Time to have another discussion on the race problem
Time to have another discussion on the race problem
Many years ago, I was fortunate to take a black history class at University of Dayton. In that era, we were referred...
Many years ago, I was fortunate to take a black history class at University of Dayton. In that era, we were referred to as black. The one thing I remember is that the black female teacher kept telling her students, “There is no racial problem in the USA, there is an economic problem.”
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Activists Protest Universities Over Investments In Puerto Rico Bondholders
Activists Protest Universities Over Investments In Puerto Rico Bondholders
A coalition of social and economic justice groups has launched a one-week campaign to end what they view as problematic...
A coalition of social and economic justice groups has launched a one-week campaign to end what they view as problematic university investments. The New York-based Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and partner organizations including three Make the Road branches will hold six protests along the East Coast, calling on Columbia, Harvard and Yale to pull their investments out of hedge funds that hold Puerto Rican debt and have advocated austerity measures in the U.S. territory, leading to mass school closings and higher tuition costs.
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Letter to the Editor: Proposed Legislation in Maryland Would Sacrifice Standards of Charter Schools
Washington Post - March 3, 2015, by Anne Kaiser - I share The Post’s interest in a healthy environment for charter...
Washington Post - March 3, 2015, by Anne Kaiser - I share The Post’s interest in a healthy environment for charter schools in Maryland, as expressed in the Feb. 25 editorial “ Give charter schools a chance.” However, this goal cannot be achieved unless we maintain the high standards for accountability, equity and quality required by Maryland’s charter school law.Over the past decade, I have seen troubling results in states that lowered their standards. A 2014 Center for Popular Democracy report found $100 million in fraud, waste and abuse by charter schools in 14 states and the District. The National Education Policy Center found that charter school teachers face significantly lower compensation and poorer working conditions, leading to high turnover rates and the hiring of unqualified teachers. Michigan, Ohio, Delaware and Pennsylvania have seen wasted taxpayer dollars in their race to expand charter schools.Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) legislation follows in these flawed footsteps by granting a disproportionate share of funding to charter schools at the expense of traditional public schools, permitting uncertified teachers, allowing union-busting by charter school operators and weakening safeguards for accountability. I will work hard through the legislative process to remove these harmful provisions so that we support charters without sacrificing standards.Anne Kaiser, Annapolis The writer, a Democrat, represents District 14 in the Maryland House, where she is majority leader.Source
Charter Schools and the Waltons Take Little Rock Back to its Segregated Past
Charter Schools and the Waltons Take Little Rock Back to its Segregated Past
Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High...
Stories about historic efforts to address racial segregation in American public education often start with Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. But the story of Little Rock and segregation badly needs updating.
Central High became one of the first practical tests of principles established in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling that overturned racially separate public schools. When nine black students showed up for opening day of the historically all-white school, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called in the National Guard to prevent them from entering. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by calling in federal troops to escort the students into the school, and Faubus eventually backed down.
But the story of racial integration in Little Rock shouldn't be confined to Central High. The same year Central was integrated, another school, Hall High, opened in the all-white part of town with an all white student body. Hall would not integrate until 1959 (Faubus closed all Little Rock high schools in school year 1958-59 to protest federal intervention), when three black girls were allowed to attend.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, through busing and other efforts, Hall had become a more racially diverse school, according to Kathy Webb, who graduated from Hall in 1967.* Webb, who is white, currently represents Ward 3 on the Little Rock City Board and has served in the Arkansas state legislature.
In a phone conversation, Webb tells me that she remembers Hall High as a racially diverse school with an academically solid reputation and a relatively high graduation rate. But then, she notes, something happened: Hall High underwent a profound change.
By 2002, when Webb returned to live in Little Rock after decades away, Hall looked more like a school from the segregationist past than the model of progressive integratio it had once been. Today, the student population of Hall is just 5 percent white, with 70 percent of students having incomes low enough to receive free or reduced price lunch. Hall has also become a school with a reputation for low academic achievement, and in 2014, the state placed Hall on a list of six Little Rock schools in "academic distress."
And while Central High continues to be more racially balanced—54 percent black, 34 percent white—Little Rock School District as a whole is racially imbalanced, as CNN recently reported, with a school population that is 70 percent black in a city that is 55 percent white.
"People have been oblivious to this," Webb says about the re-segregation of the community and Hall High in particular.
What happened to Hall High is an example of what has been happening nationwide, according to a flurry of high profile media stories. Progress on racial integration in schools achieved during the Civil Rights period has gradually eroded, and in many cities, schools are now nearly as racially divided as they were 40 years ago.
"Integration as a constitutional mandate, as justice for black and Latino children, as a moral righting of past wrongs, is no longer our country’s stated goal," writes Nikole Hannah-Jones for the New York Times Magazine.
Hannah-Jones explains how, despite research studies showing the negative effects of racially segregated schools on children's education and long term success, Republican presidents since Eisenhower have appointed conservative Supreme Court judges who have whittled away at court-ordered integration plans until "legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again."
But lengthy presentations of statistical data and litanies of high court decisions tend to overlook places where the fight to uphold the vision of a pluralistic school system is still very much alive—places like Little Rock, where the fight is still going on. The fight is inflamed with the same themes from when Ike invaded the district; the belief that "separate would never be equal" and that deep divisions in society have to be overcome by intentional policy decisions.
But now, the actors have changed. This time, those being accused of segregating students aren't local bigots. Instead, Little Rock citizens see segregation as being imposed upon them by outsiders, operating under the guise of a reform agenda.
In this conflict, the issue of local control—the cause Faubus and white Little Rock citizens held high in their fight against federal intervention—has been completely turned on its head, with the state government teaming up with wealthy allies to remove decision-making power from the community. And new entities, such as charter schools (publicly funded schools that are privately operated) and private foundations controlled by a small number of rich people, sow divisions in the community.
Once again, the fate of Little Rock's schools is a test of principles that may be adopted nationwide; only this time, in an effort to divide communities rather than unite them.
‘We Are Retreating to 1957’
"Most people [here] have been escaping rather than preparing for how to confront a world that is becoming more diverse," Arkansas State Senator Joyce Elliott tells me in a phone conversation. Elliott, who is black, is a Democratic member of the Arkansas Senate, representing the 31st District, which includes part of Little Rock.
The means of escape in Little Rock has changed over time, according to Elliott. Private schools enabling white flight from LRSD proliferated in the 1970s and '80s. In addition, district leaders, pressured by wealthy white citizens, redrew attendance zones to separate neighborhoods and avoid busing, a practice still in use today.
As John Kirk and Jess Porter explain in an overview of Little Rock's struggle with segregation appearing in the Arkansas Times, the city has been racially divided for decades by interstate highways, housing policies, and urban planning. Kirk and Porter, both history professors at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, note that segregation has been "consciously created by public policy, with private sector collusion."
"We are retreating to 1957," Elliott believes. Only now, instead of using Jim Crow and white flight, or housing and highways, the new segregationists have other tools at their disposal. First, education funding cuts have made competition for resources more intense, with wider disparities along racial lines. Second, recent state takeover of the district has spread a sense throughout the community of having lost control of its education destiny. Parents, local officials, and community activists continuously describe change as something being done to them rather than with them. And third, an aggressive charter school sector that competes with local public schools for resources and students further divides the community.
And lurking in the background of anything having to do with Little Rock school politics is the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropic organization connected to the family that owns the Walmart retail chain, whose headquarters is in Bentonville, Arkansas.
A Struggle Over Resources
Arkansas is one of the many states that funds schools less than it did before the Great Recession. According to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, between 2008 and 2014, school funding in Arkansas declined by more than 9 percent, while during those same years, student enrollment grew by 1.5 percent, according to the most recent measures and projections by the federal government.
Although the state's economy has recovered somewhat from the downturn, the state's politically conservative leadership continues to make cuts to public schools. The budget austerity is particularly harmful to schools that serve higher percentages of low-income children, as Little Rock's does.
According to a district-by-district map of poverty rates created by EdBuild, an education finance reform consultancy, the Little Rock School District, and its adjacent North Little Rock neighbor, are tasked with educating some of the poorest students in the state, with poverty rates of 26.9 percent and 33 percent, respectively, compared to school districts surrounding them, where poverty rates are much lower, around 17 percent.
State budget cuts prompted a $40 million decrease in school spending in Little Rock in early 2015. Then, later that year, a federal judge overturned the state's long-standing obligation to help fund Little Rock's expenses for desegregation. The payments had amounted to more than $1 billion in 60 years. That additional cut helped prompt another round of spending decreases in 2016.
"We are constantly having our resources taken away," Toney Orr tells me in a phone interview. "Families with means are moving on" to higher wealth schools that surround the district. "But if you’re a family without means, you can't move on," he says.
Orr, an African American father of twin sons in the Little Rock schools, tells me the general lack of resources in the district is leading to a more segregated system as "power struggles between the haves and the have-nots" have intensified.
An article in The Atlantic cites from a lawsuit brought by Little Rock parents that found huge differences between resources in schools with very high percentages of black students versus schools that enroll mostly white students. School conditions and access to computers vary considerably, with schools that are mostly white students having newer, cleaner buildings and plentiful computers while schools with almost all-black and brown students are more apt to be in decaying and decrepit buildings with few computers.
"We have created the conditions for undermining the schools," state senator Elliott says in describing the lack of resources in Little Rock schools, especially those serving low-income, non-white children.
For her part, Elliott has pushed for increases in education spending, particularly for a statewide early childhood education program for low-income kids and for dyslexia interventions in schools. Her Republican colleagues in state government tend to oppose these measures.
'A Very Racist Decision'
Not only does Little Rock have fewer resources for schools, local citizens now have less say in determining how those resources are managed.
In January 2015, the state board of education, an appointed board whose members are selected by the governor, voted to take over the district, dissolve the locally elected school board, and hand authority over to a governor-appointed Education Commissioner.
The takeover, according to an Arkansas independent news outlet, was justified largely on the basis of a previous decision to designate six schools, including Hall High School, as academically distressed. The same news article quotes a Little Rock minister calling the state takeover, "a very racist decision.”
Why racist? State takeovers have been occurring for years, for many reasons, but "racial issues" have long cast a "cloud" over these actions, according to a report by Education Week in 1998. That article quotes numerous sources who argue takeover efforts frequently have "singled out predominantly minority districts and violated the rights of voters to choose their local education policymakers."
The reporter cites survey results showing "out of 21 districts that have ceded power to mayors or state agencies in recent years … all but three have predominantly minority enrollments, and most are at least 80 percent nonwhite. Of eight districts that have been threatened with takeovers, all but two have populations that are predominantly minority, and three are at least 93 percent nonwhite."
More recently, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a national alliance of 10 community organizations and rights groups, published a report titled, ”Out of Control: The Systemic Disenfranchisement of African American and Latino Communities Through School Takeovers." The report examined state takeovers of local schools in New Jersey, Louisiana, Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania and found takeovers consistently produce increased racial segregation and loss of public institutions in communities of color.
Earlier this year, AROS director Keron Blair, in an article in Think Progress, compared takeovers "in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods to the voter ID laws that prevent many people of color from casting a ballot, saying they are both examples of distrusting people of color to govern themselves."
Proponents of the takeover of LRSD deny race has anything to do with their actions, and claim that state takeover is simply about improving academics. But there are plenty of reasons to doubt this claim.
‘No Clear Evidence’: What Takeovers Don’t Do
"The rationale for the state takeover was never about academic distress," says Arkansas State Senator Linda Chesterfield, who represents District 30 that includes part of Little Rock. In a phone conversation, she tells me that the Little Rock district—Arkansas' largest—consists of 48 schools in all, some of which had been awarded for being the "most improved" schools in the state, including one of the schools deemed academically distressed.
Adding to Chesterfield's suspicion is the fact that just 15 percent of the schools in Little Rock were judged to be in academic distress, while other districts have higher percentages of struggling schools. In Forest City, for example, three of the district’s seven schools have been labeled academically distressed. In Blytheville, the district's only middle school and only high school are labeled academically distressed. And in Pine Bluff, the district's only high school and one of the two middle schools are labeled academically distressed. Proportionally, Little Rock doesn’t even come close.
Whatever intentions drove the decision, an additional problem is this: state takeovers of local schools have rarely produced academic improvements.
A recent report, “State Takeovers Of Low-Performing Schools,” examines the track record of district and school takeovers in states that have employed this governance method the longest: Louisiana, Michigan and Tennessee. The report concludes, “There is no clear evidence that takeover districts actually achieve their stated goals of radically improving performance at failing schools.”
The report, by the Center for Popular Democracy, finds that wherever the state takeovers occur, “Children have seen negligible improvement—or even dramatic setbacks—in their educational performance.”
A ‘Sharecropper’ School District
What state school district takeovers can do very well, though, is disenfranchise local voters.
As Senator Chesterfield, who was a school board member before running for statewide office, explains, "With [elected] school boards, you have a person you can go to if you have a complaint." But in a state takeover situation, "You can't go to the state commissioner."
"We've been turned into a sharecropper school district," says Orr.
Orr’s reference is to the agricultural system that emerged in America's post-Civil War Reconstruction period where white landowners, instead of giving up property to freed blacks, allowed former slaves to stay on the white man's land as long as the black farmers—and some poor white farmers—turned over a portion of their crops each year to the owner.
In Orr's sharecropper analogy, he likens state education commissioner Johnny Key to the landowner and the appointed superintendents that have churned through the system as the field bosses. In a sharecropper arrangement, "The landowner gave you what he thought you deserved," Orr explains. And in the case of Little Rock, what the district seems to "deserve" is less voice in how the district is run.
The disenfranchisement of Little Rock citizens became especially apparent recently, when Commissioner Key suddenly, and without explanation, terminated the contract of Baker Kurrus, until then the superintendent of the Little Rock School District. (Key had originally appointed Kurrus himself.)
As veteran local journalist for the Arkansas Times Max Brantley explains, Kurrus was initially regarded with suspicion due to the takeover and the fact he was given the helm despite his lack of education background. But Kurrus had gradually earned the respect of locals due to his tireless outreach to the community and evenhanded treatment of oppositional points of view.
But many observers of school politics in Little Rock speculate Kurrus was terminated because he warned that charter school expansions would further strain resources in the district. In advising against expansions of these schools, Kurrus shared data showing charter school tend to under-enroll students with disabilities and low income kids.
He came to view charter schools as a "parallel school system" that would add to the district's outlays for administration and facilities instead of putting more money directly into classroom instruction.
"It makes no sense" to expand charter schools, he is quoted as telling the local NPR outlet. “You’d never build two water systems and then see which one worked … That’s essentially what we’re doing” by expanding charters.
Kurrus also came to believe that increasing charter school enrollments would increase segregation in the city.
"Kurrus amassed significant data illustrating that charter schools have tended to take higher income and white students from the LRSD … further segregating education," Brantley reports. "Compared to the LRSD," Brantley adds, "eStem and LISA [the predominant charter networks in the city] contain lower percentages of children who live in poverty, African-American and Hispanic students, English-language learners and special education students – all of which give the charters a strong demographic edge.
Because of the state takeover and subsequent firing of Kurrus, the citizens of Arkansas are "basically powerless," says Kathy Webb, when it comes to governing their own schools.
"I don't see a master plan for fixing the district," says Antwan Phillips. Phillips is a Little Rock attorney and currently serves on an advisory board for the schools. (He was appointed by Kurrus.)
In a phone conversation, he tells me that if the district were a sick patient visiting a doctor, there would be some kind of diagnosis and prescription, yet none of that has been put forward by the state. And although there may not be a declared plan for Little Rock schools, the undeclared plan seems to call for rapid expansion of charter schools.
'A Parallel School System’
Charter schools existed in Little Rock before the state took over the district. But many people in the city believe the purpose of the takeover is to expand these charters further and add new ones.
The two most influential charter networks in the city, eStem and LISA, both started before the state takeover but were recently expanded by the state oversight board, despite an outpouring of opposition from the community. The expansions will double student enrollment in both charter networks. A third charter school has been given a three-year extension despite "struggling academically," according to a local reporter.
The takeover "is about money," Chesterfield claims. She points to the district's annual budget of $319 million – the largest in the state – and asks, "Why else would LRSD become the focal point of charters" when there are other districts with higher percentages of struggling schools and other districts with significant achievement gaps?
There's certainly not a lot of evidence that expanding charter schools will improve the overall academic performance of the district.
A report on the academic performance of charters throughout the state of Arkansas in 2008-2009 found, "Arkansas’ charter schools do not outperform their traditional school peers," when student demographics are taken into account. (As the report explains, "several demographic factors" – such as race, poverty, and ethnicity, – strongly correlate with lower scores on standardized tests and other measures of achievement.)
Specifically in Little Rock, the most recent comparison of charter school performance to public schools shows that a number of LRSD public schools, despite having similar or more challenging student demographics, out-perform LISA and eStem charters.
There's also evidence charter schools add to the segregation of Little Rock. Soon after the decision to expand these schools, the LISA network blanketed the district with a direct mail marketing campaign that blatantly omitted the poor, heavily black and Latino parts of the city, according to an investigation by the Arkansas Times.
The charter network's executives eventually apologized for the selective mailing. In their apology, they admitted working with state education officials—the very people who are tasked with overseeing charter operations—on a marketing plan that relegated low-income households to digital-only advertising, which makes no sense because these homes are the least apt to have computers and Internet connections.
With so much evidence that charter schools are both underperforming academically and increasing segregation in Little Rock, it’s worth asking: why is this expansion happening?
What Walton Wants
What's happening to Little Rock is "happening everywhere," according to Julie Johnson Holt, a Little Rock resident with children who went through the public schools in the district.
Holt, who is white, now runs a public relations consultancy but is the former communications director for the Arkansas Attorney General and the Department of Education.
More specifically, what's happening in Little Rock, according to Holt, is the outcome of a well-financed and strategically operated effort to target the community for large charter school expansions. "The charter movement has gotten very organized and very determined," she observes.
Holt attributes much of the strategy and wealth behind the effort to expand charter schools in Little Rock to the Walton Family Foundation, whose influence "is much bigger than I realized" she says, recalling her days working inside state government.
Indeed, the Waltons' influence features prominently in virtually every major decision concerning state governance of LRSD.
In the state board's vote to take over the district, as Brantley reports for the Times, members who voted yes had family ties to and business relationships with organizations either financed by the Walton Foundation or working in league with the Waltons to advocate for charter schools.
In another recent analysis in the Times, reporter Benjamin Hardy traces recent events back to a bill in the state legislature in 2015, HB 1733, that "originated with a Walton-affiliated education lobbyist." That bill would have allowed an outside non-profit to operate any school district taken over by the state. The bill died in committee when unified opposition from the Little Rock delegation combined with public outcry to cause legislators to waver in their support.
So what the Waltons couldn't accomplish with legislation like HB 1733 they are currently accomplishing by influencing official administration actions, including taking out Kurrus and expanding charters across the city.
In one case, as Brantley reports again, a Little Rock charter is being expanded via the waiving of certain state requirements – thereby allowing the expansion to be "fast-tracked."
Brantley notes the expansion is being enabled through relocation to a new, larger site in close proximity to an existing public school that is considered "struggling" but is actually higher-rated than the charter school by the state's school evaluation system. The new site is owned by a leasing agent with an address "that happens to be the mailing address for Walton Enterprises, the holding company for the vast wealth of Walton heirs."
Most recently, WFF announced it would commit $250 million to help charter schools in 17 urban district finance access to facilities. One of the urban districts Walton intends to target is Little Rock.
So what are Waltons' intentions for Little Rock? Do they really want to re-segregate schools and take the community back to 1957?
In a recent investigative article I wrote on the influence of the Walton Foundation on education policy, I asked Jeffrey R. Henig what motivates the Waltons' efforts. Henig is a political science and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and a co-editor of the book The New Education Philanthropy.
Henig believes the goal the Waltons have in mind is for school districts across the country to be more decentralized and for the expansion of charters to allow for more "more variety" of schools, especially for schools that reflect "differing value systems or ideas of what is a good school."
One of the "value systems" Henig believes the Waltons would like to see more accommodated in public education is more schools that are "rooted in conservative tradition."
It's not hard to believe that an accommodation of more conservative tradition in public education, especially in the South, is the same thing as what Senator Elliott calls "the Old Southern economic structure."
She adds, "We know how that movie ends."
It Doesn't Have To Be This Way
Of course, the movie doesn’t have to end that way.
Arkansas state lawmakers can choose to bring education funding back to levels at least as generous as what was spent in 2008. The funding can be made more equitable by having in place distribution formulas that ensure money goes to schools that need it most.
Also, state leadership can choose to return control of LRSD to a locally elected school board and give people in Little Rock the power to determine the role of charter schools in the district.
And the citizens of Little Rock will need to choose whether to be further divided or unify in support of their historic public schools.
"I'd like to see people in Little Rock deliberately want to have children go to school together," says Elliott.
There are signs Little Rock may be doing that. As Times reporter Hardy notes in his analysis cited above, there is a unified energy throughout all racial populations in the community to take back control of their schools.
"There's been an awakening," city director Kath Webb agrees, noting the number of Hall High School alums who now volunteer in the school to mentor and tutor students and support school events.
When people living around Hall High, where Webb lives, considered renaming the Hall High Neighborhood Association to something that didn’t include the school name, homeowners decided otherwise and retained Hall High.
And the school itself, despite being stigmatized with the label of "failure" and being redesigned around racial imbalance, has chosen to keep in its mission statement a commitment to being a place for "positive learning" and "diverse cultures."
Political leaders in Arkansas should support that mission too.
*Correction: The original version of this article stated that Hall High diversified in the late 1960s. It has been corrected to indicate that that transformation happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
By JEFF BRYANT
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Voting rights: the fight for our democracy
Voting rights: the fight for our democracy
There is a battle under way for our democracy. The choice that lies in front of us: Will we be a country that...
There is a battle under way for our democracy. The choice that lies in front of us: Will we be a country that guarantees every eligible citizen the right to vote and participate? Or will we allow states and politicians to twist voting rules and ignore constitutional rights in order to limit access to democracy?
That is the choice in front of us, and it is not an abstract choice.
Read the full article here.
Elevated Level of Part-Time Employment: Post-Recession Norm?
Wall Street Journal - November 12, 2014, by Nick Timiraos - Nearly 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs that...
Wall Street Journal - November 12, 2014, by Nick Timiraos - Nearly 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs that they don’t want.
The unemployment rate has fallen sharply over the past year, but that improvement is masking a still-bleak picture for millions of workers who say they can’t find full-time jobs.
Martina Morgan is deciding which bills to skip after her hours fell at Ikea in Renton, Wash. Sandra Sok says she’s been unable to consistently get full-time hours after she transferred to a Wal-Mart in Arizona from one in Colorado.
In Chicago, Jessica Davis is frustrated by her schedule dwindling to 23 hours a week at a McDonald’s even though her location has been hiring. “How can you not get people more hours but you hire more employees?” the 26-year-old Ms. Davis said.
The situation of these so-called involuntary part-time workers—those who would prefer to work more than 34 hours a week—has economists puzzling over whether a higher level of part-time employment might be a permanent legacy of the great recession. If so, it could force more workers to choose between underemployment or working multiple jobs to make ends meet, leading to less income growth and weaker discretionary spending.
Employers added some 3.3 million full-time workers over the past year, but the number of full-time workers in the U.S. is still around 2 million shy of the level before the recession began in 2007. Meanwhile, the ranks of workers who are part time for economic reasons has fallen by 740,000 this year to around 4.5% of the civilian workforce. That is down from a high of 5.9% in 2010 but remains well above the 2.7% average in the decade preceding the recession.
“There’s just less full-time jobs available than there used to be,” said Michelle Girard, chief economist at RBS Securities Inc.
The slow decline in part-time work is particularly acute when broken out by industries. For the retail and hospitality sectors, the number of involuntary part-time workers in October was nearly double its prerecession level. For construction, mining and manufacturing work, by contrast, the share of such part-time labor was just 9% above its pre-recession level.
Other data show that the ability of part-time service workers to find full-time work has been much slower during the current recovery. In goods-producing industries, around two-thirds of involuntary part-time workers in July 2013 had found full-time employment by July 2014, up from 60% in 2009, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. But for service-sector workers, the rate has seen little improvement. Around 48% of involuntary part-time workers in July 2013 had found full-time work one year later, up from around 46% in 2009.
An important question for policy makers now is whether the elevated level of involuntary part-time work is due to cyclical factors, meaning it will fall as the economy heals, or to structural changes that have made employers more inclined to rely on a larger contingent workforce and avoid converting part-time workers to full-time positions.
On one side are economists like Ms. Girard, who say greater economic uncertainty and rising labor costs—from increases in the minimum wage, regulations or health-care expenses stemming from the Affordable Care Act—explain higher levels of part-time work. “There is a structural element to this at the very least,” she said.
The health-care law requires employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers to offer affordable insurance to employees working 30 or more hours a week or face fines. “Companies are just more inclined to hire part-time workers, not necessarily because of the health-care law, but for business reasons that make it a more attractive option,” Ms. Girard said.
Anecdotal reports have suggested employers have cut hours to prepare for the implementation of the health-care law, but that hasn’t been borne out by economic data.
An analysis by Bowen Garrett of the Urban Institute and Robert Kaestner at the University of Illinois at Chicago found a small increase in part-time work this year, but the increase occurred for part-time jobs with between 30 and 34 hours—above the 30-hour threshold that would be affected by the health-care law.
Other economists say higher levels of involuntary part-time work are mostly cyclical. Businesses don’t appear to be paying part-time workers more than full-time workers; that would be one clear sign of a shift in hiring preferences.
Elevated levels of involuntary part-time work in service jobs may reflect how low-wage employers ramped up hiring earlier in the recovery. More recently, the sector has absorbed those returning to work after long unemployment spells.
Part-time work in service jobs is “a stepping stone for the unemployed and for people out of the labor force,” said Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. Labor markets are “improving in just the way you would expect.”
Labor advocates, meanwhile, say technological changes in how businesses schedule employees are at fault. Software allows employers to schedule and cancel shifts rapidly based on business conditions.
Carrie Gleason, the director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a labor advocacy group, said that could explain why more part-time workers say they want full-time work. “There’s now this persistent uncertainty in the jobs that hourly workers have today,” she said.
“I need to spend some time with my kids,” said Ms. Morgan, 32. “Two jobs? It’s too much.”
Ikea employees are guaranteed a minimum amount of hours every week. Those that can work “during peak times when our customers are in our stores have the opportunity to obtain more hours,” said Mona Liss, a company spokeswoman. The company in June also announced it would raise the average minimum hourly wage in its U.S. stores next year by 17%.
Meanwhile, the structural-cyclical debate has important implications for the Federal Reserve. If the changes are structural, wages might begin to rise sooner than expected, putting more pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates. If they’re cyclical, it would suggest that Fed policy can remain accommodative.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen routinely highlights the elevated level of part-time work as a key measure of labor slack. “There are still ... too many who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work,” she said at a press conference in September.
Business surveys conducted by the Atlanta Fed have shown there are more part-time workers because “business conditions don’t justify converting them to full time,” said John Robertson, senior economist at the bank. But other businesses have said their reliance on a larger part-time workforce stemmed from the higher costs of hiring full-time workers.
“It would be wrong to say it’s all cyclical, and it would be wrong to say it’s all structural,” Mr. Robertson said. “We’re somewhere in the middle.”
Ulyses Coatl illustrates how any improvement might unfold. He worked for two years as a stylist at a Levi’s apparel store in lower Manhattan but quit his job in September because the hours had become too unpredictable. His schedule varied from as many as 34 hours a week to four hours, but had averaged around 18 hours in recent weeks, he said.
A Levi’s spokeswoman said the company is “always looking at ways to improve retail productivity, including store labor models and processes” that conform to “industry best practices.”
Wal-Mart says the majority of its workforce is full time, and the share of part-time workers has stayed about the same over the past decade. A spokeswoman said store employees can view all of the open shifts in their store, and that there are full-time positions available in the store at which Ms. Sok works.
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Castro moves to stop VP fire from the left
Castro moves to stop VP fire from the left
Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is...
Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program to sell bad mortgages on its books.
The changes, which HUD officials will brief stakeholders and activists on during a conference call on Monday, could be made public as early as Tuesday — depending on when department lawyers give the green light to publishing them in the Federal Register.
But they won’t take effect before the next auction of HUD mortgages, scheduled for May 18.
Castro’s actions could potentially defuse an issue that activists have been using to question his progressive credentials — and he’ll be doing it at the moment the running mate search has begun to get serious at Clinton campaign headquarters.
Among the changes, according to people with knowledge of what’s coming: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a “walk-away prohibition” to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight.
HUD officials say that the timing isn’t a response to the activist pressure or the presidential campaign calendar.
“It has always been our goal to get the policy right, regardless of arbitrary deadlines, and we expect to announce those changes this week,” said HUD press secretary Cameron French.
But the changes come after two years of calls by activists — joined last September by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — for major reforms to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program. Their calculations — numbers that HUD says are way off — allege that during Castro’s tenure, 98 percent of problematic mortgages the department has sold went to Wall Street firms that they say were responsible for the housing crisis in the first place.
With the backdrop of a Democratic Party recalibrated by Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong candidacy, activists were preparing a full offensive against Castro this week, looking to leverage his political ambitions against him to extract major concessions.
Last Thursday, activists sent an ultimatum letter to HUD titled, “Seeking swift changes to HUD's DASP program,” and demanding response within 24 hours. They had set up a national day of action for Tuesday, with protests scheduled at HUD offices in New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco, along with a news conference at Newark City Hall — which remains on for now, pending whether they feel HUD has gone far enough in what the agency tells stakeholders on Monday afternoon.
“I would say we’re cautiously optimistic, but we don’t know, and what we need to see is a plan that will lead to substantially more mortgages not getting into the hands of bad actors and saving more homes from foreclosure,” said Amy Schur, campaign director for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, on Sunday afternoon. “Unless we see that, it’s going to be a problem.”
Schur has been in touch with HUD regularly over the course of the past two years, and in recent weeks when the conversations stepped up after the activists fired a warning shot against Castro by launching a public effort built around the website DontSellOurHomestoWallStreet.org.
That first attack on Castro in early April prompted a number of leaders to rush to his defense — some because they felt the criticisms were unfair, others because they were eager to protect the future of arguably the most promising Latino rising star in the Democratic Party.
“Some of y’all may have seen recently concerns that were voiced about DASP,” Castro said last week in an appearance at a National Association of Realtors event teasing the changes.
“We’re improving that and have been working to do that to ensure that folks are able to stay in their homes longer because they’re offered principal reduction in certain instances,” Castro said, “that we get better outcomes for neighborhoods by making sure that folks who secure those loans aren’t able to just walk away from those properties and by instituting something that we refer to [as] ‘payment shock protection’ to make sure that once payments are modified that they don’t just jump up a couple years later.”
Other members of the coalition and signatories on the ultimatum letter are American Family Voices, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, Daily Kos, Democracy for America, MoveOn.org Civic Action, New York Communities for Change, Other 98% Action, Presente.org, RootsAction.org, the Rootstrikers Project at Demand Progress and the Working Families Party.
Schur said that she and others are hoping that HUD will include some method of incentivizing mortgage sales through early bidding or favorable rates to nonprofits and neighborhood groups, rather than the Wall Street firms that have bought many of the mortgages. They feel that large financial institutions don’t care about the effect on neighborhoods from letting properties go vacant or decline, or of overwhelming homeowners with liabilities — though many argue that the reason these institutions buy so many of the mortgages is that they are the only ones that have the capital and management capability to handle the purchases.
“Where we would like to be with HUD is partnering to roll out a positive program in our cities across the country,” Schur said. “We’d rather be doing that than protesting. But if the changes are insufficient and this program is going to continue to be almost a wholesale giveaway to speculators, we’re going to have to keep the pressure up. We’re not going to have a choice.”
HUD officials point out that the May 18 auction isn’t for the DASP program and call the complaints surrounding that unfair. It is for different mortgages, called an “aged loan sale,” scheduled before these reforms were far along. No DASP auction has been set yet for 2016, and reconsideration of the program, according to French, has been underway since the most recent DASP auction, at the end of last year.
“Since 2014, FHA has made changes to the DASP program before every sale. FHA has been working on the latest round of changes to the DASP program for months, and, in our desire to be as comprehensive as possible, we’ve engaged a broad group of stakeholders on the potential reforms that would make the most impact for distressed homeowners,” French said.
Activists had been growing frustrated with the pace and substance of the conversations with HUD, and HUD officials have been losing patience with them as well, feeling that the activists are out for attention and landing on Castro simply because his name is in the running mate mix.
And, well aware that this is a critical political moment for Castro, activists warn that they’re ready to keep after him until the Democratic convention in July, and beyond that if he is Clinton’s pick.
“We would all love for the secretary to really come through in a big way, but housing activists and folks in our neighborhoods are not going to stop when our neighborhoods are being sold off to Wall Street. There has to be a major, major change,” said Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change. “Folks are completely ready to keep pushing.”
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
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Low-Income Tenants Fight for Affordable Housing, Protest Proposed Trump Cuts
Low-Income Tenants Fight for Affordable Housing, Protest Proposed Trump Cuts
WASHINGTON – More than 700 people from 16 states rallied Wednesday at a Capitol Hill church to oppose the Trump...
WASHINGTON – More than 700 people from 16 states rallied Wednesday at a Capitol Hill church to oppose the Trump administration’s proposed $6.2 billion cut to federal housing programs.
Protesters held signs while shouting, “Housing is our right,” “Stop selling our neighborhoods to Wall Street,” and “No cuts to housing.”
Read the full article here.
Hearing on charter schools brings out varied opinions
State Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale got an earful during a daylong meeting in Philadelphia on Friday...
State Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale got an earful during a daylong meeting in Philadelphia on Friday on ways to improve the accountability and effectiveness of charter schools.
Paul Kihn, deputy superintendent of the Philadelphia School District, warned that if Harrisburg passed pending legislation that would permit the unlimited growth of charters, the cost to the district would be so devastating that it might not be able to manage its own schools.
Lawrence Jones Jr., head of Richard Allen Preparatory Charter School in Southwest Philadelphia, said the state needs to provide equitable funding for both district and charter schools.
"This grand experiment is one that is about to collapse under its own weight, because we are doing such a poor job in oversight," said Donna Cooper, executive director of Public Citizens for Children and Youth.
Kyle Serrette, education director for the Washington-based Center for Popular Democracy, said his organization was stunned by the number of federal fraud cases involving charter officials that have occurred in Pennsylvania in recent years.
His group, which works with community groups and unions, called for "a comprehensive investigation that allows the public, regulators, and legislators to better understand the depth of the problem" to improve oversight.
And Philadelphia City Controller Alan Butkovitz told the auditor general that his office is taking another look at the district's charter school office and a group of city charter schools.
The review, which he expects to be completed in a few months, is a follow-up to a study his office completed in 2010 which found that the charter office "was not doing its job" overseeing the schools and that questionable practices were rampant at 13 charters it reviewed.
It was the fifth and final meeting that DePasquale has held across the state to gather input on improving the state's 174 taxpayer-funded charters, which enroll 120,000 students.
Philadelphia is home to 86 charters with 67,000 students.
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Data on immigrants won't be safe from Trump, unless the data doesn't exist
Data on immigrants won't be safe from Trump, unless the data doesn't exist
When New York City implemented its IDNYC municipal ID system, it was meant to give undocumented immigrants a way to...
When New York City implemented its IDNYC municipal ID system, it was meant to give undocumented immigrants a way to access crucial services that require government identification. But as Donald Trump’s inauguration looms, a new lawsuit will test the wisdom of keeping sensitive data for the program.
A NEW LAWSUIT WILL TEST THE WISDOM OF HOLDING THE DATA
Two Republican state assembly members have sued to stop the destruction of records on hundreds of thousands of cardholders, and a court has decided that the records must remain, pending a hearing later this month. Soon after, Trump will take office, as advocates worry whether he’ll target the information to identify undocumented immigrants.
There is no guarantee the lawsuit will succeed, or that Trump will be able to use the records — which contain information on many people besides immigrants — for deportation purposes. But what looked like a clever bureaucratic gambit is unexpectedly something very different, and to immigrants, possibly more dangerous.
When it designed the IDNYC program, New York retained information on cardholders, but with a caveat: at the end of this year, the city would have the power to change how it holds the data. In an act of partisan gamesmanship, the clause in the local law amounted to a kill switch — one that was put in place, as one Councilman almost presciently put it, “in case a Tea Party Republican comes into office.”
THE CLEVER GAMBIT SUDDENLY LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT
The suit filed this week rests on New York’s state transparency law, known as the Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL. According to the suit, since there are no provisions in the law that allow for the destruction of government records, the city would be overstepping its bounds by destroying the IDNYC data, especially based on who is in office.
The dispute isn’t without precedent. In New Haven, Connecticut, a similar legal battle unfolded over the city’s municipal ID program. There, an anti-immigration group also sued the city under the state’s freedom of information law, with plans to turn the information over to ICE. In that case, the city beat back the lawsuit, but that won’t ensure the same outcome in New York.
“The city is violating state law,” Nicole Malliotakis, one of the Assembly members involved in the suit, told The Verge. “They are not doing what’s in the best interest of the citizens that they are representing.”
In many ways, the database debate parallels other stories of unintended consequences unfolding as the government prepares to transition from Obama to Trump. How will Trump use the surveillance apparatus created by Obama? What does this mean for the undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, who are staying through an Obama executive order?
THE DATABASE DEBATE PARALLELS STORIES UNFOLDING ACROSS GOVERNMENT
As the Center for Popular Democracy, which advocates for immigrants’ rights, pointed out in a report last year, there are two generally accepted ways to safeguard sensitive data: explicitly prevent its release in the legislation, or never provide the data in the first place. Cities have already proven that not retaining underlying personal information is viable — San Francisco operates a program without using underlying application documents, for one example.
Win or lose, if there’s any lesson for privacy advocates and local governments to carry from the unexpected battle over its data, it may be that even planned self-destruction is no impenetrable barrier against misuse. The best way to keep sensitive data private may still be to never hold the data at all.
By Colin Lecher
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30 days ago
30 days ago