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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

The U.S. Department of Education has released a list of the charter schools that have received federal funding since 2006.

The move comes in the wake of requests by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), dating back to 2014, for public disclosure of who had received federal taxpayer money. CMD had submitted requests for this and related information to the Department and several states.

In October 2015, CMD released its report "Charter School Black Hole: CMD Special Investigation Reveals Huge Info Gap on Charter School Spending," discussing the more than $3.7 billion dollars the federal government had spent on charters and the gaps in what the public could see about which charters received taxpayer money.

Two months later, the Department of Education issued a news release on the subject, titled "A Commitment to Transparency: Learning More about the Charter School Program." The data was released to the public on the eve of Christmas Eve.

According to the Department, "The dataset provides new and more detailed information on the over $1.5 billion that CSP [the Charter School Program] has provided, since 2006, to fund the start-up, replication, and expansion" of charters.

It includes information on which grant program funded each of the charter schools listed and how much. That is more information than the public has ever been given about the true reach of the CSP program into their communities, fueled by federal tax dollars.

It lists more 4,831 charter school with the amounts received in that period, but it does not indicate which of them closed. CMD has sought to assess the number of closed charters using other data as a proxy but ambiguities have impeded that effort.

In its December release, the agency noted that more than half of the charter schools in its list of nearly 5,000 were "operational" as of the last school year with complete data: "CSP planning and startup capital facilitated the creation of over 2,600 charter schools that were operational as of SY 2013-14; approximately 430 charter schools that served students but subsequently closed by SY 2013-14; and approximately 699 'prospective schools.'”

The fate of each of the more than 2,000 charter schools in the difference between 4,831 and 2,600 is not definitively known, although CMD's initial analysis indicates that far more than 430 charters have closed over the past two decades. The agency has not released a complete list of closed charters that received federal funds and how much.

The dataset also does not go back to the beginning of federal charter school funding in 1993, though it does cover the more recent period CMD sought information about. Accordingly, the dataset does not include all the charter schools that received federal tax monies but closed since the inception of the federal charter school program.

The list released in December also did not include the names of "prospective schools" that received federal funds but never opened, which CMD has called "ghost" schools--as with the 25 it found that never opened in Michigan in 2011 and 2012 but that received at least $1,7 million dollars, according to a state expenditure report.

So on January 13, 2016, CMD filed a new set of open records requests with the Department of Education asking that it fill in those gaps and also provide information about communications regarding closed charters and prospective charters.

This is part of a long-term investigation of charter schools that CMD started nearly five years ago.

In 2011, CMD began examining the close relationship between charter school businesses and legislators after a whistleblower provided it with all of the bills secretly voted on through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) where corporate lobbyists vote as equals with lawmakers on bills that are then pushed into law in statehouses across the country.

That award-winning investigation shed new light on an industry that had grown from an "experiment" in 1992 (in Minnesota) into an influential network with a league of federal and state lobbyists seeking increasing redistribution of funds from traditional public schools to other entities under the watchword of "choice."

Over the past nearly five years, CMD has documented the impact of the policies on American school children, despite the PR claims of the industry, which has an increasing number of allies within education agencies who are devoted to charter expansion at the expense of traditional public schools. CMD has written about numerous aspects of the charter school industry as well as corporations, non-profit groups, and policymakers involved in the effort to privatize public schools in numerous ways. CMD has also documented how budget difficulties following the Wall Street meltdown under George W. Bush have been seized on by some in the industry as opportunities to try to displace school boards and local democratic control of schools and spending. CMD has also documented how billionaire funders of ALEC, such as the Koch brothers, have pushed their hostility toward the idea of public schools under the guise of choice.

In 2014, CMD sought to determine how much money the federal government had spent on charters, through State Education Agencies (SEAs) or Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) or other vehicles and discovered that this information was not publicly available. Instead, key data about how Americans' tax dollars were being spent on the charter school experiment and its failures was largely hidden from public view.

When CMD sought the identities of the charter authorizers or CMOs that had been essentially designated via ALEC bills to determine which charters were eligible to receive federal funds, the feds suggested asking the CMOs, even though many of them are private entities not covered by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) rules or state open records laws.

CMD was told to ask NACSA, the National Association of Charter School Associations, a private group created as a result of this new industry, but NACSA also did not maintain a public list of all the charters that had received federal funding and how much each had received.

Additionally, the states through their SEAs--where pro-charter staffers work within state education departments--varied greatly in how much information was provided to the public about which charters had received funds and how that taxpayer money had been spent--despite mounting news accounts of fraud and waste by charters, including numerous criminal indictments, as tallied at more than $200 million by the Center for Popular Democracy.

Under ALEC-style charter bills, charters were exempted from most state regulations including key financial reporting and controls, and a number of charters refused requests by the press under open records laws for such information.

Although some charters were managed by school districts, many were not, and with this deregulation has emerged an array of questionable practices, such as "public" or non-profit charters that outsource their administration to for-profit firms--in addition to the advent of for-profit charters, like K12's "virtual schools," another conduit for redistributing taxpayer dollars through yet another ALEC bill.

When CMD sought information on how much money had even been spent on charters, no one knew. So CMD calculated the figure the federal government has spent fueling the charter school industry and the current tally stands at more than $3.7 billion.

But, that revealing figure did not provide the public with the information it has a right to know about where all that money actually went, as noted in CMD's report "Charter School Black Hole."

So CMD requested information about which charters received such funds and how much.

In releasing the new dataset, the Department of Education is providing new transparency about charter school grantees, although significant gaps remain.

Source: PR Watch

With 71 percent of people detained by ICE held in privately-operated facilities, the private prison industry is one of the largest beneficiaries of anti-immigrant policies. The Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York, Enlace International, New York Communities for Change, and the Strong Economy for All Coalition recently released a report that found that Wall Street companies such as JP Morgan and Wells Fargo not only profit from the industry: they massively increased their investments after Donald Trump was elected president. Check out the report here, then write a letter to one of the companies and share some of the report’s most potent facts on social media using the hashtag #BackersofHate.

Read the full article here.

L Brands Inc. is the latest retail company to end “on-call scheduling” in the face of a warning letter from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman that the practice likely violates state law. 

The company said its Bath & Body Works stores and Victoria’s Secret stores are phasing out the practice nationwide.

Rise Up Georgia, a partner of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, has been organizing L Brands workers and asking the company to end the practice, especially at Bath & Body Works stores, and says the latest move doesn’t go far enough.

As the practice of on-call scheduling has drawn more scrutiny, lawmakers and regulators are calling for an end to the practice and taking steps, as Schneiderman's office has, to rein it in. Several jurisdictions, including a few states, already have laws on the books that could be used to temper or end the practice.

On-call scheduling uses algorithms to determine when workers are most needed or not, and many retailers have taken to sending workers home or having them at the ready without pay. That wreaks havoc on workers’ lives, hampering their ability to attend school, care for families, or hold down other jobs.

An improving job market is also helping make the practice less tenable as workers are more able to find jobs that are less disruptive to them.

Retailers should be prepared to see more such concerns, warnings, and even legislation as just-in time scheduling gets more scrutiny, Gail Gottehrer, a labor & employment litigator at Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider in New York who works on behalf of employers, told Retail Dive. The practice was a major concern when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last year unanimously passed its Worker Bill of Rights law.

But some worker advocates say that L Brands move doesn’t go far enough. 

"L Brand employees still have to put their lives on hold," Erin Hurley, an organizer for Rise Up Georgia and a former Bath & Body Works employee, said in a statement. "The company might have ended one type of on-call shifts, but it is still allowing for harmful shift practices: since July, they have been relying on shift extensions at Victoria’s Secret, which are on-call shifts by another name. While we celebrate the step forward, we call on L Brands to take a definitive step toward a fair workweek by giving workers shifts with definite start and end times, and enough hours to support their families.”

Schneiderman, meanwhile, praised the move while also making it clear that his office will continue to monitor the practice. 

Wall Street Journal: Bath & Body Works to End On-Call Scheduling

Source: RetailDive