Statement on Gov. Cuomo’s Support for a $15 Minimum Wage in New York State
“This is a victory for workers who have fought for a decent wage against all odds. Workers just want the opportunity to sustain themselves, and to break from barriers that keep wages low and...
“This is a victory for workers who have fought for a decent wage against all odds. Workers just want the opportunity to sustain themselves, and to break from barriers that keep wages low and opportunities out of reach.
Our partner organizations, New York Communities for Change (NYCC) and Make the Road New York (MRNY) played an integral role in this fight. Thousands of workers have stood up across the state -- fast food workers, carwash workers, restaurant workers and other low-wage workers have mobilized, testified, shared their stories, and demanded decent wages.
“Today’s announcement from Gov. Cuomo, in line with our longstanding demands, shows our movement’s growing strength. History and momentum are on our side. We will not slow down until we win a fair wage, and a voice at work, for all families - in New York and beyond.”
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www.populardemocracy.org
The Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda.
U.S. Cities Issue IDs to Protect Undocumented Immigrants
U.S. Cities Issue IDs to Protect Undocumented Immigrants
To help combat such unintended outcomes, the Center for Popular Democracy has consulted with policymakers and advocates—including those from Poughkeepsie—who seek to start municipal ID programs....
To help combat such unintended outcomes, the Center for Popular Democracy has consulted with policymakers and advocates—including those from Poughkeepsie—who seek to start municipal ID programs. In 2015, the organization published a municipal ID toolkit listing a series of best practices for local governments to follow.
Read the full article here.
Blowback for SEC from whistleblower
Blowback for SEC from whistleblower
BLOWBACK FOR SEC FROM WHISTLEBLOWER: A whistleblower is calling foul on the SEC. Our Patrick Temple-West writes: “A whistleblower who said he is due an $8.25 million reward from the Securities and...
BLOWBACK FOR SEC FROM WHISTLEBLOWER: A whistleblower is calling foul on the SEC. Our Patrick Temple-West writes: “A whistleblower who said he is due an $8.25 million reward from the Securities and Exchange Commission said he is refusing the cash because of concerns that the agency failed to prosecute top executives at Deutsche Bank. … Ben-Artzi said he was fired after raising concerns with the way Deutsche was valuing its derivatives. In its settlement with Deutsche, the SEC alleged the company overvalued its derivatives holdings during the worst days of the 2008 financial crisis. … ‘Although I need the money now more than ever, I will not join the looting of the very people I was hired to protect,’” Ben-Artzi wrote in The Financial Times. A Deutsche Bank spokesman declined to comment.
Andrew Ceresney, the SEC's current enforcement director: “We brought all of the charges supported by the evidence and the law, which were unanimously approved by the Commission.”
TGIF! — Happy Friday. You’ve almost made it through the week without the incomparable Morning Money Ben. The Pro Financial Services team will be filling in again for him next week, so please send tips to Financial Services editor Mark McQuillan: mmcquillan@politico.com. Follow me on Twitter @vtg2.
THIS MORNING ON POLITICO PRO FINANCIAL SERVICES – Patrick Temple-West on CFTC charges of swaps-reporting violations against Deutsche Bank -- and to get Morning Money every day before 6 a.m. -- please contact Pro Services at (703) 341-4600 or info@politicopro.com.
FED UP GOING TO JACKSON — The Fed Up coalition will hold a series of events in Jackson, Wyo., next week, including an on-the-record meeting with Kansas City Fed President Esther George on Aug. 25, the coalition announced. Other Fed presidents and governors will also be attending the discussion. The docket includes a press conference and a demonstration, where members of the coalition (a marriage between unions and other community organizations) will “share their personal experiences seeking good-paying jobs in this economy and discuss the importance of diversity in Fed leadership for promoting high-quality governance and public policy.”
Don’t miss: Fed Up will also unveil a report outlining one of its central ideas: how to make the Fed a fully public institution. Its authors are Andrew Levin of Dartmouth and Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute.
Speaking of the Fed conference, three Democratic lawmakers on Thursday wrote to Fed Chair Janet Yellen, thanking her for the central bank’s focus on inequality and the impact of the economic recovery on neglected communities. “We are concerned, however, that some of your work may be undercut by the failure of all Federal Reserve entities to follow your lead,” they wrote, expressing worries that workers of color might have a harder time being heard at the Jackson Hole conference. Read the letter from Reps. John Conyers, Frederica Wilson and Marcy Kaptur here.
AIR FORCE ONE SCHEDULED FOR ASIA PIVOT — President Barack Obama is heading off to China early next month where he will participate in the G20 Leaders’ Summit, the White House announced Thursday. Obama will discuss the full gamut of international economic issues and hold “in-depth,” one-on-one meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Hangzhou.
MM prediction: Foreign exchange rate policies, the U.S.-China bilateral investment treaty, cyber issues and treatment of U.S. businesses abroad are just some of the hot financial topics that might be broached in those bilateral meetings.
The stop in China will be followed by a trip to Laos for the U.S.-ASEAN Summit and the East Asia Summit. The full trip, which comes amid efforts by the president to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal despite political headwinds from both sides of the aisle, will run from Sept. 2-9.
TRUMP A MERCER-NARY — From WSJ's Rebecca Ballhaus: "Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s latest staff shakeup reflects the growing behind-the-scenes influence of a wealthy backer relatively new in the nominee’s orbit: billionaire hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer. … He and his daughter, Rebekah, had recommended both Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon and Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, who already worked for the campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. The Mercers met privately with Mr. Trump at a fundraiser last weekend at the East Hampton, N.Y., home of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, according to a person at the event. … Top Trump donors said the staff reshuffling showed the Mercers’ widening role in the campaign." The article is here.
END OF AN ERA — Citigroup will have no more dedicated proprietary traders once Anna Raytcheva leaves at the end of this month, the WSJ reports. Raytcheva and the rest of her kind have been rendered increasingly obsolete at Citi and other large banks because of the Volcker rule, which banned most types of trades made by banks on their own behalf. She will be opening her own hedge fund next year, the veteran trader told WSJ.
WSJ’s Christina Rexrode writes: “The firm’s trading roots go back to Salomon Brothers, whose 1980s trading exploits were featured in the book ‘Liar’s Poker.’ That firm was ultimately folded into Citigroup, whose billions of dollars in trading losses during the financial crisis prompted repeated taxpayer-led bailouts. … Citigroup and other large banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley had multiple desks dedicated to the lucrative but risky practice before the financial crisis. But … to comply with the [Volcker] rule, Citigroup sold or spun off businesses, including an emerging-markets hedge fund and a private-equity unit. It also closed down Citi Principal Strategies, its dedicated proprietary trading desk, in January 2012.” Check out the story here.
FANNIE AND FREDDIE ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO — Per Bloomberg’s Joe Light: “Earth-movers are laying the foundations of a shiny new headquarters for Fannie Mae, the bailed-out giant of American mortgages. But the sleek design, replete with glass sky bridges, belies a sober reality: Fannie Mae and its cousin, Freddie Mac, are once again headed for trouble. … On Jan. 1, 2018, the two government-sponsored enterprises will officially run out of capital under the current terms of their bailout. After that, any losses would be shouldered by taxpayers. Granted, few people are predicting a disaster like the one in 2008, when the GSEs had to be thrown a $187.5 billion federal lifeline. But eight years later, people still don’t agree on what to do with these wards of the state.” Click here to read more.
ITALIAN BANKERS FACING SCRUTINY — Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena is in the news once again, this time because its CEO Fabrizio Viola and former Chairman Alessandro Profumo are being investigated for alleged false accounting and market manipulation, Reuters reports. The investigation comes just a couple of weeks after MPS announced that, with the help of JPMorgan Chase and Mediobanca, it will repackage 27-billion-Euros-worth of bad debt into securities worth a total net amount of 9.2 billion Euros.
From Reuters’ Silvia Ognibene: “The investigation, which started in 2015 following complaints filed by small shareholders and consumer associations, comes as the Tuscan bank prepares to launch a 5 billion Euro ($6 billion) stock sale after emerging as the weakest bank in Europe in industry stress tests in July. A spokesman for Monte dei Paschi said the decision to investigate Viola and Profumo followed a proposal by two shareholders to seek damages from the two executives which was rejected by other shareholders at an April meeting. … Being placed under investigation in Italy does not imply guilt and does not automatically lead to charges being laid.” More here.
A CLOSER LOOK AT LENDING CLUB — Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin on shady loans facilitated by Lending Club: “[Bryan] Sims decided to take a look at the hundreds of loans he’d invested in, arranging them in a spreadsheet … Two loans caught his eye. Both had been issued to individuals with the same employer in the same small town. So far, so coincidental. But looking deeper, Sims found that the salaries were nearly identical. Both borrowers had opened their first line of credit in the same month. This, Sims realized, is the same dude. It wasn’t a borrower who’d paid off one loan and happily returned for a second. It was one person with two active loans, and Lending Club was treating them as completely unrelated, charging wildly different interest rates. The borrower was paying about 15 percent interest on one loan of about $15,000; on the other, he was paying 9 percent on twice the principal. That meant the investors who held only the second loan were leaving money on the table. And Lending Club didn’t seem to be doing anything to help them.” Read the rest here.
‘LIKE’ IT OR NOT, FED’S ON FACEBOOK — Rounding out its social media presence, the Fed Board of Governors launched a Facebook page on Thursday. The central bank is already on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and — who knew — Flickr. Find its page here.
By VICTORIA GUIDA
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Rally Aims To Highlight Racial Employment Disparities In Metro Area
CBS Minnesota - March 4, 2015 - A report to be released on Thursday aims to highlight employment disparities in the Twin Cities.
The groups Neighborhoods Organizing for Change...
CBS Minnesota - March 4, 2015 - A report to be released on Thursday aims to highlight employment disparities in the Twin Cities.
The groups Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Economic Policy Institute say they plan to hold a rally at the Neighborhoods Organizing for Change offices on Thursday afternoon to draw attention to the racial differences between wages and jobs available here.
The groups say that, though the economy is adding jobs, the unemployment rate among black residents in the Twin Cities metro area is nearly four times that of white residents.
The groups said that the racial disparities on display in Minnesota are “among the worst in the nation.”
The rally is scheduled for 3 p.m.
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Language access order faces hurdles in implementation
Epoch Times – August 5, 2013, by Genevieve Belmaker - New York State residents with limited English language proficiency still face problems with access to government services, according to a new...
Epoch Times – August 5, 2013, by Genevieve Belmaker - New York State residents with limited English language proficiency still face problems with access to government services, according to a new study.
More than 2 million people in New York State have limited English proficiency (LEP), according to Make the Road New York (MRNY), an immigrant advocacy organization that has partnered with The Center for Popular Democracy to complete the study.
Despite the number of people with LEP and the 2011 executive order 26 issued by New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo for better provision of services, they still face many barriers accessing services.
Cuomo’s order requires that all state agencies that have direct public contact translate vital documents into the state’s top six LEP languages. The order also requires that interpretation and transportation services be provided in native languages if needed. But the study found two years later, that requirement has still not been fully implemented.
“There’s a growing number of cases where they are asking people to bring someone [for interpretation],” said Cornelia Brown, founder and executive director of the Multicultural Association of Medical Interpreters. “The one exception might be the Child Protective Services.”
Brown, who was speaking as part of a Monday, Aug. 5 conference call about the report, added that in many cases LEP people are asked to bring their own interpreters with no arrangement for reimbursement of any cost incurred.
In general, the report states that despite New York State’s indisputable position as a national leader in pro-immigrant policies, a “significant amount of work remains to be done to dismantle language barriers at government agencies that dispense key benefits and services.”
Some of the report’s key findings include that the majority of LEP New York State residents don’t get translated documents when trying to get access to state benefits and interpretation services. Despite the implementation shortfalls, most people who got translated materials or interpretation services said it was helpful.
To gather the data, MRNY and The Center for Popular Democracy worked with partner organizations across New York State starting in the spring of 2012 to survey LEP individuals in New York City, Long Island, Albany, Central New York and Buffalo.
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Activist groups march in Pittsburgh for People's Convention
Activist groups march in Pittsburgh for People's Convention
Hundreds of protesters attending the People's Convention in Downtown Pittsburgh took about two hours to march Friday in hot, humid weather from the David L. Lawrence Convention Center to Station...
Hundreds of protesters attending the People's Convention in Downtown Pittsburgh took about two hours to march Friday in hot, humid weather from the David L. Lawrence Convention Center to Station Square.
The march, which started at 2:30 p.m., made stops at the U.S. Steel Building and the Allegheny County Courthouse on Grant Street before ending at Station Square.
Marchers carried hand-painted, cardboard busts of presidential candidate Donald Trump and UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff, orange butterflies on bamboo poles, and banners bearing the slogan, "still we rise." Chants rose above the din of after traffic as prosters cried phrases like, "No justice, no peace," and "Ain't no power like the power of the people, because the power of the people don't stop."
At Seventh and Grant Street, police and marchers talked. One woman took a selfie with an officer — typical of the friendly exchanges between protesters and police.
Jose Lopez, of Brooklyn said he attended the march with Make the Road New York, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant rights.
"It's been really great. We have a lot of working people with us. A lot of our folks don't have the wages or the opportunity to meet the community and get off the block. So it's great to be here."
Pittsburgh police maintained a visible presence along the parade route. Officers on motorcycles and bicycles assembled before the march.
The march has been planned for some time, but it comes less than 24 hours after five Dallas police officers were fatally shot during a march protesting the recent shootings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana by police officers.
Seven other Dallas officers were injured in an incident President Barack Obama said "horrified" America.
Erin Morey, of Mt. Lebanon, came out to show support, particularly for Martin Esqivel Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant who was arrested at his Pittsburgh home and faces deportation.
"Every voice should be heard," said Morey, whose son Max accompanied her. "I want to support an open dialogue."
The progressive groups involved in the Pittsburgh march were hosted by the Center for Popular Democracy. They voiced concerns regarding immigration, labor, environmental and civil rights causes. The group stopped at the courthouse, but officials there had already sent civilian workers home for the day and closed the building at 2:30 p.m.
"Right now, it's going great," said Pittsburgh police Chief Cameron McLay, who walked along with the marchers, shaking hands and chatting with reporters.
"I expected to find the atmosphere more tense," he said.
McLay said the officers he'd spoken with remained positive.
"I'm really, really proud of them," he said. "Right now, they're so focused on the task before them, they're not thinking about feelings," he said.
Some marchers delivered a sharper message with a red banner that said "fire killer cops."
Among others, the groups marched by the offices of the Federal Reserve, Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Bank of New York Mellon and even train tracks, which the groups say carry crude oil, which is targeted by climate change opponents.
Toomey stayed away from his Station Square office on Pittsburgh's South Shore. Instead, the Lehigh Valley Republican held a news conference on the North Shore to express his support for law enforcement.
"It was not a good place to be," Toomey said of Station Square.
Toomey described the viral images of fatal police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota as "very disturbing," and said both incidents need to be thoroughly investigated. But the shooting rampage that left five police officers dead and seven others wounded in Dallas "has no possible justification," Toomey said.
"The vast majority of officers are good, decent, honest and hard-working individuals," Toomey said. "What is completely wrong is the narrative that somehow cops generally are the bad guys. That narrative is something I have been pushing back on because it's wrong."
Toomey's election opponent, Democrat Katie McGinty, also shared support for police and called for thorough investigations of the shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota.
In messages posted to Twitter, the city police department offered condolences to Dallas police and Gov. Tom Wolf ordered flags to be flown at half staff.
In Greensburg, the police department posted a lengthy message on Facebook that served, in part, to remind readers that police officers are human beings who are part of a larger community.
Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik held a Mass at noon for about 70 people at Saint Mary of Mercy Church in Downtown to pray for peace and reconciliation in light of the Dallas shootings.
"Yesterday was Dallas, Wednesday was Baton Rouge, Tuesday was St. Paul. And Monday, July 4th our own Wood Street. Violence continues," Zubik said during the sermon.
"Where will it be today, where will it be tomorrow? Will it stop? Do we want it to stop?" he said.
Zubik compared violence to a disease and said that it rips families apart. He asked for attendees to think of the communities affected by violence across the nation, as they are neighbors and that it was senseless to direct blame at "one group of individuals." He said "it's imperative to tear down our own prejudices."
Zubik reminded the group that there's no competition for "whose life matters most," invoking the Black Lives Matter movement. The service ended with a prayer for first responders and others involved in public safety.
"I thought the sermon was incredible," said Marie Atria of Mt. Lebanon, "this is all terrible and it has to stop."
The Church said it was a normal attendance for a midday Friday mass. Pittsburgh has a potential for violence, but the "overwhelming response from the citizens of Western Pennsylvania is they're working for peace," Zubik said.
Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald released a joint statement regarding the violence in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas:
"Today, our nation is in mourning for the deaths of so many in our community. We are hurt, angry, confused and in pain as we struggle to cope with the violence plaguing us. Our answer to the violence in our community cannot be more violence. Pittsburgh's strength has always been in coming together to solve issues and supporting each other in times of need. We rely on that strength and we need it now more than ever.
"We have great faith that all of us – residents, communities, law enforcement, activists – have the capacity to come together to heal from our pain and anger, no matter how difficult that may be for us. We can do more to honor the lives of those who were killed by working together to stop the violence and have a more peaceful community."
Peduto called for a "peace summit" to be held next week, but a date hasn't been determined.
Reporting by Max Siegelbaum, Megan Guza, Justin Merriman and Matthew Santoni.
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The Activists Who Helped Shut Down Trump’s CEO Councils
The Activists Who Helped Shut Down Trump’s CEO Councils
The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic rebuke of Donald Trump — came within 48 hours of the incendiary August 15...
The CEOs who made up two White House advisory councils have fled like rats on a sinking ship. Their exodus — a dramatic rebuke of Donald Trump — came within 48 hours of the incendiary August 15 press conference where the president praised some of the participants of last week’s white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia.
But many of the CEOs on these councils had been under heavy pressure to disavow Trump’s agenda of hate and racism even before Charlottesville. That pressure came from grass-roots activists.
The Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change and several other immigrant and worker advocates had led that activist campaign, targeting the leaders of nine major corporations affiliated with the Trump administration. The campaign, working through a website called Corporate Backers of Hate, detailed the connections between the nine companies and the Trump administration and encouraged people to send emails to both the CEOs involved and members of their corporate boards.
Read the full article here.
Open thread for night owls: 'Fearless Cities' push back against the rise of the right
Open thread for night owls: 'Fearless Cities' push back against the rise of the right
Jimmy Tobias at The Nation writes—These Cities Might Just Save the Country: Dispatches from the Urban Resistance, from Atlantic City to Miami Beach: On the second weekend of June, hundreds of...
Jimmy Tobias at The Nation writes—These Cities Might Just Save the Country: Dispatches from the Urban Resistance, from Atlantic City to Miami Beach: On the second weekend of June, hundreds of activists, NGO workers, mayors, city councilmembers, academics and others from Spain and around the world flocked to Barcelona to discuss progressive resistance to the the rise of the right wing wherever it exists...
Read the full article here.
New Website IDs Corporations Profiting From the Abuse of Communities of Color
New Website IDs Corporations Profiting From the Abuse of Communities of Color
BackersOfHate.org documents Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Uber and more companies' ties to the Trump Administration and policies that negatively impact poor people of color...
...
BackersOfHate.org documents Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Uber and more companies' ties to the Trump Administration and policies that negatively impact poor people of color...
Read full article here.
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.
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