Can these Cities Block Texas’s Vile Anti-Immigrant Agenda?
Can these Cities Block Texas’s Vile Anti-Immigrant Agenda?
Raul Reyes is the 34-year-old mayor of El Cenizo, Texas, a sweltering border town of 3,200 that sits beside the Rio...
Raul Reyes is the 34-year-old mayor of El Cenizo, Texas, a sweltering border town of 3,200 that sits beside the Rio Grande, where nearly all the residents are Latino, many are immigrants, and quite a few are undocumented too. It’s a sanctuary of sorts, a town that, since 1999, has had a policy prohibiting local police officers from asking about someone’s immigration status. It’s the town where Reyes was born and raised and a town whose residents he cares for fiercely.
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Charters Lack Sufficient Oversight
Philly.com - October 15, 2014, by Kia Hinton - Recently, charter schools have made headlines nationwide. This summer...
Philly.com - October 15, 2014, by Kia Hinton - Recently, charter schools have made headlines nationwide. This summer, the FBI raided charter schools in Connecticut, Arizona and Ohio. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform released a report on dramatic shortcomings of charter schools, saying "the lack of effective oversight means too many cases of fraud and abuse, too little attention to equity, and no guarantee of academic innovation or excellence."
Pennsylvania has seen its share of charter headlines as well. Earlier this month, ACTION United, the statewide organization I serve on the board of, released a report that uncovered no less than $30 million in fraud by Pennsylvania charter operators since the passage of the 1997 Charter School Act. Philadelphia, which now feeds $800 million a year into charter schools, has simultaneously starved the traditional public school system for years now. Students lack critical services because of the layoffs of nurses, librarians and counselors. Teachers are paying for supplies and even toilet paper out of their own pockets. And after a six year moratorium on charter expansion in Philadelphia, we learned our school district was required to accept a flood of new charter applications as part of the cigarette tax deal.
When I hear about fraudulent charter operators who steal tax dollars from Philadelphia's working families, it's personal.
My family has lived in Southwest Philadelphia for generations, in the same two-story house I grew up in. My youngest child attends Longstreth Elementary, my alma mater. Another of my children attends a Mastery Charter School. All of my children deserve a quality education.
Fraud, waste and mismanagement threaten my children's access to a quality education. Public money is being invested in a massive, fast-growing industry that fundamentally lacks meaningful oversight. Here in Philadelphia, we have just two auditors for 85 charter schools. That lack of oversight enabled people like the founders of Agora Cyber Charter and New Media Technical School to prop up their personal businesses with more than $7 million that was meant for Philadelphia's children.
For these reasons, ACTION United is calling for a statewide moratorium on new charter schools until all charter schools can assure us that they have appropriate fraud-prevention measures in place. We are asking the School Reform Commission to mandate fraud prevention in the charter application process. We are approaching all charter schools to ask them to take our fraud prevention pledge and commit to implementing a fraud risk management program at their nonprofit.
Politicians are making a lot of promises this election season, so here's something they should keep in mind: As long as we continue to lack local control over our own schools in Philadelphia, we expect the governor and the SRC to ensure precious school dollars are spent on our children - not lost to fraud.
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THE BUZZ 4: Federal Face Time
THE BUZZ 4: Federal Face Time
JACKSON HOLE, WY – Last Thursday was the first time the most powerful financial players in the U.S. formally met with...
JACKSON HOLE, WY – Last Thursday was the first time the most powerful financial players in the U.S. formally met with the people their policies affect. During the Federal Reserve Economic Policy Symposium at Jackson Lake Lodge, a meeting between the Fed and Fed Up sparked impassioned speeches that burned through barriers of language, culture, race, and socio-economic status. But the fervency expressed by Fed Up members seemingly had little influence on the Fed’s impending decision to raise interest rates, something Federal Reserve board chair Janet Yellen announced in her annual address the following day.
Still, members of Fed Up—a syndicate of the Center for Popular Democracy built around the ideology that the Fed’s policies affect people of every skin color and income bracket—were encouraged by the meeting.
Shawn Sebastian is the field director of the Fed Up campaign. “I think the meeting with the Fed was historic and unprecedented,” he said. “There are never that many Fed officials in the same room at the same time talking about monetary policy, and they’re certainly not doing that with low income people of color.”
Federal Reserve board leaders like Neel Kashkari, Lael Brainard, Esther George and board vice president Stanley Fischer all participated in the Fed Up roundtable.
The landmark meeting was the result of Jackson Lake Lodge overselling hotel rooms that Fed Up members had reserved. After the group filed several federal complaints, the Fed agreed to the sit down.
‘Don’t slow down the economy’
Echoes of agreement among Fed Up’s constituency rippled through the crowded room at Jackson Lake Lodge Thursday as the roundtable began. Members of Fed Up elucidated ideas of stagnant wages, unemployment, and underemployment that disproportionately plague people of color in the United States. Fed Up members explained how the Federal Reserve’s pending decision to slow down the economy by raising interest rates could damage already neglected communities. Nearly every speaker from Fed Up concluded with one central idea: Don’t slow down the economy. Not yet. Don’t hike interest rates. Not yet. Our communities are still underserved. Our people are still underpaid. Our unemployment rates are still nearly double the national average.
Esther George, chair of the KC Federal Reserve, responded to protestors with deference to Congress. “Our objective is to follow mandates of what Congress has made out,” she told the crowd. “The objective is not to slow down the economy; that would be irresponsible.” George continued by explaining that the objective of the Fed was to walk the balance beam between the ideal of full employment and the consequence of potential inflation due to an oversaturation in the job market.
Fed Up’s expert on economic forces, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, said the Fed’s concerns about inflation should be adjusted in light of the impacts of the Great Recession. Bivens claimed a period of “overshooting” employment targets are necessary to heal the effects of that economic disaster, and that this period of overshooting is especially important to people of color, because it takes longer for their unemployment rates to catch up to national averages.
“[If] The Federal Reserve starts slowing the economy, it starts halting progress in reducing unemployment before the benefits of that reach the last people to be hired,” Bivens said.
Promising diversity
Fed Up seemed to impact members of the Federal Reserve Board on a few fronts. Several ambitious promises were made by members of the Fed, catalyzed by discussions held during the roundtable. Sebastian believes the most concrete impacts Fed Up had on the Federal Reserve were when Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors committed to seriously considering a slate of candidates for board positions that more closely reflect America’s diversity. The board’s lack of diversity is a source of contention among Fed Up members, as the board is comprised of 16 white, predominantly male members. The only exception is Neel Kashkari of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, who is of Indian descent. Fed Up members are not the first to point this out, however. This summer a formal letter of complaint, signed by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and some 127 other lawmakers, demanded the Federal Reserve open up to more diversity.
Another victory for the Fed Up campaign happened when Kashkari recommitted to an impressive research project studying racial disparities. Minnesota and Wisconsin, both states within Kashkari’s district, are rated the worst states in the country for black people to live based on a report by 24/7 Wall Street. Kashkari’s goal is to find the source of the disparities that propagate those statistics.
Blacks in Wisconsin face an unemployment rate of 21 percent which is more than quadruple the national average. Their incarceration rate is the third highest in the country, and their rate of home ownership is the tenth lowest. At a meeting earlier this month in Minneapolis, Kashkari sat down with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change to discuss the problem.
“Some of the racial disparities are a crisis, and we need to treat them like a crisis,” Kashkari said. “There’s something structural in the U.S. economy, in good times and bad, that black unemployment is almost always twice as high as white unemployment.”
However, in spite of all protestor efforts, in what is considered to be one of Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen’s most important speeches of the year, she explicitly stated that interest rate hikes were on the horizon. Yellen told the audience at Jackson Lake Lodge, “Indeed, in light of the continued solid performance of the labor market and our outlook for economic activity and inflation, I believe the case for an increase in the federal funds rate has strengthened in recent months.” PJH
By Natosha Hoduski
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Report: Language access isn’t great
Capitol Confidential – August 7, 2013, by Jimmy Vielkind - Several immigrant advocacy groups released a report this...
Capitol Confidential – August 7, 2013, by Jimmy Vielkind - Several immigrant advocacy groups released a report this week saying it’s still difficult to get access to government services in languages other than English, nearly two years after Gov. Andrew Cuomo decreed that written and oral interpretation would be available the state’s six most-spoken foreign languages.
Cuomo signed an executive order that took effect last October mandating state officials to offer language assistance for speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, French Creole, Russian and Chinese. But the order’s scope was necessarily limited to state agencies, even though state-funded services like food stamps, driver’s licenses and unemployment benefits are administered by New York City or other counties.
The groups — including Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities at the University at Albany — visited government offices and surveyed people with limited English proficiency to develop a measure of compliance. Overall, they found that less than half the people who needed language assistance were able to receive it.
According to Nisha Agarwal, deputy director of the Center for Popular Democracy, the survey found 63 percent of citizens using state-operated facilities that are explicitly covered by the order were not successful in their quest to gain language assistance.
“The governor’s team has been very engaged on implementation, and we’re sympathetic to the challenges of getting an entire state apparatus to change,” said Agarwal. “That said, the results are by no means satisfactory, and we were quite disappointed that the state took the position that county-run agencies for state services were not within the ambit of the order. We feel it’s a pretty big gap.”
A Cuomo spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
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Secrecy Surrounds Half Billion Handout to Charters
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to spend half a billion dollars to help create new charter schools, while...
The U.S. Department of Education is poised to spend half a billion dollars to help create new charter schools, while the public is being kept in the dark about which states have applied for the lucrative grants, and what their actual track records are when it comes to preventing fraud and misuse.
Already the federal government has spent $3.3 billion in American tax dollars under the Charter Schools Program (CSP), as tallied by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
But the government has done so without requiring any accountability from the states and schools that receive the money, as CMD revealed earlier this year.
Throwing good money after bad, Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for a 48 percent increase in federal charter funding earlier this year, and the House and Senate budget proposals also call for an increase—albeit a more modest one—while at the same time slashing education programs for immigrants and language learners.
The clamor for charter expansion comes despite the fact that there are federal probes underway into suspected waste and mismanagement within the program, not to mention ongoing and recently completed state audits of fraud perpetrated by charter school operators.
Earlier this year, the Center for Popular Democracy documented more than $200 million in fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school industry in 15 states alone, a number that is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.
Is now really the right time to plow more tax money into charters?
Insiders Deliberate Far from the Public Eye
The Department of Education is currently deciding what states to award $116 million this year, and more than half a billion during the five-year grant cycle.
So who is in the running and what are their track records?
Which states have applied for a grant designed to eviscerate the public school system in the name of “flexibility?” (CMD's review of state applications and reviewers' comments from the previous grant cycle exposed “flexibility” as a term of art used by the industry for state laws that allow charter schools to: operate independently from locally elected school boards, employ people to teach without adequate training or certification, and avoid collective bargaining that helps ensure that teacher-student ratios are good so that each kid gets the attention he or she deserves.)
There is no way of knowing.
The U.S Department of Education has repeatedly refused to honor a CMD request under the Freedom of Information Act for the grant applications, even though public information about which states have applied would not chill deliberation and might even help better assess which applicants should receive federal money.
The agency has even declined to provide a list with states that have applied:
“We cannot release a list of states that have applied while it is in the midst of competition."
The upshot of this reticence is that states will land grants—possibly to the tune of a hundred million dollars or more in some cases—all at the discretion of charter school interests contracted to evaluate the applications, but without any input from ordinary citizens and advocates concerned about public schools and troubled by charter school secrecy and fraud.
But, if people in a state know that a state is applying they can weigh in so that the agency is not just hearing from an applicant who wants the money, regardless of the history of fraud and waste in that state.
Charter Millions by Hook or by Crook: The Case of Ohio
Despite ED’s unwillingness to put all the cards on the table, state reports tell us that Ohio has once again applied for a grant under the program.
The state, whose lax-to-non-existing charter school laws are an embarrassment even to the industry, has previously been awarded at least $49 million in CSP money—money that went to schools overseen by a rightwing think-tank, and, more worryingly, to schools overseen by an authorizer that had its performance rating boosted this year by top education officials who removed the failing virtual schools from the statistics so as not to stop the flow of state and federal funds.
As The Plain Dealer put it in an exposé: “It turns out that Ohio’s grand plan to stop the national ridicule of its charter school system is giving overseers of many of the lowest-performing schools a pass from taking heat for some of their worst problems.”
Another component of this plan, it turns out, was to apply for more federal millions to the failing schools that—by a miraculous sleight of hand—are no longer failing.
The director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice, David Hansen, fell on the sword and announced his resignation in June. But Democratic lawmakers suspect that this goes higher up in the chain of command, and have called on State Superintendent Richard Ross to resign.
Did the scrubbed statistics touting the success of Ohio’s charters find its way into the state application for federal millions, signed by Superintendent Ross?
What about other states, such as Indiana, with a similar history of doctoring data to turn failing charter schools into resounding success stories?
After Abysmal Results, States Re-apply for More Money
While the known unknowns are troubling, the known knowns—to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld—are also equally disturbing.
For example, Colorado applied for grant renewal this year.
But, the last time around, in 2010, the state landed a $46 million CSP grant thanks in no small part to the lax “hiring and firing” rules and the lack of certification requirements for charter school teachers--a reviewer contracted by the U.S. Department of Education to score the application noted.
Look at California.
Through meeting minutes from the California State Board of Education we also know that the Golden State submitted an application this year. In 2010, California was awarded $254 million over five years in CSP money, but as the Inspector General discovered in a 2012 audit, the state department of education did not adequately monitor any of the schools that received sub-grants. Some schools even received federal money “without ever opening to students.” A review by CMD revealed that a staggering 9 out of the 41 schools that shuttered in the 2014-'15 school year were created by federal money under CSP.
How about Wisconsin?
Wisconsin received $69.6 million between 2010 and 2015, but out of the charter schools awarded sub-grants during the first two years of the cycle, one-fifth (16 out of 85) have closed since, as CMD discovered.
Then there’s Indiana.
Indiana was awarded $31.3 million over the same period, partly because of the fact that charter schools in the state are exempt from democratic oversight by elected school boards. “[C]harter schools are accountable solely to authorizers under Indiana law,” one reviewer enthused, awarding the application 30/30 under the rubric “flexibility offered by state law.”
This “flexibility” has been a recipe for disaster in the Hoosier state with countless examples of schools pocketing the grant money and then converting to private schools, as CMD discovered by taking a closer look at grantees under the previous cycle:
The Indiana Cyber Charter School opened in 2012 with $420,000 in seed money from the federal program. Dogged by financial scandals and plummeting student results the charter was revoked in 2015 and the school last month leaving 1,100 students in the lurch.
Padua Academy lost its charter in 2014 and converted to a private religious school, but not before receiving $702,000 in federal seed money.
Have They Learned Anything?
Secretary Duncan has previously called for “absolute transparency” when it comes to school performance, but that’s just a talking point unless he releases the applications, or even a list of the states that are in the running, before they are given the final stamp of approval.
As it stands, there is no way of knowing if the state departments of education seeking millions in tax dollars:
Have supplied actual performance data that reflect the reality for students enrolled in charter schools rather than “scrubbed” or doctored numbers;
Try to outbid each other in “flexibility” by explaining, say, how charter schools in X can hire teachers without a license and fire them without cause. In its 2010 application, the Colorado Department of Education, for example, boasted of how charter school teachers are “employed at will by the school”;
Have corrective action plans so as to avoid repeating the costly waste and mistakes from the previous grant cycle (such as schools created by federal seed money closing within a few years or never even opening).
Because the federal charter schools program is designed to foster charter school growth, which in turn means that money will be diverted from traditional public schools to an industry that resists government enforcement of basic standards for financial controls, accountability, and democratic oversight, the public has a big stake in this and a right to know more, before their money disappears down black holes.
Source: PR Watch
Shutting Down the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Shutting Down the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Working at The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Kate has partnered with youth-led organizations on various policy...
Working at The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Kate has partnered with youth-led organizations on various policy initiatives and community organizing campaigns, and has represented young people facing school suspensions. At Proskauer, she has conducted trainings and served as a mentor and supervisor, enabling our lawyers to make a real difference in school suspension hearings. Even when a suspension cannot be avoided, an attorney may be able to help reduce its duration or secure other benefits, such as help for a learning disability, or a transfer to a school that is better-suited to the student.
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Seattle Officials Repeal Tax That Upset Amazon
Seattle Officials Repeal Tax That Upset Amazon
“From coast to coast, people lose their homes and get displaced from their communities even as the biggest corporations...
“From coast to coast, people lose their homes and get displaced from their communities even as the biggest corporations earn record profits and development booms,” said Sarah Johnson, director of Local Progress, a national association of progressive elected municipal officials. “Elected officials across the country are paying close attention to how Amazon and other corporations have responded to Seattle’s efforts to confront their affordable housing and homelessness crisis.”
Boulder resident among health-care protesters arrested at Cory Gardner’s Washington office
Boulder resident among health-care protesters arrested at Cory Gardner’s Washington office
A photograph of Boulder resident Barb Cardell being hauled off by Capitol police outside of Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner’...
A photograph of Boulder resident Barb Cardell being hauled off by Capitol police outside of Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner’s Washington, D.C., office on Monday shows pink name tags affixed to her shirt.
“Written on every piece of the pink tape is the name of someone I love and work with in Colorado,” she said. “They would lose their health care if this bill passes.”
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NY Fed names Williams to top post amid political backlash
NY Fed names Williams to top post amid political backlash
“Yet the drum beat of criticism in recent weeks, including a demonstration outside the New York Fed and letters from...
“Yet the drum beat of criticism in recent weeks, including a demonstration outside the New York Fed and letters from state and city lawmakers, is raising worries within the Fed about independence from political pressure. Some lawmakers have in the past said the New York Fed president should be a presidential appointment like Fed governors. On Tuesday, advocacy group Fed Up slammed the appointment of "yet another white man whose record on Wall Street regulation and full employment raises serious questions."
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7 days ago
7 days ago