Campaign News

Several organization have put together resources for municipalities wanting to enact sanctuary policies: Local Progress is aggregating sanctuary city resources from multiple organizations.

Read the full article here.

03.16.2016

Today, the FOMC announced that it will not be raising interest rates this month, which is a good thing. But at the same time, via its dot plot, the committee showed consensus in favor of raising interest rates during 2016. Today’s projections threaten employment and salaries for working families, particular from Black and Latino communities, and will bring real harm if they come to pass. Last week, low-income people of color across the country took the unprecedented step of flyering outside their regional Fed banks before the regional presidents traveled to DC for the FOMC meeting, urging them to “Connect the Dots” and not predict rate hikes in 2016 on their dot plots.

Dushaw Hockett, executive director of SPACEs, a community-based organization in Washington, DC that is part of the Fed Up Coalition, released the following statement in response to the FOMC announcement:

“Over the past seven years, the Fed has repeatedly over-estimated the health of the economy and over-estimated the likelihood of rate hikes – and that has only served to make the recovery weaker.[1] This month’s dot plot prediction is more of the same: once again the Fed is ignoring the real signs of weakness in the economy, particularly for Black and Latino communities, who haven’t had a recovery at all.

“The Fed needs to connect the dots with reality: involuntary part-time work is still almost double pre-recession levels, labor force participation rates are still low, Black unemployment is more than double white unemployment and Latino unemployment and underemployment is still at crisis levels, and wage growth is almost non-existent. A dot plot that ignores these realities actually slows down the economy by tightening credit markets. Recent data shows that there is plenty of room for the economy to grow. Rather than slowing down progress, the Fed should do all it can to facilitate growth in 2016 and beyond.”

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www.populardemocracy.org  

The 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.   www.whatrecovery.com Fed Up is a coalition of community organizations and labor unions across the country, campaigning for the Federal Reserve to adopt pro-worker policies for the rest of us. The Fed can keep interest rates low, give the economy a fair chance to recover, and prioritize full employment and rising wages.    

Press Contact: Anita Jain, ajain@populardemocracy.org, 347-636-9761  

[1] See Ylan Mui, The economy never seems to be as good as the Fed thinks it will be, Washington Post (Sept. 15, 2015) and Narayana Kocherlakota, Dovish Actions Require Dovish Talk (To Be Effective), Blog Post (Feb. 4, 2016).

Salon - May 7, 2014, by Paul Rosenberg - Just in time for National Charter School Week, there’s a new report highlighting the predictable perils of turning education into a poorly regulated business. Titled “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” the report focused on 15 states representing large charter markets, out of the 42 states that have charter schools. Drawing on news reports, criminal complaints, regulatory findings, audits and other sources, it “found fraud, waste and abuse cases totaling over $100 million in losses to taxpayers,” but warned that due to inadequate oversight, “the fraud and mismanagement that has been uncovered thus far might be just the tip of the iceberg.”

While there are plenty of other troubling issues surrounding charter schools — from high rates of racial segregation, to their lackluster overall performance records, to questionable admission and expulsion practices — this report sets all those admittedly important issues aside to focus squarely on activity that appears it could be criminal, and arguably totally out of control. It does not even mention questions raised by sky-high salaries paid to some charter CEOs, such as 16 New York City charter school CEOs who earned more than the head of the city’s public school system in 2011-12. Crime, not greed, is the focus here.

In short, the report is about as apolitical as can be imagined: It is narrowly focused on a white-collar crime wave of staggering proportions, and what can be done about it within the existing framework of widespread charter schools.

The report, co-authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, makes the point that the problem of charter school waste, fraud and abuse, which it focuses on, is just one symptom of the underlying problem: inadequate regulation of charter schools. But it’s a massive symptom, which has so far received only fragmentary coverage.The report takes its title from a section of a report to Congress by the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General, a report that took note of “a steady increase in the number of charter school complaints” and warned that state level agencies were failing “to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds [were] properly used and accounted for.”

But, the report noted, it’s not just the federal government that should be concerned. Reform efforts are underway in several states; Hawaii even repealed its existing charter school law in 2013, and put strict new oversight measures in place, and “Even the Walton Family Foundation, an avid charter advocate, launched a $5 million campaign in 2012 to make oversight of charters schools more stringent.”

“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,” said Kyle Serrette, the director of education justice at the Center for Popular Democracy. “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.”

The report explained that the problem has its roots in a historical disconnect between the original intentions that launched the charter school movement and the commercial forces that have overtaken it since. At first, the report noted:

Lawmakers created charter schools to allow educators to explore new methods and models of teaching. To allow this to happen, they exempted the schools from the vast majority of regulations governing the traditional public school system. The goal was to incubate innovations that could then be used to improve public schools. i The ability to take calculated risks with small populations of willing teachers, parents, and students was the original design. With so few people and schools involved, the risk to participants and the public was relatively low.

But the character of the movement has changed dramatically since then. As charter school growth has skyrocketed (doubling three times since 2000), “the risks are high and growing, while the benefits are less clear,” the report continued, adding:

This is not an uncommon occurrence in our nation’s history. In the past—in some cases, our very recent past—industries such as banking and lending have outgrown their respective regulatory safety nets. Without sufficient regulations to ensure true public accountability, incompetent and/or unethical individuals and firms can (and have) inflict great harm on communities.

The report found that “charter operator fraud and mismanagement is endemic to the vast majority of states that have passed a charter school law.” It organized the abuse into six basic categories, each of which is treated in its own section:

• Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; • Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; • Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; • Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, • Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.

Perhaps most disturbingly, under the first category, crooked charter school officials displayed a wide range of lavish, compulsive or tawdry tastes. Examples include:

• Joel Pourier, former CEO of Oh Day Aki Heart Charter School in Minnesota, who embezzled $1.38 million from 2003 to 2008. He used the money on houses, cars, and trips to strip clubs. Meanwhile, according to an article in the Star Tribune, the school “lacked funds for field trips, supplies, computers and textbooks.”

• Nicholas Trombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School is accused of diverting funds from it for his private purchases. He allegedly bought houses, a Florida Condominium and a $300,000 plane, hid income from the IRS, formed businesses that billed even though they had done no work, and took $550,000 in kickbacks for a laptop computer contract.

• A regular financial audit in 2009 of the Langston Hughes Academy in New Orleans uncovered theft of $660,000 by Kelly Thompson, the school’s business manager. Thompson admitted that from shortly after she assumed the position until she was fired 15 months later, she diverted funds to herself in order to support her gambling in local casinos.

Others spent their stolen money on everything from a pair of jet skis for $18,000 to combined receipts of $228 for cigarettes and beer, to over $30,000 on personal items from Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, Louis Vuitton, Coach and Tommy Hilfiger. But the real damage came from the theft of resources for children’s future.

“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” said 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 whistle-blowers 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.”

Stevens was not just expressing a nebulous hope. The report also offered a set of proposals on how to go about reining in the abuses. Initial suggestions on how to respond to each kind of abuse are presented in each of the six areas mentioned above, but there is also a comprehensive framework integrating them into a coherent whole.

The report’s first proposal is that all states should establish an oversight “Office of Charter Schools.” It “should have the statutory responsibility, authority, and resources to investigate fraud, waste, mismanagement and misconduct,” including the authority to refer findings for prosecution. It should have “an appropriate level of staffing” so that “The ratio of charter schools to full-time investigators employed by the Office should not exceed ten to one.” It should have the power to place distribution of charter school funds on hold. And it should have the authority to intervene in funding or other decisions made by charter authorizing entities if they are violating state or federal law.

A second proposal is that states amend their charter laws to “explicitly declare that charter schools are public schools, and are subject to the same non-discrimination and transparency requirements as are other publicly funded schools.”

A third proposal is to require public online availability of each charter school’s original application and charter agreement.

Not surprisingly, a number of proposals target those running charter schools. Specifically, regarding charter school governing board members, the report proposes: 1) Require them to live in close proximity to the school/s physical location. 2) Require boards to be elected “with representation of parents (elected by parents), teachers (elected by teachers) and in the case of high schools, students (elected by students).” Other board members should be “residents of the school district in which the school/s operate.” 3) Require board members to file full financial disclosure and conflict-of-interest reports, similar to those required of traditional school district board members — and post them online on the school’s website. 4) Hold board members legally liable for fraud or malfeasance occurring at the school or schools that they oversee.

More broadly, charter schools — and the oversight entities that authorize them — should be publicly transparent in the following ways: 1) A full list of each charter school’s governing board members, officers and administrators with affiliation and contact information should be available on the school’s website. 2) Minutes from governing board meetings, the school’s policies, and information about staff should be available on the school’s website. 3) Charter schools should be fully compliant with state open meetings/open records laws. 4) Charter school financial documents should be publicly disclosed annually, on the authorizer’s website, including detailed information about the use of both public and private funds by the school and its management entities. 5) Charter schools should be independently audited annually, with audits published on the school’s websites. 6) All vendor or service contracts over $25,000 should be fully disclosed. No such contracts should be allowed with any entity in which the school operator, or any board member, has any personal interest.

If most of these sound like simple common sense, that’s pretty much just the point. There are plenty of issues around education that are controversial. Protecting ourselves, our children and their future against a massive white-collar crime wave should not be one of them.

Source

Atlanta, located in the heart of the South, was a center of the civil rights movement, became a corporate hub of the New South economy, and boasts a large black professional class.

Can it help break the Federal Reserve's color barrier?

Dennis Lockhart's retirement early next year as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta has spotlighted the selection of his replacement as members of Congress and a coalition of activist groups call for an aggressive search among blacks and Latinos with finance or economics expertise.

African-Americans have served on the Federal Reserve's Washington-based Board of Governors three times in the Fed's 103-year history, and the central bank now has a female chair, Janet Yellen.

But none of the regional banks have ever been run by a black or Latino, a lack of diversity some argue is worrisome on its face and could make the system as a whole less attentive to how policy impacts less advantaged communities.

"Grave racial disparities exist across our nation in unemployment, wages and income. ... It is critical that incoming leadership ... be committed to doing more," four African-American members of the House of Representatives wrote in a letter this week to Yellen and Thomas Fanning, chair of the Atlanta Fed's private board of directors.

"Lockhart's recent retirement announcement presents an opportunity to enhance and expand the Federal Reserve's leadership," they said in the letter.

In a public webcast on Thursday, Fanning said he wants to hold "one of the most transparent processes ever," and that the search committee has already received nominations from the public at large.

As in other districts, the search will be national in scope. There is no requirement that the head of the Atlanta Fed come from the bank's southeastern region, and the 12 regional Fed banks often bring in a president from outside their own geographic area.

Executive search firm SpencerStuart has been hired to run the search. Consultant John Harpole said the firm has helped place 1,600 women, minorities and other "underrepresented groups" in corporate positions, and would cast a wide net among local institutions, national organizations and its "strong network" of sitting executives to find candidates.

The issue is sensitive for the Fed, whose policies affect every citizen but which is designed to be immune from the day-to-day politics that influence other U.S. government agencies.

Group says Fed is unaccountable 

Because monetary policy focuses on influencing interest rates that apply nationwide, Fed officials say it is too blunt a tool to address issues like the persistent gap between unemployment rates for blacks and white.

Activists counter that those sorts of problems might improve if unemployment was driven as low as possible — even at the risk of higher inflation. The Fed sets policy with two goals in mind, low employment and stable inflation of around 2 percent annually.

The U.S. unemployment rate in August, the latest month for which data is available, was 4.9 percent.

A labor-affiliated coalition of civic groups, known as Fed Up, has taken the argument even further, arguing that the Fed's very structure makes it unaccountable.

The regional banks in particular have supervisory power over local financial institutions as well as a voice in national policymaking, but are set up as private entities owned by the banks they oversee. The regional bank presidents are chosen by a local board of directors, though the choice must be approved by the Fed governors in Washington.

In a meeting with civic activists in August, New York Fed President William Dudley agreed the institution had done a "pretty lousy" job of promoting diversity. But Fed officials in general argue that the current structure has worked well, and that changes would need to offer clear advantages without risking the central bank's independence.

In that environment, the Atlanta Fed appointment will be watched closely. Though many regional bank heads come from within the broader Fed system, tapped from its ready pool of economists with doctoral degrees, Lockhart had a varied career in private equity and banking before taking over the Atlanta Fed 10 years ago.

And while the search will be national, Atlanta has a deep pool of black professionals - 10 percent of African-Americans in the city have a graduate or professional degree, three percentage points higher than the national average.

"That would be a great thing," Fanning said. "We want the best person as well."

By Howard Schneider

Source