New initiative Opioid Network lobbies legislators
New initiative Opioid Network lobbies legislators
Standing in the marble-floored hallway of a U.S. Senate building, Don LoGiudice of Boardman recalled the morning he found his son, Donny, dead from a drug overdose.
...
Standing in the marble-floored hallway of a U.S. Senate building, Don LoGiudice of Boardman recalled the morning he found his son, Donny, dead from a drug overdose.
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The Great Charter School Rip-off: Finally, the Truth Catches Up to Education “Reform” Phonies
Salon - October 2, 2014, by Jeff Bryant - Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters...
Salon - October 2, 2014, by Jeff Bryant - Last week when former President Bill Clinton meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”
A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance.
But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.
In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.
But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.
Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for millions of students, their families, and their communities. And what political leaders ought to be doing – rather than spouting unfounded platitudes, as Clinton did, about “what works” – is putting the brakes on a deal gone bad, ensuring those most affected by charter school rollouts are brought to the bargaining table, and completely renegotiating the terms for governing these schools.
The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.
After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions.”
In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.
Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of students in the New Orleans all-charter system is obtainable only by “jukin the stats” or, as the NPR reporter put it, through “a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice.” As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek a year ago, “the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.”
Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. So school districts that have not had the “benefit,” according to Arne Duncan, of a natural disaster like Katrina, are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.
School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).
The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.
The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.
The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.
None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s bets for our kids.”
What’s important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures academically, as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going by the name Jersey Jazzman stated on his personal blog. Looking at how the districts’ students perform on state assessments, he found that academic performance levels were “pretty much where you’d expect them to be” based on the fact that “most of York’s schools have student populations where 80 percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage,” and variations in student test score performance almost always correlate strongly with students’ financial conditions. He concluded that what was happening to York schools more represents a “long con” in which tax cuts and claims of “budgetary poverty” have prompted a rapacious state government to “declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures … pick at the bones of a decimated school system.”
The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in Dialogue, “It’s the same story that played out in Detroit, Flint, and Philadelphia where these ‘chief recovery officers’ or ‘emergency managers’ have all made the same recommendation: to hand over the cities’ public schools to the highest private bidder.”
Then, hiding behind pledges to do “what’s best for kids,” these operators too often do anything but.
Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues
York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their state have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since 1997.
The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was released by three groups, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.
Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors –just in Pennsylvania – include an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.
What’s even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents, every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.
Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation.
The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year that exposed $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud, waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate how charter school fraud is spreading.
What’s happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter operators being considered for that takeover – Mosaica Education, Inc., and Charter Schools USA – have particularly troubling track records.
According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, “complications soon followed.” After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit, and when Mosaica realized they weren’t making a profit within two years, they pulled up stakes and went in search of other targets.
As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report from the Florida League of Women Voters produced earlier this year found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a construction company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every year.
In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch, Charter USA’s construction company bought a former Verizon call center for $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the front door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.
No wonder York citizens are concerned.
What Happened To Charter School Accountability?
Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more “accountable” to the public are turning out to be anything but.
As an article for The Nation recently observed, “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque.”
The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.”
Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources.
In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.”
This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label.
If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what’s required, Noguera concluded is “greater transparency and collaboration with public schools.”
Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.
This report, “Public Accountability for Charter Schools,” published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, “recommends changes to state charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to the communities served,” according to the organization’s press release.
According to the report, these recommendations are the product of “a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders” from Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and other cities, who have “first-hand experience and years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to assess impact.”
These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.
For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of Open Records in Pennsylvania, “testified that her office had received 239 appeals in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters.” In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management Company, “takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually … yet has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own schools for detailed financial reports.” In Philadelphia, the report authors found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available “only one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf club in the Philadelphia suburbs.” In New York City, where charter schools are co-located in public school buildings, “public school parents have complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours, and earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the co-located charter school.” The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, which documented public school classrooms “with peeling paint and insufficient resources” made to co-locate with charters that have “new computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks.”
The Annenberg report’s policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of “standards,” which include:
Traditional school districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure a coordinated approach that serves all children.
School governance should be representative and transparent.
Charter schools should ensure equal access to interested students and prohibit practices that discourage enrollment or disproportionately push-out enrolled students.
Charter school discipline policy should be fair and transparent.
All students deserve equitable and adequate school facilities. Districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure facility arrangements do not disadvantage students in either sector.
Online charter schools should be better regulated for quality, transparency and the protection of student data.
Monitoring and oversight of charter schools are critical to protect the public interest; they should be strong and fully state funded.
Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, arguing against any regulation on charters. That organization’s response cites “remarkable results” as an excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry loves to crow about, the facts are those results really aren’t there.
Charter Accountability Now
Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out of the corners of the “black box” the industry uses to protect itself, the charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality.
Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on a publicity terror with a national campaign claiming to tell “The Truth About Charters” and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia and New York City.
But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.
There’s little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw deal. The deal is off.
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Adovates for Reading ID cards vow to continue their efforts
Adovates for Reading ID cards vow to continue their efforts
Despite collective agreement by city officials, activists say the fight for creating a Reading city ID is nowhere near over.
Make The Road Pennsylvania, a community action group leading the...
Despite collective agreement by city officials, activists say the fight for creating a Reading city ID is nowhere near over.
Make The Road Pennsylvania, a community action group leading the effort for municipal IDs, filled its Reading headquarters Thursday evening with people resolved to continue pushing for the initiative.
Reading City Council members and Mayor Wally Scott said Monday night that they would not pursue an ordinance setting up a program.
Make The Road submitted a draft ordinance for the creation of a city ID in May.
The IDs would help make everyday life easier for the elderly, undocumented immigrants, some Puerto Ricans and others who face hurdles getting ID, Make The Road says.
City officials cited several concerns about the draft ordinance, including the legality and costs of a program.
Make The Road organizers countered some of those reasons Thursday by naming 13 municipalities around the country that have already approved local IDs.
They also presented their own cost-analysis of the program which, under the group's estimates of an ID with a $30 price tag, would bring in about $130,000 for the city.
Gabriela Raful, president of the Berks County Bar Association Minority Law Committee, and Bernardo Carbajal and Abraham Cepeda, attorneys and Reading School Board members, also spoke with ID supporters.
The local bar association's board of directors endorsed the creation of a city ID Tuesday, but did not specifically endorse Make The Road's draft ordinance.
Though activists are determined, City Council President Jeffrey S. Waltman Sr. said Thursday afternoon that he doesn't think council will revisit the idea anytime soon.
"The bottom line is I don't foresee City Council taking the issue up in the near future," he said. "It deals with federal issues and with our city and our resources, we have to be focused on getting out of Act 47."
Waltman also said the draft ordinance would have to be significantly altered or completely rewritten for council to even remotely consider it.
At the council's meeting Monday, leaders expressed opposition to a stipulation in the ordinance that states the city would not be able to share cardholder information with federal authorities, such as Immigration & Customs Enforcement.
Scott did not return calls requesting comment Thursday, but expressed strong opposition at the council meeting to aspects in the draft ordinance, including the prohibition on information-sharing.
He had also questioned the constitutionality of the draft ordinance, an argument that Make The Road countered Thursday.
The Center For Popular Democracy, a social issues advocacy group based in Washington, helped craft the ordinance.
Emily Tucker, a senior staff attorney specializing in immigration law, said Thursday that in the other cities where similar legislation was introduced and passed, such as New York City and Newark, N.J., there had been no concerns from local officials about limits on information sharing.
Waltman said that the decision to not pursue the IDs is not to slight city residents, but that creating a municipal ID is an effort that the city cannot presently handle or is responsible to undertake.
Cepeda said city officials should not ignore an issue that he feels would be very beneficial to the Latino community.
"It shows that they either have an issue with the people they represent or they are clueless," Cepeda said.
By ANTHONY OROZCO
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Cash Bail Fuels the Prison Industrial Complex. But We Can Stop It.
Cash Bail Fuels the Prison Industrial Complex. But We Can Stop It.
From 2015 to 2018, the homeless population in Los Angeles rose from less than 29,000 to 59,000. Many of those homeless Angelenos were formerly incarcerated, and many will again be incarcerated for...
From 2015 to 2018, the homeless population in Los Angeles rose from less than 29,000 to 59,000. Many of those homeless Angelenos were formerly incarcerated, and many will again be incarcerated for being homeless. Yet, according to the Center for Popular Democracy’s “Freedom to Thrive” report, Los Angeles spends 25.7% of its general fund budget on policing compared to a mere 3 percent to support nondepartmental “General City Purposes,” which includes city council spending on jobs, youth, homeless services, and substance abuse programs.
Read the full article here.
Hundreds expect to be arrested during D.C. health care protest
Hundreds expect to be arrested during D.C. health care protest
After Senate Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act this week, hundreds of demonstrators gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to urge their representatives to scrap...
After Senate Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act this week, hundreds of demonstrators gathered on Capitol Hill Wednesday to urge their representatives to scrap future attempts to scuttle the health care laws and back universal coverage instead.
Of those who attended the protest, “about 600 or so people” had signed up expressing they were willing to be arrested, according to Jennifer Epps-Addison, president and co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the groups that planned the protest. “A few hundred more” came as supporters and legal observers, she said.
Read the full article here.
Charter School Cheats: New Report On Charter Industry Exposes $100 million In Taxpayer Funds Meant For Children Instead Lost To Fraud, Waste & Abuse
ProgressOhio - May 16, 2014 - A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money...
ProgressOhio - May 16, 2014 - A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.
“Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, echoes a warning from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. The report draws upon news reports, criminal complaints and more to detail how, in just 15 of the 42 states that have charter schools, charter operators have used school funds illegally to buy personal luxuries for themselves, support their other businesses, and more.
The report also includes recommendations for policymakers on how they can address the problem of rampant fraud, waste and abuse in the charter school industry. Both organizations recommend pausing charter expansion until these problems are addressed.
“We expected to find a fair amount of fraud when we began this project, but we did not expect to find over $100 million in taxpayer dollars lost. That’s just in 15 states. And that figure fails to capture the real harm to children. Clearly, we should hit the pause button on charter expansion until there is a better oversight system in place to protect our children and our communities,” said Kyle Serrette, the Director of Education Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy.”
“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” added Sabrina Stevens, Executive Director of Integrity in Education. “School funding is too scarce as it is; we can hardly afford to waste the resources we do have on people who would prioritize exotic vacations over school supplies or food for children. We also can’t continue to rely on the media or isolated whistleblowers to identify these problems. We need to have rules in place that can systematically weed out incompetent or unscrupulous charter operators before they pose a risk to students and taxpayers.”
You can read the report by going to www.integrityineducation.org or www.populardemocracy.org.
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Needed — a regional employee scheduling law
Needed — a regional employee scheduling law
"Do you know what it’s like working long, erratic hours without knowing day-to-day what your schedule would be? Some of us do. If we haven’t worked in low-wage retail or the service sector, we’re...
"Do you know what it’s like working long, erratic hours without knowing day-to-day what your schedule would be? Some of us do. If we haven’t worked in low-wage retail or the service sector, we’re lucky that usually our hard work paid off, and we could advance in our careers.
For low-wage retail and service workers at large corporations, there’s no moving forward. When someone has an “I’ll do anything it takes” attitude, they are not rewarded for their labor, their adaptability or their commitment. Instead, they are often met with the chaos of unpredictable hours.
When people don’t have stable full-time or even part-time hours, they can’t budget or schedule basic things like child care, doctor visits, classes, family time or self care.
Take Cinthia, who works for DB Shoes, one of Emeryville’s numerous corporate retail chains. She works hard to take care of her family, but struggles with not having reliable hours. She juggles appointments for her younger brother, classes and work. When we met her, we asked how much sleep she got the previous night. She said, “Four hours.”
A recent survey conducted by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and the Center for Popular Democracy found that a staggering 80 percent of retail workers have fluctuating hours from week to week; 68 percent only receive part-time hours; and more than half experience “clopening” shifts — back-to-back closing then opening a few hours later.
Two out of 3 workers surveyed want more hours but can’t get them. Fluctuating hours are considered undesirable by many workers. There are thousands of working people like Cinthia who are run ragged with erratic work schedules that not only have harmful effects on them personally, but on their families and our communities.
Our cities are built on everyone coming together to create a thriving place where people can live, work and play. But when people are not earning enough and have erratic schedules, they don’t have time to invest in our community or local businesses.
San Francisco passed a fair workweek policy, putting the Bay Area at the fair workweek movement’s forefront. Emeryville and San Jose are also considering similar policies to begin to move the entire region toward a more sustainable work model and ensure that people have both higher wages and regular, predictable hours they can count on.
Some of us take our routines for granted. We get up, rush to get everyone out the door, work a single job, come home, eat, go to bed. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. But for too many working people, that kind of stability is a dream. It shouldn’t be — and we can do something about it.
Now that we’ve won a $15 minimum wage across California, we know we need to finish the job and ensure working people have hours they can count on. A regional fair workweek provides hardworking people with the opportunity to work with stable schedules so they can pay the bills, live healthier lives, and contribute more to our communities."
By Dianne Martinez and Ruth Atkin
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What Arne Duncan Wrought
Last Friday, after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his resignation as of the end of 2015, I heard ...
Last Friday, after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his resignation as of the end of 2015, I heard President Barack Obama's assessment of him: “Arne’s done more to bring our educational system, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 21st century than anybody else.” It is worth considering carefully what the president’s words mean in the context of the priorities, programs and operation of Duncan’s Department of Education.
In a recent and very moving New Yorker piece about the significance of the closure of New York’s storied Jamaica High School, his alma mater, Jelani Cobb considers education reform in the context of history:
Like "busing" and "integration," the language of today’s reformers often serves as a euphemism for poverty mitigation, the implicit goal that American education has fitfully attempted to achieve sinceBrown v. Board of Education. Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility — of blame, really — run inward. It’s not society that has failed in this perspective. It’s the schools ... The onus shifted, and public policy followed. The current language of education reform emphasizes racial "achievement gaps" and "underperforming schools" but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened. Integration was a flawed strategy, but it recognized the ties between racial history and educational outcomes.
School policy ripped out of time and history: In many ways that is Arne Duncan’s gift to us. School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity; a Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight; the substitution of the consultant-driven, win-lose methodology of philanthropy for formula-driven government policy; school policy that favors social innovation, one charter at a time.
Such policies are definitely a break from the past. Whether they promise better opportunity for the majority of our nation’s children, and especially our poorest children, is a very different question.
School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity.
Here is what a Congressional Equity and Excellence Commission charged in 2013, five years into Duncan’s tenure as Education Secretary:
The common situation in America is that schools in poor communities spend less per pupil — and often many thousands of dollars less per pupil — than schools in nearby affluent communities ... This is arguably the most important equity-related variable in American schooling today. Let’s be honest: We are also an outlier in how many of our children are growing up in poverty. Our poverty rate for school-age children — currently more than 22 percent — is twice the OECD average and nearly four times that of leading countries such as Finland.
Arne Duncan’s signature policies ignore these realities. While many of Duncan’s programs have conditioned receipt of federal dollars on states’ complying with his favored policies, none of Duncan’s conditions involved closing opportunity gaps. To qualify for a Race to the Top grant, a state had to remove any statutory cap on the authorization of new charter schools, and to win a No Child Left Behind waiver, a state had to agree to evaluate teachers based on students’ test scores. But Duncan’s policies never conditioned receipt of federal dollars on states’ remedying school funding inequity. Even programs like School Improvement Grants for the lowest scoring 5 percent of American schools have emphasized school closure and privatization but have not addressed the root problem of poverty in the communities where children’s scores are low.
A Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight.
The nation faces an epidemic of teacher shortages and despair among professionals who feel devalued as states rush to implement the teacher-rating policies they adopted to win their No Child Left Behind waivers from the federal government. Even as evidence continues to demonstrate that students’ test scores correlate more closely with family income than any other factor, and as scholars declare that students’ test scores are unreliable for evaluating teachers, Duncan’s policies have unrelentingly driven state governments to create policy that has contributed to widespread blaming of the teachers who serve in our nation’s poorest communities.
However, Duncan’s Department of Education has been far less attentive to accountability for its own programs. In June, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools — a coalition of national organizations made up of the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Educational Justice, Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, Center for Popular Democracy, Gamaliel, Journey for Justice Alliance, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign and Service Employees International Union — asked Secretary Duncan to establish a moratorium on federal support for new charter schools until the Department improves its own oversight of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, which is responsible for the federal Charter School Program. The Alliance to Reclaim our Schools cites formal audits from 2010 and 2012 in which the Department’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG) “raised concerns about transparency and competency in the administration of the federal Charter Schools Program.” The OIG’s 2012 audit, the members of the Alliance explain, discovered that the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement and the State Education Agencies, which disburse the majority of the federal funds, are ill-equipped to keep adequate records or put in place even minimal oversight.
Most recently, just last week, the Department of Education awarded $249 million to seven states and the District of Columbia for expanding charter schools, with the largest of those grants, $71 million, awarded to Ohio, despite the fact that protracted Ohio legislative debate all year has failed to produce regulations for an out-of-control, for-profit group of online charter schools or to improve Ohio’s oversight of what are too often unethical or incompetent charter school sponsors. The U.S. Department of Education made its grant last week even though Ohio’s legislature is known to have been influenced by political contributions from the owners of for-profit charter schools.
The substitution of the consultant-driven, win-lose methodology of philanthropy for formula-driven government policy.
Title I is the federal civil rights program created in 1965 as the centerpiece of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to equalize opportunity by sending federal money to schools serving a large number or high concentration of very poor children. The Title I formula has been a primary tool for equalizing educational opportunity as a civil right for every child. In 2009, however, Arne Duncan’s Department of Education began spending some Title I funds outside the formula program for competitions like Race to the Top. Because one-time grants cannot cover ongoing operations, school districts have used the money for technology or staff development but have hesitated to reduce class size or hire teachers. For example, an evaluation determined that consultants and grant writers collected 35 percent of School Improvement Grant Funds spent in Colorado between 2010 and 2012. Another serious problem with the federal competitive grant programs is that races with winners always have losers. Redirecting funds away from the Title I Formula and into competitive grants under Duncan’s leadership drove federal funds to a few winning states and created a host of losing states — and millions of children who lost out.
School policy that favors social innovation, one charter at a time.
Public education in the United States has historically been driven by a philosophy of expanding systemic inclusion. Over time public policy has been devised to require that schools address the needs of all children as a civil right. The policies that followed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,for example, were designed to address past injustices that derived from racial segregation and poverty. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protected the rights of children with special needs. The policies of Arne Duncan’s Department of Education have instead favored a strategy of social innovation through the establishment of charter schools. The idea is that committed individuals, with grants from the government, design schools that will serve a few children, with the innovation injected back into the public schools. There is considerable evidence that many charters — especially the huge for-profit charter chains — have not innovated, that a philosophy of social innovation through charters (that serve about 6 percent of our nation’s 50 million children today) fails to consider the scale of our education challenges, that whatever innovation there has been has not spread widely, that charters have served primarily the children of parents who know how to play the school choice game, that considerable money from charter schools has flowed into private profits, and that the growth of charters in many city school districts has sucked out money and promising children and left students with serious disabilities, English language learners and the very poorest children including homeless children behind in what are becoming public school districts of last resort.
'One of The Most Basic, Promised Rights of Our Democracy'
At the very end of the 19th century, John Dewey wrote: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children ... Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up can society by any chance be true to itself.”
A hundred years later, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) told the students at Teachers College, Columbia University: “That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children ... is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination. ... It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose … tied to one another by a common bond.”
In December 2010, just two years into Duncan’s tenure as Secretary of Education, I heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson indict Duncan’s education policies for abandoning the very idea of American public education that Dewey and Wellstone had described so eloquently: “There are those who would make the case for ‘a race to the top’ for those who can run. But ‘lift from the bottom’ is the moral imperative because it includes everybody.”
If, as President Obama says, Arne Duncan has “brought our educational system, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 21st century,” I hope we will stop to reconsider. Has our society decided to strive for innovation and to abandon universal provision of services and equality of opportunity as overarching goals? And have we become satisfied to blame the teachers in our poorest communities instead of ourselves for the vast injustices that appear at school in the guise of the achievement gaps?
Source: Alternet
Local leaders ask Obama to pardon criminal immigrants before Trump takes office
Local leaders ask Obama to pardon criminal immigrants before Trump takes office
Two San Diego elected officials have joined colleagues across the country calling for President Barack Obama to issue a blanket pardon of immigrants with green cards who have committed minor...
Two San Diego elected officials have joined colleagues across the country calling for President Barack Obama to issue a blanket pardon of immigrants with green cards who have committed minor crimes.
San Diego Councilman David Alvarez and San Diego Unified School District Board President Richard Barrera, along with 57 others, signed a letter organized by Local Progress, a network of progressive municipal elected officials, that was sent to Obama this week.
The group wants to undercut President-elect Donald Trump’s ability to deport individuals who, without their minor criminal histories, would not be deportable. Between 100,000 and 200,000 families could be affected by such a pardon, according to the letter.
“From literally the day after the election, we started hearing concerns from teachers that students were worried and were afraid that they were going to be deported, that their parents were going to be deported, just based on the rhetoric from the campaign,” Barrera said by telephone. “What we’re trying to do is look for every avenue that’s available to us as elected officials to protect our young people and their families.”
The letter suggests that it would be within Obama’s power to make such a blanket pardon because of former President Jimmy Carter’s pardon of draft evaders in 1977 on his first day in office.
“We must protect the legal permanent residents of our city,” Alvarez said via email. “President-elect Trump proposed a deportation plan modeled after Operation Wetback from the 1950s. Dividing families by recklessly deporting hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents would be morally wrong and economically destructive.”
Since 2014, the Obama administration has not prioritized minor convictions for immigration enforcement, as a matter of policy not any change in law. By law, green card holders can be deported for committing offenses that would not incur jail time in today’s criminal court system, like low-level drug offenses.
Trump campaigned on the idea of deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants, particularly criminals. His transition team has yet to set forth details about which immigrants and which criminals.
By Kate Morrissey
Source
Businesses Support Raising The Minimum Wage. Why Doesn’t The Business Lobby?
Businesses Support Raising The Minimum Wage. Why Doesn’t The Business Lobby?
Raising the minimum wage. More paid sick leave and family leave. More stable scheduling for workers. When a major Republican-friendly polling shop surveyed CEOs across the country about these...
Raising the minimum wage. More paid sick leave and family leave. More stable scheduling for workers. When a major Republican-friendly polling shop surveyed CEOs across the country about these typically left-leaning policies, one thing was made clear: they overwhelmingly support them.
So when it came to presenting the results to the Council of State Chambers of Commerce, which commissioned the research, the pollsters had a challenge on their hands — how to reconcile the widespread opposition to these policies by many business lobby groups with their popularity among the people actually running businesses.
In a recorded webinar, David Merritt, the managing director of polling firm LuntzGlobal, described the “empathy” CEOs feel for workers along with their support for labor-friendly policies. “If you ask about them in isolation, of course we want to take care of people who are caring for a loved one. Of course we want to give folks more benefits or more leave or more income.”
In the presentation, obtained by liberal advocacy group the Center for Media and Democracy, Merritt told the business lobbyists that executives expressed widespread support for a number of policies that are vehemently opposed by conservative politicians.
Based on their survey of 1,000 executives, LuntzGlobal found 80% supported raising their state minimum wage, 82% supported increasing paid parental leave requirements and 73% supported increasing paid sick leave. The Washington Post first reported details of the presentation.
“If you’re fighting against a minimum wage increase, you’re fighting an uphill battle,” Merritt said in the presentation. “Because most Americans, even most Republicans, support raising a minimum wage.”
He went on to coach participants on how to oppose those policies anyhow.
“A lot of you guys have minimum wage battles at the state level. If you are fighting those fights, the best way to fight it is not to talk about the minimum wage,” he said. “If you can, turn it into a federal issue and talk about the Earned Income Tax Credit.”
Joe Crosby, Director of the Council of State Chambers, which commissioned the research, said in a statement that the survey was intended “to benchmark trends on current political issues” and “it primarily covered mid-sized and larger companies, not the smaller businesses that are most affected by wage and leave mandates.”
LuntzGlobal, founded by prominent Republican pollster and consultant Frank Luntz, was unable to comment, per the terms of its contract wit the Council of State Chambers, Crosby said.
“We have known for years”
Advocates for these worker-friendly policies said the findings are proof their cause has many allies in the business community — even if those allies aren’t often the most outspoken voices representing business interests in Washington and state houses.
“We have known for years what this research confirms: that an overwhelming share of business leaders support paid sick days, paid leave and other family friendly policies,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a group that advocates for paid leave.
At one point in the call, Merritt held up language from the group Ness belongs to (below) as polling higher among executives than any other.
“I wouldn’t have changed anything about this statement,” Merritt said in the presentation. “This was the clear winner — from the National Partnership for Women and Families… Perfect, perfect language.”
Business lobby groups like the various state-level chambers of commerce are “not currently representing the views of their members — and doing that at the expense of single moms and hard-working parents,” said Elianne Farhat, who runs the Fair Workweek Initiative, a campaign of the Center For Popular Democracy, a liberal advocacy group. “In every place fair workweek laws are moving, the chambers of commerce have been the loudest voices of opposition.”
But Crosby, the Director of the Council of State Chambers, said the real question at issue is whether labor regulations should be forced onto all businesses by law, not whether businesses support the goal of better pay and working conditions. “Of course business owners support raising wages and benefits for their employees; those are goals they work for every day,” he wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. “But one-size-fits-all government mandates simply don’t work.”
A spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association, the industry’s largest trade group and one of the loudest voices opposing minimum wake hikes, said its members are more sensitive to labor costs than those in other industries. “The Council of State Chambers represents a diverse range of businesses, including tech and manufacturing companies, that could adapt to increased labor costs more easily” than restaurant and fast food owners, said NRA spokesperson Christin Fernandez.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the federal body representing the country’s business community, echoed concerns that pro-labor policies would negatively affect employers.
“The U.S. Chamber, based on input from our members, continues to believe that imposing higher labor costs on employers, especially small businesses, will force them to cut back elsewhere, and will ultimately price low and un-skilled workers out of entry level job opportunities,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of Labor, Immigration, and Employee Benefits for the Chamber, in a statement.
Asked about the chamber’s position on paid family and sick leave, as well as predictive scheduling, all of which polled well in the survey, spokeswoman Blair Holmes wrote that the Chamber is “careful to be responsive and in synch” with the business community it represents.
“The only point we will make is to say we have not lobbied on these issues in any of the states,” she said, adding that the federal group “is not in a position to comment on the positions these state chambers may have taken” with respect to raising the minimum wage or paid leave and “will not comment on state or local versions of predictive scheduling legislation.”
On its website, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lists among its 2016 priorities: “Oppose efforts to increase the minimum wage and to index the minimum wage to inflation,” and “Oppose attempts to make FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] leave paid or to mandate paid sick leave.”
By Cora Lewis
Source
22 hours ago
22 hours ago