Live coverage of the Local Progress and the People's Convention in Pittsburgh
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Live coverage of the Local Progress and the People's Convention in Pittsburgh
This weekend we'll be covering events at the Local Progress National Convening and Center for Popular Democracy's...
This weekend we'll be covering events at the Local Progress National Convening and Center for Popular Democracy's People's Convention that are happening in Pittsburgh this weekend. More than 1,000 grassroots activists and 100 elected municipal officials will attend conference sessions and a rally in the city from July 7-9. Follow our live blog for coverage.
People's Convention addresses Immigrants rights
This weekend during a panel discussion on immigration at the Local Progress conference, “sanctuary cities” were front and center. In places that have been classified as sanctuary cities, local law enforcement is dissuaded and sometimes barred from providing information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Sanctuary cities have been a red hot topic in Pennsylvania recently with Republican U.S. Senator Pat Toomey trying (and failing) to pass a bill that would cut off funding to sanctuary cities and Democratic U.S. Senate Candidate Katie McGinty telling the Mayor of Philadelphia that his sanctuary city bill needs altering.
Opponents of sanctuary cities believe they lead to undocumented immigrants, who are arrested for violent crimes or terroristic charges, avoiding deportation. But advocates say these policies protect undocumented immigrants, who are charged with minor crimes, from falling into the hands of ICE.
“This is about trust between the community and the police department,” said Philadelphia City Councilor Helen Gym, who spoke during the panel discussion as a proponent of Philadelphia's sanctuary policy. “The community is not served when they fear the police.” The lack of a sanctuary policy in Allegheny County enabled the prosecution and possible deportation of Martin Esquivel-Hernandez, who City Paper wrote about in a cover story in June. Esquivel-Hernandez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico living in Pittsburgh, was cited for driving without a valid license by Mount Lebanon Police and paid his fine in late April. Less than a week later he was detained by ICE.
Lt. Duane Fisher, of the Mount Lebanon Police, says the township's general policy is to make contact with ICE if police “find someone who is unlicensed” and to see whether ICE has “any reason to see if [the suspect] is wanted.” ICE officials have not returned multiple calls requesting information about Esquivel-Hernandez.
Gym says stories like these can harm relationships between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. “We don’t want people to be afraid to call the police to report crimes like burglary, etc.,” said Gym. “It is not the responsibility of local police departments to enforce immigration laws, since they are federal laws.”
She also adds that immigrants have helped Philadelphia grow after 50 years of losing population. Gym says that while the native-born population in Philadelphia has remained steady or dropped over the years, the foreign-born population has grown. “The vibrancy of Philadelphia, the part that seems exciting, hast to do with immigrants feeling welcome,” Gym says.
Other elected officials at the panel from across the country—even ones that are in rust belt cities like Pittsburgh—agreed that attracting immigrants is important to a region's prosperity. Summit County, Ohio County Councilor Liz Walters said immigrants and refugees breathe new life into struggling communities. Summit County, which is just south of Cleveland, has a manufacturing past and has been losing population for decades.
Even in the face of population decline, Walters said it has not been easy to sway other local politicians to the benefits of attracting and maintaining foreign-born populations. “For some, it's easier to see differences and so it's easy to be afraid,” said Walters.
But Walters said Summit County is starting to see successes. Akron, the county seat, now holds ethnic market bus tours where long-time residents sit next to social service providers and get to sample Italian, Mexican and Southeast Asian goods. She says strategies like these don’t just show people can live together, they are good for a region’s economy: “Any city that is not thinking about a [diverse] and global-minded local economy, is going to fall behind.”
— Ryan Deto
9-11 a.m. Fri., July 8
Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, spoke at Local Progress' national meeting about combating Islamophobia. - PHOTO BY ASHLEY MURRAY
Photo by Ashley Murray
Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, spoke at Local Progress' national meeting about combating Islamophobia.
Linda Sarsour is the executive director at the Arab American Association of New York and the co-founder of Empower Change, a Muslim online organizing platform. She spoke at this morning’s Local Progress panel discussion entitled “Our Role in this Political Moment: How local officials can fight back against hate, xenophobia and Islamophobia.” City Paper’s Ashley Murray caught up with her after the discussion.
Tell me about some of the work you’ve done in New York.
My organization predominately works with immigrants from the Arab world and South Asia and has been doing immigrants-rights work — language access to services for immigrants, police reform based on accounts of unwarranted surveillance against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. That work has really opened up doors for being part of broader social-justice movements in New York City that includes working on city-wide immigrant-rights legislation and police reform with black and Latino civil-rights groups. We’ve had a lot of wins in New York. We are one of the most welcoming immigrant cities in the country. We have language-access legislation where government agencies are mandated to [provide] language access. We have passed landmark civil-rights legislation [including] police-reform legislation, creat[ing] the first-ever independent oversight for the New York Police Department. Really it was the most directly impacted communities [who were] at the forefront of those fights. I have committed myself to intersectional organizing because people are intersectional. I mean Muslims are black, white, Latino, Asian, Arab, and we also understand that within all of our communities we’re so complex. So we’re working on multiple issues because we’re not one-issue communities.
One of the things you said on the panel today is that the same people who are promoting Islamophobia may also be against LGBTQ rights and promote deporting Latinos and separating them from their families. Can you talk about that intersection?
I like to look at things from a broader perspective, and because I'm an intersectional organizer, I get to see that the same legislators that are passing anti-LGBTQ laws are the ones passing anti-Sharia bills, which are basically limiting Muslims rights to practice Islam freely in this country. People who are unconditionally pro-police and anti-police reform [and] anti-refugee resettlement are mostly the same legislators around the country. Once we started understanding that, it really helped us build alliances so that when there is an anti -refugee legislation, different movements are showing up for others. When there is an anti-LGBTQ [bill], other communities are showing up. It’s been very powerful. We’ve been able to defeat a lot of anti-refugee legislation across the country. There have been hundreds of cities that have passed welcoming-immigrants resolutions. And I think many legislators are realizing opposition is not in opposition to one group. They are actually in opposition to multiple groups, many of whom are marginalized and minority communities.
Lastly, on the panel you talked about how “Daesh” uses Islamophobia as a tool. Can you talk about that? [Sarsour told the audience that she uses the Arabic acronym Daesh because the terrorist group does not like that name. Many English-speaking media outlets use the term “self-described Islamic State” or “ISIS”.]
I think Islamophobia is systemic targeting and discriminating against Muslims in America, and what it does is it isolates Muslim Americans from the larger American society. It puts people farther into the margins and what that does is, and especially when elected officials in particular are in the media spouting anti-Muslim rhetoric, it actually gives fuel to violent extremists on the other side of the world — and particularly watching Daesh create these social-media videos where they actually quote people like Trump. This feeds into the narrative that they are trying to propose that the West is at war with Islam and that you are not welcomed in your countries, you are a minority, you are at the margin. They use this very problematic rhetoric that is actually based on things people in our country have said. So I always tell people to be careful of what type of ammunition you’re giving to the violent extremists. Unity is the enemy of terrorism, and what Daesh does not want to see is people coming together saying, "We stand with our Muslim neighbors, we stand with our LGBT neighbors." They don’t want to see people working together. And I think we’ve done a very good job in some parts of the country, in places like New York City, where we said, "We’re not going to be divided. We’re not going to let Daesh divide us; we’re not going to let the right-wing divide us."
— Ashley Murray
6-8 p.m. Thu., July 7
Culver City, Calif., City Councilor Meghan Sahli-Wells spoke to a crowd of locally elected woman officials.
Culver City, Calif., City Councilor Meghan Sahli-Wells spoke to a crowd of locally elected woman officials.
Ana Maria Archila stood at the front of a small conference room and emotionally said, "All of you represent what's possible. I need you." She told this to a small conference room of locally elected woman officials after talking about her 4-year-old daughter who told her mom that she could "be Michelle" but couldn't be president.
"She's only 4, but she already learned gender roles. That's why I need you," Archila said.
Nearly 40 women — including local city councilors, county supervisors and school-board members from as close as Wilkinsburg, Pa., to as far as Tacoma, Wash. — gathered for the Local Progress' Inagural Women's Caucus Gathering to kick off the weekend at the Westin Hotel in Downtown Pittsburgh. Local Progress, which has the tagline "The National Municipal Policy Network," is part of the Center for Public Democracy, also holding its People's Convention in town this weekend.
The purpose of the Local Progress national meeting is to "create a community to share best practices around policy and learn from campaign best practices," says Sarah Johnson, co-director of the organization. "We think local progress can play a role in supporting women."
Meghan Sahli-Wells, a city councilor from Culver City, Calif., said that although her city was founded 100 years ago, there have only been five women elected to local government. "We can still count the number on one hand," she said, holding five fingers up to drive home the point.
Various participants shared concerns about obstacles for women wanting to run — like lack of a network to raise capital — and issues once in office — like needing a career mentor.
Sequanna Taylor, now a supervisor for the 2nd District of Milwaukee County, said, "I didn't have the money, but I couldn't let that be an issue. I was out in blizzards getting signatures." Taylor said when her county came under financial distress, she grew concerned about representation in her district and decided to run. She said the board had a reputation for being made up of "good old boys."
"I have to make sure they [District 2 residents] have a voice," Taylor said.
A collective, disappointed "wow" could be heard when political scientist Dana Brown, of the Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics at Chatham University, told the room that 82 percent of the locally elected officials in Pa.'s 67 counties are male. Her organization is a bipartisan center that encourages women to run for office.
"Public policy is happening whether women are at the table or not," Brown said. "Somewhere right now there is a vote happening. ... We, in Pa., have a long way to go."
She shared research findings that show when women are at the table, they change agendas by bringing a new perspective; change procedures by changing content of discussions and enforcing transparency; and change policy outcomes because they use more collaborative and inclusive language in negotiations.
Two local politicians attended the discussion — Pittsburgh City Councilor Natalia Rudiak and Wilkinsburg Council Vice President Marita Garrett.
Rudiak said that when she was a young activist, "a man always had the megaphone [at protests]. I remember wondering if I'll ever have it." Now Rudiak, one of the youngest people ever elected to council, says "I'm doing everything I can locally to get women elected."
— Ashley Murray
By Rebecca Addison, Ryan Deto and Ashley Murray
Source
NYC pagará por abogados en casos de deportación
El Diario - July 18, 2013, by Claudia Torrens - Nueva York se prepara para dar otro paso en su tradición de ayuda a...
El Diario - July 18, 2013, by Claudia Torrens - Nueva York se prepara para dar otro paso en su tradición de ayuda a inmigrantes: planea pagar los abogados de oficio que necesitan cuando se encuentran en una corte de inmigración y enfrentan la deportación.
Algunos inmigrantes con o sin papeles en la ciudad que enfrenten la expulsión de Estados Unidos podrán a partir de finales de este año o el 2014 presentarse frente al juez de inmigración con un abogado de oficio pagado con fondos municipales, reduciendo así sus posibilidades de ser deportados porque ya no estarán solos en la corte. Activistas, un magistrado federal y funcionarios locales planean anunciar el viernes que la ciudad ha destinado $500,000 a financiar un programa piloto que ofrecerá representación legal a inmigrantes.
Brittny Saunders, de la organización Center for Popular Democracy, dijo a The Associated Press que esta es la primera vez que un programa así se implementa en una municipalidad de Estados Unidos.
"La intención que tenemos a través de este programa piloto es lograr información sobre los beneficios que la representación legal supone tanto para un individuo en detención y enfrentando la deportación como para su familia, su comunidad y la ciudad entera", dijo Saunders. "Esperamos que este programa sea un modelo para otras comunidades alrededor del país".
Inmigrantes que acaban en las cortes de inmigración y que enfrentaban la deportación no tienen derecho a ser defendidos por un abogado de oficio. Pueden contratar a un abogado privado pero muchos inmigrantes no tienen el dinero para pagar por ese servicio. Es por ese motivo que la ciudad, varios activistas y un juez federal interesado en el tema llamado Robert Kaztmann han unido esfuerzos para ofrecer ayuda a inmigrantes en esta situación.
Saunders dijo que en el estado de Nueva York una media de 2,800 inmigrantes se encuentra anualmente en proceso de deportación sin acceso a asistencia legal.
Source
Report Spotlights the New York Elites Who Fund Nativist Groups
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is at the right end of his party's...
Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is at the right end of his party's spectrum on immigration issues, but according to a new report put out by advocates for the undocumented, titled “Backers of Hate in the Empire State,” he's hardly alone in pushing a nativist agenda in New York. The report names the names of others who help fund and organize the institutions of American nativisim.
To these advocates, the Center for Public Democracy Action and Make the Road Action Fund, the Trump campaign's restrictionist immigration policies, backed up by an emphasis on the undocumented’s supposed criminality and the need to “take our country back,” are dangerous and extreme. Early on in his campaign, Trump described Mexican immigrantsas drug dealers and “rapists," released a plan for the mass deportation of 11.3 million undocumented immigrants, and called for the abolition of birthright citizenship.
The report argues that the prominence of such discourse in our politics does not reflect public opinion, which broadly supports a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. Rather, this rhetoric is driven by the activism of an impassioned minority, which influences immigration politics through organizations like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). And groups like FAIR are driven by New Yorkers like Alan and Donald Weeden.
The Weedens are best known as the directors of the Weeden Foundation, an environmentalist nonprofit based in New York. On its website, the foundation calls the “protection of biodiversity” its top priority. But in the name of “population stabilization,” the foundation and its directors have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on groups that the report asserts are working to limit the ethnic diversity of the United States.
The Weeden Foundation donated $100,000 to FAIR in 2013, and Alan Weeden has served on the group’s Board of Directors, according to the report. In Washington, FAIR is treated like a legitimate lobby, and its leaders have been invited to testify before Congress on matters of immigration more than 100 times. But the Southern Poverty Law Centerclassifies FAIR as a hate group, and the Anti-Defamation League has called the group reckless and xenophobic.
FAIR was founded in 1979 by John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist and pioneering anti-immigration activist. Tanton has well-documented ties to several white nationalist leaders, and once authored a paper titled “The Case for Passive Eugenics.” In a letter from 1993, Tanton wrote, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” While Tanton is no longer in FAIR’s leadership, he remains a celebrated figure in the organization. And FAIR’s current president, Dan Stein, appears to share much of Tanton’s basic worldview. In 1998, Stein said, “Immigrants don't come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing … Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans.” FAIR was instrumental in the passage of Arizona’s SB 1070 law, which requires police to determine the immigration status of someone arrested or detained when they have “reasonable suspicion” that the individual is not in the U.S. legally — a measure that critics argued would encourage the racial profiling of Hispanic immigrants.
Donald E. Weeden sits on the board of NumbersUSA, and his family foundation gave the group $350,000 in 2013. Founded by Tanton ally Roy Beck, NumbersUSA operates as a grassroots-driven lobby for reducing immigration to pre-1965 levels. One of NumbersUSA’s “sensible solutions” for immigration is the elimination of birthright citizenship, a fringe policy that gained mainstream visibility with Trump’s recent backing.
Former New York University professor and conservative author Carol A. Iannone sits on the Board of Directors at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Spun off from FAIR in 1985, CIS is a putatively nonpartisan think tank whose self-described mission is to provide policymakers with "reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States." The think tank’s research and statistics are often cited by members of Congress and mainstream news outlets, despite falling under perpetual criticism for their distortions. In 2014, a CIS blog post provided readers with a map titled “A Town Near You? ICE Reveals Locations of Convicted Murderers It Freed.” The map underscored the alarmism of a CIS report that claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had released 68,000 criminal aliens in 2013. Both ICE and an investigation by the Daily Beast found the report to be significantly misleading, both for the way it grouped traffic convictions with more serious crimes, and suggested that the U.S. government has the authority to indefinitely detain or deport any undocumented immigrant who is guilty of any crime. A 2001 Supreme Court ruling requires the U.S. to release undocumented immigrants who have served out their prison sentences, even if they cannot be deported because of their home country's denial of reentry.
In her own work, Iannone has echoed Tanton’s concerns with immigration’s threat to American culture, writing in The American Conservative that the 1965 Immigration Act brought about a “significant change in our national character,” as it allowed for mass immigration “to overwhelm our assimilative capacity.”
Among the other individuals singled out in the report is Barbara Winston, president of the Bruce Winston Gem Corporation and a prominent donor to the GOP, who Newsmax once put on its list of 2015’s “75 Most Influential Jewish Republicans.” Winston sits on the board of Keep Identities Safe, a group founded in the wake of September 11 to lobby for restricting access to driver's licenses, so as to prevent future terrorists from being able to board airplanes. However, the group has gone on to advocate for policies combating “ID fraud” of all kinds, including the fake IDs that allow teenagers to purchase alcohol. While much of the group’s advocacy is founded on the premise that the undocumented are more likely to commit acts of terrorism than non-U.S. citizens, Keeping Identities Safe is less intimately tied to the broader American nativist movement than the other organizations the report derides.
But the group has had a profound impact on the lives of undocumented New Yorkers. In 2007, while operating under their former name, Coalition for a Secure Driver’s License, the lobby helped defeat a bill that would have granted undocumented immigrants access to state licenses in New York. At the time, that opposition was hardly limited to hard-core nativists — current Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton came out against the measure during her last presidential campaign.
This time around, Clinton is campaigning in support of state licenses for the undocumented. Her reversal is a testament to the success that groups like Make the Road Action Fund have had in shifting the boundaries of the immigration debate within the Democratic Party.
With its new report, the group hopes to extend its influence to the other side of the aisle. The true target of the report is not the individual donors and activists it names, who are all perfectly familiar with their own associations and work. Rather, the research is aimed squarely at the New York GOP.
“We think that the Republican Party of New York should dissociate themselves, not only from the candidates that are pushing this hateful rhetoric, but also from the institutions and individuals that are supporting them,” Make the Road Action Fund co-director Javier Valdés told Daily Intelligencer.
The group will hold a protest outside of a storefront owned by Barbara Winston Tuesday afternoon, with the aim of highlighting the diamond seller’s ties to both the New York GOP and nativist causes.
For now, though, New York’s most prominent Republican continues to push the boundaries of the immigration debate ever rightward, whilesteadily advancing toward a presidential nomination.
Corrections: An earlier version of this story identified Carol Iannone as a current professor at NYU. Ms. Iannone has not been affiliated with the university since 1999. It also failed to properly credit the assertion that FAIR and CIS are organizations that seek to "limit the ethnic diversity of the United States" to the report's authors. Both organizations dispute that characterization of their work.
Source: New York Magazine
Are Superstar Firms and Amazon Effects Reshaping the Economy?
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Are Superstar Firms and Amazon Effects Reshaping the Economy?
“Wage stagnation is not a puzzle,” said Marshall Steinbaum, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, who spoke on a panel...
“Wage stagnation is not a puzzle,” said Marshall Steinbaum, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, who spoke on a panel organized by the activist group Fed Up outside the lodge where the Fed symposium later took place. “Cutting-edge research tells us exactly what’s going on, and yet the Fed seems to be considering this for the first time.”
Read the full article here.
Risking Public Money: Illinois Charter School Fraud
Best Practices to Protect Public Dollars & Prevent Financial Mismanagement...
Download the full report
Executive Summary
In 2010, fourteen years after Illinois passed its charter school law, the U.S. Department of Education raised a red flag about the state’s oversight of fiscal controls at its charter schools, finding that the state “has no system in place for monitoring [charter schools].” Four years later, this problem continues. To date, $13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials has been uncovered in Illinois. Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone. Our research uncovered three fundamental flaws with the state’s oversight of charter schools:
Oversight depends heavily on self-reporting by charter schools, or by whistleblowers. Illinois oversight agencies rely almost entirely on complaints from whistleblowers and audits paid for by charter operators. Both methods are important to uncover fraud; however, neither is a systematic approach to fraud detection, nor are they effective in fraud prevention. General auditing techniques alone do not uncover fraud. The audits commissioned by the charters and provided to Illinois oversight agencies use general auditing techniques, not those specifically designed to uncover fraud. The current processes may expose inaccuracies or inefficiencies; however, without audits targeted at uncovering financial fraud, state and local agencies will rarely be able to detect fraud without a whistleblower. Adequate staffing is necessary to detect and eliminate fraud. We found evidence that the government agencies tasked with investigating fraud are severely understaffed, which is prohibitive to conducting high quality, time-intensive audits of any type.We propose the following targeted reforms of the existing oversight structure to remedy these flaws:Mandate Audits Designed to Detect and Prevent Fraud
Charter schools should institute an internal fraud risk management program, including an annual fraud risk assessment and audits that specifically investigate high-risk areas; Charter schools should commission audits of internal controls over financial reporting that are integrated with an audit of financial statements; Existing oversight bodies should perform targeted fraud audits focused on areas of risk or weakness through the annual fraud risk assessments; and Auditing teams should include members certified in Financial Forensics trained to detect fraud.Increase Transparency & Accountability
All annual audits and fraud risk assessments should be posted on the websites of charter school authorizers, typically the local school system; Charter authorizers should create a system to categorize and rank charter audits by fraud risk levels to facilitate transparency and public engagement; Charter schools should voluntarily make the findings of their internal assessments public; Charter school authorizers should perform comprehensive reviews once every three years; The Attorney General’s office should conduct a review of all charter schools in Illinois to identify inadequate school oversight by boards of directors or executives and publicize the findings; and The state should impose a moratorium on new charter schools until the state oversight system is adequately reformed.Despite the possibility of almost $30 million lost to fraud in the last year alone, charter schools continue to experience unprecedented growth. Since 2003, charter school enrollment in Illinois has grown by 680 percent. Illinois students, their families, and taxpayers cannot afford to lose a dollar more in public funds as a result of fraud, misspending, or misdirection within the charter school system. The reforms proposed herein require a smart investment and a commitment to the future of Illinois’ youth and all its communities.
Download the full report
Elizabeth Warren and more than 100 House Democrats blast lack of diversity at the Fed
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Elizabeth Warren and more than 100 House Democrats blast lack of diversity at the Fed
The Federal Reserve System is one of the most important institutions in the entire American government. Its composition...
The Federal Reserve System is one of the most important institutions in the entire American government. Its composition is also almost shockingly non-diverse, with zero African Americans or Latinos serving on the key panel whose decisions impact job creation and the pace of economic growth, despite fairly overwhelming evidence that Fed decisions impact racial groups differently.
What's more, the bodies that choose which people sit on that non-diverse committee are themselves extremely non-diverse — locking into place a system in which the interests of African Americans, Latinos, and lower-income people more generally may be underconsidered in making decisions about unemployment, inflation, and interest rates.
All this is the subject of a letter released at noon today by a group of 111 members of the House of Representatives plus 11 senators, headlined by Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Al Franken, demanding that the Fed pay more attention to diversity in its ranks.
The key graf:
According to a study by the Center for Popular Democracy released in early February, 2016, 83 percent of Federal Reserve head office board members are white, and men occupy nearly three-fourths of all regional bank directorships. The lack of public representation on regional Banks’ boards is even more distressing in light of the lack of diversity among regional Bank presidents and the resulting lack of diversity on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Currently, 92 percent of regional Bank presidents are white, and not a single president is either African-American or Latino. Moreover, at present 100 percent of voting FOMC participants are white, while 83 percent of regional Bank presidents and 60 percent of voting FOMC members are men.
Progressives interested in monetary policy issues have long struggled to engage the public, activist groups, or elected officials in the topic. The focus on diversity from the left-wing Center for Popular Democracy's "Fed Up" campaign that inspired this letter represents a new tactical effort to change that.
Diversity among decision-makers is not, of course, directly a monetary policy issue. But as the letter points out, monetary policy does have significant consequences for racial disparities in employment. They cite research from the Economic Policy Institute "demonstrating that for every .91 percent reduction in unemployment for whites, black unemployment drops 1.7 percent" meaning that African Americans have more to gain from monetary policy that is more pro-growth and less inflation-averse.
Michigan Representative John Conyers who was one of the main driving forces behind the letter issued a statement observing that "Detroit and cities across the country with high minority populations have some of the highest unemployment rates and will be harmed if the Federal Reserve does not consider our needs when they make key policy decisions."
How the Federal Reserve is organized
The specifics of the letter hinge on the structure of the Federal Reserve system, which is, in a word, confusing.
The main hub of the Fed is the Board of Governors in Washington, DC, which consists of a chair, a vice chair, and five other board members. Currently there are two vacancies on the board, and all five board members are white.
In addition to the Board of Governors, there are 12 regional Federal Reserve banks, each of which has its own president and its own board of directors. Each bank's president is selected by its board, with the choice subject to confirmation by the main board. Each regional bank board itself is composed in part of members selected by the private banks of the region and in part of members selected by the central board.
Monetary policy decisions are made by what's known as the Open Market Committee. The committee is composed of the seven members of the Board of Governors (at present, again, there are two vacancies) plus the president of the New York Fed, plus four other regional bank presidents serving on a rotating basis.
The point of the letter is that all these various groups underrepresent women and massively underrepresent African Americans and Latinos.
Today's Fed neglects race
Diversity of membership is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure that a broad range of interests is represented. But there is considerable evidence that the current not-so-diverse group of monetary policymakers is not considering the full range of interests in American society.
Narayana Kocherlakota, the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was the only nonwhite FOMC member during his term and offered this observation back in January:
However, there is one key source of economic difference in American life that is likely underemphasized in FOMC deliberations: race. Let’s look, for example, at the most recently released transcripts for FOMC meetings, which cover the year 2010 (my first full year on the Committee). It was a challenging year for the US economy as a whole, as the unemployment rate was above 9 1/4% in every month. But it was especially challenging for African-Americans: In every month of 2010, the unemployment rate among African-Americans was at least 15 1/2%. I did a search of the hundreds of pages of the meeting transcripts. Based on that search, my conclusion is that there was no reference in the meetings to labor market conditions among African-Americans (or Black Americans).
Monetary policymakers, with their needed independence, always risk being (or at least being seen as) insufficiently empathetic to the lives of their nations’ citizens. The Federal Reserve Act has mitigated this risk in the US by ensuring that an appreciation for economic diversity is at the heart of the FOMC’s deliberations.
The details of monetary policy get pretty complicated, and there's rarely been much sign of normal people being interested in them. But issues about who is represented and whose interests get discussed are easier to understand, so you can see why this particular angle is gaining momentum in Congress.
After the release of the letter, Hillary Clinton also weighed-in on the issue via spokesman Jesse Ferguson who offered a statement:
The Federal Reserve is a vital institution for our economy and the wellbeing 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 as well as that commonsense reforms — like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve banks — are long overdue. Secretary Clinton will also defend the Fed's so-called dual mandate — the legal requirement that it focus on full employment as well as inflation — and will appoint Fed governors who share this commitment and who will carry out unwavering oversight of the financial industry
By Matthew Yglesias
Source
Trump Picks Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell To Lead The Central Bank
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Trump Picks Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell To Lead The Central Bank
“It’s relieving that Trump chose someone that represents continuity from the current Fed,” said Jordan Haedtler,...
“It’s relieving that Trump chose someone that represents continuity from the current Fed,” said Jordan Haedtler, manager of the Fed Up campaign, a coalition of groups that advocates for progressive Fed policies. “But it’s also unclear why if he wants continuity with the Fed’s policies of accommodating monetary policy and reasonable financial protections, he would not have reappointed Janet Yellen, who is by many metrics the most successful chair in Fed history.
Read the full article here.
Progressives must find the road back to Factville
Donald Trump’s upset election, I’ve had a unique and odd experience, one peculiar to D.C. I’ve participated in a number...
Donald Trump’s upset election, I’ve had a unique and odd experience, one peculiar to D.C. I’ve participated in a number of events — conferences, dinners, panels — that were planned before the election and predicated on a different outcome. To say the mood is somber at these events is an understatement.
What has been particularly discordant is to hear policy types, myself included, discuss what we need to do going forward. These include ideas to prolong the economic recovery and help ensure that it reaches more people. Also, there’s a recession out there somewhere, and we’re not ready for it, so good ideas abound regarding preparations that Congress should undertake now while the sun’s still shining. Other ideas include some of the best parts of Hillary Clinton’s agenda, including ways to help people balance work and family, pay for college, improve the Affordable Care Act, and to push back on economic discrimination by race and gender.
When I hear myself and my colleagues make these arguments, I feel as if we’re leading a parade but have neglected to turn around and see the thin crowd that’s following us.
That is, of course, an exaggeration. Clinton won the popular vote by more than 1 percent and counting. But those of us in the facts business must at least consider how little our work seemed to penetrate in the months leading up to the election.
Already, many of us progressives have dusted ourselves off and gone right back to work, promulgating more facts and policy arguments. That’s necessary and increasingly important, as the Trump team is generating policies that sound good but are wasteful and inefficient. We’re used to playing such defense, and we’re good at it.
But if that’s all we do, we’ll be failing the people whom we’re here to help. The problem isn’t that the facts aren’t out there; it’s that they don’t seem to be gaining much traction. Moreover, there is no way an $18.7 trillion economy can be successfully managed if facts are on the run. We either solve this problem or watch our country deteriorate.
So how do we find and successfully navigate the road back to Factville?
We can gain an important hint by looking at what hasn’t worked. Many in the real media (as opposed to the “alt-right”) responded, often admirably, with fact checking, even in real time, as during the presidential debates. But listen to what Major Garrett, from CBS news, said about this on the Diane Rehm radio show the other day, incisively summarizing his experiences on the campaign trail:
“Any fact-checking I did … was prima facie evidence that I was biased and that I was wrong. Fact checking Trump was proof not that he was wrong but that he was right and that anyone who would raise a question about the underlying relationship about what he said and the facts was biased and therefore legitimately disregarded … It wasn’t as if there was a conversation about this; it wasn’t as if facts were litigated back and forth. The very raising of a question about the factual basis of a Trump assertion was proof that you were wrong and biased and that was the atmosphere that I found myself existing in as a reporter and to call it challenging would be an understatement.”
The institution of the establishment media is, in other words, not trusted by partisans who can point and click to countless other places to find “facts” that meet their priors. It’s a brilliant opposition strategy: when the act of fact-checking itself signals to partisans that you’re biased, that’s checkmate against evidence.
Next, ask yourself who benefits from the absence of evidence-based analysis? Examples are useful here. I can show, using the work of the think-tankers I’ve mentioned thus far that the social insurance programs of Medicare and Social Security are highly efficient and effective in boosting the welfare of retirees, and that there are no such private systems that would be nearly as effective. I can show the same societal-wide net benefits for the Affordable Care Act and the anti-poverty safety net. Same for countercyclical policy to offset recessions. Same for public education, from quality preschool to affordable college.
Every one of these programs is a “public good” and thus adds to the role of the government and requires ample funding provided through tax revenue. So, if you’re someone who wants to keep more of your pretax income, you must discredit such programs and the government that provides them.
I see this play unfolding as we speak: One, discredit the facts so nobody knows what works and what doesn’t. Two, pass a massive tax cut that delivers the goods to the top few percent. Three, argue, based on #1 above, that the tax cuts will generate enough growth to pay for themselves. Four, when they fail to do so and the debt starts going through the roof, throw up your hands and say you’ve got to cut the “entitlements.”
I don’t profess to know how to break this chain, but I do know this: Bringing the best ideas to fruition, where “best” means those that promote the greatest social welfare, does not depend solely on logic, numbers and the best arguments.
First, both the media and allegedly centrist policy organizations need to retire the idea that pairing fact-based analysis with unfounded bias is balanced reporting. Why should there be a debate on whether trickle-down tax cuts can double the growth rate and pay for themselves? And, yet, I’m called upon to have that debate weekly. If they can get you arguing over the wrong questions, they’ve already won.
At the very least, the media should mitigate the damage by making debates more representative of the state of knowledge on an issue — meaning, as John Oliver has pointed out, that climate change debates should generally feature 97 scientists explaining that it’s real and a problem for every three people who deny that reality.
Second, we in the think tank world need to reach beyond the choir both in our policy and our communications. I can name many think tanks that work with great energy and notable successes on the problem of poverty. I cannot say the same for the problem of helping displaced manufacturing workers.
Third, we must call it like we see it with much more intensity. I wonder if one reason the progressive base wasn’t out in force was in part because we failed to explain the stakes in clear, powerful language, naming names and directly confronting falsehoods and racism.
Fourth, and relatedly, we need to be more proactive in working with and supporting advocates and social movements. The Fight For $15, the Fed Up Campaign and Black Lives Matter are examples in recent years of people coming together to pressure politicians to act. They’ve been successful because they haven’t stopped at the facts; instead, they take the facts and integrate them with people-power and a compelling moral message.
I’m sure there are more and better ideas to reestablish facts and evidence-based policy to their necessary perch. Like I said, I’m no expert in this space: When my colleagues and I were in graduate school, we studied facts, not how to reinject them into the debate. But unless we do so and couple them with progressive political movements, I fear we may make no progress.
By Jared Bernstein
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Toys 'R' Us employees demand severance pay for 33,000 workers
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Toys 'R' Us employees demand severance pay for 33,000 workers
The push comes as a part of a campaign supported by the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy. The campaign will...
The push comes as a part of a campaign supported by the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy. The campaign will host a series of events at Toys "R" Us headquarters and the offices of private-equity owners. More than 50,000 people have already signed a petition calling for Toys "R" Us workers to receive severance pay.
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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