"You can save my life - remember this conversation": Father with ALS confronts Senator Jeff Flake on flight from DC to Arizona over tax bill*
"You can save my life - remember this conversation": Father with ALS confronts Senator Jeff Flake on flight from DC to Arizona over tax bill*
A terminally-ill father suffering Lou Gehrig's disease shared his personal story with Sen. Jeff Flake with the ambition...
A terminally-ill father suffering Lou Gehrig's disease shared his personal story with Sen. Jeff Flake with the ambition to make an influence on his stance of the GOP tax reform bill.
Ady Barkan, 33, approached the Republican lawmaker during his flight home from Washington D.C. - where the ill Barkan had spent days protesting the bill.
Read the full article here.
Advocacy group calls for more oversight of California charter school spending
Advocacy group calls for more oversight of California charter school spending
A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. A 2015 report...
A lack of transparency and inadequate oversight can set up the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse. A 2015 report from the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” reported over $200 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools.
Read the full article here.
Lax Pa. Oversight of Charters Robs Taxpayers of $30M, Groups Say
Philadelphia Inquirer - October 1, 2014, by Martha Woodall - A new report from a trio of activist groups says...
Philadelphia Inquirer - October 1, 2014, by Martha Woodall - A new report from a trio of activist groups says Pennsylvania charter schools have defrauded taxpayers of more than $30 million because oversight is so lax.
The researchers call for a temporary moratorium on new charter schools, contending agencies are not able to adequately monitor the 186 charters that already exist.
The study by the Center for Popular Democracy; Integrity in Education; and Action United of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was to be released Wednesday.
The report urges the state Attorney General's Office to review all Pennsylvania charters for potential fraud. It asks the legislature to require charters to undergo regular fraud-risk assessments and fraud audits. And it suggests that until the law is changed to require such actions, charters should voluntarily undergo them and make the findings public.
Researchers said most of the $30 million in fraud that has been detected since the state's charter law was passed in 1997 was not uncovered by charter-oversight offices but by whistle-blowers and the media, including The Inquirer. They said the total amount of misspent funds was likely far larger.
"The current oversight system in Pennsylvania falls miserably short when it comes to detecting, preventing, and eliminating fraud," said Kyle Serrette, education director at the Center for Popular Democracy in Washington.
The center receives funding from foundations, including $990,000 this year from the Ford Foundation. It also receives a small amount of support from teachers' unions, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is on the organization's board.
Robert Fayfich, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, said that while his group supports accountability, the report makes "sweeping conclusions about the entire charter sector based on only 11 cited incidents in the course of almost 20 years."
". . . Fraud and fiscal mismanagement are wrong and cannot be tolerated, but to highlight them in one sector and ignore them in another indicates a motivation to target one type of public school for a political agenda," he said in a statement.
Pennsylvania school districts paid $1.5 million to charters that enrolled 128,712 students in 2012-13. More than 67,000 Philadelphia students attend 86 city charters.
Sabrina Stevens, executive director of Washington-based Integrity in Education, said: "With over $1 billion going to charter schools in Pennsylvania, it's time for charter schools to be held to the same standards of transparency and oversight that public schools are held to."
State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said it's "good that they put this together," adding that Serrette's group had testified at a charter-oversight hearing his office held in March. "To me, the more voices on this, the better. I think in the next term in the legislature, there is going to be a charter-reform bill move forward."
City Controller Alan Butkovitz said the report echoed concerns he raised in 2010, when his office released its own oversight study that highlighted several problems his office found at city charters.
"We certainly agree with the need for greater oversight and auditing," Butkovitz said. "That's been one of our constant themes."
The instances of fraud cited in the new report include cases where charter officials were indicted or pleaded guilty and instances uncovered in state audits.
Examples include Nicholas Trombetta, founder and former CEO of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Midland, who is awaiting federal trial in Pittsburgh on charges that he diverted $8 million in school funds for personal use.
The tally also includes $6.3 million that federal prosecutors allege Dorothy June Brown defrauded from the four Philadelphia-area charters she founded.
But the authors give special attention to another recent case involving a city charter: New Media Technology Charter School in the city's Stenton section. The former CEO and founding board president went to federal prison in 2012 after admitting they stole $522,000 in taxpayer money to prop up a restaurant, a health-food store, and a private school they controlled, and for defrauding a bank.
From 2005 to 2009, when the crimes were occurring, third-party auditors hired by New Media failed to spot the fraudulent payments.
"Fraud detection in Pennsylvania charter schools should not be dependent upon parent complaints, media exposés, and whistle-blowers," the authors wrote. Rather, they urged, the system should be proactive and use forensic accounting methods.
According to the report, Pennsylvania's charters are vulnerable to fraud and financial mismanagement because school districts and state offices charged with overseeing them lack resources and staff.
For example, although the cash-strapped Philadelphia district has about half of the state's charters, it has only two auditors and a small office to monitor 86 schools, the report said.
"We agree in the need of greater oversight and a deeper look into the health of charter schools," district spokesman Fernando Gallard said, "and we have taken steps to do so."
Although the district's charter office at times had only two or three staffers, Gallard said, it now has six and is seeking an executive director.
Researchers also said that charters lack strong internal fiscal controls and that their boards have not adopted strict management policies.
And even though the charters are required to have annual audits performed by outside firms, researchers said, those audits rely on general accounting techniques and are not designed to detect fraud.
"The current system of oversight relies heavily on information provided by charter schools themselves and traditional audits that are designed to check accuracy rather than detect and prevent fraud," the report said.
The report said taxpayers cannot afford to lose another $30 million in misspent charter funds. "While the reforms proposed will require additional resources," the authors said, "they represent a smart investment in our communities and in our future."
Researchers said the study was the first in what would be a state-by-state investigation of oversight of charters in the 42 states that have them.
Serrette said researchers decided to begin with Pennsylvania because the timing seemed right. He pointed out that both DePasquale in Harrisburg and Butkovitz in Philadelphia have highlighted the fraud risks in charter schools. And State Rep. James R. Roebuck Jr. (D., Phila.), minority chairman of the House Education Committee, introduced a bill last year to tighten charter controls.
Said Serrette: "The stars are aligning."
Source
Fed more upbeat on economy, unclear on timing of rate hike
The Federal Reserve offered a slightly more upbeat assessment of the economy but provided little insight into when it...
The Federal Reserve offered a slightly more upbeat assessment of the economy but provided little insight into when it will raise its benchmark interest rate for the first time in nearly a decade.
Fed officials voted unanimously to keep the target rate at zero for now, after wrapping up their regular two-day policy-setting meeting in Washington on Wednesday afternoon. In a carefully worded statement, the central bank noted that the economy has expanded “moderately.” It pointed to solid job gains and lower unemployment as signs that the labor market has improved, adding that underemployment has also diminished.
Perhaps most important, the Fed characterized the risks to its outlook for the economy as “nearly balanced” — the same description it used after its previous meeting. Some analysts believe that the Fed will move once the risks are weighted more evenly.
U.S. stock markets spiked after the release of the Fed statement but quickly settled back down. Both the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average and the broader Standard & Poor's 500 average were up about half a percentage point in mid-afternoon trading.
Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said several times that she expects the central bank will raise its benchmark federal funds rate before the end of the year, a move that would herald the end of the central bank’s unconventional — and controversial — efforts to resuscitate the American economy.
Many investors and economists believe the moment will come during the Fed’s meeting in September, which would be followed by a news conference allowing Yellen to explain the central bank’s decision more fully. But a vocal minority think the Fed will wait to move in December, the next meeting with a scheduled news conference. A few economists — including two officials within the central bank — believe the Fed should hold off until 2016 to be sure the recovery is solid.
Fed officials have debated how strong of a signal to send as the moment of liftoff nears. But the central bank has repeatedly emphasized that its decision will depend on the evolution of economic data — and so investors should look to the numbers for the green light for action.
A key figure will be the government’s estimate of second quarter economic growth slated for release Thursday. Falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a sharp slowdown in the growth of consumer spending helped drive an unexpected contraction in the economy over the winter. Fed officials are hoping that second quarter GDP growth will prove the dip was merely temporary.
A stronger reading would also align with the pickup in hiring over the past two months. Unemployment is nearing its lowest sustainable level, making some officials antsy for the Fed to start tapping the brakes on the economy.
But others have argued that exceptionally low inflation means the Fed has plenty of time to act. Price growth remains well below the central bank’s 2 percent target, and officials have said they want to be “reasonably confident” it is moving up before tightening policy. In June, the central bank had stated that energy prices “appear to have stabilized.” But on Wednesday, it cited further declines in energy prices, along with the falling price of imports, as reasons inflation has remained low.
The Fed slashed its target interest rate to zero when the country was in the grips of the financial crisis in 2008, and it has stayed there ever since. In addition, it pumped trillions of dollars into the economy in an effort to lower longer-term rates and spur borrowing among consumers and investment among businesses. Unwinding those policies will likely take years.
Meanwhile, the Fed is facing renewed scrutiny in Congress. The House Financial Services committee on Wednesday passed a bill that would require the central bank to explain when it deviates from certain monetary policy models, disclose more information on salaries and allow for audits of the Fed's decision-making process. Another bill sponsored by Texas Republican Rep. Kevin Brady would create a commission to examine the Fed, which recently celebrated its centennial.
“The Fed is trying to do too much,” Brady said in an interview. “It can be the right tool, but not for everything and everybody.”
The central bank is also facing pressure from the other end of the political spectrum. A coalition of community activists and labor groups is urging the Fed to leave its target rate unchanged amid elevated unemployment rates among minorities.
“Until we reach genuine full employment, there is no reason for the Fed to contemplate putting people out of work and slowing down our economy via interest rate hikes,” the Fed Up campaign said in a statement.
Source: The Washington Post
No Factions in Foxholes
By focusing chiefly on the surge in middle-class activism, says Andrew Friedman of the Center for Popular Democracy,...
By focusing chiefly on the surge in middle-class activism, says Andrew Friedman of the Center for Popular Democracy, the news media are overlooking a similar surge “in many of these front-line communities, brown and black communities, working-class communities.”
Read full article here.
We, The People, Defeated Republican Attempts To Repeal The Affordable Care Act
We, The People, Defeated Republican Attempts To Repeal The Affordable Care Act
After months of grandstanding and cloak-and-dagger meetings by Republican leaders, we dealt a final blow to the repeal...
After months of grandstanding and cloak-and-dagger meetings by Republican leaders, we dealt a final blow to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Who are we? We are the thousands of people who attended town hall meetings around the country to confront our elected officials, marched on the streets, and occupied the offices of our senators until we got arrested.
Early Friday morning, dozens of us who have been active in the fight against the ACA repeal stood outside the Capitol, bleary-eyed from exhaustion and tears and holding on to each other for moral support. We were stunned and elated when the ‘skinny’ repeal vote failed.
Read the full article here.
Report Shows Unemployment Rate in Twin Cities 4x Higher for Blacks than Whites
InsightNews - March 18, 2015 - At a press conference and rally last week, NOC released a report as part of a national...
InsightNews - March 18, 2015 - At a press conference and rally last week, NOC released a report as part of a national day of action, showing that the unemployment rate for Blacks in the Twin Cities is four times higher than for whites, calling on the Federal Reserve to prioritize full employment in all communities. "Minnesota is a great place to live, if you're white," said NOC executive director Anthony Newby. "The unemployment rate is 2.8%. But for black folks, unemployment is over ten percent--crisis levels. The Federal Reserve is considering raising interest rates because Wall Street thinks the economy has recovered. But that would only increase unemployment, especially in communities of color."
"Historically, the African-American community has been cut out of opportunities the government was supposedly providing to everyone--for example, homeownership programs that African-Americans could not participate in, public education programs that African-Americans were either cut out of or cut short, livable wage jobs that African-Americans would not be considered for," said Pastor Paul Slack, pastor of New Creation Church in Minneapolis and President of ISAIAH. "It's time for the Federal Reserve to act specifically in the interest of the African-American community and other low-income communities, by keeping interest rates low so that we can rebuild the wealth that was stolen from us through this recent economic crisis."Joe Elliott worked at the Target Center for five years until he was unexpectedly laid off. "I liked the job--I met a lot of great people, and went to concerts and games. But I didn't like the money. I deserve more than $8.40/hour. It wasn't supporting my daily living--bills, kids, transportation. But it's hard looking for a job as an African-American male.""The Minneapolis Fed President, Narayana Kocherlakota, has expressed support for keeping interest rates low," said Anthony Newby. "That's great. But he's also retiring in a year. We need an open and transparent process for community input on the next Minneapolis Fed president."The Federal Reserve has a key policymaking meeting coming up in mid-March.
Source
Who will win America's worst employer contest?
As pageants go, here's one whose contestants might want Steve Harvey to spare them the crown. The Center for Popular...
As pageants go, here's one whose contestants might want Steve Harvey to spare them the crown.
The Center for Popular Democracy on Wednesday debuted the Worst Employer in America Pageant theworstemployers.com. Eight companies, including Deerfield-based Walgreens, were selected as nominees, and people are being asked to vote on which is worst "based on such bad behaviors as a poor CEO to median worker pay ratio, failure to pay minimum wage and overtime, worker lawsuits against companies, or forcing workers to work through breaks, among other egregious practices."
A "winner" will be named Feb. 29. No word yet on the "prize," which will be announced the same day.
The nonprofit, which advocates for low-wage workers and immigrants among other progressive causes, is pitting two employers against each other in four categories. In banking, voters choose between Bank of America and Wells Fargo. In supermarkets, it's Sam's Club vs. Whole Foods. Among drugstores, Walgreens is up against CVS. And among pizza chains, Papa John's competes with Yum! Brands, owner of Pizza Hut.
"America's most recognizable brands are some of our biggest employers and we want to highlight their poor treatment of employees," JoEllen Chernow, director of economic justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, said in a statement. "Consumers are no longer just judging companies on how much they like their products or the efficiency of their services. In 2016, customers care about how companies treat their workers full stop. Yup, it's a thing."
In selecting the nominees, the group considered national corporations that provide everyday services to consumers, have at least 20,000 employees, are ubiquitous brands and have recently been in the news for employee-related issues.
As they click through the contest, voters will find short explanations of what landed each company on the podium.
For Walgreens, the group claims "part-time workers can't afford to get sick," because only workers who average 30 hours or more a week are eligible for paid sick time. It also claims that the CEO's 2014 pay was 540 times the median pay of Walgreens workers. Total compensation for then-Walgreens CEO Gregory Wassonwas $16.7 million, the Tribune has reported.
Walgreens declined to comment. But a spokesperson clarified that its policy is that anyone who averages 20 hours a week qualifies for paid sick leave.
As for Walgreens' opponent, the group claims CVS' CEO got a 26 percent raise in 2014 that brought his salary to $23 million, while workers making $9 an hour got less than a 5 percent bump. It also accused the company of not offering part-timers paid sick leave and mentioned a lawsuit in New York alleging that workers were ordered to racially profile nonwhite shoppers.
In an emailed statement accusing the "pageant" of relying on inaccurate and incomplete information, CVS spokesman Mike DeAngelis countered that its CEO pay is in line with industry standards and that workers who average 30 hours a week are eligible for benefits. He added that the company has firm nondiscrimination policies and is vigorously defending itself against the lawsuit.
Whole Foods spokesperson Allison Phelps noted that the company has been named one of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for for 18 consecutive years, a contest based on employee surveys.
Yum! Brands said it pays employees above the applicable minimum wage on average at its company-owned restaurants. Among the group's gripes with Yum was that it doesn't reimburse drivers for costs associated with delivery work, resulting in their receiving less than minimum wage.
Wells Fargo declined to comment. The other companies listed in the pageant did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Source: Chicago Tribune
Can Community Organizers Build Progressive Power?
Last Tuesday, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while pinned on the ground by Baton Rouge police. The next day,...
Last Tuesday, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while pinned on the ground by Baton Rouge police. The next day, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a cop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as he reached for his ID. On Thursday, protests swept across the country calling for an end to police killings of black and brown men. At one of those peaceful protests, in Dallas, a sniper opened fire from a vantage point above the march, trying to kill white police officers. Five officers died.
It was against this backdrop of deep social turmoil that dozens of community organizing groups from across the country came together in Pittsburgh for the People’s Convention.
Over the weekend, more than 1,500 community organizers and leaders—many of them Black and Latino—convened to discuss ways to create a more cohesive, powerful progressive grassroots network. It was the first step by the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive organization that is trying to fill the vacuum left in the wake of ACORN’s demise in 2010.
On top of the recent events in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas, the convention also came at a critical political moment—on the Republican side, Donald Trump’s campaign is increasingly stoking racial animosity; on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has worked to push his party’s platform leftward.
“We wanted to make it both a statement in the electoral moment and really a statement that transcends the electoral moment,” Brian Kettenring, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Prospect at the convention. “We’re trying to stand in this particular moment but also not be captive to the narrow partisan politics of our country.”
The convention started off Friday with a march of more than 1,000 activists through the streets of downtown Pittsburgh, including stops outside the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to demand fair wages for workers; the Pittsburgh Federal Reserve to call for equitable economic policies for working families; and Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey’s office to protest his anti-immigration stances. Some onlookers joined the chanting—“What do we want? Justice. If we don’t get it? Shut it down,”—and raised their fists in solidarity. Others were visibly angry at the marchers’ message of justice for undocumented immigrants and victims of police brutality.
The following day, activists heard speeches from heavyweights of the progressive movement like Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and the Reverend William Barber III, leader of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement, who both spoke powerfully about the recent killings and the need for a unified response.
“The country needs healing, but you can’t heal a dirty wound,” Ellison pronounced. “A dirty wound needs disinfectant.”
He pointed to the “amazingly poised” Diamond Reynolds, the fiancée of Philando Castile, who streamed the immediate aftermath of his shooting on Facebook, as a model for the movement. “We need to push back with the same presence of mind of Diamond Reynolds,” he said.
With the killings of Sterling and Castile fresh on everyone’s mind, the specter of police violence loomed large at the convention. But the People’s Convention also wove together the threads of today’s social justice movements—not just Black Lives Matter, but also those campaigning for immigration reform, the Fight for $15, LGBTQ rights, and environmental justice, in a way that made clear the intersectionality of modern progressive organizing.
“We’re all dealing with the various layers of oppression,” said Jose Lopez, organizing director for Make the Road New York. “Whether it’s workplace inequality, housing inequality, or the recent decision from the Supreme Court, which to a degree sent a message to our families that we’re going to create opportunity for a limited number of children but we’re going to throw away the key to the gate to this country when we begin to talk about their parents.”
“[This convention] created the space and now we have to make sure we continue to stay in contact—using CPD as the vehicle—so that we can build out a network of power that can transform everything from immigration reform to worker rights to housing rights to the attack of black and brown people in this country by police,” Lopez said.
Groups attending the convention included New York Communities for Change, which helped launch the Fight for $15 back in 2012 and is now turning its focus toward addressing affordable housing needs in the city; Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, which, in response to the police killing of Jamar Clark helped organize a protest occupation outside a North Minneapolis police precinct that lasted 16 days; the Texas Workers Defense Project, a worker advocacy group that has improved labor standards in the Texas construction industry; and Make the Road state chapters that have led local fights against deportations. Some of these groups have collaborated before, while others have been somewhat isolated from other community organizing groups.
Community organizations lost much of their national clout in the wake of ACORN’s demise, which was brought about in 2009 by a conservative smear campaign. CPD’s goal now—and that of the organizations represented at the conference—is to rebuild such groups’ institutional power and make it a critical part of the broader progressive movement.
In recent years, that movement has had some signal successes, which conference workshops showcased: how SEIU successfully organized for a $15 minimum wage in Seattle; how black community groups in St. Louis helped create lasting momentum for policing reform in the wake of Ferguson; how the New York Working Families Party established a powerful electoral presence; how organizers in Florida worked for climate justice in communities vulnerable to climate change.
“We are beginning to launch a real national organizing framework—that’s something that really hadn’t been seen since ACORN went under,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change. “I think this is the beginning of an intentional path forward to try to create real structural power for community institutions and neighborhoods that already exists in places like the labor movement.”
Creating such structural power, organizers admit, will be challenging. There’s a shortage of funding for community organizations, which has kept them closely tethered to more well-funded labor unions and foundations—and, in many ways, also tethered to their funders’ agendas. The central challenge is how to establish a sustainable and independent source of funding, as unions have done with member dues, in order for community power to become a singular force on its own.
Beyond that, a critical question for community organizers is how to capitalize on both the current social and political moment.
“The genie is out the bottle with progressive politics,” Kettenring said. He believes that a strong force of community organizations can help direct the progressive movement’s current political capital in a way that avoids pitfalls of the past. “One of the historic strategic failures of the progressive movement has been its failure on race. So when you look at this convention and look at how diverse it is and how many of the organizations are rooted communities of color, you see the potentiality of how the community organizing sector can help root a more progressive, but also diverse politics.”
By Justin Miller
Source
5 Things to Know about Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump Education Choice
5 Things to Know about Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Trump Education Choice
Billionaire Betsy DeVos, a major GOP funder and party activist from Michigan, has been tapped by Donald Trump to become...
Billionaire Betsy DeVos, a major GOP funder and party activist from Michigan, has been tapped by Donald Trump to become the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education next year.
Many have decried the choice as a looming disaster for public schools in America, with NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia observing that DeVos' "efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students. She has lobbied for failed schemes, like vouchers--which take away funding and local control from our public schools--to fund private schools at taxpayers' expense."
Randi Weingarten, the president of AFT, stated that "Betsy DeVos is everything Donald Trump said is wrong in America--an ultra-wealthy heiress who uses her money to game the system and push a special-interest agenda that is opposed by the majority of voters. Installing her in the Department of Education is the opposite of Trump's promise to drain the swamp."
The choice signals the President-elect's intention to put the expansion of taxpayer-funded charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools at the center of his national agenda on education.
Through her riches, Betsy DeVos has had a disproportionate influence on national and state policies affecting millions of Americans, helping to force through changes to the law that gut the rights of workers and redirect American tax dollars to fund risky charter school experiments that have repeatedly failed for America's children.
She has also applauded efforts to gut election laws that are designed to prevent corruption, recasting the issue of money in politics as free speech and her right to speak "as loudly as we please." (Her remarks about this and her praise for Tom DeLay's "honesty" begin at the 52-minute mark here.)
Here are five facts to get smart about who Betsy DeVos is and what her nomination could mean for America.
1. Betsy DeVos Refused to Send Her Children to Public Schools in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Betsy and her husband Dick DeVos, Jr., have four children they raised in the prosperous town of Ada, Michigan, which is the headquarters of AmWay, the multi-level marketing company that made the DeVos family billionaires. She is also an heir to the Prince Corporation fortune from sun visors and other car parts.
The public elementary, middle, and high school in Ada, a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, are highly ranked, but she did not send her children to public schools. She has said that her two daughters were home-schooled for a number of years.
Instead of sending their children to public schools, for nearly three decades, Betsy and Dick have focused on pushing vouchers for private schools and bankrolling politicians to advance their agenda to redirect American tax dollars away from truly public schools.
2. She Retained a Convicted Felon to Lobby for Her Wish List of Education Reforms (and There Are Other Scandals)
In 2004, Betsy DeVos hired Scott Jensen to aid the legislative agenda of her group "American Federation for Children" (AFC), a 501(c)(4) arm of Alliance for School Choice, her 501(c)3), which push so-called education reform measures.
The problem is that in 2002, Jensen had been charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor for misconduct in office--for illegally using his office as the Republican Assembly Speaker to direct that state employees to perform campaign work at public expense. He and the others who were charged challenged the reach of state statutes in court through various appeals from 2002 through 2004, but they lost their efforts to prevent criminal trials.
But, the fact that Jensen was charged with felonies for misusing public tax dollars for partisan political purposes did not deter Betsy DeVos from hiring him in 2004 to advance her personal agenda to change American schools on behalf of AFC.
In 2005, he was tried in state court and convicted on all counts. The presiding judge told Jensen "what you did was a great wrong to the citizens of this state" because "You used your power and your influence to run an illegal campaign funding operation." The judge sentenced Jensen to five years, including 15 months of confinement along with supervised release.
That conviction and public condemnation did not end Jensen's job for Betsy DeVos. Jensen appealed his conviction, and he also lost his office in the legislature, but he had a job with DeVos.
For the next five years, Jensen was a convicted felon and DeVos' point person in pushing her school choice agenda in the states.
In 2010, after changes in the judiciary, Jensen won an appeal of his conviction and agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor crime to settle the case.
His conviction for that crime also had no impact on DeVos' decision to keep him on to push school choice.
Accordingly, perhaps it should come as no surprise that while all that was going on, another DeVos family school choice PAC was fined for $5.2 million by the Ohio Elections Board in 2008 for circumventing Ohio campaign finance laws. It was the largest fine for violating election laws in state history.
Do the ends justify the means for Betsy DeVos?
3. DeVos Has Pushed Policies Cloaked as "Choice" that Undermine Public Schools in Michigan and Nationwide
Her particular area of interest is the deregulation and privatization of the education system, initially through the introduction of education "vouchers."
The primary organizations that DeVos has bankrolled to carry out these policy goals are the dark money group, American Federation for Children (AFC), which is a 501(c)(4), and its affiliated 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, Alliance for School Choice. These groups have become major contributors to the right-wing corporate education reform echo chamber.
AFC describes itself as "creating an education revolution" through what is described as "school choice," via vouchers (tax dollars spent on private schools including religious schools), tax credits, and non-taxable "Education Savings Accounts."
AFC has gone through several evolutions since its 1998 founding including name changes. Some of these changes occurred after political controversies such as violations of campaign finance laws in Ohio and Wisconsin, as noted above.
AFC is and always has been a very important player in local state and national politics, helping to strongly support Republican candidates who move her education privatization agenda forward.
For example, AFC invested heavily in Wisconsin's recall elections to protect its political allies, including Republican Governor Scott Walker. Since 2010, AFC has spent at least $4.5 million on independent expenditures and issue ads in Wisconsin. This amount doesn't include the individual donations given by members of the DeVos family, or any spending on dark money groups trying to influence the elections without disclosing their donors.
AFC also aggressively promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), where Jensen has represented AFC's lobbying agenda.
ALEC, describes itself as a voluntary association of state legislators but it operates as a corporate bill mill where the corporations that fund most of ALEC's operations and where corporate lobbyists and special interest representatives get an "equal voice and vote" with elected officials to approve "model" bills without the press or public present. AFC has been a "trustee" level sponsor of ALEC and is a member of ALEC's Education Task Force.
AFC works alongside ALEC to push so-called "model bills" promoting "school choice" and tax changes to subsidize private schools. Essentially, both ALEC and AFC want that national priority to be expanded funding for charter schools, which defunds truly public schools.
The nomination of Betsy DeVos to be the head of the Department of Education is a clear sign that the nation is about to embark on a dangerously extreme national experiment in the privatization of our education system that could deal a death blow to our public schools as we have known them.
There's little doubt that DeVos would use her power to undermine one of America's greatest innovations that helped make our country and economy so strong in the 20th century--quality public schools--and instead, use the idea of 'reform' to further subsidize private schools along with for-profit companies and non-profits operating charter schools.
The expansion of charters has marched forward despite the fact that fly-by-night charter operators that have committed more than $200 million dollars in fraud and waste in recent years, as documented by the Center for Popular Democracy.
Some of that expansion has occurred through for-profit companies, like K12 Inc., getting tax dollars for so-called "virtual schools," to operate as charters or as part of the public school system.
Dick DeVos, in a joint interview with Betsy DeVos, noted that he "commended to homeschoolers to consider is check out K12... Bill Bennett reviews the K12 personally, ... it's very consistent with our Christian world view..."
Like Betsy DeVos' AFC, K12 has had a seat and vote on ALEC's Education Task Force, and K12 has a seat on ALEC's corporate board. K12 has paid its CEO millions in stock in the company, whose revenues come overwhelmingly from public school budgets. CMD has called one of the leaders of K12 the highest paid "teacher" in America.
As the Center for Media and Democracy has detailed, the federal government has spent nearly $4 billion in tax dollars on the charter school experiment advanced by DeVos and other billionaires, like the Kochs and the Walton family.
CMD has also documented how charter schools in the DeVos backyard of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and how the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never even opened. That does not include the nearly $1 billion state spending that the Detroit Free Press has documented have gone to charters in that state.
4. Theocracy: She Has Pushed for Vouchers and More to Get Tax Money to Support Christian Schools
DeVos has approached the issue of education as a religious issue for her personally and as an area which she wants to change the law to reflect her personal views. A long-time partisan activist, she got involved in education "reform" in the early 1990s, around the time that her husband ran for a seat on the Michigan state Board of Education.
After he stepped down from that post, in 1993 she and her husband took on the "Education Freedom Fund," which, she has said, "I would define as ultimately Christian in its nature because in excess of 90% of the parents who receive these scholarships choose Christian schools to go to." EFF provides private funding for private school tuition, and is supported with significant donations from the DeVos family.
Why did she and here husband choose to get involved in the political battles over public education even though they did not send their kids to public schools and they financially support private Christian schools?
In a joint interview for "The Gathering," a group focused on advancing Christian ideology through philanthropy, she and her husband said they decided to focus on reforming public education and funding for private education because the "Lord led us there" and "God led us."
At that meeting, they were asked if it would not have been simpler to fund Christian schools directly rather than fund political efforts like vouchers to get more tax dollars to fund Christian schools, and she replied: "There are not enough philanthropic dollars in America to fund what is currently the need in education versus what is spent every year on education in this country... So, our desire is to confront the culture in ways that will continue to advance God's Kingdom," adding that they want "to impact our culture [in ways] that may have great Kingdom gain in the long-run by changing the way we approach things."
Her husband added: "We are working .... to allow for our Christian worldview, which for us comes from a Calvinist tradition, and to provide for a more expanded opportunity someday for all parents to be able to educate their children in a school that reflects their world view and not each day sending their child to a school that may be reflecting a world view that may be quite antithetical to the worldview they hold in their families."
When asked if they are "against public education," they have denied that charge while trying to reframe the conversation.
Betsy DeVos responded: "No, we are for good education and for having every child have an opportunity for a good education. And having grown up in families that are in the business world, we both believe that competition and choices make everyone better, and that ultimately if the system that prevails in the United States today had more competition, if there were other choices for people to make freely that all of the schools would become better as a result and that excellence would be sought in every setting. So we are very strong proponents of fundamentally changing the way we approach education ... because there are hundreds of thousands and millions of children that are forced to go every day to a school that is not meeting their needs and it's not right."
Her husband added that they are for "public education" but that's not the same as "public schools." He said public funding for education of all kinds is a "laudable concept" that should not be forced to operate through "government-run schools."
He also stated: "In my opinion, the Church has sadly retrenched from its central role in our community, to where now as we look at many communities in our country the church which ought to be in our view far more central to the life in our community has been displaced by the public school as the center for activity the center for what goes on the community...."
He added, "it is certainly our hope that churches would continue no matter what the environment whether there is government funding someday through vouchers or tax credits or some other mechanism...that more and more churches will get more and more active and engaged in education. We just can think of no better way to rebuild our families and our communities than to have that circle of church, school, and family much more tightly focused and being built on a consistent world view."
Betsy DeVos did not disagree with this statement of their shared goals and responded: "If I can just add to that very quickly, I think for many years the church in general has felt that it is important for the children of the congregation to be in the schools to make a difference but in fact I think what has happened in many cases for the last couple of decades is that the schools have impacted the kids more than the kids have impacted the schools. The young children need to have a pretty solid foundation to be able to combat the kind of influences that they are presented with on a daily basis."
(All quotes above are transcribed from their hour-long interview for "The Gathering," available here.)
5. She Bragged that Her Family Was the Biggest GOP Funder of "Soft Money," Plus They Have Funneled Millions in Dark Money
Betsy DeVos has used her family fortune to distort public policy to suit her personal agenda through direct donations and dark money because, in her own words, she wants a "return on our investment."
The DeVos family is a major funder of the Republican party. In a 1997 op-ed that DeVos wrote for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, she pointedly admitted, "my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party." She also said that she decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that they were buying influence and simply concede the point, admitting "we expect a return on our investment," to make America reflect their vision for it.
DeVos has served as chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and was the finance chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
In addition to the disclosed and undisclosed political spending for controversial politicians like Tom DeLay--whom Betsy DeVos has called one of the most honest men in politics--the DeVos family through the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation has been a major funder of many extreme socially conservative organizations such as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family and Coral Ridge Ministries.
The DeVos family fortune funds pro-education privatization, anti-union and pro-school voucher groups.
In 2011 alone, the DeVos foundation gave $3 million to David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group created and funded by the Koch Brothers. The DeVos Foundation gave another $2.5 million to the Koch conduit DonorsTrust from 2009 to 2010.
The DeVos foundation has also contributed millions of dollars to other right wing organizations such as the State Policy Network, Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, Federalist Society, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and others.
Betsy and Dick DeVos were featured at a meeting of the ALEC sibling group, the State Policy Network, which gave its highest award in 2014 to the Mackinac Center for pushing the misnamed "right to work" bill into law in Michigan, even though that think tank has claimed to the IRS that it engages in no lobbying.
Their fortune has helped to underwrite Mackinac's operations and agenda, which has included expanding powers for emergency managers to replace elected officials, which helped create the conditions for the Flint, Michigan, tragedy of kids being poisoned by lead in their water, as CMD has detailed in a history of those provision.
In 2015, DeVos money also helped fund the push for adoption of a statewide religious freedom restoration act, or RFRA law, that awards adoption agencies in Michigan the right to claim a religious exemption from having to serve LGBTQ couples. Both the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation and the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation gave money to Bethany Christian Services, which lobbied hard for passage of the controversial RFRA.
Recently, the DeVos family also helped fund two pieces of extreme state legislation in Michigan. The state preemption bill, dubbed the "death star," HB 4052, passed by the legislature in 2015 bans cities from enacting their own laws governing wages and benefits. In one fell swoop, the law preempted local regulation of nine wage and benefit policies ranging from minimum wage to worker training and organizing.
Kim Haddow and CMD researchers contributed to this article.
By Lisa Graves
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