EXCLUSIVE: City Offices Fail to Meet Law Requiring Them to Help New Yorkers Register to Vote
New York Daily News - October 21, 2014, by Erin Durkin - City agencies are failing to do their part to make voter...
New York Daily News - October 21, 2014, by Erin Durkin - City agencies are failing to do their part to make voter registration easier — even though they’re required to by law.
Legislation passed in 2000 mandates that 18 agencies give voter registration forms to visitors. But the Center for Popular Democracy found that 84% of those visitors were never offered a chance to register, according to a report to be released Tuesday.
In fact, 60% of the agencies didn’t even have forms in the office. And 95% of the clients were never asked if they wanted to register to vote.
“This is an urgent problem which is leading to the disenfranchisement of many thousands of low-income New Yorkers,” said Andrew Friedman, the group’s co-executive director.
The group found that 30% of people who visited the city offices weren’t registered to vote, higher than the national average.
Mayor de Blasio’s spokesman Phil Walzak said Hizzoner has ordered agencies to step up their compliance with the law.
Advocates say having city agencies help out with voter registration is especially important because most people nationwide sign up to vote at motor vehicle departments, but many city residents don’t drive.
Source
ABQ, SF receive grants to help immigrants become citizens
ABQ, SF receive grants to help immigrants become citizens
Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the...
Cities for Citizenship is a national initiative supported by advocacy groups Center for Popular Democracy and the National Partnership for New Americans, with Citi Community Development as founding corporate sponsor. Fourteen cities were awarded challenge grants of either $25,000 or $40,000 a year over two years after 66 cities submitted proposals.
Read the full article here.
Multiple Arrests In Midtown During May Day Protests Outside Banks
Multiple Arrests In Midtown During May Day Protests Outside Banks
Hundreds of labor and immigrant advocates marched through east midtown early Monday in a demonstration against...
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.
Hearing on charter schools brings out varied opinions
State Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale got an earful during a daylong meeting in Philadelphia on Friday...
State Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale got an earful during a daylong meeting in Philadelphia on Friday on ways to improve the accountability and effectiveness of charter schools.
Paul Kihn, deputy superintendent of the Philadelphia School District, warned that if Harrisburg passed pending legislation that would permit the unlimited growth of charters, the cost to the district would be so devastating that it might not be able to manage its own schools.
Lawrence Jones Jr., head of Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School in Southwest Philadelphia, said the state needs to provide equitable funding for both district and charter schools.
"This grand experiment is one that is about to collapse under its own weight, because we are doing such a poor job in oversight," said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.
Kyle Serrette, education director for the Washington-based Center for Popular Democracy, said his organization was stunned by the number of federal fraud cases involving charter officials that have occurred in Pennsylvania in recent years.
His group, which works with community groups and unions, called for "a comprehensive investigation that allows the public, regulators, and legislators to better understand the depth of the problem" to improve oversight.
And Philadelphia City Controller Alan Butkovitz told the auditor general that his office is taking another look at the district's charter school office and a group of city charter schools.
The review, which he expects to be completed in a few months, is a follow-up to a study his office completed in 2010 which found that the charter office "was not doing its job" overseeing the schools and that questionable practices were rampant at 13 charters it reviewed.
It was the fifth and final meeting that DePasquale has held across the state to gather input on improving the state's 174 taxpayer-funded charters, which enroll 120,000 students.
Philadelphia is home to 86 charters with 67,000 students.
Source
Minnesota pension board looks at private equity strategy
Minnesota pension board looks at private equity strategy
Toys R Us has not fared well in recent years. And critics, led by New York’s populist-leaning Center for Popular...
Toys R Us has not fared well in recent years. And critics, led by New York’s populist-leaning Center for Popular Democracy, accused the huge equity-investment firms of making hundreds of millions in fees and dividends on the failed retailer over the years.
Read the full article here.
Report: Millions of Dollars in Fraud, Waste Found in Charter School Sector
The Washington Post - April 28, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - A new report released on Tuesday details fraud and waste...
The Washington Post - April 28, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - A new report released on Tuesday details fraud and waste totaling more than $200 million of uncovered fraud and waste of taxpayer funds in the charter school sector, but says the total is impossible to know because there is not sufficient oversight over these schools. It calls on Congress to include safeguards in legislation being considered to succeed the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The report, titled “The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities To Waste, Fraud, And Abuse,” was released jointly by the nonprofit organizations Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy. It follows a similar report released a year ago by the same groups that detailed $136 million in fraud and waste and mismanagement in 15 of the 42 states that operate charter schools. The 2015 report cites $203 million, including the 2014 total plus $23 million in new cases, and $44 million in earlier cases not included in last year’s report.
It notes that these figures only represent fraud and waste in the charter sector uncovered so far, and that the total that federal, state and local governments “stand to lose” in 2015 is probably more than $1.4 billion. It says, “The vast majority of the fraud perpetrated by charter officials will go undetected because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”
The report makes these policy recommendations:
■ Mandate audits that are specifically designed to detect and prevent fraud, and increase the transparency and accountability of charter school operators and managers. ■ Clear planning-based public investments to ensure that any expansions of charter school investments ensure equity, transparency, and accountability. ■ Increase transparency and accountability to ensure that charter schools provide the information necessary for state agencies to detect and prevent fraud.
It also says:
State and federal lawmakers should act now to put systems in place to prevent fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement. While the majority of state legislative sessions are coming to an end, there is an opportunity to address the charter school fraud problem on a federal level by including strong oversight requirements in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which is currently being debated in Congress. Unfortunately, some ESEA proposals do very little reduce the vulnerabilities that exist in the current law. If the Act is passed without the inclusion of the reforms outlined in this report, taxpayers stand to lose millions more dollars to charter school fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.
The charter school sector has expanded significantly in the last decade and now educates about 5 percent of the students enrolled in public schools. The Obama administration has supported the spread of charter schools; President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2016 includes $375 million specifically for charters, a 48 percent increase over last year’s actual budget.
Proponents say charters offer choices for parents and competition for traditional public schools. Critics say that most charters don’t perform any better — and some of them worse — than traditional public schools, take resources away from school districts, and are part of an effort to privatize public education.
The report says that any “effective, comprehensive fraud prevention system” should include:
■ Taking proactive steps to educate all staff and board members about fraud; ■ Ensuring that one executive-level manager coordinates and oversees the fraud risk assessment and reports to the board of directors, oversight bodies, and school community; ■ Implementing reporting procedures that include conflict disclosure, whistleblower protections, and a clear investigation process; ■ Undergoing and posting a fraud risk assessment conducted by a consultant expert in applicable standards, key risk indicators, anti-fraud methodology, control activities, and detection procedures; and ■ Developing and implementing quality assurance, continuous monitoring, and, where necessary, correction action plans, with clear benchmarks and reporting
The report details cases across the country, among them:
The District of Columbia In February 2015, the DC Public Charter School Board unanimously voted to revoke the charter of the Dorothy I. Height Community Academy Public Charter School. The DC Attorney General is suing the founder, Kent Amos, for diverting public education funding to a private company for his personal profit. That private management company paid Amos more than $2.5 million over the last 2 years. Over the past 10 years, the school has paid the private entity more than $14 million and, while costs to the private company declined over that time, management fees rose. The charter board’s oversight report showed “no pattern of fiscal mismanagement.” Members of the DC Public Charter School Board have described their limited ability to oversee for-profit management companies, which face no requirement to disclose salaries or other pertinent information.
Michigan In April 2014, Steven Ingersoll, founder of Grand Traverse Academy, was convicted on federal fraud and tax evasion. He did not report $2 million of taxable income in 2009 and 2010. The school’s audit revealed a $2.3 million prepayment to Ingersoll’s school management company. The school’s later decision to write down $1.6 million of the loan put the school in a deficit position for the first time. Ingersoll then used half of a $.8 million loan for school construction to pay down some of his debt to the school.13 After the founder’s ouster, his daughter-in-law continued to handle the finances of the school.
Ohio In January 2015, the state auditor released a report of the results of unannounced visits by inspectors to 30 charter schools. In nearly half of the schools, the school-provided headcount was significantly higher than the auditors’ headcount. Schools are funded based on headcount, so these inflated figures amount to taxpayer dollars siphoned away from students. Among the seven schools with the most extreme variances between reported head count and the auditors’ headcount, almost 900 students were missing, at a cost of roughly $5.7 million.16 Auditors identified eight other schools with troubling, but less significant variances. In June 2014, a grand jury indicted the superintendent and 2 board members of Arise! Academy in Dayton of soliciting and accepting bribes in exchange for awarding a “lucrative” consulting contract to a North Carolina-based company. The contract was worth $420,919 and the charter personnel received kickbacks in the form of cash, travel, and payments to a separate business.
California In July 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District performed a forensic audit of Magnolia Public Schools. They found that the charter-school chain used education dollars to pay for six nonemployees’ immigration costs and could not justify $3 million in expenses over four years to outsource curriculum development, professional training, and human resources services that the school itself reported doing.
NATIONAL GROUPS CALL FOR DNC TO CAN SUPERDELEGATE SYSTEM
NATIONAL GROUPS CALL FOR DNC TO CAN SUPERDELEGATE SYSTEM
Fourteen national organizations boasting more than 10 million members are calling on the Democratic National Committee...
Fourteen national organizations boasting more than 10 million members are calling on the Democratic National Committee to end the use of superdelegates to elect the presidential nominee.
The move to end the use of superdelegates was pushed vigorously during the campaign by Sen. Bernie Sanders but many of those supporting the effort include backers of Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
DNC Rules Committee member and Rhode Island State Representative Aaron Regunberg has pledged to introduce language to end superdelegates, and several other Rules Committee members have agreed to support the effort at the Democratic National Convention at the end of July.
The organizations said in a joint letter that the superdelegates, who are typically party officials, are not elected by voters and can skew the nominating process. They say the superdelegates carry as much as the combined weight as pledged delegates from 24 states, the District of Columbia and four territories.
Organizations signing on to the letter include: Courage Campaign, Credo, Daily Kos, Demand Progress/Rootstrikers, Democracy for America, Center for Popular Democracy, MoveOn, National Nurses United, NDN, The Other 98%, Presente.org, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Progressive Democrats of America, and Social Security Works.
Simon Rosenberg, the president of NDN and a former DNC staffer, who supported Hillary Clinton during the primary, said the use of superdelegates is “discordant with broader and vital efforts by Democrats to modernize and improve our democracy. If we want the voice of everyday people to be louder and more consequential in our nation’s politics, it must also be so in our Party.”
Another Clinton supporter, Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004, said a key party goal is to “empower voices from the bottom up. The top down idea of superdelegates is obsolete and is a good place to start.”
Sanders’ supporter Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a superdelegate and former DNC official, also condemned the practice.
“The nominee of our party should be decided by who earns the most votes —not party insiders, unelected officials, or the federal lobbyists that have been given a vote in our nominating process. The current system stands against grassroots activists and the will of the voters,” she said. “We’ve seen a historic number of new voters and activists join our political process in the past year, many of whom are rightly upset at how rigged the political system can seem at times. If we want to strengthen our democracy and our party, we must end the superdelegate process.”
By MARK JOHNSON
Source
The Retail Industry is Marginalizing Women and People of Color. This Has to Change.
The Retail Industry is Marginalizing Women and People of Color. This Has to Change.
Source: In These Times...
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.
Monday's MLK50 live blog
Monday's MLK50 live blog
In addition to Wallace-Gobern, panelists will include Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Labor...
In addition to Wallace-Gobern, panelists will include Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance; Tracey Corder, director of the Racial Justice Campaign at the Center for Popular Democracy; and Jeremiah Edmond, president of G.A.M.E. Local 101.
Read the full article here.
14 hours ago
14 hours ago