Advocacy group calls for more oversight of California charter school spending
Advocacy group calls for more oversight of California charter school spending
A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. A 2015 report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy...
A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. A 2015 report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” reported over $200 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools.
Read the full article here.
Post Navigation Report Finds Lack of Proper Fraud Oversight at Charters in State
LA School Report - March 24, 2015, by Craig Clough - California is extremely vulnerable to fraud at charter schools and as a result can expect to lose $100 million in wasted tax money in 2015, a...
LA School Report - March 24, 2015, by Craig Clough - California is extremely vulnerable to fraud at charter schools and as a result can expect to lose $100 million in wasted tax money in 2015, a new report released today finds.
The report from the Center for Popular Democracy, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and Public Advocates found that there are “structural oversight weaknesses” in the state’s charter system.
Among the problems it found:
Oversight depends heavily on self-reporting by charter schools.
General auditing techniques alone do not uncover fraud.
Oversight bodies lack adequate staffing to detect and eliminate fraud.
California has the largest number of charter schools in the nation — 1,184, according to the California Charter Schools Association. The number in LA Unified grew this year to 285, 231 of which are independent.
The report recommends a few solutions, including requiring oversight agencies, such as the State Comptroller’s Office and Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, to conduct audits on charter schools once every three years, and not only when requested to do so.
“There’s no proactive system for auditing California’s charter schools by state officials… They wait until someone has whisteblowers come forward and the media has put something out, but there’s not a regular system for auditing schools,” said Kyle Serrette, director of education at the Center for Popular Democracy, in a call with reporters.
The report stated that over $81 million in fraud has been uncovered at charter schools to date, but that it is likely the “tip of the iceberg” and estimated the state will lose $100 million this year alone to waste, fraud and mismanagement at charters.
“We have a situation where we are losing millions of dollars to fraud in the charter sector every single year. We now know what the problem is,” Serrette said, adding that the backers of the report will be pushing state lawmakers for policy changes based on the findings of the report.
Serrette also said there are other states that do a better job of applying rigorous oversight of charters.
“Pennsylvania is a great example where the auditor general audits all of Pennsylvania’s charter schools every three to five years and the districts, which tend to be the authorizers there, they do the same thing,” Serrette said.
Click here to read the full report.
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Meet The ‘Rapists’ Who Built Donald Trump’s Empire
As a real estate tycoon, Donald Trump built up and has given his name to ...
As a real estate tycoon, Donald Trump built up and has given his name to clothing lines, hotels,resorts, golf courses, a winery, and apartment buildings. And for a man who has unapologetically characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, and has said that infectious diseases are spilling across the border, Trump has decided to work in industries where it’s impossible to avoid the Latino immigrants he is maligning.
A 2010 Current Population Survey found that more than 200,00 foreign-born workers work in the hospitality industry, nearly 1.2 million foreign-born workers hold construction occupations, and another 1.3 million foreign-born workers are employed in the food service industry. The data doesn’t break down the figures by nationality and legal status, though a Southern Poverty Law Center survey found that Latino immigrants are most often employed in construction, factory work, cleaning, and restaurant work.
A 2011 National Council of La Raza study corroborated those results, finding that nearly one in five employees in the accommodation industry is Latino. The group is also overrepresented in “nearly all the major service jobs in the accommodation industry,” the NCLR study stated.
For Trump, that overrepresentation of Latino laborers could very well mean that at least some of his workers are from the country that he’s made inflammatory remarks about. And if he took a stroll through some of the properties that he owns long after business hours are over, he might encounter many of these “good people“:
Construction workers
As the Washington Post reported this week, Trump relies on both undocumented and legal immigrants on the construction site of his hotel in Washington, D.C. Trump has also put undocumented immigrants on the payroll in the past. In the 1980s and 1990s, Trump was embroiled in a 15-year lawsuit for allegedly cheating 200 undocumented Polish immigrants out of meager wages and fringe benefits during the demolition of the building that preceded Trump Tower, the New York Times reported in 1998.
Trump doesn’t think it’s “crass” to tell people that he’s “really rich,” (he has a net worth anywhere between $4.1 billion and $8.7 billion), but his wealth isn’t solely from his own doing. He likely had help — as he currently does in D.C. — from immigrants like Ramon Alvarez, a window worker, who told the Washington Post, “Do you think that when we’re hanging out there from the eighth floor that we’re raping or selling drugs? We’re risking our lives and our health. A lot of the chemicals we deal with are toxic.”
A 2013 Center for Popular Democracy report found that the majority of construction site accident victims in New York State are Latinos and/or immigrant workers. Only 34 percent of all construction workers in New York state are Latino and/or an immigrant, but they comprise 60 percent of all OSHA-investigated “fall from an elevation fatalities” in the state. A 2008 Pew Hispanic study found that 17 percent of construction workers were undocumented.
Some of these workers are subject to wage theft. Fernando, an undocumented construction worker and painter, told ThinkProgress in March that he joined an union because “the contractor refused to pay me and they helped me get my money back.” He was also serious injured twice on the job, once in Galveston, Texas after Hurricane Ike.
Golf course maintenance workers
About 180,000 maintenance workers keep the nation’s 15,619 golf courses green and pristine across the country. As a four-part Golf Digest series documented, immigrants do most of the maintenance work on golf courses. “We get up early and try to stay out of the way,” one golf course worker told Golf Digest. “We don’t know anything about the players, and they don’t know anything about us.”
Most of the time, American workers just aren’t “willing to do those jobs,” Chava McKeel, the associate director of government relations for the GCSAA said.
“The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA) estimates that two-thirds of the maintenance workforce is Latino, with the largest presence in California, Texas and Florida (85 percent), followed by the Northwest (50 percent) and the Midwest/Mideast (10 to 20 percent),” Golf Digest reported. A 2008 Cornell study backs up the findings, noting that superintendents responding to their survey indicated that “72 percent of their workforce at the peak of the season was Hispanic.”
The Trump organization owns seven golf courses throughout the country. The PGA of America saidon Tuesday that the Grand Slam of Golf tournament won’t be played at the Los Angeles golf club.
Restaurant workers
The 2008 Pew Hispanic study found that about one in ten workers in the restaurant industry is an immigrant. Of those, about 20 percent of restaurant cooks and 30 percent of dishwashers are undocumented, Seattle’s KUOW reported.
Latinos are “disproportionately likely to be dishwashers, dining room attendants, or cooks, also relatively low-paid occupations,” an Economic Policy Institute report stated last year. The study also found that “one in six restaurant workers, or 16.7 percent, live below the official poverty line” while “more than two in five restaurant workers, or 43.1 percent, live below twice the poverty line.”
Restaurateur and TV star Anthony Bourdain told the Houston Press in 2007, “It is undeniable…I know very few chefs who’ve even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job.”
Though Trump is mainly in the hotel business, his establishments have restaurants, like the Trump Grill located in the atrium of the Trump Tower and The Terrace at Trump Chicago. However, his recent comments are threatening to derail plans for a new restaurant at the planned Trump International Hotel in D.C. At least 2,510 people have already signed a petition asking Chef Jose Andres to back out of working at the restaurant.
Hotel workers
According to the 2015 Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 36,700 Latinos working in the building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations, such as janitors, maids and housekeepers, pest control workers, and grounds maintenance staff. There are also an additional25,100 hotel, motel, and resort desk clerks who identify as Latino.
A 2009 study of workers across 50 U.S. hotels found that Latino women are twice as likely to be injured as white house keepers and 1.5 times more likely to be injured than men. The New York Times reported that housekeepers have a high injury rate since they have to do repetitive tasks, lift heavy mattresses, and work quickly to clean rooms.
“I have worked as a housekeeper for about 13 years. I work in pain constantly. My body aches all over, but most of all my back from bending and lifting throughout the day,” one housekeeper who worked at a Hyatt hotel said, according to a Work Safe report.
Unlike Trump, some conservative hoteliers have recognized the necessity of immigrant workers. J.W. Bill Marriott, then CEO and now Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board of Marriott International, has called for immigration reform several times in 2007, 2010, and again in 2012.
Source: ThinkProgress
Some Question City’s Decision to Keep IDNYC Documents
Some Question City’s Decision to Keep IDNYC Documents
Advocates who opposed a policy of keeping documents submitted by IDNYC applicants believe the doubts they raised in 2014 have been validated by the legal fight over destroying those papers before...
Advocates who opposed a policy of keeping documents submitted by IDNYC applicants believe the doubts they raised in 2014 have been validated by the legal fight over destroying those papers before Donald Trump becomes president.
“Now they’re saying, ‘If they come for the data, we’re going to burn it,'” says Abraham Paulos, executive director of Families for Freedom. “Well, then why did you keep in in the first place?”
The policy of keeping documents was not part of the original version of the IDNYC law but was added during intense negotiations involving City Hall, the NYPD and advocacy groups.
Some of those advocacy groups—like Families for Freedom and the New York Civil Liberties Union—ended their support for the IDNYC program over the retention policies because they feared the information could be used by federal authorities hunting for undocumented immigrants. Other organizations expressed concerns but continue to support the bill and promoted the ID program.
The fears about the documents have grown more widespread since Trump, who has pledged to deport millions of people, won election. A lawsuit by two Staten Island lawmakers has at least temporarily halted the city from a planned purge of the documents in its possession.
Mayor de Blasio recently said that IDNYC, one of his signature achievements, would no longer retain copies of passports, utility bills and other documents submitted by people applying for the card, which is held by more than 860,000 New Yorkers.
For advocates, that move—while welcome—casts a harsh light on the decision to collect the documents in the first place. Still, many immigration advocates think the ID was a positive step.
Obstacles to an idea
New Haven, Conn., was the first city to issue a municipal ID in 2007, and some local advocates had been pushing for New York City to follow suit in order to give a widely usable ID card to the undocumented as well as others who lacked official identification. De Blasio embraced the ID as a candidate and called for it in his first State of the City speech.
From the outset, the idea faced an obstacle: How do you create a tool that will be especially useful for undocumented people without making it a scarlet letter? Attaching museum discounts and other benefits to the card aimed to broaden its appeal so that even citizens would obtain it.
But while that broader usage meant the card itself didn’t necessarily indicate a holder’s immigration status, the documents associated with each application still could. To obtain an IDNYC, a person has to present documents that establish identity and residency. Among the accepted proofs of identity are foreign passports, consular ID, foreign military identification—all of which could indicate a lack of legal presence in the U.S.
The question that triggered tension during the negotiations over IDNYC was whether that material needed to be saved once IDNYC staff reviewed the documents and approved the card.
The first version of the City Council measure that created the program included the language, “The city shall not retain originals or copies of records provided by an applicant to prove identity or residency for a New York City identity card.”
But the language that became law described a very different approach. It permitted the city to, once a quarter, destroying any application documents that had been held for two years. It also created an opportunity to destroy all the documents in the program’s possession “on or before December 31, 2016” and end document retention then—an effort to ensure that the papers could be shredded before an anti-immigrant president took office.
The lawsuit by Assemblymembers Ron Castorina and Nicole Malliotakis, both Staten Island Republicans, argues the state’s freedom of information laws should prevent that destruction of documents. Malliotakis made her opposition to the destruction clause known as early as February 2015.
Behind-the-scenes debate
When IDNYC was being shaped in 2014, “retention to us was something that we absolutely did not want,” Betsy Plum, director of special projects at the New York Immigration Coalition, recalls.
However, “It was critical that the NYPD accept the ID,” she says, because one goal for the ID was for it to be a resource when someone is stopped by police. “For us and the community we work with the NYPD was a really critical partner for us to keep at the table for the ultimate success of IDNYC.”
And the NYPD said it needed the documents to investigate fraud, she says. Plum describes a back and forth between advocates and City Hall over the retention issue. “They came back saying to us: ‘This is the only way it’s going to happen.'”
A mayoral spokesperson says the retention clause was inserted “after consideration from many stakeholders, including NYPD.” In addition to the language permitting destruction after two years or at the end of 2016, the final bill did require a court order or warrant for the documents to be handed over to any third party.
Some advocates believed those safeguards were enough to justify going ahead with the ID. “Once we were able to see a clear path for the data to be protected, we saw the benefits far outweigh the risks,” Plum says.
Another advocate involved in the discussions recalls that the coalition of advocacy groups involved in the negotiations took a vote on whether to maintain or drop support for the measure; a clear majority favored pressing ahead with the ID.
But Families for Freedom did not. Paulos (who was a City Limits intern eight years ago) already harbored concerns about whether the cards themselves could be used to identify undocumented people. “The retention and the data was the deal breaker,” he recalls. “Once we heard that the NYPD was also in the discussion, we pulled out.”
The New York Civil Liberties Union also parted ways with other advocates. “In this bill, the city has not done enough to protect those documents from being used by law enforcement,” NYCLU advocacy director Johanna Miller testified as the bill was about to be signed in July 2014. “While the NYC ID will bring benefits to many people, we are disappointed that the city is inviting New Yorkers to gamble with the stakes as high as prosecution or even deportation.”
A July 2015 report by the Center for Popular Democracy (which supported the New York law) noted that “the vast majority of municipal ID card programs around the country have prohibited the copying or retention of documents presented to prove identity or residency. In New Haven, San Francisco, and Mercer County, NJ, municipal ID card programs have run smoothly for years without copying or retaining personal documents of applicants.”
“The only city-run municipal ID card program that stores applicants’ personal documents is IDNYC,” the report continued.”
No regrets from supporters
In the months after the law’s passage but before it took effect, the commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration—which oversees the ID program—issued executive orders clarifying the protections for IDNYC data and the handling of requests for program information by law enforcement.
But concerns persisted. When the first oversight hearing about the law was held in mid-2015, The Fortune Society testified that it was concerned that, despite the safeguards in the bill, “federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies may not have to meet a probable cause standard to obtain documents.”
Fortune Society director JoAnne Page now tells City Limits: “The more vulnerable people are, the most risk that damage will be done,” if personal information falls into the wrong hands. “I don’t think there is a more vulnerable group than undocumented immigrants who have criminal records.”
Plum says despite the Trump election and the lawsuit, NYIC has no regrets about its decision to support the bill despite the retention policy. “If we were all to live in a reality where we only acted as it if the worst possible things could happen and we allows ourselves to educate and serve communities from a lens of total paranoia, I think we’d have a far worse outcome for the communities we serve and protect,” she says. “I think still with the ID the benefits have and still do outweigh the risks. The alternative here would be to have had no IDNYC – to have parent who can’t get into their kids schools, to have families unable to open bank accounts, to have survivors of domestic violence afraid to call the police because they have no way to identify themselves. I don’t think anyone would want to sacrifice any of those benefits.”
The Castorina-Malliotakis lawsuit is next in court on January 18. NYCLU staff attorney Jordan Wells says he believes the city will ultimately be able to follow through on their plans to destroy the documents. “The lawsuit pending in Staten Island is without merit,” he says. “Eventually the city will be able to follow the procedure.”
But Paulos believes damage has already been done. The fact that the city will now destroy the documents, and will no longer keep those generated for new applications, makes it hard to credit the assertions that keeping that paperwork was necessary in the first place. “There’s a lot of mistrust.”
By Jarrett Murphy
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How Much Higher Should the Minimum Wage Be? (Much Higher)
Gawker - December 2, 2013, by Hamilton Nolan - Last week, voters in SeaTac, Washington voted to raise the minimum wage for airport workers...
Gawker - December 2, 2013, by Hamilton Nolan - Last week, voters in SeaTac, Washington voted to raise the minimum wage for airport workers to $15 an hour. California recently approved a statewide minimum wage of $10. As low wage workers increasingly voice their frustration with their shitty lot in life, it's time to raise the minimum wage— everywhere.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25. If one were to work full time for 50 weeks a year at that wage, one would make $14,500, which is below the poverty line for a household of two. Add to that the fact that most minimum wage workers cannot get full time hours, and the fact that many of them are supporting families (only 12% of workers earning under $10 an hour are teenagers, contrary to popular stereotypes), and the self-evidently ludicrous nature of our national standard becomes clear.
The common argument against raising the minimum wage is that it would cause employers to cut back on hiring. Not so. The economist Arindrajit Dube wrote this weekend about the latest research into this topic, which finds that fears of job loss have been greatly overstated:
In my work with T. William Lester and Michael Reich, we use nearly two decades' worth of data and compare all bordering areas in the United States to show that while higher minimum wages raise earnings of low-wage workers, they do not have a detectable impact on employment. Our estimates — published in 2010 in the Review of Economics and Statistics — suggest that a hypothetical 10 percent increase in the minimum wage affects employment in the restaurant or retail industries, by much less than 1 percent; the change is in fact statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Dube estimates that a 10% rise in the minimum wage would reduce overall poverty by 2%. That's nice. It's also evidence that we need the minimum wage to rise by much more than 10% (which would only bring it up to about $8 an hour). A $10 minimum wage would offer a full time worker a salary of $20,000 a year—a shitty salary, but enough to raise a household of three over the official poverty line, at least. A $15 minimum wage would mean a $30,000 annual salary. Of course, the vagaries of hourly work and ever-shifting schedules would mean that annual take-home pay would probably fall well under those figures.
Later this week, fast food workers across the nation will stage a one day walkout as part of their ongoing quest to shame employers into raising their wages. Shame will not work, except as a tool for motivating political will. If low wage workers in dead end jobs are ever to gain some small measure of economic security, their wages will have to be raised by law. Ten dollars an hour is a good starting point. But that should be seen as a stopgap humanitarian measure meant to be temporary, until support can be gathered for another raise, or at least for a law indexing minimum wage to inflation.
Minimum wage earners are sometimes dismissed as people too lazy to find a better job. But a land of opportunity in which there is a higher-paying job available for everyone who works hard is a childish fantasy. With a different shuffle of the deck of fate, any one of us could be earning minimum wage. The question is not "How much do those people deserve?" The question is: How much would you accept to do that job?
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Report: Pa. Charter Schools Lost 30M to Fraud, Mismanagement
Daily News - October 1, 2014, by Regina Medina -THE STATE'S charter schools are out $30 million due to chicanery and waste since the 1997 charter-school law was enacted, according to a report...
Daily News - October 1, 2014, by Regina Medina -THE STATE'S charter schools are out $30 million due to chicanery and waste since the 1997 charter-school law was enacted, according to a report released yesterday by three grass-roots education groups.
The report, "Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania's Charter Schools," was authored by the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and Action United. It calls for, among many recommendations, a moratorium on new charter schools, changes to the oversight structure and legal protections "to encourage whistle-blowers to report instances of fraud."
The state's oversight of charter schools is "not effectively detecting or preventing fraud," the report says.
The charter-school law mandates general auditing techniques, which the report claims may find inaccuracies but won't detect abuse. The report urges that charter schools follow practices used by federal agencies and conduct targeted audits that look into high-risk areas.
The report adds that whistle-blowers within the charter organizations and the media have exposed the majority of fraud cases and suggested that oversight agencies increase staffing to adequate levels.
In Philadelphia, the district Charter School Office oversees the city's 86 charters. The office has five staffers and no director.
The report cites specific cases of fraud around the state including the following from Philadelphia:
* Two officials with the Philadelphia Academy Charter School, Kevin O'Shea and Rosemary DiLacqua, were convicted in 2009 of defrauding the school of more than $900,000. They submitted fraudulent invoices for personal expenses.
* Ina Walker, former CEO, and Hugh Clark, founder, of the New Media Technology Charter School, were sentenced to prison for stealing $522,000 in taxpayer funds, which were used to fund a restaurant and a private school.
* Dorothy June Brown, who founded a number of charter schools including Laboratory Charter and Planet Abacus, is to be retried this year for allegedly defrauding $6.5 million from the schools and then attempting to cover it up.
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Ulster County Legislator Calls for Equity and Accountability in School Funding
Mid-Hudson News - December 29, 2014 - It took a 2007 Federal lawsuit to ensure equity in New York State school aid funding to local districts. Over the course of the past six years, Ulster County...
Mid-Hudson News - December 29, 2014 - It took a 2007 Federal lawsuit to ensure equity in New York State school aid funding to local districts. Over the course of the past six years, Ulster County school districts received close to $26 million or at least they would have, had the State actually implemented the promised foundation aid. Instead, the foundation aid was frozen as part of the State's budget process.
"Ulster County tax payers have been paying more and more to ensure education for all," said County Legislator David Donaldson (D, Kingston). "Yet, the State has balanced its budget without paying its promised share. The State leadership has to stop talking about supporting the future of our State and actually pay for what they promised."
Over a billion dollars are being given to serve the 3% of student population that attend Charter Schools in New York State for 2014. $54 million is estimated by a Center for Popular Democracy's report to be lost because of charter school fraud and abuse in 2014 alone. Only eighteen of the sixtytwo counties in New York State have a charter school. Ulster County has no charter schools.
"I am all for helping parents to ensure their children receive the quality education they deserve," said Donaldson. 'That quality education starts with the public education system that serves 85% of New York State's children. Until the State leaders provide the funding that will address the educational gaps in public education and ensure the oversight and accountability of private charter school education, no taxpayer dollars - whether State or local taxes - should be spent on privately run schools that are not held to the same standards or expectations as the public school system."
Donaldson wants the County Legislature to consider the measure at their January 9 session.
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Minneapolis Fed chief Neel Kashkari calls some racial disparity 'a crisis'
Minneapolis Fed chief Neel Kashkari calls some racial disparity 'a crisis'
Community organizer Wintana Melekin was grabbing a soda in late June at a coffee shop near her office when she heard Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, had...
Community organizer Wintana Melekin was grabbing a soda in late June at a coffee shop near her office when she heard Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, had just been in.
Seeing her chance, she dashed out the door after Kashkari, caught up and asked if he would meet with her organization, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, to discuss racial and economic disparities in the Twin Cities.
He agreed, and to confirm that he meant it, retweeted Melekin’s tweet saying he was willing to meet.
On Wednesday, the meeting happened. Kashkari sat down with about a dozen people at NOC’s offices in north Minneapolis and committed to an ongoing collaboration between the Minneapolis Fed and some of the state’s most outspoken critics of a status quo in which blacks are not enjoying the benefits of economic growth.
“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “One of the things I learned in 2008 is you don’t tackle a crisis with incremental solutions. You tackle a crisis with overwhelming force, and so if this is a crisis, and I think certainly parts of this are, then we need to bring overwhelming force.”
Kashkari, who became president of the Minneapolis Fed at the start of the year, is a former investment banker and Treasury official in the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed the first chief of the bank bailout program known as TARP at the end of the Bush term and start of President Obama’s administration.
Though his everyday work is at the very top of the national economy, Kashkari has a record of trying to understand its depths. As a candidate for governor in California two years ago, Kashkari spent a week living on the streets of Fresno, a midsize city, with just $40. He tried unsuccessfully to find work during that week and wound up in a homeless shelter.
It’s not clear how Kashkari and the nation’s central bank can directly address the challenges that were brought up at Wednesday’s meeting. The Fed controls interest rates, with the goal of creating maximum employment, but monetary policy can’t be targeted at segments of the population or certain states or cities. As Kashkari pointed out, black unemployment in the United States stubbornly tracks at roughly twice the level of white unemployment.
“There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment,” Kashkari said.
He said driving unemployment downward will help everyone, and he is for low interest rates as long as they aren’t driving inflation upward. But he has not heard a satisfying answer for why the disparity in Minnesota is worse than in most places, though he committed to working with NOC to understand why it is.
From NOC’s perspective, the meeting with Kashkari was historic. Never before has a Fed president met face to face with its members in Minneapolis. As local ambassadors for the national Fed Up campaign, the organization has a fresh interest in the Fed and has taken the position that interest rates should remain low.
For Anthony Newby, the head of the organization, the meeting was a good starting point. Kashkari’s comment that the economic plight of black Minnesotans is a crisis requiring a response of “overwhelming force” was particularly satisfying.
“It sets the tone for how the Fed could, in unusual and unorthodox ways, use its power and position to solve some of these equity problems,” Newby said.
Kashkari agreed to spend a day with Rosheeda Credit, a mother of five at the meeting who said she struggles to pay for rent and child care. “The crime rate is high here, and the rent is high here and we’re not getting paid enough to work here,” Credit said.
He heard from Tenice Hodges, a former teacher who moved back to Minneapolis two months ago to help her sister’s family. She is living out of her car until she can get a teaching job because she can’t afford the city’s high rents with her restaurant wages.
“We are struggling out here,” Hodges said. “Yes, I’m employed. I work every day. But can I go out and get an apartment right now? No. I don’t have $1,100 by myself, or $2,200 for a deposit.”
Kashkari committed to looking closely at the résumés of people of color that NOC submitted for various board appointments at the Minneapolis Fed. He also said he will work with NOC on research and meet with people from the organization again in the future. He also committed to attending a workshop put on by groups affiliated with NOC at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, an annual conference in Wyoming where central bankers from around the world gather.
Kashkari, who has drawn national attention by calling for a transformative solution to the problem of banks that are too big to fail, explained that his role as a regional Fed president is to understand the problems people face in his district. While the tools of monetary policy are limited, and much of the heavy lifting that causes social change much happen in Congress, he said it is important for him to meet with people as he did Wednesday to understand their concerns.
“I appreciate that you think it is business as usual,” Newby told Kashkari. “I don’t think it is business as usual.”
By ADAM BELZ
Source
U.S. Department of Education Launches Crackdown on Ohio Charters
U.S. Department of Education Launches Crackdown on Ohio Charters
Charter Schools are defined by their freedom from regulation and oversight, but that freedom has been so regularly abused by unscrupulous operators that it seems the U.S. Department of Education...
Charter Schools are defined by their freedom from regulation and oversight, but that freedom has been so regularly abused by unscrupulous operators that it seems the U.S. Department of Education is finally deciding to crack down, under pressure in this case from Ohio’s U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.
Three months ago, on June 20, 2016, Senator Brown wrote a letter to John King, now U.S. Secretary of Education, demanding increased oversight of a large grant—$71 million—the federal Department of Education made to Ohio on September 28, 2015 to expand charter schools. The grant application had been written by David Hansen, who, by September, had already been fired by the Ohio Department of Education for hiding the abysmal academic record of the state’s so-called “dropout recovery schools” and omitting their scores from a system he was creating as the Ohio Department prepared to begin holding charter schools more accountable. Hansen had also bragged in his federal grant application that Ohio had already begun more aggressively regulating charters. After the U.S. Department of Education awarded Ohio the $71 million grant at the end of September 2015, however, it was pointed out that the Ohio legislature had not yet passed the regulations for which Hansen (in July) had given the state credit. (The Ohio Legislature later adopted the most basic and minimal charter school oversight when it passed Ohio House Bill 2 on October 7, 2015).
When Ohio Senator Brown wrote to U.S. Secretary John King in June, 2016, the $71 million Ohio grant had been put on hold for months, as the U.S. Department of Education investigated Ohio’s dealings with charter schools. In his June 20 letter, Senator Brown wrote:
“In your November 2015 response letter to the members of the Ohio Congressional delegation, you outlined a number of steps ED has taken and will continue to take to verify the accuracy and completeness of ODE’s grant application. I appreciate these steps, but more must be done to provide order to the state’s chaotic charter school sector. In light of this report, I ask that you examine the performance of Ohio charter schools who have received CSP (federal Charter Schools Program) grants to determine whether grant recipients are failing or closing at a higher rate than those in other states and how the academic performance of CSP grant recipients in Ohio compares to CSP grant recipients nationwide. I further ask that when Ohio has satisfied all necessary conditions for this grant money to be released that you appoint a special monitor to review every expenditure made pursuant to this grant in order to ensure that all funds are being spent for their intended purpose. Ohio’s current lack of oversight wastes taxpayer’s money and undermines the ostensible goal of charters: providing more high-quality educational opportunities for children. There exists a pattern of waste, fraud, and abuse that is far too common and requires extra scrutiny.”
Last Wednesday, September 14, 2016, the U.S. Department of Education finally released the $71 million grant, but, as Patrick O’Donnell reports for the Plain Dealer, there are now many conditions:
“In a letter to the Ohio Department of Education today, the grant was declared ‘high risk’ because of the poor academic performance of the state’s charters and the struggles the state has had in implementing portions of House Bill 2, the state’s charter reform bill passed last fall by the state legislature… The letter states: ‘As part of this high-risk designation, we are imposing certain High-Risk Special Conditions on ODE’s CSP (Charter Schools Program) SEA (State Education Agency) grant that will help ODE and the Department more clearly determine ODE’s ongoing compliance with applicable requirements’ so that it will be more transparent and so that any issues can be identified and fixed quickly.”
Here are the conditions as reported by O’Donnell:
“(T)he state cannot give out grants to schools as it has in the past. It must have prior approval from the U.S. Department of Education before transferring any money.
“The department must evaluate dropout recovery schools better.
“The state must report its progress four times each year.
“ODE must hire an independent monitor of the grant program.
“The state must create a Grant Implementation Advisory Committee.
“And it must do demanding ratings of the oversight agencies known as ‘sponsors’ in Ohio, but as ‘authorizers’ in most other states.”
Ohio’s problems with the controversial $71 million Charter Schools Program grant are not the first time anyone has noticed the federal Department of Education’s failure to oversee the Charter Schools Program. A year ago in June, 2015, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools—a coalition of national organizations including 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—sent a letter to then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan complaining that while the Department had granted $1.7 billion to states for expansion of charter schools since 2009, the Department of Education’s own Inspector General had been raising alarms about the Department’s own lack of any kind of quality control.
The Alliance’s letter to Arne Duncan cited formal audits from 2010 and 2012 in which the Department of Education’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, which administers the Charter Schools Program, 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. The State Education Agencies that lack capacity to manage the programs are the 50 state departments of education.
In the June 2015 letter to Arne Duncan, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools enumerates the problems discovered by the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General: that the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) did not maintain records of the charter schools funded through grants to states, that OII “lacked internal controls and adequate training in fiscal and program monitoring,” that none of the three states selected as samples for investigation by the Office of Inspector General—Arizona, California, and Florida—sufficiently monitored the charter schools funded through the Department of Education’s State Education Agency grants, that 26 charter schools in these three states were shown by the Office of Inspector General to have closed after being awarded $7 million, and that even when the schools closed, nobody tracked “what happened to assets that had been purchased with federal funds.”
Thank you, Senator Sherrod Brown for doggedly demanding that the U.S. Department of Education improve oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program. Please keep on keeping on.
By Jan Resseger
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Another Police Department Says ‘No’ To ICE’s Detainer Requests
Mint Press News – August 27, 2013, by Katie Rucke -
Newark, N.J.’s refusal to detain undocumented immigrants for minor offenses could serve as an olive branch to the...
Mint Press News – August 27, 2013, by Katie Rucke -
Newark, N.J.’s refusal to detain undocumented immigrants for minor offenses could serve as an olive branch to the immigrant community.
As of last month, the Newark, New Jersey police department is no longer taking orders from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain undocumented immigrants who have been picked up for minor criminal offenses such as shoplifting or vandalism.
The policy was signed into law by Newark Police Director Samuel DeMaio on July 24.
Newark may be the first and only law enforcement agency in New Jersey no longer to honor detainer requests from ICE, but it’s far from the only police department in the country to have done so. Police departments in Los Angeles, the District of Columbia, Chicago, New York City and New Orleans have also implemented policies stating they won’t honor ICE detainer requests.
The policy change was applauded by civil rights and faith leaders, who say the detainers — which allow law enforcement to hold in custody for up to 48 hours, without a warrant, those whose immigration status is in question — discourage communities of immigrants and law enforcement officials from having a cooperative relationship.
Immigrant-rights advocates said they view the new police protocol as an olive branch to undocumented people living in the U.S., who may be hesitant to cooperate with police officers who are investigating crimes in the community for fear they may be deported. New Jersey reportedly has one of the largest immigrant populations in the nation.
“Law enforcement officials across the country have recognized that local police officers should not be in the business of federal immigration enforcement,” said Udi Ofer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey, which advocated for the policy shift.
“With this new policy in place, the Newark Police Department has made it clear that all residents, regardless of their immigration status, are safe to cooperate with the police,” Ofer continued in the release. “This policy ensures that if you’re a victim of a crime, or have witnessed a crime, you can contact the police without having to fear deportation. This will make all Newarkers safer.”
Emily Tucker is an attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy. She said the group was “thrilled that Newark is standing in solidarity with immigrant families by rejecting all future collaboration with the federal deportation apparatus.
“Spending local tax dollars to take parents away from their children and workers away from their jobs is both morally wrong and bad for the economy,” Tucker said. “We hope the Newark policy will serve as a model for the rest of New Jersey, and for cities around the country who don’t want local resources being spent to help ICE meet its arbitrary enforcement quotas.”
New Jersey to New Orleans to Los Angeles
The New York Times recently published an editorial applauding those cities that have announced they will no longer be cooperating with ICE’s detainer requests and encouraged other cities to follow suit.
“The federal dragnet that makes little distinction between tamale sellers and dangerous criminals — greatly expanded by the use of local law enforcement officials across the country — has been ensnaring record numbers of minor offenders,” the editorial board wrote. “This melding of local crime fighting and immigration enforcement has led to unjust imprisonment, policing abuses, racial profiling and paralyzing fear in immigrant communities.
“The damage to public safety is measurable; a recent study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that Latinos, both immigrants and native-born, often shun the police and are reluctant to cooperate with criminal investigations. Combating domestic violence, sexual abuse and gang-related crimes becomes far more difficult when local cops are de facto federal agents.”
Amy Gottlieb, director of the American Friends Service Committee, said she hoped other law enforcement agencies would implement similar policies, adding that “any detainer policy where people are aware that the police department is acting in support of the immigrant community is going to be helpful for police and immigrant relations.”
While Newark officers will no longer hold persons in an immigration detention center for committing a minor-level offense, the Newark Police Department will still report information to ICE after arresting an individual and also will continue to share fingerprint information with federal investigators.
“If we arrest somebody for a disorderly persons offense and we get a detainer request, we’re not going to hold them in our cell block,” DeMaio said. “I don’t know if we’ve ever gotten a detainer request on a guy with a misdemeanor,” adding that the department received a total of eight detainer requests in 2012.
Helpful or harmful to a city’s crime fighters?
While California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has said he would sign legislation limiting who state and local law enforcement officials can hold for deportation, and while Connecticut’s legislature unanimously passed similar legislation, not everyone thinks the policy is a good idea.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan, for example, called the policy “another in a long line of missteps” by his opponent, Newark Mayor Cory Booker (D), saying the new policy will only lead to an increase in crime.
“We’re sending a signal,” he said, that “you can come to the country illegally, you can shoplift, you can vandalize but it’s alright. We’re going to make sure you’re safe. It’s a great message to our kids.”
Kevin Griffs, a spokesman for the Booker campaign, said Lonegan’s understanding of the policy was inaccurate and explained that “all serious offenders obviously go to the county jail, and ultimately, the mayor’s thinking was that this was going to improve relations between the police department and the immigrant community and help the Newark Police Department catch more of the real bad guys.”
ICE officials have declined to comment on the policy change.
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