Rage Against the Scheduling Machine
The Boston Globe - December 21, 2014, by Dante Ramos - Most of the time, it’s a cop-out to...
The Boston Globe - December 21, 2014, by Dante Ramos - Most of the time, it’s a cop-out to blame technology for the human misbehavior that it enables. It isn’t PowerPoint’s fault that your co-workers add too many slides to their presentations. It isn’t Facebook’s fault that “friends” whom you barely know make odd comments on your photos. It isn’t Auto-Tune’s fault that Paris Hilton thinks she’s a singer.
But when the stakes are much higher, even software engineers should do some soul-searching. Late last month, just as shoppers around the country were girding for Black Friday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a “retail workers bill of rights” designed to give workers at retail chains more predictable schedules and discourage last-minute scheduling changes. It was a direct response to a powerful new employment trend: Increasingly, major retail and restaurant chains fine-tune their staffing — and hold down labor costs — via sophisticated software that looks at a store’s past performance, weather patterns, and real-time sales data.
The software plays an integral role in so-called just-in-time scheduling systems, which help ensure that a store won’t have eight cashiers working when there’s only enough business for four. For workers, though, these systems have serious downsides: irregular shifts, significant schedule changes on short notice, and huge variations in hours from week to week.
Earlier this year, The New York Times profiled part-time Starbucks barista Jannette Navarro, a San Diego single mom who couldn’t arrange child care or take classes because her hours fluctuated so wildly. Workers at chains from Walmart to Jamba Juice have gone public with their frustrations. “These hours don’t match the basic realities of people’s lives,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. The burden for workers with families is particularly heavy, she added. “Kids need routine, but when you work in retail routine doesn’t happen.”
The market leader in this workforce-management industry is Chelmsford-based Kronos Inc.; other players include SAP, ADP, and Oracle. What these firms have to decide is whether their products can be a force for greater equity in the workplace — or will remain one more way, in an uncertain economy, to shift more of the risk onto low-wage employees with little leverage.
The world’s richest man says we need to shorten the workweek. Who really wants to disagree?
Strikingly, none of the researchers or labor advocates whom I contacted blamed Kronos or its competitors for schedules that, ultimately, reflect the employer’s values. Still, all the evidence suggests that relying on faceless algorithms makes it easier for employers to casually jerk workers around.
If you worked in retail 20 years ago, your manager would post a handwritten schedule on the back of the bathroom door every week or two. She might have expected you to work every other Friday night, because spreading unpopular weekend shifts around helps morale. If you worked Tuesday and Thursday last week, she might give you the same shifts this week, because reinventing the schedule from scratch would be a hassle. She made judgments about which inconveniences you might grumblingly accept — and which ones were too burdensome to demand.
A robo-scheduler doesn’t recognize such objections unless it’s programmed to. “The algorithm did it,” a manager might rationalize — especially when headquarters is keeping a close eye on staffing at every store.
It also can’t be a coincidence that, as scheduling software proliferated over the last decade, so did the widespread use of on-call shifts, which require part-time employees to check in an hour or two beforehand to see if they’re needed. For workers who need to arrange child care, or work a second part-time job, being called in with a couple of hours’ notice is a disaster.
The workforce-management industry is a little cagey about how its products affect workers. “Reduce labor costs by efficiently scheduling, monitoring, and managing your workforce,” promises an Oracle marketing website. “Provide outstanding customer service as you control labor costs,” says the pitch for a Kronos product . But in a recent interview, Kronos’s vice president for business development, Charles DeWitt, argued that minimizing labor costs is “an afterthought in the calculation.” As he tells it, it’s hard enough just to match the mix of skills and certifications that a retailer needs at a given time (fluency in Spanish, the capacity to perform certain management duties) with the availability of workers, whose time constraints vary greatly.
In our conversation, DeWitt sounded genuinely interested in addressing some of the problems worker advocates have raised. Kronos is developing metrics for how often the hours an employee works differ from what’s on the original schedule, how well staffing respects workers’ preferences, and how widely a given employee’s hours vary from week to week. This is encouraging, but also unsettling: Shouldn’t such considerations have been part of the equation all along?
Eventually, labor laws have to adapt as well. Earlier this year, US Representative George Miller of California introduced the Schedules that Work Act, which would compensate retail, food service, and janitorial workers for last-minute schedule changes. But nobody thinks the federal legislation will pass anytime soon. If history is any guide, liberal states like California and Massachusetts will enact some controls, while other states will blow the issue off entirely.
Worker advocates need to look for additional pressure points — and software makers ought to own up to their own role in creating the current system. If technology firms and the retailers who hire them are looking at the right data, over a period of time that extends beyond the current quarter, they’ll be able to verify what labor activists have long believed: that more stability for workers reduces turnover and improves customer loyalty.
Maybe it’s too simplistic to hope for a simple software tool that allows employers to upgrade their schedules from 1 (“sadistic”) to 10 (“workers’ paradise”). If nothing else, Kronos and its competitors can help simply by confronting retail chains up front with the sacrifices they’re expecting from their workers.
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How cities are bypassing states to explore registering hundreds of thousands to vote
How cities are bypassing states to explore registering hundreds of thousands to vote
National groups, in search of voting rights laws that could be pursued in Republican-controlled states, have taken notice of the potential for city-by-city reforms. The Center for Popular...
National groups, in search of voting rights laws that could be pursued in Republican-controlled states, have taken notice of the potential for city-by-city reforms. The Center for Popular Democracy, a national progressive group connected to advocacy organizations in 38 states, issued a report Friday geared toward educating potential partners on what voting reforms cities can pursue.
Read the full article here.
Report: Charter schools have lost $30 million since 1997
Times Online - October 2, 2014, by JD Prose - A day after Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School founder Nick Trombetta was in a federal courtroom as part of his ongoing criminal...
Times Online - October 2, 2014, by JD Prose - A day after Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School founder Nick Trombetta was in a federal courtroom as part of his ongoing criminal case, a new report cited him as an example of $30 million in fraud and financial mismanagement among Pennsylvania charter schools since 1997.
The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was done by three organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United.
It piggybacks on a national report on charter schools in May by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education that claimed more than $136 million has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse by charter schools.
The Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Schools issued a statement saying allegations of fraud must be investigated.
“However,” the statement continued, “the report draws sweeping conclusions about the entire charter sector based on only 11 cited incidents in the course of almost 20 years, while ignoring numerous alleged and actual fraud and fiscal mismanagement in the districts over the same time period, which dwarf the charter school allegations in terms of alleged misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
To stem the loss of tax dollars by charter schools, the three nonprofit organizations make several recommendations, including annual fraud risk assessments, trained forensic auditors doing reviews, charter school authorizers doing comprehensive reviews every three years instead of every five years, and charter schools posting findings of internal assessments.
City and county controllers should also be authorized to perform fraud risk assessments and fraud audits on charter schools, the groups recommended.
They also suggested that the state attorney general’s office review all charter schools in Pennsylvania, that the Legislature pass a law to protect and encourage charter school whistle-blowers, and that the state declare a moratorium on new charter schools until reforms are implemented.
Trombetta, who faces 11 federal charges, including mail fraud and filing false tax returns, is cited as one example in the report. On Tuesday, he was in court trying to get recordings tossed in the case, in which he is accused of using various offshoots of PA Cyber to siphon away millions of taxpayer dollars.
The coalition said the report’s recommendations should be applied to traditional school districts as well as charter schools “in the name of intellectual integrity.” If not, it would just be an example of pursuing a political agenda, the coalition said.
Not surprisingly, the president of the National Education Association issued a statement trumpeting the report’s findings and blasting charter school supporters, especially Gov. Tom Corbett. “It’s time for lawmakers to stop providing charter industry players a blank check with little oversight and no accountability,” said Lily Eskelsen Garcia.
“Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett and other politicians in the state continue to push for privatization, despite compelling evidence of fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds in the charter school industry,” Garcia said.
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“We matter”: Dozens with pre-existing conditions stage D.C. sit-in over GOP health care bill
“We matter”: Dozens with pre-existing conditions stage D.C. sit-in over GOP health care bill
Marthella Johnson was born with one kidney. At a young age, the 42-year-old resident of Little Rock, Arkansas, developed kidney stones.
Before the Affordable Care Act, many insurers...
Marthella Johnson was born with one kidney. At a young age, the 42-year-old resident of Little Rock, Arkansas, developed kidney stones.
Before the Affordable Care Act, many insurers considered kidney stones a pre-existing condition and wouldn’t insure people like Johnson. After it went into effect, Johnson said she was able to buy insurance through her state’s marketplace.
Read the full article here.
'Nueva York en un Minuto': el fiscal general Jeff Sessions le declara la guerra a la pandilla MS-13
'Nueva York en un Minuto': el fiscal general Jeff Sessions le declara la guerra a la pandilla MS-13
En otras noticias, la dueña de una floristería de Nueva Jersey es acusada de robar flores de un cementerio y el expresidente dominicano Leonel Fernández está en Manhattan para presentar su nuevo...
En otras noticias, la dueña de una floristería de Nueva Jersey es acusada de robar flores de un cementerio y el expresidente dominicano Leonel Fernández está en Manhattan para presentar su nuevo libro.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Schedule Rules Prove Difficult to Implement
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to...
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to find that legislating good corporate behavior isn’t as easy as pressing a button on your smartphone.
In July, the city started implementing a first-in-the-nation law aimed at curtailing the trend toward “just-in-time” scheduling, where managers call in employees to work on short notice. The new measure requires large-chain retailers — such as Safeway and Walgreens — to publish schedules at least two weeks in advance and to compensate employees with “predictability pay” if they make changes less than a week ahead of time. It also mandates that additional hours be offered to existing employees first before new hires are made, and that part-time workers be paid at the same rate as people who work full-time.
So far, it’s been easier to publish schedules than live up to the spirit of the law.
“The two-week notice seemed to be instituted right away, but the other stuff is lagging,” said Gordon Mar, director of San Francisco Jobs With Justice, a labor-backed group that pushed for the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights” and has been monitoring its implementation.
The sluggish response may be because fines don’t kick in until Oct. 3; the city is still hashing out the rules. But the spotty compliance so far highlights the difficulty of attempts to mandate worker-friendly practices — especially the kind that touch the most fundamental aspects of business operations, rather than those that simply require higher pay and better benefits.
San Francisco employers fought the new ordinance, but couldn’t prevent its passage. Now, they complain it’s affecting service.
“We’re hearing from members in San Francisco that it really is not working well at all,” said Ronald Fong, president of the California Grocers Association. Stores can’t always predict surges in foot traffic, which might be brought on by a sunny day, leaving managers without the option to bring in more staff. That was a problem during the heat wave that swept over San Francisco this summer.
“Supplies weren’t able to get out to the shelves,” Fong said. “It just kind of snowballed, and our customers have a bad experience, or the stores lose sales.”
Some businesses don’t mind the rules in principle, but object to the red tape. “Everybody pretty much operates on a predictive schedule,” said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association. “But the process of implementing this, with offering the employees hours in writing and waiting three days for a response, it’s a lot of government intrusion into very minute detail.”
Also, not all industries schedule their workers in the same way. Milton Moritz is president of the National Association of Theatre Owners’ California and Nevada chapter, and said the theater business is by nature unpredictable, making the new law particularly difficult to comply with.
“We might not know until the Monday before the Friday a film shows, and even then we’re hiring, firing, scheduling people based on the business that film’s going to do,” Moritz said. “This ordinance flies in the face of all that. It really complicates the issue tremendously.”
The San Francisco ordinance hasn’t just been irritating for big companies. Some workers grumble the law discourages employers from offering extra shifts on short notice, because they would have to pay the last-minute schedule change penalty — even if workers would be happy for the chance to pick up more hours.
Rachel Deutsch, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy who has been helping local jurisdictions across the country craft fair-scheduling legislation, said that’s something that might change in future iterations.
“I think that’s the thing with any policy where it’s the first attempt to solve a complicated economic problem,” Deutsch said. “It’s been a learning process.”
So far, fair scheduling laws aren’t spreading as quickly as minimum wage and paid sick leave laws. A statewide bill in California failed a couple weeks ago, and no other local ordinances have passed besides San Francisco’s, though there are active campaigns in several cities including Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, several companies have acted on their own to curb some of the practices that workers have found most disruptive, like on-call shifts, where workers have to be available even if they aren’t ultimately asked to work. But in some cases — like that of Starbucks, which committed to eliminating many of those practices — those voluntary changes haven’t been any more effective than government mandates.
Erin Hurley worked at Bath & Body Works and campaigned for an end to on-call shifts. After she left the job, parent company L Brands said it would stop the practice at Bath & Body Works as well as another of its chains, Victoria’s Secret. But Hurley said she’s heard from current workers that managers are still doing effectively the same thing, by asking employees to stay a little longer.
“On-call shifts were replaced with shift extensions,” said Hurley. “Basically what L Brands did was change the name of the practice.” Keeping people on-call is very convenient for employers, and letting it go can be easier said than done. L Brands did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, advocates in San Francisco think the Retail Workers Bill of Rights has already done some good, and will be more effective when the city’s enforcement kicks into high gear — just like overtime rules did, when companies got used to obeying them.
Take Michelle Flores, 21, who has worked part time at Safeway for two years to support herself while in going to college. Unpredictable schedules made that difficult: She would only know her shifts a few days beforehand, which sometimes didn’t leave her enough time to hit the books.
“I would study from midnight until 5, 6 a.m., sleep for two or three hours, and then go to the exam,” said Flores, 21, who attends San Francisco State. This year, she expects that to change. “If I know that I have a shift scheduled, I’ll just study another day,” Flores said.
Also, the law came with some funding for community organizations to make employees aware of what workers are entitled to. That has ancillary effects — like getting people interested in joining a union, which can be better equipped to make sure companies are following the rules.
“It just creates an opportunity to talk to more workers about their rights under the law, and that leads to conversations about other issues in the workplace,” said Gordon Mar, of Jobs with Justice. “And that could lead to getting organized.”
Source: Valley News
NYC Youth, Council Members Call on City to Address Bullying and Conflict in Schools by Increasing Social and Mental Health Support, not Policing
10.30.2017
...
10.30.2017
Onyx Walker, Youth Leader from Urban Youth Collaborative alongside Council Members Daniel Dromm and Mark Levine at the steps of City Hall before the NYC Council hearing on bullying to demand social and mental health support for NYC public schools, not policing.New York, NY - On Monday, October 30th, young people from the Urban Youth Collaborative, along with NYC Council Chair of Education Committee Daniel Dromm, Council Member Mark Levine, and organizations -- including Dignity in School Campaign New York and the Center for Popular Democracy--held a press conference in front of City Hall to call on New York City to address bullying and conflict in schools by increasing social, emotional, and mental health supports, not policing and punitive zero tolerance policies. The young people are calling for drastically increasing the number of guidance counselors, restorative practices and mental health supports in schools.
The press conference coincided with the release of a new report, “Young People’s Vision for Safe, Supportive, and Inclusive Schools,” written by the Center for Popular Democracy and Urban Youth Collaborative, whose organizational members include young people from Future of Tomorrow, Make the Road New York, Sistas and Brothas United. The report recommendations were developed by youth leaders who have spent years organizing to transform their schools and their communities. In response to calls to return to discriminatory and ineffective school climate strategies, young people are advancing solutions that reimagine school safety and reduce bullying and discrimination by prioritizing and allocating funding for meeting their social, emotional, and mental health needs. Study after study shows policing and exclusionary discipline does not create safer schools, and in fact, can make students feel less safe and harm our most vulnerable students. In contrast, the supports students are calling for reduce bullying and create safer schools. Immediately following the press conference there was a a New York City Council hearing on Bullying, Discrimination, and Harassment in Schools.
Young people are uniquely situated to lead the dialogue in developing truly safe and inclusive learning communities. The blueprint highlights key priorities for all NYC schools, including: increasing the number of trained and supervised full time guidance counselors and social workers; implementation of restorative justice practice in all underserved schools and; comprehensive mental supports for young people. Young people are at the forefront of a growing movement to demand New York City divest from ineffective, costly and racially discriminatory policing practices – and instead invest in creating schools that respond to student needs and create truly safe and inclusive schools. .
"Too often, I have seen a lack of support for students, myself included, because there is a lack of guidance counselors in schools. On average there is one full time guidance counselor for every 407 students. We need to significantly increase the number of guidance counselors. By having one guidance counselor for every 100 students, a counselor’s workload will not only lessen, but the depth of the relationships they have with students will deepen" said Maybelen Navarro, Youth Leader, Urban Youth Collaborative.
“We don’t have to look very far to develop solutions that create safe and inclusive school communities. Time and time again we are reminded that young people are the best resource we have for developing successful and sustainable policies for every school in every neighborhood.” said Roberto Cabanas the Coordinator for the Urban Youth Collaborative. “Today we release this Policy Brief to share young people’s vision for their schools. We need more counselors, restorative practices, and mental health care.”
“The city must be bold enough to reimagine safety so that it is rooted in effective and humane practices of support rather than policing” said Kate Terenzi, Equal Justice Works Fellow at the Center for Popular Democracy. “Young people hold the answer to how to create inclusive and safe schools. Their solutions - guidance counselors, mental health services, and restorative justice - are proven effective by research and young people’s own expertise in navigating school environments. Placing more police and metal detectors won’t make school safer, social and mental health support will do that. ”
"It is imperative that we bolster social, emotional, and mental health support structures in NYC public schools," said NYC Council Education Committee Chairperson Daniel Dromm. "Metal detectors, increased policing and zero tolerance policies do nothing for the thousands of children affected by bullying year-round. These measures only contribute to the problem, creating hostile school climates that are not conducive to learning. To effectively push back against bullying, we must increase the number of school guidance counselors, employ restorative justice practices and offer comprehensive mental health services across the five boroughs. As Chairperson of the NYC Council Education Committee, I am committed to doing all that I can to end school bullying by moving our schools in this direction"
In addition, the report calls the city to reverse policies that have proven ineffective at creating safe and supportive environments for students policies that promote the exclusion and criminalization of Students. In particular, New York City should end arrests, as well as the issuance of summonses and juvenile reports, in schools for non-criminal violations and misdemeanors; institute a moratorium on the installation of new metal detectors in schools, and remove existing metal detectors; and, remove police officers from schools.
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PHOTOS: LINK
LIVESTREAM VIDEO: LINK
TESTIMONIES: Young People’s and the Center for Popular Democracy’s
Contact: Roberto Cabanas, Urban Youth Collaborative 973.432.2406 or Roberto.Urbanyouthcollab@gmail.com
www.urbanyouthcollaborative.org
The Urban Youth Collaborative is led by students young people and brings together New York City students to fight for real education reform that puts students first. Demanding a high-quality education for all students, young people struggle for social, economic, and racial justice in the city’s schools and communities. Organizational members include: Make the Road New York, Sistas and Brothas United, and Future of Tomorrow
www.populardemocracy.org
Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda
Lobbyists Know the Fed Has Political Power
Lobbyists Know the Fed Has Political Power
Your editorial is exactly right about the lack of impartiality with “The Federal Reserve’s Politicians” (Aug. 29). While created by Congress, the Fed continues to act as though it is completely...
Your editorial is exactly right about the lack of impartiality with “The Federal Reserve’s Politicians” (Aug. 29). While created by Congress, the Fed continues to act as though it is completely unaccountable to the people’s representatives.
As I pointed out to Chairwoman Janet Yellen during a congressional hearing last year, her own calendar reflects weekly meetings with political figures and partisan special-interest groups. Even more troubling, there is a long history of Fed chairs or governors serving as partisan figures in the Treasury or the White House before their appointment. So while the Fed is quick to decry any attempts at congressional oversight, it cannot credibly claim to be politically independent.
We need a rules-based monetary policy that doesn’t leave the Fed with the potential to push an ideologically driven agenda. To make the Fed truly free from politics, the Fed Oversight Reform and Modernization Act of 2015, which my colleagues and I have passed through the House, should be signed into law. The American people deserve transparency at the Fed and market-driven monetary policy that can finally restore confidence in our economy.
Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.)
Glen Rock, N.J.
Your editorial accuses Fed Up, a group representing low-income black and brown communities, of politicizing the Fed, when big banks have always had undue access and influence over the Fed’s policies.
In fact, commercial banks literally own the Federal Reserve. Unlike nearly every other central bank in the world, the Fed isn’t a public institution but instead operates as a joint venture with the banking sector. It is not true that as long as this status quo of Wall Street domination continues, then the Fed is “independent,” but when the Fed Up campaign’s low-income people of color dare to join the monetary-policy conversation, then the Fed’s “independence” has been compromised.
You mention that retirees living off their retirement plans are suffering from a decade of near-zero interest rates. Presumably this refers to retirees who might have a hundred thousand or two tucked away for retirement. This is already far more than the low-wage workers who have joined our campaign will be able to accrue over a lifetime of working.
But let’s take the argument at face value. Even if the Fed were to raise interest rates up to 2%, that’s a mere $2,000 on $100,000 savings over a year. That won’t make much of a difference to how well a middle-class retiree lives, but hiking rates to that level prematurely could cut off struggling families—who are disproportionately people of color—from the added jobs and higher wages they so desperately need.
Shawn Sebastian
Fed Up Campaign
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Lobbying the Federal Reserve as if it is a legislature began with the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation and the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977. The chair of the Fed became politicized and conflicted as the act included mandated congressional grilling of the Fed chair, who is now required to stabilize prices, moderate long-term interest rates, while at the same time delivering low unemployment. These lofty goals can’t necessarily be simultaneously executed, as Paul Volcker showed so well when he attacked inflation, effectively saying that employment would rise with a solid economy that had price stability.
Mr. Volcker had the courage to take the abuse and address his critics as he followed a logical path and publicly explained it, but successive chairs have gradually focused more on pleasing the president who appointed them.
Rep. Kevin Brady’s idea for a commission to rethink the idea of the Fed is a good start. We now have about 40 years of increasing monetary, fiscal and employment messes, with a paralyzed Fed, unsustainable deficits and underemployment because politics tramples economic common sense.
Larry Stewart
Vienna, Va.
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Want To Change The Face Of Politics? Help Teens Register To Vote.
Want To Change The Face Of Politics? Help Teens Register To Vote.
In a recent Center for Popular Democracy report, we detailed examples of youth-focused campaigns for high school registration around the country. In Phoenix, organizers at Living United for Change...
In a recent Center for Popular Democracy report, we detailed examples of youth-focused campaigns for high school registration around the country. In Phoenix, organizers at Living United for Change in Arizona regularly go door-to-door registering eligible students in the 27,000-student Phoenix Union High School district. They also work with school district officials to integrate voter registration in high schools.
Read the full article here.
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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2 days ago
2 days ago