CPD IN THE NEWS

PHOENIX, ARIZONA — On Arizona’s primary day this April, voters in Maricopa County waited five hours in the hot sun to cast a ballot, because the county slashed the number of polling places from 200 to 60. Some people gave up and left without voting; some fainted in the desert heat. Polling places ran out of ballots.

After the dust settled, angry voters, candidates, and political parties filed a slew of lawsuits against the state, leading to court settlements and a promise that no voter will have to wait longer than half an hour this fall.

“The primary fiasco was a huge wakeup call,” said Samantha Pstross with the Arizona Advocacy Network.

But elected officials and voting rights advocates fear the situation could be just as bad or worse on Tuesday.

“We are not ready for what I presume will be one of the largest turnouts in Arizona history,” Maricopa County supervisor Steve Gallardo told ThinkProgress. “Everyone is banking on a large number of vote-by-mail ballots. But this is not an ordinary election. We have a record number of new Latino voters. We see lots of excitement out there. We need to be prepared to handle this, but we’re already seeing problems.”

“We are not ready for what I presume will be one of the largest turnouts in Arizona history.”

Gallardo cited troubles that have already plagued the county during early voting, when turnout is usually much lighter than on Election Day itself.

On Friday, the final day of in-person early voting, voters in Tempe waited more than three hours to cast a ballot. Among them was Bob Davis, who arrived around 1:15 p.m. with his four-year-old daughter. Though he was told it would be a two-hour wait, he didn’t cast a ballot until nearly 5 p.m.

“I watched like 20 people leave the line who couldn’t wait,” he told ThinkProgress. “I knew the chance of them coming back and trying again was negligible. I felt really upset.”

Davis noted that there is a ballot measure before Arizona voters this year that would raise the minimum wage from just over 8 dollars an hour to 12 by the year 2020. He said he worries those the measure would impact most will not be able to have a say in its passage.

“If you make only 8.05 an hour, your ability to stand in line for four hours is minimal,” he said. “This is actual voter suppression.”

In Glendale, another Phoenix suburb, an understaffed site with insufficient equipment forced voters to wait more than two hours earlier this week.

“It’s discouraging,” Gallardo said. “No one should have to stand in long lines. It becomes a voting barrier. Some folks don’t have the opportunity to wait. Some are elderly and physically can’t stand that long, others only have a short lunch break from work when they can vote. So if you let long lines occur, you are disenfranchising voters.”

Maricopa County had 724 polling places for the 2012 general election. This year, they will have the exact same number, despite adding more than 90,000 more voters to the rolls. Many of those precincts’ polling places are located in the same building, meaning there will be only 640 separate locations.

“What is scary is what could happen on Election Day,” said Pstross. “If there are long lines, people will be disenfranchised left and right.”

Ever-changing laws fuel voter confusion

Arizona smashed its Latino voter registration record in the final weeks of the 2016 election, adding 150,000 new voters to the rolls. The state also led the nation in Latino early voting. Latino residents cast an unprecedented 13 percent of the votes, up from just 8 percent in 2008. Organizers credit Donald Trump for some of this participation spike, noting that his disparagement of immigrants and promises of mass deportations have mobilized Latinos who previously avoided electoral politics.

But as community advocacy groups like Bazta Arpaio, the Arizona Advocacy Network, LUCHA, and others hit the streets of Phoenix in the campaign’s final days, some fear an avalanche of last-minute court cases and legal changes could confuse and disenfranchise the voters they have worked so hard to engage.

This year alone, Arizona mailed out incorrect information about where to vote and mistranslated one of the ballot propositions on thousands of Spanish-language ballots. The state also allowed the final day of voter registration to fall on a federal holiday, leaving thousands of voters unable to register in time.

Then, on Friday night, a federal appeals court temporarily enjoined Arizona’s new law that made it a felony for anyone other than a relative or caretaker to pick up and mail in a voter’s absentee ballot. On Saturday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision and gave Arizona its blessing to enforce the ballot collection ban.

The back-and-forth left organizers scrambling.

Ben Laughlin, an organizer with the “Bazta Arpaio” campaign to unseat the controversial county sheriff Joe Arpaio, got the news of the ruling just before dispatching a small army of canvassers to knock on doors across the city.

“It causes a lot of confusion,” Laughlin told ThinkProgress. “For months we haven’t been collecting ballots because of the ban. Yesterday, we started collecting ballots. Now we’re not. It was a sweet 24 hour window.”

Bazta Arpaio blasted out this message on Friday night: “This weekend, when a volunteer comes to your door, you can have them turn in your ballot with confidence.” Less than a day later, the group had to abandon those plans.

A mother and her two sons hit the streets of West Phoenix with the Bazta Arpaio campaign. CREDIT: Alice Ollstein

Across the city, Asya Pikovsky with the Center for Popular Democracy scrambled to inform dozens of volunteers about the legal development.

“We got on the phone the second the decision came out and told every single person,” she told ThinkProgress on Saturday. “Our canvassers are following the decision to the letter.”

But other advocates expressed fears that some people could accidentally violate the newly-restored law if they did not get the news in time.

“No one should be considered a felon for helping someone else vote — especially someone who would have no other way to get to the polls,” Pstross said.

She fears even those following the law could face unlawful harassment from poll watchers, who have been instructed to follow and photograph those turning in multiple ballots.

“We’re worried that, say, someone who works at a retirement home could show up with 50 to 100 ballots,” she said. “They’re a legitimate caretaker, but even if they’re totally within the law, a crazy person could challenge and intimidate them.”

Sheriffs and vigilantes

Concerns about intimidation by poll-watchers were elevated Saturday, when a federal court declined to put a halt to plans by Trump’s campaign, the Arizona GOP, and a group run by Trump ally Roger Stone to patrol minority-heavy precincts, film those who they suspect of voter fraud, and question people exiting the polls about which candidate they supported.

“It is Plaintiff’s burden to illustrate that these activities are likely to intimidate, threaten, or coerce voters,” the court ruled. “The evidence…has failed to do so.”

But officials and voting rights advocates in Arizona are not just worried about intimidation from such volunteers — They are also sounding the alarm about the potential presence of the county sheriffs at the polls on Election Day.

The Maricopa County Recorder’s office, which administers the election, plans to call in sheriffs if there are any disputes at the polls, even though the head of the department is currently on trial for criminal contempt and racial profiling. Sheriffs have already been summoned to early voting sites, including one incident this week in which voters were upset about turned away at 4:30 p.m. because the polls were supposed to be open until 5 p.m.

“This should be an exciting time for voters — not a time of anxiety or fear.”

Voting rights advocates and elected officials said that having the same sheriffs who conducted immigration raids patrol the polls will intimidate Latino voters. Some groups have called on the Justice Department to send monitors to oversee the sheriffs’ activities, while others are demanding the County Recorder use a different law enforcement agency on Election Day.

“We have a sheriff that has divided and polarized this county and created distrust between the community and the sheriff’s office,” Gallardo said. “It’s time to distance ourselves from the sheriffs’ office and use other agencies like Phoenix Police that actually have credibility with the public. The sheriffs should not be involved in this election.”

“This should be an exciting time for voters — not a time of anxiety or fear,” added Alex Gomez, Executive Director of the Arizona Center for Empowerment. “On Election Day, the story should be about Arizonans proudly casting their ballots — not voters scared off from the polls.”

By Alice Miranda Ollstein

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Source: In These Times

The National Retail Federation is fond of pointing out that “retail means jobs.” And it’s true: the retail industry today provides one in ten private-sector jobs in the U.S., a number set to grow in the next decade.  

Yet new findings show those jobs may be keeping retail workers and their families from rising up the career ladder, exacerbating our country’s growing inequality. The findings from the Center for Popular Democracy demonstrate that, for women and people of color especially, working in retail often means instability and low pay. Both groups make up the lion’s share of cashiers, movers, and other poorly paid positions and barely figure in the upper ranks of management. In general merchandise—including big-box stores such as Target and Wal-Mart—women hold more than 80 percent of cashier jobs, the lowest-paid position. And in the food and beverage industry, women make up approximately half of the workforce but less than a fifth of managers.

People of color in the retail industry are often relegated to the least lucrative jobs as well. In home and garden stores like Home Depot and Lowes, for example, employees of color account for 24 percent of the total workforce—but 36 percent of jobs that pay least.

The findings are especially disappointing given the opportunities available for those who succeed. Certain areas of retail, such as home and garden stores and car dealers, offer living wages to workers—but both women and people of color are largely shut out of these sub-sectors. And management jobs across the industry provide wages and benefits that can allow workers to support themselves and their families—but they are closed off to many.

Reducing these disparities will take more than a bigger paycheck. Retailers must make a concerted effort to establish policies that ensure women and people of color are equally represented in management positions and develop more robust training programs for workers just starting out that give them the chance to advance.

Many retailers have training policies in place, but they can be far from meaningful. Wal-Mart, for example, recently announced it was raising wages to $10, dependent on completion of a six-month training program—an onerous requirement to earn a pitifully low wage that lags well behind the retail sector average. Real training can introduce employees to a range of job duties and responsibilities, incentivizing them to learn specialized skills that allow workers to pick up shifts, advance to higher-paying positions, and bring home a full-time paycheck. Sectors like finance long ago recognized internal barriers to promotion and created programs to promote equal opportunity. Why do we not expect the same of retail?

Retailers that lack such programs, from Walmart to Gristedes, have faced multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuits from women harmed by policies that prevented them from moving upward. Companies that fail to enact real advancement policies can expect similar pushback. 

Moreover, workers at the lowest levels are doubly punished with erratic, last-minute scheduling that wreaks havoc on their lives. These schedules are particularly difficult for women. Unable to find childcare at the last minute or unwilling to miss bedtime every night, moms in retail are often deemed ineligible for promotion. Ironically, climbing up the job ladder is the only way to obtain stable hours that let working women and their families thrive.

As these practices have grown worse, many workers have started fighting back, demanding schedules that let them plan their lives, be there for their families and pursue education.

Facing outside pressure, policymakers have also stepped in and accelerated the pace of change. Retailers demonstrated how fast they could change last year when they received a letter from New York’s Attorney General into their use of on-call scheduling. Within months, major retailers like The Gap agreed to significant reforms—and a quarter of a million workers no longer had to put their life on hold for a shift.

State and city policymakers are also leading the way to raise workplace standards, pursuing policies to raise wages to $15 per hour, secure improved work schedules, and guarantee earned sick time. Creating higher-paying, more secure retail jobs will boost the economy, as the low-income retail workforce will likely use any additional earnings to cover basic expenses.

Yet if industry leaders want retail to mean good jobs, they must step up to the plate.  Retail workers are the neighbors who shop in our local small businesses; parents trying to help their kids with homework; students working their way through college.  It’s clear that retail jobs are holding too many women and people of color back.  Rather than superficial fixes, we need bold solutions that move all retail workers forward and allow their families to thrive. 

Hundreds of labor and immigrant advocates marched through east midtown early Monday in a demonstration against corporations which they say are profiting from President Trump's agenda—one of a series of May Day protests scheduled to take place throughout the city (and beyond) on Monday.

The specific targets of this action, according to organizers from Make The Road New York, are the Wall Street banks that help finance private prisons and immigrant detention centers. To that end, organizers said twelve protesters were arrested for peaceful civil disobedience while blocking the entrances outside of JPMorgan Chase, which is one of the companies named in Make The Road's and the Center for Popular Democracy's Backers Of Hate campaign.

Read full article here.

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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