source
Es tiempo que reconsideremos lo que significa la seguridad en nuestras comunidades
Es tiempo que reconsideremos lo que significa la seguridad en nuestras comunidades
La extrema vigilancia policial y la criminalización masiva de nuestras comunidades de color es la crisis moral de nuestros tiempos.
Estados Unidos tiene la población más grande de personas...
La extrema vigilancia policial y la criminalización masiva de nuestras comunidades de color es la crisis moral de nuestros tiempos.
Estados Unidos tiene la población más grande de personas encarceladas con aproximadamente 2.2 millones personas en prisión (21 por ciento de los prisioneros del mundo). Mientras, varios departamentos de policía a través del país se encuentran bajo investigación por cargos de brutalidad policial, faltas graves y violaciones a los derechos civiles.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Was the ‘Original Bargain’ with Charter Schools a Raw Deal?
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...
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.
Source
Fed votes to keep key interest rate near 0%, stays mum on future hike
Federal Reserve policymakers Wednesday voted to keep the central bank’s benchmark interest rate near zero percent and offered no new hints of when it would enact the first hike since 2006.
...
Federal Reserve policymakers Wednesday voted to keep the central bank’s benchmark interest rate near zero percent and offered no new hints of when it would enact the first hike since 2006.
After a two-day policy meeting, officials released a monetary policy statement that was little changed from June in its guidance about what they would need to see before raising the interest rate.
11:40 a.m.: An earlier version of this article said the Fed's policy statement was identical in its guidance about what officials would need to see before raising the interest rate. The statement contained a small wording change.
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An increase would come when members of the policymaking Federal Open Market Committee have “seen some further improvement in the labor market” and is “reasonably confident” that the low inflation rate will move back toward the Fed’s 2% annual goal in the near future, the statement said.
The statement, approved by a 10-0 vote, left open the possibility of a rate hike after the Fed’s next meeting, in September. But it did not lock policymakers into taking that step in case upcoming economic data, including jobs reports for July and August, indicate the economy isn’t strong enough to handle higher interest rates.
The Fed said recent data suggest the economy “has been expanding moderately in recent months” and that the housing market “has shown additional improvement.” The Fed’s view of the labor market improved, with the statement saying there had been “solid job gains and declining unemployment.”
But Fed policymakers raised concerns about what they called soft business investment and exports.
And the statement noted inflation continued to run well below the Fed’s 2% annual target, attributing that partly to declines in energy prices as well as the lower cost of imports caused by the rising value of the dollar.
For the 12 months ended May 31, the price index for personal consumption expenditures, the Fed’s preferred gauge, was up just 0.2%.
The central bank has kept its benchmark federal funds rate near zero since December 2008 in an attempt to boost economic growth during and after the Great Recession.
As the economy has strengthened, pressure has built on Fed policymakers to start raising the rate.
Fed Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen has said that she expects an interest rate hike this year but that policymakers would continue to keep rates low for “quite some time” to continue providing support for the economy.
A survey last month by financial information website Bankrate.com found that a majority of Wall Street experts expected the Fed to raise its short-term interest rate in September.
Fed policymakers are closely watching economic data to determine when to hike the rate for the first time since 2006.
The economy shrank at a 0.2% annual rate from January through March, largely because of unusually bad winter weather and a labor dispute that slowed activity at West Coast ports.
The Commerce Department is expected to report Thursday that growth returned this spring. Analysts are forecasting that the economy expanded at a 2.9% annual rate in the second quarter.
The job market has shown solid gains in recent months, and the unemployment rate in June dropped to 5.3%, the lowest in more than seven years.
But wage growth has been sluggish. The Center for Popular Democracy has criticized the Fed for not focusing enough on wage improvements as a key factor in deciding when to raise rates.
And even with the overall economy performing better in the second quarter, growth this year is expected to be subpar. The Fed’s most recent projection, made in June, is for overall economic growth of just 1.8% to 2% for the year, which would be the worst since 2011.
Source: The Los Angeles Times
Immigration Advocates on SB 4: We’re Resisting in Texas
Immigration Advocates on SB 4: We’re Resisting in Texas
Grassroots leaders and local officials wasted little time organizing a coordinated campaign to fight SB 4, a new Texas law that targets cities, towns and sheriffs that don’t cooperate with federal...
Grassroots leaders and local officials wasted little time organizing a coordinated campaign to fight SB 4, a new Texas law that targets cities, towns and sheriffs that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Only nine days after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the legislation, formally known as Senate Bill 4, into law, grassroots advocates announced a “Summer of Resistance” campaign May 16. The statute allows police officers, sheriff deputies and Texas state troopers to ask about a person’s immigration status – whether they are here legally – during a routine stop.
Read the full article here.
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’: Crying protesters confront Jeff Flake in Capitol elevator
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’: Crying protesters confront Jeff Flake in Capitol elevator
After Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he would, in fact, vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the emotional debate over the confirmation spilled into the halls...
After Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he would, in fact, vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the emotional debate over the confirmation spilled into the halls of Congress — on live television — as two women loudly and tearfully confronted the Arizona Republican in an elevator Friday, telling him that he was dismissing the pain of sexual-assault survivors.
“What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court,” one woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted, shouted during a live CNN broadcast as Flake was making his way to a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. The Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy organization, later identified her as the group’s co-executive director, Ana Maria Archila.
“This is horrible,” she told Flake. “You have children in your family. Think about them.”
Read the article and watch the video here.
Biggest U.S. Mass Protest & Rally Ever Staged for $15 Wage Set for April
Sky Valley Chronicle - April 1, 2015 - According to organizers, it's going to be huge. Fast food workers across the country, evidently unmoved by the Reagan era inspired...
Sky Valley Chronicle - April 1, 2015 - According to organizers, it's going to be huge. Fast food workers across the country, evidently unmoved by the Reagan era inspired trickle-down theory of economics plan on striking in hundreds of U.S. cities on April 15, tax day in efforts to secure a $15 an hour wage and the right to form unions without retaliation from employers.They say they'll be joined by more than 60,000 people across the country as well as others in 35 countries around the world and that this time workers from new industries will be standing with them – from home care and child care workers, to adjunct professors, to Walmart employees. One report calls the planned action a "series of global labor strikes with protests on college campuses." According to April15.org "Millions of underpaid workers can’t support their families or make ends meet on hourly wages that haven’t kept pace with the bills – or their employers’ profits. On April 15, fast food cashiers and cooks, retail employees, child care workers, home care providers, airport workers, and all of us who believe they deserve better are showing up in cities across the country to say ENOUGH."The April 15 strike action will include rallies and marches on 170 university campuses. CBS News notes that, "Expanding the labor movement to college campuses hearkens back to successful social movements that included pressure from university students, such as the 1980s divestment campaign against U.S. corporations that invested in apartheid-era South Africa. While college students have long served as a vocal social force in American history, though, there's a growing group on campuses seeking higher wages: adjunct professors."The same report quotes Tiffany Kraft, an adjunct professor in Portland, Oregon as saying, "The universities I work for pay me next to nothing and treat me like I'm expendable. I joined the Fight for $15 to demand higher wages and more respect for our role as educators." CBS reported that adjunct professors typically earn about $20,000 to $25,000 per year and get no health benefits or job security, even though "they hold doctorates or other advanced degrees."In many communities brick layers, construction workers and auto mechanics with no college degrees earn that and more.Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City, Missouri, and a national leader for the Fight for $15 push told the Associated Press "This will be the biggest mobilization America has seen in decades," and will feature some 2,000 groups including Jobs With Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy.
SourceYou can find out here where an event near you will take place.
Fed Up With the Senate
Fed Up With the Senate
Right now, there are key vacancies at a vital government institution. President Barack Obama has fulfilled his duty and put forward eminently qualified nominees to fill the vacancies. Yet despite...
Right now, there are key vacancies at a vital government institution. President Barack Obama has fulfilled his duty and put forward eminently qualified nominees to fill the vacancies. Yet despite the nominees' strong credentials, Republicans in the Senate have dragged their feet, and the chair of the committee whose job it is to consider the nominees has refused to even schedule hearings.
No, this isn't the high-profile battle to fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. While the fight over Scalia's replacement may be stealing headlines, Republican obstructionism is actually preventing another important government body from functioning as it should: the Federal Reserve. Two vacant spots on the seven-person Federal Reserve Board of Governors have sat unfilled since 2014.
Obama nominated former community banking CEO Allan Landon to be a Federal Reserve governor in January 2015, yet Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby has let Landon's appointment languish for over a year. Last summer, Obama nominated Kathryn Dominguez, an economist at the University of Michigan, to fill the second open spot. But Shelby has reiterated that he will not schedule hearings for Landon or Dominguez.
Shelby's inaction has real consequences for working people. The Fed, like the Supreme Court, functions best when there are no vacancies. Fed governors hold permanent voting positions on the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets interest rates and makes crucial decisions that affect unemployment and wages for millions of Americans. When Fed governorships are allowed to sit vacant, some of the most important decisions about our economy are left to a smaller group of people, usually individuals who are more concerned with banking interests than with the interests of workers.
Five seats on the committee are held by regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents. Unlike Fed Chair Janet Yellen and the Board of Governors, regional bank presidents are not accountable to the public. Instead, they are chosen by the boards of directors at each regional bank, which are dominated by representatives from banks and major corporations.
Regional banks' boards tend to fill their presidencies with people who look and think like them; in fact, one-third of the current regional bank presidents have strong ties to a single firm, Goldman Sachs. Research shows that Federal Reserve Banks have historically held more conservative views about the economy. And when the Federal Open Market Committee voted to intentionally slow down the economy in December, it was mostly due to pressure from regional bank presidents who (mistakenly) believed the economy was close to full employment. At the last committee meeting, regional bank presidents, led by Kansas City Fed President Esther George, continued to advocate an aggressive path of rate hikes.
The Senate's failure to act on Obama's appointees means that the committee is dominated by more conservative, bank-friendly voices. And congressional intransigence has meant that this has been true for most of Obama's presidency. As Stanford scholar Peter Conti-Brown wrote last year, "private bankers effectively held a majority on the [Federal Open Market Committee] 58% of the time [during the Obama administration]."
Shelby says he will not consider the nominees because Obama has not appointed a vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve, a new Fed position that was created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Though the Obama administration has not appointed anybody to this position, the Federal Reserve says Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo is currently filling that role.
At a post-Federal Open Market Committee press conference last month, Yellen was asked about the Senate's inaction. "Congress intended for the Federal Reserve Board to have seven members," Yellen said, "and that tends to bring on board people with a wide spectrum of views and experience and perspectives. I think that’s valuable, and I would like to see the Senate move forward and consider these nominees so we could operate with a full complement.”
Yellen's point about a wider spectrum of views is a salient one. If confirmed, Dominguez would join Yellen as only the fifth woman serving on the Federal Open Market Committee, an historically male-dominated institution. And as the former leader of a community bank, Landon comes from the very sector that Republicans are constantly complaining lacks representation at the Fed.
Over 5,000 members of Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor-based organizations that works to bring the voices of low-income communities of color into decisions on monetary policy, agree with Yellen that Shelby must act, and have joined the 10 Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee in urging him to schedule hearings for Dominguez and Landon.
Yellen's call for the Senate to do its job echoes the sentiments of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who, it was reported last month, presciently warned against a dysfunctional confirmation process in a speech given just days before Scalia's death.
To ensure that some of the most important institutions in the country function for the people precisely as Congress intended, the heads of those institutions are imploring the Senate to do its job. For the sake of millions of working Americans, it is time for the Senate to listen.
By Djuan Wash
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Repeating the success of the Ryan White Act on the opioid front would require a massive advocacy movement in the coming years. Longtime activist Jennifer Flynn Walker, director of mobilization and...
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