Clinton offers fresh support for key progressive priorities
Clinton offers fresh support for key progressive priorities
Over the course of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton hasn’t had a whole lot to say...
Over the course of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton hasn’t had a whole lot to say about the Federal Reserve or monetary policy in general, which is why it was all the more interesting to see the Democratic frontrunner’s campaign yesterday endorse a change long sought by progressive activists. The Washington Post reported:
The Fed is led by a seven-member board of governors based in Washington and a dozen regional bank presidents based across the country, from New York to Kansas City to San Francisco. The governors are nominated by the White House and approved by the Senate, but regional bank presidents are selected by their boards of directors, whose occupants are chosen by the banking industry and by the Fed governors in Washington.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Clinton’s campaign said she supports removing bankers from the boards of directors and increasing diversity within the Fed.
In a written statement, a campaign spokesperson told the Post, “The Federal Reserve is a vital institution for our economy and the well-being of our middle class, and the American people should have no doubt that the Fed is serving the public interest. That’s why Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that commonsense reforms – like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks – are long overdue.”
This brings Clinton in line with Bernie Sanders, who endorsed this policy late last year, saying he wants a system in which “the foxes would no longer guard the henhouse.”
The statement also came the same day Clinton wrote an op-ed for the Washington Informer, an African-American newspaper, vowing to be a “vocal champion” for D.C. statehood.
“In the case of our nation’s capital, we have an entire populace that is routinely denied a voice in its own democracy,” Clinton wrote, adding, “Washingtonians serve in the military, serve on juries, and pay taxes just like everyone else. And yet, they don’t even have a vote in Congress.”
Earlier this week, Clinton also emphasized her support for a “public option” in health care coverage, including a possible Medicare buy-in policy.
The broader pattern matters, and it’s not altogether expected.
When Clinton’s campaign got underway nearly a year ago, the former Secretary of State started laying out her platform, and on a variety of issues – immigration, criminal-justice reform, expanding voting rights, etc. – the Democrat not only endorsed progressive ideas, she endorsed an agenda that was even more ambitious and further to the left than many expected.
At the time, of course, the question that loomed over the race dealt with motivation: was Clinton throwing her support behind a series of bold proposals because she was worried about Bernie Sanders, or was she serious about these plans? It’s one thing to make appeals to the left as the Democratic race gets underway, but would Clinton follow through when she shifts her attention to the general election?
The answer to these questions is coming into sharper focus. While the Democratic race still has some primaries to go, the delegate math suggests Clinton is well positioned to prevail, and she’s already begun shifting her attention to Donald Trump and the fall election. If the cynics were correct, this would be about the time we’d expect to see Clinton move gradually towards the center, eschewing some of her more progressive goals.
Except this week, we’re seeing the opposite, with Clinton backing Sanders-endorsed changes to the financial industry and touting her support for a public option.
Maybe Clinton is hoping to win over Sanders’ ardent fans who aren’t yet ready to back her candidacy in the fall. Maybe she believes these progressive goals are popular enough with the American mainstream that she’s not really taking much of a risk. Maybe she actually believes what she’s saying and none of this is calculated in any meaningful way.
Whatever the motivation, Clinton may be focusing her attention on the general election, but many of her key progressive ideals, at least for now, remain very much intact.
By Steve Benen
Source
Franken scandal haunts Gillibrand’s 2020 chances
Franken scandal haunts Gillibrand’s 2020 chances
Today, nearly a year after Gillibrand led the charge in calling for Franken’s resignation, the anger is fresh on the...
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.
Denver Receives $5 Million Challenge Grant To Promote Naturalization In The United States.
Denver Receives $5 Million Challenge Grant To Promote Naturalization In The United States.
The “America is Home” Initiative will be administered by the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA). Cities for...
The “America is Home” Initiative will be administered by the National Partnership for New Americans (NPNA). Cities for Citizenship is co-chaired by Mayors Garcetti, Mayor Emanuel, and Mayor de Blasio of New York City. The Center for Popular Democracy is a member of the C4C Executive Committee, and Citi Community Development is the founding Corporate Partner. The C4C “America is Home” Initiative is offered in cooperation with the New Americans Campaign (NAC). NPNA and NAC are two leaders in the U.S. promoting naturalization and are well positioned to bring naturalization to scale and expand to new cities.
Read the full article here.
Was the ‘Original Bargain’ with Charter Schools a Raw Deal?
The Washington Post - October 5, 2014, by Valerie Strauss - Charter school advocates didn’t like it recently when Brown...
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:”
Traditional school districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure a coordinated approach that serves all children.
School governance should be representative and transparent.
Charter schools should ensure equal access to interested students and prohibit practices that discourage enrollment or disproportionately push-out enrolled students.
Charter school discipline policy should be fair and transparent.
All students deserve equitable and adequate school facilities. Districts and charter schools should collaborate to ensure facility arrangements do not disadvantage students in either sector.
Online charter schools should be better regulated for quality, transparency and the protection of student data.
Monitoring and oversight of charter schools are critical to protect the public interest; they should be strong and fully state funded.
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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Scarlett Johansson, Her "Avengers" Co-Stars And The John Gore Organization Raise $500,000 For Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief Efforts
Scarlett Johansson, Her "Avengers" Co-Stars And The John Gore Organization Raise $500,000 For Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief Efforts
"We are deeply grateful to Scarlett Johansson, Kenny Leon and everyone involved in the production of this play for...
"We are deeply grateful to Scarlett Johansson, Kenny Leon and everyone involved in the production of this play for stepping up and contributing their talent to help towards the equitable and just rebuilding of Puerto Rico," explained Xiomara Caro, Director of New Organizing Projects for the Center of Popular Democracy and coordinator of Maria Fund. "This event demonstrates the importance of collective solidarity and responsibility and how powerful it is when we come together to help our communities."
Read the full article here.
Nine Months After Hurricane Maria, Congress Isn't Doing Much to Help
Nine Months After Hurricane Maria, Congress Isn't Doing Much to Help
If a commission discovered “any wrongdoing, any corruption, any malice in that corruption,” added Julio Lopez Varona of...
If a commission discovered “any wrongdoing, any corruption, any malice in that corruption,” added Julio Lopez Varona of the Center for Popular Democracy’s Puerto Rico programs, “then people should go to jail.” In his view that includes not just federal officials but local Puerto Rican officials, some of whom have come under fire for mismanaging the disaster and recovery. But Mark-Viverito notes that it is far too early to think about how to enact punishments on individuals.
Fed Raises Key Interest Rate, Citing Strengthening Economy
Fed Raises Key Interest Rate, Citing Strengthening Economy
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate Wednesday for just the second time since the...
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate Wednesday for just the second time since the financial crisis of 2008, saying the American economy is expanding at a healthy pace and setting itself up as a counterweight to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s push for considerably faster growth.
The Fed cited the steady growth of employment and other economic measures, and signaled that it expects to raise rates more quickly next year to prevent the economy from growing too quickly.
“My colleagues and I are recognizing the considerable progress the economy has made,” Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s chairwoman, said at a news conference after the announcement. “We expect the economy will continue to perform well.”
The widely expected decision moves the Fed’s benchmark rate to a range of 0.5 percent to 0.75 percent, still very low by historical standards. Low rates support economic growth by encouraging borrowing and risk-taking.
The American economy has expanded by about 2 percent a year over the last six years, and the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.6 percent. The Fed’s assessment that the economy is growing at a healthy pace — not too hot, not too cold — is starkly at odds with Mr. Trump, who has promised 4 percent growth and has described job creation as “terrible” and economic growth as anemic.
Already on Wednesday, one Republican member of the House Financial Services Committee, Representative Roger Williams of Texas, criticized the Fed’s move.
“Today’s decision by the Fed to raise the interest rate is entirely premature and will be burdensome to a nation already struggling to pull itself out of this slow-growth Obama economy,” Mr. Williams said in a statement. “By making rates even higher, the Fed is effectively making our hardships even harder.”
Mr. Williams did not object when the Fed raised rates last December.
In announcing the decision after a two-day meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee, the central bank gave little indication that Mr. Trump’s election had altered its economic outlook. The Fed said it still expected a slow economic expansion and a steady march toward higher rates. In separate forecasts also published Wednesday, Fed officials predicted three rate increases in 2017.
Rising Rate
The Federal Reserve raised its target rate for only the second time in more than a decade.
Note: Graphic shows the Federal Funds Target Rate previous to the December 2008 rate change; since then it is the upper limit of the Federal Funds Target Range.
By The New York Times | Source: Federal Reserve
For the first time in recent years, however, there is a real possibility of significant changes in fiscal policy. Republicans will control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and Mr. Trump has promised to increase economic growth and job creation through tax cuts and infrastructure spending.
Those measures could spur faster growth after a presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump regularly disparaged the economy’s performance under President Obama. But the Fed reiterated Wednesday that the economy is already expanding at roughly the maximum sustainable pace.
Fed officials also see evidence that the labor market is tightening. Several Fed districts reported labor shortages in the central bank’s most recent compilation of economic reports. In the Philadelphia district, construction workers are hard to find. Atlanta reported a shortage of nurses; Kansas City, truck drivers; Dallas, tech workers.
Faster growth, in the Fed’s judgment, would probably lead to higher inflation. As a result, if Republicans succeed in invigorating growth, the Fed is likely to raise rates more quickly. The greater the stimulus, the faster interest rates are likely to rise.
“Your expectation should depend very little on what you think that the F.O.M.C. is thinking and very much on your view of Trump policies and their macro effects,” said Jon Faust, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University and a former adviser to Ms. Yellen, referring to the Federal Open Market Committee. “Don’t focus on the Fed. As James Carville regularly reminded the other Clinton on the campaign trail: It’s the economy, stupid.”
Ms. Yellen emphasized that the Fed was not prejudging the likely course of events. She declined several times to comment on the merits of Mr. Trump’s plans or to predict their consequences for the economy.
“We’re operating under a cloud of uncertainty at the moment,” Ms. Yellen said.
Fed officials predicted that they would raise the Fed’s benchmark rate a little more quickly in the coming years, reaching 2.1 percent by the end of 2018. In September, they had predicted that it would reach 1.9 percent by the end of 2018. The new projections, however, reflect a significantly slower pace of increase than last December, when they expected the rate to reach 3.3 percent by 2018.
The combination of steady growth and faster rate increases indicates that some Fed officials expect the central bank to end up offsetting a modest increase in fiscal stimulus. But Ms. Yellen said most Fed officials were reserving judgment.
“Changes in fiscal policy or other economic policies could affect the economic outlook,” she said. “Of course, it is far too early to know how those changes will unfold.”
What Happens When the Fed Raises Rates, in One Rube Goldberg Machine
Exactly seven years ago, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero in order to nurse the ailing economy back to health. Recently it changed direction. This is how it works.
The tensions between monetary and fiscal policy will develop slowly. Legislation takes time to write, and any economic impact would generally be felt in coming years. Political pressures, however, may build more quickly.
Mr. Trump has made clear in the past that he likes low interest rates — and some of his plans, like infrastructure investment, will be much easier to fund if rates remain low.
“The Fed is in a tricky place,” said Michael Feroli, chief United States economist at JPMorgan Chase. “They’re trying not to prejudge how Congress and the administration duke it out, but once they see that, I think they will respond.”
There is also uncertainty about the Fed’s leadership. Ms. Yellen’s term as chairwoman ends in February 2018, and Mr. Trump has said he would prefer a Republican.
Ms. Yellen could remain on the board, a possibility she said Wednesday she had not ruled out. But the Fed, under different leadership, might well choose a different path forward. Some conservative economists, notably John Taylor of Stanford University, argue that the bank should already have raised rates above 1 percent.
The economy, for now, keeps plodding along. Steady job growth has reduced the unemployment rate to a level the Fed considers healthy. A little unemployment is natural as people change jobs and businesses close. Ms. Yellen and other Fed officials have said they see some signs of stronger wage growth. Inflation, too, has picked up a little in recent months, although both wages and inflation continue to rise more slowly than the Fed would like to see.
Ms. Yellen described the rate increase as “a vote of confidence in the economy.”
The decision was made by a unanimous vote of the 10 members of the Federal Open Market Committee, the first time in recent months the Fed has acted by consensus.
Some economists argue that the Fed should wait until inflation strengthens before raising rates, to test whether a stronger economy would persuade some people sidelined during the downturn to start looking for jobs. That would expand the labor force. Unemployment remains particularly high among minorities.
That view, however, has found little support among Fed officials, who worry that interest rates will have to be raised more quickly if they wait too long, increasing the chances of pushing the economy into recession.
“Apparently, Fed officials think the economy is growing too quickly,” said Ady Barkan, the director of Fed Up, a coalition of liberal groups that has pressed the Fed to continue its stimulus campaign. “I doubt you can find many other Americans who share that opinion. And it’s a strange conclusion to draw in the wake of an election that was so heavily impacted by voters’ economic discontent.”
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
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FED UP ACTIVISTS: 'It has taken Gary Cohn almost 2 weeks to find the backbone to gently criticize Trump'
FED UP ACTIVISTS: 'It has taken Gary Cohn almost 2 weeks to find the backbone to gently criticize Trump'
A group of liberal activists who have pressured the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low are calling on Gary Cohn...
A group of liberal activists who have pressured the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low are calling on Gary Cohn, head of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council and a potential candidate to replace Janet Yellen as Fed chair, to resign.
Cohn, who is Jewish, told the Financial Times in an interview that he was disturbed by the events in Charlottesville and disappointed with the response of the president, who appeared to equate neo-Nazis and white supremacists with counterprotesters.
Read the full article here.
Federal Government Continues To Feed Charter School Beast Despite Auditor's Warning
Federal Government Continues To Feed Charter School Beast Despite Auditor's Warning
Politicians always promise they will rid government of "waste, fraud, and abuse," so let's hope at least one political...
Politicians always promise they will rid government of "waste, fraud, and abuse," so let's hope at least one political leader or policy maker will denounce our federal government's new gift of nearly a quarter-billion dollars to charter schools.
The cash dump to charters, courtesy of taxpayers, is from the U.S. Department of Education. As Education Week reports, the money is going to eight states and 15 charter school networks from the Charter Schools Program, a federal government operation that doles out millions every year to start new charter schools.
This money is the latest installment of an over $3 billion gravy train the federal government has funded to help launch over 2,500 charter schools across the nation.
Regardless of how you feel about these schools, you should be concerned about how this new government outlay to charters will be used, based on the extensive track record of financial malfeasance in these schools.
Indeed, shortly after the USDE announcement, the Department's own auditor warned that the money is very much at risk of ending up in the pockets of fraudsters and con artists rather than in the classrooms of diligent students and dedicated teachers.
Again Education Week reports, the audit by the agency's inspector general's office examined 33 schools in six states and concluded that because of a general lack of oversight of charters there was a "risk that federal programs are not being implemented correctly and are wasting public money."
The risk stems from the "cozy relationships," the EdWeek reporter's words, between charter schools and companies that operate them, called Charter Management Organizations (CMOs).
Of the 33 charter schools the audit examined, 22 had examples, sometimes multiple examples, of how CMOs take advantage of the unusual business relationship they have with their client charters to exploit federal education funds and redirect precious taxpayer dollars to private interests that have nothing to do with education.
In one of the more egregious examples the audit round, "the CEO of one CMO in Pennsylvania had the authority to write and issue checks without charter school board approval and wrote checks to himself from the charter school's accounts totaling about $11 million."
At another Pennsylvania charter, a vendor that supplied services to the school was owned by the charter school's CMO and received $485,000 in payments from the school without charter school board approval.
In Florida, a charter and a CMO that shared the same board entered into an expensive lease agreement for the school building, then expanded the facility, extended the lease, and increased the rental payments to the CMO.
One CMO the audit examined, which operated three charters in Michigan and one in New York, required the charter schools to remit all federal, state, and local funds to the CMO and gave the CMO total responsibility, with no oversight by the charter board, for paying school expenditures.
The auditor's report doesn't provide the names of these schools, so we don't know if they have received federal grant money in the past or are some of the ones getting the new money.
However, three of the six states the audit looked at – California, Texas, and Florida – are the same states the Department of Education just decided to send more money to. The other three – Michigan Pennsylvania, and New York – have received federal money for charters in the past, either sent to the state or to charter organizations operating in the state.
These states, and presumably many others the feds send charter money to, often don't sufficiently track how the money is used, according to the audit. Of the six states examined, half could not provide consistent funding data on charter schools with CMOs, a third could not identify which charter schools used CMOs, and a third that tracked whether charter schools used CMOs had unreliable information because charter schools self-reported their operations.
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The federal auditor's revelations on charter school waste, fraud, and abuse is yet another dose of reality in a long line of factual reporting about these schools.
A study released last year by the Center for Media and Democracy found "charter spending is largely a black hole." That's because the "flexibility" charters have been granted by the government is often being used not to create education innovations but to "allow an epidemic of fraud, waste, and mismanagement that would not be tolerated in public schools," the CMD report found.
Based on its extensive research on charters, CMD examined the list of new award grantees and noted Florida, that's getting a grant of $58,454,516, has closed over 120 charter schools in a little over a decade. Texas, which is getting $30,498,392, has "an unknown number" of charter schools "housed in churches" and "closely tied to, religious groups."
Tennessee, which is getting $15,172,732, is famous for having a statewide online charter school that is so bad, the state education chief tried to get rid of it but couldn't because of political maneuvering by the charter lobby and lack of regulatory accountability.
California, which is getting $27,329,904, has some of the worst charter school scandals in the nation, according to a report from the Center for Popular Democracy, which uncovered over $81,400,000 in fraud, waste, and abuse in the state. CPD call the alarming figure "likely just the tip of the iceberg."
Louisiana, another grantee getting $4,836,766 from the feds, has been ripped off by "tens of millions of dollars in undiscovered losses" from charter schools in the 2013-14 school year, according to another CPD analysis. "The state has insufficiently resourced financial oversight," CPD contends, and has yet to put into place adequate reporting, staffing, and auditing.
Three other states – Georgia, Massachusetts, and Washington – are getting the money just when they are deeply embroiled in heated controversies over charter schools.
Georgia has a ballot initiative in November on whether to allow the state to operate an Opportunity School District that would summarily take over local schools and hand them over to charter operators. Massachusetts also has a November ballot initiative, called Question 2, that would allow the state to lift the cap on the number of charters allowed to operate in the state. And in Washington, a charter school battleground for over 20 years, court rulings, legislative shenanigans, lawsuits, and counter lawsuits related to charter schools continue to rage across the state.
No doubt, this new money – over $41 million altogether for these three states – may now sweeten the pot if pro charter forces get their way.
Regarding the individual CMOs the Department is sending money to, one of them, Uncommon Schools, is a charter chain which used to be led in part by the current head of USDE, Secretary John King. Uncommon is getting $8,004,576. No conflict of interest there.
Another recipient – the Denver School of Science and Technology charter chain in Colorado, with a grant of $4,043,361 – has paid out between $20 to $50 million to a for-profit corporation owned by two of the charter chain's director, according to another CPD analysis.
A charter school chain in Indiana getting $1,923,866 is plagued with financial problems, low enrollment, and controversy over how the CEO spends money. No doubt the infusion of federal cash will help.
The federal auditor's report recommends the convening of a formal oversight group to look into charter school financial malfeasance, more rigorous review of charter school operations by federal agencies, and legislative changes in Congress to firm up government oversight.
Here's another recommendation: Stop federal funding to expand these schools.
By Jeff Bryant
Source
Black Students in Milwaukee Are Demanding Change to Racist Discipline In Public Schools
Black Students in Milwaukee Are Demanding Change to Racist Discipline In Public Schools
A report released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Milwaukee youth group Leaders Igniting...
A report released Tuesday by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Milwaukee youth group Leaders Igniting Transformation paints a much more troubling picture.According to the report, in the 2016-2017 school year, Milwaukee Public Schools suspended 10,267 students, including one of every three ninth-graders. The Milwaukee Police Department has 12 dedicated officers assigned to public schools and another six deployed on the streets to take truant students into custody. That’s in addition to 269 school safety assistants, the city’s version of school resource officers. That deployment costs Milwaukee taxpayers more than $15 million a year, but it comes at an even greater social cost.
Read the full article here.
4 days ago
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