Campaign News

Death Cab For Cutie is no fan of Donald Trump. The group has released a new song, “Million Dollar Loan,” inspired by the candidate’s dubious claims of rising from the bottom on his own when he was actually launched into the business world on the back of a million-dollar loan from his father. In a statement, Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard said that he wrote the song after being “disgusted” by how “flippant” Trump was in his assertions. He goes on to say Trump is “beneath us,” noting that “Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that he is unworthy of the honor and responsibility of being President of the United States of America, and in no way, shape, or form represents what this country truly stands for.”

“Million Dollar Loan” is the first song from the “30 Days, 30 Songs” project, launched by the writer Dave Eggers. Imagined as a continuation of his 2012 “90 Days, 90 Reasons” project, “30 Days, 30 Songs” will, as its title suggests, launch a new, anti-Trump song into the world every day until the election. According to a press release, tracks will be a mixture of new material and unheard songs, and this week’s offerings will include original cuts from Aimee Mann, Jim James, Thao Nguyen, Bhi Bhiman, and Daveed Diggs’ group Clipping, as well as a never-before-heard-unless-you-were-there live song from R.E.M.

All of the tracks will be available on the 30 Days, 30 Songs website, as well as on both Spotify and Apple Music. You can also pick up the songs on iTunes, and all proceeds will be donated to the Center For Popular Democracy, a group that is working to ensure universal voter registration for all Americans.

By Marah Eakin

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UPDATE July 15th -- Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) invoked cloture on the ESEA bill, which contains provisions to expand the Charter Schools Program. The final vote will be held today. McConnell's move to bring matters to a close came as a surprise to the authors of the bill who had expected a more robust debate, and, as EdWeek reports, "especially squeezes Democrats who are still working on proposals to beef up accountability."

As both the House and the Senate consider separate bills that would reauthorize and expand the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year Charter Schools Program (CSP), the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has examined more than a decade of data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) as well as documentation from open records requests. The results are troubling.

Between 2001 and 2013, 2,486 charter schools have been forced to shutter, affecting 288,000 American children enrolled in primary and secondary schools.

Furthermore, untold millions out of the $3.3 billion expended by the federal government under CSP have been awarded as planning and implementation grants to schools that never opened to students.

Charters Much More Likely to Close

The failure rate for charter schools is much higher than for traditional public schools. In the 2011-2012 school year, for example, charter school students ran two and half times the risk of having their education disrupted by a school closing and suffering academic setbacks as a result. Dislocated students are less likely to graduate and suffer other harms.

In a 2014 study, Matthew F. Larsen with the Department of Economics at Tulane University looked at high school closures in Milwaukee, almost all of which were charter schools. He concluded that closures decreased “high school graduation rates by nearly 10%" The effects persist "even if the students attends a better quality school after closure.”

Hidden behind the statistics are the social consequences. According to a 2013 paper by Robert Scott and Miguel Saucedo at the University of Illinois. They found that school closures “have exacerbated inter-neighborhood tensions among Chicago youth in recent years” and have been a contributing factor to the high rate of youth incarceration.

Because the U.S. Department of Education does not provide the public with any accounting for the amount of taxpayer money—whether state or federal—that has been spent on these failed charter schools, there is no way to estimate the total amount of money missing in action. However, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) recently estimated that "according to standard forensic auditing methodologies, the deficiencies in charter oversight throughout the country suggest that federal, state and local government stand to lose more than $1.4 billion in 2015."

Major Probes into Closed Charters Underway

According to a PowerPoint presentation CMD has uncovered, the watchdogs at the U.S. Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General are currently conducting major nationwide probes into the lack of accountability and oversight within the Charter School Program. One of these audits focuses on where federal grants end up when charter schools are forced to close. A spokesperson for OIG confirmed to CMD that these investigations are ongoing.

The new probes come in the wake of a scathing 2012 audit, which exposed an utter lack of financial controls in the case of money awarded to charters that later closed. “The school files had no follow-up documentation for any of the 12 closed schools reviewed,” the OIG noted in the case of California. The U.S. Department of Education had conducted no oversight and failed to ensure that states receiving tens or hundreds of millions in grants had “procedures to properly account for SEA grant funds spent by closed charter schools.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Department of Education officials have assured stakeholders that the problems with millions disappearing down black holes are now a thing of the past. But the fact that the OIG has found reason to launch major investigations this year tells a different story.

Federal Millions Missing in Action as Charter Close or Never Open

It is impossible to anticipate the findings of the ongoing OIG probes, but even a cursory review of federal charter school grants in Wisconsin and Indiana, conducted by CMD, uncovered dozens of schools that were created out of seed money under the program but later forced to shutter because of financial mismanagement, failure to educate students or lack of enrollment.

Wisconsin received $69.6 million between 2010 and 2015, but out of the charters awarded sub-grants during the first two years of the cycle, one-fifth (16 out of 85) have closed since.

Indiana was awarded $31.3 million under the Charter Schools Program between 2010 and 2015. One of the reasons the state landed the grant, the reviewers contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to score the application make clear, was that charter schools in the state are exempt from democratic oversight by elected school boards. “[C]harter schools are accountable solely to authorizers under Indiana law,” one reader enthuses, awarding the application 30/30 on the rubric “flexibility offered by state law.” This “flexibility,” which the federal program is designed to promote, has been a recipe for disaster:

The Indiana Cyber Charter School opened in 2012 with $420,000 in seed money from the federal program. Dogged by financial scandals and plummeting student results the charter was revoked in 2015 and the school last month leaving 1,100 students in the lurch.

Padua Academy lost its charter in 2014 and converted to a private religious school, but not before receiving $702,000 in federal seed money.

Via Charter School was awarded $193,000 in a “planning grant” but never opened.

Early Career Academy landed a $193,000 planning grant and was due to open last year. This has been postponed because of “governance issues,” according to the school. The charter is sponsored by a for-profit college—ITT Tech—that is currently being sued by federal government for coercing students into taking out student loans for college credits that do not transfer.

In April 2015, Education Secretary Arne Duncan testified in front of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education on abuse of federal funding by for-profit colleges, such as ITT Tech, that were “taking advantage of a massive influx of taxpayer resources.”

“The findings that we are putting forward are pretty stunning…pretty egregious. The waste of taxpayer money—none of us can feel good about,” said Duncan.

And yet, he is calling for a 48 percent expansion of the charter schools program—a program that will likely be up for the vote in the House and Senate this week, before the results of any of the OIG audits are made public to lawmakers and stakeholders.

CMD will soon be releasing the full dataset, as well as information on the methodology used to arrive at the list of closed schools, to help reporters and public school advocates tell the story.

Source: PR Watch

Neel Kashkari tried living on streets for a week during his failed run for California governor in 2014. Now, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis will spend a day in the life of a black family barely making ends meet.

“Walking a day in somebody else’s shoes is actually -- it makes the anecdotes that much more real,” Kashkari, 43, told reporters Wednesday in Minneapolis after a meeting with the local community to discuss race and economic inequality. “It influences how I think about the problems we face.”

Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executive who went on to oversee the U.S. government’s $700 billion financial rescue program, took the helm of the Minneapolis Fed in January.

National poverty levels among blacks stand at 26 percent, more than double those for whites. Fed Chair Janet Yellen has discussed inequality and the fact that minorities have higher unemployment than whites in speeches and testimony to Congress.

Outrage has mounted in the U.S. over a recent spate of fatal shootings of black men by police, some of which were filmed and broadcast over social media, worsening racial tensions in many communities.

On Wednesday, Kashkari, whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from India, heard Rosheeda Credit describe how she and her boyfriend worked three jobs between them to support their family. She then invited him to find out himself what it was like by spending the day with her.

Kashkari said he’d be “happy to do it.”

The Fed has also been under fire from Democrats, including presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for a lack of diversity on the boards of directors on the 12 regional Fed banks. Kashkari said the central bank had a lot of work to do to improve diversity and was committed to making that happen.

By ALISTER BULL & JEANNA SMIALEK

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The original concept of charter schools emerged nationally more than two decades ago and was intended to support community efforts to open up education. Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers union, lauded the charter idea in 1988 as way to propel social mobility for working class kids and to give teachers more decision-making power.

“There was a sense from the start that they would develop models for the broader system,” John Rogers tells Capital & Main. Rogers, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. He adds that charter schools were to be laboratories where parents and educators would work together to craft the best possible learning environment and to serve as engines of innovation and social equity.

But critics of today’s market-based charter movement say monied interests have turned those learning labs into models for capital capture in the Golden State and beyond–“the charter school gravy train,” as Forbes describes it. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed and, like most privately run businesses, the schools prefer to avoid transparency in their operations. This often has brought negative publicity to the schools – last month the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the principal of El Camino Real Charter High School charged more than $100,000 in expenses to his school-issued credit card, many of them for personal use.

See More Stories in Capital & Main’s Charter School Series

“Information belongs to the public,” says Daniel Losen, who conducts law and policy research on education equality issues. “To the extent that you think choice should benefit parents—good choices are made with good information.” Losen co-authored a March, 2016 report about charter schools’ disciplinary policies, produced by the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have flowed into expanding America’s privately-run charter school system over the past two decades, including $3.3 billion in federal funds alone, reports an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy. California has the nation’s largest number of charter schools, with most of them located in Los Angeles County. But in an age when words like “accountability” and “transparency” dominate political discourse, the financial mechanics of charters receive less oversight and scrutiny than the average public school bake sale.

Charter schools were originally intended to support community efforts to open up education.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools candidly spells out the Golden State’s laissez faire rules of the game on its website: “California law provides that charter schools are automatically exempt from most laws governing school districts.”

The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) has explicitly opposed state legislation that would clearly define the existing transparency laws and codes for charter schools — standards charters can now avoid despite their use of public funds.

“Charters don’t have to disclose budgets,” says Jackie Goldberg, a long-time Los Angeles school teacher and former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board president, who also served in the California State Assembly. “Once a charter is written, it’s not subject to the Brown or the Public Records acts.”

The CCSA opposes several bills currently progressing through the state legislature that would bring charter school transparency requirements into line with those expected of public schools. One measure spells out the expectation that charters would follow the same standards as public schools when it comes to the Public Records Act that guarantees access to public records; CCSA argues that most charter schools already voluntarily comply—so the law is therefore unnecessary.

Below are several of areas of concern often cited by charter school critics.

Open Meetings

California public schools are required to follow the Ralph M. Brown Act that requires regular meetings with notices posted in advance, along with public testimony and the availability of agendas and minutes. Open meetings guarantee the right of local parents, teachers and taxpayers to participate in discussions about policy, funding, disciplinary standards—all the heated issues that arise in local schools or that go before school boards.

The finances of charter schools receive less oversight than the average public school bake sale.

But a group called the Charter Schools Development Center provides advice and wiggle room to attorneys representing charter schools on Brown Act requirements. Charters are frequently run by a nonprofit whose board members are chosen and named by previous board members. The CSDC’s Guide to the Brown Act pointedly raises the question of whether governing structures fit the profile of “local legislative bodies” required to comply with the Brown Act and recommends charter school boards “cover their bases” and follow at least the spirit, if not the precise requirements, of the Brown Act.

Disciplinary Protocols and “Counseling Out”

The California Education Code stipulates that a public school student undergoing the drastic disciplinary measure of expulsion is entitled to a due process hearing that includes district administrators and the principal, and allows the student and parents to present arguments and information.

That doesn’t apply to California charter schools, according to a 2013 state Court of Appeals ruling that holds charters can “dismiss” a student without due process. The ruling differentiates between expulsion and dismissal. Following a dismissal, a student is then sent back to the public school system. (The UCLA report that Daniel Losen co-authored found national suspension rates at charter schools were 16 percent higher than those of public schools.)

Charter schools depend on their reputations for teaching students who hit high test-score marks. The practice known as “counseling out” is used to winnow out difficult students, and extends beyond California—the New York Times has detailed incidents in a high-achieving charter school in Brooklyn.

Counseling out can happen for a variety of reasons, not just disciplinary. Jackie Goldberg says she personally witnessed a counseling out session at a South Los Angeles charter, where a student’s mother was simply told by a school staff member that her son was better off finding “a school that meets his needs.”

Public schools, on the other hand, cannot “counsel out” challenging students.

Conflicts of interest

Public school governments are required to follow California Government Code 1090, which states that officials can’t vote on issues or contracts wherein they have a vested interest. Charter decision-makers are not subject to the conflict-of-interest code.

Veteran educators and administrators interviewed by Capital & Main have expressed deep concern about the disparities between transparency requirements for public schools and publicly funded charter schools.

Most California charters are run by educational management organizations (EMOs), which are described by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado as “private entities [that] may not be subject to the same financial or other document/records disclosure laws that apply to state-operated entities and public officials.”

Steve Zimmer, the current LAUSD school board president and a former high school teacher and counselor, has been critical of the lack of oversight of charter funding.

“You don’t have to go through a procurement process, you don’t have to follow labor standards,” he says. “This is playing out on a multiplicity of levels.”

Audits are not routinely required in the California charter system. It was only in 2006—some 14 years after California became the second state in the nation to pass legislation to create charter schools—that the state Charter Schools Act was amended to allow local school officials to request a state audit of a charter school’s financial transactions when they suspect something is amiss.

It took a state audit—triggered by a request from the Los Angeles County Office of Education—to uncover $2.6 million in payments that went to Kendra Okonkwo, the founder of Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists charter school, and to her close family members—with no oversight from the governing board of the nonprofit running the South Los Angeles school.

Another audit uncovered an Oakland charter school founder directing $3.8 million to companies he owned. American Indian Model Schools founder Ben Chavis is presently under IRS and FBI investigations related to his dealings with the school district.

More recently, a San Jose Mercury News investigation of California Virtual Academies, an online charter school chain run by the Virginia-based, publicly traded company K12 Inc., found that not even half of its enrollees graduated with a high school diploma and even fewer—almost none—were qualified to attend a California state university. The online chain, launched by former Goldman Sachs banker Ronald Packard, with seed money from Larry Ellison, cofounder of tech giant Oracle, and former junk bond purveyor Michael Milken, has collected more than $310 million in state funds over a dozen years. (An April 12 statement from K12 Inc. criticized the investigation as incomplete.)

A study commissioned by the Center for Popular Democracy calculates the lack of oversight has cost California $81 million.

Jason Mandell, Director of Advocacy Communications at the California Charter Schools Association, says that charter school opacity is changing. “There’s an increasingly thorough review process. If a charter school isn’t meeting standards, the charter can be shut down. When you know you’re going to be scrutinized and people are watching, you better perform. [Charters] have more autonomy in exchange for greater accountability.”

Last year, however, Governor Jerry Brown, himself a charter school founder, passed on a chance to tighten that accountability. He vetoed a bill approved by both houses of the legislature that would have made it explicit that schools should be subject to the Brown and Public Records acts.

David Tokofsky, a former member of the LAUSD Board of Education who has also worked for a charter school operator, cautions that the push for charter schools has been framed in terms of “education reform,” although the movement behind these schools, he says, is really one for deregulation of financial oversight and management.

“Deregulation was supposed to be about curriculum,” Tokofsky says, allowing teachers and parents more freedom to craft education and programs to fit the students. “It has become deregulation about every aspect of the school.”

“We know,” he adds, “when deregulated banks fail; we know when deregulated airplane doors fail. Do we know when deregulated schools are hurting your kids?”

By Bobbi Murray

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