Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has found a great way to drum up business for charter schools: make it easier to
close entire local school districts. That's what's happened in Buena Vista and Inkster, Michigan, leaving thousands of kids forced to either relocate to neighboring school districts or pick charter schools, and leaving hundreds of teachers without jobs—and, in some cases, without paychecks they earned. Most Buena Vista students are being sent to Saginaw, which has its own serious budget problems and is laying off its art teachers:
Cassandra Frazier, a Buena Vista High School graduate, found this news particularly disturbing. "My daughter Senethea, she expresses herself through art, through drawings," she said. "They need art teachers."
When Buena Vista shut down this year, she immediately moved Senethea into Arthur Eddy Academy, a Saginaw school -- but now that school is closing, too. "I don't know where I'm going to send her," Frazier said. "I'm going to try to send her somewhere where she can wear a uniform. I hope they accept her, I hope I'm not too late."
Meanwhile, in Inkster, charter schools are moving in to offer a "choice":
Charter schools, like those represented by American Charter Education Services, are using the dissolution as an opportunity to recruit more students before the beginning of the school year.
This Thursday, the group will organize a meeting at which parents can enroll their children in local charters, which are publicly funded but can be privately run. So far, about 15 charter schools have confirmed their participation in the meeting. "We want to let the parents know that they have a choice and don't have to stand by and have their kids shipped away to the new boundaries," said Josh Coggins, the group's CEO. "We hope to help with dispelling the myth of charter schools and letting them know that a charter school is a public school."
Of course, that's a choice engineered in part by an anti-public education, pro-charter governor: send your kid to another town, or go charter. It's
almost exactly like destroying public education was the game plan all along.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's news in education and labor.
A fair day's wage
- Shockingly, McDonald's franchise owners disagree with the lawsuit against them for making workers take their pay in fee-laden debit cards:
Attorneys for Albert and Carol Mueller, whose company owns 16 regional McDonald's restaurants, contend the payroll cards "are the functional equivalent of cash or checks" and that employees "consented to the conduct about which they complain."
Um, yeah. If you have to pay fees to get your money, that's not the functional equivalent of cash or checks. And I'm thinking if the employees had consented, there wouldn't be a lawsuit to begin with.
- Table games dealers at Connecticut's Foxwoods Resort Casino have a tentative deal on a contract giving them retroactive raises and the right to decide how tips are distributed.
- Lazy, Lazy, Union Workers: Washington 787 Workers to Make Up South Carolina 787 Shortfall.
- Yes, Wall Street is overpaid.
- Here's what can happen when non-profits start relying on corporate sponsorships: Lee Fang reports that three interns at the Organization for Chinese Americans were fired for criticizing Walmart:
Lisa Lei, a student at the University of California, Irvine and one of the former OCA interns fired for disrespecting Walmart, told The Nation that she had raised concerns about Walmart’s efforts to build a new store in downtown Los Angeles, near Chinatown, at a meeting with coworkers. She says she was shut down by her supervisor and told not to criticize the organization’s sponsors.
Later, at the OCA convention in July, which was underwritten in part by Walmart and attended by Walmart’s outreach staff, Lei and two other interns posted a short Instagram video of themselves making a rude gesture about Walmart. The video, which was cross-posted onto one of the intern’s personal Facebook accounts, was discovered, and according to the interns, OCA staff swiftly summoned the students involved. The video was deleted off both of their personal social media accounts. The next morning, says Lei, “We were not given any time to ask why and were told it was because of the video. In less than ten minutes, I was escorted out of the hotel. Within thirty minutes, all three of us were watched and escorted out of the hotel.”
- The Massachusetts Nurses Association is pushing for a ballot initiative setting maximum patient levels for nurses. Such measures improve patient safety and nurses' working conditions at the same time.
- What is Smart about Budget Cuts that Push More People into Poverty?
- 8 Ways Privatization Has Brought Pain and Misery to American Life.
- Caterpillar is laying off 125 workers.
- The Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity is trying to claim that New Hampshire is losing jobs because its laws aren't anti-union enough, but NH Labor News clears that right up: The company that AFP cited as leaving New Hampshire because of its labor law is actually shopping around for state and local tax incentives in North Carolina. Oh, and it's still hiring in New Hampshire.
Education
- Sarah Jaffe takes an in-depth look at Oregon's Pay It Forward plan:
Some herald it as a debt-free degree, but that largely depends on how you define “debt.” Students won't have a fixed sum hanging over their head, gathering interest that’s being skimmed off by a for-profit lender or big bank—but they will be making regular payments of a (small) chunk of their income for a (rather long) time. Though the final details will be hammered out in the pilot program, the bill suggests that graduates of four-year programs pay 3 percent of their income—and grads of two-year schools pay 1.5 percent—for 24 years. The goals are to eliminate the upfront cost of college and to allow students to take jobs that pay less but have more social benefit without worrying about making monthly debt payments. Students who make a lot of money will pay a larger amount into the fund, and each generation will fund schools for the generation after them—hence the name, Pay It Forward.
It's noteworthy that the proposal came from students themselves. In the fall of 2012, Barbara Dudley, the founder of the Oregon Working Families Party, taught a capstone class at Portland State University on student debt with professor Mary King. The Pay It Forward plan had been considered elsewhere—most recently in Washington state—and the students considered it as along with other proposals for state and national action to solve the student debt crisis. “We fell in love with it,” says Kevin Rackham, who was a junior at Portland State when he took Dudley and King's course.
- Ugh, Jeff Bezos, ugh. Not like the Washington Post's editorial board could be much more enthusiastic about corporate education policy than it already is, but Bezos is quite the donor for a range of terrible education policy organizations.
- What's wrong with giving schools A-F grades?
But based on an analysis conducted by Matt DiCarlo of the Albert Shanker Institute, the grading system devised for Indiana had more to do with the characteristics of the students served by schools than it had to do with giving parents and policymakers real insight into the effectiveness of the schools.
DiCarlo’s analysis showed, “Almost 85 percent of the schools with the lowest poverty rates receive an A or B, and virtually none gets a D or F.” Conversely, over half of the schools with the highest percentages of the poorest students received “an F or D, compared with about 22 percent across all schools.”