Campaign News

Salon - March 2, 2015, by Jeff Bryant -What fun we had recently with North Carolina’s recently elected U.S. senator, Republican Thom Tillis, who insisted we didn’t need government regulations to compel restaurant employees to wash their hands in between using the toilet and preparing our food.

His solution to proper sanitation practices in restaurants – “the market will take care of that” – was roundly mocked by left-leaning commentators as an example of the way conservatives uphold the interests of businesses and moneymaking above all other concerns.

Fun, for sure, but it’s no laughing matter that the Tillis plan for public sanitation appears to increasingly be the philosophy for governing the nation’s schools.

Rather than directly address what ails struggling public schools, policy leaders increasingly claim that giving parents more choice about where they send their children to school – and letting that parent choice determine the funding of schools – will create a market mechanism that leaves the most competent schools remaining “in business” while incompetent schools eventually close.

Coupled with more “choice” are demands to increase the numbers of unregulated charter schools, especially those operated by private management firms that now have come to dominate roughly half the charter sector.

As schools lose more and more students to the charter schools, parents then “vote with their feet,” choice advocates argue, and the market will “work.”

Why the “Tillis Rule” that seems so wrong for public health has been declared the wave of the future for the nation’s schoolchildren and families seems to hardly ever get questioned.

Tarheel School Choice Extravaganza

The Tillis Rule is certainly now the driving force behind new education policy in North Carolina, as rapid charter school expansions and a new voucher plan have opened up public schools to various “market forces.”

How’s that working out?

So far, not so hot. For instance, in Charlotte, at least three charter schools abruptly closed down this year alone, some after having been in operation for only a few months. The most recent shutdown was particularly noticeable.

That school, Entrepreneur High, focused on teaching students job skills, so they could be financially independent when they graduated. Turns out the school had its own financial problems with only $14 in the bank and $400,000 in debt. In fact, the school never even really had a financial plan at all.

In other news from the front of “school choice” in the Tarheel State, left-leaning group N.C. Policy Watch recently reported about a state auditor who checked the books of a Kinston charter school and found the school overstated attendance–thereby inflating its state funds by more than $300,000.

The school shorted its staff by more than $370,000 in payroll obligations, according to reports, while making “questionable payments of more than $11,000″ to the CEO and his wife. And the CEO’s daughter was being paid $40,000 to be the school’s academic officer even though she had zero experience in teaching or school administration.

When the reporter, Lindsay Wagner, tried to contact the school’s CEO to question him about the auditor’s findings, she discovered he had left his position and was working elsewhere in the state – running a different charter school.

Meanwhile, the state has rolled out another school choice venture: vouchers, called Opportunity Scholarships, that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and get taxpayer funding to enroll the kids in the schools of their choice. Wagner, again, wondered where the money was heading and found 90 percent of it goes to private religious institutions.

More recently, Wagner’s account of this money found “more than $4,000,000 worth of taxpayer-funded school vouchers have now been paid out to private schools.” Of the top 12 private schools benefiting from this money, all are religious schools.

Also, Wagner reported, voucher funds come with “virtually no accountability measures attached … Private schools are also free to use any curriculum they see fit, employ untrained, unlicensed teachers and conduct criminal background checks only on the heads of schools. For the most part, they do not have to share their budgets or financial practices with the public, in spite of receiving public dollars.”

It’s unfair, however, to single out North Carolina for school choice shenanigans.

Charter Corruption Spreads, Grows

In Ohio, for instance, a recent investigation into charter schools by state auditors found evidence of fraud that made North Carolina’s pale in comparison. The privately operated schools get nearly $6,000 in taxpayer money for every student they enroll, but half the charter schools the auditor looked at had “significantly lower” attendance than what they claimed in state funding.

One charter school in Youngstown had no students at all, having sent the kids home for the day at 12:30 in the afternoon.

This form of charter school fraud is so widespread, according to an article in Education Week, many states now employ “‘mystery’ or ‘secret shopper’ services used in retail” that pose as inquiring parents to call charter schools to ensure they’re educating the students they say they are.

Enrollment inflation is not the only form of fraud charter schools practice. In Missouri, a federal judge recently fingered a nationwide chain of charter schools, Imagine, for “self-dealing” in a lease agreement that allowed it to fleece a local charter school of over a million dollars.

“The facts of the case mirror arrangements in Ohio and other states,” the reporter noted, “where Imagine schools pay exorbitant rent to an Imagine subsidiary, SchoolHouse Finance. The high lease payments leave little money for classroom instruction and help explain the poor academic records of Imagine schools in both states.”

A charter school manager in Michigan is about to go on trial for steering nearly a million dollars in public funds targeted to renovate his charter school into his own bank account.

In Washington, which was late to the game of charters and choice, the state’s first charter school is already under investigation for financial and academic issues.

Investigators in the District of Columbia, recently uncovered a charter school operator who “funneled $13 million of public money into a private company for personal gain.”

A recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school finances in Illinois and found “$13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials … Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone.”

One example the CPD report cited was of a charter operator in Chicago who used charter school funds amounting to more than $250,000 to purchase personal items from luxury department stores, including $2,000 on hair care and cosmetic products and $5,800 for jewelry.

The report made specific policy recommendations, including financial reviews and a moratorium on new charters, to increase the transparency and accountability of these schools – the type of policy recommendations charter and school choice fans continue to fight at every turn.

Voucher Ventures Expand Across the Country

While charter school operations continue to waste public money on scandals and fraud – all in the name of “choice” – newly enacted school vouchers divert more public school dollars to private schools.

In parts of Ohio, “the state-sponsored voucher program has increased or even doubled enrollment at some private schools.”

In Indiana, which has the largest taxpayer-funded school voucher program in the country, according to a local source, virtually all of the participating schools, 97 percent, are religiously affiliated private schools.

In Louisiana, over a third of students using voucher funds to attend private schools are enrolled schools “doing such a poor job of educating them that the schools have been barred from taking new voucher students.”

In parts of Wisconsin, “private schools accepting vouchers receive more money per student than public school districts do for students attending through open enrollment.”

Despite the obvious misdirection of taxpayer money, more states are eager to roll out new voucher plans or expand the ones they have. As the Economist recently reported, “After the Republicans’ success in state elections in November, several are pushing to increase the number and scope of school voucher schemes,” including Wisconsin, where probable presidential candidate Scott Walker has proposed to remove all limits on the number of schoolchildren who could attend private schools at taxpayer expense.

Of course, not all voucher-like schemes are called “vouchers.” According to a report from Politico, some states are considering voucher-like mechanisms called Education Savings Accounts that allow parents to pocket taxpayer money that would normally pay for public schools to be used for other education pursuits, including private school and home schooling. Two states – Florida and Arizona – already have them, but six more may soon follow.

Vouchers Hit the Hill

Support for vouchers extends to Congress, as another Politico article reported, where Republican, and some Democratic, lawmakers are “proposing sweeping voucher bills and nudging school choice into conversations about the 2016 primaries.”

According to a report from Education Week, congressional Republicans leading the effort to rewrite the nation’s federal education policy, called No Child Left Behind, are “intent on drafting the most-conservative version of the federal K-12 law possible,” which would include a voucher-like scheme allowing federal money designated as Title I funds, the program for schools with low-income students, “to follow those students to the school of their choice, including private schools.”

In fact, working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives currently is a bill called the Student Success Act that would provide for this “Title I Portability.” In the U.S. Senate, according to Education Week, Title I Portability is also included in a draft bill to rewrite NCLB introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

“Everyone should care and learn about Title I Portability,” warns public school advocate Jan Resseger on Public School Shakedown, a blog site operated by the Progressive magazine.

Resseger points to a statement by the National Coalition for Public Education stating, “This proposal would undermine Title I’s fundamental purpose of assisting public schools with high concentrations of poverty and high-need students.” Resseger also cites, from the Center on American Progress, a brief opposing Title I Portability. “According to CAP,” Resseger explains, Title I Portability would be “Robin Hood in Reverse … taking from the poor and giving to the rest,” ignoring the long-known fact that socioeconomic isolation has a devastating impact, as, on average, “school districts with highly concentrated family poverty would lose $85 per student while more affluent school districts would gain, on average, $290 per student.”

Despite the damage that Title I Portability could do to public schools serving our most high-needs students, charter school advocates appear to back the measure, according to a recent post at Education Week. “By and large, we feel that when the dollars follow children to the school that they select, you create a better marketplace for reform,” the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Nina Rees is quoted.

What about those charters that continue to commit waste and fraud while they funnel public money into privately operated businesses? Will “the market will take care of that”?

Where Choice Fails

Back to the Tillis Rule, consider another example of leaving public health policy up to individual choice: the recent measles outbreak.

That outbreak made it abundantly clear that where parents have the good fortune to be “safe in the herd” of vaccinated children, they often don’t feel an obligation to vaccinate their own offspring.

One can be sympathetic to parents with religious beliefs, or parents who simply hate seeing their babies being stuck with needles, and still justifiably point out to those parents that their “principles” come at the expense of other people’s potential inconvenience, expense and, possibly, suffering.

If those parents lived in a very different country that didn’t provide safety in the herd – or, in the case of Sen. Tillis, didn’t provide for basic sanitation – they’d probably feel quite differently about imposed health regulations.

Certainly comparing healthcare policy to education is not a false equivalency. The two policy arenas are strongly interrelated. The positive correlation between numbers of years of education to healthcare outcomes is well documented.

Further, parents clustered around schools often may share the same information and attitudes, which also can affect health outcomes.

In the case of the recent measles outbreak in California, University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen took numbers initially crunched by Duke University sociology professor Kieran Healy and found, “Runaway vaccine exemptions are problems of the private and charter schools … The average charter school kindergartner goes to school with classmates almost five times more likely to be non-vaccinated; and charter school kids are more than 3-times as likely to be in class with 5 percent or more kids exempt.”

As Cohen revealed, charter schools he examined have “fewer kids eligible for free-lunch than regular public schools (43 percent versus 55 percent). … Rich charter schools on average have the highest [vaccine] exemption rates, while poor schools – charter or not – are heavily clustered around zero.”

Cohen concluded, “Because they are more parent-driven, or targeted at certain types of parents, charter schools are more ideologically homogeneous. And because anti-vaccine ideology is concentrated among richer parents, charter schools provide them with a fertile breeding ground in which to generate and transmit anti-vaccine ideas.” (H/T Ron Wile.)

Better Than Choice: A Guarantee

Tillis Rule notwithstanding, most people understand that public health policy should be guided not by desires to maximize personal choice but by the need to guarantee public safety and wellbeing. That guarantee, rather than the maximization of choice, is what makes it possible to have the freedom to conduct commerce, live and work safely in our communities, and move about freely in society.

Why should that guarantee we insist on for public health be any different from what we insist on for public education?

Instead, with today’s school choice crowd, children’s guaranteed access to high-quality public education appears to be no longer the goal – either by policy or practice.

Under the Tillis Rule, it’s assumed some schools will be allowed to remain lousy at least for some substantial period of time (how long is anyone’s guess), while “the money follows the child,” “people vote with their feet” and “the market works.”

Any negative consequences to those students and families unlucky or unfortunate enough to be stuck in the not-so-good schools – after all, it’s impossible for every family to get into the “best school” – seem to not matter one whit.

And that’s really sick.

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Bloomberg News - November 11, 2014, by Christopher Condon - Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will meet Nov. 14 with a coalition of community groups, labor unions and faith leaders seeking to influence monetary policy and the way some Fed officials are appointed.

The group has called for the Fed to place greater weight on lowering unemployment. They also want more public say in the appointment of district Fed leaders, just as regional Fed presidents in Dallas and Philadelphia plan to retire next year.

“The most important thing is to keep interest rates low,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate at the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizers. “The hawks in the Fed are pushing hard to raise rates soon, but most people in the public realize we are not three months away from a recovery.”

The meeting comes as the Fed moves closer to a decision on when to raise interest rates for the first time since 2006.

Unemployment fell to 5.8 percent in October, and most Federal Open Market Committee officials expect the U.S. central bank will lift its benchmark rate at some point next year, after leaving it near zero since December 2008.

The organizers look to add to pressure on the central bank to be more transparent. The Fed has come in for criticism from Congress, where Republicans have proposed legislation limiting its discretion on monetary policy and banking supervision. Congress has already curbed the Fed’s emergency lending powers.

The FOMC, the Fed’s main policy-setting panel, has 12 voting seats. Eight of those are reserved for the bank’s board of governors and the president of the New YorkFed. The heads of the other 11 regional banks rotate through four remaining spots.

Regional Feds

The governors are appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the Senate. Regional bank heads are picked by their respective boards, which are typically dominated by business executives. The group meeting with Yellen say there should be more public input when Philadelphia’s Charles Plosser and Dallas’s Richard Fisherstep down in 2015.

“The Dallas Fed needs to create a transparent and inclusive process for selecting” a new president, Danny Cendejas, an organizer at the Texas Organizing Project, said in a statement. “Members of the public have the right to know who is making this crucial decision and what criteria they are using.”

The group sent an open letter to Yellen, and to the Philadelphia and Dallas boards, demanding more transparency and public engagement.

Marilyn Wimp, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Fed, said in an e-mail the bank had received the letter. She declined to comment further. James Hoard, spokesman for the Dallas Fed, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Plosser and Fisher have been among Fed officials favoring raising rates sooner to prevent inflation and financial-instability pressures from building.

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Karla Cano faces uncertainty. She had expected to qualify for deferred action under the Obama administration’s executive orders on immigration. But a tied decision by the U.S. Supreme Court creates uncertainty for Cano and her family.

“All that is unjust about my situation will continue,” said Cano, 21, a senior at Mount Mary University and the mother of a 2-year-old son.

“I am in college so I can have a career helping others, but I cannot start a career like that without work authorization,” she said. “We just want to help this country and support our families like anyone else.”

The court on June 23 deadlocked on President Barack Obama’s executive actions taken to shield millions living in the United States from deportation.

The 4–4 tie means the next president and a new Congress will determine any change in U.S. immigration policy. The president said the court’s deadlock “takes us further from the country we aspire to be.”

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, called the court ruling unacceptable and pledged to “do everything possible under the law to go further to protect families.”

The dispute before the eight justices — the case was heard in April, after the death of Antonin Scalia — was over the legality of the administration’s orders creating “deferred action for parents of Americans and lawful permanent residents” or DAPA and expanding “deferred action for childhood arrivals” or DACA.

Basically the actions would have provided protection from deportation and three-year work permits to about 5 million undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, as well as undocumented people who came to the United States before the age of 16.

The president announced the orders in 2014 and, soon after, they were challenged by 26 states led by Republican governors, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Federal district and appeals courts sided with the states and said the executive office lacked the authority to issue orders shielding immigrants from deportation.

The high court tie means the appeals court ruling stands. But the ruling in United States v. Texas did not set any landmark standards in the dispute over immigration.

The U.S. Justice Department brought the case to the Supreme Court, seeking to overturn the appeals court decision.

The American Civil Liberties Union was among the many groups to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

Cecillia Wang, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, the “4–4 tie has a profound impact on millions of American families whose lives will remain in limbo and who will now continue the fight. In setting the DAPA guidelines, President Obama exercised the same prosecutorial discretion his predecessors have wielded without controversy and ultimately the courts should hold that the action was lawful.”

Reaction from the U.S. progressive community was swift and compassionate.

“This split decision deals a severe blow to millions of immigrant families who have already been waiting more than 18 months for the DAPA and DACA programs to be implemented,” said Alianza Americas’ executive director Oscar Chacón. “The cold fact is that millions of parents and children will go to bed tonight knowing once again that their families could be torn apart at any moment.”

At the Center for Popular Democracy, co-executive director Ana Maria Archila said, “If the highest court in the land cannot find a majority for justice and compassion, there is something truly broken in our system of laws, checks and balances.”

In Wisconsin, Voces de la Frontera held news conferences in Green Bay, Madison and in Milwaukee. LULAC, Centro Hispano and the Southside Organizing Committee also were involved.

“This is very sad for me,” said Jose Flores, a factory worker, father of four and also the president of Voces de la Frontera. “I have been waiting and fighting for reform like DAPA for years. But we are not giving up. I refuse ... to shrink back into the shadows.”

Cano, a member of Voces de la Frontera, said, “I am not giving up on the struggle. We need more people to get involved in the upcoming elections, because this decision shows the importance of both the presidential and U.S. congressional elections and whom the next president will nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

BY LISA NEFF

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Amsterdam News - July 17, 2014, by Stephon Johnson - Last week, a new coalition of food delivery workers, low-wage tipped workers and women’s rights leaders across New York called for an end to subminimum wages for tipped workers. This campaign begins right when Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is preparing to appoint a Wage Board charged with recommending an increase in the minimum wage for tipped workers.

The broad coalition fighting for subminimum wage workers includes Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy, Fast Food Forward, the Labor-Religion Coalition, the National Employment Law Project, New York Communities for Change, the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Strong for All, United New York and other community groups.

On July 10, Domino’s delivery workers rallied outside of a Manhattan Domino’s restaurant to call for an end to subminimum wages for tipped workers, citing wage theft, and demanding an administrative wage order that requires companies to directly pay tipped workers the state’s minimum wage, with tips as an addition.

“The public might think we do well, but the reality is that many times we don’t even get a tip,” said Alfredo Franco, a tipped Domino’s delivery worker in New York City. “Delivery fees are often confused with a tip for the drivers. We never see a penny of that. Many of us have to work two or three jobs just to get by, sacrificing everything, including time with our families. We need a reliable income. The tipped [sub]minimum wage has to go.”

According to a report released on July 9 by the National Employment Law Project, a wage order eliminating the tipped subminimum wage would benefit close to 229,000 low-wage tipped workers in New York. Women make up more than 70 percent of the low-wage work force. The wage order would benefit working women and, according to the report, make progress in addressing the gender pay gap in New York.

Michael Stewart, executive director of United NY, released a statement championing the NELP’s report. “As New York faces one of the worst economic inequality crises in the nation, it should put an end to the subminimum wage for tipped workers that leaves so many of our neighbors living in extreme poverty,” said Stewart. “The minimum wage is already too low. Allowing employers to pay below it does further damage to workers and our economy.”

As a result of legislation signed by Cuomo last year, New York’s minimum wage is scheduled to go up to $9 an hour by Dec. 31, 2015, and the minimum wage for tipped food service workers is still stuck at $5 an hour, with tipped hotel workers earning slightly more at $5.65 an hour.

Zenaida Mendez, president of the National Organization for Women of New York State, said the gender pay gap needs to close, and no longer allowing the subminimum wage for tipped workers would help it along.

“The poverty rate for waitresses is three times the rate for the American workforce as a whole,” said Mendez. “For this reason, the National Organization for Women is seeking to eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers. This pay inequality must end.”

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