CPD IN THE NEWS

A recent study published by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and the Center for Popular Democracy, entitled “The Tip of the Iceberg,” found $203 million lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in charter schools, with a projected $1.4 billion in losses in 2015 alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned as well: It has investigated schools in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Connecticut, Arizona, Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana and Illinois.

Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform released a report detailing the standards that should be required to raise the charter sector to the level of equity and transparency that public schools must meet. Such reforms are popular: A 2015 poll showed that 89 percent of respondents favored making charter board meetings publicly accessible, 88 percent supported routine audits of their finances and 86 percent desired transparent budgets.

Whether or not one thinks that charter schools are a good thing, we should be able to agree that greater accountability strengthens our school system. However, many charter advocates have stood in the way of reform.

In California, four long-overdue bills that would bring a higher level of accountability to the state’s 1,100 charter schools were introduced last March. A 2015 report from the Center for Popular Democracy documented how charter schools in California have lost $81 million in public funds to fraud and abuse. Over the last 10 years California’s Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team revealed multi-million dollar scams in Los Angeles, Oakland and Santa Ana, to name a few cities, as well as rampant abuse in what was the state’s largest charter operator.

Instead of supporting common-sense reform, the state’s charter industry, represented by the California Charter School Association, has fiercely opposed the bills. “We believe current laws address these concerns and these proposals are unnecessary,” the lobbying group wrote in a press release.

California, the state with the largest number of charter schools, should lead the way for reform. But progress is slow going: There is little indication that any of the bills will make progress in Sacramento this year. 

In Connecticut, it took a scandal to spur this kind of reform. A 2014 study from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers ranked Connecticut as the seventh-lowest state with regard to charter accountability. In response, the state passed a law in July that makes all charter school records a matter of public record subject to the Freedom of Information Act. It also requires charter schools to have anti-nepotism and conflict of interest policies, and it empowers the state’s Department of Education to post each school’s certified audit statement on its website.

The reform was spurred by a massive scandal around a prominent charter school figure named Michael Sharpe. For years Sharpe led a chain of schools called the Jumoke Academy and advocated for unfettered charter expansion. Yet, in early 2015, in the midst of an FBI investigation and after more than six months of relentless investigative reporting by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s Department of Education found Sharpe’s network riddled with “rampant nepotism.” Its report also revealed that Sharpe had ordered “expensive and ornate modifications” to an apartment owned by his company, which he then rented for his own use.

In the aftermath of these revelations, Connecticut’s reform law was approved in May by a 35 to 1 vote in the state Senate and 142 to 3 in the state Assembly. While this is a positive development, other states should not have to wait for a scandal of this magnitude before demanding greater accountability.

Charter reform can be a bipartisan cause. In Ohio, Republican State Senator Peggy Lehner began pushing for laws to require greater disclosure of how public funds are spent after, she says, seeing “story after story” about charter school scandals. A recent investigation by the Akron Beacon Journal found that of the 300 charter schools reporters contacted, only a fourth provided basic information like board members’ names. Meanwhile, 87 percent of charters got Ds or Fs on the most recent state report cards.

Major charter advocates spoke to the need for reform. “Charter schools are public schools, and there should not be a veil of secrecy,” said Chad Aldis, vice president for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which sponsors 11 charter schools in the state. “We need to have transparency.”

In June, a bill that passed the state Senate that would require Ohio to annually audit all charter school operators to monitor the use of public funds. Charter schools would also have to obey open records laws and other transparency standards that are already the norm in public schools.

Such changes should be no-brainers. And yet the bill has stalled in the General Assembly. With much of the debate going on behind closed doors, the public has thus far not been able to get a clear sense for the cause of the delay.

Sunshine advocates fear that the inaction of the Ohio House bodes ill for the bill’s future. “It appears that the poor-performing charter school sector has again won the day,” argues Stephen Dyer, former legislator and Education Policy Fellow at the progressive think tank Innovation Ohio.

Rather than standing in the way of greater accountability, lawmakers should view the current bill as a first step. Not only should the measures be passed, they should be strengthened. Communications and overhead costs would not have to be disclosed under the state Senate’s bill, casualties of the charter industry’s lobbying.

Moreover, Ohio’s bizarre system of charter approval would remain largely unchanged under the bill. Instead of having a few authorizing agencies to approve charter schools, Ohio allows dozens of groups, including non-profits, to sponsor and approve charter schools. These authorizers receive payments from the schools and rarely close them as a result.

The public deserves better — in Ohio and beyond. If charter schools are to become a permanent and respected part of public education in America, their champions will need to clean up their sector and let the sunshine in.

Source: Al Jazeera America

Protesters rallied in Washington, New York City and Philadelphia yesterday against an imminent government action that would damage the financial prospects of ordinary workers. And no, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

The Center for Popular Democracy’s Fed Up campaign wants the Federal Reserve to break with expectations and hold interest rates steady rather than hiking them this week. They believe minority communities have yet to recover from the ravages of the financial crisis, and are still experiencing high unemployment and stagnant wages.

Read the full article here.

Epoch Times - May 18, 2014, by Petr Svab - Due to poor oversight charter schools lost over $100 million to waste, fraud, and abuse over the past 20 years, according to a report by two anti-charter non-profits.

The $100 million cited by the report is an aggregation of audit and prosecution results on local, state, and federal levels.

The Center for Popular Democracy, and Integrity in Education, are both relatively new organizations, formed in 2012 and 2014 respectively. Both have a track record of opposing charter schools.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run. They operate under “charters” issued for five years that require them to measure up to goals the schools set, including academic goals.

The federal Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) stated in 2010 that local agencies issuing the charters “often fail to provide adequate oversight needed to ensure that Federal funds are properly used and accounted for.”

There are three such agencies in New York State: State University of New York, Board of Regents, and the New York City Department of Education. None of them responded to an immediate request for comment.

Between January 2005 and September 2013 the OIG opened 62 charter school investigations, resulting in 40 indictments and 26 convictions of charter school officials.

New York did relatively well. The report cites only two cases of fraud or mismanagement. One dealt with the East New York Preparatory Charter School in Brooklyn. It was ordered to close in 2010 after revelations that the school’s founder named herself a superintendent and gave herself a $60,000 raise.

Another school mentioned was the Niagara Charter School in Buffalo, where the State Education Department found “pervasive appearance of financial mismanagement and less-than ethical behavior,” including spending on plane tickets, restaurant meals, and alcohol, and over $100,000 spent on no-bid consulting contracts.

With the charter school sector growing, the report argues that charter-issuing organizations often lack the resources to do proper oversight. Just last year, over 600 charter schools opened across the nation. There are an estimated 6,400 charter schools enrolling over 2.5 million students, according to the report.

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This article is the second part of a series of conversations with contributors to the demands of the Movement for Black Lives. Part One was on reparations. 

In July 2015, more than 2,000 members of The Movement for Black Lives—a group composed of more than 50 racial justice organizations—convened in Cleveland to recognize the violence committed against Black people in this country and around the world. At the assembly, participants decided the Movement needed to form a coalition that articulated concrete ways to build a more equitable society. Six legislative platforms emerged that covered issues like economic justice, reparations, political empowerment, and divestment from policing and incarceration. In their Invest-Divest platform, the authors called instead for investment in programming, like restorative justice initiatives, that would decrease incarceration and strengthen communities.

We’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions.

According to the Brookings Institution, White Americans are equally likely to use and more likely to deal drugs, while African Americans are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced harshly. For U.S. residents born in 2001, the Bureau of Justice Statistics predicts that 1 in 111 White women will go to prison in her lifetime, while 1 in 18 Black women will. For White men, the likelihood is 1 in 17; for Black men, 1 in 3.

“At the heart of the Invest-Divest demand is the recognition that our city, state, and federal budgets reflect the dehumanization, and the degradation of Black life through lack of investment in anything besides Black incarceration or surveillance,” says Marbre Stahly-Butts, co-author of demands from the Invest-Divest platform that call for reallocating government funds from law enforcement to long-term safety, and decriminalizing drug and prostitution crimes.

Stahly-Butts, a facilitator of the Cleveland convening and deputy director of racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy, explains that our current criminal justice system is based on a premise of comfort, rather than of safety: Instead of addressing the roots of uncomfortable issues such as drug addiction, mental illness, and poverty, we’ve come to accept policing and incarceration as catch-all solutions. This disproportionally affects African Americans.

Here she discusses why divestment from the prison and military industries is as critical to a just future as investment in public institutions.

The following interview has been lightly edited.

Liza Bayless: How does the Invest-Divest platform play into the Movement for Black Lives?

Marbre Stahly-Butts: The call for Invest-Divest has been at the center of organizing and activism work for at least the last decade, if not more. Since slavery, but especially in the age of mass incarceration in the last 30 or so years, [there has been an] incredible increase in the amount of spending that goes to police departments—to cages, prisons and jails, corrections offices, military equipment, and surveillance equipment. At the same time, [there has been] divestment from the social safety net, from social services and education to affordable housing.

What makes our communities safe is not more guns, more police, or more cages.

What makes our communities safe is not more guns, more police, or more cages, but employment opportunities, safe housing, jobs, education, restorative justice. To live in the world we’re envisioning requires a real investment—both by private parties, but also by public dollars.

Bayless: In August, the Department of Justice announced it would end use of private prisons. How significant is this step?

Stahly-Butts: It’s an important step and in many ways a symbolic step, but I think it’s essential that states follow suit. The caging of our people actually happens on a local level, and so the same week that the Department of Justice made that announcement, I believe in Florida they decided to continue contracts with local prisons and, in fact, expand them.

Most of our people are kept in public facilities, so there’s a real need to decarcerate and not just de-profitize. It would matter a lot if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did it, because that’s, in fact, where most of the [prison] beds are.

A month [after the announcement], the Department of Justice released guidelines around its increased funding of police officers and officers in schools. So it’s important to realize that the criminalization—and the incarceration—of our people really is something that the government has not divested from, and in some ways has actively continued.

There’s a lot of work to be done, but I was pleased about implications of ending those contracts.

Bayless: Usually we hear from organizations about investment more than divestment. What makes the concept of divestment so important to this platform?

Stahly-Butts: I think that we see a general narrative on the left around the need to increase infrastructure and investment. Obama, Clinton, and other progressives constantly affirm their commitment to investment strategies, whether it’s health care, job programs, or educational funding. But the divestment piece is essential to a conversation around the livelihood, wealth, health, and survival of Black, brown, and poor communities.

There has to be a conversation about real solutions to incarceration.

If we continue to lock up and put one of every three Black men under police control; if we continue to incarcerate Black women at the highest-growing rates; and continue surveillance and denying people [driver’s] licenses and housing opportunities when they are out of incarceration, [then] we’re undermining our investments if we’re not also divesting from these systems that have led to this mass criminalization of folks for behaviors that often have nothing to do with public safety. 

Bayless: The topic of mass incarceration has been at the forefront of the country’s conversations about racial injustice. Is there something missing from that discussion?

Stahly-Butts: It’s essential that we talk about the entire purview of things that don’t belong under the criminal code, from the way poverty is criminalized to the ways homelessness is criminalized. Even in Florida, wearing saggy pants [has been criminalized].

There has to be a conversation about real solutions to incarceration, and not just changing the practices of putting people in cages, but also changing the entire orientation for communities that criminalize them en masse, that have police in schools, that believe that the only answer to mental health and other issues is cages and handcuffs. There’s a real need for cultural change and a social conversation about the roots of the system, and other ways to deal with these issues that is not state violence.

Bayless: By focusing on decriminalization of certain crimes—in this case, nonviolent ones such as drug and prostitution crimes—as fundamentally different from “violent” crimes, is there a risk people convicted of the latter could end up with harsher sentences?

Stahly-Butts: There’s a false dichotomy between violent and nonviolent crimes. We often talk about it as if there’s some fine line, but in fact every state, every city defines that differently. Whether we’re talking about crimes that hurt people or impact property, or crimes that are about mental health or drug addiction, the idea of investment is key to all of them.

Folks are working locally to realize what it means to build alternative structures to criminal justice.

If we use the money that we’re currently using to cage people, and take the literally trillions of dollars to invest in the well-being of our people—in jobs, education, trauma-informed services, restorative justice—we would see a real addressing of all sorts of social issues, including the ones that make people less safe.

Bayless: Anything else you’d like to add about this platform?

Stahly-Butts: Folks are working locally to realize what it means to build alternative structures to criminal justice, to divest from policing and invest in communities. Despite the past two years—where we’ve seen literally dozens of Black folks be killed on video, and uprisings in communities from Baltimore to Ferguson—we’ve seen incredible movement and energy.

By Liza Bayless

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