Full Employment for All: The Social and Economic Benefits of Race and Gender Equity in Employment
How much stronger could the economy be if everyone who wanted a job could find one—regardless of race, ethnicity, or...
How much stronger could the economy be if everyone who wanted a job could find one—regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender?
To inform the Fed UP campaign, PolicyLink and the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) estimated the potential economic gains of full employment for all. The following 13fact sheets illustrate what the United States economy—and the economies of the metropolitan regions where each Federal Reserve office is located—could look like with true full employment for all.
For additional information about Fed Up: The National Campaign for a Strong Economy, visit http://whatrecovery.org.
Download the full report here
Federal Reserve under growing pressure to reform system, goals
WASHINGTON, Aug 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve has two guiding goals when designing monetary policy: maximum...
WASHINGTON, Aug 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Reserve has two guiding goals when designing monetary policy: maximum employment and stable inflation.
But as the country's central bankers converge for their annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this week, they are under increasing pressure to reform their own system and goals to better reflect the diversity of America and its incomes.
At this year's flagship economic policy conference, from Aug. 25 to 27, U.S policymakers will confer not only with their counterparts from around the world but also host a meeting on Thursday with a group calling for a radical overhaul of the Fed.
Fed Up, a network of community organizations and labor unions that wants a more diverse, transparent and income-inequality aware central bank, will meet with Kansas City Fed President Esther George.
It may be one reason why the organizers changed the dress code for the evening, usually a suited and booted affair, to casual attire.
So far three other Fed policymakers, New York's William Dudley, Cleveland's Loretta Mester and Boston's Eric Rosengren, are also scheduled to show up.
A Fed spokesman said Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard from the Washington-based Board of Governors also plans to attend the meeting.
The activists will look to build on their proposals, put forward in conjunction with former top Fed policy adviser Andrew Levin, to make the Fed's 12 regional banks government entities. The Fed is the world's only major central bank that is not fully public.
POWERFUL ALLIES
The group has recently been joined by powerful allies in Congress in forcing racial, gender and income inequality up the Fed's agenda.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has come out in favor of restricting the financial world's influence on regional Fed boards.
In May, 127 U.S. lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders sent a letter to Fed Chair Janet Yellen urging more diversity among its ranks in order to "reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country."
Currently 11 of the 12 regional Fed presidents are white, 10 are male, and none are black or Latino. At the Board level, the highest echelons of the Fed, Yellen is the first woman chair in the central bank's 103-year history.
SIGNS OF CHANGE
There are indications that the steady drumbeat of pressure is having some effect on areas on which the Fed does have some control.
"I believe that diversity is extremely important in all parts of the Federal Reserve," Yellen told Congress in June under sustained scrutiny from lawmakers about the Fed's performance.
Minorities now make up 24 percent of regional Fed bank boards, up from 16 percent in 2010, while 46 percent of all directors are either non-white or a woman.
Yellen, who has not been shy in speaking on income inequality, has also noted that rising inequality could curb U.S. economic growth.
And for a Fed not used to addressing distributional issues associated with monetary policy, such considerations are now seeping into policy discussions.
"The unemployment rate for African Americans and for Hispanics stayed above the rate for whites..." the Fed noted in minutes released last week from its policy meeting in July.
Or as Yellen put it to Congress in June, "We're certainly very focused on...wanting to promote stronger job markets with gains to all groups." (Reporting by Lindsay Dunsmuir; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
By Lindsay Dunsmuir
Source
Using Scale and Reach to Battle Inequality
The Hill - November 19, 2013, by Ana Maria Archila - Across the country, it’s become increasingly...
The Hill - November 19, 2013, by Ana Maria Archila - Across the country, it’s become increasingly evident that problems stemming from inequality have reached a level that can only be characterized as a crisis. With the wealth gap between the top .01 percent of households and the rest of us greater than it was in 1928 before the onset of the Great Depression, opportunities for too many Americans are disappearing.
At her confirmation hearing last week to become the next chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen characterized income inequality as an “extremely difficult and to my mind very worrisome problem.” And while the recent race for Mayor in New York City focused plenty on the wealth gap, it remains to be seen how far a local politician can go to implement the type of policies the nation’s largest city desperately needs.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to restore our democracy to a system that truly gives everyone a chance to thrive. But a large part of the solution will come from dedicated community members partnering with organizations with policy expertise, strategy insights, and coalition coordination experience to achieve meaningful reforms. That’s why this week, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Leadership Center for the Common Good announced a plan to merge on Jan. 1, 2014.
The new organization will be called The Center for Popular Democracy with a sister c4 organization called Action for the Common Good. Together, we will work at the center of emerging new politics, working to build the capacity and resilience of rooted, democratic community organizing institutions. We will share organizing models and strategies with a vast partner network to replicate campaigns and tactics that work to confront racial and economic inequality.
Already,we’ve seen examples of the types of changes motivated, coordinated community efforts can produce. And as new partnerships and increased collaboration online help movement leaders to share best practices – there’s plenty of reason to believe communities can implement changes that make a difference.
In New York, coalitions of community groups, progressive unions, and faith networks cametogether this year to secure a raft of impressive victories, from a raise in the state’s minimum wage, to the adoption of paid sick days’ legislation in New York City to the passage of pro-immigrant language access initiatives in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island. And, in the face of fierce opposition from outgoing Mayor Bloomberg, the Center for Popular Democracy and our allies secured passage of new laws to stop the discriminatory policing tactics of the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk.”
With real roots in the African-American, Latino and immigrant communities, and connections across faith and labor organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy is poised to provide expanded reach and scale on issues from education policy to immigrant and racial justice, voting rights and homeownership.
As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently said, “The new CPD fills animportant void - aggressively innovating and replicating public policies that expand rights and opportunities for workers, for immigrants, and for people of color." That’s part of our belief that just as our communities are stronger together, so are organizers. It’s time to put our strength, scale and reach to work.
Ana Maria Archila is the co-executive director of the new Center for Popular Democracy.
Source
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
At Urban Outfitters, On Call Needs An Off Switch
URBAN Outfitters, you're breaking my heart. I'd loved you since I discovered your lone West Philly shop...
URBAN Outfitters, you're breaking my heart.
I'd loved you since I discovered your lone West Philly shop when I was in college. You'd just changed your name from the Free People Store, and your countercultural merchandise spoke to my giddy dreams of a boho life. I was smitten the day I bought an Indian-print cotton bedspread from you to sew into curtains for my first-ever single-girl apartment.
"Where'd you get them?" friends would ask, eyeing my handiwork.
"Urban," I'd say, knowing the word had become code for "I may be broke, but at least I'm hip."
MORE COVERAGE
Urban Outfitters company asks employees to work for free
God, I was young.
Since then, you've become more successful than I have, morphing into a $1 billion global behemoth that also encompasses the brands Free People, Anthropologie, Bhldn and Terrain. Your clothes still skew to the young demographic I used to belong to, so I'd taken to scanning your racks for Christmas gifts for my clothes-horse teenager.
She got to wear your cute stuff and I got to maintain a touchstone relationship with a company that had put down roots in Philly, as I had, and never left. It made me happy.
Sure, your price tags indicated you'd gotten a tad full of yourself ($89 for a cotton/poly romper? Really?). And you'd stumbled embarrassingly in attempts to be edgy (a shirt evocative of the one the Nazis made gay concentration-camp prisoners wear? What were you thinking?).
Still, Urban, I'd cut you slack the way family cuts slack to kin. You've remained a player in a city that has lost too many homegrown businesses to either bankruptcy or foreign soil. That counts for a lot in my book.
You may not be perfect, I'd always told myself, but you're ours.
But Urban - oh, Urban. I've been learning about the way you treat your part-time employees, the young, mostly female staff who work in your retail stores. And I'm ashamed of you.
For years, you've subjected them to an enslaving scheduling system that betrays your "free people" roots. Basically, you give them their schedule only a few days in advance, with some shifts designated as "on call." But they don't know, until three hours before the shift is to begin, whether you need them to work that shift or not. If not, they don't get paid.
Yet they're required to hold that time for you, in case you do.
"On calls are considered scheduled shifts, and the same attendance policy applies," your employee handbook says.
All I can ask, Urban, is: What the hell? But your PR flacks didn't respond to my questions.
The use of "on-call" staffing is obviously necessary in medical and first-responder fields, where lives depend on workers being available when needed. Reasonable people know it's part of the gig. But using the same scheduling to ensure that a billion-dollar retailer doesn't "waste" money on excess workers during a slow day at the shop?
C'mon, Urban. It's horrible.
The unpredictability means employees can't schedule classes, if they're in school. Or go to a second job, so they can cobble together a full-time salary. Or reliably arrange child care or pay their bills, since their cost to do both remains fixed even though their working hours don't.
Their only compensation, if I read the handbook correctly, is that they get to keep their jobs so you can continue to exploit their need to make a living.
"It's pretty messed up," one of your employees told me when I asked her about the policy. I won't say which of your 179 U.S. stores employs her, since she needs her crappy job. She's toiling through college and doesn't know, week to week, what her paycheck will be. "It's hard to plan," she said.
She could get a job at a different store, but it seems you're not the only retail chain doing this.
Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, and L Brand Inc.'s Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works are some of the other billion-dollar corporations whose on-call scheduling have wreaked havoc on their workers. The practice began about 10 years ago, says Carrie Gleason, as globalization increased retail competition and companies needed new ways to shave expenses.
"They started incorporating new technology into scheduling that used software algorithms" to track store traffic, the time of year, even weather patterns, says Gleason, director of the fair-work-week initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy.
But the predictions aren't perfect, so on-call staffing provides wiggle room to keep labor costs down. Retailers also tie store managers' bonuses to how low they keep labor costs.
How can you stand being part of this, Urban?
In April, New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called companies like you on the carpet, following his investigation into the legality of on-call staffing at 13 retailers whose New York stores employ thousands of low-wage Americans.
As a result, big changes have happened.
Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works stopped the practice nationwide. Abercrombie and Gap say that nationally they, too, are phasing out on-call shifts.
But you, Urban, are dragging your feet. You'll stop the practice in New York, you announced this month, but everywhere else it'll be exploitation as usual.
Which means you're doing the right thing in New York only because New York law requires you to. As for everywhere else, it's human decency be damned.
"If Urban found a business model to let them stop on-call shifts in New York, they ought to be able to find a business model that will let them stop the shifts everywhere else," says Lance Haver, formerly the city's consumer advocate and now director of civic engagement for City Council.
"If they don't, then consumers can say we're not going to shop at their stores until they change their practice. We can refuse to support a store that abuses the people who wait on us."
Haver also thinks the only way to assure that businesses like you, Urban, treat employees better is for your workers to organize.
"People say there's no longer a reason for people to join unions," he says, "but that's because they don't know about these disgusting practices."
Lest you think, Urban, that all your employees are miffed with you, that's not the case. I spoke with one employee, a fan, who asked not to be named because she's hoping to work her way into your corporate headquarters at the Navy Yard. She sees her on-call schedule as a necessary evil, given the vagaries of the retail market.
"The company has to do right by its shareholders," she told me. "I think they're stuck between a rock and a hard place."
Except that your company founder and CEO, former hippie and current billionaire Richard Hayne, owns most of your stock.
He has the clout to end on-call staffing. That's not being between a rock and a hard place. It's holding the power position.
Please, Urban, return to your roots and free your people. And please start in Philly.
Because family comes first.
Source: Philly.com
At Least 32 Arrested During May Day Rally in New York City
NEW YORK (WABC) -- The police packed it in Monday night after the rally that took over Foley Square. The May Day rally...
To the wide range of advocates for an ever widening group of causes, this May Day was instead about unified resistance.
Read full article here.
Elizabeth Warren and more than 100 House Democrats blast lack of diversity at the Fed
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
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’: Crying protesters confront Jeff Flake in Capitol elevator
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you!’: Crying protesters confront Jeff Flake in Capitol elevator
After Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he would, in fact, vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S....
After Sen. Jeff Flake’s announcement that he would, in fact, vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, the emotional debate over the confirmation spilled into the halls of Congress — on live television — as two women loudly and tearfully confronted the Arizona Republican in an elevator Friday, telling him that he was dismissing the pain of sexual-assault survivors.
“What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court,” one woman, who said she had been sexually assaulted, shouted during a live CNN broadcast as Flake was making his way to a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. The Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning advocacy organization, later identified her as the group’s co-executive director, Ana Maria Archila.
“This is horrible,” she told Flake. “You have children in your family. Think about them.”
Read the article and watch the video here.
Fast-Food Labor Organizers Plan Actions for April 15
ABC News - March 31, 2015, Candice Choi - Fast-food labor organizers say they're expanding the scope of their campaign...
ABC News - March 31, 2015, Candice Choi - Fast-food labor organizers say they're expanding the scope of their campaign for $15 an hour and unionization, this time with a day of actions including other low-wage workers and demonstrations on college campuses.
Kendall Fells, organizing director for Fight for $15, said Tuesday the protests will take place April 15 and are planned to include actions on about 170 college campuses, as well as cities around the country and abroad.
At an event announcing the actions in front of a McDonald's in New York City's Times Square, organizers said home health care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors, child care workers and Wal-Mart workers will be among those turning out in April.
Terrence Wise, a Burger King worker from Kansas City, Missouri, and a national leader for the Fight for $15 push, said more than 2,000 groups including Jobs With Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy will show their support as well.
"This will be the biggest mobilization America has seen in decades," Wise said at the rally as pedestrians walked past on the busy street.
The plans are a continuation of a campaign that began in late 2012. The push is being spearheaded by the Service Employees International Union and has included demonstrations nationwide to build public support for raising pay for fast-food and other low-wage workers, although turnout has varied from city to city. Last May, the campaign reached the doorsteps of McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, where protesters were arrested after declining to leave the property ahead of the company's annual meeting.
Fells, an SEIU employee, said April 15 was picked for the next day of actions because workers are fighting "for 15."
"It's a little play on words," he said.
Fells noted that while the push began as a fast-food worker movement, it has morphed into a broader push for low-wage workers and is now shifting into a social justice movement with the involvement of "Black Lives Matter" activists joining in in the April protests. Still, he said McDonald's Corp. remained a primary target.
"McDonald's needs to come to the table because they could settle this issue," he said.
In a statement, McDonald's said it respects people's right to peacefully protest, but added that the demonstrations over the past two years have been "organized rallies designed to garner media attention" and that "very few" McDonald's workers have participated.
In addition to the ongoing demonstrations, organizers have been working on multiple fronts to make the legal case that McDonald's Corp. should be held accountable for working conditions at its franchised restaurants. That finding is seen as critical in being able to negotiate with one entity on behalf of workers across the chain, rather than dealing with the thousands of franchisees who operate the majority of McDonald's more than 14,000 U.S. restaurants.
McDonald's and other fast-food chains have maintained that they're not responsible for hiring and employment decisions at franchised locations.
One closely watched case addressing the matter began this week, when the National Labor Relations Board began hearings on complaints over alleged labor violations at McDonald's restaurants. The board's general counsel had said last year that McDonald's could be named as a joint employer along with franchisees in the complaints.
The hearing is scheduled to resume May 26 and is set to be a lengthy legal battle. Whichever side loses is expected to appeal, with the possibility of the case eventually heading to the Supreme Court.
In a statement, McDonald's has said the board's decision to name McDonald's as a joint employer "improperly strikes at the heart of the franchise system."
"The SEIU put a target on McDonald's back more than two years ago; the Board has now joined in taking aim, and has done so by managing the McDonald's case in an unprecedented manner," the statement said.
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.
Source
17 hours ago
3 days ago