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An earlier review identified the "Three Big Sins of Charter Schools": fraud, a lack of transparency, and the exclusion of unwanted students. The evidence against charters continues to grow. Yet except for its reporting on a few egregious examples of charter malfeasance and failure, the mainstream media continues to echo the sentiments of privatization-loving billionaires who believe their wealth somehow equates to educational wisdom.

The Wall Street Journal, in its misinformed way, says that the turnaround of public schools requires "increasing options for parents, from magnet to charter schools." Wrong. As the NAACP affirms, our nation needs "free, high-quality, fully and equitably-funded public education for all children." For all children, not just a select few.

The NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter schools. And Diane Ravitch makes a crucial point: "Would [corporate reformers] still be able to call themselves leaders of the civil rights issue of our time if the NAACP disagreed with their aggressive efforts to privatize public schools?"

Here are the four big sins of charter schools, updated by a surge of new evidence:

1. Starve the Beast

Corporate-controlled spokesgroups ALEC, US Chamber of Commerce, and Americans for Prosperity are drooling over school privatization and automated classrooms, with a formula described by The Nation: "Use standardized tests to declare dozens of poor schools 'persistently failing'; put these under the control of a special unelected authority; and then have that authority replace the public schools with charters." But as aptly expressed by Jeff Bryant, "As a public school loses a percentage of its students to charters, the school can’t simply cut fixed costs for things like transportation and physical plant proportionally...So instead, the school cuts a program or support service."

It's an insidious and ongoing process, aided and abetted by business-friendly mainstream media outlets, to convince Americans that "every family for itself" is better than the mutual support and cooperation of a public school system.

2. Cream and Segregate and Discard

Urban charter schools primarily enroll low-income minority students. That seems admirable upon first reflection, but selective admissions of the best students from ANY community will make an individual school look good, leading to the belief that the concept will work on a larger scale. Success is much harder to achieve if a school accommodates special needs and English-learner students.

Numerous sources reveal the high degree of segregation in charter schools -- white or black, and by income and special need.

As expressed in the report "Failing the Test," "School choice is just that — except that charter schools are doing the choosing instead of communities."

It gets worse. Prominent New York charter network Success Academy has been accused of "counseling out" students who are low-performing or disruptive or otherwise difficult to teach. Even worse are charters that shut down, stranding hundreds of students, while their business operators can just move on to their next project. Nearly 2,500 charter schools closed their doors from 2001 to 2013, leaving over a quarter of a million kids temporarily without a school.

3. Scream 'Public' to Get Tax Money, Plead 'Private' to Hide Salary Data

Charter schools are increasingly run by private companies, or by private trusts. The National Labor Relations Board affirms that charters are private, not public.

As private entities, they are unregulated and lacking in transparency, and, as concluded by the Center for Media and Democracy, they have become a "black hole" into which the federal government has dumped an outrageous $3.7 billion over two decades with little accountability to the public.

4. Engage in "Fraud, Waste, Abuse, and Mismanagement"

That's how the Center for Popular Democracy describes charter performance in 2015, during which the schools wasted an estimated $1.4 billion of taxpayer money. The fraud is far-reaching, with examples from around the country:

The Department of Education audited 33 charter schools and concluded: "We determined that charter school relationships with CMOs (charter management organizations) posed a significant risk to Department program objectives."

In California, charter performance is so poor that even the National Association of Charter Authorizers is calling on the state to better control the authorization of such schools. At present, there are almost no restrictions on opening a charter school, and existing schools are restrictive in their enrollment policies.

Because of charters, Michigan cities have lost nearly half (46.5%) of their revenue over the past 10 years. Detroit, which is surpassed only by New Orleans in the number of charter students, half of the charter schools perform only as well as, or worse than, traditional public schools. A federal study found an "unreasonably high" number of charters among the lowest-rated public schools in the state.

In Louisiana, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, "charter schools have experienced millions in known losses from fraud and financial mismanagement so far, which is likely just the tip of the iceberg."

According to PR Watch, Florida "has one of the worst records in the nation when it comes to fraud and lack of charter school oversight." Texas has an unknown number of charters housed in churches. Nine charters in Washington remain open despite being declared unconstitutional by the state's Supreme Court.

Ohio might be worst of all. Since the 2006-07 school year, 37 percent of the state's charter schools receiving federal grants have either closed or never opened. An Ohio newspaper reported, "No sector – not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals – misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio."

The Big Picture

Despite student selection advantages, charter schools generally perform no better than public schools, according to the most recent CREDO study and as summarized by the nonpartisan Spencer Foundation and Public Agenda: "There is very little evidence that charter and traditional public schools differ meaningfully in their average impact on students' standardized test performance." As for technology-based schools, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools admits that "The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action to state leaders and authorizers across the country."

Charter schools have turned our children into the products of businesspeople. Americans need to know how important it is to get the profit motive out of education, and to provide ALL our children the same educational opportunities.

By Paul Buchheit

Source

More than a dozen community activists picketed the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this week, protesting what they say is the bank president’s refusal to meet with them to discuss how Fed monetary policy affects real people.

The roughly 15 activists are members of ACTION United, an organization representing low-income people of color in Philadelphia. ACTION United is affiliated with the national Fed Up campaign, a coalition of progressive groups advocating Fed monetary policies that prioritize full employment and shared economic prosperity.

Fed Up and ACTION United planned Tuesday's protest because they say that Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker reneged on a promise to meet, and allow group members to give him a tour of low-income neighborhoods where they are active. The activists point to a video in which Harker appears to commit to the meeting in a conversation with ACTION United organizer Kendra Brooks at the annual Jackson Hole symposium in August.

When Brooks followed up, Theresa Singleton, the Philadelphia Fed’s vice president and community affairs officer, said in an email obtained by HuffPost that a meeting was not in the cards, because the bank is reluctant to work with “just one organization."

Instead, Singleton invited Brooks to Tuesday’s community development briefing for low- and moderate-income community stakeholders. Singleton also said Fed staff would “design and organize” their own community tour.

That response rankled Fed Up and ACTION United members. The Federal Reserve has a dozen regional banks, and the activists have met or have planned meetings with all of the regional Fed leaders except Philadelphia's since the campaign began in August 2014. They want a meeting -- and they want it to take place in an economically distressed community of color -- not in the Fed’s offices.

So they decided to pressure the Philadelphia Fed with a protest, featuring Fed Up’s trademark “What recovery?” signs and green "Whose Recovery?" T-shirts.

ACTION United also sent Brooks to the community development briefing, where she and several nonprofit executives and bankers who work with low- and moderate-income earners spoke with Harker and Singleton.

Brooks said she was mostly pleased with what she heard from Harker and other Fed officials, who she said sounded genuinely committed to researching the conditions in communities the Fed serves and finding ways to improve “economic autonomy” in the Philadelphia region. 

“The outcome of the meeting was much better than we anticipated, but going in, we did not know the information that we knew coming out.” Brooks said. “We hope he will continue to keep the doors open for organizations like ours and our coalition. And that we will continue to be a part of that conversation and not excluded.”

But Brooks noted that the Fed officials did not discuss how monetary policy and the Fed’s adjustment of interest rates disproportionately affects low-income workers and communities of color.

For the Fed Up campaign, the exclusion of monetary policy reaffirms that nothing short of a meeting between Harker and activists will suffice.

“We appreciate and accept the invitation to discuss community development and research, but this is not a substitute for the promise President Harker made to Fed Up,” said Shawn Sebastian, a policy advocate and staff attorney for the Fed Up campaign. “President Harker promised to speak with working families in the black neighborhoods of Philadelphia about their experiences -- where unemployment is double white unemployment. Harker promised to discuss how his monetary policy decisions can build a true full employment economy that works for everyone.”

Philadelphia Fed spokeswoman Marilyn Wimp, in an email to HuffPost, didn't address a question about whether Harker reneged on his promise to meet with protesters. She instead pointed to Tuesday's briefing as evidence of Harker's interest in reaching out to diverse parts of the community.  

But the list of the Tuesday briefing’s attendees reveals that Brooks was the only stakeholder from a group with a position on Fed interest rates.

Crafting monetary policy is a main responsibility of the Federal Reserve regional banks. Regional Fed presidents occupy five of the 12 seats on the Federal Open Market Committee, responsible for adjusting the Fed’s benchmark interest rates. Lately, they have accounted for half of the committee’s votes, because the Senate has failed to approve presidential nominees for two of the seven seats reserved for members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington.

The FOMC keeps its benchmark interest rates low when it is more concerned about full employment, and raises them to curb excessive inflation when the economy has grown enough to drive up prices.

Fed Up wants the central bank to maintain current low interest rates for the near term, which will allow economic demand to continue to grow, benefitting workers with more jobs and higher wages. The campaign applauded the Fed’s decision to leave rates unchanged in September.

But Fed Up leaders said they're worried about the Philadelphia Fed and the role its president may play in future monetary policy decisions. The Philadelphia region's previous Fed president, Charles Plosser, who left the post in March, was an outspoken inflation hawk.

Harker, who will serve a one-year term on the FOMC in 2017, was a member of the Philadelphia Fed board’s search committee for a new president, recusing himself once he became a candidate.

Harker’s views on monetary policy are not yet known. He is a former trustee of the Goldman Sachs Trust, which Sebastian and other Fed Up critics said they worry will make him more sympathetic to financial institutions' concerns about inflation.

Source: Huffington Post

Payday lending has come under attack in recent years for exploiting low-income borrowers and trapping them in a cycle of debt. The problem has grown to such an extent that last month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed new rules to rein in the most egregious abuses by payday lenders.

Yet payday lenders are not alone in profiting from the struggles of low-income communities with deceptive loans that, all too often, send people into crushing debt. In fact, such targeting has grown common among industries ranging from student loan providers to mortgage lenders.

For decades, redlining denied black people and other communities of color access to mortgages, bank accounts and other important services. Today, black and brown women are similarly being “pinklined” with lending schemes that deny them the opportunity for a better life.

A recent report underlines the toll these practices have taken on women of color. Among other alarming statistics, the report shows that 6 out of 10 payday loan customers are women, that black women were 256 percent more likely than their white male counterparts to receive a subprime loan, and that women of color are stuck paying off student debt for far longer than men. It also shows that aggressive lending practices from payday lending to subprime mortgages have grown dramatically in recent years.

In Los Angeles, debt is a dark cloud looming over the lives of thousands of low-income women all over the city.

Barbara took over the mortgage for her family’s home in South Central Los Angeles in 1988. She had a good job working for Hughes Aircraft until she was injured on the job in 1999 and took an early retirement. To better care for an aging mother living with her, she took out a subprime loan for a bathroom renovation.

The interest rate on the new loan steadily climbed, until she could barely afford to make monthly payments. She took out credit cards just to stay afloat, burying her under an even higher mountain of debt. To survive, she asked her brother to move in, while her son also helped out with the bills.

Numerous studies have shown that borrowers with strong credit — especially black women and Latinas — were steered toward subprime loans even when they could qualify for those with lower rates.

Women of color pay a massive price for such recklessness. The stress of dealing with debt hurts women in a variety of ways.

Alexandra, a former military officer, lost her partner, the father to her daughter, after a protracted struggle with ballooning subprime loan payments. The credit card debt she needed to take out as a result threatened her health, leaving her with hair loss, neck pain and sleep deprivation. She eventually needed to file for bankruptcy to settle the debt.

Women of color are vulnerable to dubious lenders because structural racism and sexism already puts far too many women in economically vulnerable positions. The low-wage workforce is dominated by women, and the gender pay gap is significantly worse for women of color. Many women of color are forced to take out loans just to survive or to try to improve their desperate situations.

Predatory lending practices, and other corporate practices that deny communities opportunities and exploit the most economically vulnerable, have been allowed to proliferate for far too long. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began taking action on payday and car title loans last month, but more needs to be done.

Regulators must ensure all lending takes into account the borrower’s ability to repay, and that lenders do not disproportionately target and attempt to profit off of the least protected.

The payday lending rules acted on last month are a step in the right direction but don’t go nearly far enough. We have a lot of work ahead of us to ensure black and Latina women are not exploited by the 21st century version of redlining.

Marbre Stahly-Butts is deputy director of Racial Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, of which Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment is an affiliate.

By Marbre Stahly-Butts 

Source

Activists are trying to combat both the accelerated tracking and detaining of immigrants and the use of for-profit prisons to hold them by targeting the big banks that prop up for-profit prison companies.

Read the full article here.