Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in the New Yorker about the importance of the vote on whether to unionize at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The workers are paid $15 an hour. They are organizing against a behemoth corporation owned by the richest man in the world over working conditions, pay too. The vote concludes Monday. Six thousand workers will define the future for millions of others. Bernie Sanders tweeted recently that the 50 richest Americans own more than the bottom 50%. Is this our future?
He writes:
Most contemporary union drives are ultimately about the past—about the contrast that they draw between the more even prosperity of previous decades and the jarring inequalities of the present. But one that will culminate on Monday, the deadline for nearly six thousand employees of an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, to cast ballots on whether to affiliate with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, is the rare union campaign that is obviously about the future. In this case, hyperbole is possible. The Democratic congressman Andy Levin, of Michigan, a union stalwart, has described it as “the most important election for the working class in this country in the twenty-first century.” On Monday, the Reverend Dr. William Barber, as prominent a figure as exists in the modern civil-rights movement, travelled to Alabama and said, “Bessemer is now our Selma.”
That this election is about the future has something to do with the workers themselves, who embody the political transformation of the South to which progressives pin their dreams. According to union officials, a majority of the people employed at the facility, which is outside of Birmingham, are Black, and a majority are women. On the drive up to the facility, supporters of the R.W.D.S.U. planted a sign featuring the Democratic politician and voting-rights advocate Stacey Abrams striking a Rosie the Riveter pose. A high-ranking labor official in Washington pointed me to a detail from an interview, published in The American Prospect, with the campaign’s on-the-ground leader, a thirty-three-year-old organizer named Josh Brewer. Brewer said that many of the workers who supported the union had been involved in demonstrations to bring down Confederate statues in Birmingham, and they often organized themselves.
But the significance of the drive has more to do with the company itself. Amazon is now among the largest private employers in the United States; its founder, Jeff Bezos, is arguably the wealthiest man in modern history. The company has paid every one of its workers fifteen dollars per hour since November, 2018, while also pioneering second-by-second monitoring of its employees. “This isn’t just about wages,” Stuart Appelbaum, the R.W.D.S.U.’s president, told me, on Monday. It is also about the strenuous pace of work, and the real-time surveillance methods that Amazon has used to monitor employees. Appelbaum said some of the workers that his union has represented have had employers that monitored their locations with G.P.S. chips in their delivery trucks, “but there’s nothing like this, where you’re expected to touch a package every eight seconds.” It had been hard to organize within the Bessemer facility, he said, in part because many of the workers did not know one another. “It’s hyper-Taylorism,” Damon Silvers, the director of policy and the special counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said. “Amazon has determined an optimal set of motions that they want their employees to do, and they have the ability to monitor the employee at all times and measure the difference between what the employee does and what they want them to do, and there is nowhere to hide.” Appelbaum said, “People tell us they feel like robots who are being managed by robots.”
The Amazon union drive has drawn a rare intensity out of the usual suspects. Abrams, Levin, and Bernie Sanders have announced their support for it, and so has President Joe Biden, who recorded a strong message encouraging the organizers and discouraging any effort to interfere with them. It has also drawn some unusual allies, above all the conservative Republican senator Marco Rubio, of Florida, who published an op-ed in USA Today declaring his support for the organizing workers and his opposition to Amazon’s ways: “The days of conservatives being taken for granted by the business community are over.”
Amazon’s influence is so vast—touching on issues from wealth and income inequality to antitrust policy, the American relationship with China, the omnipotence of workplace surveillance, and the atomizing effect of big business, in its most concentrated and powerful form, on families and communities—that it can scramble ordinary politics. For a moment, at least, it can put Marco Rubio and Stacey Abrams on the same side. Most organizing campaigns have a symbolic quality, in which the employer and its workers stand for different models of economic organization. The fight in Bessemer is different because it is so direct. Amazon isn’t a proxy for the future of the economy but its heart.
A year into a pandemic that has kept many Americans cooped up at home, ordering supplies and streaming their entertainment, seems an unpromising time to take on Amazon, which supplies many of those services. Amazon’s revenue grew by nearly forty per cent in 2020, and its workforce grew by about fifty per cent; Jeff Bezos’s wealth reportedly increased by nearly seventy billion dollars last year. The company has become so ubiquitous that even to inquire about it entangles you in its machinery: type “is Amazon popular?” into a search engine and you might find, as I did, that most of the top results are books about popularity which are sold on Amazon. You can find evidence that Amazon both is and isn’t popular in survey data. In one poll, ninety-one per cent of respondents said that they had a favorable view of Amazon; in another, fifty-nine per cent thought the company was bad for small business. To count on broad opposition to Amazon right now is to assume such cognitive dissonance: that Americans may increasingly rely on Amazon and view it favorably while also believing that the company needs to change...
The labor leaders in Washington seemed to see Republican support as welcome but mostly ornamental—like if a distant relative had sent, for Christmas, a very large painting of a duck. They found the Democrats’ reaction more significant. In Biden’s message of support earlier this month, he warned employers not to interfere with union elections: “You should all remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that unions are allowed to exist. It said that we should encourage unions.” Silvers, of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said he thought that Biden was speaking directly to the workers who were organizing. “The way he’s talking is not unprecedented, but the precedents are in the Roosevelt Administration,” he said. Appelbaum, of the R.W.D.S.U., said that there had been more talk about the importance of unions in the last Presidential campaign than he’d ever heard before. “We used to talk about how even those Democratic Presidents who we like would barely talk about unions. Biden is different.”
Marion Brady is a progressive educator who has never given up the fight to make education a lively and engaging experience.
He wrote the following to me:
Diane,The courses of study I give away were developed for Prentice-Hall over a period of seven years, working with dozens of middle school teachers nationwide. They taught every lesson, providing feedback and suggestions, and those that P-H thought were most insightful were brought together for a week at the end of every semester to go over final versions. P-H shelved it and gave me copyrights when the marketing department concluded that Phyllis Schafley’s claim that departures from tradition were a slippery slope to communism. Since my brother and I put them online and free, downloads of files range from 600 to 1600 per week without a dime to advertise. Standardized testing is the major obstacle to acceptance.I’ve double-checked the links. They’re important. Thanks much for all you do.
Marion
Salvaging public schooling
By Marion Brady
Public schooling should be the bedrock of democracy, but the institution’s failure to produce a citizenry more resistant to authoritarianism and fantastical conspiracy theories is surely evidence of a serious institutional problem.
Unfortunately, it’s also a problem that most schools are poorly equipped to address. It has to do with what learners think and, with one exception, traditional schooling’s interest in what learners think is minimal.
That exception: How much of the “core” curriculum’s standardized, secondhand information can kids stuff into short-term memory long enough to pass a test?
Good teachers do good things with the subjects in the core curriculum, but no mix of traditional school subjects will produce learners or a citizenry with sufficient intellectual depth and breadth to support democracy, societal stability, and the fresh thinking required by the accelerating rate of social change.
The brain seeks order, organization, pattern, regularity, connections, relationships, wholeness. The core gives it a hodge-podge of disconnected subjects with differing aims, incompatible conceptual frameworks, specialized vocabularies, myriad abstractions and dissimilar methodologies, all at odds with both the integrated nature of the world that schooling is supposed to explain and the way our brains organize information to create sense and meaning.
A couple of paragraphs from a column I wrote twenty or so years ago for Knight-Ridder/Tribune newspapers for a series called “Rethinking Schools” illustrates why the core’s standalone subjects can’t do the job that needs doing.
“We want a pair of socks. Those available have been knitted in a Third World country. Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming. Global warming alters weather patterns. Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes. Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure. Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care. Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates. Mortality is a matter of life and death. Buying socks, then, is a matter of life and death.
“Making detailed sense of this simple cause-effect sequence requires not only some understanding of marketing, physics, chemistry, meteorology, economics, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and a couple of other fields not usually taught in middle or high schools, it requires an understanding of how fields fit together and interact.”
Planet Earth is on an unsustainable path largely of humankind’s choosing. The accelerating rate of environmental, demographic and technological change is creating problems with no known solutions. If our children and our children’s children are to have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of coping with the world they’re inheriting, they need more than a curriculum based on the Common Core Standards or similar knowledge-fragmenting curricula can give them.
Curricular change
Fortunately, a general education discipline that welds not only the core subjects but all present and future school subjects into working parts of a single, comprehensive, integrated, easily understood and used structure of knowledge doesn’t have to be invented. It already exists, is in universal use, teaches at rates unmatched by any other approach, costs nothing to adopt, and fits inside present bureaucratic boundaries and expectations.
Every reader of these words began using that discipline’s major organizers at birth and developed them to sophisticated levels long before reaching school age.
We’re born hungry. We fuss and a nipple with nourishment appears, introducing the thought process that, radically elaborated by lived experience and appropriate schooling, will teach us most of what we’ll learn for the rest of our lives.
That thought process? Not recalling information, but relating it.
Relating
Knowledge expands as relationships are discovered between and among aspects of reality not previously thought to relate—nipples relate to fussing, tides relate to moon, societal stability relates to trust, peace relates to justice, time relates to space.
The relating process that teaches so much so rapidly and efficiently has five elements rooted in the questions where, when, who, what, why? When we focus attention on a particular matter, we (1) locate it in space, (2) establish time parameters, (3) identify relevant actors or objects, (4) describe action, and (5) assume or postulate the action’s cause. The five, integrated systemically, create sense, meaning, “stories,” knowledge, understanding.
Because all fields of study are elaborations of answers to the five questions, and because (when focused on a particular matter) the questions integrate systemically, all knowledge integrates systemically, maximizing the knowledge-creating relating process.
And humankind’s chances of survival.
Institutional transformation
Do this: Switch middle and high schooling’s primary focus from learner ability to recall secondhand information, to learner ability to relate information. Engineer “deep” understanding by requiring adolescents to discover the relating process for themselves via “active learning”—engaging in activities that help them lift the relating process into consciousness and put it to intellectually challenging use.* Do that, and the young will move to levels of academic performance not now possible, levels so far beyond the reach of machine-scored standardized tests their inability to evaluate complex thought will be obvious.
I know this to be true beyond a shadow of doubt from leading a seven-year-long nationwide project involving dozens of middle school teachers working with kids of every level of ability. The project was cut short by the reactionary “back to basics” fad, followed by “standards and accountability” and high-stakes testing.
Using scores on tests of recalled core curriculum content to shape education policy doesn’t just invite societal suicide, it assures it.
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*The links below access FREE—no strings, no advertising, no obligations—materials supporting and implementing the above.
· Courses of study written for middle school and older learners— An introduction to systems thinking; American history; civics; world history; world cultures. (Free for teachers/mentors for use with their own learners:)
Fiorina Rodov wanted to teach, and, as she writes, she believed the glowing claims about charter schools as beacons of hope for the neediest students. She saw “Waiting for ‘Superman'” and cheered for the kids who wanted to get into a charter. She believed the movie’s hype about the magic of charters. So she got in 2016 a job teaching in a charter school in Los Angeles.
The school was non-union. Teacher turnover was high every year. Student attrition was high.
But the chasm between the hype and reality became evident to me immediately upon starting work. There were high attrition rates of students and teachers. Over the summer, more than half the faculty resigned and were replaced by new teachers. About three-quarters of the students hadn’t returned either, and though new kids had registered, the enrollment wasn’t anywhere near what was needed in order to be fiscally stable, because funding was tied to enrollment. There were legal violations: The special education teacher had 43 students, though the law capped class sizes at 28. The overage made him fall behind on students’ individualized education plans (IEPs), making the school noncompliant on special education requirements.
Rodov also learned about the big-money forces promoting the charter myth. She was in L.A. for the election campaign between charter skeptic Steve Zimmer (chair of the LAUSD school board and former TFA) and charter zealot Nick Melvoin. The charter leaders across the city strongly supported Melvoin, of course.
I learned that billionaires fund local school board elections across America in order to accelerate charter school growth. In District 4 in Los Angeles, Steve Zimmer was financed by teachers’ unions while Nick Melvoin was reportedly bankrolled by California billionaires Eli Broad, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and Gap clothing company co-founder Doris Fisher, as well as out-of-towners like former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Walmart heirs and siblings Jim and Alice Walton, and others in an expensive race...
Furthermore, CCSA [California Charter Schools Association] Advocates donated to an organization called Speak UP, which was a “strong opponent” of Zimmer, according to the Los Angeles Times, and whose co-founder and CEO Katie Braude resides in the Pacific Palisades, where the median home price is about $3.4 million. Braude helped launch the Palisades Charter School Complex, which sought to serve “all students in an ethnically and economically diverse student body,” according to her bio on the Speak UP website. But at Palisades Charter High School, “[w]hite students are 2.8 times as likely to be enrolled in at least one AP class as Black students,” while “Black students are 7 times as likely to be suspended as [w]hite students,” according to ProPublica. In 2016 and 2017, Black students were victims of hate crimes at Palisades Charter High School, and in 2020, a Black teacher sued the school for racial discrimination, wrongful termination, harassment and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” According to the Pacific Palisades Patch, Pamela Magee, the school’s executive director and principal, responded to the teacher’s allegations via email, “PCHS is an equal opportunity employer, and we take allegations of discrimination seriously…”
Melvoin’s list of individual donations, according to the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, is filled with some of the same moguls who donated to CCSA Advocates, such as Eli Broad and Reed Hastings. It also includes then-co-chairman of Walt Disney Studios Alan F. Horn, president of the Emerson Collective Laurene Powell Jobs, and Martha L. Karsh and her husband Bruce Karsh, who at the time of the election was the chair of the Tribune Media Company, which then owned the Los Angeles Times. (Bruce Karsh stepped down from the Tribune in October 2017, five months after the school board election.)
The billionaires who fund school board races across the country also finance education reporting. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which was partly behind a $490 million plan reported in 2015 to enroll half of LAUSD’s students in charters by 2023, funded the Los Angeles Times’ reporting initiative Education Matters with the Baxter Family Foundation and the Wasserman Foundation, which also support charters. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Amazon (whose founder and former CEO—now executive chairman—Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post) fund the Seattle Times’ Education Lab. The Bezos Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, fund Chalkbeat. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation fund Education Week and The 74, which owns the LA School Report. The Gates Foundation finances the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), whose “Fixes” column in the New York Times covers education and other issues. And Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective owns the Atlantic, which has a robust education section.
The infusion of billionaire cash and media ownership helps to explain why the mainstream media seldom reports on the failures of charter schools or expose their lies and propaganda.
Rodov goes on to explain that her school was finally closed, but no one in the mainstream media in Los Angeles bothered to interview teachers about “the climate of terror at the school.”
She ends with the hope that Biden’s election will mean an end to favoritism towards charter schools and a beginning of focus on public schools, which are a vital democratic institution.
Those of us who are sick of charter school lies and propaganda share her hope. We will know in time whether Biden will keep his promise to cut off federal funding of for-profit charters, whether he will eliminate the $440 million federal Charter Schools Program (which Betsy DeVos used as her private slush fund), and whether he will make the strengthening of public schools his top education priority. Six percent of America’s students attend charter schools, and they are the darling of billionaires like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Laurene Powell Jobs, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and many more (I wrote a chapter in my recent book Slaying Goliath naming the billionaires and corporations that pour money into charter schools). Let the billionaires pay for them.
The Economic Policy Institute is one of the very few think tanks in Washington, D.C., that is not funded by Bill Gates or the Waltons. It is openly on the side of working people. It does valuable research. During the pandemic, unionized workers fared slightly better than non-union workers.
Figure B in this article shows that as the percent of people in unions declined, the share of income going to the top 10% increased.
Union membership reached a peak (about 33% of all workers) in the late 1940s-early 1950s.
Since then, the spread of anti-union laws (so-called “right to work” laws) has caused a sharp decline in union jobs.
The anti-union movement has been funded over the years by big business and billionaires, of course. They are now fighting the movement for a $15 an hour minimum wage. They live in luxury but don’t understand why working people need a living wage just to pay the rent and put food on the table.
Over the past decade, I have repeatedly defended unions, and extremely stupid people have accused me of being paid by the teachers’ unions. Jeanne Allen of the pro-choice Center for Education Reform once tweeted that my “beautiful home” in Brooklyn Heights must have been paid for by the unions. Yes, I did live in a beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, but I paid for it myself, without a penny from any union.
I defend unions because they provide a pathway into the middle class for people who are poor and working class. By joining a union, they are part of an organization that will make sure they have a good salary, health benefits, and a pension. Why is so problematic for rightwing conservatives and the 1%? Billionaire John Arnold is offended by public pensions, and he has spent a few millions trying to persuade the public that pensions are bankrupting the public sector. I think it is more likely that the public sector has been starved by tax breaks for billionaires.
So, yes, I would like to witness the rebirth of unions in my lifetime. They are the very best protection for working people. They build a middle class. Our society needs more unions, a higher minimum wage, and representation for all workers.
Education Trust, which is amply funded by billionaires, says it advocates for equity when it promotes standardized testing. Twenty years of standardized testing shows that this is a useless and fraudulent effort. Education Trust should be advocating for unions if it really wants equity.
Let us hope that billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and Eli Broad, to mention just a few, will invest in union organizing drives. If they truly want to promote equity in American society, that is the best way to advance the cause. Not charter schools. Not vouchers. Not standardized testing. Unions. Unions that assure a decent standard of living and a decent retirement for every member.
Gary Rubinstein revisits the past decade of failed reforms and notes how frequently the “reformers” made promises and then failed to keep them. Michelle Rhee came on the national scene, appearing on the cover of TIME, then disappeared after helping to sink the mayor of D.C. who hired her. Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein claimed that under their leadership, there was a “miracle” in New York City, but the miracle disappeared when they and their public relations team left office. Jeb Bush touted a Florida “miracle,” but Florida remains mired in the depths of mediocrity when assessed by NAEP. Laurene Powell Jobs promised to “reinvent” the high school and handed out $100 millions to the schools she chose; many failed soon after. We await the “miracle.” Even Betsy DeVos claimed to be “rethinking” school, wondering why we needed public schools at all; now she is busy spreading millions to charter and voucher advocates in the red states.
Gary concluded his review of all the rethinking, reinventing, and rebranding by taking a close look at a school hyped by TFA. He looked at the numbers, and lo and behold, no miracle there.
In this “model” school, the kids are faring poorly:
OK, “So what,” you say, “only 1.1% of their 10th graders passed the science test and 2.7% of their 10th graders passed the math test. What matters is ‘growth.” Well in that department they didn’t fare so well either.
He concludes:
Usually it’s a lot harder than this. They often pick a school that has artificially inflated test scores due to attrition. Keep in mind, this is the school Villanueva Beard chose to highlight. One of the lowest performing schools in test scores and growth in the state of Indiana.
Whether they are ‘rethinkers,’ ‘reinventers,’ or ‘reimaginers’, a reformer by any other name still doesn’t know anything about schools.
The burning question is: When will the billionaires who fund “reform” and “reinvention” decide to stop funding failure?
Tom Loveless is an experienced education researcher who taught sixth grade in California. He has long been skeptical of top-down solutions to classroom-level problems. In this post, he explains why Common Core failed.
The theory of standards-based reform is that if everyone has the same curriculum and the same instruction, no one will fall behind. Thirty years ago, I wrongly believed that, and I supported the idea of national standards written by those in the field. But it is perfectly obvious that students in the same school with the same teachers using the same curriculum and having the same instruction do indeed have different outcomes. Having the same standards, curriculum, and instruction does not assure equal outcomes for all students. David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, and Bill Gates, who funded the standards, did not know that.
He writes:
More than a decade after the 2010 release of Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics, no convincing evidence exists that the standards had a significant, positive impact on student achievement. My forthcoming book next month—“Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core”—explores Common Core from the initiative’s promising beginnings to its disappointing outcomes.
While the book is specifically about Common Core, the failure of that bold initiative can only be understood in the context of standards-based reform, of which Common Core is the latest and most famous example. For three decades, standards-based reform has ruled as the policy of choice for education reformers.
The theory of standards-based reform rests on the belief that ambitious standards in academic subjects should be written first, guiding the later development of other key components of education—curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability. By promoting a common set of outcomes, standards-based reformers argue, the fragmentation and incoherence plaguing previous reform efforts could be avoided.
The approach is inherently top-down and regulatory, with standards developed by policy elites and content experts at the top of the system. The other components, all of which are bolted to the academic standards, grow in importance downstream and are often under the control of practitioners. The book focuses on curriculum and instruction, the what and the how of learning. They are key to the production of learning in classrooms.
Despite the theory’s intuitive appeal, standards-based reform does not work very well in reality. One key reason is that coordinating key aspects of education at the top of the system hamstrings discretion at the bottom. The illusion of a coherent, well-coordinated system is gained at the expense of teachers’ flexibility in tailoring instruction to serve their students. Classrooms are teeming with variation. An assumption of Common Core advocates is that variation in learning occurs primarily because of schools and classrooms possessing disparate, and all too often, indefensibly low standards—that if schools were brought under a common regime of high expectations, children who are falling behind would catch up or never fall behind in the first place.
Please open the link and read the rest of the article.
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matter, closely watches the spending of the New York City Department of Education. Unlike any other city, NYC is required by state law to provide either free space for charter schools or to pay their rent for private facilities. This law was passed by the Legislature at the urging of Governor Cuomo, who called himself “a champion for charter schools.”
Haimson found that the city has been overpaying for charter rents and leases. In the most bizarre example, she points out that the city pays the rent for two Success Academy charter schools that are located in a building owned by the Success Academy corporation. The rent initially was $793,000 but the building’s owner (Success Academy) raised the rent to $3.4 million! The full report is included in a PDF file.
Haimson writes:
Report finds DOE overspent by many millions on rental subsidies for charter schools and owed millions to co-located public schools for facility upgrades
Analysis by Class Size Matters reveals that in FY 2020, over $11.6 million was spent on lease subsidies for charter schools owned by their Charter Management Organization or affiliated organization, and $9.6 million in state reimbursements for lease subsidies were sacrificed
New York, NY (March 25, 2021) – Today, Class Size Matters released a new report, posted here, showing that the DOE has overspent on rental subsidies to charter schools by many millions, and underspent by many millions on the legally required matching funds for public schools co-located with charters.
The new report, DOE Overspending on Charter School Facility Costs and Underspending on Matching Funds to Public Schools, includes updated information provided by the DOE in response to a letter sent by the New York City Comptroller’s Office about the findings of an earlier report produced by the nonprofit organization.
“We were surprised to find that the DOE confirmed many of the findings of our earlier report to the Comptroller, either directly or indirectly, and did not dispute any part of the report’s analysis, which showed that the DOE overspent by many millions on charter leases and underspent by many millions on matching funds to public schools,” said Leonie Haimson, the Executive Director of Class Size Matters.
The new report finds that in FY 2020, the DOE paid approximately $108 million for charter school rental subsidies with the state reimbursing about $65 million, amounts that are likely to increase rapidly each year, as enrollment and rental costs increase. Despite this, Governor Cuomo has proposed eliminating all state reimbursements for charter school rental assistance in his Executive budget, which is estimated to cost the city $100 million in FY 2022 and significantly increase in cost over future years.
“As this report makes clear, New York City is the only district in the state and the nation obligated to help pay for charter school rent and the costs are rising sharply every year,” said New York City Council Finance Chair Daniel Dromm. “Now Governor Cuomo is threatening to eliminate any state reimbursement for this spending, which would cost New York City an additional $100 million in lease aid for FY22 and even more thereafter. We cannot allow this to happen, especially in light of the fact that the state still owes New York City $2 billion in Campaign for Fiscal Equity funding. We cannot allow the Governor to shortchange the city’s most needy students.”
The report also finds that in FY 2019, the DOE appeared to overspend on lease payments for 39 charter schools through overpayments totaling $21 million over the schools’ base rents, and that by holding leases totaling $13.4 million directly for eight buildings that house charter schools, the city made itself ineligible to receive an estimated $9.6 million in state reimbursements in FY 2020.
In addition, the DOE paid $11.6 million in rental subsidies for eight charter schools whose Charter Management Organization (CMO) or affiliated organization owned the space in FY 2020. In many cases, the base rents of these charter schools and the DOE payments increased sharply from FY 2019 to FY 2020, raising questions about whether the rents were fairly assessed and whether there is evidence of self-dealing by the charter schools.
In one example, the rent for the two Success Academy charter schools housed at Hudson Yards increased from approximately $793,000 to over $3.4 million – more than quadrupling – despite the fact that the space is owned by the Success Charter Management Organization. This increase in rent allowed Success Academy to charge the DOE $3.02 million in rental subsidies in FY 2020, an increase of 38 percent from the previous year.
The report also analyzed new data sent by the DOE to the City Comptroller’s Office that revealed millions of dollars in matching funds were owed to public schools for facility enhancements and repairs, compared to the cost of the renovation of their co-located charter schools. These matching funds have been legally required since 2010.
According to the new DOE data, only four public schools out of 812 cases received matching funds equal to the amount spent by their co-located charter schools in the same year, and not a single public school received the same cumulative amount as its co-located charter school spent over the six-year period from FY 2014 to FY 2019. Over this period, 127 co-located public schools were owed a total of $15.5 million. A searchable database is posted here.
Four public schools with the highest amount in missing matching funds were identified, for a total of $4.1 million in missing funds: P.S. 368 in Brooklyn, Mosaic Preparatory Academy and The Mickey Mantle School in East Harlem, and The Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts in Harlem. Two of these schools are also D75 schools serving seriously disabled students.
Mosaic Preparatory Academy, an elementary school, lacked over $929,000 over this period. As Shaheem Lewis, the former PTA President and the father of two children in the school said, “I was shocked to learn that we have been shorted by nearly a million dollars by the DOE in matching funds. For years, we have asked the School Construction Authority to upgrade our auditorium because the seats are falling apart, and to repair the floors of the stage and the gym which are so worn they are dangerous. Most of our classrooms also lack air-conditioning, while the co-located Success Academy Harlem 3 has installed air conditioners in its classrooms. This is not fair to our kids, and it’s past time that the DOE provided the funding so these sub-standard conditions can be improved.”
In the new spreadsheets, the DOE claimed several reasons for not matching these funds, including that the co-located charter schools expenditures were for air conditioners and repainting and/or reflooring projects, but these exclusions are inconsistent with the State law and Chancellor’s Regulation. Even if the DOE reasons for these exclusions were correct, public schools still received the amount of matching funds they were due in any one year less than five percent of the time.
Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, President of Community Education Council in District 4, home of the two schools lacking the most in matching funds, said: “Our East Harlem public schools have been historically disenfranchised. The worst kind of inequity is that co-located charter schools with corporate funding have access to resources absent from our public schools. The state amended the charter law in 2010 to make sure that there wouldn’t continue to be separate and unequal facilities within the same building. To add insult to injury, neither the principals nor the parents at our public schools are informed when they qualify for matching funds, which widens the inequities. It is time for transparency and for the city to support our public schools with the funds that they are entitled!”
The report makes a number of proposals to address these deficiencies, including that the DOE should provide the matching funds owed to public schools from FY 2014 to FY 2019, and, if the DOE does not agree to do so, the State or City Comptroller should audit these expenditures. The DOE should also report regularly and post online all of the amounts spent by charter schools on facility upgrades and send these reports to the principals and School Leadership Teams at the co-located public schools, specifying any expenditures that they will not match. For every charter school facilities spending not matched, the reasons for this should be clearly described, along with the sections in the law or regulations that allow for this exemption.
The Chancellor should require that charter schools rent their own buildings rather than have the DOE lease space for them, because under current law, the DOE is losing millions in State reimbursement. The DOE should also never pay charter schools more in lease subsidies than their base rent, which appeared to have occurred at a loss of $21 million in FY 2019. If these charter schools were overpaid, the DOE should demand they reimburse these funds in future years or subtract the amounts from future DOE payments. If DOE does not agree to do so, the City Comptroller should audit these payments.
The City Comptroller should also analyze closely whether the rents charged to charter schools by their CMOs or allied organizations are fairly assessed on an annual basis so that the city is not forced to expend excessive amounts on rent subsidies.
Finally, the New York State Legislature should eliminate the DOE’s obligation to pay for any charter facilities where CMOs or related organizations own their spaces. The Legislature should also reject the Governor’s proposal to eliminate state reimbursement for the DOE’s lease subsidies, and instead amend the law to remove any obligation on the part of the city to cover the cost of private facilities for charter schools going forward.
As City Comptroller Scott Stringer concluded: “When public dollars support improvements in co-located school buildings, we must leverage these investments to make sure all students benefit and ensure schools have the resources owed to them to provide better student learning environments. Students, teachers, principals, and parents deserve far greater transparency and communication.”
If you are a teacher, you are invited to participate in a survey.
Tim Slekar is writing a book about teachers and their working conditions. He would be grateful to teachers who agree to take the attached survey and return it to him. His email is Timslekar@gmail.com
Darcie Cimarusti, communications director for the Network for Public Education, reports on the assault on public school funding in Iowa. K12 Inc., the for-profit virtual charter chain, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is noted for high attrition rates, low graduation rates, low test scores, and high profits. Its top executives are each paid millions of dollars.
In multiple states across the country omnibus schools choice bills with sweeping charter and voucher provisions have been introduced. NPE Action has been following these bills here. Just such a bill was introduced in Iowa, SSB 1065 which would modify the state’s existing charter school law, which requires the approval of a local school board, to allow charter applicants to apply directly to the state board for a charter with no local approval required. Lobbying disclosures show that K12 Inc., which recently rebranded as Stride, Inc., has lobbied in favor of the bill.
Should the Iowa legislature send this bill to Governor Kim Reynolds’ desk, no doubt K12’s lobbying efforts will intensify. Currently K12 operates 51 online charter schools in 20 states.
The following essay was written by Michael Podhorzer, Senior Advisor to the president of the AFL-CIO. I totally agree that the key to building a strong middle class is the expansion of unions. The plutocrats have done a great job of demonizing them and destroying the ladder into the middle class that unions offer. Right now, Amazon workers are deciding whether to form a union in Bessemer, Alabama. I hope they win. Jeff Bezos should share the wealth with those who work for him. He should not have nearly $200 billion. Why should Elon Musk and Bill Gates have nearly $200 billion? Couldn’t they be satisfied and live in luxury with only a few hundred millions? In a just world, societies would dedicate their best efforts to reducing inequality and eliminating poverty. Let’s give credit to Joe Biden on this important issue. He has said he is a union guy, and he is pushing legislation to enable workers to join unions.
Podhorzer wrote:
The House of Representatives is expected to pass the PRO Act this week, Amazon workers in Alabama continue to vote to form a union and President Biden’s released a video encouraging working people to join unions.
While the prospect of a national conversation about supporting working people organizing themselves against their exploitation is long overdue, maddeningly, even those who support unions regret the “decline in union membership.” Stating the fact that union members make up a smaller share of the workforce than they once did in the passive voice (decline) erases causality, implicitly confirming the idea working people are now less likely to want to be in a union, or that unions are outdated, or that unions themselves have done a poor job selling themselves. In fact, research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologyshows more than 60 million people would vote to join a union today if given the opportunity and Gallup recently found that union approval stands at 65%, one of the highest marks in a half-century.
A more accurate characterization of the same fact would be, “intense and sustained corporate campaigns to bust unions, make it more difficult to form unions, exclude more sectors of the workforce from access to union membership and depict unions in the worst possible ways, along with an often bi-partisan retreat in federal support for working people, relentless roll backs by Republican Presidents and Republican trifecta states have dramatically reduced the number of working people who even have the option of joining one.”
This is yet another example of progressives repeating their opponents’ framing with the effect of making the intentional and contingent seem natural and inevitable. Similarly, we routinely talk about profits rising, but never about the fact that an increasing share of those rising profits come from preventing working people from sharing in the gains from their increasing productivity. Thus, since the pandemic, all of Amazon’s gains have been captured by Jeff Bezos and the company’s largest shareholders, not the working people risking (and losing) their lives to enable many of us to get through this year without much to disturb our lifestyles.
Meanwhile, progressive opinion leaders and policy wonks wring their hands and heroically search for fresh solutions to the most pressing crises of the day as if there isn’t a substantial body of evidence that increased union membership ameliorates many of them, including income inequality, democratic participation, racism and authoritarianism among other things (below).
Studies show that union workers make about $150 billion more a year than non-union workers in wages alone controlling for industry, occupation education and experience. And union workers are much more likely to have health, pension and leave benefits than non-union workers, and those benefits are much more substantial than those non-union workers who have them at all. To put that in perspective: $150 billion is more than twice the SNAP program, yet costs the taxpayer almost nothing.
All of this will seem improbable at best as long as you imagine that the benefits accrue from unions as the institutions you experience in your professional life. The benefits accrue from allowing working people to organize themselves collectively and democratically to act on their own behalf. It is the practice of acting democratically and collectively to negotiate contracts and set working conditions that produces more tolerant, effective citizens. Union members vote for things that matter in their daily lives from their shop steward to the health benefits in their contracts. They can see how much more powerful they are together, embracing their linked fate than they are on their own. They practice a democracy that has all but disappeared elsewhere in America.
Even if most progressives don’t fully understand how much more powerful working people acting together on their own behalf are than government programs designed to help them, corporations do. That’s why, since the Wagner Act they have relentlessly attacked working people’s ability to combine.
The Taft-Hartley Act is most known for opening the door to “right to work.” By the 1950’s most southern states were “right to work,” crippling the CIO’s multiracial organizing efforts in the region. The creation of an effectively non-union, low wage region of the country quickly had two profound effects. First, by offering a low wage domestic region to relocate to, unionized corporations had greater leverage against their employees demands. Arguably as important, but much less recognized, it put an end to the development of a national working class consciousness.
Even less well recognized are the impacts of the restrictions Taft-Hartley put on joint action. The Taft-Hartley Act also banned jurisdictional strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing. In doing so, the Act made illegal the ways in which working people could join together beyond their own employer on behalf of other working people. In this way again, corporations were able to criminalize the development of class solidarity. That has also radically shaped the incentives of unions as institutions.
MORE THAN THE WEEKEND
While there’s growing acknowledgment of how much the neoliberal market absolutism that triumphed in the late 1970’s is responsible for the present state of affairs, there’s relatively little genuine awareness of what it replaced, or how breaking working people’s ability to act collectively was central to its success.
Although very far from perfect, from the New Deal until the 1970’s was a period in which pluralism was seen as an essential element of healthy democracy. And there was no more important element of pluralistic America than the labor movement. At an elite level, a tripartite pluralism consisting of business, labor and government was seen as crucial for the nation’s prosperity and robust democracy. (For example, John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism; The Concept of Countervailing Power and The New Industrial State.)
Unions demonstrated to ordinary people that community problems could only be solved by coming together; strength in numbers was more than a slogan, it was a democratic habit and the way America often functioned. This was a period of movements that led the way to the progress since eroded and continuously under siege. The advances made on civil rights, women’s rights, environmental protection and limiting foreign military intervention and nuclear proliferation (for a time) reflected sustained collective action that required immense social capital built up from the myriad associations that were common at the time to cohere and a shared experience that government would be responsive.
That social capital and sense of agency is shot, demonstrated by our learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s shredding so much of what those movements delivered. This Brookings’ Tracking Deregulation in the Trump Era provides a staggering inventory of decimation. For example, not only has Trump been dismantling the environmental regulatory system, the EPA has been routinely granting thousands of waivers and just not enforcing the law. And, almost without notice, the longstanding treaties and instruments to control nuclear proliferation have been discarded.
The rest of this Weekend Reading provides a guide to resources that demonstrate the ways in which an empowered workforce changes everything and concludes with key points about the PRO Act.
Inequality
The labor movement plays many positive roles in democratic societies—but the most foundational is making sure that the people who do the work of society share in the wealth they create. This is one of many charts the show the connection between corporate success weakening unions and the increasing share of income going to the top ten percent.
Income inequality is the result of unequal power. It’s that simple.
This paper from Hank Farber, Daniel Herbst, IIlyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu is just-revised and packed with terrific (and comprehensive) analysis of the relationship between unions and inequality. It shows how the strength of unions and collective bargaining in the United States after World War II disproportionately benefited low wage workers and workers of color. It remains the gold standard analysis so far of unions and economic outcomes over the long-run in the 20th century.
Internationally, this report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) documents the positive effects of unions across the developed world.
This paper found that, “the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality” from 1973 to 2007.
Democracy
As I said earlier, it is only recently that the accepted idea of that holding free and fair elections was the only requirement to qualify as a democracy. The degree to which people have collective agency in their daily lives determines the health of the society and the democracy. We don’t even notice the ways in which the law facilitates the affluent acting collectively, most notably through corporations. Or the ways in which the law inhibits everyone else from acting collectively. The following research develops that idea.
Authoritarianism. This study in Nature showed that “Participatory practices at work change attitudes and behavior toward societal authority and justice.” Specifically, they found that “participatory meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and to be more willing to participate in political, social, and familial decision-making.” It confirms earlier research here and here that unions fundamentally change members understanding of and expectations for the relations of power between themselves and their employers.
Resistance to system justification. John Jost’s Theory of System Justification provides a powerful explanation of why oppressed people rarely rebel. Much more to come on this in future Weekend Reading and Open Mic. Relevant here is the theory’s logic, borne out in research that willingness to protest is much less a function of the extent of oppression than beliefs about group efficacy. “Collective action is more likely when people have shared interests, feel relatively deprived, are angry, believe they can make a difference and strongly identify with relevant social groups.”
Responsive Congressional Representation. This recent paper from Michael Becher and Daniel Stegmueller uses an impressive array of survey data and union membership data to show how the presence of stronger unions within U.S. House districts leads to more policy responsiveness for lower-income Americans (and less responsiveness for higher-income Americans), especially on economic issues.
Protest. This paper by Greg Lyon and Brian Shaffner documents how unions increase protest activity among non-members through social ties, especially relevant for thinking about how unions have seeded and supported recent protests.
Racism
Although very far from perfect, and especially in its origins often an accomplice to segregation and racism, the union movement has also been an essential partner in dismantling elements of systemic racism. In Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965, Eric Schickler recovers the importance of the partnership between the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the Civil Rights movement. The solid segregationist South initially supported most of the early New Deal’s pro-worker legislation, including the Wagner Act. However, once the CIO began multi-racial organizing efforts in the South, Southern Democrats turned on the labor. Over the next several decades, the Civil Rights movement and the CIO the power of the Southern wing inside the Democratic Party, succeeding in adopting a Civil Rights plank at the 1948 Democratic Convention that triggered Thurmond’s third party candidacy that year which carried Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Speakers at the March on Washington included A. Philip Randolph and Walter Reuther.
Furthermore, union membership increases racial tolerance. For example, this paper from Paul Frymer and Jake Grumbach uses survey data to show how union membership leads to more tolerant views of racial minorities among white workers, and is an important reminder of the spillover effects of unions on many other attitudes and preferences beyond economic policy.
Politics
Many have written about the role of unions in politics. Tom Edsall makes the point, obvious to Grover Norquist, business and the right wing, but somehow obscure to many Democrats and progressives, that gutting the labor movement would mean that, “the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics.” Republicans wasted little time after their state electoral sweep in 2010 to attack unions, beginning in Wisconsin. The recent book, State Capture, tells this story.
Numerous studies document the connection between union strength Democratic and progressive political impacts. Union members vote more Democratic than their neighbors. Nate Silver (2008) and Harry Enten (2012) write about how consequential that gap was, accounting for about 1.7 points of Obama’s margin in both elections. After controlling for other demographics they found that union membership was one of the most important variables. Thus, it is not surprising that fewer union members = fewer Democrats:
Right to Work. In this 2018 study, Alexander Hertel Fernandez carefully examined the impact of the passage of Right to Work laws and concluded that Democrats pay an average of a 3.5 point penalty after passage. They attribute that to lower union density, less political activism and collateral impacts on family and neighbors. Data for Progress takes a different approach, and finds the same result. Instead of looking at RTW, they create a time series relating union density to congressional vote for each of the 50 states. As union density in a state declines, so does the Democratic vote share. It’s a very steep curve after 1990. (Includes density-Democratic vote graphs for every state.)
Fewer Resources for Politics. Both the OpenSecrets and FollowTheMoney websites track union giving. For example, the 2018 election cost $2.1 billion more than 2010, but union spending increased by only $81 million. That was the pattern at the state level as well. That said, unions are still a very significant share of independent spending.
So, while Democratic strategists obsess in their search for the message or counsel a “cultural” conservatism that will get a few more working class votes, they ignore the evidence that increased union membership would provide a much greater and durable increase in Democratic support.
THE PRO ACT
The PRO Act is the most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression because it will:
Empower workers to exercise our freedom to organize and bargain.
Ensure that workers can reach a first contract quickly after a union is recognized.
End employers’ practice of punishing striking workers by hiring permanent replacements. Speaking up for labor rights is within every worker’s rights—and workers shouldn’t lose our jobs for it.
Hold corporations accountable by strengthening the National Labor Relations Board and allowing it to penalize employers who retaliate against working people in support of the union or collective bargaining.
Repeal “right to work” laws—divisive and racist laws created during the Jim Crow era—that lead to lower wages, fewer benefits and more dangerous workplaces.
Create pathways for workers to form unions, without fear, in newer industries like Big Tech.
