CPD IN THE NEWS

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

The campaign manager for a group trying to raise Arizona's minimum wage said on Wednesday that the effort was helped considerably by his own timely loan of $100,000.

Bill Scheel is one of three founding partners of the public-relations and political-strategy firm Javelina, which Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families hired to run its campaign. The Phoenix-based firm got the job done in the form of Proposition 206, which will appear on the November 8 ballot.

Preliminary state campaign-finance records show that Bright Owl, a limited liability company of which Scheel is the sole member and manager, made a $100,000 contribution to the campaign on August 4.

Asked on Wednesday about the cash infusion, Scheel said the money is an interest-free loan, not a donation, and that it will be classified as such on the campaign's official pre-primary report, which is due to the state on Friday.

According to Scheel, the loan came in the nick of time to cover legal fees for an unexpected court challenge to the initiative, and was made possible by money he inherited after his parents died a few years ago.

"I couldn't think of a better way to honor their memory than to provide this loan, which has helped get our Healthy Working Families initiative on the ballot," he said.

If Arizona voters approve the measure, the state's minimum wage would go up to $10 an hour next year and rise to $12 in 2020.

But it almost didn't make the ballot. The Arizona Restaurant Association sued, claiming many of the petition gatherers hired by the campaign ineligible to collect signatures. The association wanted tens of thousands of signatures thrown out, potentially enough to knock the initiative off the ballot.

The campaign itself was in need of a raise.

Before Scheel's loan, the two largest payments to the campaign were a July 19 donation of $25,000 from the United Food and Commercial Workers union Region 8 States Council, and a May 12 donation of $25,000 from the California-based Fairness Project. Prior to that, records show, from January 1 to May 31, the effort was funded with $384,642 donated by the nonprofit activist group Living United for Change in Arizona, (LUCHA), which reportedly received money for the effort from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Popular Democracy.

During that same period in the first half of 2016, the group spent $337,975.59 on signature gatherers, printing services, and other expenses, including $3,000 in consulting fees paid to Tomas Robles, the campaign's chairman and LUCHA's executive director.

Scheel says the campaign pays his company $10,000 a month for campaign management, plus another $5,000 a month for communications, all of which is split by several people at Javelina.

On top of all those expenses came the legal bills for the lawsuit by the restaurant association.

"We didn't have money set aside for legal expenses," Scheel explained, adding that his loan was a "huge help" to the campaign. It was also a risk to put his own money on the line, he admitted.

"If the court had ruled against us last Friday, my $100,000 would be gone," he said. "Legal fees is basically what [the money] was spent on."

Arizona's Minimum-Wage Initiative Saved by Political Consultant's Inheritance

Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families

The group's tenacity, along with Scheel's inheritance money, paid off in the courtroom. Last week, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the lawsuit because the association filed the complaint seven days after the signatures were submitted to the Arizona Secretary of State's Office, exceeding the statutory limit of five days.

Now, the website for Arizonans for Fair Wages and Healthy Families lists Bright Owl as a major funding source, along with LUCHA, the UCFW, and the Fairness Project.

Scheel, who hasn't made any other contributions to the campaign, expects to be repaid out of donations that come in between now and November, he said.

"There will be future donations coming into the campaign from donors," he said. "About $1.5 million."

In response to questions from New Times, he said he hasn't made any deals with the unions and activist groups behind the campaign, nor does he expect anything in return other than repayment, if the group can manage it. His loan simply came at the right time and was a "huge help" to the legal effort that saved the initiative, he said.

"This really is a labor of love for me," Scheel said. "When I work on a campaign, I go all in. I want it to succeed."

By Ray Stern

Source

"Yellen's background as a trained economist and experienced Fed official gave her needed independence from the influence of Wall Street,” says Jordan Haedtler, campaign manager for Fed Up, a grass roots Democratic effort. He says it's concerning that Powell would be Trump's second Carlyle Group veteran appointed to the Fed board. Earlier this year, Trump nominated Randal Quarles, another Carlyle Group alum, to an open Fed board seat overseeing bank regulation.

Read the full article here.

Democracy for America (DFA) members joined Americans across the country to stand against white supremacy and against the deadly violence committed by Nazi groups in Charlottesville.

Read the full article here.