CPD IN THE NEWS

According to a 2013 report by the Center for Popular Democracy, Latinos and immigrants are disproportionately killed in construction accidents. Between 2003 and 2011, 75 percent of construction workers who died on the job were US-born Latinos or immigrants. The report points out that in 60 percent of the fall death cases investigated by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the victims were Hispanic and/or immigrants. That percentage jumps to 74 in New York City, and to 88 in Queens. “This is very troubling. We need to put an end to this crisis,” said Senator Peralta.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education - April 28, 2014, by Paul Basken - The State University of New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government is backing away from a politically divisive report critical of a worker’s-rights law, admitting that the industry-financed analysis has multiple major flaws that undermine its central finding.

The report, published in February, criticizes New York State’s so-called Scaffold Law, which holds contractors and property owners legally liable for on-site injuries and accidents. The analysis suffers from "really big weaknesses," said the institute’s director, Thomas L. Gais, who added that he considers the report as not officially a product of his institute. The key analytical section of the report "is just really awful," he said.

The Rockefeller Institute prides itself as a provider of unbiased and empirical policy analysis. Defenders of the Scaffold Law, however, have complained that the institute tainted itself by accepting an $82,000 payment from a business group with construction-industry supporters to produce the report.

The report is "junk" and "fundamentally biased," said the Center for Popular Democracy and the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, two groups representing unionized workers and immigrants.

The case has shined a spotlight on the question of whether universities and their research institutes, as declining public financing leaves them increasingly reliant on private-sector support, are able to provide policy makers with objective technical advice.

There are hundreds of such institutes at universities around the country, and it’s often possible to "predict the policy outcomes from where their support comes from," said Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University who writes about bias in research.

A ‘Quality-Control Issue’

Mr. Gais, a social scientist who has led the Rockefeller Institute for four years, adamantly denied there was any bias in the report on behalf of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York. The alliance has long opposed the Scaffold Law, but Mr. Gais said he never expected to get any repeat business from the industry-affiliated group. "We got the money no matter what we wrote," he said.

The report instead suffered from what Mr. Gais called a "quality-control issue," in which a relatively new institute researcher, Michael R. Hattery, delivered it to the Lawsuit Reform Alliance without its being thoroughly reviewed at the institute.

Another major problem with the 89-page report, Mr. Gais said, lies with a section that uses a flawed statistical analysis to make the "counterintuitive" argument that New York’s worker-safety law actually leaves workers less safe.

That section’s author, R. Richard Geddes, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, also has drawn criticism within his own institution. At least two members of the labor-studies department at Cornell wrote newspaper op-eds criticizing Mr. Geddes’s work.

One, Richard W. Hurd, a professor of industrial and labor relations, wrote that Mr. Geddes had "misused sophisticated statistical techniques and produced inaccurate results." Lee H. Adler, an instructor of labor and employment law at Cornell, wrote that the episode reflects more than a century of attempts by business leaders to deprive workers of the fundamental right to sue.

Mr. Geddes emotionally denounced the criticism in an interview with The Chronicle, saying he had absolutely not been influenced by the source of money and describing his work as a state-of-the-art analysis of who actually gets injured on construction sites in New York State.

"I find that offensive, I find that deeply offensive, that they said my work is biased, after we spent hours and hours collecting the best data we could find," Mr. Geddes said.

A Valid Concern

Among its arguments, the report compares worker-injury records in New York and Illinois, which repealed a similar worker-protection law in 1995. The study found that both accident rates and costs declined in Illinois after repeal.

The labor groups said the study’s shortfalls included a failure to take into account situations where higher union-membership rates would encourage workers to report accidents, and workplaces where greater percentages of immigrants might depress reporting statistics.

Mr. Geddes said the critics bore the responsibility of showing how such factors would substantially have affected the report’s conclusions. Mr. Hattery said he also stood by the report but recognized that the possible effect of those omissions was a valid concern that should be assessed in future studies.

Mr. Geddes said he recognized some drawbacks in a system where academic institutes rely more heavily on private supporters. "It has made it harder because people without any evidence at all, any support, are attacking, are saying you’re biased," he said. "I find that profoundly offensive."

Mr. Hattery, however, said he welcomed the process now unfolding. "I don’t at all resent or have a problem with these kinds of questions’ being asked," he said. "When you think you have integrity and are humble and a good conscience, you’re probably in trouble."

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Ask an education “reform” proponent about any issue facing public education and the answer is always the same: “school choice.” Whether they’re championing charter schools, vouchers or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), advocates prefer to frame the debate around the right of parents to send their child to a better-performing school. This is merely a smokescreen to divert attention away from what school choice is really about: the transfer of public money to the private sector without accountability or transparency.

Many school choice campaigns are bankrolled by a faction of incredibly wealthy conservative donors and political groups, including the Koch Brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (better known as ALEC). Their agenda is clear: dismantle public education.

But it’s a safe bet you won’t hear their names during National School Choice Week (Jan 25-30). What you will hear is a lot of people parroting messages about “freedom,” “innovation,” “options,” even “civil rights” – buzzwords that underpin the campaigns to expand charter schools, vouchers and ESAs across the country. But the jargon masks the devastating impact these policies have had on public education, particularly on those students who are supposed to benefit the most.

Unaccountable Charter Schools: The Truth Hurts

Many people support the idea behind charter schools, but how many are aware of the mounting troubles the charter industry has experienced lately? Probably not enough. Proponents work very, very hard to maintain a facade of success and transparency in the face of evidence that many of these schools operate without any oversight, while wasting taxpayer money and fostering inequity and racial segregation.

Take the North Carolina State Board of Education, which just this month rejected the Department of Public Instruction’s annual report on charter schools as “too negative.” Dominated by school privatization stalwarts, the board is determined to prevent any meaningful oversight of the state’s charters and demanded revisions to the report before it could be submitted to the legislature.

North Carolina educator Stuart Egan took the board to task in an open letter to Lt. Governor and board member Dan Forrest: “Overall, charter schools seem to lack diversity and operate under a different set of rules according to the report you are trying to squelch. The fact is that many of the charter schools you have enabled are perpetuating segregation and are not accomplishing what you advertised they would do,” Egan wrote.

Given the magnitude of waste and fraud in the sector, it’s unsurprising why many charter operators are hiding from accountability and regulation.  And according to a new study, the expansion of unregulated charter schools, particularly in urban communities, is beginning to resemble the effort a decade ago to pump up bad mortgages that eventually blew up the economy.

“Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in Black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers,” Preston Green III of the University of Connecticut and co-author of “Are We Heading Toward a Charter School ‘Bubble’?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis” told EduShyster. “At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight is creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in low-income communities.”

Vouchers: Who Is Really Benefitting?

According to the 2015 PDK/Gallup poll, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose school vouchers. They see it for what it is: a privatization scheme that subsidizes tuition for students in private schools. And perhaps they are aware that there is no conclusive evidence that vouchers improve student achievement. The public is also not fooled by the often-repeated falsehood that vouchers are primarily benefitting disadvantaged students.

In Scott Walker’s Wisconsin and Mike Pence’s Indiana, where vouchers have expanded dramatically, promises that the programs would serve low-income students in failing schools didn’t last. “That tale quickly and methodically changed,” said Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. By 2015,  only 2 percent of participants [in the voucher program] had attended an ‘F’ public school.

“The most expansive voucher program in America has become an entitlement program which, in large part, now benefits middle class families who always intended to send their children to private (mostly religious) schools and taxpayers are footing the growing bill,” Meredith said.

Education Savings Accounts (or Vouchers on Steroids)

In 2015, Nevada lawmakers were hoping to blaze a new trail for school choice with a new gambit, education savings accounts (ESA), which allow parents to claim more than $5,000 in state funds each year and use it for any qualified education expense. This includes religious-based private schools, but also a variety of other services, all with little or no oversight over student outcomes. In addition, states impose no quality controls on the textbooks, curriculum, tutoring, or supplemental materials that parents can purchase with ESA funds.

Education savings accounts exist in five states, but Nevada became the first to pass a bill that offered them to every public school student regardless of family income. Very few private schools in the state, however, have tuition low enough to be covered by the $5,100 or $5,700 provided annually by ESAs. Wealthier parents can supplement their own income to pay for the tuition, but for lower-income families private school will remain largely out-of-reach.

Earlier this month, a state judge slapped an injunction on the program. In his ruling, District Judge James Wilson said the law diverted public funds to pay for private school tuition and was therefore unconstitutional. The decision will be appealed because advocates have vested a lot in the scheme. ESAs are unquestionably the new school choice battleground and are being pushed in a growing number of states with proponents deploying the usual tropes about “freedom” and “flexibility” to mask their real impact: erosion of public school funding, fewer education resources, wider achievement gaps and increased segregation.

Real Innovation That Works

The good news is that a growing number of communities are finding solutions to struggling schools and achievement gaps that benefit all students, not just some. Educators and parents are working together to expand the community schools model, which is currently present in nearly 5,000 schools nationwide. When public schools extend services and programs beyond the school day, creating strong learning cultures and safe and supportive environments for both students and educators—in effect becoming community “hubs” – student outcomes improve. In 2015, Minnesota educators were instrumental in persuading the legislature to pass a bill creating a grant program for “Full-Service” Community Schools and other states may soon follow suit.  To learn more about community schools, read “Investing in What Works” by the Southern Education Foundation and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Source: NEA Today

Crain's New York Business - February 8, 2014, by Chris Bragg - Before Carl Heastie's election as Assembly speaker last week, the Bronx lawmaker's biggest accomplishment in Albany may have been passing a 2012 bill creating a fleet of outer-borough green taxis. The legislation's primary opponent was the Metropolitan Taxi Cab Board of Trade, a yellow-cab group that saw the new taxis as a major threat.

Yet one of the group's lobbyists, Michael Woloz, recalls Mr. Heastie being an honest broker who made the bill fairer to yellow cabs, despite Mr. Woloz's group having had little prior relationship with the lawmaker. He said Mr. Heastie made a point of citing his business background.

"I remember he told us very early on in the process that he had an M.B.A. from Baruch," Mr. Woloz said. "We took that to mean he was coming not from a place of activism, but from a place of pragmatism."

The business community hopes Mr. Heastie, a former city budget analyst, will have that approach as speaker. His history, such as his taxi-bill experience, offers some clues.

Though not a prodigious bill writer, he once sponsored legislation to let check-cashers make high-interest loans. Bill proponents donated $10,000 to the Bronx Democratic Party that Mr. Heastie led; Mr. Heastie has said that had no effect on him. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's chief banking regulator, Benjamin Lawsky, helped kill the bill, arguing that poor people would be sucked into debt.

Mr. Heastie gave up his Bronx Democratic chairmanship when he gained the speakership, but eyes will be trained on the operatives who have long been close to the county leader. One is Stanley Schlein, who is often described as a "political fixer" and whose ethical troubles include being fined $15,000 for using city resources for his law practice.

Mr. Heastie's right-hand man, lobbyist and consultant Patrick Jenkins, has a good reputation. But he represents the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, a powerful group and a bane of business interests for its opposition to tort reform.

One of that group's top tasks will be to get Mr. Heastie to block reform of the state's 129-year-old scaffold law, as the last speaker, Sheldon Silver, did for years. But prosecutors say Mr. Silver had a financial incentive to do so: a $120,000 salary and several million dollars in fees from a personal-injury law firm. A scaffold-law reform bill is carried by Assemblyman Joseph Morelle, who lost the speaker's race to Mr. Heastie.

Mr. Heastie's position on the issue is not clear, according to Tom Stebbins, executive director of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York. He sponsored neither Mr. Morelle's bill nor one from Queens Assemblyman Francisco Moya that Mr. Stebbins considers a "red herring."

"We're just pleased that the new speaker of the Assembly is not on the payroll of the trial lawyers," Mr. Stebbins said. But the lawyers' lobby has made 26 contributions totaling $26,600 to Mr. Heastie's campaign fund since 2000. A spokesman for Mr. Heastie has said he will make decisions solely on the merits.

Josie Duffy of the Center for Popular Democracy, part of a coalition opposing scaffold-law reform, said, "We appreciate the speaker's past support for worker safety."

Mr. Heastie chaired the Assembly Labor Committee, a post typically held by strong supporters of unions. He sponsored the Wage Theft Prevention Act, which passed in 2010 over business groups' objections.

Mr. Heastie's spokesman also noted his sponsorship of a bill to let domestic-violence victims break their lease if their home is unsafe.

Mr. Heastie originally voted against gay marriage, but supported the marriage-equality bill that passed in 2011.

Before his election to the Assembly in 2000, Mr. Heastie, now 47, was a budget analyst in the city comptroller's office. Like Mr. Silver, he has a reputation as someone who does more listening than speaking, and whose opinions can seem inscrutable. He is considered media-shy, but is known for keeping his word, which helped him to rapidly line up votes for the speakership.

"I've always been a coalition builder, even when I was county chair in the Bronx," Mr. Heastie said at a press conference last week. "I like to hear other, differing opinions."

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