CPD IN THE NEWS

Today, nearly a year after Gillibrand led the charge in calling for Franken’s resignation, the anger is fresh on the minds of major donors across the country...Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director for the Center for Popular Democracy, called Gillibrand’s response “important and courageous.” “It probably made her more enemies than friends,” said Archila, who famously confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) in a congressional elevator this summer during the Kavanaugh hearings.

Read the full article here.

ABC News - March 31, 2015, Candice Choi - Fast-food labor organizers say they're expanding the scope of their campaign for $15 an hour and unionization, this time with a day of actions including other low-wage workers and demonstrations on college campuses.

Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fight for $15, said Tuesday the protests will take place April 15 and are planned to include actions on about 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the country and abroad.

At an event announcing the actions in front of a McDonald's in New York City's Times Square, organizers said home health care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors, child care workers and Wal-Mart workers will be among those turning out in April.

Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City, Missouri, and a national leader for the Fight for $15 push, said more than 2,000 groups including Jobs With Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support as well.

"This will be the biggest mobilization America has seen in decades," Wise said at the rally as pedestrians walked past on the busy street.

The plans are a continuation of a campaign that began in late 2012. The push is being spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union and has included demonstrations nationwide to build public support for raising pay for fast-food and other low-wage workers, although turnout has varied from city to city. Last May, the campaign reached the doorsteps of McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, where protesters were arrested after declining to leave the property ahead of the company's annual meeting.

Fells, an SEIU employee, said April 15 was picked for the next day of actions because workers are fighting "for 15."

"It's a little play on words," he said.

Fells noted that while the push began as a fast-food worker movement, it has morphed into a broader push for low-wage workers and is now shifting into a social justice movement with the involvement of "Black Lives Matter" activists joining in in the April protests. Still, he said McDonald's Corp. remained a primary target.

"McDonald's needs to come to the table because they could settle this issue," he said.

In a statement, McDonald's said it respects people's right to peacefully protest, but added that the demonstrations over the past two years have been "organized rallies designed to garner media attention" and that "very few" McDonald's workers have participated.

In addition to the ongoing demonstrations, organizers have been working on multiple fronts to make the legal case that McDonald's Corp. should be held accountable for working conditions at its franchised restaurants. That finding is seen as critical in being able to negotiate with one entity on behalf of workers across the chain, rather than dealing with the thousands of franchisees who operate the majority of McDonald's more than 14,000 U.S. restaurants.

McDonald's and other fast-food chains have maintained that they're not responsible for hiring and employment decisions at franchised locations.

One closely watched case addressing the matter began this week, when the National Labor Relations Board began hearings on complaints over alleged labor violations at McDonald's restaurants. The board's general counsel had said last year that McDonald's could be named as a joint employer along with franchisees in the complaints.

The hearing is scheduled to resume May 26 and is set to be a lengthy legal battle. Whichever side loses is expected to appeal, with the possibility of the case eventually heading to the Supreme Court.

In a statement, McDonald's has said the board's decision to name McDonald's as a joint employer "improperly strikes at the heart of the franchise system."

"The SEIU put a target on McDonald's back more than two years ago; the Board has now joined in taking aim, and has done so by managing the McDonald's case in an unprecedented manner," the statement said.

This weekend we'll be covering events at the Local Progress National Convening and Center for Popular Democracy's People's Convention that are happening in Pittsburgh this weekend. More than 1,000 grassroots activists and 100 elected municipal officials will attend conference sessions and a rally in the city from July 7-9. Follow our live blog for coverage.

People's Convention addresses Immigrants rights

This weekend during a panel discussion on immigration at the Local Progress conference, “sanctuary cities” were front and center. In places that have been classified as sanctuary cities, local law enforcement is dissuaded and sometimes barred from providing information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Sanctuary cities have been a red hot topic in Pennsylvania recently with Republican U.S. Senator Pat Toomey trying (and failing) to pass a bill that would cut off funding to sanctuary cities and Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate Katie McGinty telling the Mayor of Philadelphia that his sanctuary city bill needs altering.

Opponents of sanctuary cities believe they lead to undocumented immigrants, who are arrested for violent crimes or terroristic charges, avoiding deportation. But advocates say these policies protect undocumented immigrants, who are charged with minor crimes, from falling into the hands of ICE.

“This is about trust between the community and the police department,” said Philadelphia City Councilor Helen Gym, who spoke during the panel discussion as a proponent of Philadelphia's sanctuary policy. “The community is not served when they fear the police.” The lack of a sanctuary policy in Allegheny County enabled the prosecution and possible deportation of Martin Esquivel-Hernandez, who City Paper wrote about in a cover story in June. Esquivel-Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico living in Pittsburgh, was cited for driving without a valid license by Mount Lebanon Police and paid his fine in late April. Less than a week later he was detained by ICE.

Lt. Duane Fisher, of the Mount Lebanon Police, says the township's general policy is to make contact with ICE if police “find someone who is unlicensed” and to see whether ICE has “any reason to see if [the suspect] is wanted.” ICE officials have not returned multiple calls requesting information about Esquivel-Hernandez.

Gym says stories like these can harm relationships between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. “We don’t want people to be afraid to call the police to report crimes like burglary, etc.,” said Gym. “It is not the responsibility of local police departments to enforce immigration laws, since they are federal laws.”

She also adds that immigrants have helped Philadelphia grow after 50 years of losing population. Gym says that while the native-born population in Philadelphia has remained steady or dropped over the years, the foreign-born population has grown. “The vibrancy of Philadelphia, the part that seems exciting, hast to do with immigrants feeling welcome,” Gym says.

Other elected officials at the panel from across the country—even ones that are in rust belt cities like Pittsburgh—agreed that attracting immigrants is important to a region's prosperity. Summit County, Ohio County Councilor Liz Walters said immigrants and refugees breathe new life into struggling communities. Summit County, which is just south of Cleveland, has a manufacturing past and has been losing population for decades.

Even in the face of population decline, Walters said it has not been easy to sway other local politicians to the benefits of attracting and maintaining foreign-born populations. “For some, it's easier to see differences and so it's easy to be afraid,” said Walters.

But Walters said Summit County is starting to see successes. Akron, the county seat, now holds ethnic market bus tours where long-time residents sit next to social service providers and get to sample Italian, Mexican and Southeast Asian goods. She says strategies like these don’t just show people can live together, they are good for a region’s economy: “Any city that is not thinking about a [diverse] and global-minded local economy, is going to fall behind.”

— Ryan Deto

9-11 a.m. Fri., July 8

Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, spoke at Local Progress' national meeting about combating Islamophobia. - PHOTO BY ASHLEY MURRAY

Photo by Ashley Murray

Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, spoke at Local Progress' national meeting about combating Islamophobia.

Linda Sarsour is the executive director at the Arab American Association of New York and the co-founder of Empower Change, a Muslim online organizing platform. She spoke at this morning’s Local Progress panel discussion entitled “Our Role in this Political Moment: How local officials can fight back against hate, xenophobia and Islamophobia.” City Paper’s Ashley Murray caught up with her after the discussion.

Tell me about some of the work you’ve done in New York.

My organization predominately works with immigrants from the Arab world and South Asia and has been doing immigrants-rights work — language access to services for immigrants, police reform based on accounts of unwarranted surveillance against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. That work has really opened up doors for being part of broader social-justice movements in New York City that includes working on city-wide immigrant-rights legislation and police reform with black and Latino civil-rights groups. We’ve had a lot of wins in New York. We are one of the most welcoming immigrant cities in the country. We have language-access legislation where government agencies are mandated to [provide] language access. We have passed landmark civil-rights legislation [including] police-reform legislation, creat[ing] the first-ever independent oversight for the New York Police Department. Really it was the most directly impacted communities [who were] at the forefront of those fights. I have committed myself to intersectional organizing because people are intersectional. I mean Muslims are black, white, Latino, Asian, Arab, and we also understand that within all of our communities we’re so complex. So we’re working on multiple issues because we’re not one-issue communities.

One of the things you said on the panel today is that the same people who are promoting Islamophobia may also be against LGBTQ rights and promote deporting Latinos and separating them from their families. Can you talk about that intersection?

I like to look at things from a broader perspective, and because I'm an intersectional organizer, I get to see that the same legislators that are passing anti-LGBTQ laws are the ones passing anti-Sharia bills, which are basically limiting Muslims rights to practice Islam freely in this country. People who are unconditionally pro-police and anti-police reform [and] anti-refugee resettlement are mostly the same legislators around the country. Once we started understanding that, it really helped us build alliances so that when there is an anti -refugee legislation, different movements are showing up for others. When there is an anti-LGBTQ [bill], other communities are showing up. It’s been very powerful. We’ve been able to defeat a lot of anti-refugee legislation across the country. There have been hundreds of cities that have passed welcoming-immigrants resolutions. And I think many legislators are realizing opposition is not in opposition to one group. They are actually in opposition to multiple groups, many of whom are marginalized and minority communities.

Lastly, on the panel you talked about how “Daesh” uses Islamophobia as a tool. Can you talk about that? [Sarsour told the audience that she uses the Arabic acronym Daesh because the terrorist group does not like that name. Many English-speaking media outlets use the term “self-described Islamic State” or “ISIS”.]

I think Islamophobia is systemic targeting and discriminating against Muslims in America, and what it does is it isolates Muslim Americans from the larger American society. It puts people farther into the margins and what that does is, and especially when elected officials in particular are in the media spouting anti-Muslim rhetoric, it actually gives fuel to violent extremists on the other side of the world — and particularly watching Daesh create these social-media videos where they actually quote people like Trump. This feeds into the narrative that they are trying to propose that the West is at war with Islam and that you are not welcomed in your countries, you are a minority, you are at the margin. They use this very problematic rhetoric that is actually based on things people in our country have said. So I always tell people to be careful of what type of ammunition you’re giving to the violent extremists. Unity is the enemy of terrorism, and what Daesh does not want to see is people coming together saying, "We stand with our Muslim neighbors, we stand with our LGBT neighbors." They don’t want to see people working together. And I think we’ve done a very good job in some parts of the country, in places like New York City, where we said, "We’re not going to be divided. We’re not going to let Daesh divide us; we’re not going to let the right-wing divide us."

— Ashley Murray

6-8 p.m. Thu., July 7

Culver City, Calif., City Councilor Meghan Sahli-Wells spoke to a crowd of locally elected woman officials.

Culver City, Calif., City Councilor Meghan Sahli-Wells spoke to a crowd of locally elected woman officials.

Ana Maria Archila stood at the front of a small conference room and emotionally said, "All of you  represent what's possible. I need you." She told this to a small conference room of locally elected woman officials after talking about her 4-year-old daughter who told her mom that she could "be Michelle" but couldn't be president.

"She's only 4, but she already learned gender roles. That's why I need you," Archila said.

Nearly 40 women — including local city councilors, county supervisors and school-board members from as close as Wilkinsburg, Pa., to as far as Tacoma, Wash. — gathered for the Local Progress' Inagural Women's Caucus Gathering to kick off the weekend at the Westin Hotel in Downtown Pittsburgh. Local Progress, which has the tagline "The National Municipal Policy Network," is part of the Center for Public Democracy, also holding its People's Convention in town this weekend.

The purpose of the Local Progress national meeting is to "create a community to share best practices around policy and learn from campaign best practices," says Sarah Johnson, co-director of the organization. "We think local progress can play a role in supporting women."

Meghan Sahli-Wells, a city councilor from Culver City, Calif., said that although her city was founded 100 years ago, there have only been five women elected to local government.  "We can still count the number on one hand," she said, holding five fingers up to drive home the point.

Various participants shared concerns about obstacles for women wanting to run — like lack of a network to raise capital — and issues once in office — like needing a career mentor.

Sequanna Taylor, now a supervisor for the 2nd District of Milwaukee County, said, "I didn't have the money, but I couldn't let that be an issue. I was out in blizzards getting signatures." Taylor said when her county came under financial distress, she grew concerned about representation in her district and decided to run. She said the board had a reputation for being made up of "good old boys."

"I have to make sure they [District 2 residents] have a voice," Taylor said.

A collective, disappointed "wow" could be heard when political scientist Dana Brown, of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics at Chatham University, told the room that 82 percent of the locally elected officials in Pa.'s 67 counties are male. Her organization is a bipartisan center that encourages women to run for office.

"Public policy is happening whether women are at the table or not," Brown said. "Somewhere right now there is a vote happening. ... We, in Pa., have a long way to go."

She shared research findings that show when women are at the table, they change agendas by bringing a new perspective; change procedures by changing content of discussions and enforcing transparency; and change policy outcomes because they use more collaborative and inclusive language in negotiations.

Two local politicians attended the discussion — Pittsburgh City Councilor Natalia Rudiak and Wilkinsburg Council Vice President Marita Garrett.

Rudiak said that when she was a young activist, "a man always had the megaphone [at protests]. I remember wondering if I'll ever have it." Now Rudiak, one of the youngest people ever elected to council, says "I'm doing everything I can locally to get women elected."

— Ashley Murray

By Rebecca Addison, Ryan Deto and Ashley Murray

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The Washington Post - October 5, 2014, by Valerie Strauss - Charter school advocates didn’t like it recently when Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform issued a report calling for the strengthening of charter oversight and authorization. While noting that many charters work hard to “meet the needs of their students,” the report said that “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.” It provided some common-sense recommendations, including an innocuous call for the establishment of minimum qualifications for charter school treasurers. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, not surprisingly, bashed the report.

Meanwhile, a new report was just issued by three groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education and ACTION United — that found major fraud and mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s charter schools. It found:

Charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania school children since 1997. Yet every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. While the state has complex, multi-layered systems of oversight of the charter system, this history of financial fraud makes it clear that these systems are not effectively detecting or preventing fraud. Indeed, the vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media exposés, not by the state’s oversight agencies.

The great New York Times writer Michael Powell recently wrote a column detailing what can go wrong with a charter school when there is little or no oversight; in this case, he explores the sickening mess surrounding Prime Time Prep in Texas, created by Deion Sanders, a Hall of Fame cornerback and National Football League commentator.

Yes, there are many fine charter schools. But seriously bad news about many others keeps coming, and concerns are rising as the number of charters overall is increasing. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools says that in 2013-2014, 2.57 million students were enrolled in more than 6,000 public charter schools nationwide, with nearly 2,000 new charter schools opening in the past five years.

Here’s a piece about what’s going on in the charter world by Jeff Bryant, who is the director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He owns a marketing and communications consultancy in Chapel Hill, N.C., and has written extensively about public education policy. A version of this appeared in Salon.

By Jeff Bryant

When former President Bill Clinton recently meandered onto the topic of charter schools, he mentioned something about an “original bargain” that charters were, according to the reporter for The Huffington Post, “supposed to do a better job of educating students.”

A writer at Salon called the remark “stunning” because it brought to light the fact that the overwhelming majority of charter schools do no better than traditional public schools. Yet, as the Huffington reporter reminded us, charter schools are rarely shuttered for low academic performance. But what’s most remarkable about what Clinton said is how little his statement resembles the truth about how charters have become a reality in so many American communities.

In a real “bargaining process,” those who bear the consequences of the deal have some say-so on the terms, the deal-makers have to represent themselves honestly (or the deal is off and the negotiating ends), and there are measures in place to ensure everyone involved is held accountable after the deal has been struck.

But that’s not what’s happening in the great charter industry rollout transpiring across the country. Rather than a negotiation over terms, charters are being imposed on communities – either by legislative fiat or well-engineered public policy campaigns. Many charter school operators keep their practices hidden or have been found to be blatantly corrupt. And no one seems to be doing anything to ensure real accountability for these rapidly expanding school operations.

Instead of the “bargain” political leaders may have thought they struck with seemingly well-intentioned charter entrepreneurs, what has transpired instead looks more like a raw deal for many students, their families, and their communities.

Charter Schools As Takeover Operations

The “100 percent charter schools” education system in New Orleans that Clinton praised was never presented to the citizens of New Orleans in a negotiation. It was surreptitiously engineered.

After Katrina, as NPR recently reported, “an ad hoc coalition of elected leaders and nationally known charter advocates formed,” and in “a series of quick decisions,” all school employees were fired and the vast majority of the city’s schools were handed over to a state entity called the “Recovery School District” which is governed by unelected officials. Only a “few elite schools were … allowed to maintain their selective admissions.”

In other words, any bargaining that was done was behind closed doors and at tables where most of the people who were being affected had no seat.

Further, any evidence of the improvement of the educational attainment of students in the New Orleans Recovery all-charter Recovery District is obtainable only by “jukin the stats” or, as the NPR reporter put it, through “a distortion of the curriculum and teaching practice.” As Andrea Gabor wrote for Newsweek a year ago, “the current reality of the city’s schools should be enough to give pause to even the most passionate charter supporters.”

Yet now political leaders tout this model for the rest of the country. Education Secretary Arne Duncan once even said that he thinks “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina” because it wrecked the previous low-functioning school system and brought about the rise of charter schools in the Recovery District. So some school districts that have not had a Katrina are having charter schools imposed on them in blatant power plays. An obvious example is what’s currently happening in the York, Pennsylvania.

School districts across the state of Pennsylvania are financially troubled due to chronic state underfunding – only 36 percent of K-12 revenue comes from the state, way below national averages – and massive budget cuts imposed by Republican Governor Tom Corbett (the state funds education less than it did in 2008).

The state cuts seemed to have been intentionally targeted to hit high-poverty school districts like York City the hardest. After combing through state financial records, a report from the state’s school employee union found, “State funding cuts to the most impoverished school districts averaged more than three times the size of the cuts for districts with the lowest average child poverty.” The unsurprising results of these cuts has been that in school districts serving low income kids, like York, instruction was cut and scores on state student assessments declined.

The York City district was exceptionally strapped, having been hit by $8.4 million in cuts, which prompted class size increases and teacher furloughs. Due to financial difficulties, which the state legislature and Governor Corbett had by-and-large engineered, York was targeted in 2012, along with three other districts, for state takeover by an unelected “recovery official,” eerily similar to New Orleans post-Katrina.

The “recovery” process for York schools also entailed a “transformation model” with challenging financial and academic targets the district had little chance in reaching, and charter school conversion as a consequence of failure. Now the local school board is being forced to pick a charter provider and make their district the first in the state to hand over the education of all its children to a corporation that will call all the shots and give York’s citizens very little say in how their children’s schools are run.

None of this is happening with the negotiated consent of the citizens of York. The voices of York citizens that have been absent from the bargaining tables are being heard in the streets and in school board meetings. According to a local news outlet, at a recent protest before the city’s school board, “a district teacher and father of three students … presented the board with more than 3,700 signatures of people opposed to a possible conversion of district schools to charter schools,” and “a student at the high school also presented the board with a petition signed by more than 260 students opposed to charter conversion.” Yet the state official demanding charter takeover remains completely unaltered in his view that this action is “what’s bets for our kids.”

What’s important to note is York schools are not necessarily failures academically, as New Jersey-based music teacher and education blogger going by the name Jersey Jazzman stated on his personal blog. Looking at how the districts’ students perform on state assessments, he found that academic performance levels were “pretty much where you’d expect them to be” based on the fact that “most of York’s schools have student populations where 80 percent or more of the children are in economic disadvantage,” and variations in student test score performance almost always correlate strongly with students’ financial conditions.  He concluded that what was happening to York schools more represents a “long con” in which tax cuts and claims of “budgetary poverty” have prompted a rapacious state government to “declare an educational emergency, and then let edu-vultures … pick at the bones of a decimated school system.”

The attack on York City schools is not unique. As an official with the National Education Association recently pointed out on the blog Living in Dialogue, “It’s the same story that played out in Detroit, Flint, and Philadelphia where these ‘chief recovery officers’ or ‘emergency managers’ have all made the same recommendation: to hand over the cities’ public schools to the highest private bidder.”

Then, hiding behind pledges to do “what’s best for kids,” these operators too often do anything but.

Charter Schools Takeover, Corruption Ensues

York teachers and parents have good reasons to be wary of charter school takeover. As a new report discloses, charter school officials in their state have defrauded at least $30 million intended for school children since 1997.

The report, “Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools,” was released by three groups, the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and ACTION United.

Startling examples of charter school financial malfeasance revealed by the authors –just in Pennsylvania – include an administrator who diverted $2.6 million in school funds to a church property he also operated. Another charter school chief was caught spending millions in school funds to bail out other nonprofits associated with the school. A pair of charter school operators stole more than $900,000 from the school by using fraudulent invoices, and a cyber school entrepreneur diverted $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane.

What’s even more alarming is that none of these crimes were detected by state agencies overseeing the schools. As the report clearly documents, every year virtually all of the state’s charter schools are found to be financially sound. The vast majority of fraud was uncovered by whistleblowers and media coverage and not by state auditors who have a history of not effectively detecting or preventing fraud.

Pennsylvania spends over a billion dollars a year on charter schools, and the $30 million lost to fraud documented in this study is likely the minimum possible amount. The report authors recommend a moratorium on new charter schools in the state and call on the Attorney General to launch an investigation.

The report is a continuation of a study earlier this year that exposed $100 million in taxpayer funds meant for children instead lost to fraud, waste, and abuse by charter schools in 15 states. Now the authors of the study are going state-by-state, beginning with Pennsylvania, to investigate how charter school fraud is spreading.

What’s happening to York City is not going to help. The two charter operators being considered for that takeover – Mosaica Education, Inc., and Charter Schools USA – have particularly troubling track records.

According to a report from Politico, after Mosaica took over the Muskegon Heights, Michigan school system in 2012, “complications soon followed.” After massive layoffs, about a quarter of the newly hired teachers quit, and when Mosaica realized they weren’t making a profit within two years, they pulled up stakes and went in search of other targets.

As for the other candidate in the running, Charter Schools USA, a report from the Florida League of Women Voters produced earlier this year found that charter operation running a real estate racket that diverts taxpayer money for education to private pockets. In Hillsborough County alone, schools owned by Charter Schools USA collaborated with a construction company in Minneapolis, M.N. and a real estate partner called Red Apple Development Company in a scheme to lock in big profits for their operations and saddle county taxpayers with millions of dollars in lease fees every year.

In one example, cited by education historian Diane Ravitch, Charter USA’s construction company bought a former Verizon call center for $3,750,000, made no discernible exterior changes except removal of the front door and adding a $7,000 canopy, and sold the building as Woodmont Charter School to Red Apple Development for $9,700,000 six months later. Lease fees for the last two years were $1,009,800 and $1,029,996.

No wonder York citizens are concerned.

What Happened To Charter School Accountability?

Charter schools that were supposedly intended to be more “accountable” to the public are turning out to be anything but.

As an article for The Nation recently observed, “Charters were supposed to be laboratories for innovation. Instead, they are stunningly opaque.”

The article, written by author and university professor Pedro Noguera, explained, “Charter schools are frequently not accountable. Indeed, they are stunningly opaque, more black boxes than transparent laboratories for education.”

Rather than having to show their books, as public schools do, Noguera contended, “Most charters lack financial transparency.” As an example, he offered a study of KIPP charter schools, which found that they receive “‘an estimated $6,500 more per pupil in revenues from public or private sources’ compared to local school districts.” But only a scant portion of that disproportionate funding – just $457 in spending per pupil – could accurately be accounted for “because KIPP does not disclose how it uses money received from private sources.

In addition to the difficulties in following the money,” Noguero continued, “there is evidence that many charters seek to accept only the least difficult (and therefore the least expensive) students. Even though charter schools are required by law to admit students through lotteries, in many cities, the charters under-enroll the most disadvantaged children.”

This tendency of charter schools operations provides a double bonus as their student test scores get pushed to higher levels and the public schools surrounding them have to take on disproportionate percentages of high needs students who push their test score results lower. Noguera cited a study showing that traditional schools serving the largest percentages of high-needs students are frequently the first to be branded with the “failure” label.

If charter schools are going to have any legitimacy at all, what’s required, Noguera concluded is “greater transparency and collaboration with public schools.”

Fortunately, yet another new report points us in the right direction.

This report, “Public Accountability for Charter Schools,” published by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, “recommends changes to state charter legislation and charter authorizer standards that would reduce student inequities and achieve complete transparency and accountability to the communities served,” according to the organization’s press release.

According to the report, these recommendations are the product of “a working group of grassroots organizers and leaders” from Chicago, Philadelphia, Newark, New York, and other cities, who have “first-hand experience and years of working directly with impacted communities and families, rather than relying only on limited measures such as standardized test scores to assess impact.”

These new guidelines are intended to address numerous examples of charter school failure to disclose essential information about their operations, including financial information, school discipline policies, student enrollment processes, and efforts to collaborate with public schools.

For instance, the report notes that the director of the state Office of Open Records in Pennsylvania, “testified that her office had received 239 appeals in cases where charter schools either rejected or failed to answer requests from the public for information on budgets, payrolls, or student rosters.” In Ohio, a charter chain operated by for-profit White Hat Management Company, “takes in more than $60 million in public funding annually … yet has refused to comply with requests from the governing boards of its own schools for detailed financial reports.” In Philadelphia, the report authors found a charter school that made applications for enrollment available “only one day a year, and only to families who attend an open house at a golf club in the Philadelphia suburbs.” In New York City, where charter schools are co-located in public school buildings, “public school parents have complained that their students have shorter recess, fewer library hours, and earlier lunch schedules to better accommodate students enrolled at the co-located charter school.” The report quotes a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, which documented public school classrooms “with peeling paint and insufficient resources” made to co-locate with charters that have “new computers, brand-new desks, and up-to-date textbooks.”

The Annenberg report’s policy prescriptions fall into seven categories of “standards:”

Unsurprisingly, the report got an immediate response from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That organization’s response cites “remarkable results” as an excuse for why charters should continue to be allowed to skirt public accountability despite the fact they get public money. However, whenever there is close scrutiny of the remarkable results the charter industry loves to crow about, the facts are those results really aren’t there.

Charter Accountability Now

Of course, now that the truth about charter schools is starting to leak out of the corners of the “black box” the industry uses to protect itself, the charter school PR machine is doing everything it can to cover up reality.

Beginning with the new school year, the charter school industry has been on a publicity terror with a national campaign claiming to tell “The Truth About Charters” and high dollar promotional appeals in Philadelphia and New York City.

But the word is out, and resistance to charter takeovers is stiffening in more places than York. In school systems such as Philadelphia, Bridgeport, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, where charter schools are major providers, parents and local officials have increasingly opposed charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. A recent poll in Michigan, where the majority of charter operations are for-profit, found that 73 percent of voters want a moratorium on opening any new charter schools until the state department of education and the state legislature conduct a full review of the charter school system.

There’s little doubt now that the grand bargain Bill Clinton and other leaders thought they were making with charter schools proponents was a raw deal. The deal is off.

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