CPD IN THE NEWS

Charter Schools are defined by their freedom from regulation and oversight, but that freedom has been so regularly abused by unscrupulous operators that it seems the U.S. Department of Education is finally deciding to crack down, under pressure in this case from Ohio’s U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.

Three months ago, on June 20, 2016, Senator Brown wrote a letter to John King, now U.S. Secretary of Education, demanding increased oversight of a large grant—$71 million—the federal Department of Education made to Ohio on September 28, 2015 to expand charter schools.  The grant application had been written by David Hansen, who, by September, had already been fired by the Ohio Department of Education for hiding the abysmal academic record of the state’s so-called “dropout recovery schools” and omitting their scores from a system he was creating as the Ohio Department prepared to begin holding charter schools more accountable. Hansen had also bragged in his federal grant application that Ohio had already begun more aggressively regulating charters. After the U.S. Department of Education awarded Ohio the $71 million grant at the end of September 2015, however, it was pointed out that the Ohio legislature had not yet passed the regulations for which Hansen (in July) had given the state credit. (The Ohio Legislature later adopted the most basic and minimal charter school oversight when it passed Ohio House Bill 2 on October 7, 2015).

When Ohio Senator Brown wrote to U.S. Secretary John King in June, 2016, the $71 million Ohio grant had been put on hold for months, as the U.S. Department of Education investigated Ohio’s dealings with charter schools. In his June 20 letter, Senator Brown wrote:

“In your November 2015 response letter to the members of the Ohio Congressional delegation, you outlined a number of steps ED has taken and will continue to take to verify the accuracy and completeness of ODE’s grant application. I appreciate these steps, but more must be done to provide order to the state’s chaotic charter school sector. In light of this report, I ask that you examine the performance of Ohio charter schools who have received CSP (federal Charter Schools Program) grants to determine whether grant recipients are failing or closing at a higher rate than those in other states and how the academic performance of CSP grant recipients in Ohio compares to CSP grant recipients nationwide. I further ask that when Ohio has satisfied all necessary conditions for this grant money to be released that you appoint a special monitor to review every expenditure made pursuant to this grant in order to ensure that all funds are being spent for their intended purpose. Ohio’s current lack of oversight wastes taxpayer’s money and undermines the ostensible goal of charters: providing more high-quality educational opportunities for children. There exists a pattern of waste, fraud, and abuse that is far too common and requires extra scrutiny.”

Last Wednesday, September 14, 2016, the U.S. Department of Education finally released the $71 million grant, but, as Patrick O’Donnell reports for the Plain Dealer, there are now many conditions:

“In a letter to the Ohio Department of Education today, the grant was declared ‘high risk’ because of the poor academic performance of the state’s charters and the struggles the state has had in implementing portions of House Bill 2, the state’s charter reform bill passed last fall by the state legislature… The letter states: ‘As part of this high-risk designation, we are imposing certain High-Risk Special Conditions on ODE’s CSP (Charter Schools Program) SEA (State Education Agency) grant that will help ODE and the Department more clearly determine ODE’s ongoing compliance with applicable requirements’ so that it will be more transparent and so that any issues can be identified and fixed quickly.”

Here are the conditions as reported by O’Donnell:

    •    “(T)he state cannot give out grants to schools as it has in the past. It must have prior approval from the U.S. Department of Education before transferring any money.

    •    “The department must evaluate dropout recovery schools better.

    •    “The state must report its progress four times each year.

    •    “ODE must hire an independent monitor of the grant program.

    •    “The state must create a Grant Implementation Advisory Committee.

    •    “And it must do demanding ratings of the oversight agencies known as ‘sponsors’ in Ohio, but as ‘authorizers’ in most other states.”

Ohio’s problems with the controversial $71 million Charter Schools Program grant are not the first time anyone has noticed the federal Department of Education’s failure to oversee the Charter Schools Program. A year ago in June, 2015, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools—a coalition of national organizations including the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Educational Justice, Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, Center for Popular Democracy, Gamaliel, Journey for Justice Alliance, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign, and Service Employees International Union—sent a letter to then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan complaining that while the Department had granted $1.7 billion to states for expansion of charter schools since 2009, the Department of Education’s own Inspector General had been raising alarms about the Department’s own lack of any kind of quality control.

The Alliance’s letter to Arne Duncan cited formal audits from 2010 and 2012 in which the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG), “raised concerns about transparency and competency in the administration of the federal Charter Schools Program.”  The OIG’s 2012 audit, the members of the Alliance explain, discovered that the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, which administers the Charter Schools Program, and the State Education Agencies, which disburse the majority of the federal funds, are ill equipped to keep adequate records or put in place even minimal oversight. The State Education Agencies that lack capacity to manage the programs are the 50 state departments of education.

In the June 2015 letter to Arne Duncan, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools enumerates the problems discovered by the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General: that the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) did not maintain records of the charter schools funded through grants to states, that OII “lacked internal controls and adequate training in fiscal and program monitoring,” that none of the three states selected as samples for investigation by the Office of Inspector General—Arizona, California, and Florida—sufficiently monitored the charter schools funded through the Department of Education’s State Education Agency grants, that 26 charter schools in these three states were shown by the Office of Inspector General to have closed after being awarded $7 million, and that even when the schools closed, nobody tracked “what happened to assets that had been purchased with federal funds.”

Thank you, Senator Sherrod Brown for doggedly demanding that the U.S. Department of Education improve oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program. Please keep on keeping on.

 By Jan Resseger

Source

New York Times - November 14, 2014, by Binyamin Appelbaum - Jean Andre traveled from Queens to the Federal Reserve Board’s stately headquarters here on Friday to tell the people who make monetary policy that he needs their help. He cannot find regular work on film and photo shoots. The jobs he does find pay less.

The Fed’s chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, agreed to meet with about 30 workers and activists, including Mr. Andre, in a gesture of concern for the plight of Americans searching for work and struggling to make a living.

For one hour on Friday, the workers sat in the Fed’s ornate conference room and told their stories to Ms. Yellen and other Fed officials, including three other members of the Fed’s board of governors — Stanley Fischer, the vice chairman; Lael Brainard; and Jerome H. Powell — who listened and asked questions.

“The Federal Reserve is too important of an institution to be insulated from the voices and perspectives of working families,” said Ady Barkan, a lawyer with the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group based in Brooklyn that orchestrated the meeting. “We think that the Fed needs to listen more and be more responsive, and we’re very grateful for this first opportunity.”

The meeting was closed to the media. The workers described what they said, and the Fed declined to comment, citing a policy of silence about private meetings.

Mr. Barkan’s group is campaigning for the Fed to continue its stimulus campaign, citing the high level of unemployment, particularly in minority communities, and the slow pace of wage growth as evidence the economy still needs help. The group argued the Fed could help to drive up wages by keeping interest rates low.

Mr. Andre, 48, said two jobs were canceled this week. And instead of $400 a day for a print shoot, he said he now made $250 or $300.

“They tell me if I don’t take the job there’s lots of other people willing to work,” he said. “So what can I do? I have a family. I have to take it.”

Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group, said monetary policy would be “the single most important determinant of wage growth,” and that he was glad to see workers recognize the Fed’s importance.

A conservative group, American Principles in Action, criticized the meeting as “highly political” and inappropriate. It said it would seek a similar meeting to share its view that the Fed’s stimulus campaign is damaging the economy.

The labor and community groups at the meeting wore green T-shirts that said “What Recovery?” on the front, with a chart illustrating meager wage gains on the back. They are also pressing Ms. Yellen to change the way the Fed chooses the presidents of its regional banks.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said Thursday that its president, Richard W. Fisher, would step down March 19. Charles I. Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, plans to retire at the beginning of March.

The Philadelphia Fed said shortly before the meeting on Friday that it had created an email address for inquiries about its presidential search process. It described the account, which will be maintained by the company conducting the search, Korn Ferry, as part of its commitment to conduct a “broad search.”

“I expect the same thing from Dallas,” said Connie Paredes, 42, who traveled to the meeting as a representative of the Texas Organizing Project, speaking at a rally outside the Fed before the group went inside. “We expect to be included in the process.”

Organizers from Dallas and Philadelphia said they would press for similar meetings with the presidents and board of the local Fed banks.

Source

Coretta Scott King opposed violence in all its forms — from the personal violence that took her husband 50 years ago Wednesday, to what she described as the economic violence of unemployment and poverty that continues around us.

Read the full article here.

Times Union - August 10, 2014, by  Casey Seiler - Between its draft and final versions, a report by SUNY's Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government on New York's controversial Scaffold Law incorporated changes that tended to increase its estimates of the law's cost and impact.

Some of the changes echoed suggestions made to researchers by the leader of an anti-Scaffold Law organization that paid $82,000 to fund the report — sponsorship that has led critics to attack the study as advocacy in the guise of research. Its authors, however, insist the changes reflect nothing more than their own good-faith efforts to clarify the analysis.

The Scaffold Law, which places "absolute liability" on employers for gravity-related workplace injuries, is supported by labor unions but opposed by business groups that claim it needlessly drives up construction costs. Opponents would like to see New York follow other states by adopting a "comparative negligence" standard that would make workers proportionately responsible when their actions contribute to an accident.

The Rockefeller Institute report was funded by the Lawsuit Reform Alliance, a leading opponent of the law, through its research arm, the New York Civil Justice Institute. The study, made public in February, drew initial controversy for a statistical analysis that concluded construction injuries in Illinois dropped after the state repealed its version of the Scaffold Law in 1995. That finding was highlighted by the law's opponents, and harshly criticized by labor groups such as the Center for Popular Democracy.

The director of the Albany-based Rockefeller Institute, Thomas Gais, subsequently backed away from that chapter, citing what he described as flaws in the Illinois analysis — conducted by a Cornell University researcher — and the fact that the report was released to its funders before a final round of vetting had taken place.

After that dispute came to light in April, advocates on both sides filed Freedom of Information Law requests to find out if pressure had been placed on the institute, either during its research or after the report's release.

Documents produced by the Rockefeller Institute in response to the Center for Popular Democracy's FOIL included email correspondence between researchers and Tom Stebbins, the leader of the Lawsuit Reform Alliance. The exchanges, described last month by the Times Union, included a July 2013 email containing two pages of Stebbins' suggested edits offered in response to a draft version of the report. While many of his suggested changes were merely typographical, others went to the substance of the report.

The institute initially refused to release the draft report, but produced it last week on the advice of SUNY's FOIL officer. Side-by-side comparisons of the two reports show that in several instances changes were made that addressed issues raised by Stebbins.

The contract between the institute and the LRA required the researchers to communicate regularly with their funders as the report progressed. In an interview last week, Stebbins said his suggestions were nothing more than an effort "to get the complete picture" of the costs of Scaffold Law.

The second section of the report, prepared by lead researcher Michael Hattery, attempted to assess the public sector costs and impacts imposed by Scaffold Law, including the annual average price of Scaffold Law-related injury awards for public projects. In the draft, researchers found that sum by taking total spending on state and local capital projects (not including public authorities) and applying the average percentage that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority reported spending for labor law injury award costs. (Because the MTA uses what's essentially an in-house insurance entity, it offered the researchers rich data on insurance costs, claim awards and construction value.)

In the draft version of the report, the formula estimates the cost of gravity-related claims costs by using half of the MTA's fraction (0.3 percent of total construction value) to estimate awards in urban areas and a quarter of the MTA average (0.15 percent) for non-urban awards. Using those multipliers, the average cost added up to $28.3 million for 2007-2011.

"Why do you use half of the MTA average .3%," Stebbins asked the researchers in his notes on the draft. He added that it seemed "very inconsistent" with the industry's estimate that Scaffold Law adds at least 4 percent to the cost of any public construction project.

"How can we reconcile?" he wrote.

Stebbins also pointed the authors to data available from the New York City School Construction Authority, which has in recent years buckled under escalating insurance costs for its projects.

The $28.3 million figure, he wrote, "does not include additional insurance costs, which is likely the driver of the 4% estimate. Any thoughts on getting to that number? ... Perhaps we could have an MTA estimate for payouts and an SCA estimate for insurance. That may help reconcile the two figures."

The final report uses calculations that doubled the potential claims costs.

A corrected version of the draft's calculation ($30.2 million) is offered as a "lower bound" for average annual injury awards, but the report provides a new "upper bound" of $60.5 million obtained by employing the full MTA average (0.6 percent) for urban projects and half of that fraction (0.3 percent) for non-urban work.

In a response to the Times Union's emailed questions last week, Hattery said that the injury award cost figure was always intended as "a very rough estimate" due to a lack of specific data.

"After reflection — after the first draft — we chose to use a range rather than a single point estimate," he said. "This is often done so that users and readers of the report do not overvalue the 'precision' of a single number when it is based on a significant set of assumptions."

The same chapter of the draft includes a two-page case study on the construction of the Lake Champlain Bridge, in which those interviewed — including the chief engineers on the New York and Vermont sides of the project, Vermont's attorney general, and the contractor's project engineer and risk control manager — said Scaffold Law had only marginal impact on the structure's price tag.

In his edits, Stebbins recommended scrapping the case study: "As discussed, suggest we remove this section unless we can get someone to talk."

"I felt that no one they interviewed knew what Scaffold Law was and how it affected the cost of construction," Stebbins said last week. " ... We were not able to get people who understood what the costs were."

The final report jettisoned the Champlain Bridge analysis.

Hattery said the case study was dropped because it failed to provide a contrast between insurance costs in the two states. Because New York was the principle partner in the bridge project, he said, "there was no contrast to compare in the execution of the project ... nor were there any fall-from-height claims to review and describe, to our knowledge."

In its place, a new case study was added that examined Scaffold Law's impacts on the School Construction Authority, and described the $1.1 million settlement of an accident claim that ended up costing half of the construction value of the project where the injury occurred.

Hattery said the SCA analysis was included because of the researchers' desire to offer "at least one specific Scaffold case in a higher-density urban environment. ... The case was completed later, in part, because it required a longer time frame for access to personnel, data, etc."

Stebbins said it would have been irresponsible for researchers to not have addressed the SCA in the analysis.

The final report was the centerpiece of February's annual Scaffold Law reform lobby day at the Capitol. The Lawsuit Reform Alliance touted its release with a news statement: "With the study in hand," it concluded, "Scaffold Law reform advocates look for positive traction in the legislature this year."

Instead, the session ended with no action taken on Scaffold Law.

Josie Duffy of the Center for Popular Democracy called on the Rockefeller Institute to release all the drafts of the disputed report.

"The public deserves a full accounting of SUNY's role in helping business groups attack worker safety laws," she said.

Source.