Report: Lax Oversight Leaves Charter Schools Vulnerable to Fraud
SF Gate - March 24, 2015, by Jill Tucker - California’s 1,100 charter schools are subject to insufficient financial...
SF Gate - March 24, 2015, by Jill Tucker - California’s 1,100 charter schools are subject to insufficient financial oversight, lax practices that leave the door wide open to fraud, mismanagement and abuse, according to a report released Tuesday by a trio of education policy groups.
Since the first charter school opened in 1992, state or local officials have uncovered more than $81 million in fraud or mismanagement. But that’s probably the tip of a very big iceberg, according to the report released by Public Advocates, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Center for Popular Democracy.
The report’s authors estimate that charter school fraud could be closer to $100 million in 2015 alone, based on methodology cited the Association for Certified Fraud Examiners 2014 Report to Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse.
“Charter schools promised to innovate and show best practices for schools — but is this how they are living up to that promise? This is not an example of how schools should work – this is an example of what not to do,” said Martha Sanchez, a parent and community leader with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
The California Charter School Association, however, criticized the report for “making estimates based on global assumptions calls into the question the credibility of the report and the organizations that published it.”
“While we don’t presume to understand the motives behind this report we do know that California is a state where the charter school sector, authorizers and legislators have come together to put into place real solutions,” according to the charter organization, in a statement. “It is unfortunate that we continue to have similar distractions for a sector that the report itself suggests is demonstrating to be responsible users of precious public funds in addition to serving a half a million public school students well.”
The report cites several instances of uncovered fraud, including $2.7 million for excessive amounts of school supplies at Los Angeles’ Wisdom Academy of Young Scientists Charter Schools, provided by vendors who were family members or close acquaintances of the former executive director and who charged exorbitant prices.
The report also cited Oakland’s American Indian charter schools, where the former director reportedly diverted more than $3 million to his own businesses via rent and other expenditures.
The agency that authorized the charter school — typically the local school district or county office of education — is responsible for oversight, but they don’t always have enough staff to perform fraud risk assessments, the report said.
The report recommended that charter school audits include an assessment by someone certified in financial forensics and that school board or county boards of education should require charter schools to ensure fraud controls are in place before granting a charter or renewing one.
“California already spends too little on public education, so it’s critical to ensure that this money actually goes where it’s intended — to serve kids,” said Hilary Hammell, an attorney at Public Advocates. “When charter school operators misappropriate public education money, our state’s most vulnerable families suffer.”
Source
This holiday season, let's talk about retail workers instead of coal miners
This holiday season, let's talk about retail workers instead of coal miners
Far more than the miners or factory workers that President Trump regularly touts, the retail salesperson is the face of...
Far more than the miners or factory workers that President Trump regularly touts, the retail salesperson is the face of today’s economy. Nearly 16 million people work in retail in America, more than 300 times as many as the 52,000 in coal mining. They are the people wrapping gifts, stocking shelves and providing advice on what to buy this holiday season for your friends and family.
Read the full article here.
Uniting to Improve Wages and Conditions for Workers
Huffington Post - February 26, 2013, by Camille Rivera - In March of 1968 -- just three weeks before he was...
Huffington Post - February 26, 2013, by Camille Rivera - In March of 1968 -- just three weeks before he was assassinated -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in a speech that one of the great lessons of the civil rights struggle was that it was not just about integration -- but also about economic justice.
"We know now that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters," Dr. King said. "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger? ... What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn't earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?"
Unfortunately, 45 years later, we can still ask those questions.
New York is one of the richest cities in America, but it also has one of the widest income inequality gap in the nation: A report last year found that the top one percent of income earners made 32 percent of the income.
We have far too many hard-working New Yorkers, many of them people of color, working at or below minimum wage, often without overtime and benefits. They work in car washes, fast food restaurants, as airport security guards and in food service and small supermarkets.
That's Why UnitedNY, Make the Road NY, New York Communities for Change and labor organizations like the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and 32BJ SEIU supported the workers when they formed an unprecedented coalition across all industries last summer, and held a big rally and march in New York City on July 24.
Since then, there have been actions, a boycott and a one-day fast food walk out -- all of which generated a great deal of public support. Five car washes have voted to join RWDSU; some supermarkets have settled unfair labor practices suits and agreed to pay a combined $750,000 in lost wages and back pay.
That's also why UnitedNY and the Center for Popular Democracy released a report on the ongoing plight of low-wage workers in New York City at a "Workers Rising" symposium on Feb. 13. The report spelled out the problem -- and organizing efforts -- and offered a list of recommendations to improve wages and working conditions for those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
The recommendations range from supporting legislation to allow paid sick days for workers, to establishing a Mayor's Office of Labor Standards to ensure that employment laws are enforced, to urging New York State to allow the City to set a minimum wage higher than the State minimum, due to the higher cost of living in the five boroughs. These proposals are the result of conversations with workers who have struggled for far too long to make ends meet. They are the result of hearing from families who have lost loved ones who could not afford to take time off from work to get the medical care they needed before it was too late.
Hundreds of workers, advocates and community members turned out for the symposium, which featured lively panel discussions about strategies to help lift low-wage workers into the middle class. The energy inside those rooms was electric; the air was thick with hope and dreams.
A gaggle of elected officials was on hand for the Workers Rising event, including two declared mayoral candidates -- Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and former city comptroller Bill Thompson - as well as City Council members and others.
The report came just one day after President Obama said in his State of The Union speech that America should not be a place where working people who make minimum wage are still in poverty.
"That's wrong," he told a joint session of Congress. "In the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty."
Obama called for raising the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour, with indexing tied to cost of living increase. That's certainly a lot better than $7.25, which is the minimum wage at the federal level and in the State of New York, but nowhere near enough in New York City.
The UnitedNY/CPD report said raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour would allow full-time workers to make just $20,000 a year. The report also noted that more than 110,000 full-time workers live in poverty.
Any way you look at it, an increase in the minimum wage is overdue, and needs to be enacted immediately. If it can't be approved on the federal or state levels, those of us here in New York City must find a way to increase it locally. It is clear that $7.25 an hour is not enough to make ends meet, and the time for change is now.
All in all, the symposium helped to foster real conversation between elected officials, policy experts, and the low-wage workers themselves about the economic issues that are plaguing New York's workforce. Symposium attendees left the conference energized, engaged and filled with hope. They would have made Dr. King proud.
Source: Huffington Post
The elevator moment: when to speak up, when to stay quiet, and the power of both
The elevator moment: when to speak up, when to stay quiet, and the power of both
Anger, pain, and courage. That was what the moment was about. Two women and their pain. A U.S. Senator in an elevator,...
Anger, pain, and courage.
That was what the moment was about.
Two women and their pain.
A U.S. Senator in an elevator, literally trapped and torn.
Frozen by their escalating anger and anguish over what he had just announced.
A yes vote for Brett Kavanaugh to join the Supreme Court.
Read the article and watch the video here.
Can Game-Changing "Community Schools" Model Survive Dallas ISD Politics?
Can Game-Changing "Community Schools" Model Survive Dallas ISD Politics?
On a sunny morning in early May, a wayward DART bus pulled to a stop in front of Paul Laurence Dunbar Learning Center...
On a sunny morning in early May, a wayward DART bus pulled to a stop in front of Paul Laurence Dunbar Learning Center in South Dallas. From the porches of tumbledown homes, neighbors glanced with mild curiosity as the school’s principal, Dionel Waters, stepped aboard. Waiting for him on the bus was an array of local dignitaries, including a city council member, a state representative, a U.S. Congressman, a Dallas County judge, and the guest of honor, Robert Kaplan, the president of the Dallas Fed. The riders had accepted an activist group's invitation to tour hardscrabble Dallas neighborhoods that remain untouched by the region’s booming economy.
Waters stood at the front of the idling bus with a microphone and described for Kaplan some of Dunbar’s challenges. The previous school year, all but two of the campus’ 594 students qualified as low-income. The median household income for the surrounding neighborhood, which borders the sprawling parking lots on Fair Park’s eastern edge, is around $10,000 per year. Broken families are the norm, as are parents with criminal records. Unemployment in the area is staggering, with only a third of working-age men and around 40 percent of working-age women with jobs, according to census data.
Then, Waters pivoted. Together with Hank Lawson, who works for the community development nonprofit Frazier Revitalization Inc., Waters described a vision for transformational change at Dunbar. With support from the Texas Organizing Project, which organized the bus tour, Dunbar would open the 2016-17 school year as Dallas ISD’s first ever “community school.”
Community schools are built on the idea that education doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Poverty levels, family structure, health and nutrition, emotional well-being, and all manner of other outside factors impact academic performance and school quality. Creating a better school, then, requires addressing not only what happens in the classroom but outside social and economic factors as well.
Exactly what a community school looks like depends on the specific needs of the individual school and the surrounding community. Generally speaking, though, the model emphasizes getting parents, community members and teachers greater input in campus decision-making; forging partnerships with local businesses and nonprofits to provide programming and services the school can’t; and finding non-punitive ways to address student behavior.
It is billed as a more humane alternative to No Child Left Behind-style school reform, which can punish poor and heavily minority schools for poor performance without doing much to address root causes.
Community schools are meant to be transformational. A report released in February by the Center for Popular Democracy profiled eight campuses and school districts across the country that have implemented the community schools model with tremendous success.
One of the more dramatic turnarounds took place in Austin. Webb Middle School, a perennially low-performing campus in a working class Hispanic neighborhood in northeast Austin, was on the brink of closure in 2007 when neighbors rallied and convinced the district to give them a final chance to save the school. They turned to the community schools model and crafted a detailed plan based on feedback from parents and neighbors.
The school restored music and art to the curriculum, adding band, orchestra and a dance troupe. The Boys and Girls Club began offering after-school programs. Another nonprofit provided college mentoring. A mobile clinic offered free immunizations and physicals. Other organizations provided parents help with employment, housing and health issues and offered them ESL classes.
Test scores climbed. So did enrollment. By 2015, Webb had gone from the worst middle school in the district to one of its best.
Waters and Lawson hoped something similar could happen at Dunbar, which had been placed on the state’s list of failing schools in the 2014-15 school year. So did Ed Turner, the Texas Organizing Project staffer who’d already spent months laying the groundwork and joined Waters and Lawson on the bus. And so, for that matter, did DISD administrators. Cynthia Wilson, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa’s chief of staff, told the Observer the following day that the district was supporting the community schools model in general and the Dunbar pilot in particular. “From our perspective, [it’s] a win-win,” she said.
On the bus, Kaplan nodded along as Waters spoke; turning Dunbar into a community school certainly seemed like a no-brainer.
But then, rather abruptly, DISD pulled the plug. Alendra Lyons, a community leader in the Dunbar neighborhood who both works at the school and serves on its site-based decision-making committee, was told at a committee meeting in June that the community schools pilot had been moved elsewhere.
Why, after months of planning and the showy presentation to the VIPs on the DART bus, the Dunbar project had been unceremoniously scrapped, Lyons couldn’t say, only that it definitely wasn’t happening.
DISD’s official explanation is, in a word, bureaucracy.
In a July 25 email, DISD spokesman Andre Riley said the community schools initiative had been moved from under Wilson and into the school leadership department.
Stephanie Elizalde, the chief of school leadership, said in a subsequent interview that she decided that John Neely Bryan Elementary in East Oak Cliff was a better fit for the pilot. Like Dunbar, John Neely Bryan is overwhelmingly low-income and has struggled academically, bouncing on and off the state’s list of failing schools. Last August, it received its second consecutive “improvement required” designation from the Texas Education Agency; a third would mean implementation of a “campus turnaround plan” and potentially drastic changes at the campus.
Unlike Dunbar, however, Bryan is part of DISD’s “Intensive Support Network,” two dozen struggling schools targeted by district administrators for special oversight. It also has a more seasoned principal. Elizalde describes Waters as “likeable, intelligent [but] also relatively inexperienced” – barely 30 with just two years as a principal under his belt. Elizalde felt that Bryan’s principal, DISD veteran Tonya Anderson, was better equipped to make the pilot a success.
For advocates of community schools, the stakes are high. A high-profile failure in the pilot could taint the model in DISD and cripple efforts to expand to other campuses. “That is what I don’t want to have happen,” Elizalde said. "I’ve got to think bigger picture."
But several people familiar with the discussions say Dunbar was the victim less of ordinary bureaucratic machinations but of DISD’s toxic internal politics. Specifically, they point to a long-simmering feud between the Texas Organizing Project and trustee Bernadette Nutall.
The rift dates back to efforts to rescue Dade Middle School, which, thanks to poor planning, sky-high turnover, and heavy-handed interventions by then-Superintendent Mike Miles, spun into chaos soon after it opened for the 2013-14 school year. The Texas Organizing Project was heavily involved in the turnaround effort, mobilizing parents and pushing DISD to make Dade the first of 20 community schools in the district. So, for that matter, was Nutall, who was famously removed from the campus following a confrontation with Miles.
By all accounts, the turnaround effort has been a success. There is much less agreement on whether Dade’s resurgence has more to do with the Texas Organizing Project’s community work, Nutall’s close oversight, or, alternately, a belatedly successful intervention by Miles, whose administration found a hyper-competent principal in Tracie Washington and offered the district’s best teachers a hefty salary bump to teach at Dade.
Nutall has bristled at the Texas Organizing Project’s credit-taking. In response to a KERA story this spring focused on the organization’s efforts to turn Dade and other campuses into community schools, Nutall sent an indignant email to trustee Miguel Solis, who was quoted in the piece broadly endorsing the community schools concept, and several DISD administrators saying Dade’s success had been “hijacked.”
Dade staff and community members had long been trying to have a meaningful role in the school, Nutall wrote, but they were consistently rebuffed by Miles and the previous campus administration.
“However, since the new administration has been in place, the staff, parents, students and community members have been able to implement the very same suggestions that were ignored before,” she wrote. “The results have been tremendous. Yet, they weren’t recognized for their efforts. Instead, they believe that their results have been hijacked in an effort to falsely attribute their success to a concept that had little to do with the results.”
In an interview, Nutall said she supports community schools but that there “has to be buy in from all parties.” That wasn’t present at Dade, and it wasn’t present at other campuses where Texas Organizing Project wanted to implement the model. “I understand them [the Texas Organizing Project] getting upset,” she said, adding that “they wanted the whole Lincoln-Madison feeder pattern.”
“I am not going to force something on principals and teachers,” Nutall said. “That is not good governance.”
At the same time, Nutall distanced herself from the decision to move the community schools pilot from Dunbar. The decision, Nutall said, was a judgment call by Elizalde and other DISD administrators.
Allison Brim, organizing director for the Texas Organizing Project, was also careful to downplay the friction between her group and Nutall.
“Essentially what happened, there had just been turnover in the administration,” Brim said.
In early 2016, former chief of school leadership Robert Bravo, with whom the Texas Organizing Project had been in discussions, was replaced by Elizalde. “She was very supportive of the community school concept but really wanted to reconsider where we were going to do the first pilot, which we were open to in some ways as well.”
John Neely Bryan, in everyone’s view, could benefit as much from the community schools model as Dunbar. Perhaps even more, given the comparative lack of outside resources directed at Bryan by churches and nonprofits.
“We were also interested in having full support from the trustee,” Brim said. She described Nutall as “supportive” of community schools but said that John Neely Bryan’s trustee, Lew Blackburn,”was pretty eager to find a school in his district” for a pilot.
In the end, for the Texas Organizing Project as well as for Elizalde, the most important thing “was really getting the opportunity to prove that this model was an effective, successful model for school turnaround,” Brim said.
All parties – Brim, Elizalde, and Nutall – were quick to say that the idea of turning Dunbar into a community school isn’t dead. Discussions are ongoing, and DISD and the Texas Organizing Project may well get around to implementing the model in the coming years.
Dunbar, after all, is still in sore need of a turnaround. State accountability ratings the Texas Education Agency will release in the coming days will show that Dunbar is on the state’s list of failing schools for the second consecutive year, which has made Elizalde rethink the decision to move the pilot.
“If I had a crystal ball and could have seen that Dunbar was going to wind up in [improvement required]-2 status," she said, "I would have left it there anyway.”
By ERIC NICHOLSON
Source
Does the Federal Reserve need reforming?
Does the Federal Reserve need reforming?
First, the Federal Reserve is a pretty complex place. There’s the Fed in Washington we talk about every time interest...
First, the Federal Reserve is a pretty complex place. There’s the Fed in Washington we talk about every time interest rates are changed (or not changed). Then there are 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks, each with a board of directors of nine people.
That’s where the Democratic Party, and activist groups on the left, are aiming their fire.
Currently, three of those nine directors are representatives of private banks (private banks are members of the regional Federal Reserve Banks). Another three are community representatives, but also elected by private banks. The remaining three are appointed by the Board of Governors.
Critics on the left, in addition to calling for more diversity within the Federal Reserve system, also want private banks gone from regional fed banks. “These private banks get a say on who’s on those board of directors and they get representatives on those boards of directors,” said Ady Barkan, campaign director of Fed Up, a left-leaning group that’s pushed for changes at the fed. “It’s an egregious example of regulatory capture.”
Barkan says that regional bank presidents tend to be more conservative, more hawkish on interest rates, than their counterparts in Washington D.C. He blames both a lack of diversity and the influence of private banks. “You can’t imagine for example that cable networks would get some special role in choosing people on the FCC,” said Andrew Levin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College.
But the fed has already undergone some major reforms to limit influence. Under Dodd Frank, the private-bank representatives who serve on regional boards don’t get to nominate regional presidents anymore. “The bankers themselves are not involved in the choice of that person,” explained Stephen Ceccetti, professor of economics at Brandeis International Business school. “That is the person who participates in monetary policy discussions and decisions.”
Ceccetti also argues that the conservative, hawkish leanings of some regional Fed presidents are actually at odds with bank profits. “Higher interest rates don’t help banks,” he said.
Lastly, he said, regional Fed banks aren’t responsible for actually regulating banks, “they don’t even get to see the stuff.”
Chair Janet Yellen herself has said that if the fed were redesigned from scratch, it would probably look pretty different than it did a hundred years ago, but, in her view, it works pretty well. Ceccetti agreed, saying “I don’t see that anyone’s been able to show that there’s any harm or pressure applied by the banks through their directors to the policy of the Federal Reserve.”
Changing the structure of the fed would require an act of congress.
By SABRI BEN-ACHOUR
Source
These Activists Marched From Charlottesville To D.C. To Let Everyone Know That 'White Supremacy Is Real'
These Activists Marched From Charlottesville To D.C. To Let Everyone Know That 'White Supremacy Is Real'
We previously reported that a coalition of activists were planning a 10-day march from Charlottesville to D.C. called...
We previously reported that a coalition of activists were planning a 10-day march from Charlottesville to D.C. called The March to Confront White Supremacy.
Well, the march has been successfully completed!
Read the full article here.
New Report Alleges Charter School Fraud Could Be Costing IL Taxpayers $27 Million
Education Votes - February 2, 2015, by Brian Washington - Proven or suspected fraud in Illinois’ charter school...
Education Votes - February 2, 2015, by Brian Washington - Proven or suspected fraud in Illinois’ charter school industry is suspected of carrying a price tag for taxpayers as high as $27.7 million—that’s according to a new report that some say adds more credence to the argument that these schools need more oversight and accountability.
The report, Illinois’ Charter School Fraud Risk Problem, alleges three fundamental problems with charter school oversight in the state:
Oversight depends heavily on whistleblowers and reporting by the charters themselves; General auditing techniques commissioned by the charters are not specifically designed to uncover fraud, only inaccuracies and inefficiencies; and Government agencies in Illinois tasked with investigating fraud are severely understaffed.The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), which authored the report, also claims to have uncovered massive deficiencies which, at a minimum, reportedly total at least $13.1 million.
“Here is yet another state where lawmakers continue to dump massive amounts of public school funds into the charter industry, yet no one is held accountable at any stage of the funding pipeline,” said NEA President Lily Eskelsen García, who represents about 3-million educators nationwide.
Despite the alleged problems outlined by CPD, as well as what critics charge is the inability of charter schools to show real improvement in relation to student achievement, charter school enrollment in the state has grown by 680-percent.
In the Chicago Public Schools district, the state’s largest public school system, the budget for charter schools, which are considered public schools because they are taxpayer funded, is $616 million for fiscal year 2015—an increase of 15 percent compared to fiscal year 2014.
“Operators (of charter schools) continue to line their pockets unchecked while public schools are forced to slash programs due to lack of funding,” said Eskelsen Garcia. “Lawmakers need to stop treating education budgets like a slush fund for corporate charter school operators and hold them accountable to the students and communities they are supposed to be serving.”
For Illinois, CPD is recommending that the state make major changes to its current oversight structure, including the following:
Mandated audits designed to detect and prevent fraud; Increased transparency and accountability; and A state-imposed moratorium on new charter schools until the state oversight system has been reformed.“Illinois students, their families, and taxpayers cannot afford to keep losing millions of dollars in public funds at the hands of charter school operators, who essentially enforce their own rules,” said Eskelsen Garcia. “It’s time for the Illinois legislature, State Board of Education, and authorizers, like Chicago Public Schools, to step in and make sure these operators use the funds they are given to fulfill their own promises of a great education for their students. There should be a sound structure for oversight and accountability whenever taxpayer dollars are applied.”
CPD’s Illinois report follows two other state-specific reports–including one which focused on the state of Pennsylvania. That report, issued last month, charged that fraud and abuse of the state’s charter school industry amounted to a $30 million loss for state taxpayers.
Meanwhile, another recent report by CPD alleges that nationwide taxpayers have lost $100 million due to charter school fraud.
“It’s time Illinois and all states are able to assure taxpayers that their charter oversight systems are airtight and dedicated to quality and community,” said Eskelsen García.
Source
Promueven petición contra Wells Fargo y JPMorgan por “financiar el dolor” de inmigrantes
Promueven petición contra Wells Fargo y JPMorgan por “financiar el dolor” de inmigrantes
La petición cuenta con el respaldo de más de 70 organizaciones bajo el paraguas de la coalición #FamiliesBelongTogether...
La petición cuenta con el respaldo de más de 70 organizaciones bajo el paraguas de la coalición #FamiliesBelongTogether, que incluye a Presente.org, la Unión de Libertades Civiles de EEUU (ACLU), MoveOn.org, Amnistía Internacional, la Alianza Nacional de Trabajadoras Domésticas, MomsRising, Center for Popular Democracy, y Make the Road New York, entre otras.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
A Five-Point Plan for Sanders Going Forward
A Five-Point Plan for Sanders Going Forward
When Bernie Sanders announced a year ago that he was running for president, few of his supporters—and probably not even...
When Bernie Sanders announced a year ago that he was running for president, few of his supporters—and probably not even Sanders himself—expected that he would actually win. It appeared that Sanders, like his hero Eugene Debs—who ran for president five times in the early 1900s on the Socialist Party ticket—was running mainly to inject progressive issues into the national debate and to help build a movement for radical change.
Debs never captured more than 6 percent of the popular vote (in 1912), but his campaigns played an important role in shaping Americans’ views. In the 1912 presidential race, Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson (the eventually winner) and Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt co-opted many of Debs’s ideas. Congress eventually adopted some of the planks of the Socialist Party’s 1912 platform, including the minimum wage, child labor laws, women’s suffrage, Social Security, unemployment insurance, occupational health and safety laws, and the creation of the Labor Department.
So in “Debsian” terms, Sanders has already won. His attacks on the “billionaire class” have resonated with the American people. Far more than Hillary Clinton, he has tapped and channeled Americans’ anger over rising inequality, declining living standards, and the disproportionate political influence of big business and the super-rich. Although he calls himself a democratic socialist, Sanders is really championing a new New Deal—an American version of European social democracy.
And polls reveal that a majority of Americans agree with his policy agenda for challenging the political and business establishment. One CNN poll found that 71 percent of Americans—including 84 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents and 51 percent of Republicans—believe that our economic system unfairly favors the wealthy. Another poll by CBS and The New York Times found that 63 percent of Americans favor increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and large corporations to help reduce income inequality. Indeed, poll after poll has also showed that large majorities of Americans favor a campaign-finance overhaul, stricter Wall Street regulations, government-mandated paid family leave, and a federal minimum wage increase to $15 an hour by 2020.
Sanders has pushed Hillary Clinton—a liberal on domestic social issues, a centrist on taxes and business regulations, a sometime foreign policy hawk, and a less-than-ardent progressive—to the left. Indeed, the Democrats’ presidential primary has largely been fought on Sanders’s terms. His priorities—increasing the minimum wage, toughening Wall Street regulations, expanding Medicare and providing free public higher education, combating unemployment (particularly high among African-Americans), paid family leave, and ending the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels—have dominated the debates and pushed Clinton to adopt milder versions of his proposals. (In some areas, such as police racism, our biased criminal justice system, and mass incarceration, Clinton has taken the lead and Sanders has followed suit.)
In one year, Sanders has gone from being a relatively invisible senator from a small state—an outsider in the upper chamber and in mainstream politics, not even a registered Democrat—to being a political force to be reckoned with. Along with Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, he now leads the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
Nevertheless, in the last few weeks it has become clear that Sanders will not be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. In states that have already held primaries, Clinton has gained 12,989,134 (57 percent) of the votes compared with 9,957,889 votes (43 percent) for Sanders. In the delegate count, Clinton is beating Sanders 1,772 (54 percent) to 1,498 (46 percent). Sanders ran a remarkable campaign, but he’s come up short.
Ardent Sanders supporters who still believe that he has a chance to capture the nomination are simply wrong. Even if Sanders beats Clinton in all the remaining primaries (Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, California, Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, and the District of Columbia), he won’t have enough delegates to garner the nomination at the party’s Philadelphia convention. That reality requires Clinton and Sanders to recognize that they—and their supporters—need one another. It also begs the question: What should Sanders do? How can he build on his popularity and success in this year’s campaign to further his goal of transforming American society and politics?
Drawing on the ideas of many people—activists, journalists, scholars, and others, inside and outside Sanders’s camp—I suggest a five-point plan for Sanders and the Sanderistas. This plan gives the many liberals and progressives who have “felt the Bern” a road map to ensure that the 74-year-old Vermont socialist with a Brooklyn accent makes the transition from candidate for president to catalyst for change.
Step One
Between now and the convention, Sanders should fight to the end to get as many delegates as possible. Voters in the remaining primaries—all of which save the June 14 Washington, D.C., contest will be held on June 7—have the right to vote for Sanders or Clinton. Americans deserve to see how much support Sanders has for his progressive agenda. Moreover, having a competitive race with a large Democratic turnout is particularly important in California, which follows an unusual system in which the two candidates with the most primary votes, regardless of party, advance to the general election. Democratic registration in California has been surging, so a strong turnout by Sanders supporters could shut out Republicans from the run-offs for U.S. Senate and some tight congressional contests, and help guarantee more Democratic victories in November.
Between now and the June primaries, Sanders should stop criticizing the Democratic National Committee and Hillary personally and return to focusing on policy issues. After those primaries, he should negotiate a truce with Clinton. In exchange for Sanders suspending his campaign and endorsing Clinton before the Democratic convention, the two Democrats should agree on a strategy that gives Sanders and his followers a significant voice at the convention, during the fight against Trump, and in the run-up to the next Clinton administration.
Step Two
At the convention and through Election Day, Sanders will surely remain on the public stage. He will certainly get a prime-time speaking role at the Democratic convention, where he can reiterate his attacks on the nation’s economic and social injustices, attack Trump, and strongly endorse Clinton.
He should also use his leverage to shape the party’s platform on issues like Wall Street reform, the minimum wage, skyrocketing college tuition, and paid family leave, and insist that Clinton incorporate some of his key policy ideas into her campaign stump speeches. One sign that Clinton and DNC chair Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz are taking heed of Sanders’s insurgency is the appointment this week of a majority of progressives to the party’s platform committee. They include AFSCME’s Paul Booth, former EMILY’s List head Wendy Sherman and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress. Also on the committee are House Democrats Luis Guttierez, of Illinois, Barbara Lee of California, and Maryland’s Elijah Cummings, along with Ohio State Representative Alicia Reece, all stalwart progressives. They join Sanders’s nominees Cornel West, House Democrat Keith Ellison of Minnesota, environment activist Bill McKibben, Arab American leader James Zogby, and Native American White House aide Deborah Parker. (Unfortunately missing from the committee are any progressive economists.)
Sanders has predicted that the convention could get “messy,” explaining that “that’s what democracy is about.” But Sanders should discourage his supporters from disrupting the convention inside and outside the hall. If his followers want to protest, there are plenty of targets in Philadelphia—big banks, insurance companies, McDonald’s, Walmart stores—where they can rally against the billionaire class. A prime target for protesters would be Verizon, where they could join the picket lines of employees who have been on strike since April.
When the convention is over, Sanders should energetically campaign for Clinton in key swing states and for progressive Democrats running for Congress in close races, in order to increase turnout among his supporters. He should make sure that his key staff members land posts on Clinton’s campaign and those of Democratic candidates in battleground races. These aides can help mobilize Sanders’s volunteers and followers to support Clinton. Also in this window, Sanders should escalate his attacks on Trump and remind his supporters of the damage that a Trump presidency would do to the country and to the progressive agenda.
Step Three
After Election Day, once Clinton has won the White House and the Democrats have recaptured the Senate, Sanders will be in a strong position to reshape the agenda of both the Democratic Party and the nation. New York Senator Charles Schumer, a liberal on social issues but a strong ally of Wall Street, may well be the Senate’s next majority leader. To balance the party’s leadership, Sanders should push for a progressive to replace Wasserman Schultz as head of the DNC. Strong candidates include such popular legislators as Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon (the only Senate member to endorse Sanders), and Dick Durbin of Illinois, and House members Karen Bass and Xavier Becerra (both of California), Keith Ellison of Minnesota, and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. The party’s next chair could also come from the ranks of such respected political veterans as Democracy Alliance head Gara LaMarche, Common Cause Director Miles Rapoport, or even billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. (Full disclosure: Rapoport serves on the Prospect’s board.)
Step Four
After January, when the new president and Congress take office, Sanders will become chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee—assuming Democrats retake the upper chamber, as predicted. In that position, Sanders can influence federal budget, tax, and regulatory policy to advance a progressive agenda around financial reform, anti-poverty initiatives, health care, environmental sustainability, affordable housing, Social Security, labor law reform, workplace safety, paid family leave, and even campaign-finance reform, immigration reform, and the military budget.
One of his perks in that post will be to fill the committee’s staff with experts from universities and such progressive think tanks as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, the National Employment Law Project, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He will also be able to hold public hearings—in Washington, D.C., but also in cities around the country—on a wide range of issues. Hearings provide opportunities for ordinary Americans as well as experts to make their voices heard, gain media attention, and advance a progressive agenda. They can serve as forums that can help support grass-roots activists.
Sanders could also work with progressive think tanks and activist groups to create a “shadow cabinet” of experts on the left to parallel Clinton’s cabinet picks. This Sanders circle could issue regular reports on what the major federal executive agencies could be doing to advance an economic and social justice agenda, much as the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership reports became the blueprint for the Reagan Revolution.
Step Five
Through the 2018 midterm elections and beyond, Sanders can help build the “grass-roots political revolution” without which, as he has said throughout his campaign, there is little hope for transformational change. Sanders’s campaign success has been fueled by the many grass-roots insurgencies that in recent years have challenged the political and economic establishment. These include Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Fight for $15, campus campaigns to divest from fossil fuels and slash student debt, and crusades for women’s health care access, marriage equality, and gun safety. Sanders’s campaign helped give voice to these activists and their issues. They fed his campaign and were fed by it.
Many progressive politicians have promised to transform their electoral campaigns into ongoing movement operations, but few have had the patience or resources to do so. Many of Jesse Jackson’s supporters hoped that his presidential efforts in 1984 and 1988 would evolve into a permanent Rainbow Coalition of progressive activists, but it didn’t happen. After Obama won his brilliantly executed 2008 campaign—built by an army of seasoned political and community organizers who trained hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the art of activism—he created the nonprofit now known as Organizing for Action (OFA).
Many of the organizers who worked on that campaign went to work for OFA, hoping to build an infrastructure to keep campaign volunteers involved in issue battles in between election cycles. But OFA has not lived up to its early promise, in large part because Obama made it an arm of the DNC in a bid to build support for his legislative agenda.
Occasionally, however, the candidate and the movement forge ahead beyond the campaign. After the writer Upton Sinclair narrowly lost his 1934 bid to become California governor on a radical End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform, his followers built a statewide movement through EPIC clubs that revitalized the state’s Democratic Party into an effective political operation over the next several decades. Similarly, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, a former political science professor and community organizer, took seriously his responsibility to turn his electoral support into a broad statewide progressive movement. After he died in a tragic plane crash in 2002 while running for a third term, his supporters launched several organizations—including Wellstone Action, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, and Minnesotans for a Fair Economy—to mobilize Minnesotans around issues and help recruit, train, and elect progressives to office.
Ever since Sanders first announced his plan to run for president, many journalists and activists have looked for signals that he was making plans, once the election was over, to transform his campaign into that “grass-roots political revolution” he’s been calling for. Not surprisingly, during the campaign Sanders and his top advisers have focused almost entirely on winning votes and delegates. But early on, some of his key operatives were already thinking about the longer term.
Next month, some progressive leaders inside and outside the Sanders campaign will convene a three-day meeting in Chicago for what they are calling a People’s Summit to strategize about how to build on the Sanders campaign over the long haul. Neither Sanders nor his aides have agreed on what a post-campaign operation would look like. But many understand that Sanders is in a unique position to use his influence and fundraising ability to build an organization or network to mobilize his supporters that, in the short term, can push President Clinton and the Democrats in Congress to the left on key issues like the minimum wage, health-care reform, Supreme Court nominees, and Wall Street regulation, and, in the longer term, can become an ongoing force for progressive change.
Can Sanders sustain the momentum of his campaign into the marshy terrain of movement-building? He has the capacity to raise money from the millions of people who helped him collect more than $200 million for his campaign. He has an unprecedentedly large list of volunteers who could form the basis of an ongoing organization. How many will want to participate in or contribute to a Sanders-led movement is anybody’s guess. How Sanders deploys these lists, and how he will connect with the many existing progressive groups—unions, environmental groups, community organizing networks, and others—is another open question.
Election campaigns have a set of rules, and a predictable beginning, middle, and end, that helps bring people together for a common goal—electing a candidate on a particular date. Movements are more complicated. The American progressive movement is a diverse mosaic with many groups that compete for attention and funding. They work on many different issues. Some are more willing than others to participate in coalitions, agree on a common set of issue priorities, and forge compromises on legislation. Some are reluctant to endorse candidates or get involved in election campaigns. Many of the activists affiliated with these groups came together to support Sanders, but there is no guarantee that they won’t go their own ways after Election Day.
As the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for eight years (1981-89), Sanders helped build a political coalition that not only adopted progressive laws and helped build progressive institutions but also stayed in power for three decades after he left office to run for Congress. In the House and Senate, however, Sanders been known as more of a gadfly than a coalition-builder.
But even as a figurehead, Sanders can play an important role in strengthening the left. Sanders can select a number of key issues and work closely with unions and other groups that are already working on those causes. He can be their champion and give them more visibility. He can show up at their meetings and rallies and support their causes. He can raise money to support existing local, statewide, and national groups—like National People’s Action, Planned Parenthood, MoveOn, the Center for Popular Democracy, the Sierra Club, Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, and many others—that recruit and train people in the skills of citizen activism and campaign mechanics, and that help elect progressive Democrats to local, state, and national office.
Going into the 2018 midterm elections, and beyond, Sanders can focus attention on helping a select group of progressive Democrats win primary battles and support their campaigns against Republicans running for local and state offices as well as Congress. In that way, he can help groups build and train a “farm team” of progressive candidates to run for myriad offices, laying the groundwork for expanding the progressive caucuses in the House and Senate.
As part of this inside/outside strategy, Sanders could work with progressive activist groups and his progressive Senate and House colleagues to identify a few key legislative priorities to build multi-year campaigns around these issues. He and his network can convene an annual “Feel the Bern” conference (and some state-level summits as well) to bring together the many strands of the progressive movement, highlight their commonalities, celebrate their victories, showcase their leaders, organizers, and candidates, and identify the key battles on the horizon.
This five-point plan will likely meet with resistance from some Sanders supporters who argue passionately that he can still win the Democratic nomination. Sanders’s string of primary wins has made the notion of a President Sanders begin to seem at least plausible. His favorability ratings have consistently exceeded Clinton’s. He has shown that he can raise significant sums from millions of small-dollar contributors without relying on Wall Street, corporate America, and the super-rich to bankroll his campaign. He has attracted huge crowds and recruited large numbers of volunteers in blue and red states alike. He has surprised many skeptics with his knowledge of policy details and his first-rate performances at Democratic debates.
Indeed, it is remarkable how well Sanders has done despite what he and his supporters have justifiably called a “rigged” system. His backers are correct that some of the party’s rules—regarding the debate schedule, super-delegates, and other matters, many of them mishandled by Wasserman Schultz, the transparently pro-Clinton chair of the Democratic National Committee—put Sanders at a disadvantage.
Sanders’s enthusiasts hope that they can persuade enough super-delegates to switch their loyalties away from Clinton. Their main argument is that Sanders has a better chance than Clinton to beat Trump. In a race once regarded as a coronation for Clinton, recent polls of registered voters show her in a statistical dead heat against Trump. Sanders, by contrast, who enjoys much higher favorability ratings than Clinton, bests Trump, 54 percent to 39 percent, in a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
Of course, Sanders has not yet been subjected to the kind of opposition media campaign that he would certainly face were he the nominee. Slate’s Michelle Goldberg noted in February that Republicans were already salivating about how they would excavate the radical speeches and writings from Sanders’s past, seek to discredit him as an unpatriotic Marxist ideologue, and exploit “his youthful opposition to the CIA and his anti-military leanings” if he were to win the nomination. Republicans would not only paint Sanders as an extreme “tax and spend” liberal but also try to transform him, in the public’s imagination, into a supporter of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, and Mao Tse-tung. This assault may not work with under-40 voters for whom the Cold War is a distant memory and who associate socialism with Scandinavia, not Cuba or China. But such attacks could certainly weaken many undecided voters’ support for Sanders.
By contrast, most Americans already know Clinton’s vulnerabilities since she’s been in the public arena for decades. This accounts for her low favorability ratings, but it also somewhat inoculates her from GOP efforts to further destroy her support. And Clinton is likely to win a surge in Democratic and independent support once she wins the nomination, just as Republicans began rallying behind Trump once he became his party’s presumptive nominee.
And the “Sanders or bust” crowd is playing into Trump’s hands. Some even say they won’t support or vote for Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination, arguing that she and Trump are equally undesirable—two sides of America’s corrupt corporate-dominated political system. The media have exaggerated the number and ferocity of Sanderistas who hold these views, but if enough Sanders followers refuse to vote for Clinton, it could help Trump win in several key battleground states like Colorado, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Florida, and possibly hand Trump the White House.
Some Clinton supporters—particularly among pundits and journalists—have also turned nasty, taking to the blogosphere and talk shows to trash Sanders’s ideas and to attack his most zealous enthusiasts as sexist, racist, and rude. But Clinton knows she needs Sanders’s supporters to win the White House, which is why she has adopted watered-down versions of Sanders’s agenda and why she has tread lightly in criticizing Sanders—at least publicly.
Sanders himself recognizes that his primary goal of making America a more humane and fair society will be made much more difficult if Trump becomes the nation’s president. Despite his differences with Clinton over policy issues, Sanders—as both a politician and a leader of a social insurgency—knows that his movement’s ability to influence the nation’s political culture and public policy will be much greater with her, rather than Trump, in the White House.
Electing Clinton will not produce the “political revolution” that Bernie has been calling for. Indeed, he acknowledged that even if he won the White House, little would change without a significant grass-roots movement to mobilize Americans to challenge corporate America’s disproportionate influence on our political life. Sanders’s supporters don’t want to give up on his election, but they may end up with something more lasting in the end—a generation-long movement. The five-point plan is a good place to start.
By Peter Dreier
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19 hours ago
19 hours ago