Denver's rapid charter expansion yields underwhelming results
Denver's rapid charter expansion yields underwhelming results
Dive Brief: Twenty-seven new charter schools have opened in Denver in the last five years with six more set to open...
Dive Brief:
Twenty-seven new charter schools have opened in Denver in the last five years with six more set to open this summer, but critics point to data about underwhelming performance and examples of forced choice that parents don’t want.
An Alternet article reposted by Salon reports some of the charters that have replaced traditional school options practice harsh discipline disproportionately levied against students of color, and opponents argue a small, powerful circle of local leaders have pushed a charter agenda with the support of big money from outside of the city that has bought electoral support.
A report from the Center for Popular Democracy identified 38% of Denver’s charters as performing “significantly below expectations,” and some parents say they’d prefer more funding and support for neighborhood schools over new expenditures on charters.
Dive Insight:
Charter school performance across the country is mixed. There are high-performing charter schools that have impressive student outcomes that proponents can point to as evidence the charter sector should be expanded. At the same time, there are mediocre or low-performing charter schools that critics can point to as saying the sector does nothing more than siphon funding from traditional schools.
While the CPD study found 38% of Denver’s charters to be significantly underperforming, another found six out of eight of the city’s top schools to be charters. A report to the Colorado General Assembly based on data from the 2011-12 school year found similarly mixed results, where charters perform better on some metrics but not on others. Denver is not the only city engaging in this debate, which has become familiar in virtually every major urban area in the country.
By Tara García Mathewson
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Jeff Flake lies to a dying man about the impact of his tax bill vote
Jeff Flake lies to a dying man about the impact of his tax bill vote
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) doesn't have the monopoly in telling happy lies about the Republican tax bill in hoping...
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) doesn't have the monopoly in telling happy lies about the Republican tax bill in hoping constituents will let her off the hook. On a flight back to Arizona Thursday evening, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) was politely confronted by fellow Arizonan Ady Barkan, who is also founder of Center for Popular Democracy's Fed Up campaign and was returning home after being arrested protesting the tax vote.
Read the full article here.
Loan market shrugs off prison financing protests
Loan market shrugs off prison financing protests
Advocacy groups in New York gathered Wednesday near JP Morgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s apartment, calling...
Advocacy groups in New York gathered Wednesday near JP Morgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon’s apartment, calling on the bank to stop lending to private prison and immigration detention companies, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the protest organizers.
Read the full article here.
Communities Demand End to HUD Distressed Loan Sales
US Finance Post - September 10, 2014, by Christine Layton - Community groups and homeowners in 10 cities have started...
US Finance Post - September 10, 2014, by Christine Layton - Community groups and homeowners in 10 cities have started to rally at local offices of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), calling for an end to a program that sells off delinquent loans to investors, HousingWire reports.
The groups are protesting the HUD Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which was created two years ago to auction delinquent loans to the highest bidders. In 2010, the government began selling delinquent mortgages that are at least 90 days past due to the highest bidder in an attempt to help the FHA rebuild cash reserves that were hit hard by loan defaults during the recession.
In the first 2 years, the FHA sold 2,000 loans in six auctions. In September 2012, when the loan pools were expanded under the new DASP program, it sold over 3,000 loans during the first auction.
The community groups claims these sales harm stabilization goals in neighborhoods, including affordable housng and homeownership.
“We’re seeing an unprecedented rise of the corporate landlord, and HUD’s DASP is just facilitating the process,” said Rachest Laforest, executive director of the Right To The City Alliance. She argues that HUD should instead use a system to favor nonprofit bidders whose mission is to invest in the community with greater requirements for winning bidders to preserve homeownership and offer affordable housing options to homeowners.
In a report released earlier this month, HUD said it sold $15.8 billion in nonperforming loans since 2010, which reduces losses to its insurance fund and saves homeowners from foreclosure. New reports claim the program helps the FHA avoid having to get more money from taxpayers, although it is questioned whether there are any efforts to protect neighborhoods that are hit hard by foreclosures.
About 97% of loans sold have gone to for-profit, private investors, such as private equity firms, hedge funds and mutual funds. Just 11% of the loans sold under DASP are considered “re-performing,” according to a report released by the Center for American Progress, while 22% were allowed to short sale or the property was surrendered for loan forgiveness. One-third were turned around and re-sold, while another one-third went into foreclosure.
“These are companies that put the financial gains of their shareholders first and community stabilization second — or I would say it’s not even necessarily a priority for them,” said Connie Razza, co-author of a report released by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Right To The City Alliance.
The group has sent a petition to Julian Castro, who took over HUD, which houses the FHA, asking that he stop selling loans under DASP until the program an be strengthened and refocused on improving neighborhoods.
During the housing crash, the share of FHA loans skyrocketed as homeowners could not get private loans, increasing from 2% of mortgages in 2006 to almost one-third by 2009. A wave of defaults put the FHA’s mortgage insurance fund into the red, and it took its first $1.7 billion taxpayer bailout in 2013. So far, almost 100,000 non-performing loans have been sold under DASP, giving the FHA a net of $8.8 billion.
Source: US Finance Post
Fed Up With the Senate
Fed Up With the Senate
Right now, there are key vacancies at a vital government institution. President Barack Obama has fulfilled his duty and...
Right now, there are key vacancies at a vital government institution. President Barack Obama has fulfilled his duty and put forward eminently qualified nominees to fill the vacancies. Yet despite the nominees' strong credentials, Republicans in the Senate have dragged their feet, and the chair of the committee whose job it is to consider the nominees has refused to even schedule hearings.
No, this isn't the high-profile battle to fill the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. While the fight over Scalia's replacement may be stealing headlines, Republican obstructionism is actually preventing another important government body from functioning as it should: the Federal Reserve. Two vacant spots on the seven-person Federal Reserve Board of Governors have sat unfilled since 2014.
Obama nominated former community banking CEO Allan Landon to be a Federal Reserve governor in January 2015, yet Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby has let Landon's appointment languish for over a year. Last summer, Obama nominated Kathryn Dominguez, an economist at the University of Michigan, to fill the second open spot. But Shelby has reiterated that he will not schedule hearings for Landon or Dominguez.
Shelby's inaction has real consequences for working people. The Fed, like the Supreme Court, functions best when there are no vacancies. Fed governors hold permanent voting positions on the Federal Open Market Committee, the body that sets interest rates and makes crucial decisions that affect unemployment and wages for millions of Americans. When Fed governorships are allowed to sit vacant, some of the most important decisions about our economy are left to a smaller group of people, usually individuals who are more concerned with banking interests than with the interests of workers.
Five seats on the committee are held by regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents. Unlike Fed Chair Janet Yellen and the Board of Governors, regional bank presidents are not accountable to the public. Instead, they are chosen by the boards of directors at each regional bank, which are dominated by representatives from banks and major corporations.
Regional banks' boards tend to fill their presidencies with people who look and think like them; in fact, one-third of the current regional bank presidents have strong ties to a single firm, Goldman Sachs. Research shows that Federal Reserve Banks have historically held more conservative views about the economy. And when the Federal Open Market Committee voted to intentionally slow down the economy in December, it was mostly due to pressure from regional bank presidents who (mistakenly) believed the economy was close to full employment. At the last committee meeting, regional bank presidents, led by Kansas City Fed President Esther George, continued to advocate an aggressive path of rate hikes.
The Senate's failure to act on Obama's appointees means that the committee is dominated by more conservative, bank-friendly voices. And congressional intransigence has meant that this has been true for most of Obama's presidency. As Stanford scholar Peter Conti-Brown wrote last year, "private bankers effectively held a majority on the [Federal Open Market Committee] 58% of the time [during the Obama administration]."
Shelby says he will not consider the nominees because Obama has not appointed a vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve, a new Fed position that was created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Though the Obama administration has not appointed anybody to this position, the Federal Reserve says Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo is currently filling that role.
At a post-Federal Open Market Committee press conference last month, Yellen was asked about the Senate's inaction. "Congress intended for the Federal Reserve Board to have seven members," Yellen said, "and that tends to bring on board people with a wide spectrum of views and experience and perspectives. I think that’s valuable, and I would like to see the Senate move forward and consider these nominees so we could operate with a full complement.”
Yellen's point about a wider spectrum of views is a salient one. If confirmed, Dominguez would join Yellen as only the fifth woman serving on the Federal Open Market Committee, an historically male-dominated institution. And as the former leader of a community bank, Landon comes from the very sector that Republicans are constantly complaining lacks representation at the Fed.
Over 5,000 members of Fed Up, a coalition of community and labor-based organizations that works to bring the voices of low-income communities of color into decisions on monetary policy, agree with Yellen that Shelby must act, and have joined the 10 Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee in urging him to schedule hearings for Dominguez and Landon.
Yellen's call for the Senate to do its job echoes the sentiments of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who, it was reported last month, presciently warned against a dysfunctional confirmation process in a speech given just days before Scalia's death.
To ensure that some of the most important institutions in the country function for the people precisely as Congress intended, the heads of those institutions are imploring the Senate to do its job. For the sake of millions of working Americans, it is time for the Senate to listen.
By Djuan Wash
Source
LA Officials Urged To Divest From Banks Engaged Predatory Practices
LA Officials Urged To Divest From Banks Engaged Predatory Practices
A coalition of advocates pushing for more responsible banking Thursday called on Los Angeles officials to stop doing...
A coalition of advocates pushing for more responsible banking Thursday called on Los Angeles officials to stop doing business with banks that engage in predatory practices and to take stronger action to implement safe banking policies.
Read the full article here.
Poor Immigrants Get Free Legal Defense in New York City Program
NBC News - June 25, 2014, by Kat Aaron and Seth Freed Wessler - Leroy Samuels walked into the Varick Street immigration...
NBC News - June 25, 2014, by Kat Aaron and Seth Freed Wessler - Leroy Samuels walked into the Varick Street immigration court in lower Manhattan, his wrists handcuffed and attached to a chain around his waist. “My heart is beating,” Samuels’ older sister Anneisha said from a courtroom bench as her father beside her, his head in his hands to hide tears. Samuels, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, nodded at his family and lowered his eyes.
Three days earlier, the 24-year-old had been in a New Jersey detention center preparing to appear at his first hearing alone. Immigrants facing deportation, like Samuels, aren’t eligible for court-appointed attorneys. And like most immigrants in his position, he couldn’t afford one on his own
“I found some lawyers online, but they asked for $4,000,” Anneisha said. “I just hung up.”
Without legal defense, Samuels was sure he’d be deported to Jamaica, the country where he was born but has not been for nearly 15 years since his father brought him to the U.S.
But Samuels arrived in court that December morning with an attorney anyway. He is one of 190 people facing deportation from New York City who have been provided a free lawyer through the Family Unity Program, a city council-funded pilot initiative that provides for two public defenders’ offices to hire lawyers to represent poor immigrants in detention. It's the first program of its kind in the country. Now city lawmakers are poised to expand it almost ten-fold, making New York City the first municipality to provide legal defense to all detained indigent residents facing deportation.
“Justice shouldn't depend on the income level of anyone,” says Judge Robert Katzmann, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, who convened a multi-year study group from which the pilot emerged. “I think that the project will create momentum for greater support for providing counsel for people facing deportation.”
A number of other cities, including Boston and Chicago, are exploring similar programs. And this year, Alameda County, California, which includes the cities of Oakland, Fremont and Berkeley, started a program that approaches New York’s.
“This is part of a trend,” says Raha Jorjani, the immigration attorney hired by Alameda County. “Public defenders are saying that until Congress acts to provide legal defense for immigrants in deportation proceedings, we at the county level have to do our part to mitigate harm to clients.
In recent years, more immigrants have found themselves in court as the U.S. government has deported and detained nearly 400,000 each year. Though not all people facing deportation are detained, those who get locked up, either because they were previously charged with a crime or entered the country without papers, are less likely to have an attorney to represent them and more likely to be deported. The two biggest factors in successfully resolving a case are having a lawyer and being free during the trial, according to a report by Katzmann’s group.
Preliminary data on the New York City pilot, which comes to a close on June 30th, shows that of 190 detainees, almost half have been released or have a legal case to argue for release. Some may still be deported but can now fight from outside prison.
Providing these immigrants with legal defense, Katzmann says, creates both fairness and efficiency, saving county and federal governments money they’d otherwise spend locking people up. “It's a benefit to the judge, it’s a benefit to the government and to the non-citizen. It's really an example of how the government process can be made better.”
For Samuels, the road to immigration court started with legal trouble in 2010. He’d been without a place to stay and was sleeping on a friend’s couch. The friend, Samuels says, asked him to hold onto a package of drugs. Samuels says police officers arrived at the apartment and arrested him. He pleaded guilty and was convicted of criminal possession of a controlled substance and sentenced to time-served, six days in jail.
Samuels and his family say he quickly straightened his life. He found a steady job at a pharmacy, stopped hanging with friends who sold drugs and made sure to see his son, who lived with his ex-girlfriend, at least twice a week. A year passed and then two. He thought the criminal case was behind him.
Then at around 8:30 one morning last December, as he walked home to his Brooklyn apartment after working the night shift, he was stopped on the street and arrested by federal immigration agents. He was placed in detention in New Jersey, facing deportation. Immigration attorneys say it’s not uncommon for officials to detain immigrants long after an arrest.
“I never really thought about being deported,” Samuels said this winter from behind glass in the visitation room at the Hudson County, New Jersey, detention center. “I had a good job. I had visits with my son. I was on my way,” Samuels said. He’d hoped to enroll in culinary school, but from detention, he saw his plans evaporating. And his live-in girlfriend was pregnant and due in May. “What if I’m not there?” he said.
“The first time that I visited my brother at Hudson,” Anneisha Samuels says, “I didn’t know what to do. It’s not like when people are arrested, regular arrested, and they get a lawyer.”
Anneisha had recently lost her job as a home health aide. Their father was between jobs, too.
The next day, Anneisha received a call from Talia Peleg of Brooklyn Defenders Services, one of three attorneys from her office working on the immigrant defense pilot program. (The Bronx Defenders office employs three others.) Peleg bore good news: She would represent Leroy in court free of charge.
“An attorney knows how to talk the talk and walk the walk,” Peleg explained recently. “And to translate these complex immigration issues into a narrative that makes sense to the court,” without a lawyer, “I don’t know if that would be possible.”
The program attorneys say their representation by no means guarantees that their clients will stay in the U.S. For people with many criminal convictions, there’s no viable legal argument to stay. Many of these people are subject to what's known as mandatory detention. For them, fighting to remain in America can mean months or even years in detention while their case winds through the system. Some opt to leave.
Diego Garcia, originally from Guerrero, Mexico, picked up several misdemeanor and disorderly conduct charges in New York. He was fired from a catering job and was drinking heavily.
Eventually, those arrests led to deportation proceedings. He landed in the Hudson County detention center, and then at the Varick Street Immigration Court, where he, too, met Peleg. He was so eager to get out of prison that he told her he just wanted to be deported, but she encouraged him to sit through a 35-minute intake questionnaire to see what his options might be.
It turned out Garcia was eligible for a U visa, a special visa for victims of crime–in his case, witness tampering. The catering company he’d worked for had paid him and others far less than minimum wage, according to the Department of Labor. Garcia’s lawyers say his employer then pressured him to lie to federal investigators who were at the time looking into workplace violations.
Garcia was thrilled to hear there was a possible path to staying in America.
Peleg explained that the visa—if it came through—would take months, and he'd have to stay at Hudson while they fought. Rather than wait in jail, Garcia accepted the removal order, and went back to Mexico. “I wanted to be free,” he said recently by phone from Mexico City, “and fight from there.”
“It's very hard to be incarcerated, waiting,” Garcia said “When you're there, you feel confused, fearful.”
Peleg and Garcia are in regular contact as she pursues his U visa. And he has some money to help him get through the wait. When Peleg contacted the Department of Labor, which had repeatedly fined the catering company, officials said they had more than $3,000 in back wages for Garcia.
According to New York City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, who represents several heavily immigrant communities in Queens, before the pilot project, she heard from families who spent thousands of dollars on immigration lawyers. “Often times it was money that these families didn't have,” she said. But no one was beating down her door demanding publicly-funded lawyers, she said. “My constituency didn't even know that that's what they needed to cry out for.”
Now, that’s changed. The families she talks to are getting help from attorneys whose sole focus is on immigration defense. “We're raising the level of justice,” Ferreras said.
The final draft of the budget, released by the city council Tuesday night, allocates $4.9 million to expand the program. Now, all poor New Yorkers facing deportation, both at Varick Street and nearby immigration courts in New Jersey, will be appointed an attorney.
Ultimately, the goal of the project’s advocates is to provide counsel for all migrants facing deportation in New York State, which would cost $7.4 million, said Peter Markowitz, who runs the immigration legal clinic at Cardozo School of Law, which has helped lead advocacy for the pilot program.
That price tag would be offset by savings for the state, which would spend less on health care and foster care for children whose parents are deported, according to a study by the Center for Popular Democracy, another group supporting the program. The private sector would benefit, too; New York State employers now lose an estimated $9.1 million dollars in turnover costs to replace detained and deported workers, the study found.
Nationally, it would cost just over $200 million to give a lawyer to every indigent immigrant facing deportation, according to one recent study. The federal government would save close to $175 million in detention costs, the study found.
In April, Leroy Samuels appeared in in the Varick Street court again. He walked through the doors in cuffs, and his sister and father sat in the same spot. His attorney had already made a deal with the federal government’s lawyer: Samuels would be granted release. After a short hearing, the judge warned Leroy not to get into any more trouble, and then told the now-25-year old that he could leave. In the courthouse cafeteria Samuels embraced his father and sister and thanked his attorneys.
Samuels’ return has been difficult. He says that he hasn’t been able to get his job back—his former boss told him the company isn’t hiring.
But weeks ago, his girlfriend gave birth to their son. The day he was released, Samuels said, “I feel like I got a fresh start because of these lawyers.”
Source.
Frustrated Employees Say Starbucks Still Needs to Improve Horrible Work Schedules
Frustrated Employees Say Starbucks Still Needs to Improve Horrible Work Schedules
Source: Grub Street...
Source: Grub Street
In August 2014, Starbucks promised to start making baristas' schedules more manageable. If complaints from baristas 15 months later are any indication, however, corporate still has its work cut out.
While fast-food workers rallied in 270 cities on Tuesday for better pay, a group of Starbucks workers apparently spent the daydemonstrating in front of Seattle's Pike Place location to protest what they say are ongoing scheduling snafus. A report recently backed up these claims: The advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy asked 200 employees about their workweeks, and many said they still get schedules with almost no advance notice and still do "clopenings," the infamous shift where a barista closes the store at night and returns hours later to open it the following morning.
Work life has improved for some baristas, but others claim corporate isn't doing nearly enough to fix the mind-set "that being sick is your fault." Inan essay posted this week on Medium, Darrion Sjoquist, a barista whose mom also worked at Starbucks, wrote that his store still expects workers to find someone to cover their shift, no matter the situation:
"You are expected to show up for work if your son has been missing for 24 hours or your grandfather has died. If you are so sick that it hurts to speak, you are expected to call and text and beg every available person and ask them to sacrifice their day off, their precious hours before work or after school to help you solve a problem neither of you had any control over."
As an example, he recounts a recent 4 a.m. phone call he got from a co-worker:
As soon as she said my name, I knew why she was calling. She was sick. She asked if I could cover her 4:30 a.m. to 10:30 am shift that morning. She’d tried every number she could and was having difficulty speaking, let alone standing and working for six hours. She said she didn’t know who else to call or what else she could do. She asked if I could cover even part of her shift.
"I said yes. I worked her six-hour shift that morning and returned an hour later to work my own eight-hour shift that afternoon. I worked her shift because if I hadn’t, no one would have, or even worse, she would have tried."
He and a group of baristas sent a letter to CEO Howard Schultz in hopes that "he hears my story," but they haven't gotten a reply yet. The company hasn't said much of anything lately about this mess, but at the time of that Center for Popular Democracy report, a rep noted there was still "work to do."
All of a sudden, Gary Cohn is seen as shoo-in to be next Fed chairman
All of a sudden, Gary Cohn is seen as shoo-in to be next Fed chairman
Seemingly overnight, White House senior economic adviser Gary Cohn has emerged from the pack and is widely viewed as...
Seemingly overnight, White House senior economic adviser Gary Cohn has emerged from the pack and is widely viewed as the most-likely next chairman of the Federal Reserve, besting all competitors by a country-mile in a recent poll.
The survey, conducted late last month by Bloomberg News, now gives Cohn a ranking of 75 out of 100, well ahead of Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, a distant second with a ranking of 55. Cohn had a ranking of 21 in the prior survey in early June.
Read the full article here.
Forum Held On Report That Calls For Minimum Wage Raise To $10 An Hour
NY1 - A forum was held Wednesday at the CUNY...
NY1 - A forum was held Wednesday at the CUNY Murphy Institute on a new report by United New York and the Center for Popular Democracy that recommends increasing the city's minimum wage to $10 an hour.
It also calls for earned sick leave, schedule predictability, and passing legislation that allows the city to adjust its own minimum wage above that of the state.
The report focused mostly on service industry jobs.
"This is a moment in New York City where we can finally demand that this be a city that stands up for low-wage workers and doesn't shy away from that role," said Deborah Axt of Make the Road New York.
"If we are to maintain our progressive reputation as the bright shining star, then New York City really needs to claim a lot of the recommendations that came out of this forum here today," said City Councilwoman Letitia James, whose district covers part of Brooklyn.
The report said that the city's unemployment rate rose from 5 to 10 percent since 2007, while its homeless population has doubled since 1992.
It also found that real median income is down $3,000 since 2008.
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5 days ago
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