Campaign News

York Daily Record - November 4, 2014, by Rev. Aaron Willford, Sandra Thompson and Clovis Gallon - Over the past few months, something remarkable happened in York. Parents, teachers, students, neighbors and faith leaders united to send a clear message that the education of York's children is more important than the profit margin of an out-of-state charter operator.

On behalf of that community, we would like to thank the York City School Board for standing up for our students, making sure their education comes first, and rejecting a charter takeover of our schools.

When the school board met on Oct. 15, Chief Recovery Officer David Meckley pressured board members to vote on an incomplete, poorly researched charter plan that was rolled out less than a week before. With so little time to review the plan and so many unanswered questions about it, the community urged the board to cast a no vote.

Rejecting the charter plan was not an easy decision for the school board, but it was the right decision — and we applaud their courage. If the plan had been enacted, money that should support students in the classroom would have flowed to a for-profit management company instead. City school children would have been treated like guinea pigs in a radical experiment, and their parents would have lost any say in how their neighborhood schools are run.

Perhaps the school board was looking into a crystal ball when it cast that vote. Just a week later, a federal judge appointed a receiver for Mosaica Education Inc., one of the two charter companies initially in the running to take over York city's schools. The heavily indebted Mosaica was sued by its primary lender in September after defaulting on its debt.

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Imagine where York's students would be if a charter operator took over their schools and, right out of the gate, found itself under enormous financial pressure for "a series of bad business decisions," as lender Tatonka Capital Corp. claims in its lawsuit against Mosaica.

The case against Mosaica followed a string of troubling studies questioning charter school oversight and accountability in Pennsylvania. A spring report from Auditor General Eugene DePasquale found that a lack of state oversight of charters was creating problems — with some observers comparing the current charter environment to the "wild, wild west."

A blistering report from the Center for Popular Democracy this fall revealed more than $30 million in proven or alleged fraud, waste, or abuse in Pennsylvania's charter school system over the past 17 years.

Giving Meckley a blank check on charterization in York would have been a big mistake.

Fortunately, the school board recognized how fraught with risk this plan was and chose to maintain local control of all the city's schools.

Now, it is critical for the school board to work in partnership with York's educators to improve the city's schools and give every child a shot at success.

Educators and administrators are already implementing a road map to fiscal recovery that will strengthen educational programs. We are glad that the school board is giving this "internal option," as it is known, an opportunity to work before taking any action that will negatively impact our schools, our students, or our community.

York city schools, like many other districts across the commonwealth, face a funding crisis created by deep cuts in state funding for public schools. All Pennsylvania school children deserve better from Harrisburg. It is high time our elected leaders reverse those cuts and put our schools back on track.

Until that happens, York's children should not be treated any differently than other Pennsylvania students. They shouldn't be guinea pigs in a charter experiment. And they shouldn't be deprived of the opportunity to attend their neighborhood schools.

Our school board agrees, and now it is up to all of us to take responsibility for the future of our city's public schools and the students who learn there.

We have no doubt that the York community is strongly committed to making our schools the best they can be. Working together, we can achieve truly remarkable things.

Rev. Aaron Willford is a member of York Concerned Clergy. Sandra Thompson is president of the York NAACP. Clovis Gallon is a teacher and York Education Association member.

 

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I'VE ALWAYS enjoyed talking with people, and, as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in the hotel industry. It's been my dream to work with guests at the front desk to make sure they have the best experience possible.

As an African-American woman, I knew that lucky breaks weren't going to be handed to me, so I did everything I could to achieve my dreams. I went to school and got my bachelor's degree in hospitality and hotel management in 2000 from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

However, apart from a brief internship after college at the Best Western and a year at the Hilton working at the switchboard, which was almost a decade ago, I haven't been able to find work in my chosen field - a field in which I have a degree.

I've heard people say the recession is over because the unemployment rate is about 5 percent. But I can tell you that things are still really bad in the black community. Currently, unemployment for blacks is about 9 percent.

I've always been politically active and serve as the judge of elections in my voting district. So when I heard about a campaign that calls on the Federal Reserve to ensure that everybody gets decent paying work, including black folks, I was eager to join.

When I got my degree 16 years ago, the economy was in decent shape. Armed with my degree, the internship experience and good recommendations, I didn't expect to have any problems getting a job in a hotel. I applied to two dozen jobs and, after being turned down at all of them, I had to take other kinds of jobs in food service or customer service.

Finally, after many years, I got my switchboard job at the Hilton. Even though I was getting only $10 an hour, I was excited to finally be working at a hotel and thought I would just stay there and work my way up. But the recession hit in 2008, and I was laid off a year later.

That's when things became really tough. The recession hit African-American women, even college-educated ones like me, particularly hard. I've worked on and off since 2008, but finding good work has become almost impossible. At one point, I was traveling two hours each way to get to my job at a state-run liquor store.

I eventually had to quit when I suffered severe medical issues. I was diagnosed with a neurological condition and uterine fibroids, all within a matter of months. A couple of years ago, I was able to work again and joined a job skills program. The program placed me at a job where I work part-time - only 20 hours a week - as a cashier and food server at a university dining hall.

The unemployment rate apparently counts people like me as employed, even though I don't work enough hours to pay my bills. I'm overqualified and underpaid (I earn $11.25 an hour), but since I'm working - even though I'm still on Medicaid and food stamps - I'm used as evidence to say the recession is over.

Involuntary part-time unemployment is a more accurate figure to look at. It's over 15 percent for blacks! That's a whole lot of people who aren't making ends meet, but are still being counted as working.

People need to know that the Federal Reserve has incredible power over the economy and people's lives. It might seem very abstract, but it's not. If the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates low, the economy will continue to grow and people like me will be able to find full-time jobs or better paying work. If it raises rates because it claims the economy is doing well, it will be tougher for everyone to find jobs.

I'm going to Jackson Hole, Wyo., next week to join a protest against the Federal Reserve, which holds a symposium there every year. We want the president of the Philadelphia Fed, Patrick Harker, and the rest of the Fed, to see what regular folks go through beyond the numbers in the headlines.

Every week, I still go online to look for jobs at large hotel chains. I know that one of these days I will work at a hotel again. I just need the economy to give me a fair chance.

Salwa Shabazz lives in Philadelphia and is a member of the Fed Up campaign, an initiative of the Center for Popular Democracy.

By Salwa Shabazz

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Last year’s behind-the-scenes selection of three men with ties to Goldman Sachs to serve atop the Federal Reserve did not go over well with outspoken civic groups and many Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who have all called for a more transparent and inclusive central bank. In response to the critics, the Fed has rolled out a series of announcements, online forums and face-to-face meetings with Americans to portray a more open process of selecting its 12 district presidents that is also more sensitive to racial and gender diversity.

The Minneapolis Fed, like its counterparts in Philadelphia and Dallas last year, named a president in Neel Kashkari with a past at Goldman, the Wall Street bank. But it also broke ranks from others when it released video testimonials from directors shedding light on the year-long search process, and even published a “summary of attributes” sought in the candidate. The Atlanta Fed said last month it seeks a “diverse set of candidates” to replace outgoing chief Dennis Lockhart, and this month its board chair hosted a pubic webcast to explain the historically shrouded search process, raising hopes it would name the first black or Latino Fed president in the central bank’s 103-year history.

“In the Federal Reserve system we are taking this very seriously, but it’s not just because we want to go and say we’re diverse,” Loretta Mester, the Cleveland Fed President, told a gathering of low-wage workers and progressive economists organized by Fed Up, a labor-affiliated coalition of civic groups pushing for reforms. “It really is about … getting different view points that are very helpful to us in setting policy and thinking about the economy and understanding the trends,” she said at the Cleveland Fed on Friday. Mester met the group a day after her bank launched an online application form for the public to recommend people “diverse in backgrounds and perspectives” for board positions and advisory roles across her Midwest district. Asked to what extent outside pressure prompted the move, a spokeswoman said it was “just the latest in our ongoing efforts to broaden our outreach.”

The 12 Fed presidents have five rotating votes on U.S. interest rate policy. Unlike the five current governors at the Fed Board in Washington, who are selected by the White House and approved by the Senate, the presidents are chosen by their district directors, half of whom are themselves picked by private local banks that technically own the Fed banks. The dizzying structure is meant to ensure views from across the country are heard. But critics say it leaves the Fed beholden to bankers who are not representative of the public, and they point out that 11 of 12 district presidents are white while 10 of them are men. Among employees at the Fed Board in Washington, including service workers, 43 percent were non-white and 43 percent female last year. However at the executive level it was 18 percent and 37 percent, respectively, according to the central bank.

Clinton, the presidential candidate, has come out in favor of dropping bankers from district boards and making the Fed “more representative of America as a whole,” according to her party’s platform. That followed a May letter from 127 lawmakers to Fed Chair Janet Yellen urging more diversity.

After years of resisting more overt political efforts to curb its independence, the Fed under Yellen appears willing to take small steps in the name of transparency and inclusively. In an unusual entry in minutes of their meeting last month, Fed officials discussed a staff analysis of “differential patterns of unemployment across racial and ethnic groups.” U.S. unemployment among blacks is twice that of whites.

“While we applaud this progress, these very basic steps were available to them for the last hundred years and have only been rolled out very recently,” Shawn Sebastian, a Fed Up field director, said of the series of efforts by Fed banks.

In its latest critique, Fed Up called it “disappointing” that Nicole Taylor, a black woman and dean of community engagement and diversity at Stanford University whose term as director at the San Francisco Fed is soon to expire, would be succeeded on that district’s board by Sanford Michelman, a white man who is co-founder of law firm Michelman & Robinson LLP. John Williams, president of the San Francisco Fed, told reporters on Wednesday that while he has no control over the selection of directors, this board revamp “just redoubles my efforts and my team’s efforts to make sure that we are getting the voices and experiences from across the spectrum.” He added: “It’s definitely a step back in terms of what I’d like to see on our board. We’re working actively to build representation of women and minorities.”

By Jonathan Spicer

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