CPD IN THE NEWS

Al Jazeera America - April 14, 2015, by Amy Dean - Charter schools are everywhere. Not long ago, these publicly funded but privately run institutions were a relative rarity. Those that existed served mostly as experimental academies whose successful lessons could be applied elsewhere in their host school districts. But in the last 15 years, swaths of the U.S. public education system have been turned over to charters. In fact, they are being used as a means to crush teachers’ unions and to pursue high-stakes testing.

Charter advocates justify this ascent by promising an antidote to the disappointing outcomes of traditional public schools in segregated and underfunded urban districts. But the research is in: Charter schools have failed to deliver on their promises.

It is time lawmakers freeze their growth and consider how to provide the best education possible for all students.

Underwhelming performance

There are recent precedents for a moratorium on charter schools. Philadelphia, which issued dozens of charter licenses before 2008, did not allow any new ones from 2008 to 2015. The Chicago School District declared a freeze on charters for the 2015–16 school year. Connecticut and Delaware are considering similar actions. Other school boards and states should follow suit.

As a bevy of recent studies prove, charter schools are not substantially outperforming neighborhood public schools. In Arizona, for example, “on average, charter schools in Arizona do no better, and sometimes worse, than the traditional public schools” according to a study by the Brookings Institution. A similar study in Ohio showed that public schools were producing better results than their charter peers in most parts of the state. In Illinois the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity found that Chicago’s charter schools are “less likely to be racially or ethnically diverse” than and “consistently underperform” their public school peers.

That charter schools are not doing better than traditional public schools is particularly disturbing, since they have a host of advantages. Notably, many charters cherry-pick their students. A 2013 study by Reuters found that charter schools employ complicated screening mechanisms to admit only students who are most likely to succeed. This ensures that students from deeply impoverished families or households where English is not spoken at home are less likely to gain admission. These methods include using English-only documents, demanding proof of citizenship (which is illegal) and narrowing application windows to a few hours.

Charters also regulate the composition of their student bodies through expulsions. In 2014 the Chicago School District reported that public schools expelled 182 students out of 353,000. By contrast, charter schools booted 307 students out of 50,000. The expelled students end up back in the public schools, which become the institution of last resort. Charter schools should in theory register superior test scores, since they are not serving some of the highest-need students. Yet that has not been the case on the whole.

Charters have fallen short in terms of transparency and accountability too. A 2010 review from the Philadelphia controller’s office found that the city’s charter schools had little oversight from the understaffed and underfunded school district. Numerous charter operators have been charged with corruption and misuse of funds.

A national moratorium on charter schools would stop the hemorrhaging of funds from traditional public schools.

A 2014 report by two anti-education-privatization organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, found $136 million in fraud and abuse in 15 states. A follow-up study (PDF) in Pennsylvania revealed “charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania schoolchildren since 1997.” Some of the questionable dealings may not be illegal because of the intricacies of state laws, but there is little doubt that public money is being wasted.

A recent review of charter school scandals in Florida and Michigan by The Washington Post listed numerous cases of real estate flipping, in which charter schools were used as vehicles for exorbitant profits. Michigan’s largest charter operator, National Heritage Academies gets a 16 percent return on its investment in rent from the state — nearly twice what most commercial properties receive.

A nationwide moratorium

Chicago and Philadelphia provide good examples for setting moratoriums on charter schools, but the freeze has been limited in both cities. Philadelphia’s School Reform Commission did not approve a new charter school in the last seven years. But the number of students enrolled at the existing charters continued to grow, doubling from 2007 to 2015. This year the commission approved five new charters — a regrettable reversal of the moratorium.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has declared that no new charter schools will be funded during the 2015–16 year. However, there is good reason to believe that he is simply playing politics and that he will not extend the moratorium. He faced a tough re-election battle, and the temporary halt was seen as an attempt to lure supporters of public education back into his camp. His poll numbers plunged in 2013 when he closed 50 neighborhood public schools, mostly in black and Hispanic neighborhoods that turned out for him in the 2011 election. His attempts to use the moratorium to appeal to disaffected voters shows that black and Latino parents, whom advocates of the charter industry insist want more charter schools, are hardly as enamored with charters as previously thought.

Nationwide, the expansion of charter schools continues unabated. Charter advocates report that 500 new charter schools opened during the 2014–15 school year, enrolling 348,000 students. One in 20 American students is enrolled in a charter school.

It is time for this to stop.

Charter advocates claim that they are data-driven technicians who pay attention to evidence of what works. But research does not support their preferred education policies. A national moratorium on charter schools would stop the hemorrhaging of funds from traditional public schools. It would also allow time to address the corruption that has plagued the charter industry. This would create an opportunity for some reflection on what actually works best for educating our children. 

Amy B. Dean is a fellow of the Century Foundation and a principal of ABD Ventures, a consulting firm that works to develop innovative strategies for organizations devoted to social change. She is a co-author, with David Reynolds, of “A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement.”

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

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NBC News - February 25, 2015, by Berkeley Brean - You know that hard earned money you pay the state and your local school district in taxes? Every year more of it goes to charter schools. $1.5 billion this year alone. So who's keeping an eye on that money to make sure it's not getting wasted? That's what we're digging into in our exclusive New York State Exposed Education report. The report outlining fraud and mismanagement by charter schools in New York is titled "Risking Public Money: New York Charter School Fraud." Click here to read the report  

What would the reaction be if the superintendent or principal in your school district signed deals with their friends and contacts? We're going to lay out the facts and circumstances and you decide whether the charter school did something wrong or was being efficient.

Eugenio Maria de Hostos parent Jeremaine Curry says, "We want to give our kids the best foundation."

Jeremaine Curry made a choice. He wanted his son Jayden to be in a school he trusted, so he chose Eugenio Maria de Hostos -- the oldest charter school in the city. He says, "It gives our kids the best competitive advantage."

Eugenio is listed in the report that analyzed audits by the state comptroller's office. At Eugenio, the audit showed the school gave contracts to organizations either run by board members or friends of board members. For example, their first building? Owned by the Ibero Action League, the sponsor of the school and the rent was "set a bit higher."

The school pays $200,000 for Phys Ed at the downtown YMCA run by board member George Romell, $57,000 for music instruction from the Hochstein School of Music where board member Margaret Quackenbush teaches and $100,000 contract for cleaning services where the company's manager is a board member's brother.

Berkeley Brean: "Everybody who got hired or got that job either had a connection to the board or was a friend of yours."

Julio Vasquez, Chair of Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School: "Ah, not really. Here's what happened."

Vasquez says the non-profits they contract with were partners of the charter from day one.

Brean: "So you don't think you could have saved public money at all by putting out bids?"

Vasquez: "Not at all. Who in the community would...?”

Brean: "How would you know unless you did it?"

Vasquez: "I would not know."

The report says because of a general lack of oversight of charter schools, the state could lose $54 million in possible charter school fraud and mismanagement in one year. Regular district schools get audited at least once every five years. Charter schools can be audited, but only at the state comptroller's discretion. We tracked down Kyle Serrette -- the author of the report and we pressed him on the criticism of Eugenio.

Brean: "Is what they did all that bad?"

Kyle Serrette: "When they rented a facility without figuring out the fair market value was then that potentially wasted money."

Brean: "I mean, to me, it sounds like they were using the efficiencies that were at their fingertips."

Serrette: "They may have been doing the best they know how to do."

Serrette continues, "If you're going to enter into an agreement, you should see if there's a better deal elsewhere."

"Absolutely, I mean, that we didn't follow the procurement process in certain instances? I admit that and going forward, we will," says Vasquez. "But I have to also say that there are times when you have an emergency that you have to act and get it done. That's what we're all about."

Now, Eugenio Maria de Hostos has the second highest test scores of the 11 charters in Monroe County. Its charter just got re-approved by the state, so the state thinks it's doing a good job for children.

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Washington, D.C.'s think tanks produce a tsunami of studies, reports and manifestos. Most of it has a readership that, outside of wonks and reporters, could be counted on the fingers of one hand.

It truly matters that this not be the fate of a new paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Fed Up, and the Center for Popular Democracy.

Read the full article here.

Filed under In Real Terms

This is In Real Terms, a column analyzing the week in economic news. Comments? Criticisms? Ideas for future columns? Email me or drop a note in the comments.

U.S. manufacturing jobs, I argued a few weeks ago, are never coming back. But that doesn’t stop politicians from talking about them. Donald Trump scored his knockout blow in Indiana in part by railing against the decision by Carrier, a local air-conditioning manufacturer, to shift production to Mexico. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have sparred throughout their race over who would best protect manufacturing jobs. And the man they are all trying to replace, President Obama, pledged during his reelection campaign to create a million manufacturing jobs during his second term; he’s still about 700,000 jobs short of that goal.

Candidates talk about manufacturing because of what it represents in the popular imagination: a source of stable, well-paying jobs, especially for people without a college degree. But that image is rooted more in nostalgia than in reality. Manufacturing no longer plays its former role in the economy, and not only because there are far fewer factory jobs than in the past. The jobs being created today often pay less than those of the past — sometimes far less.

A new report this week from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, found that a third of production workers — non-managers working on factory floors and in related occupations — earn so little that their families receive some form of public assistance such as food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit. Many of those workers are temps, who account for a growing share of factory employment. The median wage for a manufacturing production worker, according to separate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was $16.14 an hour in 2015, below the $17.40 an hour for all workers.

On average, manufacturing jobs still pay better than most jobs available to people without a college degree. The median manufacturing worker without a bachelor’s degree earned $15 an hour in 2015, a dollar more than similarly educated workers in other industries.1 But those averages obscure a great deal of variation beneath the surface. Average manufacturing wages are inflated by high-earning veterans; newly created jobs tend to pay less. And there are substantial regional variations. The average manufacturing production worker in Michigan earns $20.80 an hour, vs.$18.86 in South Carolina, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Why do factory workers make more in Michigan? In a word: unions. The Midwest was, at least until recently, a bastion of union strength. Southern states, by contrast, are mostly “right-to-work” states where unions never gained a strong foothold. Private-sector unions have been shrinking across the country for decades, but they are stronger in the Midwest than in most other parts of the country. In Michigan, 23 percent of manufacturing production workers were union members in 2015; in South Carolina, less than 2 percent were.2

Unions also help explain why the middle class is healthier in the Midwest than in the Southeast, where manufacturing jobs have been growing rapidly in recent decades. A new analysis from the Pew Research Center this week explored the state of the middle class in different parts of the country by looking at the share of households making between two-thirds and double the national median income, after controlling for the local cost of living. In many Midwestern cities, 60 percent or more of households are considered “middle-income” by this definition; in some Southern cities, even those with large manufacturing bases, middle-income households are now in the minority.

Even in the Midwest, however, unions are weakening and the middle class is shrinking. In the Indianapolis metro area, where the Carrier plant Trump talks about is located, the share of households in the middle tier of earners has shrunk to 54.8 percent in 2014 from 58.9 percent in 2000. And unlike in some parts of the country, the decline in the middle class there has been primarily driven by people falling into the lower tier of earners, not moving up. The Carrier plant, where workers make more than $20 an hour, is unionized.

Cause and effect here is complicated. Unions have been weakened by some of the same forces that are driving down wages overall, such as globalization and automation. And while unions benefit their members, economists disagree over whether they are good for the economy as a whole. Liberal economists note that overall wages tend to be higher in union-friendly states; conservative economists counter that unemployment tends to be higher in those states, too.

But this much is clear: For all of the glow that surrounds manufacturing jobs in political rhetoric, there is nothing inherently special about them. Some pay well; others don’t. They are not immune from the forces that have led to slow wage growth in other sectors of the economy. When politicians pledge to protect manufacturing jobs, they really mean a certain kind of job: well-paid, long-lasting, with opportunities for advancement. Those aren’t qualities associated with working on a factory floor; they’re qualities associated with being a member of a union.

#FedSoWhite

When the Federal Reserve’s policy-making Open Market Committee meets next month to decide whether to raise interest rates, every one of the 10 voting members will be white. Eleven of the 12 regional Fed bank presidents, who rotate voting responsibility, are white, and not one is black or Latino. (Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari is Indian-American.) The Fed does a bit better when it comes to gender balance — Chair Janet Yellen is a woman, as are three other voting FOMC members. But overall, the people making U.S. monetary policy are disproportionately white men.

Does that matter? More than 100 members of Congress think so. In a letter to Yellen on Thursday, 11 senators and 116 members of the House of Representatives — all of them Democrats — wrote that they are “deeply concerned that the Federal Reserve has not yet fulfilled its statutory and moral obligation to ensure that its leadership reflects the composition of our diverse nation.” The letter is only the latest effort to draw more attention to the Fed’s lack of diversity: A report earlier this year from the liberal Center for Popular Democracy highlighted the issue, and several members of Congress also asked Yellen about it when she testified on Capitol Hill in February. (Bernie Sanders signed the letter. Hillary Clinton, who wasn’t eligible to sign since she isn’t in Congress, said she agreed with the message.)

It isn’t clear whether policy would be any different if the Fed were more diverse. But the letter writers and their allies argue that at the very least the Fed’s lack of representation could be skewing the way policymakers view the economy. By law, the Fed must balance two competing goals: maintaining stable prices (which the Fed defines as inflation of about 2 percent per year) and promoting full employment. In recent months, Yellen and her colleagues have begun the process of raising interest rates — concluding, in effect, that with the unemployment rate down to 5 percent, the “full employment” part of their mandate is largely complete. But the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 8.8 percent in April, as high as the white unemployment rate was in the middle of the recession. For them, “full employment” remains a long way off.

The long road back

Last week I noted that Americans who graduated from college during the recession are still struggling to make up for the slow start to their careers. The Wall Street Journal this week told the even more harrowing tale of people who lost jobs during the recession, many of whom still bear deep financial and psychological scars.

That isn’t surprising. Losing a job is a significant setback in any context, but it is far worse when a bad economy makes it hard to get back to work quickly. People who are laid off in a recession are far more likely to become unemployed for more than six months, which can then make it harder to find a job even once the economy improves. One estimate cited by the Journal found that people who lose jobs during a recession continue to make 15 to 20 percent less than their peers who kept their jobs, even a decade or more after the recession ended. And that is just in the typical recession; the most recent downturn was far worse.

Number of the week

Just under 8 million Americans were looking for work in March, and employers had 5.8 million jobs available to be filled. Economists look at the ratio of those numbers as a gauge of the health of the labor market, and by that measure, the economy is looking good: There were 1.4 unemployed workers for every open position in March, the fewest since 2001.

Don’t take the workers-per-job ratio too literally, though. The official definition of “unemployment” leaves out plenty of people who want jobs, and the government count of job openings is also incomplete, counting only positions for which companies are actively recruiting. But alternative measures of both unemployment and openings show the same trend: There are more jobs and fewer workers to fill them. That’s good news for workers who want jobs, and also for those who already have them — at some point, companies that want to attract workers will have to start offering higher pay.

Elsewhere

Americans are having fewer babies. Janet Adamy looks at the causes and consequences of the U.S. “baby lull.”

Eduardo Porter argues the government should do more to create good jobs for those displaced by the transition toward a service-based economy.

Timothy O’Brien, who saw Donald Trump’s tax returns as part of a lawsuit a decade ago, provides some hints as to what voters might learn if Trump ever releases the documents publicly.

Lam Thuy Vo and Josh Zumbrun dive into the data on the jobs created since the start of the recession.

In much of the country, poor people don’t have access to broadband internet, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation.

By Ben Casselman

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