CPD IN THE NEWS

Hundreds of activists, community organizers and progressive elected officials from around the country are meeting in Pittsburgh this weekend.

The two conventions, aimed at social and economic progress, will take on new perspectives in the wake of the police shooting deaths of two black men in Minnesota and Louisiana.

Pittsburgh Bureau of Police officials also said Friday that officers will have a heightened awareness of safety in the wake of Thursday night's shooting in Dallas, Texas that killed five police officers and injured seven more.

The Center for Popular Democracy, a national nonprofit that fights for racial equality, worker and immigrant rights, is hosting its first People’s Convention. It’s taking place in Pittsburgh, partly because of the city’s labor roots, location and number of organizations willing to partner, organizers said.

The CPD’s Co-Executive Director Andrew Friedman said attendees are on the front lines of groups demanding higher wages, affordable housing and racial equality. The goal is to build a community of action and share best practices for inciting change.

“I think there’s a huge value in folks realizing they’re not fighting alone,” Friedman said, “and learning about other campaigns in other parts of the country, and sharing strategies that are proving effective.”

Friedman said the Convention will focus on new conversations in light of the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, two black men shot by police this week.

“I think it’s going to have a huge influence, I think folks are coming to the convention with broken hearts and in very low spirits,” Friedman said. “I think folks are in mourning and in shock frankly from these two very painful videos that have surfaced.”

Across the street from the People’s Convention, the annual Local Progress Convening, a gathering of 100 elected officials from across the country, is also taking place this weekend. The convening is another event headed by the CPD, hosted by Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto and though separate from the People’s Convention, will have some coinciding events.

“In order to get any change accomplished, you need allies on the inside that are willing and able to move the levers of governmental power,” said Convening Co-Director Ady Barkan. “And you need advocates and community members and organized institutions on the outside pushing for those changes.”

Barkan said representatives from each gathering will speak at one another’s conventions. 

Friedman said gun violence and opportunities for the African American community will now have a larger focus on the conference’s agenda. He said attendees include activists who focus on ending police violence in Minneapolis – the site of one of the recent shootings.

One of the conference’s events is a march through Pittsburgh protesting inequality in immigration policies, environmental care and workers’ wages.

Organizers said another stop at the courthouse has been added to the march to honor Black Lives Matter and discuss the week’s news.

By VIRGINIA ALVINO

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Democrats on April 3 amassed enough support to block a U.S. Senate confirmation vote on President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, but Republicans vowed to change the Senate rules to ensure the conservative judge gets the lifetime job.

As the Judiciary Committee moved to send Gorsuch’s nomination to the full Senate, Sen. Christopher Coons became the 41st Democrat to announce support for a procedural hurdle — a filibuster — requiring a super-majority of 60 votes in the 100-seat Senate to allow a confirmation vote...

Read full article here.

2015 will forever be remembered as the year the political establishment was shaken by the populist-driven presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. But it should also be remembered as the year another established order was forever altered by change, dissent and revelations of its corruption.

For years, an out-of-touch establishment has dominated education policy too. A well-funded elite has labeled public education as generally a failed enterprise and insisted that only a regime of standardized testing and charter schools can make schools and educators more “accountable.” Politicians and pundits across the political spectrum have adopted this narrative of “reform” and now easily slip into the rhetoric that supports it without hesitation.

But in 2013 a grassroots rebellion growing out of inner city neighborhoods from Newark to Chicago and suburban boroughs from Long Island to Denver began to counter the education aristocracy and tell an alternative tale about schools.

The education counter-narrative is that public schools are not as much the perpetrators of failure as they are victims of resource deprivation, inequity in the system and undermining forces driven by corruption and greed. In other words, it wasn’t schools that needed to be made more accountable; it was the failed leadership of those in the business and government establishment that needed more accountability.

The uprising has been steadily growing into an Education Spring unifying diverse factions across the nation in efforts to reverse education policy mandates and bolster public schools instead of punishing them and closing them down.

2015 became the year the uprising reached a level where it forever transformed the hegemonic control the reformers have had on education policy.

Most prominently, No Child Left Behind, the federal law that’s been driving education policy since 2001, was replaced with a new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, thatreverses many of the edicts of NCLB or leaves them up in the air for states and courts to decide.

Also, comments made by establishment presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will reverberate through the election in 2016. Specifically, at a town hall held in South Carolina, broadcast by C-SPAN, Clinton responded to a question about charter schools by saying, “Most charter schools, I don’t want to say every one, but most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids. Or if they do, they don’t keep them.” A week or so later, Clinton transgressed the status quo again by remarking, in a conversation with members of the American Federation of Teachers, “I have for a very long time also been against the idea that you tie teacher evaluation and even teacher pay to test outcomes. There’s no evidence. There’s no evidence.”

Organizations and individuals connected to wealthy donors to the Democratic Partywere appalled, but the truth is out, and skepticism about education policy prescriptions touted as necessary “reforms” to the system has now left the fringe and become mainstream.

The bigger, more important story emerging from 2015 is that the American public is increasingly at odds with a reform movement that seeks to remake schools into an image promoted by wealthy private foundations, influential think tanks and well-financed political operations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council(ALEC).

The evidence against the education establishment’s case piled up as the year rolled on, and the narrative of public education policy will never be the same.

Blows to the Testocracy

Take the issue of standardized testing. The idea that school improvement should be about enforcing uniform measures of test score outcomes across the nation had a particularly bad year in 2015.

As Seattle classroom teacher and public school activist Jesse Hagopian explains in an article for the National Education Association, standardized tests became the focal point of widespread scorn and dissent.

More than 620,000 public school students around the U.S. refused to take standardized exams. Also, numerous states ended high school graduation tests, and dozens of universities and colleges reduced or eliminated test requirements for their admissions process.

The backlash to standardized testing prompted changes in federal policy as well, including the revision of NCLB. As Hagopian writes, “ESSA deposes one of the cruelest aspects of the test-and-punish policy under NCLB: the so-called ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ annual test score improvement requirement that labeled nearly every American school failing.”

Also, as Hagopian notes, President Obama, acknowledging the growing resistance to testing, “announced in October that ‘unnecessary testing’ is ‘consuming too much instructional time.’ This announcement came as a surprise given Obama’s support for policies like Race to the Top that contributed to the proliferation of high-stakes testing. The reversal of rhetoric was a result of the mass opt-out movement and will surely embolden authentic-assessment activists in the coming year.”

“Pressure from parents, students, teachers, school officials, and community leaders began turning the tide against standardized exam overuse and misuse during the 2014-2015 school year,” declares a report from the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest.org).

FairTest’s report highlights “assessment reform victories” in numerous states where officials suspended or significantly revised testing policies and created “alternative systems of assessment and accountability” that “deemphasize standardized tests.”

Think Progress, the action center of the left-leaning Beltway think tank the Center for American Progress, also reports on the overturn of the testocracy in its review: “these education protests got results in 2015.”

Noting the growing opt-out movement in Colorado, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Wisconsin, the Think Progress writer highlights New York in particular, “where 20 percent of students opted out of tests in 2015. The number of New York students opting out quadrupled from [2014].”

Reform Is Losing the Left

New York in particular provides an example of how education reform may fare in the near future, at least in left-leaning states where leaders have been persuaded by big-money donors to crack down on public schools and educators.

Led by Governor Andrew Cuomo and his former state education chief, now currently acting U.S. Secretary of Education, John King, the Empire State had been a model for reform ideology, being among the first to implement the Common Core and its associated tests and pursuing a harsh new model for evaluating teachers, in which 50 percent of teachers’ performance rating was tied to students’ test scores.

But recently Cuomo made “a complete about face” on education, observes a recent op-ed in a New York press outlet. The writer – Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a progressive New York state organization – notes that Cuomo had made his test-based teacher evaluation system the “top legislative priority in 2015″ and had claimed it was ”one of the greatest legacies for me and the state.”

But the evaluation system had angered teachers and parents and helped spur the test boycotts noted above. Seeing his public approval numbers plummeting, Cuomo engineered, according to Easton, a redo on the evaluation system that prompted the state education authority to place a moratorium on test-based teacher evaluations.

Easton believes Cuomo’s actions in New York are likely too little, too late – arguing that he has been “the author of his own demise on education issues.” That may be, but far more likely, other Democratic Party governors are bound to notice how reform policies like those carried out in New York have now lost the left and are rapidly growing out of favor with the public at large.

Of course, in states and districts where test-based teacher evaluations are already established in the policy landscape, teachers will likely feel the effects of these systems for some time. So the fight over teacher evaluations will go state by state in the years ahead.

But as new reports continue to call these flawed and unfair evaluations into question, there will be more examples of these systems being overturned.

Reform Fads Don’t Work

Using test scores to evaluate teachers – one of the pillars of the reform movement – is not the only policy idea going out of favor. Using the scores to evaluate the viability of local schools is running into more opposition as well

In Tennessee, also an early adopter of reform fads, leaders had put into place a system that used student scores on standardized tests to pronounce schools as “failing” and provide the rationale for the state to take over management of the schools by an appointed board. What follows these takeovers, invariably, is that the agency, whose officials are handpicked by conservative lawmakers, transfers the schools to privately operated charter management organizations.

In Tennessee, the state takeover agency is called the Achievement School District, but the model is being adopted under other guises by many other states.

Now Tennessee’s much-lauded takeover program has run into “political trouble” according to a recent article in Education Week.

“Several Democratic state lawmakers,” according to the article, “will propose bills this upcoming legislative session to either shut down the turnaround district, which mostly is based in Memphis, or severely limit its authority to take over schools.”

The legislature’s Black Caucus, the representatives of the communities most often targeted by the takeovers, are helping to lead the pushback.

In Memphis, where the ASD has charterized more than two dozen schools, parents are leading the fight as well. As Chalkbeat Tennessee reports, members of the district’s neighborhood advisory councils have called the takeover process a “scam” and claimed the method for taking over their neighborhood schools “was rigged in favor of pairing struggling schools with charter operators.”

But the trouble with the ASD isn’t purely “political.” The takeover effort is also in trouble because it doesn’t work. The EdWeek article points to a recent Vanderbilt University study that showed district-led turnaround efforts had performed better than the the ASD. The study concluded, “Until the state-run district can begin to show academic progress, it shouldn’t be allowed to take over more schools.”

These events and others prove 2015 marks the year that standardized testing – and all its associated uses for unfairly judging teachers and schools – has now become a policy pariah. So what will reformers rally around now?

A Year of Charter School Scandals

For sure, charter schools provided reform fans with some cause to celebrate in 2015, as more than 500 new public charter schools opened during the school year, enrolling nearly 3 million students nationwide, according to charter industry reports.

As a recent report from a consulting group that works with the charter industry found, 2015 was a year in which charter schools reached impressive new benchmarks. These schools are now the most rapidly growing form of schools in America, with enrollments expanding by an average of 12 to 13 percent annually over the past 10 years. Charters now educate one in 16 children nationally and, in a number of big cities, now rival traditional school districts as the major provider of public education. Three of the nation’s five largest cities enroll more than 20 percentof their students in charter schools.

What’s growing particularly rapidly are large charter school chains, which have expanded at roughly twice the pace of the charter industry overall, increasing their student enrollments by 25 percent annually.

But charter school expansions come with a significant negative to the reform movement. As the numbers and influence of these schools grow, so do the scandals associated with them and so do the divisive fights in communities where these schools are proliferating.

The scandals and malfeasance associated with charter schools rose to levels in 2015 beyond what emerged in 2014.

Early in the year, a report from the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school finances in Illinois and found “$13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials … Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone.”

One example the CPD report cited was of a charter operator in Chicago who used charter school funds amounting to more than $250,000 to purchase personal items from luxury department stores, including $2,000 on hair care and cosmetic products and $5,800 for jewelry.

In April, another report from the Center for Popular Democracy, along with the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), uncovered over $200 million in “alleged and confirmed financial fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement” committed by charter schools around the country.

Authors of the report called $200-plus million the “tip of the iceberg,” because much of the fraud “will go undetected because the federal government, the states, and local charter authorizers lack the oversight necessary to detect the fraud.”

Then, in October, the Center for Media and Democracy published a new reportrevealing that the federal government has spent over $3.7 billion in taxpayer money on charter schools with virtually no accountability for the funds.

According to the report, the federal government, state governments and charter authorizers have generally not provided the public with ready information about how federal funds for charters have been spent. Attempts to trace federal grant money to recipients are apt to encounter “substantial obstruction” from states reluctant to reveal how charter money is spent and how state government handles charter oversight.

The report contends, “Unlike truly public schools, which have to account for prospective and past spending in public budgets provided to democratically elected school boards, charter spending is largely a black hole.”

In Michigan, for instance, where four out of five charters are run by for-profit management companies, CMD found “ghost schools“ that had received millions in federal funding but either never opened or were quickly closed with no account for the money. Some charter operators in the state have been accused, and convicted, of crimes, including felony fraud and tax evasion. But most often, no perpetrators of the malfeasance are brought to justice.

Interspersed among these massive reports are news stories from local press outlets, too numerous to count, about charter school frauds, financial and academic, that boggle the mind in their outrageousness.

In May, an Ohio paper began its news story about Ohio charter schools, “No sector – not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals – misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.” Reporter Doug Livingston wrote, “State auditors have uncovered $27.3 million improperly spent by charter schools, many run by for-profit companies, enrolling thousands of children and producing academic results that rival the worst in the nation.”

Charter school malfeasance in the Buckeye State has gotten so bad it’s even drawn the attention of FBI investigators.

More recently, Florida press outlets reported the state has given about $70 million to charter schools that later closed and returned virtually none of the money to taxpayers. While the state is able to recover computers and other equipment these schools purchased with taxpayer money, the far more substantial costs for purchasing and improving property and making lease payments stays in private pockets after the schools close.

Why Charter Schools Won’t Save Reform

Scandals will continue to dog charter schools because of the way they are organized and operated. As a recent policy brief from the National Education Policy Center explains, the very structure of the charter school business introduces new actors into public education who skim money from the system without returning any benefit to students and taxpayers.

In one of the more bizarre schemes the authors examine, charter operators use third-party corporations to purchase buildings and land from the public school district itself, so taxpayer dollars are used to purchase property from the public. Thus, the public ends up paying twice for the school, and the property becomes an asset of a private corporation.

In other examples, charter operators will set up leasing agreements and lucrative management fees between multiple entities that end up extracting resources that might otherwise be dedicated to direct services for children.

These arrangements, and many others documented in the brief, constitute a rapidly expanding parallel school system in America, populated with enterprises and individuals who work in secret to suck money out of public education.

Meanwhile, charter expansions continue to be met with increased community resistance wherever they roll out.

In Nashville, Tennessee, Jefferson County, Colorado, and across South Florida, every new charter school expansion is now met with fierce opposition from the community.

As the Los Angles Times reported in September, a plan devised in secret by a billionaire and his foundation would pay for the capital costs and lobbying to force through a plan to convert as many as half of the city’s schools into charters. The community has responded with outrage.

In what is likely to be an important legal precedent, the supreme court of the state of Washington found that charter schools are unconstitutional because they aren’t truly public schools.

Now calls for charter school moratoriums are becoming practically ubiquitous in state legislatures and local district school boards.

The mounting controversy surrounding charter schools is a strong indicator that if education reform proponents collect all their policy eggs in the basket of “school choice,” they are missing the main reasons why their movement is spurring increased resistance.

What Reform Fans Don’t Get

Indeed, resistance to the education reform agenda is not as much a rejection of its various policy features as it is a rejection of the philosophy that drives it.

This philosophy puts little stock in democratic governance of schools, believing instead that really smart people, armed with the right data and algorithms, are what it takes to determine education policy from New York to Nevada.

This core philosophy makes infinite sense to folks with backgrounds in law, business management, finance, or economics, but tends to rub educators and parents the wrong way because of its failure to acknowledge that teaching and learning are primarily relationship-driven endeavors and not technical pursuits.

To teachers, it makes about as much sense to base their actions exclusively on a data set or a marketing principle as it would for husbands and wives to conduct their marriages on that basis or for parents to raise their children that way. Sure, knowing some objective “things” about how students are doing is important, but there’s way more important stuff to attend to.

And parents will grow ever more skeptical of the false promise of “school choice” because it doesn’t deliver what they really want: the guarantee of good neighborhood schools that are free and equitable to all children.

But too few reformers get this. Instead, what we can expect in 2016 is for the current education establishment to use the considerable financial resources at its disposal to mount yet more marketing and public relations efforts, while the pushback from grassroots public education advocates will grow even stronger, and political leaders will be increasingly pressured to decide where they stand.

Source: Salon

Fox News Latino - January 16, 2015 - A new analysis of federal safety data found that while overall jobs in the construction industry are getting safer, Latino workers are still getting injured at alarming rates.

According to the data, between 2010 and 2013, the number of deaths among Latinos in the construction industry rose from 181 to 231. The number of deaths also rose in the industry overall, from 774 to 796, but that increase is attributed entirely to Latinos. During the same period, deaths for non-Latino construction workers fell from 593 to 565.

Each day across the country, hundreds of day laborers and migrant workers wait in street corners waiting to get hired. They are sometimes picked up by contractors or subcontractors looking to cut corners by hiring cheap labor that won’t expect benefits – most undocumented workers live in the shadows and, in general, don’t qualify for any federal benefits.

"There’s a clear correlation between low-wage jobs and unsafe jobs," said Occupational Safety and Health Administration chief David Michaels, according to the Nation. "Workers in low wage jobs are at much greater risk of conditions that will make it impossible for them to live in a healthy way, to earn money for their family, to build middle class lives."

Another reason for the spike in deaths is a rise in safety violations on job sites run by smaller, non-union contractors and an unwillingness by some undocumented workers to report violations, according to a 2013 study by the New York State Trial Lawyers Association.

"Contractors aren’t taking simple steps to protect their workers," Connie Razza, from the Center for Popular Democracy, told the New York Daily News. "They are not providing the training and the safety equipment that are required by law."

Advocacy groups are working to combat any changes to New York’s scaffolding law, which organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy say gives incentive to keep workplaces safe. The law holds owners and contractors who did not follow safety rules fully liable for workplace injuries and deaths.

Contractors argue that it has driven up insurance costs to record levels.

Lawmakers, however, have historically blocked any of the proposed changes to the law.

"All we’re looking for is the ability to have the same right as anybody else would in the American jurisprudence system," said Louis J. Coletti, president and CEO of the Building Trades Employers' Association.

In an attempt to make their work environments safer, some day laborers have joined together to seek protection through collective action. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, some day laborers in New York City turned to one another about the dangerous conditions, and decided together how to deal with them.

The Bay Parkway Community Job Center in Brooklyn brought in safety experts for guidance; community groups and foundations rallied around the laborers, helping them buy their new trailer with several grants.

With the help of organizations such as the Worker’s Justice Project, laborers learned about wage and hour laws, the hazards of exposure to certain building materials and what kinds of actions or treatment by the people who hire them constitute abuse and violations.

"When something isn’t right, at that moment, you may not realize it or attach much significance to it," Rafael Tecpanecatl, a laborer who came from Mexico 11 years ago told Fox News Latino. "I’ve worked many jobs that I realized later were hazardous to my health. I’d get on ladders that were not steady, I’ve sanded walls and cut plywood and had debris go into my eyes and lungs."

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