Protesting health care repeal
Protesting health care repeal
Senate Republicans tried and failed three times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Many Americans who were against the repeal spent time calling and writing to their senators, and even making it...
Senate Republicans tried and failed three times to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Many Americans who were against the repeal spent time calling and writing to their senators, and even making it to Washington to protest the plans in person. Those advocates say they believe standing up against the repeal efforts made all the difference. Karen Scharff from Citizen Action, Michael Kink from Strong Economy for All, and Jaron Benjamin from Housing Works discuss their fight against the repeal.
Watch the video here.
These Cities Aren’t Waiting for the Supreme Court to Decide Whether or Not to Gut Unions
These Cities Aren’t Waiting for the Supreme Court to Decide Whether or Not to Gut Unions
In the face of the Janus case, local elected officials across the country are renewing our efforts to help workers organize—in traditional ways, and in new ones. Brad Lander is a New York City...
In the face of the Janus case, local elected officials across the country are renewing our efforts to help workers organize—in traditional ways, and in new ones. Brad Lander is a New York City Council Member from Brooklyn and the chairman of the board of Local Progress, a national association of progressive municipal elected officials. Helen Gym is a Councilmember At Large from Philadelphia and Vice-Chair of Local Progress, a national network of progressive elected officials.
Read the full article here.
Fed’s Kashkari to Spend Day in Life of Struggling Black Family
Fed’s Kashkari to Spend Day in Life of Struggling Black Family
Neel Kashkari tried living on streets for a week during his failed run for California governor in 2014. Now, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will spend a day in the life...
Neel Kashkari tried living on streets for a week during his failed run for California governor in 2014. Now, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will spend a day in the life of a black family barely making ends meet.
“Walking a day in somebody else’s shoes is actually -- it makes the anecdotes that much more real,” Kashkari, 43, told reporters Wednesday in Minneapolis after a meeting with the local community to discuss race and economic inequality. “It influences how I think about the problems we face.”
Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who went on to oversee the U.S. government’s $700 billion financial rescue program, took the helm of the Minneapolis Fed in January.
National poverty levels among blacks stand at 26 percent, more than double those for whites. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has discussed inequality and the fact that minorities have higher unemployment than whites in speeches and testimony to Congress.
Outrage has mounted in the U.S. over a recent spate of fatal shootings of black men by police, some of which were filmed and broadcast over social media, worsening racial tensions in many communities.
On Wednesday, Kashkari, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, heard Rosheeda Credit describe how she and her boyfriend worked three jobs between them to support their family. She then invited him to find out himself what it was like by spending the day with her.
Kashkari said he’d be “happy to do it.”
The Fed has also been under fire from Democrats, including presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for a lack of diversity on the boards of directors on the 12 regional Fed banks. Kashkari said the central bank had a lot of work to do to improve diversity and was committed to making that happen.
By ALISTER BULL & JEANNA SMIALEK
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Systemic Fraud Found In GOP-Endorsed Charter Schools
Atlas Left - May 24, 2014, by Josh Kilburn - The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant $3 million in taxpayer money to charter schools; schools that both Democrats and...
Atlas Left - May 24, 2014, by Josh Kilburn - The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant $3 million in taxpayer money to charter schools; schools that both Democrats and Republicans are lining up behind. In the wake of this, Ring of Fire took a critical eye to some of the rampant abuses in the system with guest and Bill Moyers.com senior digital producer, Joshua Hollands, present to help explain what it meant.
While discussing how abused the system is, Joshua Holland referenced a report by Integrity in Education and the Center for Popular Democracy in regards to the systematic abuse and waste in charter schools:
[They found] in fifteen states, just fifteen states they looked at, they found $140 million dollars in public funds that were lost to fraud, waste, and abuse . . . This is all taxpayer money, so, that’s right. What they found, for example, was using public education dollars, these private operators were using them to prop up other businesses. There was an incident where somebody was feeding these public dollars into their health food store. In another instance, there was somebody who was using these dollars to make repairs on their apartment complex that they’d rented out. This again is somewhat unsurprising given that you have such limited oversight.And the reason for that limited oversight? Charter schools try to have it both ways; when it comes to public money, they’re suddenly public institutions. When it comes to public oversight, they change the color of their scales and become private institutions with “proprietary secrets.”
There are other problems as well; charter school teachers are paid less than public school teachers, administrations are paid more, and they’re less likely to be unionized than public school teachers. And that’s the union busing angle: the private sector unionization is at an all time low — only 7%. The majority of unionized workers are in the public sector, which is what the big businesses are targeting in an systematic, widespread anti-union, anti-worker putsch to restore our nation to the gilded glory days of the 1870s and 1880s.
Our public schools are not the problem. In wealthy districts, the public schools are top in the world as far as reading, writing, and other testing goes. It’s only in the poorer districts, where childhood poverty is rampant, that we find the lower numbers pulling down the average. Since “we tolerate a high level of childhood poverty relative to other nations,” in the words of Joshua Holland, and poor children don’t preform as well as their wealthy counterparts do, low test scores should come as no surprise. Out of 35 nations tested, the United States rates 34 in child poverty; the only country below us is Romania. And until we do something about the rampant poverty, instead of blaming it on the teachers, the problem won’t be going away.
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Fast-Food Labor Organizers Plan Actions for April 15
ABC News - March 31, 2015, Candice Choi - Fast-food labor organizers say they're expanding the scope of their campaign for $15 an hour and unionization, this time with a day of actions including...
ABC News - March 31, 2015, Candice Choi - Fast-food labor organizers say they're expanding the scope of their campaign for $15 an hour and unionization, this time with a day of actions including other low-wage workers and demonstrations on college campuses.
Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fight for $15, said Tuesday the protests will take place April 15 and are planned to include actions on about 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the country and abroad.
At an event announcing the actions in front of a McDonald's in New York City's Times Square, organizers said home health care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors, child care workers and Wal-Mart workers will be among those turning out in April.
Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City, Missouri, and a national leader for the Fight for $15 push, said more than 2,000 groups including Jobs With Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support as well.
"This will be the biggest mobilization America has seen in decades," Wise said at the rally as pedestrians walked past on the busy street.
The plans are a continuation of a campaign that began in late 2012. The push is being spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union and has included demonstrations nationwide to build public support for raising pay for fast-food and other low-wage workers, although turnout has varied from city to city. Last May, the campaign reached the doorsteps of McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, where protesters were arrested after declining to leave the property ahead of the company's annual meeting.
Fells, an SEIU employee, said April 15 was picked for the next day of actions because workers are fighting "for 15."
"It's a little play on words," he said.
Fells noted that while the push began as a fast-food worker movement, it has morphed into a broader push for low-wage workers and is now shifting into a social justice movement with the involvement of "Black Lives Matter" activists joining in in the April protests. Still, he said McDonald's Corp. remained a primary target.
"McDonald's needs to come to the table because they could settle this issue," he said.
In a statement, McDonald's said it respects people's right to peacefully protest, but added that the demonstrations over the past two years have been "organized rallies designed to garner media attention" and that "very few" McDonald's workers have participated.
In addition to the ongoing demonstrations, organizers have been working on multiple fronts to make the legal case that McDonald's Corp. should be held accountable for working conditions at its franchised restaurants. That finding is seen as critical in being able to negotiate with one entity on behalf of workers across the chain, rather than dealing with the thousands of franchisees who operate the majority of McDonald's more than 14,000 U.S. restaurants.
McDonald's and other fast-food chains have maintained that they're not responsible for hiring and employment decisions at franchised locations.
One closely watched case addressing the matter began this week, when the National Labor Relations Board began hearings on complaints over alleged labor violations at McDonald's restaurants. The board's general counsel had said last year that McDonald's could be named as a joint employer along with franchisees in the complaints.
The hearing is scheduled to resume May 26 and is set to be a lengthy legal battle. Whichever side loses is expected to appeal, with the possibility of the case eventually heading to the Supreme Court.
In a statement, McDonald's has said the board's decision to name McDonald's as a joint employer "improperly strikes at the heart of the franchise system."
"The SEIU put a target on McDonald's back more than two years ago; the Board has now joined in taking aim, and has done so by managing the McDonald's case in an unprecedented manner," the statement said.
America’s Massive Retail Workforce Is Tired of Being Ignored
America’s Massive Retail Workforce Is Tired of Being Ignored
Francisco Aguilera has worked at the Express on Bay Street in Emeryville, California for the past year and a half. “I do a little bit of everything,” from running the register to folding and...
Francisco Aguilera has worked at the Express on Bay Street in Emeryville, California for the past year and a half. “I do a little bit of everything,” from running the register to folding and arranging clothes to working in the stockroom in the back of the store, he says. Soft-spoken with an open smile, Aguilera is what many people picture to be the typical retail worker: someone putting in a few hours in the evenings at a shopping complex while attending college during the day. He likes his job well enough, though he notes it can be tiring to work until 9:30 or 10:00 at night and then find time to do his schoolwork.
Read the full article here.
Woman Who Confronted Jeff Flake in the Elevator: 'I Wanted Him to Feel My Rage'
Woman Who Confronted Jeff Flake in the Elevator: 'I Wanted Him to Feel My Rage'
The protesters who cornered Flake just before he voted on Kavanaugh's confirmation spoke out about why they did it.
...
The protesters who cornered Flake just before he voted on Kavanaugh's confirmation spoke out about why they did it.
Read the full article here.
Object Action: The "F" Word in a Post-truth Era Opening Reception to Collect For Change Inauguration
Object Action: The "F" Word in a Post-truth Era Opening Reception to Collect For Change Inauguration
Object Action: The "F" Word in a Post-Truth Eramarks the inauguration of Collect For Change-an initiative which collaborates with artists across disciplines, offering artwork with a portion of...
Object Action: The "F" Word in a Post-Truth Eramarks the inauguration of Collect For Change-an initiative which collaborates with artists across disciplines, offering artwork with a portion of sales benefiting a charity personally selected by each artist. As a feminist response to the one-year anniversary of the current administration, the group exhibition highlights "objects" and works by female artists "objecting" to a dominant paradigm through innovative media in the feminist realm.
Featured artists Ana Teresa Fernández, Chitra Ganesh, Michelle Hartney, Angela Hennessy, Nadja Verena Marcin, Sanaz Mazinani, and Michele Pred will donate a portion of all artwork sales to Art & Abolition, The Center For Popular Democracy's Puerto Rico Rebuilding Fund, Girls Garage, Girls Inc., NARAL Pro-Choice California, Planned Parenthood, and 350.org.
Read the full article here.
Failing the Test: Searching for Accountability in Charter Schools
Failing the Test: Searching for Accountability in Charter Schools
The original concept of charter schools emerged nationally more than two decades ago and was intended to support community efforts to open up education. Albert Shanker, then president of the...
The original concept of charter schools emerged nationally more than two decades ago and was intended to support community efforts to open up education. Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers union, lauded the charter idea in 1988 as way to propel social mobility for working class kids and to give teachers more decision-making power.
“There was a sense from the start that they would develop models for the broader system,” John Rogers tells Capital & Main. Rogers, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. He adds that charter schools were to be laboratories where parents and educators would work together to craft the best possible learning environment and to serve as engines of innovation and social equity.
But critics of today’s market-based charter movement say monied interests have turned those learning labs into models for capital capture in the Golden State and beyond–“the charter school gravy train,” as Forbes describes it. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed and, like most privately run businesses, the schools prefer to avoid transparency in their operations. This often has brought negative publicity to the schools – last month the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the principal of El Camino Real Charter High School charged more than $100,000 in expenses to his school-issued credit card, many of them for personal use.
See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Charter School Series
“Information belongs to the public,” says Daniel Losen, who conducts law and policy research on education equality issues. “To the extent that you think choice should benefit parents—good choices are made with good information.” Losen co-authored a March, 2016 report about charter schools’ disciplinary policies, produced by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
Billions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into expanding America’s privately-run charter school system over the past two decades, including $3.3 billion in federal funds alone, reports an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy. California has the nation’s largest number of charter schools, with most of them located in Los Angeles County. But in an age when words like “accountability” and “transparency” dominate political discourse, the financial mechanics of charters receive less oversight and scrutiny than the average public school bake sale.
Charter schools were originally intended to support community efforts to open up education.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools candidly spells out the Golden State’s laissez faire rules of the game on its website: “California law provides that charter schools are automatically exempt from most laws governing school districts.”
The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has explicitly opposed state legislation that would clearly define the existing transparency laws and codes for charter schools — standards charters can now avoid despite their use of public funds.
“Charters don’t have to disclose budgets,” says Jackie Goldberg, a long-time Los Angeles school teacher and former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board president, who also served in the California State Assembly. “Once a charter is written, it’s not subject to the Brown or the Public Records acts.”
The CCSA opposes several bills currently progressing through the state legislature that would bring charter school transparency requirements into line with those expected of public schools. One measure spells out the expectation that charters would follow the same standards as public schools when it comes to the Public Records Act that guarantees access to public records; CCSA argues that most charter schools already voluntarily comply—so the law is therefore unnecessary.
Below are several of areas of concern often cited by charter school critics.
Open Meetings
California public schools are required to follow the Ralph M. Brown Act that requires regular meetings with notices posted in advance, along with public testimony and the availability of agendas and minutes. Open meetings guarantee the right of local parents, teachers and taxpayers to participate in discussions about policy, funding, disciplinary standards—all the heated issues that arise in local schools or that go before school boards.
The finances of charter schools receive less oversight than the average public school bake sale.
But a group called the Charter Schools Development Center provides advice and wiggle room to attorneys representing charter schools on Brown Act requirements. Charters are frequently run by a nonprofit whose board members are chosen and named by previous board members. The CSDC’s Guide to the Brown Act pointedly raises the question of whether governing structures fit the profile of “local legislative bodies” required to comply with the Brown Act and recommends charter school boards “cover their bases” and follow at least the spirit, if not the precise requirements, of the Brown Act.
Disciplinary Protocols and “Counseling Out”
The California Education Code stipulates that a public school student undergoing the drastic disciplinary measure of expulsion is entitled to a due process hearing that includes district administrators and the principal, and allows the student and parents to present arguments and information.
That doesn’t apply to California charter schools, according to a 2013 state Court of Appeals ruling that holds charters can “dismiss” a student without due process. The ruling differentiates between expulsion and dismissal. Following a dismissal, a student is then sent back to the public school system. (The UCLA report that Daniel Losen co-authored found national suspension rates at charter schools were 16 percent higher than those of public schools.)
Charter schools depend on their reputations for teaching students who hit high test-score marks. The practice known as “counseling out” is used to winnow out difficult students, and extends beyond California—the New York Times has detailed incidents in a high-achieving charter school in Brooklyn.
Counseling out can happen for a variety of reasons, not just disciplinary. Jackie Goldberg says she personally witnessed a counseling out session at a South Los Angeles charter, where a student’s mother was simply told by a school staff member that her son was better off finding “a school that meets his needs.”
Public schools, on the other hand, cannot “counsel out” challenging students.
Conflicts of interest
Public school governments are required to follow California Government Code 1090, which states that officials can’t vote on issues or contracts wherein they have a vested interest. Charter decision-makers are not subject to the conflict-of-interest code.
Veteran educators and administrators interviewed by Capital & Main have expressed deep concern about the disparities between transparency requirements for public schools and publicly funded charter schools.
Most California charters are run by educational management organizations (EMOs), which are described by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado as “private entities [that] may not be subject to the same financial or other document/records disclosure laws that apply to state-operated entities and public officials.”
Steve Zimmer, the current LAUSD school board president and a former high school teacher and counselor, has been critical of the lack of oversight of charter funding.
“You don’t have to go through a procurement process, you don’t have to follow labor standards,” he says. “This is playing out on a multiplicity of levels.”
Audits are not routinely required in the California charter system. It was only in 2006—some 14 years after California became the second state in the nation to pass legislation to create charter schools—that the state Charter Schools Act was amended to allow local school officials to request a state audit of a charter school’s financial transactions when they suspect something is amiss.
It took a state audit—triggered by a request from the Los Angeles County Office of Education—to uncover $2.6 million in payments that went to Kendra Okonkwo, the founder of Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists charter school, and to her close family members—with no oversight from the governing board of the nonprofit running the South Los Angeles school.
Another audit uncovered an Oakland charter school founder directing $3.8 million to companies he owned. American Indian Model Schools founder Ben Chavis is presently under IRS and FBI investigations related to his dealings with the school district.
More recently, a San Jose Mercury News investigation of California Virtual Academies, an online charter school chain run by the Virginia-based, publicly traded company K12 Inc., found that not even half of its enrollees graduated with a high school diploma and even fewer—almost none—were qualified to attend a California state university. The online chain, launched by former Goldman Sachs banker Ronald Packard, with seed money from Larry Ellison, cofounder of tech giant Oracle, and former junk bond purveyor Michael Milken, has collected more than $310 million in state funds over a dozen years. (An April 12 statement from K12 Inc. criticized the investigation as incomplete.)
A study commissioned by the Center for Popular Democracy calculates the lack of oversight has cost California $81 million.
Jason Mandell, Director of Advocacy Communications at the California Charter Schools Association, says that charter school opacity is changing. “There’s an increasingly thorough review process. If a charter school isn’t meeting standards, the charter can be shut down. When you know you’re going to be scrutinized and people are watching, you better perform. [Charters] have more autonomy in exchange for greater accountability.”
Last year, however, Governor Jerry Brown, himself a charter school founder, passed on a chance to tighten that accountability. He vetoed a bill approved by both houses of the legislature that would have made it explicit that schools should be subject to the Brown and Public Records acts.
David Tokofsky, a former member of the LAUSD Board of Education who has also worked for a charter school operator, cautions that the push for charter schools has been framed in terms of “education reform,” although the movement behind these schools, he says, is really one for deregulation of financial oversight and management.
“Deregulation was supposed to be about curriculum,” Tokofsky says, allowing teachers and parents more freedom to craft education and programs to fit the students. “It has become deregulation about every aspect of the school.”
“We know,” he adds, “when deregulated banks fail; we know when deregulated airplane doors fail. Do we know when deregulated schools are hurting your kids?”
By Bobbi Murray
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Laws & Lives
New York Daily News - January 23, 2015, by Josie Duffy - We all want to see New York thrive, but weakening critical workplace safety laws like the Scaffold Safety Law would only...
New York Daily News - January 23, 2015, by Josie Duffy - We all want to see New York thrive, but weakening critical workplace safety laws like the Scaffold Safety Law would only put the most vulnerable workers at risk (“Cure what ails New York, gov,” Column, Jan. 21). As Fox News recently reported, deaths among Latino and immigrant construction workers are on the rise, even as they fall for other workers. The Scaffold Safety Law creates a strong incentive to keep workers safe. It says that if those who control a worksite fail to follow commonsense rules, they can be held liable for the injuries they cause. Without a strong Scaffold Safety Law, we’ll only see many more injured construction workers across New York — with Latino and immigrant workers most at risk. Josie Duffy, policy advocate Center for Popular Democracy
5 days ago
5 days ago