Demonstrators bring Dreamers, TPS cause to Trump’s doorstep
Demonstrators bring Dreamers, TPS cause to Trump’s doorstep
Several dozen demonstrators, organized by progressive groups and chanting in Spanish, brought the cause of the Dreamers...
Several dozen demonstrators, organized by progressive groups and chanting in Spanish, brought the cause of the Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status refugees—both groups targeted for eviction from the U.S. by Donald Trump—to the doorstep of the GOP president and his Republican backers on the evening of Feb. 1.
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Neel Kashkari Named Next Minneapolis Fed President
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was...
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Kashkari’s resume includes stops at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co., and a failed run for governor of California last year. At the Treasury, he was Secretary Henry Paulson’s key aide in overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Kashkari will take over from Narayana Kocherlakota on January 1, 2016, according to a statement Tuesday from the Minneapolis Fed.
“He has a little bit of all the pieces you’d want in a Fed president,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut.
As head of one of 12 regional Fed banks, Kashkari will join the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank’s policy making panel. The Fed is weighing ending a seven-year era of near-zero interest rates, with investors betting it will move next month. Kashkari is not scheduled to vote on policy decisions until 2017. Kocherlakota, as is customary for outgoing FOMC members, will not attend the December meeting.
QE ‘Morphine’
Kocherlakota is one of the Fed’s most dovish policy makers who has argued it should keep rates on hold into next year. Kashkari has offered observations on monetary policy via his twitter feed, without spelling out whether he would favor raising rates or delaying liftoff in the current climate. In an April 2013 comment he likened the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase program to “morphine. makes u feel better but doesn’t cure.”
“I don’t think we know that much” about Kashkari’s views on monetary policy, said Angel Ubide, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “My experience with people who get appointed is whatever they thought before and what they do later doesn’t necessarily correlate.”
Kashkari, 42, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He began his career as an aerospace engineer at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California.
Goldman Sachs
Kashkari’s appointment places another ex-Goldman Sachs banker at the helm of a regional Fed bank. Robert Steven Kaplan at the Dallas Fed and New York’s William C. Dudley are Goldman alums. Philadelphia Fed chief Patrick Harker previously served as a trustee at Goldman Sachs Trust and as a member of the board of managers of Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Partners Registered Fund.
“We’re disappointed that yet another former Goldman Sachs insider has been elevated to a regional president position,” said Jordan Haedtler at the Center for Popular Democracy in Washington.
Such appointments need “more transparency and public input,” said Haedtler, who’s deputy campaign manager at Fed Up, a national coalition that’s calling for changes at the central bank and wants to keep rates low to boost employment.
Kashkari worked at Goldman in the early 2000s before accepting a post at the Treasury in 2006. He joined Pimco, then led by bond fund manager Bill Gross, in 2009 to help oversee an expansion into equities, an attempt to reduce the firm’s heavy dependence on the fixed-income market. When he left in 2013, the company’s equity unit had attracted $10 billion in assets, or less than 1 percent of the firm’s total assets at the time.
Bank Bailout
TARP, approved by Congress in October 2008, remains one of the more controversial measures taken during the financial crisis. It authorized the government to purchase up to $700 billion in troubled assets from financial institutions, in an effort to bolster global credit markets. The government ultimately used $475 billion, including $250 billion to stabilize banks, $82 billion to bail out auto makers and $70 billion to save insurer American International Group Inc., according to the Treasury’s website.
“Mr. Kashkari is an influential leader whose combined experience in the public and private sectors makes him the ideal candidate to head the Minneapolis Fed,” said MayKao Hang, incoming chair of the Minneapolis Fed’s board of directors and co-chair of the search committee.
Kashkari, a Republican, was defeated by incumbent California Governor Jerry Brown in November 2014, getting 43 percent of the vote to Brown’s 57 percent.
Presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks are appointed by a portion of their respective boards of directors, subject to the approval of the Fed Board in Washington. Reserve bank boards typically consist of nine members, including three bankers. The banking members are excluded under Dodd-Frank from participating in the selection of presidents.
Source: Bloomberg Business
Letter: Congress must pass law for universal health care
Letter: Congress must pass law for universal health care
Here are the health care issues on which we need government to act......
Here are the health care issues on which we need government to act...
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The New Education Reform Lie: Why Denver Is a Warning Sign, Not a Model, for Urban School Districts
The New Education Reform Lie: Why Denver Is a Warning Sign, Not a Model, for Urban School Districts
Scott Gilpin works in advertising, so he's used to dealing with people in the promotions business. He's just not used...
Scott Gilpin works in advertising, so he's used to dealing with people in the promotions business. He's just not used to seeing them operating a local public school.
Gilpin lives in Denver, where he grew up, graduated from high school and now has two children enrolled in the public school system. Recently, when he decided to get more involved in Denver school politics, he discovered that the most rapidly growing form of school in his community were charter schools. So he determined to check one out.
When he toured his first charter, a school in the Strive Preparatory network, he couldn't help but take note of the school’s staffing structure, which could have supported a mid-sized promotional campaign: his guide was the chief of external affairs for the network, and the school boasted a senior director of development and an associate director of recruitment, too.
Gilpin—who sent his children to the local public school they were zoned for, as his parents had done—wondered, "What kind of local public school needs to recruit its students?"
As Gilpin would learn, lots of new Denver schools are that "kind of school."
Across the city, Denver has opened 27 charter schools in the last five years, and plans to start up six more in the 2016-17 school year – effectively doubling the number of charter schools in the city in less than six years, according to a recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy, a left-leaning research and advocacy organization in Washington, DC. Yet this rush to expand charters is hardly justified by the performance of the ones already in operation.
According to CPD, based on the school performance framework Denver uses to evaluate its own schools, "Forty percent of Denver charter schools are performing below expectations.” And of those schools, 38 percent are performing significantly below expectations.
Nevertheless, numerous articles and reports in mainstream media outlets and education policy sites enthusiastically tout Denver as the place to see the next important new "reform" in education policy in action.
"Reformers are paying close attention to Denver," notes David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute in an op-ed recently published by U.S. News & World Report. Osborne declares Denver's education reform effort a success based on evidence of gains in "academic growth" and on-time high school graduation. He says Denver can show the rest of the nation "a way to transform … 20th-century school systems, built on the principles of bureaucracy, into 21st-century systems, built to deliver continuous improvement."
Recent reports from other Beltway-based think tanks, on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, also hail Denver as a model for advancing "school choice" and charter schools that have the power to "transform" the education of low-performing students. Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution named Denver the second-best of the nation's 100+ largest school districts that provide parents with options for "school choice."
But Gilpin and other Denverites tell a different story about Denver-style urban school reform.
Instead of a glowing example, they point to warning signs. Rather than a narrative of success, their stories reveal disturbing truths about Denver's version of modern urban school reform – how policy direction is often controlled by big money and insiders, why glowing promises of "improvement" should be regarded with skepticism, and what the movement's real impacts are, especially in communities dominated by poor families of color.
'Eye Opening' Revelations
Gilpin's initial foray into Denver school politics began in 2011 when he joined in a campaign in support of a new bond initiative to raise new funding for, "school renovations and classroom enrichment programs,” as the Denver Post put it.
The proposals passed in the 2012 ballot, but Gilpin's plunge into citizen involvement brought him up close to the often-unseen inner workings of contemporary urban education reform in Denver.
"What I found was eye-opening," Gilpin tells me in a phone conversation. Among those eye-openers were the intense lobbying and marketing efforts being undertaken to promote charter schools; their powerful and elite corps of backers; and the staggering amount of money, from taxpayers and private donors, that is being funneled to them.
Specifically, Gilpin saw firsthand how bond money intended for renovations and instructional programs was instead used to purchase a 13-story building downtown to house, in part, a new charter school.
Gilpin then learned that the district's chief operations officer, David Suppes, had signed the intent-to-purchase agreement for the new building on August 10, nearly two weeks before the board approved the bond initiative on August 23. Gilpin also saw how school leadership overlapped with the vendors and contractors used by the schools, potentially creating conflicts of interest and cronyism.
As the Colorado Independent reports, two members of the controlling school board majority in 2013, Barbara O’Brien and Landri Taylor, headed up organizations that contracted directly with the city school district. The two consistently voted with attorney Mike Johnson, whose law firm earned $3.8 million from the district during his tenure on an advisory committee before stepping up to the board.
Taylor, who was appointed to the board in 2013 and had the advantage of running as an incumbent in 2015, was well known as a key backer of opening new charter schools. After winning the election in 2015, he abruptly resigned earlier this year for family reasons.
To replace Taylor, the board picked MiDian Holmes who, according to Chalkbeat Colorado, is "an active member in the school reform advocacy group Stand for Children," a pro-charter organization that has made large donations to school board candidates running on a pro-reform platform. (Holmes eventually resigned when background checks revealed she is a convicted child abuser, and the board seat is, at this date, vacant.)
This tight, sometimes hidden, collusion in Denver school governance has led Gilpin to believe Denver reform is the product of "an elite circle" of people with little to no input from the public. Other careful observers agree.
"Forced on Our Community”
"They invite the community to look at plans already being put into place," Earleen Brown tells me about the Denver school board in a conversation over the phone.
An African American grandmother from a Northeast Denver community populated predominantly by non-white, poor families, Brown sees the Denver school reform model from a very different vantage point from where Gilpin sees it. (Denver schools are majority Latino and African American, with 70 percent of students classified as low-income and nearly a third non-native English speakers.) But she shares many of his concerns.
Like Gilpin, Brown's involvement in Denver school politics began with a bond referendum, this one in 2008. In that effort, Brown contends, there was widespread belief money would go toward paying for either a new traditional comprehensive public high school in Northeast Denver or for a substantial renovation of the existing Montbello High School.
In 2009, after the bond passed, district officials approached parents in the Montbello neighborhood, a mostly African American community, with a set of four options for the struggling high school. The options followed guidelines from the Obama administration, which ranged from changing staffing to closing the school. Parents, Brown recalls, created a petition campaign that gathered over 300 names in favor of the option labeled "transformation," the choice generally agreed to be the least disruptive to the school.
But when district officials came back with their decision, they had picked a different option: turnaround, generally regarded as a much more disruptive process. And the next year, Montbello parents learned yet another option had been chosen for their school: closure. The last class to graduate from Montbello was in 2014, and the school is now no more.
Now the community has – instead of the traditional, comprehensive high school parents requested – an array of new charter schools. Housed in what used to be Montbello High are two innovation schools (schools that get much of the flexibility of charter schools but are not privately operated). One school has a very specialized program focused on international studies. The other is an arts-focused school that is already being scaled back due to academic distress.
Some of the new schools serving the Montbbello community are well known for enforcing the harshest forms of school discipline disproportionally on students of color. A 2015 report from a Denver-based education justice and civil and immigrant rights organization tracked Denver school discipline incidents – such as out-of-school suspension, expulsion, or referral to law enforcement – and the correlation of those incidents to race.
What the report shows, according to a review in the Colorado Independent, is that students of color in Denver schools are 219 percent more likely to receive harsher discipline than their white peers. The disparity is particularly acute among charter and innovation schools. According to the report, nine of the ten worst offenders in Denver are charter or innovation schools. The schools that replaced Montbello high are numbers five and two on the 10 worst list, with racial gaps in punishment that are 990.9 and 1,361.4 percent wider. (The worst school, a charter with a racial punishment gap of 2,991.2 percent, is now closed.)
The discriminatory treatment toward her community has led Brown to believe the whole Denver reform model has been "forced on our community."
What Big Money Wants
While some parents see the effort to remake Denver’s schools as an agenda controlled by a small circle of local actors, others point to big money and influence coming from outside.
When Emily Sirota and her family moved to Denver in 2007, she and her husband quickly became concerned the schools their children would eventually attend were too focused on test scores and competition, and that leadership was "divorced from the desires of families," she tells me in a phone call. Her concerns motivated her to run for school board in 2011.
The quick lesson Sirota learned about Denver education politics was that connections to big money had more to do with determining opposing forces than traditional party lines.
Sirota, who is a Democrat, aligns politically with many in Denver who participate in education advocacy and serve on appointed education committees and elected boards. But because she did not align with the reform orthodoxy of school closures and charter school expansions (a wave of reform that many trace to Michael Bennet, a former investment banker who was superintendent of the district from 2005 to 2009 and is now a Democratic U.S. Senator for Colorado), she was not on the side of big money.
As The Nation's John Nichols reported at the time, big money lined up with Sirota's opponent Anne Rowe. Rowe, a former owner of a Denver publishing business, has strong ties to the Denver Public Schools' political establishment and was founding co-chair of A+ Denver, an influential advocacy group that backs charter schools and the Denver reform model.
Nichols notes that Rowe received strong financial support from "donors who, in several cases, have ties to groups that promote charter schools and vouchers" across the country, including the Alliance for Choice in Education, Stand for Children, and Democrats for Education Reform.
That funding disadvantage – Rowe out-raised Sirota by more than $90,000 – was "one of the biggest reasons" she lost, Sirota contends. An article for In These Times points out that many of the same donors who funded her opponent also funded two other establishment candidates – Allegra Haynes, who won her race, and Jennifer Draper Carson, who lost hers by just 73 votes.
"Denver school board elections are just the latest examples of elections being bought," says Jeannie Kaplan, an eight-year veteran of the Denver school board. Kaplan, who has lived in Denver for over 40 years and raised children in the local public schools, first ran for school board in 2005 in an open seat contest she won. Kaplan was term-limited out in 2013 and could no longer run. Two years later, deep-pocketed privatizers poured money into the school board race and swept the election to take a 7-0 majority. As Kaplan describes on her personal blog, a key to the election sweep was late money coming into the race to preserve the at-large seat held by the pro-reform Haynes.
Campaign funding reports show that Haynes outspent her opponent Robert Speth by more than 2 to 1.
An article in the American Prospect on the increasing role of big money in school board races reports that Democrats for Education Reform, a PAC founded by hedge fund managers that pushes hard to expand charter schools nationwide, ”contributed a quarter-million dollars to launch the Raising Colorado super PAC, which went on to spend $90,000 running ads and mailing flyers" in support of Haynes and Lisa Flores, another pro-reform candidate who also won. (According to the Center for Media and Democracy, DFER has poured millions of dollars of "dark money" into elections in Colorado and other states to tilt elections to candidates who favor charters and other "reform" measures.)
As Kaplan writes in a blog post,”Public education in Denver, despite what you may have heard or read about in the press, is a system in chaos. It is a system run by a cabal. It is a system where politics, pardon the expression, trumps good policy and the truth."
'Highly Politicized’
So how did education reform in Denver become mostly about politics and power?
"Denver school reform has become highly politicized because the ideas supporting it are highly controversial," Chris Lubienski, an education scholar and a professor of education policy, organization, and leadership at the University of Illinois, tells me over the phone.
From 2011 to 2015, Lubienski and a team of other education researchers conducted a study to ascertain how intermediary organizations (IOs) supported by foundations and philanthropists influence public opinion on education in Denver. These organizations, which “serve a number of functions in school reform, including advocacy, consultation, policy design, alternative teacher and leadership preparation, and research,” tend to promote reforms that "are often highly contested by parents, public education advocates, and teachers unions," the report contends. "In addition, the research evidence on the efficacy of these reforms is similarly unsettled."
"In Denver, reform ideas emerged from a very small handful of people," Lubienski tells me. "Reformers who work there may believe the origin of these ideas is in research and is homegrown,” but he points to influence centers outside Denver, such as Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., as more likely incubators of these reforms.
Lubienski also questions claims from Denver reform proponents that a democratic process produced their policies. "Their origins are not as democratic as is suggested," he shares. "Having policy decisions result from more of a consensus-based approach is admirable. But in Denver, that consensus is not as well developed as many people say it is."
In Denver, according to the study, only three foundations – the Daniels, Piton, and Donnell-Kay Foundations – fund most of the IOs driving change in the system. "Without this hub of funding," the report concludes, "and alignment around the importance of [these] reforms, it is unlikely that such reforms would have moved forward at the size and scope that we witness in Denver."
The study from Lubienski et. al., also cites the influence of a small number of national foundations, principally the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that advocate for expansions of charter schools. Other sources, such as the Denver Post, document the influence of the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic organization created by the wealth of the family that owns the Walmart retail chain. According to the Post, in 2011, WFF awarded Denver with nearly $8 million in grant money, "more than many of the nation’s largest cities," because of "the strength and profile of [Denver's] charter-school world."
The Problem With 'Portfolio' Reform
Though the evidence that the reforms these foundations are pushing actually work is nowhere near as convincing reformers would have you believe, efforts to root charters deep within Denver’s educational soil continue apace.
The mechanism reformers have used to seed the growth of charters across the city is the "portfolio model” — an approach that “shifts decision-making away from district superintendents and other central-office leaders,” according to the National Education Policy Center. Four strategies form the core foundation of such an approach: “school-level decentralization of management; the reconstitution or closing of ‘failing’ schools; the expansion of choice, primarily through charter schools; and performance-based (generally test-based) accountability.”
In Denver's case, the portfolio approach has led to the rapid expansion of charters while closing supposedly failed public schools. As Osborne writes in his U.S. News op-ed, "Since 2005 [Denver] has closed or replaced 48 schools and opened more than 70, the majority of them charters." Of Denver's 223 schools, 55 are charters and another 38 are "innovation schools" which Osborne describes as being "like charters."
To feed the system's numerous new charter schools, Denver has implemented an enrollment process that gives parents the opportunity to list up to 5 schools for their children to attend rather than simply relying on proximity. To help guide parents in making their school choices, the district uses a school ranking system with color-coded labels for schools – blue at the top (for "distinguished), green, yellow, orange, and red (for "accredited on probation") at the bottom. The rankings are used not only by parents, but also by the district to determine which schools need interventions and closure.
As Chalkbeat notes, Denver also has "enrollment zones" where students "are given a preference at the schools in the zone and are guaranteed a spot at one of them, though not necessarily their first pick. The zones are set up to encourage — some would say force — families to participate in the choice process."
But research experts are skeptical the portfolio approach alone will yield good results.
In an op-ed for Education Week, Montclair State University professor Katrina Bulkley joins with Columbia Teachers College professors Jeffrey Henig and Henry Levin to caution, "The portfolio-management approach to urban education is a work in progress."
NEPC adds further caution, writing, "There exists a very limited body of generally accepted research about the effects of portfolio district reform."
NEPC managing director William Mathis, one of the report’s authors, tells me that it is, in particular, the combination of reforms that confounds research into portfolio results. "There are so many factors at play that describing causality is problematic,” Mathis notes. “Portfolios mean different things in different places.”
"If you don't change what happens in the classroom, you don't really change anything," Mathis contends. And he finds little evidence a portfolio approach will necessarily result in improvements in curriculum and instruction.
Former school board member Jeannie Kaplan also questions the success of such reforms. In an op-ed published last year in the Denver Post, Kaplan spotlighted numerous negative outcomes after many years of portfolio-based reform, including growing achievement gaps between white and non-white students, a school system stubbornly segregated along racial lines, and high staff turnover rates in schools.
Her op-ed pointed to a 2015 analysis from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (an organization that advocates the portfolio approach), which looked at the 50 largest urban school districts in the country that have been actively engaged in education reform. Kaplan noted that, "Of them, Denver Public Schools was dead last in both reading and math, with gaps of 38 percent and 30 percent respectively. The average for the other districts was around 14 percent for each subject.
“As for graduation rates, Denver ranked 45th out of the 50 districts."
Whose Choice?
So far, less than 27 percent of families have opted to participate in Denver’s choice program, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. The remaining 73 percent have chosen to remain in their current local schools.*
That same analysis attributes the low participation rate to the extremely small percentage of parents who opt to "choice out of" their current school when their children are not in a "transition year" – for instance, moving from an elementary school into a middle school. An older article in the Denver Post reported numerous parents feeling "stressed out" over the choice process.
That said, some parents do find there are advantages to the choice system. For instance, when Scott Gilpin looked to enroll one of their daughters in a school, they used the enrollment process to "choice into" an innovation school that offered a dual language program. Similarly, when Emily Sirota looked for a school for her oldest daughter, she found an innovation school that had an expeditionary approach more to her liking.
But there's also evidence Denver's system of choice leads to a lot of outcomes that look more like forced choice. For instance, Gilpin notes that the enrollment zones set up to encourage choice often result in students being placed in charters whether their families indicated that as their top choice or not.
When Sirota visited the neighborhood school her family was zoned for, she noticed extremely large class sizes and the lack of adequate facility space for the students. Upper grades in the elementary school were housed in portable buildings. No doubt, such conditions dis-incentivize parents from choosing that school.
"Choice sounds good," says Earleen Brown, but "there aren't five high performing schools in our area to choose from," she says. Although there are some "blue schools" in Brown's Northeast neighborhood, she argues their high ranking is often mostly due to Denver's methodology that rewards schools for recent growth in test scores, even when the percent of students who are on grade level in the school is still quite low.
Also, many of the traditional public schools in Brown's community have been closed or had charter schools "co-located" in them (an arrangement where a charter takes over a portion of a public school's facility). So for some families in Northeast Denver "being able to enroll in a nearby traditional public school is a choice you don't get," she notes. Certainly, for parents who wanted Montbello High School to serve as a traditional, comprehensive high school, that choice was simply overruled by the district.
"We really have no choice in our community," Brown maintains.
What Parents Want
Given all of the obvious flaws and questionable results attached to Denver’s current reform model, one can’t help but wonder why is this approach is being lifted up as a "model of excellence" to be replicated across the nation.
Of course, we've seen this type of bluster in support of charter schools and education reform before. For years, the New Orleans school system was held up as a reform model for other urban communities to emulate.
NOLA schools, essentially wiped out by Hurricane Katrina, provided reformers with "a clean slate" to remake an urban public school system based on their own ideas alone, which consisted primarily of converting the district into a nearly all charter school entity and turning school enrollment into a choice process.
Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal claimed NOLA-style reform had laid down a path for schools everywhere else to follow. David Osborne, in another of his laudatory commentaries about education reform, wrote in 2015, "New Orleans made charter schools work." Politico reported, “Mayors and governors from Nevada to Tennessee" were in full throttle campaigns to "replicate the New Orleans model.”
Except that, for a host of reasons, the New Orleans model turned out to be impossible to replicate. In fact, in Denver today there’s little discussion of education reform being patterned after New Orleans. In Osborne's promotion of the Denver model, in fact, he contrasts the Denver approach with New Orleans’, and lauds it for being an approach to education reform that hasn't required state intervention or other forms of "insulation from local electoral politics."
But it's not clear that the form of electoral politics practiced in Denver has yet given parents what they want as much as it has delivered outcomes desired by an elite few.
In Earleen Brown's case, what she wants is pretty specific: She'd like to see the district act on her community's desire to have a comprehensive, public high school.
Jeannie Kaplan advocates the adoption of models she has seen work in the past that provided schools resources to stay open longer hours and provide a fuller range of services including tutoring, health care, and extra-curricular activities. "Now we call these 'community schools,'" she explains. What Denver needs most, she believes "is the money [to fund] this."
"We need more focus on the schools in our neighborhoods, rather than popping up new charter schools here and there," Emily Sirota maintains. And she'd like to see smaller class sizes, guaranteed recess for kids, and a more equitable system that ensures a high level of quality curriculum and instruction in all schools, not just the ones the better-off children attend.
As for Scott Gilpin, he wants to see spending on education in Denver going more toward the classroom instead of to administration, consultants, and school board elections. He thinks less emphasis on testing would not only free up more time for instruction; it would make teachers' jobs more rewarding — which would, in turn, lower teacher attrition rates.
What Denver parents seem to want most from education policy in their community is for leaders to find a different way to talk about these issues, and to solicit, and honor, parent input before decisions are made.
Whether they will ever get what they want in this regard remains an unsettlingly open question.
* Though officials from Denver Public Schools argue that in the transition grades (kindergarten and grades 6 and 9) participation levels are now at 84%, overall participation rates across all grades remain at just 26.5%.
Jeff Bryant is director of the Education Opportunity Network, a partnership effort of the Institute for America's Future and the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. He has written extensively about public education policy.
By Jeff Bryant
Source
Woman who confronted Flake 'relieved' he called for delaying Kavanaugh vote
Woman who confronted Flake 'relieved' he called for delaying Kavanaugh vote
Maria Gallagher, who on Friday confronted Sen. Jeff Flake with her story of sexual assault, said she was "relieved"...
Maria Gallagher, who on Friday confronted Sen. Jeff Flake with her story of sexual assault, said she was "relieved" when the Arizona Republican called for an FBI investigation into allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Gallagher, a resident of New York, stood next to Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy, earlier Friday as the two held open the doors of an elevator Flake was taking on his way to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Soon after, Flake said he would vote to advance Kavanaugh's nomination to the Senate floor, but he said he wanted a vote in the full body delayed for one week while the FBI investigated the allegations.
Read the full article here.
Fed Up group plans counter Jackson Hole conference
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the...
The Fed Up coalition, made up of community activist groups, has rented a conference room in the same hotel where the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank will be holding its annual Jackson Hole conference starting Thursday.
The group said Monday it will bring in low-wage workers from around the country who are struggling to make ends meet to emphasize the need for the Fed to do more to attack income inequality.
"Our life is a constant struggle. We know we have to pay the rent, buy food and pay the utilities on a very limited budget," Dawn O'Neal, a teaching assistant at a day care center in Atlanta, told reporters on a conference call Monday.
The mother of four said she made $8.50 an hour at her job and her husband, who is currently unemployed, has been trying to earn money by lining up early in the morning to compete for part-time construction jobs.
Ady Barkan with the Center for Popular Democracy and campaign director for Fed Up said that before Fed officials "can have a real discussion of raising interest rates and slowing the economy, they should understand firsthand who it would effect."
Barkan joked that while the Kansas City Fed charges $1,000 per person for its conference, participation in the teach-in will be free. In addition to arguing that raising rates now would be premature, the group will hold discussions on ways to reform the Fed's current selection process for the presidents of the Fed's 12 regional banks.
The group has protested the recent selection of Robert Kaplan, a former top executive at Goldman Sachs and currently associate dean at the Harvard Business School, as the new president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, saying the selection process shut out input from community groups.
While the Fed announced in May that Yellen would not be attending this year's conference, Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer is scheduled to deliver comments on inflation during a panel discussion at Jackson Hole on Saturday.
Financial markets will be closely examining those comments for any hints about whether the Fed is still likely to boost interest rates at its Sept. 16-17 meeting despite a huge sell-off in recent days in stocks that saw the Dow Jones industrial average fall another 588.47 points or 3.6 percent on Monday.
Source: CNBC
Democrats to introduce bills to challenge arbitration system
Democrats to introduce bills to challenge arbitration system
By Nick Niedzwiadek ALBANY — Democratic lawmakers are expected to introduce a pair of bills to counter how corporations...
By Nick Niedzwiadek
ALBANY — Democratic lawmakers are expected to introduce a pair of bills to counter how corporations use binding arbitration to limit their financial exposure in legal disputes.
Consumer advocates say corporations are increasingly requiring potential employees and consumers to agree to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute as a precondition for employment or use of a product. They say that such proceedings lack transparency, put people on an uneven playing field against well-heeled corporations and can leave people with little other legal recourse.
Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner of the Bronx and Sen. Brad Hoylman of Manhattan are expected to introduce a bill that would amend state labor law to allow employees or organized labor organizations the power to bring legal proceedings against an employer for potential violations as a stand-in for the Department of Labor — independent of any private employment agreement. The state would recover a portion of the fines assessed as part of such proceedings.
Senator Jose Serrano of the Bronx and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh of Manhattan would establish a similar process for private citizens to seek civil penalties on behalf of the state for violations of consumer protection statutes if the applicable public agency fails to pursue them due to a lack of resources.
“Too often large companies take advantage of consumers by forcing them into signing 'take-it-or-leave-it' contracts that include hidden clauses requiring forced arbitration that heavily favor businesses,” Serrano said in a statement. “My legislation will create a level playing field and give the power back to the consumers in New York State by allowing them an opportunity to fight back when they are victims of fraud."
Several of the legislators are expected to announce the legislation at a protest in Manhattan on Thursday along with New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Tish James, according to organizers. Joining them will be a number of progressive groups, including the Center for Popular Democracy, Citizen Action, Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change. The event will coincide with the release of a report called: “Justice for Sale: How Corporations Use Forced Arbitration Agreements to Exploit Working Families.”
"Legal rights are worthless if there's no remedy when laws are broken,” Kate Hamaji, a research analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy who authored the report, said in a statement. “Forced arbitration essentially allows corporations to opt out of the justice system by creating a private parallel system that makes it prohibitively expensive to seek justice and creates incentives for arbitrators to rule in favor of companies."
The report can be found here.
Time for an accountable Fed
Time for an accountable Fed
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke...
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Janet Yellen, released a proposal for reform of the Federal Reserve Board's governing structure in a press call sponsored by the Fed Up campaign. The proposal has a number of important features, but the main point is to make the Fed more accountable to democratically elected officials and to reduce the power of the banking industry in monetary policy.
Under its current structure, the banks largely control the 12 Federal Reserve district banks. This matters because the presidents of these banks are part of the Federal Reserve Board's Open Market Committee (FOMC) which determines monetary policy. At any point in time, five of 12 district bank presidents will be voting members of the FOMC, but all 12 take part in the discussion. The voting presidents will typically be outnumbered by the seven Federal Reserve Board governors, who are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, although there have been just five sitting governors for the last two years, as the Senate has refused to consider President Obama's nominees.
There is no obvious reason why the banking industry should have special input into the country's monetary policy. This would be comparable to reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission's board for the cable television industry. While there is no way to prevent an industry group from trying to influence a government regulatory body, in all other cases, they at least must do so from the outside. It is only the Fed where we allow the most directly affected industry group to actually have a direct voice in the policies determined by its regulatory agency.
This is an especially important issue because the Fed's policies are so central to the health of the economy. If the Fed's fears over inflation lead it to raise interest rates to slow the economy and reduce the rate of job creation, there is little that Congress will be able to do to counteract the Fed's actions. For example, if the Fed wants to prevent the unemployment rate from getting below 4.5 percent unemployment, there will be little that Congress and the president can do to get unemployment lower. In that case, the Fed may have needlessly be keeping millions of people out work — disproportionately affecting minorities and less-educated workers — because of a possibly mistaken view of the economy's limits. Furthermore, by deliberately weakening the labor market, the Fed will be keeping tens of millions of workers from having the bargaining power they need to secure wage gains.
While governors who are appointed by democratically elected officials are likely to recognize the importance of reducing unemployment and balance it against the risk of inflation, the district bank presidents are likely to be less concerned about unemployment. It is worth noting that all the dissenting votes calling for more a hawkish stance since the start of the Great Recession have been cast by bank presidents. It is likely that the need to maintain the support of the bank presidents on the FOMC has prevented the Fed from being more aggressive in trying to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment.
It would be good to see the presidential candidates address the proposal put forward by Levin and the Fed Up campaign. There are very few areas of government that are more important in people's daily lives than the Fed's monetary policy. It literally determines how many people will hold jobs and has a huge effect on workers' wages.
While it would not be appropriate for the president or other politicians to try to micromanage monetary policy, they certainly should be setting its general course. This is analogous to the relationship with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). No one expects Congress or the president to decide which drugs get approved; however, if the FDA were to allow two years to pass in which it approved no new drugs, it would be entirely appropriate for Congress and the president to question its conduct. The same would apply if the FDA were found to regularly approve drugs that turned out to be harmful.
In the case of the Fed, it is appropriate for the presidential candidates to be telling voters what sort of people they would appoint to the Fed. It is also appropriate for them to comment on its governance structure, which can only be changed by an Act of Congress, which would have to be signed by the president.
Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
By Dean Baker, contributor
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Five Key Questions to Ask Now About Charter Schools
Washington Post - January 23, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - You can tell that National School Choice Week is nearly upon...
Washington Post - January 23, 2015, by Valerie Strauss - You can tell that National School Choice Week is nearly upon us — it runs from Jan. 25- 31 — by the number of announcements coming forth hailing the greatness of school choice.
Jeb Bush’s Florida-based Foundation for Excellence in Education put out an announcement that it would participate in a march next week in Texas to support school choice (with one of the speakers being Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Jeb’s son). There’s a new poll by the pro-choice American Federation for Children showing (I bet you can guess) that most Americans support school choice. Etc., etc.
There is other school choice news too, but you won’t hear it from the pro-choice folks. This comes from 10th Period blog, by Steven Dyer, a lawyer who is the education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio and who once served as a state representative and was the chief legislative architect for Ohio’s Evidence Based Model of school funding:
In a disturbing new report from State Auditor David Yost, officials found that at one Ohio charter school, the state was paying the school to educate about 160 students, yet none, that’s right, zero, were actually at the school. And that’s just the worst of a really chilling report, which, if the results are extrapolated across the life of the Ohio charter school program, means taxpayers have paid more than $2 billion for kids to be educated in charter schools who weren’t even there. Here are the takeaways:
Seven of 30 schools had headcounts more than two standard deviations below the amount the school told the state it had.
Nine of 30 schools that had headcounts at least 10% below what the charter told the state it had, though it was less than two standard deviations.
The remaining 14 had headcounts that weren’t off by as much.
However, 27 of 30 schools had fewer students at the school than they were being paid to educate by the state
This means that more than 1/2 of all the charter schools chosen at random had significantly fewer students attending their schools than the state was paying them to educate, while 90% had at least some fewer amount.
So in honor of National School Choice Week, here are five questions that should be asked about charter schools, which today enroll about 2.57 million students in more than 6,000 charter schools nationwide.
The questions, and supporting material, come from the Center for Popular Democracy, which has exposed over $100 million public tax funds stolen in the charter school industry in a report titled, “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.”
Here are the center’s questions: 1. How much money has your state lost to charter waste, fraud and abuse?
With at least $100 million tax dollars lost to fraud, waste, or abuse by charter operators in the United States, there is significant progress needed before the charter sector can claim best practices on fraud and abuse. What’s worse, given the scant auditing and little regulation, the fraud uncovered so far might only be scratching the surface. The types of fraud fall into six major categories: [Reference: CPD report, May 2014] • Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain; • School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses; • Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger; • Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided; • Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and, • Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.
2. Are charter operators required to establish strong business practices that guard against fraud, waste, mismanagement, and abuse? Do regulators in your state have the authority and resources to regularly assess charter school business practices?
Despite millions of dollars lost to shady practices, charter operators are overwhelmingly not required by law to establish strong business practices that protect against fraud and waste. We need change:
* Charter schools should institute an internal fraud risk management program, including an annual fraud risk assessment. * Oversight agencies should regularly audit charter schools and use methodologies that are specifically designed to assess the effectiveness of charter school business practices and uncover fraud.
3. Does your state require charter school operators and their boards of directors to provide adequate documentation to regulators ensuring funds are spent on student success?
Across the country, investigations led by attorneys general, state auditors and charter authorizers have found significant cases of waste, fraud and abuse in our nation’s charter schools. The majority of investigations are initiated by whistleblowers because most regulators do not have the resources to proactively search for fraud, waste, or abuse of public tax dollars. [References:CPD report, December 2014; CPD report, October 2014]
4. Can your state adequately monitor the way charters spend public dollars including who charter operators are subcontracting with for public services?
Because most charter schools laws do not adequately empower state regulators, regulators are often unable to monitor the legality of the operations of companies that provide educational services to charter schools. For example, Pete Grannis, New York State’s First Deputy Comptroller, reported recently that charter school audits by his office have found “practices that are questionable at best, illegal at worst” at some charter schools.[1] While his office would like to investigate all aspects of a charter operators business practices, they do not have the authority. To reform the system, he believes that “as a condition for agreeing to approve a new charter school or renew an existing one, charter regulators could require schools and their management companies to agree to provide any and all financial records related to the school.” [2]
This example typifies the lack of authority given to charter oversight bodies. Lawmakers should act to amend their charter school laws to give charter oversight bodies the powers to audit all levels of a charter schools operations, including their parent companies and the companies they contract out their educational services to.
5. Are online charter operators audited for quality of services provided to students and financial transparency?
Online charter schools represent another rapidly growing sector. The rapid growth has made the online charter school industry susceptible to similar pitfalls facing the poorly regulated charter industry as whole. As one longtime academic researcher puts it, “The current climate of elementary and secondary school reform that promotes uncritical acceptance of any and all virtual education innovations is not supported by educational research. A model that is built around churn is not sustainable; the unchecked growth of virtual schools is essentially an education tech bubble.”[3]
Given the poor outcomes being generated by most online charter schools, state regulators should be empowered with more authority to ensure these schools are not violating state laws or their charter agreements.
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/ny-state-official-raises-alarm-on-charter-schools-and-gets-ignored [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/ny-state-official-raises-alarm-on-charter-schools-and-gets-ignored [3]http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/virtual-schools-annual-2013
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor in the political glare
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor in the political glare
In the middle of meetings of the world’s central banking elite in Wyoming’s Jackson Lake Lodge in August 2015, Lael...
In the middle of meetings of the world’s central banking elite in Wyoming’s Jackson Lake Lodge in August 2015, Lael Brainard sat down with activists who were denouncing calls for tighter monetary policy amid America’s sluggish wage growth.
As the Federal Reserve Board member listened intently over the course of about an hour, protesters from New York ranging from fast-food employees to a worker on film sets talked about the difficulties of making ends meet on rock-bottom wages in a high-cost metropolis, recalls Shawn Sebastian, field director of the Fed Up coalition that arranged the meeting.
Ms Brainard’s decision to drop by carried a message. A fairly new member of the Board of Governors who had said relatively little about monetary policy, Ms Brainard was about to set out her stall as a vocal advocate of low interest rates at the Fed — based in part on the absence of wage growth.
Her steadfast calls for continued economic stimulus have burnished her credentials among pro-worker groups including Fed Up, which met a broader range of Fed officials at this year’s Jackson Hole gathering. They come amid speculation that she could be in line for a cabinet role if the Democrats hold the White House in November.
“When it comes to monetary policy, Lael Brainard is one of the strongest and loudest voices advocating for policies that working families across the US need,” says Mr Sebastian.
In Washington, Ms Brainard is being spoken of as one of the candidates for Treasury secretary in a Hillary Clinton administration — a move that would make her the first woman to head the department. At the same time she has become the target of Republican attacks because of her public support for the Clinton campaign and fury within the party over easy-money policies.
Early this year Ms Brainard donated $2,700 to the Clinton campaign, a decision described by former officials as a blunder for a sitting Fed governor during an election year — even if it is permissible under Fed rules. It increased the Fed’s political vulnerability at a time when it is a prime target for vituperative assaults on its independence by Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate.
The donation was the subject of sharp exchanges in Congress last month as Fed chair Janet Yellen was forced to reject claims by Republican representative Scott Garrett that the central bank is excessively cosy with the Democrats.
There are people who blather on and she is not one of them
Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Joe Biden
Ted Truman, a former Fed official who is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says Ms Brainard’s donation was a personal mistake that “didn’t help the Fed at all”. He also argues that the issue pales in comparison with politically charged episodes in the past, such as the Nixon years when the Fed was leaned on heavily to keep rates low.
Ms Brainard’s forceful drive for easy monetary policy began two months after the 2015 Jackson Hole meetings, when she delivered a blunt speech that left some with the impression that she was at loggerheads with Ms Yellen. Ms Brainard warned against prematurely lifting rates amid slack in the labour market and subdued inflation — even as the chair was steering markets to expect a move by the end of the year.
Ms Brainard did not go on to formally dissent when Ms Yellen presided over a rate increase that December. Since then the two policymakers have appeared more closely aligned, with both recently arguing that the US recovery has further room to run before the central bank needs to increase rates again.
Ms Brainard has urged caution in part because of the risk that overseas shocks ricochet back to the US via highly integrated financial markets. This global focus builds on her work as the US’s top financial diplomat under former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner between 2010 and 2013, where in the gruelling post of undersecretary for international affairs she was a key US figure in discussions over the euro area debt crisis, as well as the broader global fallout from the financial crash.
Fed should not rush to raise rates, says Brainard
Already low expectations of a September increase fall further after policymaker’s cautious comments
One official who spoke with her regularly was George Papaconstantinou, Greece’s finance minister from 2009 to 2011. He recalls hearing from Ms Brainard two or three times a week during the febrile days of early 2010, as Europe dragged its feet over how to handle the Greek crisis and the US pushed for action. The calls were partly “therapy” for him and partly information-gathering by Ms Brainard so she had “a better sense of how close we were to the edge”. He says: “She clearly knew her stuff.”
Ms Brainard, who declined to comment for this article, developed her interest for global affairs in part on the back of her upbringing as a diplomat’s daughter, spending some of her childhood behind the iron curtain in Poland and East Germany. A former MIT economics professor, she has three children and is married to Kurt Campbell, a former top state department official.
A reserved individual, Ms Brainard left the Treasury with a mixed reputation among officials, some of whom found her unsupportive and distant. Others, including Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to vice-president Joe Biden, praise her straight-talking manner and clarity of thought. “There are people who blather on and she is not one of them,” he says.
When Washington observers size up potential Treasury secretaries, Ms Brainard’s name comes up alongside Gary Gensler, the former head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook.
What gives Ms Brainard’s claim potency is not only her international and domestic economic experience, but also the helpful absence of a stint on Wall Street in her curriculum vitae. For many Democrats, her very public campaign for low rates has only strengthened her qualifications for the post.
By Lael Brainard
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1 month ago
1 month ago