CPD IN THE NEWS

Chicago Tribune - March 31, 2015, by Alejandra Cancino - The group huddled in front of a McDonald's in downtown Chicago, preparing to tell the 100 people who had gathered there how the Fight for $15 had taken on a broader fight on behalf of low-wage workers ranging from airport workers to adjunct college professors.

Many of the people who listened to the speeches were young, too young to recall the 1960s-era protests. But that clearly was the vibe of Tuesday's rally.

Participants in the Fight for $15 movement, who are planning protests on April 15, say they have taken on a broader fight on behalf of low-wage workers ranging from airport workers to adjunct college professors.

"This fight is a fight about racial justice and economic justice," Charlene Carruthers, national director of the Black Youth Project 100, told the crowd. Her organization is composed of black activists ranging in age from 18 to 35.

"For us, the Fight for 15 is also a fight for our lives," Carruthers said. "When we say 'black lives matter,' that includes black workers."

Ed Shurna, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, which is participating in the Fight for $15 campaign, said its strategy seems to borrow elements from eras of the 1930s and the 1960s.

"It has the feel of the civil rights movement, the feel of the labor movement, but it's 2015 so it's done in a different way," Shurna said. He said this campaign is trying to get corporations to take responsibility for the struggles of their workers and get them to increase wages, offer benefits and improve working conditions.

McDonald's and its franchisees have been the main target of the campaign. Workers have filed lawsuits and complaints at various federal agencies alleging labor law violations, wage theft and unsafe working conditions. Moreover, the campaign, backed by the Service Employees International Union, wants the National Labor Relations Board to declare that McDonald's and its franchisees share responsibility for working conditions, benefits and pay.

"We won't stop until these multibillion-dollar companies pay us a living wage of $15 per hour," said Douglas Hunter, a McDonald's worker.

In a statement, McDonald's said it respects people's right to peacefully protest. "Historically, very few McDonald's employees have participated in these organized events," Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem, a McDonald's spokeswoman, said in the statement.

Matt Hoffmann, an adjunct professor at Loyola University, said faculty members of colleges in Chicago and across the nation have drawn inspiration from fast-food workers and the Fight for $15.

He said adjuncts want to be paid $15,000 per course, a figure that would include wages and benefits. He said he currently is paid $4,500 per course and doesn't receive benefits.

Hoffmann, who spoke at Tuesday's rally, said, "We struggle with our bills; we receive no benefits and we have little job stability."

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, Mo., and a national leader of 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.

Source

Democracy for America (DFA) members joined Americans across the country to stand against white supremacy and against the deadly violence committed by Nazi groups in Charlottesville.

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Ask an education “reform” proponent about any issue facing public education and the answer is always the same: “school choice.” Whether they’re championing charter schools, vouchers or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), advocates prefer to frame the debate around the right of parents to send their child to a better-performing school. This is merely a smokescreen to divert attention away from what school choice is really about: the transfer of public money to the private sector without accountability or transparency.

Many school choice campaigns are bankrolled by a faction of incredibly wealthy conservative donors and political groups, including the Koch Brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council (better known as ALEC). Their agenda is clear: dismantle public education.

But it’s a safe bet you won’t hear their names during National School Choice Week (Jan 25-30). What you will hear is a lot of people parroting messages about “freedom,” “innovation,” “options,” even “civil rights” – buzzwords that underpin the campaigns to expand charter schools, vouchers and ESAs across the country. But the jargon masks the devastating impact these policies have had on public education, particularly on those students who are supposed to benefit the most.

Unaccountable Charter Schools: The Truth Hurts

Many people support the idea behind charter schools, but how many are aware of the mounting troubles the charter industry has experienced lately? Probably not enough. Proponents work very, very hard to maintain a facade of success and transparency in the face of evidence that many of these schools operate without any oversight, while wasting taxpayer money and fostering inequity and racial segregation.

Take the North Carolina State Board of Education, which just this month rejected the Department of Public Instruction’s annual report on charter schools as “too negative.” Dominated by school privatization stalwarts, the board is determined to prevent any meaningful oversight of the state’s charters and demanded revisions to the report before it could be submitted to the legislature.

North Carolina educator Stuart Egan took the board to task in an open letter to Lt. Governor and board member Dan Forrest: “Overall, charter schools seem to lack diversity and operate under a different set of rules according to the report you are trying to squelch. The fact is that many of the charter schools you have enabled are perpetuating segregation and are not accomplishing what you advertised they would do,” Egan wrote.

Given the magnitude of waste and fraud in the sector, it’s unsurprising why many charter operators are hiding from accountability and regulation.  And according to a new study, the expansion of unregulated charter schools, particularly in urban communities, is beginning to resemble the effort a decade ago to pump up bad mortgages that eventually blew up the economy.

“Supporters of charter schools are using their popularity in Black, urban communities to push for states to remove their charter cap restrictions and to allow multiple authorizers,” Preston Green III of the University of Connecticut and co-author of “Are We Heading Toward a Charter School ‘Bubble’?: Lessons from the Subprime Mortgage Crisis” told EduShyster. “At the same time, private investors are lobbying states to change their rules to encourage charter school growth. The combination of multiple authorizers and a lack of oversight is creating an abundance of poor-performing schools in low-income communities.”

Vouchers: Who Is Really Benefitting?

According to the 2015 PDK/Gallup poll, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose school vouchers. They see it for what it is: a privatization scheme that subsidizes tuition for students in private schools. And perhaps they are aware that there is no conclusive evidence that vouchers improve student achievement. The public is also not fooled by the often-repeated falsehood that vouchers are primarily benefitting disadvantaged students.

In Scott Walker’s Wisconsin and Mike Pence’s Indiana, where vouchers have expanded dramatically, promises that the programs would serve low-income students in failing schools didn’t last. “That tale quickly and methodically changed,” said Teresa Meredith, president of the Indiana State Teachers Association. By 2015,  only 2 percent of participants [in the voucher program] had attended an ‘F’ public school.

“The most expansive voucher program in America has become an entitlement program which, in large part, now benefits middle class families who always intended to send their children to private (mostly religious) schools and taxpayers are footing the growing bill,” Meredith said.

Education Savings Accounts (or Vouchers on Steroids)

In 2015, Nevada lawmakers were hoping to blaze a new trail for school choice with a new gambit, education savings accounts (ESA), which allow parents to claim more than $5,000 in state funds each year and use it for any qualified education expense. This includes religious-based private schools, but also a variety of other services, all with little or no oversight over student outcomes. In addition, states impose no quality controls on the textbooks, curriculum, tutoring, or supplemental materials that parents can purchase with ESA funds.

Education savings accounts exist in five states, but Nevada became the first to pass a bill that offered them to every public school student regardless of family income. Very few private schools in the state, however, have tuition low enough to be covered by the $5,100 or $5,700 provided annually by ESAs. Wealthier parents can supplement their own income to pay for the tuition, but for lower-income families private school will remain largely out-of-reach.

Earlier this month, a state judge slapped an injunction on the program. In his ruling, District Judge James Wilson said the law diverted public funds to pay for private school tuition and was therefore unconstitutional. The decision will be appealed because advocates have vested a lot in the scheme. ESAs are unquestionably the new school choice battleground and are being pushed in a growing number of states with proponents deploying the usual tropes about “freedom” and “flexibility” to mask their real impact: erosion of public school funding, fewer education resources, wider achievement gaps and increased segregation.

Real Innovation That Works

The good news is that a growing number of communities are finding solutions to struggling schools and achievement gaps that benefit all students, not just some. Educators and parents are working together to expand the community schools model, which is currently present in nearly 5,000 schools nationwide. When public schools extend services and programs beyond the school day, creating strong learning cultures and safe and supportive environments for both students and educators—in effect becoming community “hubs” – student outcomes improve. In 2015, Minnesota educators were instrumental in persuading the legislature to pass a bill creating a grant program for “Full-Service” Community Schools and other states may soon follow suit.  To learn more about community schools, read “Investing in What Works” by the Southern Education Foundation and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Source: NEA Today

Donald Trump’s first year in office will be remembered in this country as a nightmare of national debasement, a time during which the worst America has to offer was on open display: immigration roundups and white supremacist rallies, plutocratic tax policies and oil drilling in the Arctic, nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea, and a US-backed war against Yemen. The frightful headlines, the garbage hot takes, the nonstop onslaught of official lies are so consuming and absolute that they start to feel normal, which is the worst feeling of all.

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