New York City Increases Its Resistance to Federal Entreaties on Foreign-Born Detainees
The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Kirk Semple - For years, New York City correction officials routinely...
The New York Times - December 5, 2013, by Kirk Semple - For years, New York City correction officials routinely provided federal immigration authorities with information about foreign-born detainees in their custody. The city, in response to federal requests, would transfer many of those detainees into federal custody, often leading to their deportation.
But a series of laws passed by the City Council over the past two years sought to restrict this cooperative agreement.
And according to new city statistics, the laws appear to be achieving their goal, prompting celebration — albeit guarded — among immigrants’ advocates.
From July, when the most recent of the restrictive laws went into effect, to September, city officials responded to 904 federal hold requests, known as detainers, according to the statistics. Of those detainers, the city declined to honor 331, or 37 percent.
In contrast, until the laws were passed, the city customarily honored every detainer, according to city officials.
“We feel good about the impact that this legislation has had because it has stopped the deportation of a lot of New Yorkers,” Javier H. Valdes, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, an advocacy group, said on Thursday.
“Our hope,” he said, “is that with the new administration we can increase the number of New Yorkers who will not be turned over to immigration.”
Even with the new city laws, New York’s restrictions are still not as tight as those of other major cities, like Chicago and Washington, advocates said.
Cooperation between local governments and federal immigration authorities has been a deeply contentious issue around the United States.
Some jurisdictions, convinced that the federal government has not done enough to enforce immigration laws, have increased their role in immigration enforcement. But others, concerned about the impact of deportations on their communities, have tried to put distance between themselves and the immigration machinery of the federal government.
Much of the recent debate has surrounded the federal Secure Communities program. The initiative allows Homeland Security officials to more easily compare the fingerprints of every suspect booked at a local jail with those in its files. If they find that a suspect is a noncitizen who is in the country illegally or has a criminal record, they may issue a detainer.
The Secure Communities program, a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy, has been vehemently opposed by some elected officials around the country, who have sought to limit their jurisdictions’ participation.
In November 2011, the City Council passed a law that narrowed the range of detainers the city would honor. Among other terms, the law prevented correction officers from transferring immigrants to federal custody if the inmates had no convictions or outstanding warrants, had not previously been deported, were not suspected gang members or did not appear on a terrorist watch list.
The effect on the detainer system was immediate: Correction officials went from routinely honoring all detainers to, according to the recently released statistics, about 75 percent of them.
In February, the Council imposed additional restrictions, including blocking detainers for immigrants facing all but the most serious misdemeanor charges, like sexual abuse, assault and gun possession.
Under these new guidelines, the percentage of detainers the city rebuffed rose to about 37 percent from about 25 percent. The rates may have even been higher had the federal government not concurrently altered its own detainer policy, limiting the range of immigrants it would seek custody of.
Still, immigrant advocates said they would press for more restrictions and have reoriented their lobby toward Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, who has vowed to end the city’s cooperation with federal immigration detainers except for detainees convicted of “violent or serious felonies.”
Newark, San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif., are also among the cities that have more restrictive detainer policies than New York, according to Emily Tucker, staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group in New York.
“New York City can do much better than these numbers show we are doing at the moment,” she said.
Source
Seattle Scales Back Tax in Face of Amazon’s Revolt, but Tensions Linger
Seattle Scales Back Tax in Face of Amazon’s Revolt, but Tensions Linger
Ms. Kniech was one of more than 50 local lawmakers in the United States who sent an open letter to Seattle leaders and...
Ms. Kniech was one of more than 50 local lawmakers in the United States who sent an open letter to Seattle leaders and residents on Monday supporting the tax and criticizing Amazon’s resistance to it. “By threatening Seattle over this tax, Amazon is sending a message to all of our cities: we play by our own rules,” the letter said.
Read the full article here.
Yellen nudges up traders' view on year-end United States rate hike
Yellen nudges up traders' view on year-end United States rate hike
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Friday that the case for raising interest rates has strengthened in light of a...
Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Friday that the case for raising interest rates has strengthened in light of a solid job market and an improved outlook for the US economy and inflation.
At a gathering of central bankers from round the world in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Yellen said improvements in the USA labor market and expectations for moderate economic growth have boosted the case for a rate rise, supporting what the rate futures market has been pricing in for some time. The gains were all but erased after Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said her remarks leave open the possibility of boosting rates in September.
The economy is "nearing" the Fed's goals of full employment and stable prices, share said.
With an interest rate hike unlikely in the immediate future, the dollar is struggling to gain traction.
Still Yellen declined to hint at whether the Fed might raise rates at its next policy meeting, September 20-21, or at its subsequent meetings in early November and mid-December.
The head of America's central bank said the case for an interest rate hike had strengthened but stopped short of indicating any timetable for a move.
"Yellen's speech at Jackson Hole today didn't necessarily offer much in the way of surprises", said OANDA senior market analyst Craig Erlam.
"New policy tools, which helped the Federal Reserve respond to the financial crisis and Great Recession, are likely to remain useful in dealing with future downturns", Yellen said. Although setting a hawkish tone and perhaps trying to sound balanced, Yellen did issue a few cautionary words, but for the most part, she indicated that more rate hikes were on the horizon.
Although US government data earlier on Friday showed the economy growing only sluggishly in the second quarter, Yellen said a lot of new jobs were being created and economic growth would likely continue at a moderate pace.
Yellen's words returned a measure of clarity on the intentions of U.S. monetary policymakers, who have been publicly at odds in recent months over the need to raise rates in the near-term. "On balance, it strengthened the case for a December move", said Bill Northey, chief investment officer for the private client group at U.S. Bank in Helena, Montana.
Prices for fed funds futures implied investors saw about even odds that the Fed will raise rates in December, largely unchanged from before Yellen's remarks.
The dollar eased to 100.47 yen from 100.55 yen Thursday in NY, while the euro nudged up to US$1.1291 from US$1.1281.
In a meeting, members of the groups Fed Up and the Center for Popular Democracy told Fed policymakers that the assessment that the USA was approaching full employment did not reflect life for many blacks and Latinos looking for work. The dollar's 5 percent loss this year reflects a dimming outlook for the US central bank to reduce stimulus and diverge from unprecedented easing in Europe and Asia.
In afternoon trading, the dollar index, which measures the greenback versus six major currencies, rose 0.8 percent at 95.563.
By Adam Cater
Source
Charter School Fraud Has Cost Pennsylvania at Least $30 Million
Daily Kos - October 2, 2014, by Laura Clawson - Pennsylvania's charter schools are rife with fraud and mismanagement,...
Daily Kos - October 2, 2014, by Laura Clawson - Pennsylvania's charter schools are rife with fraud and mismanagement, as anyone who reads local newspapers knows. But a new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, "Integrity in Education, and Action United" details just how big the problem is. Pennsylvania charter school enrollment and funding is growing rapidly and without adequate oversight, and according to the report, there's been at least $30 million in fraud by charter school officials since 1997. For instance:
In 2012, the former CEO and founder of the New Media Technology Charter School in Philadelphia was sentenced to prison for stealing $522,000 in taxpayer money to prop up a restaurant, a health food store, and a private school. Media coverage of parent complaints of fiscal wrongdoing initially uncovered the fraud. Nicholas Tombetta, founder of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, has been indicted for diverting $8 million of school funds for houses, a Florida condominium, and an airplane. In 2005, a former business associate of Tombetta surfaced allegations of fraud, which led to the investigation. Dorothy June Brown, founder of Laboratory, Ad Prima, Planet Abacus, and Agora Cyber charter schools, will be retried this year for allegedly defrauding the schools of $6.5 million and conspiring to conceal the fraud from 2007 to 2011. Two administrators plead guilty and testified against Brown in her first trial. In 2009, the Pennsylvania Department of Education conducted an audit of Agora after receiving complaints from parents of Agora students.You'll notice that in each of those cases, it was complaints from parents or a tip from a business associate that led to investigations. Pennsylvania should be doing more to uncover wrongdoing before it's so blatant that parents are screaming about it. In Philadelphia, there are 86 charter schools and only two auditors. What's more, charter school auditors in Pennsylvania don't actively look for fraud; the report calls for expanded local audit authority, fraud risk assessments for all charter schools in the state, and targeted fraud audits. The report's authors also call for a moratorium on new charter schools until these oversight goals are met.
Source
Whose Recovery? We’re ‘Fed Up’
The Fed Up campaign made their presence known in Jackson Hole, Wyoming hoping to convince the Republican Party that the...
The Fed Up campaign made their presence known in Jackson Hole, Wyoming hoping to convince the Republican Party that the Federal Reserve is ruining the economy. CNBC’s Heesun Wee and campaigner Connie Razza discuss.
Duration: 12:05
Source: MSNBC
Why Community Schools Are The Key To Our Future
by Kyle Serrette, Director of Education Justice Campaigns, Center for Popular Democracy John H. Reagan High...
by Kyle Serrette, Director of Education Justice Campaigns, Center for Popular Democracy
John H. Reagan High School is located in northeast Austin. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Reagan’s student body became increasingly poor as middle-class families left the area. In 2003, a student was stabbed to death by her former boyfriend in a school hallway. The incident made headlines and scared away neighborhood families. Students left Reagan in droves. Enrollment dropped from more than 2,000 students to a new low of 600, and the graduation rate hovered just below 50 percent. In 2008, the district threatened to close Reagan. In reaction, a committee of parents, teachers, and students, brought together by Austin Voices for Education and Youth, formulated a plan to turn Reagan into a community school. The district accepted their plan.
Today, five years after adopting the community school strategy, Reagan is graduating 85 percent of its students, enrollment has more than doubled, and a new early college program has made it possible for Reagan’s students to earn two years of college credits from a nearby community college while still attending high school.
Reagan High School, or any community school for that matter, doesn’t immediately look different than any other school — that is, until you spend some time there.
At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is a big place, with almost 50 million primary and secondary students attending more than 98,000 public schools in 14,000 school districts.
Many things unite our vastly different 50 states, but our approach to education is not one of them.
It is fair to say that the United States does not have one approach to education. Rather, it has thousands of pedagogical approaches that fit into roughly the same structure (elementary, middle, high school).
If the universe of poorly funded public schools in the United States were the night sky on a clear night, you would find some really bright stars and a lot of jarring empty space. The problem with a scattershot approach to education in such a vast country is that there’s no effective way to share successful practices.
Thousands of schools in poor neighborhoods fail generation after generation, while other schools with the same demographics and challenges have found ways to succeed and break the cycle of failure. Today, if you are a business, nonprofit, or any type of entity, it is quite hard to figure out if a school wants help or what kind of help it needs. Most schools lack a clear analysis of what they need to help improve outcomes, and if they do have a clear understanding of needs, most lack a point person to manage partnerships.
Unfortunately, there is also no sound system for sharing successful strategies from schools that are getting it right. This is analogous to a heart surgeon developing a revolutionary life-saving approach and only telling people she bumped into about it. Yet that’s basically how our education system works in the United States.
While poor schools have taken many paths to transform themselves into successful schools, one particular path has worked again and again. There are 5.1 million children enrolled in approximately 5,000 community schools in the United States, and those numbers are growing quickly. In New York, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio promised to create 100 community schools. As mayor, he has fulfilled that campaign promise and recently announced a plan to grow that number to 200 by 2017.
Philadelphia mayoral candidate Jim Kenney announced a plan to open 25 new community schools during his first term. This past December, Ras Baraka, mayor of Newark, announced a plan to scale up community schools with a tentative commitment of $12.5 million from the Foundation for Newark’s Future, the organization created to manage the $100 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated to the city in 2010 to reform the city’s floundering school system.
Community schools are not a new concept. John Rogers, community schools historian at UCLA, tells us they have existed at least since the turn of the 20th century in many forms, but always with the same objective of addressing inequities at both the school and community levels. Jane Addams’s Hull House in the 1890s is an early example: “There were kindergarten classes in the morning, club meetings for older children in the afternoon, and for adults in the evening more clubs or courses in what became virtually a night school. The first facility added to Hull House was an art gallery, the second a public kitchen; then came a coffee house, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a cooperative boarding club for girls, a book bindery, an art studio, a music school, a drama group, a circulating library, an employment bureau, and a labor museum.”
Long before Reagan became a community school, it housed a daycare for the babies of student mothers so they could continue their education. That daycare still exists today with approximately 20 babies enrolled, but there’s more. When school social workers noticed that student moms at Reagan were missing classes to take their babies to doctor appointments, the social workers applied for and won a grant to have a mobile clinic visit the campus once a week. Now student moms can make appointments for their babies to receive checkups without leaving school. Reagan also allows parents to eat lunch with their babies in the daycare and attend parenting classes. Students in Reagan’s Pregnant and Parenting Teen Program now have a remarkable 100 percent graduation rate.
Discipline problems historically have plagued Reagan. Students were frequently suspended, and chronic attendance issues landed students and families in court, which then imposed fines that families could not afford. Dropout rates were high.
Today, a full-time bilingual social worker works to diagnose chronic attendance problems and connects students and their families with supports, with service referrals rather than fines. A student-led youth court has been developed in partnership with the University of Texas–Austin Law School. The youth court and a restorative justice program together have dramatically reduced discipline issues. Today, Reagan is a top Title I high school in Austin.
While there is a fair amount of variability within schools that have implemented this strategy, thousands of schools have gotten it just right. We wanted to understand what distinguished them from the others.
Here’s what we found those schools shared in their strategic plans: 1) culturally relevant and engaging curricula; 2) an emphasis on high-quality teaching, not high-stakes testing; 3) wraparound supports, such as health care and social and emotional services; 4) positive discipline practices, such as restorative justice; 5) parent and community engagement; and 6) inclusive school leadership committed to making the transformational community school strategy integral to the school’s mandate and functioning.
It all seems intuitive. Schools that form strategic partnerships with businesses, nonprofits, local and federal governments, universities, hospitals, and other organizations to meet core unmet needs are usually successful over time. In most strapped schools, a principal doesn’t have time to find the appropriate partners, let alone conduct an analysis of needs. This leaves schools with a random partner strategy, which is no strategy at all. The community school strategy puts one person in charge of determining the school’s ever-evolving needs. The cost incurred to create this position and the work it supports — around $150,000 — pays for itself and then some.
Nine years ago, when Baltimore’s Wolfe Street Academy elementary school became a community school, 90 percent of its students were living in poverty, 60 percent spoke a language other than English at home, and its mobility rate was high at 46.6 (less than half of its students attended for more than three years). Wolfe Street Academy ranked 77th in the district in academic measures, and only half its children reached reading proficiency by fifth grade. It had no library and only sporadic parent or community engagement.
Today, Wolfe Street ranks second in the city academically, its mobility rate has dropped to 8.8 percent, 95 percent of fifth-grade students are reading proficient, and its average daily attendance rate is 95 percent. It has a library, a book club, and volunteer help from a retired librarian. Forty parents attend a morning meeting every day before school while the students eat breakfast. They share school and community news, both good and bad. This transformation at Wolfe Street has taken place even as more students living in poverty have arrived and as the number of students speaking a language other than English in the home has grown.
During one of Wolfe Street’s annual needs assessments, it determined that its curriculum was not dynamic enough to give the school a chance to achieve its academic goals. In response, Wolfe Street formed a partnership with the Baltimore Curriculum Project, which now provides staff with professional development and supports the school with teacher recruitment and retention.
When the assessment revealed that many of its students had never visited a dentist the school partnered with the University of Maryland Dental School to hold free oral health screenings for all the students. A partnership was formed as well with the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work as a way to respond to what the assessment revealed about the daily impact of trauma on their students’ lives. Now licensed social workers and multiple social work interns are available and offer case management and referrals.
We are in the enviable position of knowing what works. And now, with the recent passage of the federal education legislation Every Student Succeeds Act, funds are explicitly available for the essential elements of community schools, such as community school coordinators, needs assessments, and after-school programming.
A United States where every public school is a community school would be a very different place — it would be a school with the community inside it. Your bank, local architect, grocery store, hospital, and other institutions we associate with being part of the broader community outside our schools would be deeply integrated into them. The tax code could be designed to accelerate and incentivize partnerships with schools. The lines between the inside and outside of schools would blur.
And if you imagine a United States in 2050 where all 98,000 schools have a clear sense of their individual needs and are able to communicate these needs effectively to potential partners, this might be a game changer.
With a new granular understanding of every school’s needs, we could scale partnerships and connect schools with similar needs or pair schools that could benefit from each other’s strengths. We could analyze needs and assess intervention strategies between schools and across districts, cities, states, and the nation.
If you can imagine the world back when it wasn’t connected by the internet and experience again how everything changed when we finally were connected, that is the level shift our schools would experience if every school were a community school. A networked school system would exist, and our atomized system of disparate schools would fade away as a relic of the past.
Source
If Amazon Wants New York, Make It Unionize
If Amazon Wants New York, Make It Unionize
The Center for Popular Democracy awarded Walgreens its “worst employer” prize because of its treatment of the retail...
The Center for Popular Democracy awarded Walgreens its “worst employer” prize because of its treatment of the retail chain’s employees.
Read the full article here.
The Controversial New Argument For The Fed To Raise Interest Rates
The Federal Reserve has kept its main interest rates, which banks use to lend to one another and determine the cost of...
The Federal Reserve has kept its main interest rates, which banks use to lend to one another and determine the cost of credit throughout the rest of the economy, at or near zero since December 2008. The central bank has maintained the low rates so as not to disrupt the country's recovery from the largest financial crisis and recession in decades.
But several current and former senior economic officials told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the virtually unprecedented, prolonged period of near-zero rates risks depriving the Fed of the “ammunition” to address the next recession -- let alone another financial crisis. The Fed's primary method of economic stimulus, they note, has traditionally been cutting interest rates, something that is not possible if rates are already so low.
That could force the government to rely disproportionately on fiscal stimulus, these experts warn, holding a recovery hostage to a partisan ideological divide that has paralyzed Congress and shows no signs of abating.
None of the officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal explicitly called for an interest rate increase in order to keep the Fed’s options open for the next crisis. The main reason that Fed officials publicly provide for a rate hike is still that they believe price inflation is on track to hit the Fed’s 2 percent target. (William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, signaled on Wednesday that the the Fed was reconsidering a September interest rate hike after several days of volatility in the stock market.)
But Fed watchers believe that a desire to replenish the Fed’s proverbial firepower for the next recession is part of the motivation of Fed officials who want to “normalize” -- i.e., increase -- rates.
Narayana Kocherlakota, the outgoing president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis,vehemently opposes an interest rate hike in the near future. Kocherlakota nonetheless believesthat his central bank colleagues’ perception that low interest rates have given the Fed less “monetary policy ‘space’” will prompt them to raise rates sooner and higher than is desirable.
Jack McIntyre, a portfolio manager and senior research analyst at Brandywine Global, a Philadelphia-based asset management firm, also said those concerns are part of the Fed’s calculus. “Yes, the [Fed would] like to remove emergency-level monetary stimulus to build up ammunition for the next slowdown in the U.S. economy,” McIntyre told The Huffington Post. “It would be a net positive to move us off of zero interest rates to build up some ammunition so they can cut them when it slows down.”
Many economists insist, however, that these fears are misplaced. They instead argue that the best way for the Fed to prepare for the next recession is to prevent the economy from slowing down too soon in the near term.
“I would much rather have the Fed engage in slowdown and recession prevention by getting us to reach levels at which a rate hike would not be premature,” Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said earlier this week.
If the Fed raises rates in the coming months to give itself leeway for the next recession, Bivens warned, it risks “creating the crisis you are trying to have tools to fight against.”
Bivens is one of a number of liberal-leaning economists and activists who argue that the economy is still far from full employment. They want the Fed to wait for widespread wage growth to take hold before raising rates, and they were in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Thursday and Friday to make their case to Fed officials directly.
When the economy slows down more substantially, Bivens said, the Fed could still stimulate growth using quantitative easing, the massive asset purchasing program it initiated during the most recent recession after interest rates had already bottomed out.
There are other even less conventional techniques available to the central bank, like instituting negative interest rates, which would effectively charge banks for depositing their money rather than lending. It is an idea that former Fed chair Ben Bernanke told The Wall Street Journal has merit.
Richard Parker, an economist at Harvard, agrees with Bivens and other economists that middle- and lower-income workers have yet to share in the gains of the current recovery, but is less worried about the damaging effect of a rate hike.
Instead, Parker believes that lawmakers and activists concerned about low wage growth should focus on changing the regulatory and fiscal policies that he believes would have a bigger impact.
Parker supports a “retained earnings tax” that would penalize corporations for hoarding cash for stock buybacks and other actions “meant to bolster share prices (and hence bonuses)” that do little for the real economy.
And while Parker acknowledges that partisan gridlock makes the prospects of pro-growth fiscal policy dim at the federal level, he sees the success of efforts to raise the minimum wage at the state and local level as a model for incremental progress.
“It is beginning to look like the early Progressive Era, when states were the laboratories for democracy,” he said.
Source: Huffington Post
Scarlett Johansson recauda medio millón para Puerto Rico
Scarlett Johansson recauda medio millón para Puerto Rico
Las compañías Marvel y Disney donaron todos los costos de producción al igual que una aportación económica de $350,000...
Las compañías Marvel y Disney donaron todos los costos de producción al igual que una aportación económica de $350,000 dólares los cuales estarán destinados a la ayuda a Puerto Rico organizados por el Hurricane María Community Recovery Fund.
Read the full article here.
John Williams named to take over key New York Fed president post
John Williams named to take over key New York Fed president post
Fed Up, a group of economists and former Fed officials, and other organizations have been critical of the selection...
Fed Up, a group of economists and former Fed officials, and other organizations have been critical of the selection process as well as the approach the central bank has taken to policy-making. "The NY Fed should go back to the drawing board and draw from the deep, diverse, and highly qualified list of candidates provided to it by the Fed Up coalition (as well as surveying the views of other public interest groups)," the Economic Policy Institute's Josh Bivens said in a recent statement. "This is too important a decision to make on institutional autopilot."
Read the full article here.
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