Former New York City council member Eva Moskowitz earns more than the president of the United States in her current role running Success Academies, a chain of charter schools. She applies political pressure by canceling school days to bus students to Albany to lobby in favor of bigger and bigger giveaways to charter schools—giveaways Gov. Andrew Cuomo is usually eager to grant. And the "success" of her chain's name comes not just from political maneuvering but from disciplinary practices that break kids early and push out the ones who might bring test scores down.
Kindergarteners at Success Academies schools can be disciplined and ultimately suspended for big scary stuff like calling out answers and leaving their seats without permission. And discipline and suspension are used as tools to drive out kids administrators don't want to be responsible for. The principal at one school made a list with 16 names on it.
The heading on the list was “Got to Go.”
Nine of the students on the list later withdrew from the school. Some of their parents said in interviews that while their children attended Success, their lives were upended by repeated suspensions and frequent demands that they pick up their children early or meet with school or network staff members. Four of the parents said that school or network employees told them explicitly that the school, whose oldest students are now in the third grade, was not right for their children and that they should go elsewhere.
The current and former employees said they had observed similar practices at other Success schools. According to those employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their relationships with people still at the network, school leaders and network staff members explicitly talked about suspending students or calling parents into frequent meetings as ways to force parents to fall in line or prompt them to withdraw their children.
These aren't hardened criminals. These are kindergarteners who have trouble living up to school rules requiring them to "sit with their backs straight, their hands clasped and their eyes on the teacher." They're kids who need special education. Consider it:
In the 2012-13 school year, the most recent one for which state data is available, Success schools suspended between 4 percent and 23 percent of their students at least once, with most suspending more than 10 percent. According to the most recent statistics from the city’s Education Department, from 2013-14, traditional public schools suspended 3 percent of students that academic year.
And those suspensions, as parents and observers have long suspected and as we now know, are used as weapons against kids who might drag down the charter chain's test scores. Then, brutalized by Success, those kids are sent back to public schools, where their scores are used as evidence that Success is successful. It's disgusting, but it's one of the shining examples of what corporate education "reform" is trying to achieve.
Continue reading below the fold for some of the week's labor news.
- Making applicants for college faculty jobs bid on how low a salary they'd take? One Florida school is thinking about it. There are some obvious problems:
Most “everybody sees that as a very bizarre way to take applications for staff and faculty positions in education -- imagine the single mother with three kids trying to underbid the married lady with no kids and a husband who has a good job,” said Robyn Bell, an assistant professor of music and president of State College’s Faculty Senate. “The single mother never has a chance.”
Then again, maybe some people don't see that as a problem.
- Will an effort to repeal prevailing wage law make it onto Michigan's ballot?
- The coal industry continues its war on coal workers.
- Depressing but important stuff:
The U.S.’s low unionization rates come with consequences for its workers. It leads rich nations in low-wage jobs—more than 20 percent of jobs pay less than two-thirds of the median wage. And the U.S. ranks in the bottom third of countries in terms of its work-life balance. Americans work about 1,790 hours per year on average, but workers in most wealthier nations work less than 1,600. 11.8 percent of American adults work long hours; less than 1 percent of Dutch workers put in more than 50 hours a week.
Reviving unions could be a way to counter these trends. The IMF concluded that countries with higher rates of union coverage enjoy lower rates of inequality and lower rates of poverty.
- Isn't that perfect? AirBnB is using "Uber for temps" to fight Prop F, a San Francisco ballot measure to regulate short-term rentals like AirBnB.
- Sacramento is raising its minimum wage to $12.50 by 2020, but after a series of compromises with business groups, workers groups say it's a flawed bill.
- Now that's what I call grounds for a wage theft lawsuit against Amazon:
Prime Now drivers are suing Amazon over pay that amounts to less than the California minimum wage. Drivers in the Los Angeles market make $11 an hour, but buy their own gas, insurance, and auto maintenance service. Drivers who cover 120 miles in a day without being reimbursed at the standard per-mile rate “make $88 in pay for eight hours with $69 in expenses, and are left with $19,” attorney Beth Ross, who is representing the Prime Now drivers, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
- Macy's will open on Thanksgiving again this year.
- Brooklyn warehouse workers fight to form a union and end discrimination.
- Fleece outerwear and blankets made in the U.S.? Good idea.
The sensible fleece jacket Ben Waxman received one winter got him thinking. The lightweight synthetic material was made nearby in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but the jacket was designed and sewn thousands of miles away overseas.
“Why can’t this be made in Portland, Maine?” he wondered.
As of this month, it is.
- For sexually harassed employees, T-Mobile has terrible service.
- Thanksgiving? Pfft. REI is giving workers a paid holiday on Black Friday.
- Corporate lobbying gets in the way of fairness for workers (but what else is new?):
Less than a year after San Francisco passed a first-of-its-kind fair scheduling ordinance for retail employers, progressive activists in Minneapolis began pushing for an even stronger scheduling ordinance of their own—along with paid sick leave, wage theft protections, and the possibility of a $15 minimum wage.
But the campaign, dubbed the Working Families Agenda, ran into a roadblock earlier this month when its most powerful political ally, Mayor Betsy Hodges, decided to abandon the fair scheduling component. Language in the proposed ordinance called for scheduling notice of at least two weeks in advance and extra “predictability pay” for workers who were scheduled after that threshold.
- Workers Independent News week in review: