CPD IN THE NEWS

WTAX News Radio - February 2, 2015 - Charter schools in Illinois are in the cross hairs of a new report alleging a lack of accountability leading to between $13 million and $27 million in fraud.“At a time when (Chicago Public Schools are) crying broke, and public schools are grossly under-resourced, and there’s a public demand for transparency and accountability around every corner,” says Action Now executive director Katelyn Johnson, “it seems unconscionable that CPS and the state of Illinois would not invest in rigid financial oversight of charter schools.”Johnson’s group is supporting the Center for Popular Democracy in the report, “Risking Public Money.”Andrew Broy has a differing viewpoint. He’s the president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and dismisses the other two groups as union-funded and anti-charter to begin with.“The question” about accountability, he says, “is if there are challenges with an internal governing board, how do we uncover that and make sure it’s taken care of, and the current law equips districts with all the tools they need to make sure that happens.”Source

To first-time organizer Sarafina Davis, Saturday’s Black Lives Matter protest was about one thing: The death of people who look like her.

“Our black men are being killed on these streets and there is no accountability,” Davis, a Pittsburgh resident, said.

Spreading fast through social media, Saturday’s demonstration started at Point State Park, where two separate groups gathered before meeting under the I-279 overpass. The protesters then made a loop through Downtown, along Liberty Avenue, Sixth Street, Grant Street and Fort Pitt Boulevard before returning to Point State Park. The march, coming after a week of carnage, lasted nearly three hours.

Police placed the number of protestors between 1,200 and 1,300 strong at its peak on Sixth Avenue.

Davis had never been involved in activism before this weekend but was drawn in because of concern for her children.

“[I realized] that could be my kid,” Davis said, referring to deaths like that of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

Early Tuesday morning, Sterling was killed during a police confrontation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a parking lot where he sold homemade CDs. On Wednesday, Castile, a school cafeteria supervisor, was killed during a traffic stop in St. Paul, Minnesota. Both deaths were filmed and went viral on social media.

An otherwise peaceful protest of hundreds of people in downtown Dallas Thursday night turned violent when 25-year-old Micah Johnson shot police officers, killing five and injuring seven.

At Pittsburgh’s protest, concern for the next generations inspired activist Rod Adams, from Minneapolis, who was in town for the People’s Convention, a weekend gathering of more than 1,500 people from community organizations across the country to discuss confronting social issues such as immigration and economic inequality.

“They are not only killing us, they are killing our future,” Adams said.

After two groups of protesters combined in Point State Park, they marched up Liberty Avenue before hooking onto Sixth Avenue.

Adams was out in front of the demonstration for the majority of the march, which swelled in numbers as it moved through Downtown.

“People were coming out of their businesses and taking off their aprons [to join the march],” Adams said.

The protesters stopped outside the Port Authority Building for 10 minutes to protest the January killing of Bruce Kelley Jr. in Wilkinsburg. Port Authority police shot and killed Kelley, who was black, after he stabbed and killed a police dog. After a five-month review that ended in June, the Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala found the two officers were justified in their use of force.

But Kelley’s case still makes Juliandra Jones, a Pittsburgh resident, concerned about police conduct with black people.

“We need to better train police officers in how to handle situations with minorities,” Jones said. By protesting, she hoped “the government would properly look at its policies.”

While Kelley was armed, reporting by The Guardian has shown that black people are more likely to be killed by police than white people regardless of situation, with 7.13 black people killed per million people, compared to 2.91 white people killed per million.

On Sixth Street, the protest erupted in an optimistic rendition of the chorus from Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” several times, but most chants expressed deep frustration. Protesters — and the occasional bystander — joined in chants of “the whole damn system is guilty as hell”  and “if we don’t get [justice] then shut it down” throughout the march.

The protest itself cooperated with city police throughout the day. After walking down Sixth Avenue — with a stop in front of Allegheny County Courthouse — protesters hoped to march onto I-376. But a police barricade — which including some officers in tactical gear — stood in the way.

A call went out for parents to take their kids home, and protesters locked arms and marched towards the entrance to the parkway.

The police line did not budge, and leaders huddled with police officers as the crowd chanted slogans. After 10 minutes of conversation, the protest’s leaders announced the police’s intention to arrest anyone who entered the parkway. Instead, the protesters turned onto Fort Pitt Boulevard and marched back to Point State Park.

There, numerous speakers, including Adams, Davis and Brandi Fisher, another Pittsburgh activist, took to a previously set-up stage to engage the dwindled crowd, which police said was 400 to 500 people, for an hour.

Some made use of spoken word poetry when presenting their point. Despite differences in presentation, they all coalesced around one point — their struggle would be a long one requiring constant action.

“Every time a body hits the ground that looks like my brother or sister, I will be out in the streets,” Adams said. He pressed others to make the same commitment.

Fisher, who is president of the Alliance for Police Accountability, made reference to Thursday night’s shooting in Dallas.

“What the Dallas shooting shows us is that if there is no accountability, there is no justice, there is no peace,” Fisher said, harkening back to the much-used chant “No justice, no peace”.

After the speeches, protesters dispersed from the park. The protest was peaceful, with no arrests or citations reported. Adams was impressed by the turnout produced by a Facebook event and thought it showed the precarious state of the nation.

“This is amazing,” Adams, who protested in Ferguson, Missouri, said. “[But] it shows you the moment we are in in this country.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

By Stephen Caruso

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Many of us think that any employment, even part time, provides a measure of security. This is not the case for the millions of low-wage workers who are subject to unstable work schedules. In an effort to minimize labor costs (and with an egregious fixation with statistical models), businesses are hiring part time and using scheduling software that attempts to dynamically match labor hours with demand. This practice, known as ‘just-in-time’ work scheduling, shifts business risk to some of the most vulnerable workers and has serious consequences for families.

Store managers say that they prefer to hire workers with open availability, so employment is essentially contingent on open availability with no minimum guarantee of hours. Applicants are compelled to conceal outside commitments, including caregiver duties and their own medical needs. Workers who desperately need more hours are unable take a second job, since anything less than full availability is responded to punitively with reduced shifts. Workers are sometimes sent home early or without clocking in at all.

Unpredictable schedules means workers are unable to improve their future earnings through school or training. Over the long term, career trajectories are negatively affected because part-time workers receive lower hourly wages, less training, and fewer opportunities for job promotion. This structural barrier to economic mobility has the potential to create a permanent underclass of worker.

Volatile work schedules also mean volatile incomes, and added uncertainty in daily life. “The amount of hours and days I work changes on a weekly basis so I never know how much my check will be,” a worker testifying for the Fair Workweek Initiative explains. “That means I don’t know how much I can contribute to rent and bills, how much food I can buy for my daughter, or whether I can even afford to do laundry that week.” 

Last fall, The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) presented an audio conference to discuss updates to the social safety net to better accommodate volatile work schedules. During the conference, Jessica Webster from the Legal Services Advocacy Project in Minnesota related a story about a mother of one-year-old twins who was working as a security guard while receiving TANF. An unexpected drop in work hours caused interruption in her subsidized childcare, resulting in job loss and homelessness.

Called the “next new human right” by American Prospect, the issue of fair work schedules has gained a lot of traction over the past year. In 2014, a federal bill to address abusive scheduling practices died in committee and was reintroduced by Senator Warren in 2015 with substantially more sponsors. Advocates are not waiting for action from Capitol Hill, however. In 2014, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the Retail Workers Bill of Rights, the first sweeping reforms addressing on-demand scheduling and part-time work in the country. In 2015, several jurisdictions introduced legislation designed specifically to address fair work scheduling.

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) maintains a repository for information pertaining to unstable work schedules and the University of Chicago hosts the Employment Instability, Family Wellbeing, and Social Policy Network (EINet), a group of academics and policymakers who are working to address these issues. The NationalWomen’s Law Center has presented testimony to congress and compiled fact sheets that spell out legal provisions as well as the effects on female-headed households.

Perhaps as a result of increased media coverage, some retailers announced an end to on-call shifts, with mixed results. In December, Kronos, one of the largest software developers in the work scheduling space, announced a partnership with the Center for Popular Democracy to build in features that take worker preference into account. Even more encouraging, some business leaders and academics are questioning whether minimizing labor costs is actually beneficial to the bottom line. Researchers at the Center for WorkLife Law assert that it is possible to improve scheduling efficiency, while considering the needs of workers.

What Community Groups Can Do While the fight for a fair work week continues, it is likely that many constituents of community organizations are facing this kind of uncertainty with both schedule and income. This may impede the work of community groups in many ways, from making it more complicated to determine appropriate affordable rent based on income to making it harder for residents to regularly show up for trainings, appointments, or organizing meetings.

Some of CLASP’s recommendations for adapting social service agencies to this new work environment can apply to community organizations as well. They include:

1. Offering blocks of call-in time, rather than specific appointments.

2. Using sliding fee schedules so that a temporary change in income doesn’t disqualify a family for services.

3. Estimating incomes over a longer time horizon or projecting future income with variability in mind.

4. Lengthening re-qualification periods for services.

5. Developing education and job-search tools that can be accessed intermittently online rather than holding workshops

6. Offering childcare with extended hours and vouchers that permit hours to be purchased in blocks of time that can vary from week to week.

7. Providing information on off-hours public transit options and income-based transportation fees, like those offered by the city of Seattle. Sincepoverty is now growing fastest in the suburbs, those living outside of urban centers have fewer transportation options, especially for non-standard shifts. Logistics can quickly get out of hand for those who commute to multiple part-time jobs or need pick up children from day care at a specific time.

Community-based organizations might also consider taking on an advocacy role with public agencies. When it comes to public benefits, just-in-time scheduling creates an irony that borders on the absurd: while unstable work hours compel many families to rely on public benefits, this same volatility often prevents access to those benefits. A small, temporary increase in income or decrease in work hours can trigger automatic sanctions or program disqualification.

Though under federal funding, accommodations would be allowed under the sorts of circumstances just-in-time scheduling creates, Webster noted that state agencies often fail to exercise this discretion, and clients and administrators alike are often not aware it is possible. State and local agencies can and should realign their processes to address this. But there is also an opportunity for those outside of public agencies to make a difference by organizing to inform recipients of their benefits rights. These efforts would save money by reducing “churn” (i.e., people kicked off benefits only to be put back on them again), improve outcomes for recipients, and remove disincentives to work. CLASP notes that these ideas have broad political support, which could be encouraging news for enterprising community practitioners who would like to develop a role in this area.

Fundamentally, we need to advance legal and cultural recognition that, especially for those who are resource-constrained, time is tremendously valuable, and that human needs are not nearly as scalable as mathematical models imply.

Source: Rooflines

Times Online - October 5, 2014, by The Times Editorial Board - It’s been a tough week for supporters of the charter school movement in Pennsylvania.

On Tuesday, PA Cyber School founder Nick Trombetta and his attorney were back in a federal courtroom trying to have evidence suppressed in his upcoming criminal trial on charges of mail fraud, theft, tax conspiracy and filing false tax returns. Trombetta is accused of siphoning off millions of taxpayer dollars for his own gain.

On Wednesday, a new report was released citing Trombetta as an example of $30 million in fraud and financial mismanagement among the state’s charter schools since 1997.

The report was done by three organizations — the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United. It follows a national report in May by the first two groups that claimed $136 million has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse by charter schools.

While the numbers are alarming, we know that all charter schools are not part of the problem. Still, it only takes a few incidents — such as the case against Trombetta — to give the entire movement a black eye.

What we will say is that state’s charter school law is badly in need of revision, particularly in the area of accountability. State legislators need to step in now and address the problems if charter schools are to remain part of the state’s education program.

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