Mysterious "Computer Glitch" Conveniently Cancels Hotel Rooms For Fed Protesters At Jackson Hole Event
Mysterious "Computer Glitch" Conveniently Cancels Hotel Rooms For Fed Protesters At Jackson Hole Event
Over the last two years, the Fed Up Campaign has routinely brought a coalition of low-wage workers to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to protest Federal Reserve hike rates amidst the unequal “economic...
Over the last two years, the Fed Up Campaign has routinely brought a coalition of low-wage workers to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to protest Federal Reserve hike rates amidst the unequal “economic recovery.” The Jackson Hole event is invite only, closed to the public and costs $1,000 per person to attend.
It appears that this year, Janet Yellen and company went out of their way to ensure there would be no such protests diverting the attention of the nation's most esteemed economists.
According to a formal complaint filed by Ady Barkan, the Campaign Director for the Fed Up Campaign, to the DOJ and the Department of the Interior, “In early May, members of our coalition made three separate reservations for a total of 13 rooms at the Lodge for the nights of August 24, 25, and 26. We paid for the rooms. We requested and paid for rollaway beds that would allow us to sleep three guests to a room, for a total of 39 guest accommodations.
On July 26, my colleague Ruben Lucio received a phone call and then a follow-up email from Zachary Meyers, the Director of Hotel Operations at the Company, informing us that the Company would not honor our paid-for reservations and we could no longer stay at the Lodge. Meyers informed Lucio of a “reservations system glitch that caused the overbooking of Jackson Lake Lodge affecting your reservations” and explained that “the system issue caused us to take reservations for rooms that we don’t actually have inventory to honor. I’m very sorry for the unfortunate mishap with our systems at GTLC that led to this regrettable situation.”
The complaint also states that of the 18 rooms that were affected by the supposed “glitch,” all 13 rooms that were allocated to the Fed Up Coalition were coincidentally all cancelled. Of course, the hotel denied any knowledge that these rooms were protesting the oligarchs at the Fed.
“There is no legitimate explanation for the Company’s decision. As Klein explained to me, the Company books out its conference and sleeping rooms on a first-come first-serve basis. However, faced with an alleged computer glitch that affected only the three nights we were present, the Company decided to honor reservations made after ours and cancel our reservations. Our reservations constituted only 3 percent of the rooms at Jackson Lake Lodge (13 out of 385), yet the Company decided that our group would bear 72 percent of the total burden for its mistake (13 rooms out of 18 overbooked reservations). This is egregious disparate treatment.
In addition, Klein’s stated rationale for selecting our 13 rooms for cancellation is an explicit and intentional targeting of our First Amendment right to assemble on government property: he selected us precisely because we are a group of multiple guests. Because we were arriving in groups of 5, 5, and 3 rooms, we would not be allowed at the Lodge. (Yet Klein notably did not remove rooms from the reservation block belonging to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, even though its block was far larger than ours and would have been even “easier” to cancel.)”
According to the Intercept, the Fed Up coalition is still planning to attend the conference. “They still expect 120 members, their largest contingent ever, to attend the proceedings, but they will have to stay in alternative accommodations that are a 20- to 30-minute drive away, separate from symposium guests and the press.”
We are sure that the Fed, already criticized for its lack of diversity, had no say in this mysteriously convenient “glitch.”
By Tyler Durden
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13 Retailers Questioned By N.Y. Attorney General About Worker Scheduling
LA Times - April 13, 2015, by Samantha Masunaga - he scheduling practices of 13 retailers, including Gap Inc., Target Corp. and Abercrombie & Fitch Co., are being scrutinized by New York Atty...
LA Times - April 13, 2015, by Samantha Masunaga - he scheduling practices of 13 retailers, including Gap Inc., Target Corp. and Abercrombie & Fitch Co., are being scrutinized by New York Atty. Gen. Eric T. Schneiderman.
In a letter sent to the retailers, the attorney general's office said it had received reports that a growing number of employers, particularly in the retail industry, were requiring hourly employees to work on-call shifts. The office said it had “reason to believe” the 13 retailers might be using this kind of scheduling.
A New York state law requires that employees who are asked to come into work must be paid for at least four hours atminimum wage or the number of hours in the regularly scheduled shift, whichever is less, even if the employee is sent home.
California has a similar law that says employees must be paid for half of their usual time — two to four hours — if they are required to come in to work but are not needed or work less than their normal schedule.
The letter was also sent to J. Crew Group Inc.; L Brands, which owns Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works; Burlington Stores Inc.; TJX Cos.; Urban Outfitters Inc.; Sears Holdings Corp.; Williams-Sonoma Inc.; Crocs Inc.; Ann Inc., which owns Ann Taylor; and J.C. Penney Co.
The letters ask the retailers for more information about how they schedule employees for work, including whether they use on-call shifts and computerized scheduling programs.
Rachel Deutsch, an attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, a New York worker advocacy group, said on-call scheduling can make it difficult for workers to arrange child care or pick up a second job.
“These are folks that want to work,” she said. “They’re ready and willing to work, and some weeks they might get no pay at all even though they set aside 100% of their time to work.”
Danielle Lang, a Skadden fellow at Bet Tzedek Legal Services in Los Angeles, said the attorney general’s action could have repercussions in other states.
“The New York attorney general is a powerful force,” she said. “It’s certainly an issue that’s facing so many of our low-wage workers in California, and anything that puts a highlight on this practice and really pressures employers to think about these practices is a good thing.”
Sears, Target and Ann Inc. said in separate statements that they do not have on-call shifts for their workers. J.C. Penney said it has a policy against on-call scheduling.
TJX spokeswoman Doreen Thompson said in a statement that company management teams “work to develop schedules that serve the needs of both our associates and our company.”
Gap said in a statement that the company has been working on a project with the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings College of the Law to examine workplace scheduling and productivity and will see the first set of data results in the fall.
“Gap Inc. is committed to establishing sustainable scheduling practices that will improve stability for our employees, while helping toeffectively manage our business,” spokeswoman Laura Wilkinson said.
The remaining companies did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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BERNANKE’S FORMER ADVISOR: “PEOPLE WOULD BE STUNNED TO KNOW THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE FED IS PRIVATELY OWNED”
BERNANKE’S FORMER ADVISOR: “PEOPLE WOULD BE STUNNED TO KNOW THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE FED IS PRIVATELY OWNED”
With every passing day, the Fed is slowly but surely losing the game.
Only it is not just former (and in some cases current) Fed presidents admitting central banks are increasingly...
With every passing day, the Fed is slowly but surely losing the game.
Only it is not just former (and in some cases current) Fed presidents admitting central banks are increasingly powerless to boost the global economy, even if they still have sway over capital markets. What is far more insidious to the Fed’s waning credibility is when former economists affiliated with the Fed start repeating mantras that until recently were only a prominent feature in the so-called fringe media.
This is precisely what happened today when former central bank staffer and Dartmouth College economics professor Andrew Levin, special adviser to then Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke between 2010 to 2012, joined with an activist group to argue for overhauls at the central bank that they say would distance it from Wall Street and make its activities more transparent and accountable to the public.
Levin is pressing for the overhaul with Fed Up coalition activists. Many of the proposed changes target the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, which are quasi-private and technically owned by commercial banks in their respective districts.
All of that is not surprising. What he said to justify his new found cause, however, is.
“A lot of people would be stunned to know” the extent to which the Federal Reserve is privately owned, Mr. Levin said. The Fed “should be a fully public institution just like every other central bank” in the developed world, he said in a conference call announcing the plan. He described his proposals as “sensible, pragmatic and nonpartisan.”
Why is that stunning? Because it has long been a bone of contention if only among the fringe media, that at its core the Fed is merely a private institution, beholden only to its de facto owners: not the people of the U.S. but to a small cabal of banks. Worse, the actual org chart of who owns what is not disclosed, even as the vast majority of the U.S. population remains deluded that the Fed is a publicly owned institution.
As the WSJ goes on to note, the former central bank staffer said he sees his ideas as designed to maintain the virtues the central bank already brings to the table. They aren’t targeted at changing how policy is conducted today. “What’s important here is that reform to the Federal Reserve can last for 100 years, not just the near term,” he said.
And this is coming from a former Fed employee and Ben Bernanke’s personal advisor! That in itself is a most striking development, because now that the insiders are finally speaking up, it will be a race among both current and prior Fed workers to reveal as much dirty laundry as possible ahead of what is increasingly being perceived by many as the Fed’s demise.
To be sure, Levin’s personal campaign for Fed transformation will not be easy, and as the WSJ writes, what is being sought by Mr. Levin and the activists is significant and would require congressional action. Ady Barkan, who leads the Fed Up campaign, said the Fed’s current structure “is an embarrassment to America” and Fed leaders haven’t been “willing or able” to make changes.
Specifically, Levin wants the 12 regional Fed banks to be brought fully into the government. He also wants the process of selecting new bank presidents—they are key regulators and contributors in setting interest-rate policy—opened up more fully to public input, as well as term limits for Fed officials.
This would represent a revolution to the internal staffing of the Fed, which will no longer be at the mercy of its now-defunct shareholders, America’s commercial banks; it would also mean that Goldman Sachs would lose all its leverage as the world’s biggest central bank incubator, a revolving door relationship which has allowed the Manhattan firm to dominate the world of finance for the decades.
Levin’s proposal was made in conjunction with the Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up coalition, a group that has been pressuring the central bank for more accountability for some time. The left-leaning group has been critical of the structure of the regional banks, and has been pressing the Fed to hold off on raising rates in a bid to make sure the recovery is enjoyed not just by the wealthy, in their view.
The proposal was revealed on a conference call that also included a representative from Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, although all campaigns were invited to participate.
The WSJ adds that according to Levin, who knows the Fed’s operating structure intimately, says the members of the regional Fed bank boards of directors, the majority of whom are selected by the private banks with the approval of the Washington-based governors, should be chosen differently. The professor says director slots now reserved for financial professionals regulated by the Fed should be eliminated, and that directors who oversee and advise the regional banks should be selected in a public process involving the Washington governors and local elected officials. These directors also should better represent the diversity of the U.S.
Levin also wants formal public input into the selection of new bank presidents, with candidates’ names known publicly and a process that allows for public comment in a way that doesn’t now exist. The professor also wants all Fed officials to serve for single seven-year terms, which would give them the needed distance from the political process while eliminating situations where some policy makers stay at the bank for decades. Alan Greenspan, for example, was Fed chairman from 1987 to 2006.
As the WSJ conveniently adds, the selection of regional bank presidents has become a hot-button issue. Currently, the leaders of the New York, Philadelphia, Dallas and Minneapolis Fed banks are helmed by men who formerly worked for or had close connections to investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Levin called for watchdog agency the Government Accountability Office to annually review and report on Fed operations, including the regional Fed banks. He also wants the regional Fed banks to be covered under the Freedom of Information Act. A regular annual review hopefully would insulate the effort from perceptions of political interference, Mr. Levin said.
* * *
While ending the Fed may still seem like a pipe dream, at least until the market’s next major crash at which point the population may finally turn on the culprit behind America’s serial boom-bust culture, the U.S. central bank, Levin’s proposal would get to the heart of the most insidious conflict of interest in the US: the fact that the Federal Reserve works not for the people of America, but for its owners – the banks.
Which is also why, sadly, this proposal will be dead on arrival, as its passage would represent the biggest loss for Wall Street in the past 103 years, far more significant than anything Dodd-Frank could hope to accomplish.
By Zero Hedge
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Car wash activists release report on John Lage
Amsterdam News - June 20, 2013 - According to a recently released report by car wash workers and their advocates, the owner of several car washes with labor law violations is still paid by the...
Amsterdam News - June 20, 2013 - According to a recently released report by car wash workers and their advocates, the owner of several car washes with labor law violations is still paid by the city to clean city-owned cars.
Created and distributed by Make the Road New York, Center for Popular Democracy, New York Communities for Change and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, the report includes public documents that they believe show that city taxpayers have “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting” John Lage and his associate Fernando Magalhaes.
According to the report, between 2007 and 2013, Lage Car Wash Inc. had contracts with the New York City Police Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) worth over $300,000 combined. Also, the city paid Lage Car Wash at least $135,924 for the past three years for car wash services and almost $38,000 to other entities that are controlled by Lage or Magalhaes. Last year, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation in Lage’s business practices.
Currently, car wash employees of Lage’s report that they work over 50 hours a week for an hourly wage of $6 without tips or about $7.30 including tips and including overtime. Back in 2005, the U.S. Labor Department sued Lage on charges he and 15 of his companies “willfully and repeatedly” violated wage laws. The suit ended with Lage paying $4.7 million in wages and fines.
None of this was of much surprise to Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union President Stuart Appelbaum.
“This report is proof that Lage Car Wash Inc. and its treatment of workers is not fair to the workers, nor do these conditions uplift and sustain our communities,” said Appelbaum. “New York City should quickly take action and truly reconsider doing business with a company who operates in this manner.”
Last week, car wash workers and supporters attended the Car Wash Workers General Assembly, where they discussed their experiences working for Lage-owned companies.
“We learned from the strike at Sunny Day [in the Bronx] and the struggle at Soho [in Manhattan] that we can defend our rights and win, and we are no longer going to accept mistreatment and poverty wages,” said Hector Gómez, a car wash worker who worked at the recently closed Lage Car Wash in Soho and currently works at Sutphin Car Wash. “Just think how much more we can win when all the car washes in New York City are organized and united.”
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Campaign Zero: A ‘Blueprint for Ending Police Violence’
On Friday, activists with the country’s growing racial justice movement unveiled a new campaign to end police violence, bridging protester demands with data and policy to create structural...
On Friday, activists with the country’s growing racial justice movement unveiled a new campaign to end police violence, bridging protester demands with data and policy to create structural solutions to the crisis that has gripped national attention for more than a year.
Launched as an online manifesto with an interactive website, Campaign Zero proposes new federal, state, and local laws that would address police violence and reform the criminal justice system—including demilitarizing law enforcement, increasing community oversight, limiting use-of-force, and requiring independent investigation and prosecution of police violence cases.
“More than one thousand people are killed by police every year in America,” the group states on its website. “Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless ‘quality of life’ behaviors or mental health crises.”
The action plan also incorporates recommendations by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing as well as those of research organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy. The architects behind Campaign Zero characterized it as a project that will continue to develop over time as new solutions emerge and more supporters come on board.
The four creators of the new campaign and authors of the manifesto—Samuel Sinyangwe, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay McKesson—are co-founders of We The Protesters, which as the Guardian notes is “a prominent section of a wider protest movement that is frequently referred to, in general terms, as Black Lives Matter.”
“This is just the beginning,” they wrote in a statement accompanying the launch.
In the year that has passed since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, police have killed at least 1,083 Americans—an average of nearly three people per day, according to figures compiled by VICE News. Even that figure, released August 9, quickly became outdated.
The policy recommendations also call for an end the controversial practice of “broken windows” policing—a tactic that involves cracking down on petty infractions as a means to prevent more serious crime. The chokehold death of Eric Garner, who was targeted by police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, heightened criticism of the policy, which Columbia law professor Patricia J. Williams said “has intimidated, dispossessed and humiliated millions of innocent people” for two decades.
Campaign Zero launches just as new reports highlight the lack of training and culture of aggression that permeates law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Addressing that issue in another policy demand, Campaign Zero states, “An intensive training regime is needed to help police officers learn the behaviors and skills to interact appropriately with communities.”
The group points to the recent successful overhaul of policing tactics in Richmond, California, a city which reduced its crime rate by 33 percent through community policing.
“We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country,” Campaign Zero states.
Campaign Zero also introduces strategies for charting presidential candidates’ policy positions on such issues. Racial justice activists have recently engaged with the campaigns of candidates including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Jeb Bush to demand action plans on addressing police brutality and criminal justice reform.
“Right now, the country is awake,” organizers stated. “We must continue to leverage this awakening for substantive change. We have an opportunity to change the way that issues in blackness are prioritized in political spaces and an opportunity to redefine how the political process interacts with our communities.”
“America is finally waking up to this very necessary and critical conversation about race, equity, and preserving the life and dignity of all citizens,” Packnett told the Guardian on Friday.
Added McKesson, “This is a blueprint for ending police violence.”
This Common Dreams article is reposted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License
Source: San Diego Free Press
Economic Sector Bias at the Federal Reserve
Economic Sector Bias at the Federal Reserve
In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly outnumber women in key posts at Federal Reserve Banks throughout the United States...
In part one of this two-part posting, I looked at the gender bias at the Federal Reserve, showing how men vastly outnumber women in key posts at Federal Reserve Banks throughout the United States despite the Fed's Congressional mandate. In part two of this posting, I want to take an additional look at the Fed's bias; its failure to represent the economic diversity of America.
For those of you that either didn't read part one or who are unaware of the Federal Reserve's organizational setup, here is a graphic from a report by the Center for Popular Democracy showing the link between the Federal Reserve and its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and its district banks known as Federal Reserve Banks:
Here is a map showing the regions covered by each of the 12 district banks (Federal Reserve Banks) and the 24 branches within each district:
Note that Alaska and Hawaii are covered by the San Francisco district.
If we start at the top of the organizational chart, the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for a 14-year term of office. The President (and Senate) also confirm two members of the Board to be Chair (currently Janet Yellen) and Vice Chair for four year terms. The FOMC consists of 12 members; the seven aforementioned Board members, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and four other regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents on a rotating, one-year term basis. The Federal Reserve Banks form an important link between the Federal Reserve and their local economy and help to dictate the Federal Reserve's monetary policies. Each of the twelve district banks has their own president and boards of directors (nine directors in total for each bank); in addition, each of the 24 district branches has its own directors (seven directors in total for each branch). The Board of Directors for each Reserve Bank are appointed in two ways; the majority are appointed by the Reserve Bank and the remainder are appointed by the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. The directors for each district bank then appoint their own president and vice president. It all sounds rather nepotistic, doesn't it?
By law, under the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977, the Boards of Directors of the Federal Reserve are to be
"...elected with due but not exclusive consideration to the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor and consumers.".
That is, each of the leaders/directors of the world's most influential central bank and its district banking system are to represent a wide variety of each of the economic sectors that make up the American economy.
The report by the Center for Popular Democracy compares the economic sector representation during the period from 2006 to 2010 when the Government Accountability Office examined the composition of the Federal Reserve Bank Boards and the present. Here is a graphic showing the past and present composition:
In both 2006 to 2010 and 2016, directors from the banking sector filled over one-third of the board seats, growing by 3 percentage points over the timeframe of the study. In combination, in 2016, representatives from the commercial and industrial sector and the banking sector filled 68 percent of seats, up from 63 percent in 2006 to 2010. The service sector's representation fell from 26 percent of seats to 18 percent and agriculture and food processing saw their representation fall from 6 percent of seats to 3 percent. Interestingly, even though they are relatively poorly represented compared to the other sectors, the number of directors affiliated with consumer and community organizations rose from 3 percent to 8 percent.
For your illumination, here are a few of the Directors for each of the Federal Reserve Banks that you can get a sense of who is dictating America's monetary policies:
If you are interested in who is on the boards of the other Federal Reserve Banks, please see the original report.
Interestingly, during the "financial crisis" of 2008, there was some question about directors' independence and actions taken by the Federal Reserve banks since there was at least the perception of conflicts of interest when director-affliated institutions took part in the Federal Reserve System's emergency programs. With a preponderance of representation from the banking and commercial sectors, it certainly doesn't take a genius to figure out which sectors of the economy will likely be favoured by Federal Reserve policies should there be another "financial crisis", does it?
By A Political Junkie
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EXCLUSIVE: City Lawmaker Demands that Charter Schools Show How They Use Tax Money
New York Daily News - February 24, 2015, by Ben Chapman and Lisa Colangelo - A lawmaker is asking the city’s charter schools to hand over paperwork showing how they use millions of dollars in tax...
New York Daily News - February 24, 2015, by Ben Chapman and Lisa Colangelo - A lawmaker is asking the city’s charter schools to hand over paperwork showing how they use millions of dollars in tax money. And they have five days to do it.
City Councilman Daniel Dromm, who chairs the Education Committee, said he is troubled by the “lack of transparency and accountability” of charter schools.
“They receive over a billion dollars in taxpayer funds and we don’t know what’s going on,” Dromm, a Queens Democrat, told the Daily News on Monday.
Dromm sent a letter to all 197 charter schools in the city asking them for copies of their committee board minutes and fraud prevention policies. He also asked if they would voluntarily submit to the city Conflict of Interest Board to examine relationships between school board members and developers.
Dromm’s action comes after The News reported in November that an analysis by the Center for Popular Democracy found more than $28 million in questionable spending and probable financial mismanagement in 95% of the charter schools examined by state auditors since 2002.
James Merriman, CEO of the New York Charter School Center, dismissed Dromm as an “attack dog” for the United Federation of Teachers, which is opposed to charter schools.
Source
We’re onto the phony education reformers: Charter school charlatans and faux reformers take it on the chin
2015 will forever be remembered as the year the political establishment was shaken by the populist-driven presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But it should also be...
2015 will forever be remembered as the year the political establishment was shaken by the populist-driven presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But it should also be remembered as the year another established order was forever altered by change, dissent and revelations of its corruption.
For years, an out-of-touch establishment has dominated education policy too. A well-funded elite has labeled public education as generally a failed enterprise and insisted that only a regime of standardized testing and charter schools can make schools and educators more “accountable.” Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum have adopted this narrative of “reform” and now easily slip into the rhetoric that supports it without hesitation.
But in 2013 a grassroots rebellion growing out of inner city neighborhoods from Newark to Chicago and suburban boroughs from Long Island to Denver began to counter the education aristocracy and tell an alternative tale about schools.
The education counter-narrative is that public schools are not as much the perpetrators of failure as they are victims of resource deprivation, inequity in the system and undermining forces driven by corruption and greed. In other words, it wasn’t schools that needed to be made more accountable; it was the failed leadership of those in the business and government establishment that needed more accountability.
The uprising has been steadily growing into an Education Spring unifying diverse factions across the nation in efforts to reverse education policy mandates and bolster public schools instead of punishing them and closing them down.
2015 became the year the uprising reached a level where it forever transformed the hegemonic control the reformers have had on education policy.
Most prominently, No Child Left Behind, the federal law that’s been driving education policy since 2001, was replaced with a new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, thatreverses many of the edicts of NCLB or leaves them up in the air for states and courts to decide.
Also, comments made by establishment presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will reverberate through the election in 2016. Specifically, at a town hall held in South Carolina, broadcast by C-SPAN, Clinton responded to a question about charter schools by saying, “Most charter schools, I don’t want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or if they do, they don’t keep them.” A week or so later, Clinton transgressed the status quo again by remarking, in a conversation with members of the American Federation of Teachers, “I have for a very long time also been against the idea that you tie teacher evaluation and even teacher pay to test outcomes. There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence.”
Organizations and individuals connected to wealthy donors to the Democratic Partywere appalled, but the truth is out, and skepticism about education policy prescriptions touted as necessary “reforms” to the system has now left the fringe and become mainstream.
The bigger, more important story emerging from 2015 is that the American public is increasingly at odds with a reform movement that seeks to remake schools into an image promoted by wealthy private foundations, influential think tanks and well-financed political operations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council(ALEC).
The evidence against the education establishment’s case piled up as the year rolled on, and the narrative of public education policy will never be the same.
Blows to the Testocracy
Take the issue of standardized testing. The idea that school improvement should be about enforcing uniform measures of test score outcomes across the nation had a particularly bad year in 2015.
As Seattle classroom teacher and public school activist Jesse Hagopian explains in an article for the National Education Association, standardized tests became the focal point of widespread scorn and dissent.
More than 620,000 public school students around the U.S. refused to take standardized exams. Also, numerous states ended high school graduation tests, and dozens of universities and colleges reduced or eliminated test requirements for their admissions process.
The backlash to standardized testing prompted changes in federal policy as well, including the revision of NCLB. As Hagopian writes, “ESSA deposes one of the cruelest aspects of the test-and-punish policy under NCLB: the so-called ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ annual test score improvement requirement that labeled nearly every American school failing.”
Also, as Hagopian notes, President Obama, acknowledging the growing resistance to testing, “announced in October that ‘unnecessary testing’ is ‘consuming too much instructional time.’ This announcement came as a surprise given Obama’s support for policies like Race to the Top that contributed to the proliferation of high-stakes testing. The reversal of rhetoric was a result of the mass opt-out movement and will surely embolden authentic-assessment activists in the coming year.”
“Pressure from parents, students, teachers, school officials, and community leaders began turning the tide against standardized exam overuse and misuse during the 2014-2015 school year,” declares a report from the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest.org).
FairTest’s report highlights “assessment reform victories” in numerous states where officials suspended or significantly revised testing policies and created “alternative systems of assessment and accountability” that “deemphasize standardized tests.”
Think Progress, the action center of the left-leaning Beltway think tank the Center for American Progress, also reports on the overturn of the testocracy in its review: “these education protests got results in 2015.”
Noting the growing opt-out movement in Colorado, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Wisconsin, the Think Progress writer highlights New York in particular, “where 20 percent of students opted out of tests in 2015. The number of New York students opting out quadrupled from [2014].”
Reform Is Losing the Left
New York in particular provides an example of how education reform may fare in the near future, at least in left-leaning states where leaders have been persuaded by big-money donors to crack down on public schools and educators.
Led by Governor Andrew Cuomo and his former state education chief, now currently acting U.S. Secretary of Education, John King, the Empire State had been a model for reform ideology, being among the first to implement the Common Core and its associated tests and pursuing a harsh new model for evaluating teachers, in which 50 percent of teachers’ performance rating was tied to students’ test scores.
But recently Cuomo made “a complete about face” on education, observes a recent op-ed in a New York press outlet. The writer – Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a progressive New York state organization – notes that Cuomo had made his test-based teacher evaluation system the “top legislative priority in 2015″ and had claimed it was ”one of the greatest legacies for me and the state.”
But the evaluation system had angered teachers and parents and helped spur the test boycotts noted above. Seeing his public approval numbers plummeting, Cuomo engineered, according to Easton, a redo on the evaluation system that prompted the state education authority to place a moratorium on test-based teacher evaluations.
Easton believes Cuomo’s actions in New York are likely too little, too late – arguing that he has been “the author of his own demise on education issues.” That may be, but far more likely, other Democratic Party governors are bound to notice how reform policies like those carried out in New York have now lost the left and are rapidly growing out of favor with the public at large.
Of course, in states and districts where test-based teacher evaluations are already established in the policy landscape, teachers will likely feel the effects of these systems for some time. So the fight over teacher evaluations will go state by state in the years ahead.
But as new reports continue to call these flawed and unfair evaluations into question, there will be more examples of these systems being overturned.
Reform Fads Don’t Work
Using test scores to evaluate teachers – one of the pillars of the reform movement – is not the only policy idea going out of favor. Using the scores to evaluate the viability of local schools is running into more opposition as well
In Tennessee, also an early adopter of reform fads, leaders had put into place a system that used student scores on standardized tests to pronounce schools as “failing” and provide the rationale for the state to take over management of the schools by an appointed board. What follows these takeovers, invariably, is that the agency, whose officials are handpicked by conservative lawmakers, transfers the schools to privately operated charter management organizations.
In Tennessee, the state takeover agency is called the Achievement School District, but the model is being adopted under other guises by many other states.
Now Tennessee’s much-lauded takeover program has run into “political trouble” according to a recent article in Education Week.
“Several Democratic state lawmakers,” according to the article, “will propose bills this upcoming legislative session to either shut down the turnaround district, which mostly is based in Memphis, or severely limit its authority to take over schools.”
The legislature’s Black Caucus, the representatives of the communities most often targeted by the takeovers, are helping to lead the pushback.
In Memphis, where the ASD has charterized more than two dozen schools, parents are leading the fight as well. As Chalkbeat Tennessee reports, members of the district’s neighborhood advisory councils have called the takeover process a “scam” and claimed the method for taking over their neighborhood schools “was rigged in favor of pairing struggling schools with charter operators.”
But the trouble with the ASD isn’t purely “political.” The takeover effort is also in trouble because it doesn’t work. The EdWeek article points to a recent Vanderbilt University study that showed district-led turnaround efforts had performed better than the the ASD. The study concluded, “Until the state-run district can begin to show academic progress, it shouldn’t be allowed to take over more schools.”
These events and others prove 2015 marks the year that standardized testing – and all its associated uses for unfairly judging teachers and schools – has now become a policy pariah. So what will reformers rally around now?
A Year of Charter School Scandals
For sure, charter schools provided reform fans with some cause to celebrate in 2015, as more than 500 new public charter schools opened during the school year, enrolling nearly 3 million students nationwide, according to charter industry reports.
As a recent report from a consulting group that works with the charter industry found, 2015 was a year in which charter schools reached impressive new benchmarks. These schools are now the most rapidly growing form of schools in America, with enrollments expanding by an average of 12 to 13 percent annually over the past 10 years. Charters now educate one in 16 children nationally and, in a number of big cities, now rival traditional school districts as the major provider of public education. Three of the nation’s five largest cities enroll more than 20 percentof their students in charter schools.
What’s growing particularly rapidly are large charter school chains, which have expanded at roughly twice the pace of the charter industry overall, increasing their student enrollments by 25 percent annually.
But charter school expansions come with a significant negative to the reform movement. As the numbers and influence of these schools grow, so do the scandals associated with them and so do the divisive fights in communities where these schools are proliferating.
The scandals and malfeasance associated with charter schools rose to levels in 2015 beyond what emerged in 2014.
Early in the year, a 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.
In April, another report from the Center for Popular Democracy, along with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), uncovered over $200 million in “alleged and confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” committed by charter schools around the country.
Authors of the report called $200-plus million the “tip of the iceberg,” because much of the fraud “will go undetected because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”
Then, in October, the Center for Media and Democracy published a new reportrevealing that the federal government has spent over $3.7 billion in taxpayer money on charter schools with virtually no accountability for the funds.
According to the report, the federal government, state governments and charter authorizers have generally not provided the public with ready information about how federal funds for charters have been spent. Attempts to trace federal grant money to recipients are apt to encounter “substantial obstruction” from states reluctant to reveal how charter money is spent and how state government handles charter oversight.
The report contends, “Unlike truly public schools, which have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending is largely a black hole.”
In Michigan, for instance, where four out of five charters are run by for-profit management companies, CMD found “ghost schools“ that had received millions in federal funding but either never opened or were quickly closed with no account for the money. Some charter operators in the state have been accused, and convicted, of crimes, including felony fraud and tax evasion. But most often, no perpetrators of the malfeasance are brought to justice.
Interspersed among these massive reports are news stories from local press outlets, too numerous to count, about charter school frauds, financial and academic, that boggle the mind in their outrageousness.
In May, an Ohio paper began its news story about Ohio charter schools, “No sector – not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals – misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” Reporter Doug Livingston wrote, “State auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”
Charter school malfeasance in the Buckeye State has gotten so bad it’s even drawn the attention of FBI investigators.
More recently, Florida press outlets reported the state has given about $70 million to charter schools that later closed and returned virtually none of the money to taxpayers. While the state is able to recover computers and other equipment these schools purchased with taxpayer money, the far more substantial costs for purchasing and improving property and making lease payments stays in private pockets after the schools close.
Why Charter Schools Won’t Save Reform
Scandals will continue to dog charter schools because of the way they are organized and operated. As a recent policy brief from the National Education Policy Center explains, the very structure of the charter school business introduces new actors into public education who skim money from the system without returning any benefit to students and taxpayers.
In one of the more bizarre schemes the authors examine, charter operators use third-party corporations to purchase buildings and land from the public school district itself, so taxpayer dollars are used to purchase property from the public. Thus, the public ends up paying twice for the school, and the property becomes an asset of a private corporation.
In other examples, charter operators will set up leasing agreements and lucrative management fees between multiple entities that end up extracting resources that might otherwise be dedicated to direct services for children.
These arrangements, and many others documented in the brief, constitute a rapidly expanding parallel school system in America, populated with enterprises and individuals who work in secret to suck money out of public education.
Meanwhile, charter expansions continue to be met with increased community resistance wherever they roll out.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Jefferson County, Colorado, and across South Florida, every new charter school expansion is now met with fierce opposition from the community.
As the Los Angles Times reported in September, a plan devised in secret by a billionaire and his foundation would pay for the capital costs and lobbying to force through a plan to convert as many as half of the city’s schools into charters. The community has responded with outrage.
In what is likely to be an important legal precedent, the supreme court of the state of Washington found that charter schools are unconstitutional because they aren’t truly public schools.
Now calls for charter school moratoriums are becoming practically ubiquitous in state legislatures and local district school boards.
The mounting controversy surrounding charter schools is a strong indicator that if education reform proponents collect all their policy eggs in the basket of “school choice,” they are missing the main reasons why their movement is spurring increased resistance.
What Reform Fans Don’t Get
Indeed, resistance to the education reform agenda is not as much a rejection of its various policy features as it is a rejection of the philosophy that drives it.
This philosophy puts little stock in democratic governance of schools, believing instead that really smart people, armed with the right data and algorithms, are what it takes to determine education policy from New York to Nevada.
This core philosophy makes infinite sense to folks with backgrounds in law, business management, finance, or economics, but tends to rub educators and parents the wrong way because of its failure to acknowledge that teaching and learning are primarily relationship-driven endeavors and not technical pursuits.
To teachers, it makes about as much sense to base their actions exclusively on a data set or a marketing principle as it would for husbands and wives to conduct their marriages on that basis or for parents to raise their children that way. Sure, knowing some objective “things” about how students are doing is important, but there’s way more important stuff to attend to.
And parents will grow ever more skeptical of the false promise of “school choice” because it doesn’t deliver what they really want: the guarantee of good neighborhood schools that are free and equitable to all children.
But too few reformers get this. Instead, what we can expect in 2016 is for the current education establishment to use the considerable financial resources at its disposal to mount yet more marketing and public relations efforts, while the pushback from grassroots public education advocates will grow even stronger, and political leaders will be increasingly pressured to decide where they stand.
Source: Salon
April 15: National Protests on Tax Day Demand Trump Release His Tax Returns
April 15: National Protests on Tax Day Demand Trump Release His Tax Returns
WASHINGTON - Today, the National Working Families Party announced their participation in the Tax Day March. President Trump’s financial ties to Russia are causing growing questions for both...
WASHINGTON - Today, the National Working Families Party announced their participation in the Tax Day March. President Trump’s financial ties to Russia are causing growing questions for both Democrats and Republicans. As a result, thousands of people plan to gather in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, April 15, 2017, at 11 a.m. The Tax March was an idea that started on Twitter, but has gained momentum on and offline, with over 135 marches planned in cities across the country...
Read full article here.
De Blasio Administration Rejects Two Council Voter Registration Bills
Gotham Gazette - October 23, 2014, by Kristen Meriwether -In 2000 the City Council passed Local Law 29 which aimed to increase voter registration by requiring 19 city agencies to offer voter...
Gotham Gazette - October 23, 2014, by Kristen Meriwether -In 2000 the City Council passed Local Law 29 which aimed to increase voter registration by requiring 19 city agencies to offer voter registration forms to its customers. It's fourteen years after the law's passage and compliance has been abysmal.
A report compiled by Center for Popular Democracy released this week shows during their walk-ins to 14 of those city agencies, 95 percent of people were never asked if they wanted to register to vote. Of those who self-identified as citizens, the report indicated 84 percent were not given a voter registration form.
On Thursday the City Council held an oversight hearing to discuss the poor compliance and introduce two bills aimed to increase voter registration at the city agency level. Intro 493, sponsored by Committee on Government Operations chair Ben Kallos, would require 15 additional agencies to be covered under the agency-based voter registration law. Intro 356, sponsored by Council Member Jumaane Williams, would assign a code to each agency that would be printed on the voter registration forms and allow the City to track how many forms are being utilized from each agency.
Both bills are being rejected by the de Blasio administration.
"We are committed to getting agency-based voter registration right," Mindy Tarlow, director of the Mayor's Office of Operations, said during her testimony. "But to get it done, we are going to need time and space to manage the agencies and correct long-standing behavior."
Tarlow pointed to Directive 1, issued by Mayor Bill de Blasio on July 11, 2014. In the directive—his first as mayor—he ordered each agency covered under Local Law 29 to prepare a plan showing how they would implement the requirements of the Charter and submit it within 60 days.
The directive also requires each agency submit a semi-annual report on how the plan is being implemented which will include the number of voter registration forms distributed, the number of registration forms completed, and the number of forms transmitted to the Board of Elections.
Tarlow said she agrees with the assessment that there is a problem, but she argued that with the administration already addressing the problem, it was too early for further legislation.
"It is hard. We are trying to bring a number of agencies along," Tarlow said, adding that before moving on new legislation, "we want a chance to feel like we have made some inroads."
Tarlow did not provide an exact timeline as to when the Council would see the results from Directive 1, but did promise to share preliminary reports with the Council some time at the end of November. Kallos jokingly said he looked forward to to reading it in between bites of his Thanksgiving dinner.
"We need the flexibility to watch this over time," Henry Berger, special counsel to the mayor, said during the hearing.
Intro 356The administration's rejection of the second bill, Intro 356, is based less on Directive 1 and more on privacy concerns. Tarlow argued that by putting a code which would identify what agency a voter was getting services from may deter voters from registering at agencies.
"This is to protect the privacy of the individuals who receive services from government that they don't wish to be disclosed," Tarlow said in her testimony.
The council members now face the prospect of attempting to negotiate the bills with the administration.
On Thursday, Council Member Williams went through a lengthy back-and-forth with members of the administration as well as representatives of the Board of Elections (who testified in a later panel) to dispute objections. Williams argued there was already a code (the number 9) on all voter registration forms coming from City agencies and a separate code for those coming from CUNY.
Both Williams and Kallos asked if it was a matter of that information being released to the public or simply being documented. Tarlow said it wasn't a matter of determining who the person was, but what services they were seeking or receiving. She said the administration believes the fear of that information getting out would deter people from signing up to register to vote.
Williams pointed out information such as social security numbers, fax numbers, and driver's license numbers are all exempt from public reporting, but records are still kept. He argued this code could be exempt as well.
Michael Ryan, executive director of the New York City Board of Elections (BOE), said during his testimony the BOE did not believe this code could be exempt based on current law, but he admitted they did not have a chance to dive in deeply on the issue because they were preparing for the upcoming election.
"I don't know that I have been persuaded," Williams said.
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