CPD IN THE NEWS

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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Capitol Confidential - August 20, 2014, by Casey Seiler - The Center for Popular Democracy, a labor-backed advocacy group that supports New York’s controversial Scaffold Law, has filed an appeal of its initial Freedom of Information Law request for all communications between SUNY’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, the business-backed anti-Scaffold Law group that paid almost $83,000 for an analysis of the law’s economic impacts.

That report, made public in February, has been the subject of fierce debate — concerning the details of the Institute’s report as well as larger issues of academic integrity. The Rockefeller Institute subsequently backed away from the most controversial chapter of the report, which included a statistical analysis that concluded gravity-related accidents fell in Illinois after the state ditched its version of Scaffold Law.

Scaffold Law, which places “absolute liability” on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a “comparative negligence” standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.

The initial FOIL request from the Center for Popular Democracy resulted in SUNY’s release of email communications between Rockefeller Institute researchers and Tom Stebbins of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance — contact that was required by the contract for the report.

On appeal, SUNY released an initial draft copy of the report that had been attached to one of those emails. The TU last week offered a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions.

The Center is now requesting to see all subsequent drafts of the report. “Given that the anti-worker groups behind this debunked report are still trying to use its flawed findings to weaken New York’s safety laws, SUNY should release all of the drafts that we know exist,” said the group’s Josie Duffy. “What we saw in the one draft that SUNY did release was disturbing enough, but we still don’t have a full accounting of how this study was manipulated.”

A SUNY spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment — though it’s unlikely the system would have anything to say about the mere filing of a FOIL request.

Here’s the Center’s FOIL appeal:

Center FOIL appeal

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The New Crossroads - May 13, 2013, By Gregory N. Heires - Grassroots campaigns for local and state laws requiring employers to provide their workers with paid sick days are gaining steam.

In the latest sign of the growing movement, the New York City Council approved legislation that would make 1 million workers eligible for paid sick days.

The passage of the bill capped a three-year fight for the legislation by unions and health-care advocates.

But the legislation faces a possible veto by billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has said he would not sign the bill into law. However, the City Council approved the legislation by a veto-proof margin.

On the day of the vote, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising.org, an online and on-the-ground grassroots organization of more than a million people who are working to achieve economic security for all families in the United States, said, “It’s been a long fight, but today the New York City Council heeded the call of New York families and passed a bill that would allow more than a million New Yorkers to earn paid time off to use when they are sick or to take care of a sick child, spouse or parent.”

Rowe-Finkbeiner called upon Bloomberg to “stand up to corporate lobbyists, listen to the people who elected him and sign this important bill.”

The new paid sick leave bill, which the Council passed by a 45-3 vote, would go into effect in April 2014. Initially, the law would require businesses with 20 or more workers to provide five paid sick days to its employees.

In October 2015, it would be expanded to cover firms with 15 or more workers. Furthermore, the law would protect workers who are not entitled to paid sick leave from being fired if they take time off.

“This is a sweet victory,” Bill Lipton, state director of the Working Families Party, told The New York Times. “It provides economic security for New Yorkers, and a shot in the arm for the paid sick days movement across the country.”

The Working Families Party and MomsRising.org were part of a coalition that included the New York City Central Labor Council, the Center for Popular Democracy, the New York City Council’s Progressive Caucus, 32 BJ SEIU, Make the Road New York, A Better Balance and NY Paid Sick Leave Coalition.

New York City joins an increasing number of municipalities and states that are supporting sick pay legislation. San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee have adopted paid sick day laws. Pushes for similar legislation are underway in nearly 20 cities and states, including Denver, Miami, Seattle, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

In March, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) introduced the Health Families Act. The legislation would allow workers to earn paid sick leave that they could use for personal illnesses, caring for a sick family member, preventive care or treatment for domestic violence.

In the United States, 40 million people work in jobs that don’t offer paid sick leave. One million workers in New York City, primarily low-wage workers, don’t have paid sick days.

In addition to arguing that workers have the right to paid sick leave, supporters of the New York City bill argued that the policy simply makes common sense. Faced with the prospect of losing pay, workers without the right to paid time off often decide to go to work when they have contagious illnesses. Furthermore, workers are less productive when they are ill.

“It’s an incredible feeling to know that I won’t ever again have to choose between my child’s health and my job,” said Juana Sanchez, who has three children and is a member of Make the Road New York, a Brooklyn-based community organization that represents Latino and other low-income workers.

“I believe this law enshrines the principle that American exceptionalism is not just about large profits and small elites, but a workplace that is safe, fair and respectful of the lives of workers,” said City Council member Gale Brewer, who first introduced the bill in 2009.

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A U.S. central banker on Wednesday pledged to devote more resources to addressing economic disparities between black and white Americans, saying the high rate of unemployment among African Americans is "really troubling."

"I do think some of the racial disparities are a crisis and we need to treat them like a crisis," Neel Kashkari, chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said after meeting with members of the Minneapolis black community and Fed Up, a network of community organizations and labor unions calling for changes to the U.S. central bank.

Kashkari, a former Republican candidate for California governor, is the son of Indian immigrants and the only one of 17 Fed policy-makers nationwide who is not white.

Unemployment among black Americans, for example, is typically twice that for whites, Kashkari noted. Educational disparity may be one factor, but more research is needed to identify causes, he said.

"We need to understand the 'why?' before we can design potential solutions," Kashkari said. "You don’t tackle a crisis with incremental solutions ... We need to bring overwhelming force to try to address this."

At the same time, Kashkari suggested the solutions are likely to go beyond the powers of the Fed, with lawmakers and local politicians likely in a better position to craft meaningful solutions.

The Fed, he said, has only the tool of interest rates at its disposal. As long as inflation remains low, he said, the Fed can keep rates low to boost job prospects for all Americans. But, he said, there is little the Fed can do to address structural problems in the economy besides contribute to research.

Regional Fed bank presidents often meet with members of their communities but only rarely are those meetings publicized.

Wednesday's meeting and press conference afterward was livestreamed by Minneapolis-based media collective Unicorn Riot from the offices of Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, which hosted the event at which several community members aired their experiences with low pay, long hours and homelessness.

Kashkari promised to spend a day with one of the participants to better understand the challenges she faces.

He also promised to meet with community activists again this month on the sidelines of an annual meeting of global central bankers in a national park near the well-heeled town of Jackson, Wyoming, and to collaborate on research.

"My job is to be your voice," he said.

By KRISTOFFER TIGUE

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