CPD IN THE NEWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Source: Al Jazeera America

On Friday, activists with the country’s growing racial justice movement unveiled a new campaign to end police violence, bridging protester demands with data and policy to create structural solutions to the crisis that has gripped national attention for more than a year.

Launched as an online manifesto with an interactive website, Campaign Zero proposes new federal, state, and local laws that would address police violence and reform the criminal justice system—including demilitarizing law enforcement, increasing community oversight, limiting use-of-force, and requiring independent investigation and prosecution of police violence cases.

“More than one thousand people are killed by police every year in America,” the group states on its website. “Nearly sixty percent of victims did not have a gun or were involved in activities that should not require police intervention such as harmless ‘quality of life’ behaviors or mental health crises.”

The action plan also incorporates recommendations by the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing as well as those of research organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy. The architects behind Campaign Zero characterized it as a project that will continue to develop over time as new solutions emerge and more supporters come on board.

The four creators of the new campaign and authors of the manifesto—Samuel Sinyangwe, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay McKesson—are co-founders of We The Protesters, which as the Guardian notes is “a prominent section of a wider protest movement that is frequently referred to, in general terms, as Black Lives Matter.”

“This is just the beginning,” they wrote in a statement accompanying the launch.

In the year that has passed since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, police have killed at least 1,083 Americans—an average of nearly three people per day, according to figures compiled by VICE News. Even that figure, released August 9, quickly became outdated.

The policy recommendations also call for an end the controversial practice of “broken windows” policing—a tactic that involves cracking down on petty infractions as a means to prevent more serious crime. The chokehold death of Eric Garner, who was targeted by police for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, heightened criticism of the policy, which Columbia law professor Patricia J. Williams said “has intimidated, dispossessed and humiliated millions of innocent people” for two decades.

Campaign Zero launches just as new reports highlight the lack of training and culture of aggression that permeates law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Addressing that issue in another policy demand, Campaign Zero states, “An intensive training regime is needed to help police officers learn the behaviors and skills to interact appropriately with communities.”

The group points to the recent successful overhaul of policing tactics in Richmond, California, a city which reduced its crime rate by 33 percent through community policing.

“We must end police violence so we can live and feel safe in this country,” Campaign Zero states.

Campaign Zero also introduces strategies for charting presidential candidates’ policy positions on such issues. Racial justice activists have recently engaged with the campaigns of candidates including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Jeb Bush to demand action plans on addressing police brutality and criminal justice reform.

“Right now, the country is awake,” organizers stated. “We must continue to leverage this awakening for substantive change. We have an opportunity to change the way that issues in blackness are prioritized in political spaces and an opportunity to redefine how the political process interacts with our communities.”

“America is finally waking up to this very necessary and critical conversation about race, equity, and preserving the life and dignity of all citizens,” Packnett told the Guardian on Friday.

Added McKesson, “This is a blueprint for ending police violence.”

This Common Dreams article is reposted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Source: San Diego Free Press

As the movement for a $15 minimum wage grows, low-wage workers know the problem isn’t just the hourly pay rate. It’s also the number of hours scheduled. I’ve worked at Gap in multiple locations since October 2014. I’d like to earn a living wage – but a raise alone won’t help me pay the bills if exploitative schedules aren’t fixed too.

I spent most of 2014 unemployed while applying to dozens of jobs. Then, in October, I finally got a job at Gap. Our schedule comes out less than a week in advance. Some of the shifts leave workers “on-call,” meaning we don’t know if we’re going to be working at all that day. The earliest we find out is two hours before the shift is scheduled to start. At my first store, I had 18 hours of penciled-in shifts with only nine guaranteed hours some weeks. This is not uncommon in the industry.

The volatility of on-call scheduling, in combination with the low pay, meant my life at Gap wasn’t all that different from when I was unemployed. Though I was working, I still had to go to a food pantry for groceries. In winter, I had to choose between racking up heat bills I couldn’t afford and freezing in my apartment. My landlord would ask me when I’d have the rent money, but I couldn’t give her an answer because I never knew how many hours I’d actually work in a given week. I couldn’t afford to live in the city where I worked, so I had to transfer to a Gap store back home.

I’m not the only one struggling. Retail workers have the second-lowest average weekly earnings of workers in any sector in the US economy: $444 per week. We also have the second-lowest average weekly working hours. From 2006 to 2010, the number of people working part-time for economic reasons and not by choice, grew from 4 to 9 million. It’s called involuntary part-time work, meaning we want full-time employment but a lack of opportunities prevents us from doing so. 

Unpredictable last-minute scheduling makes it difficult to budget and turns even the most basic decisions into headaches. Will we need babysitters for our children? Will we be able to make a doctor’s appointment? Will we have to rush to Gap from our second jobs? 

One of my co-workers, started working at Gap as she was transitioning out of homelessness, but she wasn’t making enough to get stable housing on her own. Most so-called middle class jobs lost in the recession have been replaced by low-wage work like retail jobs. I’m thankful to be working, but gratitude born of desperation is no comfort and it certainly doesn’t pay the rent.

As the involuntary part-time worker population has drastically grown, so too has Gap’s executive compensation. Since 2010, total executive compensation packages exploded from $19m to over $42m by 2014. Former CEO Glenn Murphy’s compensation increased from $5.9m in 2010 to $16m in 2014. So-called ‘on-call scheduling’ creates a cheap on-demand workforce, enabling the Gap to pad its bottom line. The gains don’t go to us; they flow to the top-earners in the company. We make the sacrifices, they reap the rewards. 

Another co-worker began working at Gap, in addition to a second retail job, as a way to escape the illicit drug trade. My colleague once told me: “everybody wants a job, no one wants to really be out hustling in the streets.” But the on-call shifts became unbearable, and he struggled to pay rent. For him, the trade-off between street money and regular employment was costly. This structural combination of low wages and unfair scheduling pressures workers into the underground economy, and is a hidden pipeline to the prison system.

I do, however, feel hope. Here in Minnesota, lawmakers are considering new legislation, supported by workers and community groups like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, that would require three weeks’ advance notice of work schedules. Across the country, low-wage workers are fighting for fair scheduling and the tide is turning. Just this summer, Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch have announced an end to their on-call shifts. The Gap can be part of this rising tide.

Source: The Guardian

Abercrombie & Fitch announced last week that it would stop requiring workers to be on call for shifts that could be canceled with little notice, making it the latest retailer to pull back from such scheduling practices.

Williams-Sonoma ended on-call shifts in the last several months, while Gap has scaled back the practice ahead of a study it has commissioned on scheduling. Last year, Starbucks announced that it was bringing more “stability and consistency” to its employees’ hours after an article in The New York Times highlighted the company’s habit of giving workers little advance notice on their schedules and requiring some to close and open stores in consecutive shifts, known as “clopening.”

Although the workers directly affected by unpredictable schedules are the most obvious winners, the biggest beneficiaries of a change in the practice could be their children.

A growing body of research suggests that children’s language and problem-solving skills may suffer as a result of their parents’ problematic schedules, and that they may be more likely than other children to smoke and drink when they are older.

“Young children and adolescents of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside standard daytime working hours are more likely to have inferior cognitive and behavioral outcomes,” the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal advocacy group, said last week in a report.

Last year, two Democratic representatives introduced the Schedules That Work Act, which would require employers to give workers more say about their hours and provide them with incentives to encourage more stable schedules.

“We are all talking about this today,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, who is one of the bill’s lead sponsors. “Five years ago, it was an issue people would have brushed to the corner.” The bill has 69 co-sponsors; two Democrats also introduced companion legislation in the Senate.

Among the needs that policy makers and activists working on the issue identify is finding stable, professional child care on a schedule that shifts from week to week.

“The arrangements families put together are usually ad hoc,” Ms. DeLauro said. “They have to rely on other family members, friends. If something breaks down in that chain, they have a problem.”

While all shifting schedules pose a challenge in this regard, on-call work may be unique in the way it complicates child care arrangements.

Kris Buchmann of Albuquerque worked a retail job at a local mall when her son, now 3 ½, was about 1 year old. She said she was frequently scheduled for on-call shifts that never materialized or that lasted less than an hour when they did.

“I still had to pay a babysitter,” said Ms. Buchmann, who is active in a New Mexico organizing group called Organizers in the Land of Enchantment, or OLÉ. “Sometimes I would have to go pick her up, take her back to my house because she didn’t have transportation, drive to work, get sent home, still have to pay her, and drive her home.”

When Ms. Buchmann demanded a more stable schedule, her employer refused, an experience that is not uncommon. After that, she left the job.

As practices like unpredictable scheduling have proliferated in recent years, fed by a shift toward lean staffing models made possible by sophisticated software, they have attracted public criticism.

In a nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll in May, 72 percent of Americans favored requiring chain stores to provide at least two weeks’ notice for any change in schedule, or else compensate workers with extra pay.

Regulators have also taken notice. In April, the office of the New York State attorney general sent letters to 13 retailers, questioning their use of on-call shifts. The letters, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, said retailers were providing workers with “too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay.”

Several companies that received letters from the New York attorney general have denied that they use on-call scheduling for low-wage workers, or that it is common in their stores. Some retailers say that only a small fraction of their workers who have been on unpredictable schedules care for children.

“Very few of our store associates are working parents,” said Michael Scheiner, a spokesman for Abercrombie & Fitch, which was among the letter’s recipients.

But the problem appears to be widespread. A 2012 study of nonfood retail workers in New York City by Stephanie Luce of the City University of New York and by the Retail Action Project, a workers’ advocacy group, found that more than half of the surveyed workers who cared for others, like children or elderly family members, had to make themselves available for last-minute shifts.

Because the practice is relatively new, however, scholars must infer its likely impact from research over the last decade showing the effects on children of parents working nonstandard hours, including night shifts, that have been more common for years.

In one of the most respected studies, published in 2005 in the journal Child Development, Prof. Wen-Jui Han of New York University looked at children during their first three years of life, controlling for such demographic variables as their mothers’ income, education, and race and ethnicity.

Professor Han, who was then at Columbia University, found that children of mothers who worked nonstandard schedules performed lower on problem-solving, verbal comprehension and spoken language tests than children of mothers who worked traditional schedules. Part of the explanation, she concluded, was increased stress on the part of the parents.

“Parents try their best to attend to their children in a sensitive and warm manner, but the physical and emotional exhaustion from nonstandard schedules makes it difficult,” Professor Han said in an interview. “With young children, if they’re crying, asking for food, asking for something, it’s all about how you interact with them.”

Another key issue, she found, was access to quality child care. Children whose mothers worked nonstandard schedules during their first year of life were significantly less likely to be enrolled in professional day care centers throughout early childhood. This type of child care setting, she noted in the paper, tends to be associated with better cognitive development than informal arrangements like relying on extended family members, a frequent alternative.

As for adolescents, Professor Han and two colleagues published a second paper, in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2010, which said that the longer mothers worked odd hours, the more likely their children were to smoke, drink, act out and engage in sexual activity.

The specific effect of on-call work and other frequently changing schedules — as opposed to work hours that fall outside the traditional workday — is only beginning to be studied, but social scientists worry that it has similar implications for children.

In a study of female workers at a large clothing retailer published last year in the Industrial & Labor Relations Review, Julia R. Henly and Susan J. Lambert of the University of Chicago found that the unpredictability of the workers’ schedules was related to higher stress and difficulties juggling work and family demands.

While the study did not examine the way this affected children, Dr. Henly suggested that the challenges posed by unpredictable work hours could take a toll on children as well. She also predicted that mothers with constantly changing work schedules would be less likely to enroll their children in preschool and other high-quality child care facilities.

“Some amount of early childhood education is important,” she said. “But it’s impossible to take advantage of those opportunities if you have a schedule that doesn’t allow you to get your kid there.”

According to Carrie Gleason of the Center for Popular Democracy, a nonprofit organization that helps community groups organize, such complications may explain why there appear to be fewer parents who work on-call shifts.

“A lot of times we find that they don’t last very long,” she said. “It’s absolutely impossible for working parents to meet their responsibilities to their families and hold down a job at a company with on-call shifts.”

Still, even parents who don’t work on-call jobs often have little advance notice of their schedules. In many companies that officially promise to make schedules available in advance, Ms. Gleason said, “managers edit the schedule up until the hours someone is supposed to come in.”

Correction: August 14, 2015 

Because of an editing error, an article on Thursday about the effects on children of their parents’ unpredictable work schedules misstated part of the name of a group in which Kris Buchmann, who left a retail job because of the difficulties in arranging child care, is active. It is Organizers in the Land of Enchantment, not Organizers in the Land of Enrichment.

Source: New York Times