ABQ, SF receive grants to help immigrants become citizens
ABQ, SF receive grants to help immigrants become citizens
Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the...
Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, with Citi Community Development as founding corporate sponsor. Fourteen cities were awarded challenge grants of either $25,000 or $40,000 a year over two years after 66 cities submitted proposals.
Read the full article here.
Warren leads crusade for diversity at Fed
Warren leads crusade for diversity at Fed
“I’m judging John Williams based on the last several years of him being wrong about the levels of maximum employment...
“I’m judging John Williams based on the last several years of him being wrong about the levels of maximum employment and pushing for additional [interest rate hikes] prematurely because that mistake puts millions of jobs at risk,” said Shawn Sebastian, who co-leads the Fed Up coalition comprising advocacy groups and unions.
Read the full article here.
Groups launch 'people's filibuster' against GOP health bill
More than a dozen groups opposing the Senate GOP's healthcare bill will hold a "people's filibuster" for two days on...
More than a dozen groups opposing the Senate GOP's healthcare bill will hold a "people's filibuster" for two days on the lawn of the Capitol.
Activists and Democratic lawmakers will speak out against the ObamaCare repeal bill Monday and Tuesday and possibly later in the week.
Read the full article here.
Education “Reformers’” New Big Lie: Charter Schools Become Even More Disastrous
Salon - March 2, 2015, by Jeff Bryant -What fun we had recently with North Carolina’s recently elected U.S. senator,...
Salon - March 2, 2015, by Jeff Bryant -What fun we had recently with North Carolina’s recently elected U.S. senator, Republican Thom Tillis, who insisted we didn’t need government regulations to compel restaurant employees to wash their hands in between using the toilet and preparing our food.
His solution to proper sanitation practices in restaurants – “the market will take care of that” – was roundly mocked by left-leaning commentators as an example of the way conservatives uphold the interests of businesses and moneymaking above all other concerns.
Fun, for sure, but it’s no laughing matter that the Tillis plan for public sanitation appears to increasingly be the philosophy for governing the nation’s schools.
Rather than directly address what ails struggling public schools, policy leaders increasingly claim that giving parents more choice about where they send their children to school – and letting that parent choice determine the funding of schools – will create a market mechanism that leaves the most competent schools remaining “in business” while incompetent schools eventually close.
Coupled with more “choice” are demands to increase the numbers of unregulated charter schools, especially those operated by private management firms that now have come to dominate roughly half the charter sector.
As schools lose more and more students to the charter schools, parents then “vote with their feet,” choice advocates argue, and the market will “work.”
Why the “Tillis Rule” that seems so wrong for public health has been declared the wave of the future for the nation’s schoolchildren and families seems to hardly ever get questioned.
Tarheel School Choice Extravaganza
The Tillis Rule is certainly now the driving force behind new education policy in North Carolina, as rapid charter school expansions and a new voucher plan have opened up public schools to various “market forces.”
How’s that working out?
So far, not so hot. For instance, in Charlotte, at least three charter schools abruptly closed down this year alone, some after having been in operation for only a few months. The most recent shutdown was particularly noticeable.
That school, Entrepreneur High, focused on teaching students job skills, so they could be financially independent when they graduated. Turns out the school had its own financial problems with only $14 in the bank and $400,000 in debt. In fact, the school never even really had a financial plan at all.
In other news from the front of “school choice” in the Tarheel State, left-leaning group N.C. Policy Watch recently reported about a state auditor who checked the books of a Kinston charter school and found the school overstated attendance–thereby inflating its state funds by more than $300,000.
The school shorted its staff by more than $370,000 in payroll obligations, according to reports, while making “questionable payments of more than $11,000″ to the CEO and his wife. And the CEO’s daughter was being paid $40,000 to be the school’s academic officer even though she had zero experience in teaching or school administration.
When the reporter, Lindsay Wagner, tried to contact the school’s CEO to question him about the auditor’s findings, she discovered he had left his position and was working elsewhere in the state – running a different charter school.
Meanwhile, the state has rolled out another school choice venture: vouchers, called Opportunity Scholarships, that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and get taxpayer funding to enroll the kids in the schools of their choice. Wagner, again, wondered where the money was heading and found 90 percent of it goes to private religious institutions.
More recently, Wagner’s account of this money found “more than $4,000,000 worth of taxpayer-funded school vouchers have now been paid out to private schools.” Of the top 12 private schools benefiting from this money, all are religious schools.
Also, Wagner reported, voucher funds come with “virtually no accountability measures attached … Private schools are also free to use any curriculum they see fit, employ untrained, unlicensed teachers and conduct criminal background checks only on the heads of schools. For the most part, they do not have to share their budgets or financial practices with the public, in spite of receiving public dollars.”
It’s unfair, however, to single out North Carolina for school choice shenanigans.
Charter Corruption Spreads, Grows
In Ohio, for instance, a recent investigation into charter schools by state auditors found evidence of fraud that made North Carolina’s pale in comparison. The privately operated schools get nearly $6,000 in taxpayer money for every student they enroll, but half the charter schools the auditor looked at had “significantly lower” attendance than what they claimed in state funding.
One charter school in Youngstown had no students at all, having sent the kids home for the day at 12:30 in the afternoon.
This form of charter school fraud is so widespread, according to an article in Education Week, many states now employ “‘mystery’ or ‘secret shopper’ services used in retail” that pose as inquiring parents to call charter schools to ensure they’re educating the students they say they are.
Enrollment inflation is not the only form of fraud charter schools practice. In Missouri, a federal judge recently fingered a nationwide chain of charter schools, Imagine, for “self-dealing” in a lease agreement that allowed it to fleece a local charter school of over a million dollars.
“The facts of the case mirror arrangements in Ohio and other states,” the reporter noted, “where Imagine schools pay exorbitant rent to an Imagine subsidiary, SchoolHouse Finance. The high lease payments leave little money for classroom instruction and help explain the poor academic records of Imagine schools in both states.”
A charter school manager in Michigan is about to go on trial for steering nearly a million dollars in public funds targeted to renovate his charter school into his own bank account.
In Washington, which was late to the game of charters and choice, the state’s first charter school is already under investigation for financial and academic issues.
Investigators in the District of Columbia, recently uncovered a charter school operator who “funneled $13 million of public money into a private company for personal gain.”
A recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school finances in Illinois and found “$13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials … Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone.”
One example the CPD report cited was of a charter operator in Chicago who used charter school funds amounting to more than $250,000 to purchase personal items from luxury department stores, including $2,000 on hair care and cosmetic products and $5,800 for jewelry.
The report made specific policy recommendations, including financial reviews and a moratorium on new charters, to increase the transparency and accountability of these schools – the type of policy recommendations charter and school choice fans continue to fight at every turn.
Voucher Ventures Expand Across the Country
While charter school operations continue to waste public money on scandals and fraud – all in the name of “choice” – newly enacted school vouchers divert more public school dollars to private schools.
In parts of Ohio, “the state-sponsored voucher program has increased or even doubled enrollment at some private schools.”
In Indiana, which has the largest taxpayer-funded school voucher program in the country, according to a local source, virtually all of the participating schools, 97 percent, are religiously affiliated private schools.
In Louisiana, over a third of students using voucher funds to attend private schools are enrolled schools “doing such a poor job of educating them that the schools have been barred from taking new voucher students.”
In parts of Wisconsin, “private schools accepting vouchers receive more money per student than public school districts do for students attending through open enrollment.”
Despite the obvious misdirection of taxpayer money, more states are eager to roll out new voucher plans or expand the ones they have. As the Economist recently reported, “After the Republicans’ success in state elections in November, several are pushing to increase the number and scope of school voucher schemes,” including Wisconsin, where probable presidential candidate Scott Walker has proposed to remove all limits on the number of schoolchildren who could attend private schools at taxpayer expense.
Of course, not all voucher-like schemes are called “vouchers.” According to a report from Politico, some states are considering voucher-like mechanisms called Education Savings Accounts that allow parents to pocket taxpayer money that would normally pay for public schools to be used for other education pursuits, including private school and home schooling. Two states – Florida and Arizona – already have them, but six more may soon follow.
Vouchers Hit the Hill
Support for vouchers extends to Congress, as another Politico article reported, where Republican, and some Democratic, lawmakers are “proposing sweeping voucher bills and nudging school choice into conversations about the 2016 primaries.”
According to a report from Education Week, congressional Republicans leading the effort to rewrite the nation’s federal education policy, called No Child Left Behind, are “intent on drafting the most-conservative version of the federal K-12 law possible,” which would include a voucher-like scheme allowing federal money designated as Title I funds, the program for schools with low-income students, “to follow those students to the school of their choice, including private schools.”
In fact, working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives currently is a bill called the Student Success Act that would provide for this “Title I Portability.” In the U.S. Senate, according to Education Week, Title I Portability is also included in a draft bill to rewrite NCLB introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.
“Everyone should care and learn about Title I Portability,” warns public school advocate Jan Resseger on Public School Shakedown, a blog site operated by the Progressive magazine.
Resseger points to a statement by the National Coalition for Public Education stating, “This proposal would undermine Title I’s fundamental purpose of assisting public schools with high concentrations of poverty and high-need students.” Resseger also cites, from the Center on American Progress, a brief opposing Title I Portability. “According to CAP,” Resseger explains, Title I Portability would be “Robin Hood in Reverse … taking from the poor and giving to the rest,” ignoring the long-known fact that socioeconomic isolation has a devastating impact, as, on average, “school districts with highly concentrated family poverty would lose $85 per student while more affluent school districts would gain, on average, $290 per student.”
Despite the damage that Title I Portability could do to public schools serving our most high-needs students, charter school advocates appear to back the measure, according to a recent post at Education Week. “By and large, we feel that when the dollars follow children to the school that they select, you create a better marketplace for reform,” the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Nina Rees is quoted.
What about those charters that continue to commit waste and fraud while they funnel public money into privately operated businesses? Will “the market will take care of that”?
Where Choice Fails
Back to the Tillis Rule, consider another example of leaving public health policy up to individual choice: the recent measles outbreak.
That outbreak made it abundantly clear that where parents have the good fortune to be “safe in the herd” of vaccinated children, they often don’t feel an obligation to vaccinate their own offspring.
One can be sympathetic to parents with religious beliefs, or parents who simply hate seeing their babies being stuck with needles, and still justifiably point out to those parents that their “principles” come at the expense of other people’s potential inconvenience, expense and, possibly, suffering.
If those parents lived in a very different country that didn’t provide safety in the herd – or, in the case of Sen. Tillis, didn’t provide for basic sanitation – they’d probably feel quite differently about imposed health regulations.
Certainly comparing healthcare policy to education is not a false equivalency. The two policy arenas are strongly interrelated. The positive correlation between numbers of years of education to healthcare outcomes is well documented.
Further, parents clustered around schools often may share the same information and attitudes, which also can affect health outcomes.
In the case of the recent measles outbreak in California, University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen took numbers initially crunched by Duke University sociology professor Kieran Healy and found, “Runaway vaccine exemptions are problems of the private and charter schools … The average charter school kindergartner goes to school with classmates almost five times more likely to be non-vaccinated; and charter school kids are more than 3-times as likely to be in class with 5 percent or more kids exempt.”
As Cohen revealed, charter schools he examined have “fewer kids eligible for free-lunch than regular public schools (43 percent versus 55 percent). … Rich charter schools on average have the highest [vaccine] exemption rates, while poor schools – charter or not – are heavily clustered around zero.”
Cohen concluded, “Because they are more parent-driven, or targeted at certain types of parents, charter schools are more ideologically homogeneous. And because anti-vaccine ideology is concentrated among richer parents, charter schools provide them with a fertile breeding ground in which to generate and transmit anti-vaccine ideas.” (H/T Ron Wile.)
Better Than Choice: A Guarantee
Tillis Rule notwithstanding, most people understand that public health policy should be guided not by desires to maximize personal choice but by the need to guarantee public safety and wellbeing. That guarantee, rather than the maximization of choice, is what makes it possible to have the freedom to conduct commerce, live and work safely in our communities, and move about freely in society.
Why should that guarantee we insist on for public health be any different from what we insist on for public education?
Instead, with today’s school choice crowd, children’s guaranteed access to high-quality public education appears to be no longer the goal – either by policy or practice.
Under the Tillis Rule, it’s assumed some schools will be allowed to remain lousy at least for some substantial period of time (how long is anyone’s guess), while “the money follows the child,” “people vote with their feet” and “the market works.”
Any negative consequences to those students and families unlucky or unfortunate enough to be stuck in the not-so-good schools – after all, it’s impossible for every family to get into the “best school” – seem to not matter one whit.
And that’s really sick.
Source
Warren met privately with 'Draft Warren' supporters
Elizabeth Warren says she has no intention of jumping into the 2016 race, but she recently met behind closed doors with...
Elizabeth Warren says she has no intention of jumping into the 2016 race, but she recently met behind closed doors with members of a movement that’s urging her to run.
The Massachusetts senator held a private meeting April 22 with a small group of progressive leaders from across the country — including some vocal “Run Warren Run” supporters who continue to hold out hope that she’ll enter the presidential race.
In an hourlong meeting with her staff and a 30-minute meeting with Warren, the group of about a half-dozen top progressive activists — including three who are active in the movement — did not discuss the draft campaign. Instead, the conversation focused on issues of social and racial justice. The activists highlighted specific issues the senator can use to influence the presidential debate in 2016 and, they hope, push Hillary Clinton to the left on issues including police brutality, immigration reform, prison privatization, and reducing fees to promote naturalized citizenship, among others.
The meeting’s purpose was to see “how Elizabeth Warren, with her platform, could work with us to move a progressive vision for the country and really engage with communities of color,” said attendee Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change. “That goes hand in hand with what she’s already doing.” Warren is addressing problems that are “part and parcel of what we believe is wrong with this country,” he said.
An aide to Warren maintained that the senator did not know the group she was meeting with had any connection to the Run Warren Run campaign until POLITICO informed her office. “The point of the meeting was to discuss economic and social justice issues,” the aide said. “As Sen. Warren has said many times, she does not support the draft group’s efforts and is not running for president.”
But Westin is a vocal supporter of the campaign to draft Warren and, as a co-chair of New York’s Working Families Party, voted last February for the political party to join the “Run Warren Run” coalition. Just weeks before the sit-down with Warren, he wrote a blog post for MoveOn.org calling for her to run for president. His co-author on the piece, Katelyn Johnson, executive director of Chicago’s Action Now Institute, also attended the sit-down with Warren.
“Elizabeth Warren is not the only candidate who could ensure a robust presidential primary, but she is the best,” they wrote. “[Warren] is the one who can truly give Clinton a run for the money and yes, even has a shot to win the nomination. We urge Warren to acknowledge the importance of this political moment and enter the race.”
At the meeting with Warren, they were also joined by Daniel Altschuler, managing director of the Make the Road Action Fund, which is also on the advisory council of the Working Families Party and supports the draft Warren movement. But no effort was made during the meeting to urge the senator to enter the race.
“This was about someone who we want to be sharing the issues that are affecting communities of color and working-class communities to make her the strongest possible champion on those issues,” Altschuler said. “The senator has been a tremendous champion on issues of the financial system run amok and income inequality. We think that a lot of the issues affecting our communities are tied to those big financial systems; we wanted to share some of the issues we’re working on.”
Some in the group — which included Shabnam Bashiri from Rise Up Georgia; Bill Bartlett from Action United, a Pennsylvania group; and Brian Kettenring, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy — privately pointed out that November 2016 is a long way off and insisted there is still plenty of time for Warren her to get in the race if she decides to do so.
If Warren wants the group to stand down, the meeting with some of its diehard supporters did little to advance that goal.
“I would still love to see her run for president,” said Westin, speaking after the meeting. “Connecting with the grass-roots groups is a very big piece of how we continue to amplify her message. People are getting away with murder — literally and figuratively, on Wall Street.”
The Run Warren Run campaign was launched in December by Democracy for America and MoveOn and coordinates with Ready for Warren, another group urging the senator to run. In a letter to the Federal Election Commission from her attorney last August regarding the Ready for Warren PAC, Warren said she “does not, explicitly or implicitly, authorize, endorse, or otherwise approve of the organization’s formation or activities.”
But many who met with her last month share the position that Clinton needs a serious primary challenger.
“The Democratic Party needs a contested primary,” said Jennifer Epps-Addison, director of Wisconsin Jobs Now, who also was in the Warren meeting. “Black folks in our communities have been systematically attacked. It’s not simply about police brutality. Our goal in talking to Warren was to make those connections the same way we did during the civil rights movement.” She said her goal is to get Warren “to be talking about racial justice as part of her progressive message.”
While she is not part of the movement to draft Warren, Epps-Addison added, “We feel that many Democrats are not speaking truthfully to the values that many of the base and voters are concerned about, including black folks.”
In the absence of a competitive Democratic primary, however, some progressives are hoping they can at least push Warren to be the party’s agenda-setter.
“For Sen. Warren, you’re seeing her evolve from a very effective advocate on a set of issues into more of a movement leader and a party leadership role,” said Kettenring. “We’re all evolving, and she is, too. That’s part of the dynamic at work here. Some of the people I know who were in the ‘draft Warren’ movement are people we work with and know, because they’re part of the broader progressive ecosystem. I’d say more of us are stepping up to define the terms of the debate.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/warren-met-privately-with-draft-warren-supporters-117671
Avoiding 'Regressive Mistake,' Fed Holds Off on Rate Hike — For Now
Update 3 PM EDT: In a decision that aligns with progressive demands, the Federal Reserve ...
Update 3 PM EDT:
In a decision that aligns with progressive demands, the Federal Reserve announced on Thursday that it would keep interest rates near zero in light of "recent global economic and financial developments" and in order to "support continued progress toward maximum employment and price stability."
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders issued the following statement today after the Federal Reserve announced that it would hold off on raising interest rates:
“It is good news that the Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates today. At a time when real unemployment is over 10 percent, we need to do everything possible to create millions of good-paying jobs and raise the wages of the American people. It is now time for the Fed to act with the same sense of urgency to rebuild the disappearing middle class as it did to bail out Wall Street banks seven years ago.”
The New York Times reports that the Fed’s decision, "widely expected by investors, showed that officials still lacked confidence in the strength of the domestic economy even as the central bank has entered its eighth year of overwhelming efforts to stimulate growth."
Progressives cheered the news, with Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute saying, "Today’s decision by the Federal Reserve to keep short-term rates unchanged is welcome. [...] We hope they continue their pragmatic, data-based approach and allow unemployment to keep moving lower, and only tighten after there is a significant and durable increase in inflation."
He continued: "Tightening before the economy has reached genuine full-employment is not just a mistake, it’s a regressive mistake that would hurt the most vulnerable workers—low-wage earners and workers from communities of color—the most."
However, Reuters reports that "the central bank maintained its bias toward a rate hike sometime this year, while lowering its long-term outlook for the economy."
Which means that pro-worker organizations, which have largely opposed a rate increase that they say would slow the economy and stifle wage growth, will have to keep up the fight.
"We applaud Chair Yellen and the Federal Reserve for resisting the pressure being put on them to intentionally slow down the economy," said Ady Barkan, campaign director for the Fed Up coalition, which rallied outside the Federal Reserve on Thursday.
"Weak wage growth proves that the labor market is still very far from full employment," Barkan continued. "And with inflation still below the Fed’s already low target, there is simply no reason to raise interest rates anytime soon. Across America, working families know that the economy still has not recovered. We hope that the Fed continues to look at the data and refrain from any rate hikes until we reach genuine full employment for all, particularly for the Black and Latino communities who are being left behind in this so-called recovery."
Earlier...
Progressives are cautioning the U.S. Federal Reserve against slowing the economy by raising interest rates "prematurely"—a decision the Fed will announce Thursday.
The U.S. central bank will issue its highly anticipated short-term interest rate decision following a two-day policy meeting, with a 2 pm news conference led by Fed Chair Janet Yellen.
As CBS Moneywatch notes, "[t]he decision affects everything from the returns people get on their bank deposits to how much consumers and employers pay for credit cards, mortgages, small business loans, and student debt." That's because a higher rate makes it more expensive for individuals and businesses to borrow, with rising bank lending rates shrinking the nation's money supply and pushing up rates for mortgages, credit cards, and other loans.
Just before the announcement, the advocates, economists, and workers of the Fed Up coalition will be joined by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) at a rally outside the Fed, calling on the central bank to keep interest rates low to allow for more jobs and higher wages.
"The point of raising rates is to rein in an overheating economy that is threatening to push inflation outside the Fed’s comfort zone," explained Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. "But inflation has been running below the Fed’s target for years—and its recent moves have been down, not up."
Furthermore, wrote economist Joseph Stiglitz at the Guardian earlier this month: "If the Fed focuses excessively on inflation, it worsens inequality, which in turn worsens overall economic performance. Wages falter during recessions; if the Fed then raises interest rates every time there is a sign of wage growth, workers’ share will be ratcheted down—never recovering what was lost in the downturn."
Progressive activists opposed to an interest rate hike overwhelmed the Fed's public comment system on Monday in a last-minute effort to sway the central bank. Raising the rate, they said, would be catastrophic for working families, particularly in communities of color that are still struggling. The Fed Up campaign, which includes groups like the Center for Popular Democracy, Economic Policy Institute, and CREDO Action, say the central bank "privileges the voices and needs of corporate elites rather than those of America's working families."
"A higher interest rate means that fewer jobs will be created, and that the wages of workers at the bottom will remain too low to live on," wrote Rod Adams, a member of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change in Minneapolis, in an op-ed published Wednesdayat Common Dreams. "That’s because when the Fed raises rates, they are deliberately trying to slow down the economy. They’re saying that there are too many jobs and wages are too high. They’re saying that the economy is exactly where it should be, that people like me are exactly where we should be."
However, at this point, "many observers believe the Fed will not raise rates this week," analyst Richard Eskow wrote on Wednesday.
"The Fed is really the central bank of the world. If the Fed raise rates a little bit, it will have an impact all over the world, particularly in emerging markets," billionaire private equity professional David Rubenstein told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday.
"I think the Fed is sensitive to that," Rubenstein said, "and I think therefore the Fed is likely to wait for another month or two to get additional data and probably telegraph a little bit better than it has now that it's about ready to do it at a particular time."
Meanwhile, global markets are fluctuating wildly in anticipation of Yellen's announcement and subsequent news conference.
But as Eskow noted, Thursday's real surprise "is that there’s any question at all what [the Fed] will do. That suggests that our economic debate is not yet grounded in economic reality, at least as most Americans experience it."
While the Guardian is providing live updates on the Fed's decision, others are making comment under hashtags that reflect the unbalanced economic recovery:
Source: CommonDreams
Charter Schools and the Waltons Take Little Rock Back to its Segregated Past
Charter Schools and the Waltons Take Little Rock Back to its Segregated Past
Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High...
Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. But the story of Little Rock and segregation badly needs updating.
Central High became one of the first practical tests of principles established in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned racially separate public schools. When nine black students showed up for opening day of the historically all-white school, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to prevent them from entering. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by calling in federal troops to escort the students into the school, and Faubus eventually backed down.
But the story of racial integration in Little Rock shouldn't be confined to Central High. The same year Central was integrated, another school, Hall High, opened in the all-white part of town with an all white student body. Hall would not integrate until 1959 (Faubus closed all Little Rock high schools in school year 1958-59 to protest federal intervention), when three black girls were allowed to attend.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, through busing and other efforts, Hall had become a more racially diverse school, according to Kathy Webb, who graduated from Hall in 1967.* Webb, who is white, currently represents Ward 3 on the Little Rock City Board and has served in the Arkansas state legislature.
In a phone conversation, Webb tells me that she remembers Hall High as a racially diverse school with an academically solid reputation and a relatively high graduation rate. But then, she notes, something happened: Hall High underwent a profound change.
By 2002, when Webb returned to live in Little Rock after decades away, Hall looked more like a school from the segregationist past than the model of progressive integratio it had once been. Today, the student population of Hall is just 5 percent white, with 70 percent of students having incomes low enough to receive free or reduced price lunch. Hall has also become a school with a reputation for low academic achievement, and in 2014, the state placed Hall on a list of six Little Rock schools in "academic distress."
And while Central High continues to be more racially balanced—54 percent black, 34 percent white—Little Rock School District as a whole is racially imbalanced, as CNN recently reported, with a school population that is 70 percent black in a city that is 55 percent white.
"People have been oblivious to this," Webb says about the re-segregation of the community and Hall High in particular.
What happened to Hall High is an example of what has been happening nationwide, according to a flurry of high profile media stories. Progress on racial integration in schools achieved during the Civil Rights period has gradually eroded, and in many cities, schools are now nearly as racially divided as they were 40 years ago.
"Integration as a constitutional mandate, as justice for black and Latino children, as a moral righting of past wrongs, is no longer our country’s stated goal," writes Nikole Hannah-Jones for the New York Times Magazine.
Hannah-Jones explains how, despite research studies showing the negative effects of racially segregated schools on children's education and long term success, Republican presidents since Eisenhower have appointed conservative Supreme Court judges who have whittled away at court-ordered integration plans until "legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again."
But lengthy presentations of statistical data and litanies of high court decisions tend to overlook places where the fight to uphold the vision of a pluralistic school system is still very much alive—places like Little Rock, where the fight is still going on. The fight is inflamed with the same themes from when Ike invaded the district; the belief that "separate would never be equal" and that deep divisions in society have to be overcome by intentional policy decisions.
But now, the actors have changed. This time, those being accused of segregating students aren't local bigots. Instead, Little Rock citizens see segregation as being imposed upon them by outsiders, operating under the guise of a reform agenda.
In this conflict, the issue of local control—the cause Faubus and white Little Rock citizens held high in their fight against federal intervention—has been completely turned on its head, with the state government teaming up with wealthy allies to remove decision-making power from the community. And new entities, such as charter schools (publicly funded schools that are privately operated) and private foundations controlled by a small number of rich people, sow divisions in the community.
Once again, the fate of Little Rock's schools is a test of principles that may be adopted nationwide; only this time, in an effort to divide communities rather than unite them.
‘We Are Retreating to 1957’
"Most people [here] have been escaping rather than preparing for how to confront a world that is becoming more diverse," Arkansas State Senator Joyce Elliott tells me in a phone conversation. Elliott, who is black, is a Democratic member of the Arkansas Senate, representing the 31st District, which includes part of Little Rock.
The means of escape in Little Rock has changed over time, according to Elliott. Private schools enabling white flight from LRSD proliferated in the 1970s and '80s. In addition, district leaders, pressured by wealthy white citizens, redrew attendance zones to separate neighborhoods and avoid busing, a practice still in use today.
As John Kirk and Jess Porter explain in an overview of Little Rock's struggle with segregation appearing in the Arkansas Times, the city has been racially divided for decades by interstate highways, housing policies, and urban planning. Kirk and Porter, both history professors at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, note that segregation has been "consciously created by public policy, with private sector collusion."
"We are retreating to 1957," Elliott believes. Only now, instead of using Jim Crow and white flight, or housing and highways, the new segregationists have other tools at their disposal. First, education funding cuts have made competition for resources more intense, with wider disparities along racial lines. Second, recent state takeover of the district has spread a sense throughout the community of having lost control of its education destiny. Parents, local officials, and community activists continuously describe change as something being done to them rather than with them. And third, an aggressive charter school sector that competes with local public schools for resources and students further divides the community.
And lurking in the background of anything having to do with Little Rock school politics is the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic organization connected to the family that owns the Walmart retail chain, whose headquarters is in Bentonville, Arkansas.
A Struggle Over Resources
Arkansas is one of the many states that funds schools less than it did before the Great Recession. According to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2008 and 2014, school funding in Arkansas declined by more than 9 percent, while during those same years, student enrollment grew by 1.5 percent, according to the most recent measures and projections by the federal government.
Although the state's economy has recovered somewhat from the downturn, the state's politically conservative leadership continues to make cuts to public schools. The budget austerity is particularly harmful to schools that serve higher percentages of low-income children, as Little Rock's does.
According to a district-by-district map of poverty rates created by EdBuild, an education finance reform consultancy, the Little Rock School District, and its adjacent North Little Rock neighbor, are tasked with educating some of the poorest students in the state, with poverty rates of 26.9 percent and 33 percent, respectively, compared to school districts surrounding them, where poverty rates are much lower, around 17 percent.
State budget cuts prompted a $40 million decrease in school spending in Little Rock in early 2015. Then, later that year, a federal judge overturned the state's long-standing obligation to help fund Little Rock's expenses for desegregation. The payments had amounted to more than $1 billion in 60 years. That additional cut helped prompt another round of spending decreases in 2016.
"We are constantly having our resources taken away," Toney Orr tells me in a phone interview. "Families with means are moving on" to higher wealth schools that surround the district. "But if you’re a family without means, you can't move on," he says.
Orr, an African American father of twin sons in the Little Rock schools, tells me the general lack of resources in the district is leading to a more segregated system as "power struggles between the haves and the have-nots" have intensified.
An article in The Atlantic cites from a lawsuit brought by Little Rock parents that found huge differences between resources in schools with very high percentages of black students versus schools that enroll mostly white students. School conditions and access to computers vary considerably, with schools that are mostly white students having newer, cleaner buildings and plentiful computers while schools with almost all-black and brown students are more apt to be in decaying and decrepit buildings with few computers.
"We have created the conditions for undermining the schools," state senator Elliott says in describing the lack of resources in Little Rock schools, especially those serving low-income, non-white children.
For her part, Elliott has pushed for increases in education spending, particularly for a statewide early childhood education program for low-income kids and for dyslexia interventions in schools. Her Republican colleagues in state government tend to oppose these measures.
'A Very Racist Decision'
Not only does Little Rock have fewer resources for schools, local citizens now have less say in determining how those resources are managed.
In January 2015, the state board of education, an appointed board whose members are selected by the governor, voted to take over the district, dissolve the locally elected school board, and hand authority over to a governor-appointed Education Commissioner.
The takeover, according to an Arkansas independent news outlet, was justified largely on the basis of a previous decision to designate six schools, including Hall High School, as academically distressed. The same news article quotes a Little Rock minister calling the state takeover, "a very racist decision.”
Why racist? State takeovers have been occurring for years, for many reasons, but "racial issues" have long cast a "cloud" over these actions, according to a report by Education Week in 1998. That article quotes numerous sources who argue takeover efforts frequently have "singled out predominantly minority districts and violated the rights of voters to choose their local education policymakers."
The reporter cites survey results showing "out of 21 districts that have ceded power to mayors or state agencies in recent years … all but three have predominantly minority enrollments, and most are at least 80 percent nonwhite. Of eight districts that have been threatened with takeovers, all but two have populations that are predominantly minority, and three are at least 93 percent nonwhite."
More recently, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a national alliance of 10 community organizations and rights groups, published a report titled, ”Out of Control: The Systemic Disenfranchisement of African American and Latino Communities Through School Takeovers." The report examined state takeovers of local schools in New Jersey, Louisiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania and found takeovers consistently produce increased racial segregation and loss of public institutions in communities of color.
Earlier this year, AROS director Keron Blair, in an article in Think Progress, compared takeovers "in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the voter ID laws that prevent many people of color from casting a ballot, saying they are both examples of distrusting people of color to govern themselves."
Proponents of the takeover of LRSD deny race has anything to do with their actions, and claim that state takeover is simply about improving academics. But there are plenty of reasons to doubt this claim.
‘No Clear Evidence’: What Takeovers Don’t Do
"The rationale for the state takeover was never about academic distress," says Arkansas State Senator Linda Chesterfield, who represents District 30 that includes part of Little Rock. In a phone conversation, she tells me that the Little Rock district—Arkansas' largest—consists of 48 schools in all, some of which had been awarded for being the "most improved" schools in the state, including one of the schools deemed academically distressed.
Adding to Chesterfield's suspicion is the fact that just 15 percent of the schools in Little Rock were judged to be in academic distress, while other districts have higher percentages of struggling schools. In Forest City, for example, three of the district’s seven schools have been labeled academically distressed. In Blytheville, the district's only middle school and only high school are labeled academically distressed. And in Pine Bluff, the district's only high school and one of the two middle schools are labeled academically distressed. Proportionally, Little Rock doesn’t even come close.
Whatever intentions drove the decision, an additional problem is this: state takeovers of local schools have rarely produced academic improvements.
A recent report, “State Takeovers Of Low-Performing Schools,” examines the track record of district and school takeovers in states that have employed this governance method the longest: Louisiana, Michigan and Tennessee. The report concludes, “There is no clear evidence that takeover districts actually achieve their stated goals of radically improving performance at failing schools.”
The report, by the Center for Popular Democracy, finds that wherever the state takeovers occur, “Children have seen negligible improvement—or even dramatic setbacks—in their educational performance.”
A ‘Sharecropper’ School District
What state school district takeovers can do very well, though, is disenfranchise local voters.
As Senator Chesterfield, who was a school board member before running for statewide office, explains, "With [elected] school boards, you have a person you can go to if you have a complaint." But in a state takeover situation, "You can't go to the state commissioner."
"We've been turned into a sharecropper school district," says Orr.
Orr’s reference is to the agricultural system that emerged in America's post-Civil War Reconstruction period where white landowners, instead of giving up property to freed blacks, allowed former slaves to stay on the white man's land as long as the black farmers—and some poor white farmers—turned over a portion of their crops each year to the owner.
In Orr's sharecropper analogy, he likens state education commissioner Johnny Key to the landowner and the appointed superintendents that have churned through the system as the field bosses. In a sharecropper arrangement, "The landowner gave you what he thought you deserved," Orr explains. And in the case of Little Rock, what the district seems to "deserve" is less voice in how the district is run.
The disenfranchisement of Little Rock citizens became especially apparent recently, when Commissioner Key suddenly, and without explanation, terminated the contract of Baker Kurrus, until then the superintendent of the Little Rock School District. (Key had originally appointed Kurrus himself.)
As veteran local journalist for the Arkansas Times Max Brantley explains, Kurrus was initially regarded with suspicion due to the takeover and the fact he was given the helm despite his lack of education background. But Kurrus had gradually earned the respect of locals due to his tireless outreach to the community and evenhanded treatment of oppositional points of view.
But many observers of school politics in Little Rock speculate Kurrus was terminated because he warned that charter school expansions would further strain resources in the district. In advising against expansions of these schools, Kurrus shared data showing charter school tend to under-enroll students with disabilities and low income kids.
He came to view charter schools as a "parallel school system" that would add to the district's outlays for administration and facilities instead of putting more money directly into classroom instruction.
"It makes no sense" to expand charter schools, he is quoted as telling the local NPR outlet. “You’d never build two water systems and then see which one worked … That’s essentially what we’re doing” by expanding charters.
Kurrus also came to believe that increasing charter school enrollments would increase segregation in the city.
"Kurrus amassed significant data illustrating that charter schools have tended to take higher income and white students from the LRSD … further segregating education," Brantley reports. "Compared to the LRSD," Brantley adds, "eStem and LISA [the predominant charter networks in the city] contain lower percentages of children who live in poverty, African-American and Hispanic students, English-language learners and special education students – all of which give the charters a strong demographic edge.
Because of the state takeover and subsequent firing of Kurrus, the citizens of Arkansas are "basically powerless," says Kathy Webb, when it comes to governing their own schools.
"I don't see a master plan for fixing the district," says Antwan Phillips. Phillips is a Little Rock attorney and currently serves on an advisory board for the schools. (He was appointed by Kurrus.)
In a phone conversation, he tells me that if the district were a sick patient visiting a doctor, there would be some kind of diagnosis and prescription, yet none of that has been put forward by the state. And although there may not be a declared plan for Little Rock schools, the undeclared plan seems to call for rapid expansion of charter schools.
'A Parallel School System’
Charter schools existed in Little Rock before the state took over the district. But many people in the city believe the purpose of the takeover is to expand these charters further and add new ones.
The two most influential charter networks in the city, eStem and LISA, both started before the state takeover but were recently expanded by the state oversight board, despite an outpouring of opposition from the community. The expansions will double student enrollment in both charter networks. A third charter school has been given a three-year extension despite "struggling academically," according to a local reporter.
The takeover "is about money," Chesterfield claims. She points to the district's annual budget of $319 million – the largest in the state – and asks, "Why else would LRSD become the focal point of charters" when there are other districts with higher percentages of struggling schools and other districts with significant achievement gaps?
There's certainly not a lot of evidence that expanding charter schools will improve the overall academic performance of the district.
A report on the academic performance of charters throughout the state of Arkansas in 2008-2009 found, "Arkansas’ charter schools do not outperform their traditional school peers," when student demographics are taken into account. (As the report explains, "several demographic factors" – such as race, poverty, and ethnicity, – strongly correlate with lower scores on standardized tests and other measures of achievement.)
Specifically in Little Rock, the most recent comparison of charter school performance to public schools shows that a number of LRSD public schools, despite having similar or more challenging student demographics, out-perform LISA and eStem charters.
There's also evidence charter schools add to the segregation of Little Rock. Soon after the decision to expand these schools, the LISA network blanketed the district with a direct mail marketing campaign that blatantly omitted the poor, heavily black and Latino parts of the city, according to an investigation by the Arkansas Times.
The charter network's executives eventually apologized for the selective mailing. In their apology, they admitted working with state education officials—the very people who are tasked with overseeing charter operations—on a marketing plan that relegated low-income households to digital-only advertising, which makes no sense because these homes are the least apt to have computers and Internet connections.
With so much evidence that charter schools are both underperforming academically and increasing segregation in Little Rock, it’s worth asking: why is this expansion happening?
What Walton Wants
What's happening to Little Rock is "happening everywhere," according to Julie Johnson Holt, a Little Rock resident with children who went through the public schools in the district.
Holt, who is white, now runs a public relations consultancy but is the former communications director for the Arkansas Attorney General and the Department of Education.
More specifically, what's happening in Little Rock, according to Holt, is the outcome of a well-financed and strategically operated effort to target the community for large charter school expansions. "The charter movement has gotten very organized and very determined," she observes.
Holt attributes much of the strategy and wealth behind the effort to expand charter schools in Little Rock to the Walton Family Foundation, whose influence "is much bigger than I realized" she says, recalling her days working inside state government.
Indeed, the Waltons' influence features prominently in virtually every major decision concerning state governance of LRSD.
In the state board's vote to take over the district, as Brantley reports for the Times, members who voted yes had family ties to and business relationships with organizations either financed by the Walton Foundation or working in league with the Waltons to advocate for charter schools.
In another recent analysis in the Times, reporter Benjamin Hardy traces recent events back to a bill in the state legislature in 2015, HB 1733, that "originated with a Walton-affiliated education lobbyist." That bill would have allowed an outside non-profit to operate any school district taken over by the state. The bill died in committee when unified opposition from the Little Rock delegation combined with public outcry to cause legislators to waver in their support.
So what the Waltons couldn't accomplish with legislation like HB 1733 they are currently accomplishing by influencing official administration actions, including taking out Kurrus and expanding charters across the city.
In one case, as Brantley reports again, a Little Rock charter is being expanded via the waiving of certain state requirements – thereby allowing the expansion to be "fast-tracked."
Brantley notes the expansion is being enabled through relocation to a new, larger site in close proximity to an existing public school that is considered "struggling" but is actually higher-rated than the charter school by the state's school evaluation system. The new site is owned by a leasing agent with an address "that happens to be the mailing address for Walton Enterprises, the holding company for the vast wealth of Walton heirs."
Most recently, WFF announced it would commit $250 million to help charter schools in 17 urban district finance access to facilities. One of the urban districts Walton intends to target is Little Rock.
So what are Waltons' intentions for Little Rock? Do they really want to re-segregate schools and take the community back to 1957?
In a recent investigative article I wrote on the influence of the Walton Foundation on education policy, I asked Jeffrey R. Henig what motivates the Waltons' efforts. Henig is a political science and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and a co-editor of the book The New Education Philanthropy.
Henig believes the goal the Waltons have in mind is for school districts across the country to be more decentralized and for the expansion of charters to allow for more "more variety" of schools, especially for schools that reflect "differing value systems or ideas of what is a good school."
One of the "value systems" Henig believes the Waltons would like to see more accommodated in public education is more schools that are "rooted in conservative tradition."
It's not hard to believe that an accommodation of more conservative tradition in public education, especially in the South, is the same thing as what Senator Elliott calls "the Old Southern economic structure."
She adds, "We know how that movie ends."
It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
Of course, the movie doesn’t have to end that way.
Arkansas state lawmakers can choose to bring education funding back to levels at least as generous as what was spent in 2008. The funding can be made more equitable by having in place distribution formulas that ensure money goes to schools that need it most.
Also, state leadership can choose to return control of LRSD to a locally elected school board and give people in Little Rock the power to determine the role of charter schools in the district.
And the citizens of Little Rock will need to choose whether to be further divided or unify in support of their historic public schools.
"I'd like to see people in Little Rock deliberately want to have children go to school together," says Elliott.
There are signs Little Rock may be doing that. As Times reporter Hardy notes in his analysis cited above, there is a unified energy throughout all racial populations in the community to take back control of their schools.
"There's been an awakening," city director Kath Webb agrees, noting the number of Hall High School alums who now volunteer in the school to mentor and tutor students and support school events.
When people living around Hall High, where Webb lives, considered renaming the Hall High Neighborhood Association to something that didn’t include the school name, homeowners decided otherwise and retained Hall High.
And the school itself, despite being stigmatized with the label of "failure" and being redesigned around racial imbalance, has chosen to keep in its mission statement a commitment to being a place for "positive learning" and "diverse cultures."
Political leaders in Arkansas should support that mission too.
*Correction: The original version of this article stated that Hall High diversified in the late 1960s. It has been corrected to indicate that that transformation happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
By JEFF BRYANT
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