Campaign News

CBS Minnesota - March 4, 2015 - A report to be released on Thursday aims to highlight employment disparities in the Twin Cities.

The groups Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Economic Policy Institute say they plan to hold a rally at the Neighborhoods Organizing for Change offices on Thursday afternoon to draw attention to the racial differences between wages and jobs available here.

The groups say that, though the economy is adding jobs, the unemployment rate among black residents in the Twin Cities metro area is nearly four times that of white residents.

The groups said that the racial disparities on display in Minnesota are “among the worst in the nation.”

The rally is scheduled for 3 p.m.

Source

If Congress won’t focus on a new policy idea, and if state legislatures are indifferent or hostile, why not skip them both and start at the city level?

That’s the approach with a proposed law in San Francisco to require businesses there to pay for employees’ parental leaves.

It might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the kind of liberal policy that could happen only in a place like San Francisco. But Scott Wiener, the city and county supervisor who proposed the policy, sees it differently.

“The more local jurisdictions that tackle these issues, the more momentum there is for statewide and eventually national action,” he said.

It’s part of a broader movement, mostly led by liberal policy makers, to take on not just the duties that make cities run — like road maintenance and recycling — but also bigger political issues. Think soda taxes, universal health care, calorie counts on menus, mandatory composting and bans on smoking indoors.

The federal government is too gridlocked to make anything happen, these policy makers say. So they are turning to cities, hoping they can act as incubators for ideas and pave the way for state and federal governments to follow.

Conservatives used the strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, often for anti-regulatory policies. On the liberal side, Baltimore helped inspire others by passing a living wage law in 1994. The method has grown more popular in recent years, said Margaret Weir, a professor at Brown University who studies urban politics.

“Historically, especially for groups that want more government action and more generous social and economic policies, they could go to the federal government and achieve those things,” Ms. Weir said. “That has become more difficult. It’s a reflection of the loss of power at the federal level.”

Opponents have frequently responded by trying to limit the legislative power of cities. Many states have passed so-called pre-emption laws, which block cities from making their own laws on certain issues, including gun control, plastic bag bans, paid leave, fracking, union membership and the minimum wage. It’s a strategy pioneered by the tobacco lobby and later much used by the National Rifle Association. In all but seven states, state laws pre-empt local gun laws.

The pro-business American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, has pushed for many of the pre-emption laws. More recently, however, it has adopted the methods of its opponents. It has helped policy makers in local government make laws to reduce the size of government, for instance, even when states decline to do so.

One division of ALEC, called the American City County Exchange, has most notably pushed for local right-to-work laws to allow workers who are members of a union to opt out of paying dues. Yet in other cases, it has drafted legislation to prevent cities from coming up with their own laws, including on issues like plastic bag bans and containers for composting.

“Sometimes cities and counties overstep the powers they’ve been given,” said Jon Russell, director of the exchange and a town councilman in Culpeper, Va. “There are certain times states and cities are going to disagree, but for the most part, we’re going to figure out ways to resolve certain regulatory issues while staying in our lanes.”

The demographics of big urban centers — often more liberal and diverse than other parts of the country, and more likely to be governed by a single party — foster more progressive policy-making than elsewhere.

And that policy-making does seem to bubble upward to the national level. Workers’ rights are one of the main focuses of today’s urban politics, and several such city policies are now getting state and national attention, including in the presidential campaign. Paid sick leave is an example. The first city to require it was San Francisco in 2006. It is now the law in 23 cities and states, and President Obama last fall required federal contractorsto provide it. (Meanwhile, more than a dozen states have pre-emption laws to stop cities from requiring paid sick leave.)

Minimum wage is another example. SeaTac, Wash., passed a $15 minimum wage in 2013. Nearby Seattle followed, and then so did San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Calif., and Emeryville, Calif.

Fourteen states have since changed their minimum wage laws, two bills in Congress would do the same nationally, and all three Democratic presidential contenders have said they would raise the federal minimum wage.

“It’s all due to victories at the city level,” said Ady Barkan, co-director of Local Progress, a network of local progressive elected officials. “They actually did it and showed it was possible politically and as a policy matter.”

But many of these policies have not caught on widely. Take soda taxes: Berkeley, Calif., is the only city to have passed one. Similar laws have failed in San Francisco and New York state.

Other city legislation that could eventually be passed at the state or federal level includes those related to drones, ride-hailing and home-sharing.

San Francisco’s paid parental leave policy, which would be the first such law in the nation, would apply to all businesses with at least 20 employees, some of whom work at least some of the time in the city, including national chains that do not offer paid leave to workers elsewhere.

Californians already receive paid parental leave from the state. It is one of three states to offer it; the state’s temporary disability fund pays 55 percent of workers’ salaries, up to a maximum salary of $105,000. In San Francisco, companies would pay the remainder for six weeks of “bonding leave” for all new parents, including fathers, same-sex parents and adoptive parents.

The city’s board of supervisors, which will vote on the policy, has not a single Republican. It would be a much harder sell almost anywhere else.

From Mr. Wiener’s point of view, that gives the board a responsibility: “To push the envelope on these issues, because we can.”

Source: New York Times

We don’t know very much about President-Elect Donald Trump’s ideas about education. Although, during the campaign, Trump briefly presented a plan for a $20 billion block grant program for states to expand market-based school choice, and although he has hinted that he will reduce the role of the U.S. Department of Education and particularly its civil rights enforcement division, there has been no substantive explanation or discussion of these ideas.

One thing we do know for sure, however, is that every branch of our federal government will be dominated by Republicans—the Presidency, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court.

A new President whose plans we do not know.  The absence of checks and balances. Federal public education policy that has for years been undermining support for the institution of public education.  Those of us who believe improving the public schools is important have good reason to be nervous, even afraid.

After all, in 2000 and especially after we were distracted in September of 2001 by the attacks on the World Trade Center, we were unprepared to speak to the federal test-and-punish education law, No Child Left Behind. We failed to connect the dots between an accountability-driven, poorly funded testing mandate and the destruction of respect for school teachers and the drive for school privatization that lurked just under the surface of federal policy.  And in 2008, we didn’t anticipate the collusion of government technocrats and philanthro-capitalists that emerged when the federal stimulus gave billions of dollars to the U.S. Department of Education for competitive experiments with top-down turnarounds to close and privatize schools and attack teachers.

Advocates for improving public schools—particularly the schools in the struggling neighborhoods of our cities where poverty is concentrated—were unprepared.  We struggled to define what it all meant. Why had accountability replaced nurturing children as the mission of the schools? How are achievement gaps affected by opportunity gaps?  What did it mean that everyone had come to define school quality by test scores without any attention to the capacity of communities to provide the necessary conditions for teaching and learning?  How had it happened that everybody was suddenly focused on so-called “failing” schools?  Why did everyone suddenly feel that it was appropriate to blame and castigate school teachers who were said to be protecting adult interests instead of putting students first? And how had it happened that so many people prized the innovation that was supposed to come with charter schools unbound from bureaucratic regulations, and yet those in charge no longer worried about strengthening the oversight necessary for protecting children’s rights and the expenditure of tax dollars?  How had so many people come to accept that the market would take care of all this?

We watched with dismay as all this came to pass, but we were unprepared to name it, unprepared to think through how it all worked, unprepared to do something about it.

But there is an important development these days among advocates for public schools—the people who agree that we need to promote equity and justice in education’s public sector.  Advocates today share broad consensus around the following priorities:

•    driving long-denied public investment to improve the public schools in our poorest communities where family poverty is concentrated, and correcting inadequate and inequitably distributed school funding;

•    addressing family poverty that, research has demonstrated again and again, is likely to undermine children’s achievement at school;

•    ensuring that public dollars are not diverted and that charter schools do not operate as parasites destroying their host school districts;

•    supporting school teachers as a strong, stable cadre of professionals;

•    reducing reliance on standardized testing and eliminating high stakes punishments including turnarounds;

•    rejecting privatization of education and ensuring strong oversight by government of the institutions that serve our children and spend our tax dollars;

•    eliminating widespread overuse—especially in the schools serving our society’s poorest children—of the practices of suspending and expelling students and the widespread obedience-driven discipline practices imposed on poor children when more privileged children attend schools where they are encouraged to question and engage.

At the national level, organizations supporting justice and equity in public education are now unified across a range of constituencies and sectors to endorse and work for these values and priorities.  Here are just some of the centers of advocacy these days:

•    The Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools is a broad coalition of unions—the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union; civil rights and community organizing groups–Advancement Project, Alliance for Educational Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, Journey for Justice Alliance; and academic, philanthropic and justice advocacy groups—the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, the Gamaliel Network, and the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

•    The NAACP and Black Lives Matter have recently come together in the civil rights community to challenge privatization and lack of oversight as charter schools have expanded.

•    The Network for Public Education is an alliance of advocates including school teachers, activists, and bloggers in support of strong and inclusive public schools and in opposition to unregulated charter schools and to over-reliance on high stakes testing.

•    The National Education Policy Center, located at the University of Colorado, publishes academic research and reviews research from other agencies on education policy.

•    The Education Law Center, and its Education Justice program, and Public Advocates and other school law attorneys are working for school funding equity and civil rights protection.

Last week the education writer, Jonathan Kozol, reminded us about what most of us now know how to articulate but what, ten or fifteen years ago, we would have struggled to say: “Slice it any way you want. Argue, as we must, that every family ought to have the right to make whatever choice they like in the interests of their child, no matter what damage it may do to other people’s children. As an individual decision, it’s absolutely human; but setting up this kind of competition, in which parents with the greatest social capital are encouraged to abandon their most vulnerable neighbors, is rotten social policy.  What this represents is a state supported shriveling of civic virtue, a narrowing of moral obligation to the smallest possible parameters.  It isn’t good… for democracy.”

Today we are well-aware of the organizations that have persistently undermined support for public education and at the same time pressed for an unregulated school marketplace as the alternative: the Hoover Institution; the Heritage Foundation; the American Enterprise Institute; the Thomas Fordham Foundation; Michigan’s Dick and Betsy DeVos and their many far-right organizations; New York hedge fund managers spreading their billions across New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts via the dark money Families for Excellent Schools; the New Schools Venture Fund; the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington that promotes portfolio school reform; the Gates, Walton, and Broad venture philanthropies spending billions promoting charter schools; the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan that granted billions of dollars—without much oversight at all according to the Department’s own Office of Inspector General— to states to expand charter schools; and the American Legislative Exchange Council that promotes school privatization across the states via its large membership of state legislators.

The same election that brought us President-Elect Donald Trump also brought evidence that today’s public school advocates have become organized  and effective. Question 2 to expand the growth of charter schools went down to resounding defeat in a Massachusetts referendum, and Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s plan for state takeover and charterization of Georgia’s struggling public schools was also soundly defeated at the polls.  Voters responded to protect the idea of public education when the stakes for public schools were clearly defined by well organized and well informed advocates.

During a Donald Trump administration we must stay organized, raising our voices persistently to name and frame our concerns with precision and passion.  A public education system is the best institution to meet the needs of all kinds of children and protect their rights through law.  Our public schools are, of course, imperfect.  It is our responsibility to pay attention and ensure that our schools work for all children.  Democracy makes our role as citizens possible and requires engaged citizenship.

Looking back on his life as an education professor and advocate for education, Bill Ayers suggests something that will be particularly important for us to remember under the presidency of Donald Trump: that public education is the institutional embodiment of the values that define our democracy. “Education for free people is powered by a particularly precious and fragile ideal. Every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a work in progress and a force in motion, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, moral, and creative force, each of us born equal in dignity and rights, each endowed with reason and conscience and agency, each deserving a dedicated place in the community of solidarity as well as a vital sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.  Embracing that basic ethic and spirit, people recognize that the fullest development of each individual—given the tremendous range of ability and the delicious stew of race, ethnicity, points of origin, and background—is the necessary condition for the full development of the entire community, and, conversely, that the fullest development of all is essential for the full development of each. This has obvious implications for education policy.” (Demand the Impossible, p. 161)

By janresseger

Source

OZY - April 29, 2014, by Pooja Bhatia - Comprehensive immigration reform is on again. No, it’s off again. No, it’s on again. Nope, it’s off again.

Take heart, CIR enthusiasts. As the back-and-forth over immigration reform enters its umpteenth year, a potential workaround might be coming to a city near you.

Since 2007, a handful of cities have issued municipal IDs to residents, regardless of their citizenship. The idea is to integrate undocumented immigrants by making it easier for them to open bank accounts, interact with the police, access city services and rent an apartment. Bringing the undocumented “out of the shadows” will improve civic life for everyone, proponents say.  

It’s a warm-hearted move as well as a political calculation. The concept is generally popular in cities, which tend to lean liberal, and is sure to have long-range appeal among voters as national demographics shift. About a dozen cities are in some stage of the municipal ID process.

The line between protecting and branding residents can be a fine one.

But ID cards are not an easy way out of the immigration quagmire. Opponents argue that municipal IDs overstep local authority, could lead to fraud and lure terrorists. The earliest version won vicious backlash, including from federal authorities. Even those who support the cards stress the importance of sweating the small stuff, like card design and privacy controls. The big risk: Unless they’re popular with immigrants and non-immigrants alike, the ID cards can brand as outsiders the very people they attempt to embrace.

“It’s been trial and error for cities to even realize that it’s a risk and start guarding against it,” says Emily Tucker, an attorney at the Center of Popular Democracy who has studied the issue in depth. 

This week, New York City will hold its first hearings on municipal ID legislation, a pet project of the new mayor, Bill de Blasio. If approved, New York’s program would be the most prominent of its kind. It would send a message, too, for New York City has a certain symbolic status in matters of security and immigration. 

Proponents like Tucker are enthusiastic about New York’s foray into municipal IDs, if a bit wary. If not done right, they say, the ID cards won’t protect undocumented immigrants, but just sort and label them for easy deportation. The line between protecting and branding can be a fine one. The IDs tend to work best when other protections for undocumented residents are in place: confidentiality for city services, local law enforcement policies that limit interaction with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other “sanctuary city” provisions. “Without those things, people won’t want to use the card — they’ll be too afraid,” says Tucker.

Cities vary enormously on this count: Some abide by the ICE’s “detainer requests,” holding suspected unauthorized immigrants in local jails until the federal authorities pick them up. Others refuse. Some jurisdictions allow police to act as ICE deputes. Others won’t allow police officers to inquire about immigration status.

California Highway Patrol officers lead an information session on obtaining a state driver’s license at the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, Calif., on April 23, 2014.

New Haven, Conn., was the first municipality to adopt local IDs, in 2007, after a robber stabbed an immigrant to death. According to reports, undocumented immigrants were dubbed “walking ATMs” — often, they carried cash, as they couldn’t open bank accounts. New Haven’s program faced some backlash, including, allegedly, from federal authorities: Less than two days after the city passed municipal ID legislation, the ICE raided homes in the area and detained 32 immigrants.

Although the city has stood by its program– it’s issued some 10,000 IDs– it’s not clear how functional the IDs are. Cashiers often don’t accept it, researchers found, and it served mostly to underscore the city’s pro-immigrant attitude. 

Since 2007, Oakland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and several localities in New Jersey have all joined suit. Programs in Richmond and Los Angeles have been approved, and local governments from Philadelphia to Iowa City and Phoenix are contemplating issuing cards, too.

The local ID programs are yet another instance of cities taking “an affirmative step toward securing interests of their residents in the face of congressional inaction,” says Peter Bailon, a lawyer at the progressive American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange. They also demonstrate cities’ ability to enact progressive agendas that likely wouldn’t fly nationally.

But are cities exceeding their authority? “It’s not just usurping but contravening federal law,” says Ira Melhman, spokesperson for the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). There’s controversy here. Although the federal government places control over immigration firmly within its authority, the law does not explicitly forbid the issuance of local IDs, proponents say. And the feds have tended to turn a blind eye to the programs.

Mehlman and others say they also worry about terrorism. They argue that municipal ID requirements are lax and could allow criminals to procure false identification. Official documentation, even if limited to a few municipal venues, could serve as “breeder documents” for other IDs, they say. New York state Senator Greg Ball blasted the municipal ID plan as the “de Blasio Terrorist Empowerment Act.”

ID proponents dismiss such fears as absurd. The IDs, they point out, have stringent eligibility requirements and limited jurisdiction. They don’t replace federal identification documents such as passports, social security cards or tax identification numbers. Their main concern is that the IDs actually be used.  

It may not be so easy to circumvent the federal government though, even for cities that are relatively friendly to the undocumented, like New York. De Blasio’s administration has already issued notice that it could put out bid specifications for ID cards, but the City Council has lagged. Only 15 council members have come out saying they favor the legislation, short of the 26 needed for a majority.

Of course, with hearings starting tomorrow, that could change quickly. Are you ready for your New Yorker ID, New Yorkers?