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In Seattle’s 2013 election, Nick Licata broke the city’s record for the most votes received citywide for a city councilor in a contested race. That same year he was named the country’s Most Valuable Local Official on The Nation’s list of most valuable progressives.

During his time on council, Licata sponsored and passed legislation like paid sick leave and supported a plan to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, two social-justice objectives sought by activists around the country. At the end of last year, the veteran Seattle city councilor retired after 18 years in office.

That’s not the end of Licata’s social-justice crusade, however. This week he’ll visit Pittsburgh to attend two conventions on social-justice issues and share insights from his recently released book, Becoming a Citizen Activist.

“My primary mission right now,” says Licata, “is to work with both citizens and elected [officials] to recognize that no matter what happens after November, it’s critical that we maintain an activist space at the local level, because we’ve shown at the local level we can accomplish things, and we can continue to accomplish things no matter who is president.”

Pittsburgh and other cities haven’t seen as much progress on paid sick leave and the Fight for $15 as has Licata’s native Seattle. Pittsburgh City Council passed a paid-sick-leave bill last year, but a judge struck it down in December as unenforceable. And while the city and some employers have raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour, a mandatory minimum wage citywide is a ways away.

But Pittsburgh must be doing something right because it was selected to host those two social-justice conventions. The People’s Convention will bring more than 40 national activist organizations to the city, while the Local Progress Convening will see the arrival of hundreds of progressive municipal elected officials.

“Pittsburgh was identified as a place where [the] movement is very real,” says Erin Kramer, executive director of social-justice group One Pittsburgh. “There’s more workers organizing per capita in Pittsburgh than any other city in the country right now. There’s something happening in Pittsburgh right now, and folks want to come see it and learn from it.”

The pairing of the events isn’t an accident. They’re both sponsored by the Center for Popular Democracy, a group that works to build alliances between progressive organizations and politicians. Participants say collaboration between the two bodies is integral to ensuring progressive laws are passed and enacted.

“It is very important for elected officials who are trying to advance social change to have a direct understanding of the specific concerns of communities,” says Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of Popular Democracy. “And it’s very important for community members to have relationships with elected officials. We know in the places where working families are winning we need both the pressure on the outside and the strategy on the inside.”

Jimmy John’s employee Chris Ellis has worked in the fast-food industry for more than two decades and has become a leader in the local Fight for $15. At the People’s Convention next week, he’ll have the opportunity to meet leaders from movements in other cities throughout the country.

“[I hope to learn] better organizing skills not just for the Fight for $15 movement but for all movements in general,” Ellis says. “I’m the type of person who sees myself trying to organize other fights, because once this fight is over, I’m looking for other fights.”

The interconnectedness of social-justice issues is widely recognized by activists. The People’s Convention will focus on topics like workers’ rights, health care, gun violence and education — issues that One Pittsburgh, which is part of the hosting committee, has been working on for more than a decade. The idea is to collaborate on these issues to build momentum and produce results.

“In Pittsburgh there’s lots of progressive work on half-a-dozen different issues at any given time, and increasingly those organizations are building partnerships with each other,” says Kramer, from One Pittsburgh. “We’ve been getting together to learn from each other and build our campaigns together. What I think folks are increasingly realizing is whether it’s housing, minimum wage or education justice, it’s really the same people who need to come together to build power to build a city that works for all of us.”

The event will develop strategies for appealing to lawmakers, but will also address barriers in cities where the majority of elected officials are already supportive of social-justice movements.

“Increasingly, we find ourselves literally preempted from solving problems at the local level by state legislatures that are unfriendly to the solutions we would propose,” says Kramer. “A good example is where we passed paid-sick-day legislation for tens of thousands of people in Pittsburgh and immediately it goes in front of the court because the restaurant association [the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association] objects. The reason we don’t have a $15-an-hour minimum wage for the vast majority of Pennsylvanians is because you can’t do that at the city level.”

Combating these barriers that stifle progress at the municipal level — and particularly, developing strategies for fighting lawsuits against progressive laws — is something that will be discussed at the Local Progress convention this weekend as well.

“It’s the strategy,” says Licata, a Local Progress co-founder. “It’s smart on [the opposition’s] part, and I think that’s what we’ll see in other cities — corporate strategy to try to limit [these laws]. What I would like to see as we see more of these lawsuits being filed is Local Progress use our network to work on national strategies to fight these corporate challenges through the court system.”

To ensure laws fall within a city’s jurisdiction, Local Progress has also been holding workshops to examine the power that states hold over local municipalities. And they’re also looking into legislation that is being passed to further limit cities’ rights.

“As a rule of thumb, cities are creatures of the state,” says Licata. “Over half the states limit the authority of cities, and one of the ongoing battles we’re having that impacts local politics is the whole issue of states limiting citizens’ rights. We’ve been fighting on that. It’s a major concern.”

Ultimately, as a former activist turned politician turned activism author, Licata says the intersection of the two events and collaboration is important to ensuring that things like paid sick leave and a $15-an-hour minimum wage are realized.

“People at the People’s Convention and the politicians at Local Progress are literally the same people. A lot of the people at Local Progress were activists,” he says. “When someone gets elected to office, people who got the person elected to office think he or she will take care of the problems, and the person who gets elected thinks, ‘Oh, I have to act differently.’ But you have to continue organizing and use the power you get as an elected official to amplify your organizing.

“Government is a tool. It’s not an end-product. I think getting into office does give you more power, but you want to distribute that power so other people have access to power. The main ask of progressive politicians who want to build communities is to disperse the power that was given to them to as many people as possible.”

According to Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, who as city councilor joined Local Progress nearly a decade ago, the group can counterbalance those organizations that are trying to get conservative legislation passed.

“Certainly we’ve learned from other cities through these organizations,” says Peduto. “We hear a lot about ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] and how it is a network that is putting state legislatures into very conservative, Tea Party-type of policies, and it networks nationally. Well, this is the answer, and these organizations have become the network that helps progressive policies to work their way into implementation in city halls. And the fact that they chose Pittsburgh to do it shows that we are a part of that network and one of the areas that the rest of the country looks towards.”

Like Peduto, event organizer Popular Democracy hopes its network of activists and politicians will have the ability to shape the future of the country.

“It’s a really important moment politically because our nation is at a crossroads between the politics of hate and xenophobia and the politics of opportunity and interdependence,” says Popular Democracy’s Archila. “We are in the process of a presidential election where the issues that matter to the working-class community are really centrally positioned in the debate. How the solutions are advanced will depend on who is in motion. And we will have in Pittsburgh thousands of people who are in motion across the country and who are helping define the debate for what’s possible in their cities.”

By Rebecca Addison

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by Kyle Serrette, Director of Education Justice Campaigns, Center for Popular Democracy

John H. Reagan High School is located in northeast Austin. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Reagan’s student body became increasingly poor as middle-class families left the area. In 2003, a student was stabbed to death by her former boyfriend in a school hallway. The incident made headlines and scared away neighborhood families. Students left Reagan in droves. Enrollment dropped from more than 2,000 students to a new low of 600, and the graduation rate hovered just below 50 percent. In 2008, the district threatened to close Reagan. In reaction, a committee of parents, teachers, and students, brought together by Austin Voices for Education and Youth, formulated a plan to turn Reagan into a community school. The district accepted their plan.

Today, five years after adopting the community school strategy, Reagan is graduating 85 percent of its students, enrollment has more than doubled, and a new early college program has made it possible for Reagan’s students to earn two years of college credits from a nearby community college while still attending high school.

Reagan High School, or any community school for that matter, doesn’t immediately look different than any other school — that is, until you spend some time there.

At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is a big place, with almost 50 million primary and secondary students attending more than 98,000 public schools in 14,000 school districts.

Many things unite our vastly different 50 states, but our approach to education is not one of them.

It is fair to say that the United States does not have one approach to education. Rather, it has thousands of pedagogical approaches that fit into roughly the same structure (elementary, middle, high school).

If the universe of poorly funded public schools in the United States were the night sky on a clear night, you would find some really bright stars and a lot of jarring empty space. The problem with a scattershot approach to education in such a vast country is that there’s no effective way to share successful practices.

Thousands of schools in poor neighborhoods fail generation after generation, while other schools with the same demographics and challenges have found ways to succeed and break the cycle of failure. Today, if you are a business, nonprofit, or any type of entity, it is quite hard to figure out if a school wants help or what kind of help it needs. Most schools lack a clear analysis of what they need to help improve outcomes, and if they do have a clear understanding of needs, most lack a point person to manage partnerships.

Unfortunately, there is also no sound system for sharing successful strategies from schools that are getting it right. This is analogous to a heart surgeon developing a revolutionary life-saving approach and only telling people she bumped into about it. Yet that’s basically how our education system works in the United States.

While poor schools have taken many paths to transform themselves into successful schools, one particular path has worked again and again. There are 5.1 million children enrolled in approximately 5,000 community schools in the United States, and those numbers are growing quickly. In New York, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio promised to create 100 community schools. As mayor, he has fulfilled that campaign promise and recently announced a plan to grow that number to 200 by 2017.

Philadelphia mayoral candidate Jim Kenney announced a plan to open 25 new community schools during his first term. This past December, Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark, announced a plan to scale up community schools with a tentative commitment of $12.5 million from the Foundation for Newark’s Future, the organization created to manage the $100 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated to the city in 2010 to reform the city’s floundering school system.

Community schools are not a new concept. John Rogers, community schools historian at UCLA, tells us they have existed at least since the turn of the 20th century in many forms, but always with the same objective of addressing inequities at both the school and community levels. Jane Addams’s Hull House in the 1890s is an early example: “There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, and a labor museum.”

Long before Reagan became a community school, it housed a daycare for the babies of student mothers so they could continue their education. That daycare still exists today with approximately 20 babies enrolled, but there’s more. When school social workers noticed that student moms at Reagan were missing classes to take their babies to doctor appointments, the social workers applied for and won a grant to have a mobile clinic visit the campus once a week. Now student moms can make appointments for their babies to receive checkups without leaving school. Reagan also allows parents to eat lunch with their babies in the daycare and attend parenting classes. Students in Reagan’s Pregnant and Parenting Teen Program now have a remarkable 100 percent graduation rate.

Discipline problems historically have plagued Reagan. Students were frequently suspended, and chronic attendance issues landed students and families in court, which then imposed fines that families could not afford. Dropout rates were high.

Today, a full-time bilingual social worker works to diagnose chronic attendance problems and connects students and their families with supports, with service referrals rather than fines. A student-led youth court has been developed in partnership with the University of Texas–Austin Law School. The youth court and a restorative justice program together have dramatically reduced discipline issues. Today, Reagan is a top Title I high school in Austin.

While there is a fair amount of variability within schools that have implemented this strategy, thousands of schools have gotten it just right. We wanted to understand what distinguished them from the others.

Here’s what we found those schools shared in their strategic plans: 1) culturally relevant and engaging curricula; 2) an emphasis on high-quality teaching, not high-stakes testing; 3) wraparound supports, such as health care and social and emotional services; 4) positive discipline practices, such as restorative justice; 5) parent and community engagement; and 6) inclusive school leadership committed to making the transformational community school strategy integral to the school’s mandate and functioning.

It all seems intuitive. Schools that form strategic partnerships with businesses, nonprofits, local and federal governments, universities, hospitals, and other organizations to meet core unmet needs are usually successful over time. In most strapped schools, a principal doesn’t have time to find the appropriate partners, let alone conduct an analysis of needs. This leaves schools with a random partner strategy, which is no strategy at all. The community school strategy puts one person in charge of determining the school’s ever-evolving needs. The cost incurred to create this position and the work it supports — around $150,000 — pays for itself and then some.

Nine years ago, when Baltimore’s Wolfe Street Academy elementary school became a community school, 90 percent of its students were living in poverty, 60 percent spoke a language other than English at home, and its mobility rate was high at 46.6 (less than half of its students attended for more than three years). Wolfe Street Academy ranked 77th in the district in academic measures, and only half its children reached reading proficiency by fifth grade. It had no library and only sporadic parent or community engagement.

Today, Wolfe Street ranks second in the city academically, its mobility rate has dropped to 8.8 percent, 95 percent of fifth-grade students are reading proficient, and its average daily attendance rate is 95 percent. It has a library, a book club, and volunteer help from a retired librarian. Forty parents attend a morning meeting every day before school while the students eat breakfast. They share school and community news, both good and bad. This transformation at Wolfe Street has taken place even as more students living in poverty have arrived and as the number of students speaking a language other than English in the home has grown.

During one of Wolfe Street’s annual needs assessments, it determined that its curriculum was not dynamic enough to give the school a chance to achieve its academic goals. In response, Wolfe Street formed a partnership with the Baltimore Curriculum Project, which now provides staff with professional development and supports the school with teacher recruitment and retention.

When the assessment revealed that many of its students had never visited a dentist the school partnered with the University of Maryland Dental School to hold free oral health screenings for all the students. A partnership was formed as well with the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work as a way to respond to what the assessment revealed about the daily impact of trauma on their students’ lives. Now licensed social workers and multiple social work interns are available and offer case management and referrals.

We are in the enviable position of knowing what works. And now, with the recent passage of the federal education legislation Every Student Succeeds Act, funds are explicitly available for the essential elements of community schools, such as community school coordinators, needs assessments, and after-school programming.

A United States where every public school is a community school would be a very different place — it would be a school with the community inside it. Your bank, local architect, grocery store, hospital, and other institutions we associate with being part of the broader community outside our schools would be deeply integrated into them. The tax code could be designed to accelerate and incentivize partnerships with schools. The lines between the inside and outside of schools would blur.

And if you imagine a United States in 2050 where all 98,000 schools have a clear sense of their individual needs and are able to communicate these needs effectively to potential partners, this might be a game changer.

With a new granular understanding of every school’s needs, we could scale partnerships and connect schools with similar needs or pair schools that could benefit from each other’s strengths. We could analyze needs and assess intervention strategies between schools and across districts, cities, states, and the nation.

If you can imagine the world back when it wasn’t connected by the internet and experience again how everything changed when we finally were connected, that is the level shift our schools would experience if every school were a community school. A networked school system would exist, and our atomized system of disparate schools would fade away as a relic of the past.

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Backyard barbecues. Fireworks. A day off work. Among these traditions we look forward to on the Fourth of July, there is an even more patriotic rite of passage: the oath immigrants take to become American citizens.

Read the full article here.

San Diego Free Press - March 13, 2012, by Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment - When it comes to foreclosing on Californians, it looks like Wells Fargo may take the prize. According to a report released today, Wells Fargo is responsible for more homes in the foreclosure pipeline in California than any other single lender.

Wells Fargo is servicing the most loans, but they are providing less principal reduction to struggling borrowers than either Bank of America and Chase – who themselves should be doing more! The recent report from the Monitor of the multi-state Attorneys General settlement with the five big mortgage servicers showed that Wells Fargo trails behind Bank of America and Chase when it comes to the amount of principal reduction given as part of first lien loan modifications.

This is the very same Wells Fargo that just had its most profitable year ever in 2012, with earnings of $19 billion.

The report, California in Crisis: How Wells Fargo’s Foreclosure Pipeline Is Damaging Local Communities, by ACCE (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), the Center for Popular Democracy and the Home Defenders League, shows the harm coming to homeowners, communities and the economy unless Wells Fargo reverses its course and averts some or all of the impending foreclosures.

Click here to download the report.

The report uses data from Foreclosure Radar to look at loans currently in the foreclosure pipeline in California – meaning loans that have a Notice of Default or Notice of Trustee Sale. Of the 65,466 loans in the foreclosure pipeline, close to 20% of them are serviced by Wells Fargo.

If Wells Fargo’s 11,616 distressed loans go through foreclosure, California will take a next $3.3 billion hit: Each home will lose approximately 22 percent of its value, for a total loss of approximately $1.07 billion; homes in the surrounding neighborhood will lose value as well, for an additional loss of about $2.2 billion; and government tax revenues will be cut by $20 million, as a result of the depreciation.

And not surprisingly, African American and Latino communities will be particularly hard-hit. The report includes maps for seven major cities showing minority density and dots for each of Wells Fargo’s distressed loans. In city after city, they are heavily clustered in neighborhoods with high African American and Latino populations.

“My community has been absolutely devastated by the foreclosure crisis, and I put a lot of the blame at the doorstep of Wells Fargo,” says ACCE Home Defenders League member Vivian Richardson. “Wells Fargo’s heartless and unfair foreclosure practices are sending far more homes into foreclosure than is necessary.”

San Francisco Supervisor David Campos released a statement of support: “Our communities and our entire State are still reeling from the housing crisis, and will be for years to come. As this report shows, the numbers of homes still facing foreclosure is enormous. Principal reduction is clearly a critical strategy for saving homes and stabilizing the economy. Wells Fargo and the other major banks should be doing more of it.”

The report recommends:

Wells Fargo should commit to a broad principal reduction program.

This means that every homeowner facing hardship should be offered a loan modification, when Wells has the legal authority to do so. The modification should be based on an affordable debt-to-income ratio, achieved through a waterfall that prioritizes principal reduction and interest rate reductions. Junior liens must also be modified.

Wells Fargo should report data on its principal reduction, short sales, and foreclosures by race, income, and zip code.

Wells Fargo must be more transparent about its mortgage practices. The bank has an egregious history of harming California’s African American and Latino communities through predatory and discriminatory lending. To show the public that it has reformed, Wells Fargo must make this data available. The people of California need to know that Well Fargo is no longer discriminating against people of color and is fairly and equitably providing relief to homeowners and to the hardest hit communities.

 Wells Fargo should immediately stop all foreclosures until the first two demands are met.

In the event that it takes a few months to set up a fully functioning principal reduction program, Wells Fargo needs to immediately stop all foreclosures. Wells Fargo has done enough harm. It’s time to stop. California deserves a break.

ACCE is waging a campaign to push Wells Fargo to be a leader in California, their home state, in saving homes – beginning with their performance to comply with the Attorneys General Settlement and with the Homeowner Bill of Rights, but not ending there.

Click here to sign on to a letter to Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf to support to campaign demands.

 

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