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What’s the solution?

 Julia Steiny wrote a piece in GoLocalProv today making the case against the use of teacher seniority in pretty much any school situations.

I am no great lover of seniority. The school I work in was forced to make some layoffs last year, and a teacher recognized by most students as one of the best teachers in the whole school had to leave because she was one of the newest teachers. Anyone who would argue this is a perfect system has an imperfect understanding of our schools.

But I want to know what the alternative solution is!

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T is for Theocrat

Progressives have long been skeptical of “grassroots” movement born with a rant on corporate media and promoted by folks like former House majority leader, Dick Army, and a bevy of right-wing billionaires. But that hasn’t stopped the right-wing from claiming the Tea Party is “surprising new political force” out to upset the status quo. So which is it? Surprise, surprise!

Beginning in 2006 we interviewed a representative sample of 3,000 Americans as part of our continuing research into national political attitudes, and we returned to interview many of the same people again this summer. As a result, we can look at what people told us, long before there was a Tea Party, to predict who would become a Tea Party supporter five years later. We can also account for multiple influences simultaneously — isolating the impact of one factor while holding others constant.

Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today. Continue reading “T is for Theocrat”

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Make Serious Investments to Create Good Paying Jobs for Rhode Islanders

Dear Mr. President:
Over recent weeks I have visited Main Street small businesses and toured manufacturing facilities throughout Rhode Island’s First Congressional District. I have met with jewelry makers, boat builders, and creators of cutting edge medical devices and aeronautical components, and heard from restaurant owners, small textile retailers, and information technology start-ups. Across this diverse array of interests I hear one common and constant concern – in order to survive, prosper, and grow, entrepreneurs and seasoned small business owners alike need consumers, and those consumers need jobs.

Since becoming a member of Congress, I have hosted Town Hall and Tele-town Hall Meetings in communities across my District in an effort to hear directly from constituents. With unemployment in my state and across the country at unacceptably high levels, we must heed concerns from Main Street and the families we serve. In light of recent Congressional Budget Office projections that forecast slow economic and job growth, and in advance of your announcement outlining recommendations to spur job creation, I would like to take this opportunity to share the views of constituents in Rhode Island’s First Congressional District and some of my thoughts on this critical matter.

Rhode Island was the first state in the northeast to enter the recession three years ago, and at 10.8%, our unemployment rate continues to be among the nation’s highest. As you have consistently expressed, our government must set priorities, cut what does not work or is not needed, and make the investments that will create jobs, sustain our economy today and into the future, and ensure our ability to compete in the world.

Nationally, the manufacturing sector has been a bright spot even during these trying economic times. If this vital economic engine is to be sustained, we must continue our investments in programs that help manufacturers compete in a global economy, retool to be more efficient and effective businesses, and retrain the workforce so that skill sets utilized in declining sectors can be transferred to those that are expanding. This is the driving force behind my Make It In America Block Grant legislation and a number of common sense, job- creating bills that have been introduced in the 112th Congress to strengthen and modernize our nation’s manufacturing industry. I strongly encourage your Administration to carefully consider these proposals that will help bolster research and development, expand advanced manufacturing capabilities, and level the playing field with our foreign competitors.

If we are going to strengthen our manufacturing capabilities and make new products here at home, then we must have the ability to execute the timely and effective transport of goods, people, and ideas. This work will require significant investments, both public and private, in our nation’s infrastructure. A critically important first step in this effort is the passage of a robust surface transportation reauthorization.

Building and repairing our nation’s highways, roads, and bridges now is not only a surefire job-creating strategy, this important infrastructure work also helps advance the broader economy, enhances the safety of our citizens, and is a far more cost-effective investment today than it will be in the years ahead. Without a doubt, we must work collectively to rein in our nation’s debt. However, numerous studies, such as the Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers, clearly demonstrate that we cannot be responsible stewards of our nation’s finances if we continue to allow the price-tag for infrastructure improvements to escalate with each passing year.

This vital work also extends beyond roads and bridges, and includes our nation’s water systems, ports, schools, public parks and facilities, power grids, and telecommunications. The nearly 14 million unemployed Americans, more than 61,000 of which reside in Rhode Island, demand bold action from their government. When our nation endured the economic strains of the Great Depression, it was bold action in the form of the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration that helped put Americans back to work, building and repairing our nation’s infrastructure.

While labor and financial market conditions in the 1930s may have been vastly different than today, what remains the same is the underlying notion that a robust investment in rebuilding our nation’s roads, bridges, and schools will generate job growth and enhance our ability to compete in the global economy. Investing today in building and restoring our nation’s infrastructure is not only smart job-creating policy, it is also smart fiscal policy – as continued deferred maintenance drives the future costs of repairs higher and higher. I strongly urge that your recommendations for job creation include a range of options that encourages both public and private investment in this important work – including the creation of an infrastructure bank and enhanced, innovative, and effective funding opportunities for states, cities, and towns that will put people back to work on priority infrastructure projects.

At the same time, we must recognize that a comprehensive proposal to create and sustain jobs in America must include initiatives that support workforce training and small businesses. Job growth today and into the future, especially for our nation’s manufacturing and construction sectors, requires enhanced support for effective on-the-job training programs, and greater collaboration between our elementary and secondary schools, higher education institutions, and employers in developing multiple career pathways for young adults and improving the skills of unemployed and underemployed Americans. Furthermore, as a member of the Committee on Small Business, I strongly encourage your continued efforts to expand small business access to capital, the lifeblood of small start-ups and longstanding businesses alike. The more than 95,000 small businesses in Rhode Island make up 96% of the state’s employers. They have endured the brunt of our nation’s economic downturn, and our country’s full and sustained economic recovery requires that small businesses have access to the resources that will allow them to form, grow, and prosper.

As the debt ceiling debate underscored, there is strong disagreement about the best approaches and the appropriate role for government in creating jobs. There is no shortage of ideas on how to put people back to work and spur economic growth in the near-term. But, the time for bold action is now. On behalf of my constituents in Rhode Island’s First Congressional District, I thank you for this opportunity to give voice to the small businesses, manufacturers, builders, and unemployed as you prepare your proposals. I look forward to hearing your recommendations, and working to find common ground across the aisle and between levels of government to help put Americans back to work.

Sincerely,

David N. Cicilline

Member of Congress

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Why you can’t simply can’t trust Education Reformers with the facts

Because they leave most of the real facts out:

from today’s POLITIFACT:

But the mayors’ statement leaves out an important fact: The DRA is a test that very few students take because it is given only in schools that don’t go above second grade. In all other elementary schools, the state uses the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), a series of reading, writing, math and science tests used by Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermomt and Maine. Those tests start in grade 3.

And as I wrote earlier this year, how did BVP do on the NECAP?

The NECAP scores are out and the policy wonks will be going over them I am sure.  Here is a little tidbit in the data.  The wunderkind of the charter school movement, Blackstone Valley Prep, AKA, the Mayoral Academy, with all of their hype, score well below the state average on the test in both reading and math.

The State average in reading is 71%: Mayoral Academy score? 61

The State average in math is 55%: Mayoral Academy score? 48

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Labor Day Address

labor day address

1934 was a tumultuous year for the Labor Movement in the United States, as the country continued to struggle its way out of the Great Depression. The Labor battles that raged in 1934 were preceded a year earlier with a sense of hope and promise for workers struggling for the necessities of survival against brutal oppressive employers. Following the Depression in the first year of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, a series of economic programs were implemented to aid in the recovery of our country. In June of 1933, Congress passed the “National Industrial Recovery Act”, which was the first actual Bill to guarantee and protect Collective Bargaining rights for workers in the United States.

Immediately, large scale organizing campaigns began in earnest up and down the industrialized east coast and other industrialized centers in the country. Yet, enforcement of the Act by those very individuals charged with its administration was woefully inept and met with stiff resistance from business leaders. Frustrated Union organizers fought with little success for the Collective Bargaining promised by the NIRA.

Once again, the stark reality became clear to the workers and the unions.

Once again, the government’s empty promises were not kept.

Once again, workers would be forced to win Democracy in their work placed – the hard way.

 

THE BATTLES LINES WERE DRAWN

In 1933 and 1934 workers organized across the length and breathe our Country.  Fed up with speed-ups, oppressive, unsafe working conditions, child labor and company control of too many aspect of their lives.  In those truly epic years workers in the United States fought for dignity and respect in their workplace by using the only weapon they had in their arsenal.  In 1934 workers hit the bricks and held fifteen major strikes.  Most notably were four strikes which labor historians agree were the most important strikes in the United States history.

  • The “Toledo Auto Lite Strike” in 1934, which pitted 6,000 automotive workers in a five day running battle with 1300 armed members of the Ohio National Guard.  Known as the “Battle of Toledo” the clash left two strikers dead and over 200 wounded, the victory led to wide spread unionization in Toledo and was the beginning of the United Auto Workers rise to prominence in organizing the automobile manufacturing industry.
  • The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike in 1934 which changed the city of Minneapolis.  The strike paved the way for mass organization of the over-the-road drivers throughout the Midwest and opened the doors of union membership to thousands of Minneapolis workers in other industries.
  • The 1934 West Coast Longshoreman’s Strike lasted 83 days; triggered by sailors and culminating in a four-day general strike in San Francisco which crippled the local economy and broke the back of the open-shop company unions and led to the unionization of all of the West coast ports of the United States.
  • The fourth and largest strike was the 1934 General Textile Strike which was the largest strike in United States History; involving over 400,000 textile workers from Alabama to Maine.  The strike began over fair wages and working condition in an industry awash with unfairness, abuse, child labor, dangerous working conditions, and minimal pay.

In September of 1934 in Rhode Island, the Great Textile Strike engulfed the primary industry in the Ocean State and required the calling out of the National Guard for riot duty.  By the second week of the strike, tensions between workers and owners erupted into open conflict centered in Saylesville, now Central Falls, where we stand today and in Woonsocket.  On September 10th, the continued misuse of force by deputy sheriffs, closely allied with the owners of the huge Sayles Textile Complex, provoked large scale rioting in and around the Sayles Bleachery and streaming out along Lonsdale Avenue and into this very cemetery where workers fled from guards and sheriffs armed with rifles and machine guns.  The workers used the headstones to block themselves from the incessant volley of bullets trained on them.

Gravestones tell the story of those who rest below them. And in this cemetery some of the gravestones tell another story.  Some of them carry the scars of machine gun bullets, as did so many of the workers who were wounded in that massacre and two who would not leave the cemetery alive.

The ultimate sacrifices born by workers in the strikes of 1934 and perpetuated upon them by guardsman, vigilantes and company thugs are unparalled in labor history even to this day.

Those workers earned and deserve our respect and recognition for paying the ultimate price of martyrdom so that others might be free from worker exploitation.

In 1934, thirty-three workers became martyrs in the Labor Movement:

In Florida – Frank Norman, an organizer kidnapped & murdered.

In George – textile workers Leon Carroll, Reuben Saunders and

V. Blalock were shot and killed.

In Texas – Charles Shapiro murdered on a picket line.

In Alabama – coal miners Edward Woolens, H.C. Collins and Ed Higgins were killed.

In Louisiana – longshoreman Murphy Humphrey murdered by sheriff’s deputy.

In Kentucky – miner Pezzy Adkins – ambushed and murdered by vigilante.

In South Carolina – textile workers John Blackborough, Lee Crawford, E.M. Knight, Ira Davis, Claude Cannon, C.L. Ricker and Maxie Peterson – ALL murdered by guards at the Chiguola Mills

In North Carolina – Ernest Riley killed on a picket line.

In Chicago – bakery worker Joseph Piskondwicz killed on a picket line.

In Wisconsin – Leo Wakefield and Henry Engleman were shot down by deputy sheriffs.

In Minnesota – teamsters Henry Ness and John Belor were killed by police.

In Washington – Shelby Daffron and Otto Heland, both longshoremen, lost their lives

In California – Longshoremen Howard Sperry, Nick Bordois, Richard Parker and John Knudsen killed during the Longshoremen Strike.

And in September 1934, textile workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Jude Courtemanche & Leo Rovette fell from tyranny’s bullets as did Charles Gorzynski and William Black on this very hallowed ground in Central Falls where we stand on this Labor Day 2011.

My brothers and sisters, since we stood here on Labor Day one year ago to commemorate the Rhode Island martyrs of the Great Textile Strike of 1934 by erecting this memorial on this spot in the Moshassuck Cemetery to the martyrs of the Saylesville Massacre the renewed attack on the Labor Movement here in Rhode Island and nationally, strongly mirrors the oppressive treatment of workers so long ago.

Nationally, the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, made it possible to allow unlimited amounts of corporate money into the United States political system.  This played a heavy hand in the election of new anti-worker elected officials and the attacks that followed.  – and this madness is what followed in 2011:

Since the November 2010 election, the Big Business/Anti-worker agenda across the United States has introduced Right to Work legislation in fifteen states.

In several states, legislators have attempted to eliminate automatic dues deductions.

In Minnesota – legislators have attempted to take away whistle blower protections for meat packing workers, and over-time pay away from construction workers.

In Maine – Republican Governor Paul LePage removed a mural honoring workers and Maine’s’ labor history from the state’s Department of Labor Building.  He followed that with a Right to Work Law.

Republicans in New Hampshire pushed Right to Work.

In Missouri, in what can only be described as a Tea Party “side- show”, – Republican legislators tried to roll back child labor laws.

In Oklahoma – the Republican controlled legislature passed a law that requires a parent’s consent for teenagers working in a grocery store to be part of the Union.

Republican legislators in Tennessee want to make union rallies and picket lines a crime!

In Pennsylvania – the Republican Governor wants to privatize the state-run liquor stores, jeopardizing more than 500 million in revenue and threatening the wages & benefits of Union members who work in those stores.

In Ohio, the first state to legalize public sector collective bargaining – the Republican super-majority meant that the legislature passed and Governor Kasich signed into Law SB-5 – stripping Ohio’s public employees of the right to bargain collectively with their employers.

And in Wisconsin – the legislature passed and Governor Walker signed a budget that denies teachers, fire fighters and state workers the fundamental right to bargain collectively.

 

RHODE ISLAND SINCE LAST LABOR DAY 

The Westin Hotel in Providence where workers are represented by UNITE/HERE Local 217, attempted to impose a 20% pay reduction, an increase in health insurance costs, and an outsourcing of the jobs of many union workers.

In Providence, the labor movement was once again under attack and used as a scapegoat for the economic woes of the states and municipalities when the School Boards voted to fire all 1,926 teachers on February 4th.

After months of bargaining in good faith, Laborer’s Local 1322, Cranston Bus Drivers were faced with a bleak future when the city council recommended the privatization of the town’s school bus service.

At Amica Insurance in Lincoln, the company eliminated the jobs of 55 maintenance workers by privatizing their department to a contractor with a history of NLRB violations.

IBEW members at Local 2323 were forced out on strike when Verizon officials attempted to take back 50 years of contract negotiations by eliminating job security, slashing pays and benefits, and sending jobs overseas.

And RIGHT HERE in Central Falls, the site of the riots of 1934, the Rhode Island Department of Education waged war on the public school teachers halfway into a three-year contract.  On February 23rd, the Central Falls Board of Trustees voted to issue termination notices to all Central Falls High School teachers.  The Board read each name in a crowded auditorium.

Like the textile strike 77 years ago, the labor strife in Central Falls was once again national news.

AND WHAT DID LABOR DO?

We fought back as we always do.

We stopped the right wing’s agenda to legislate Right to Work Laws in all fifteen attempts this year.

We stopped them from repealing the Minnesota Whistle Blower Act of 1987.

Governor Guy LePage of Maine lost his bid to turn Maine into a Right to Work State.

In New Hampshire, Governor Lynch vetoed the Tea Party’s Right to Work Law the moment it hit his desk.

In Missouri, the anti-union state Senate would not have its way.  We soundly defeated their attempts to eliminate child-labor laws.

Pennsylvania will not be privatizing their liquors stores thanks to an extensive lobbying and education campaign by organized labor.

In Ohio, Governor Kasich’s approval numbers are in the 30’s and his anti-union Collective Bargaining Bill will be on the November 8ballot where the latest poll number show 56 – 32 to repeal.

In Wisconsin, Governor Walker’s numbers are worse than Governor Kasich’s’ after stripping public unions of collective bargaining rights.  And two safe Republican Senators lost their recall election and were replaced by pro-worker candidates.

 

AND WE FOUGHT BACK IN RHODE ISLAND TOO!

THE STATE HOUSE MASSACRE OF 2010

In November the members of Rhode Island unions sent a message to the State House… “If you’re going to run as a Democrat, than you damn well better VOTE like one!” The members proved it by working hard to defeat six incumbent democrats hostile to working families and replaced them with worker friendly democrats.

Westin workers, members of UNITE/HERE Local 217, ratified an agreement after a successful boycott with significant gains to their contract and no privatization of union members’ jobs.

The Providence Teachers Union reached a new three-year Agreement; with all termination notices rescinded.

After intense pressure from organized labor and the general public, the Cranston School Committee decided to end their fool-hardy quest to privatize the ninety bus drivers, members of Laborer’s Union, Local 1322.

IBEW, Local 2323 workers are back to work after being forced out by Verizon three weeks ago after the Company agreed to streamline negotiations and bargain in good faith.

And last week, the Rhode Island Board of Regents voted 7 to 1 to reject charter schools in Cranston.

They can knock us down, but they can’t lick us – this IS Labor Day – in the state which held the first Labor Day Parade in the United States.

And every working man and woman in this state owes a great debt of gratitude to those who were knocked down and got up before and to all of us who continue to fight back today.   We ARE the Labor Movement!

And we say to ALL of you workers – whether you are union or not –

YOU’RE WELCOME!

You’re welcome for:       Eight-hour day

You’re welcome for:    Forty-hour workweek

You’re welcome for:    Child labor laws

You’re welcome for:    Health insurance & Pension benefits

You’re welcome for:    Paid vacations & paid sick days

And you’re welcome for this Labor Day Weekend and every other weekend of the year – because…..

WE ARE THE UNION AND DAMN PROUD OF IT!

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Dan Gordon REMOVED from GOP Caucus by a majority vote

From Kathy Gregg @ Projo:

“PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The tiny House Republican caucus has voted to “expel” one of its members: freshman Rep. Daniel P. Gordon Jr. of Portsmouth.

House Minority Leader Brian Newberry confirmed Wednesday that 6 of the 10 House Republicans voted Tuesday afternoon to expel Gordon, at a caucus held at the State House. The meeting was held an hour before the full House and Senate gathered, for the first time in months, for a briefing on the state’s looming pension-crisis.

The reasons for this rare act are not yet entirely clear and Gordon, who describes himself as a self-employed contractor, was not immediately available for comment.”

Not available for comment?  Grow a pair Danny Boy!

“But in response to an inquiry, Newberry made public the letter he sent Gordon on Wednesday, and an earlier letter in which he took Gordon to task for making derogatory comments about his Republican colleagues in various online forums.

In a September 2 warning letter, Newberry said: “Many, many of the comments I have seen have crossed the line into personal invective and attack … It is simply not permissible for you to launch personal attacks against your colleagues. Disagreement is fine and no one is required to like any other member of the House on a personal level.”

But “none of that excuses your conduct or lack of decorum. Your actions are unbecoming of someone holding your office. If they do not cease immediately, I will have no choice but to take the necessary steps to impose appropriate sanctions up to and including possible expulsion as a member of the House Republican Caucus.”

His letter to Gordon on Wednesday began: “I write on behalf of the House Republican Caucus in follow-up to recent conversations and to my letter of September 2nd to inform you that the Caucus met last night and voted to expel you as a member. ”

I said from about a month after he was elected that Dan Gordon was no good.  He is a racist, a homophobe, and a low-life.  I couldnt be happier that this happened to him.  Now he can know once and for all that he IS NOT welcome.  You keep heading up to the State House to play Representative Big Dan, no one needs or wants you there though…

Looks like an easy win for this seat next year…

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They Are Not Starving, They Are BEING Starved!

Like a banal refrain in American discourse on Africa they ring out: death, disease, war torn, drought, famine, starvation, etc. The list could go on but it would not matter. Like the white noise of a humming fan on a hot summer day, we hear the Western refrain on Africa, yet, somehow we do not. That Africans starve, that they experience famine is common “knowledge”. But what if something is true at the very moment that it is untrue?

This is exactly the case with current mainstream reporting on the so-called drought induced famine in the Horn of Africa, which is threatening the starvation of millions of Africans. We are led to believe that the current drought (which many specialist attribute to climate change) and enduring “tribal” [“ethnic” is the appropriate term] conflicts are the root causes of food shortages in the horn of Africa. Nothing could farther from the truth!

There is a single country in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has enough arable land to feed the entire rest of the Continent with food left to spare. Africa is the most resource rich land mass on the planet. Western nations (and increasingly China) have thrived off of the stolen natural and human resources of Africa for Centuries. From the extraction of coltan (a metallic mineral which allows cell phone batteries to retain a charge), to the displacement of Africa’s best prepared minds (brain drain) through Western neo/colonialism; from the guinea pig testing ground for pharmaceutical companies, to the dumping ground for weapons manufactures; from the illegal fishing off the Somali coast, to the unethical influence peddling of Uncle Tom African leaders, Africa is exploited, and that, unabated and without interruption.

Foreign nations, US colleges (Harvard, Vanderbilt, and many others), and private corporations are partnering with so-called African leaders in parasitic relationships to lease or buy vast areas (more than twice the size of Montana and counting) of the most fertile farmland throughout the African Continent. This land is being used to grow food and ship it back to their respective countries. Nikhil Aziz, executive director of Grassroots International, a human rights and international development organization that supports community-led sustainable development projects, sums it up this way:

African land is being sought in 90-year leases either to grow food crops for export to those countries with scarce arable land or to grow fuel crops like jatropha and palm oil for ethanol, even as almost 300 million Africans are hungry. Or, the land is sometimes being snapped up simply for speculative purposes.

We must come to understand that, technically, there is no actual food shortage in Africa. The Continent is producing sufficient quantities of food, even in the midst of drought stricken regions. But the food is not used to feed Africans. This is why we need to complete the revolutionary struggles that began so many years ago by the likes of Cabral, Biko, and Lumumba. Africa is not yet free.

What we find is that many of the nations which experience food shortages actually produce large amounts of food on land which they’ve either leased or sold to foreign nations or US and Indian corporations. The shocking irony is that many of these African countries have come to rely on food aid imports from Western NGOs at the precise moment that they’re exporting food grown on their own soil for other wealthier nations — indeed, some of the very same nations which run those NGO’s. It’s quite appalling!

Imagine that you discovered that a family whom you firmly believed was starving, actually owned many acres of prime farmland, but had leased it out to an out-of-state food corporation. You then learned that the food corp. was growing food on this SAME land and shipping it back to their home state to sell to others. What advise could be offered to this family? Should they expect to survive they’d do well to terminate the suicidal lease they’ve signed with the food corp, take their land back, and grow food to feed THEMSELVES.

This is the context of the so-called food shortages experienced in Africa. The “drought” argument is a red herring, a mass mediated perspective tendentious in its ignoring of the political economy of famine in Africa. Actual shortages of rainfall are clearly realities, but rainfall has less to do with the relationship of crop production to feeding hungry people as does intelligent economic and political decisions by the people’s alleged political leaders which ensure self-preservation.

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Hegemony of Narrative: “The Help” as Freedom Myth

“Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.”

~Michel-Rolph Trouillot
“Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”

~ Althusser

What is required for an empire to maintain the subjugation, if not the compliance, of its darker subjects? The Imperials must manage their subject’s collective memories about, not only who they were, but who and where they politically are. Hegemony of narrative of both the subject and subjugator is an indispensable tool in the hands of the colonizer.

With the release of the film “The Help” came the usual adoration associated with cinemagraphic attempts at complicated feel-good stories about race relations. All the usual suspects were presented: the white liberal heroine-protagonist (Skeeter), the Black role players (Aibileen and Minny) and depictions of personal prejudice rather than institutional white supremacy as merely a social inconvenience. Like “Precious” and “Crash”, “The Help” has become a race film of sorts in the modern era; not an all Black cast, but, indeed myths which shape popular perceptions about Black life.

The cultural danger in this film (and others like it) is that, via cinemagraphic nostalgia, they so often succeed at (re)inscribing ahistorical notions about racial inequality that, at best appear to be matters of mere social misfortune often at the hands single individuals, or “persons unknown”, and at worst completely obscure the visceral thrust of triune forces which bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. The result of this? We enjoy a film’s romanticized representations of bad days gone by while being anesthetized into indifference toward the economic and social plight of our modern day “Help”.

Lest my disapproving criticism of the film stand alone, I join it with the chorus of other thinkers on these matters. Nelson George, filmmaker and author, wrote in the New York Times:

A larger problem for anyone interested in the true social drama of the era is that the film’s candy-coated cinematography and anachronistic super-skinny Southern belles are part of a strategy that buffers viewers from the era’s violence. The maids who tell Skeeter their stories speak of the risks they are taking, but the sense of physical danger that hovered over the civil rights movement is mostly absent. Medgar Evers is murdered in Jackson during the course of the story, but it is more a TV event, very much like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, than a felt tragedy.

Or professor Rebecca Wanzo:

One of the three narrators, Aib[i]leen, says that she realizes she is more free than the racist character that destroys her livelihood, a claim that encourages readers to feel better about segregation because, in this logic, nobody can take real, psychological freedom from anyone. Freedom is really about how you feel, not about, you know, the law.

Yet, a more thorough critique is rendered in an open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH). They speak to a problematic socio-aesthetic binary which emerges in the feature adaptation, and is patriarchal both in its asexual Mammy-gendering of Black women and its stereotypical portrayals of Black men and community.

“The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.”

And,

“We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.”

The film’s distortion of narrative, on its own, could stand as an eruption on the terrain of sound historiography on the period. But this tragedy, as suggested by the ABWH, is deepened by class cues which sketch “the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.”

In 1935 a crucial piece of worker legislation, the National Labor Relations Act, was passed. Known as the “Wagner Act” after New York Sen. Robert Wagner, who in sponsoring the bill, reasoned that “Men versed in the tenets of freedom become restive when not allowed to be free.” The National Labor Relations Act constituted a seminal democratic moment in American labor and union organizing. Wagner’s bill, among other things, guaranteed protections for union organizing independent of company domination, the right to strike, boycott, and demonstrate against recalcitrant employers, and banned firing as a coercive tool to control union ranks.

The constellation of its lofty achievements notwithstanding, where the Wagner Act failed in its attempts to enhance the democratization of American labor was in its shameful exclusion of Domestic Workers. Southern senators, in an effort to safeguard their own economic greed, saw to it that no domestic worker could ever unionize under the legal indemnity of the Act. Political cooperation was contingent upon the prohibition of the domestic labor force, of which 90 percent were Black women in the South. Hegemony of dominant narratives create sinister silences around this issue via its omission. That domestic workers were left outside of the protective legal umbrella of the Wagner Act often goes under/unmentioned even in college lectures and text.

Possibilities of protecting the collective interest of our modern day “help” must be central in the overall struggle for workers rights, understanding that domestic labor, unlike other labor, is isolated work. At this writing only one state, New York, has passed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. California’s state government is under increasing pressure from organized domestic laborers and their allies to follow suit. In the context of the film’s ahistorical misrepresentation of the politics of Black women’s domestic labor there are existing ways to support private home worker’s economic rights. By organizing you can press your state legislature to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights law.

Links to organizing:

domesticworkers.org/ny-bill-of-rightsdomesticworkers.org/members#rifuerza-laboral.org/caringacrossgenerations.org/

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Board of Regents say AF isn’t good enough for Cranston…but it’s fine for Providence?

It’s amazing how much you can learn about people–and the system they represent–by reading between the lines of their decisions. I was at the Board of Regents meeting today, and what I saw there taught me a lot about the different levels of value those in power assign to the different communities they are supposed to represent equally.

For those of you who haven’t heard yet, the BOR voted to deny Achievement First’s application to open their schools in Cranston, following the request of Governor Chafee, who advised the Board to take into account the opposition by the Cranston community over the past few months.

The governor then, a mere sentence after validating the concerns of the hundreds of Cranston parents and community members who have been protesting the AF proposal on the grounds that it could be damaging to the Cranston community (protesters have cited the financial ramifications of taking that much money out of the district, the loss of public accountability inherent in allowing a private board to take governing authority from public institutions like a school committee, and worries about the organization’s discipline policies which many believe to be excessive) made a recommendation that the Board instead explore bringing the charter management organization into Providence. And the Board, mere seconds after voting to keep Achievement First out of Cranston–presumably because they agreed with the Cranston community’s claims that it could, indeed, damage their district in all the ways cited above–wholeheartedly passed a motion to begin the process of looking into creating an AF district in Providence.

Wait…how does that work?

Now, there are a couple different ways to read the governor’s advice and the Board’s actions. But as someone who was there, listening to the debate, I can tell you that it seemed pretty clear to me that Governor Chafee and the Board of Regents made a simple decision, and one that those in power have been making regarding those who aren’t for centuries: what’s not good enough for us is good enough for them. Specifically, an organization that the clear majority of white, middle-class parents in Cranston don’t believe to be good enough for their students is just fine for all those low-income students and parents in Providence.

It’s hard for me to understand their line of reasoning. How can they recognize Cranston’s concern about AF’s military-like discipline and history of excessive punishment scandals, but still think this set of values is fine to inflict on kids in Providence? (I’m not a big fan of PPSD’s discipline policies, but I don’t think they’re comparable to those of Achievement First.) How can they agree that Cranston’s parents are right not to accept a disempowering administrative system in which they have little or no say in how their children get educated, but still think such a system should be acceptable to parents in Providence?

I don’t know how to answer these questions without going back to that same fundamental perspective: what’s not good enough for us is good enough for them. It boils down to nothing more than inequality of the worst kind.

Of course, there are already immense inequalities between Cranston and Providence schools. And I’m certainly not arguing that PPSD is a haven of perfect pedagogy and policy; on the contrary, I work with students in Providence–at times organizing against the school district–so I know very well the deep problems in our school system. We need to think creatively about how we can have better parent engagement, because our schools will never improve until parents are involved, and what we’re doing now clearly isn’t working; we need a curriculum that students find relevant to their lives, because what we’ve got now consistently alienates kids into boredom and apathy; we need to improve support systems for students and create more secure cultures of learning, because now those are few and far between; and, in the long-term, we need to change the way low-income communities are short-changed out of resources for their schools, because without more resources much of the above list won’t be possible.

These are not easy problems to solve. But they are solvable. And they are only solvable if we put all of our public attention, energy, and efforts on public education, rather than diverting these resources into creating a new, private district with even less public accountability and an even dimmer community focus. The people of Cranston have made clear that their students deserve better than Achievement First. Why should Providence’s students deserve any less?

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Remember Saylesville: The Long Memory is the most radical idea in America

“The long memory is the memory radical idea in the country.” — Utah Phillips 

On Monday, September 5 there will be a Labor Day rally at the Saylesville Massacre Monument at 11:00 AM. Jim Riley, Secretary-Treasurer of Local 328, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the RI AFL-CIO’s largest organization, will speak about our history and the current state of affairs.

The monument is located in Moshassuck Cemetery, 978 Lonsdale Avenue in Central Falls, still the scene of Labor-Management strife. Come and commemorate the martyred activists from the 1934 textile strike, hear blistering talk, and show the world we haven’t forgotten our roots and we’re not going away.

Register on FACEBOOK

From prior posts

Celebrate Labor Day this year by remembering the Great Textile Strike of 1934 and the Battle of the Gravestones .

Join the Rhode Island Labor History Society this Monday at the Moshassuck Cemetery in Central Falls, 978 Lonsdale Ave, at 11:00 AM for a ceremony remembering the valiant battle waged by the workers against the power of the State and corporate exploitation.

On Labor Day, 1934, a national textile strike began in Rhode Island and spread to southern cloth mills in an attempt to raise wages and improve working conditions during the Great Depression.

The event turned ugly when local management ask for protection at the non-union Sayles Finishing Company. National Guardsmen, with fixed bayonets, confronted hundreds of unarmed strikers and chased them into the Moshassuck Cemetery. Ironically, union picketers too cover behind headstones in the graveyard. The bullet holes remain dozens of stones to this day. Strife there lasted almost three weeks resulting in the injury and wounding of hundreds of protesters and the deaths of several others. The strike would erupt in violence in Woonsocket as well.

In this period of the Great Recession, let’s remember the struggle of our ancestors and learn the lessons of the past. Pay homage to those who made sacrifices so long ago so that we, their grand children, could have a better life. And in doing, we must learn to mobilize in a very different world to maintain the food life that our families fought and died for.

 

***

Original Post

This year is the 75th anniversary of The Uprising of ’34. The “Uprising” was a national textile workers strike that saw some intense street fighting in the Saylesville neighborhood of Lincoln.  Check out this VIDEO. Anyway, while researching the strike for a project with the Rhode Island Labor History Society, I came across this section of text is an issue of Time Magazine.  Governor TF Green, after declaring that there was no strike, but “It is a Communist insurrection,” he faced the following situation:

Jitters, Lawyer, banker, scholar, Fellow of Brown University, 66-year-old Governor Green belongs by birth to Rhode Island’s Republican mill-owning class but has cast his lot with plebeian Democrats. Last week he was an old man badly frightened when he asked his State Assembly for: 1) $100,000 to up the State police force from 51 to 1,000 during the emergency; 2) $100,000 more to put 1,000 War veterans under arms; 3) power to close any or all textile mills in the State; 4) power to call in Federal troops, which he said President Roosevelt had promised him.
Republicans lined up behind the Governor, his own partymen against him. The Republican leader of the Senate said he had received the following message from Brig.-General Herbert R. Dean, commander of the State’s National Guard: “I think I can control the situation but for God’s sake tell the Legislature to do something. We need Federal troops!”
Answered the Democratic leader of the Senate: “Don’t call in the regular army! Don’t militarize Rhode Island for the sake of the selfish interests of a small group of mill-owners! If you want to stop the trouble, stop it at its source, the mills, which are a cancer in this body politic.”

When the shouting died that night the Assembly had granted none of the Governor’s requests. Voluntarily mills at Woonsocket, Saylesville and four other trouble spots closed and the Governor started a Communist round-up on his own authority. Though Federal troops were reported mobilizing in New York and New England, President Roosevelt at Hyde Park appeared to be in no rush to send them to Rhode Island.

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Providence Journal Losing It’s Tax Cut Religion?

With all the Huricane Irene preperation going on, maybe you missed the monumental shift yesterday in editorial policy at the newspaper of record in Rhode Island.  After years of supporting tax cuts for the elite and encouraging buidgetary policy coddling the CEO class in the hopes that they would through their good graces employ the rest of us….well the Fountain Street gang may be seeing the light….maybe.

And well, since maybe there is some buyers remorse, feel free to link to the Providence Journal’s website to read the editorial.

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Oh, Doreen, Please….

Someone please give me notice if Rep. Costa’s “Paying More For TANF” bill makes it to a hearing next spring, because that should be a fun one.  As I pointed out in a prior post, drug testing mothers on assistance may feel good to some, but its not getting anyone “off welfare” in any productive manner.

According to my good friends at PolitiFact (who actually came with some numbers this time), Costa’s proposal will guarantee the state spends more money on the program.  So ironic.  If the state wants to up the budget by $100k, I’m sure there are better ideas.  And, according to the ProJo, there are less than 6,000 people receiving TANF in RI.  If they were all at a PC basketball game, you would be saying “there’s nobody here.”

FYI Rep. Costa: Take a lesson from John Dillinger.  When they asked him why he robs banks, he said “That’s where the money is.”  You can’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor.  Any mathlete can tell you that.

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RIFuture, I still love you- but…

Y’all might have noticed me not posting so much, as if nothing is going on in the criminal justice realm like the California hearing on Solitary Confinement, or Bloomberg editorializing that companies should Ban the Box (and cited a DOJ report regarding 30% of Americans having a criminal record *Hint, hint, ProJo “Pants On Fire”).  And maybe you noticed I began the post with “Y’all.”

In New Orleans, “Y’all” is proper speech used by teachers, judges, and Fortune 500 companies (the latter I’m just guessing).  And this is my new home, where I’m going to one of America’s top law schools, where (hopefully) they too will learn to deal with my big mouth.  NOLA is the most incarcerated city in the most incarcerated state in the most incarcerated nation in the world, and people down here don’t have the luxury of ignoring this, nor can they ignore racism and corruption.

Last week, five cops were convicted of shooting six people (killing two) on Danziger Bridge.  Their cover-up (trying to frame the victims) and “Katrina Defense” (it was a war zone, shit happens) both dramatically failed… yet this partially filmed shooting still took six years to see a trial.  It was not the attorney general who led the way, but community activists and the families hammering away and telling the story in the face of death threats.  Ultimately five other cops pled guilty and testified against these five, and the FBI proved the challenge of any police department investigating themselves.

But I have books to re-read on rules of procedure and whatnot, so I’ll miss a few things.  I’m researching the disenfranchisement laws, looking at Prison-Based Gerrymandering, marijuana possession, and Ban the Box.  And perhaps some artsy activities might occur on occasion.  Sound familiar?

I’ll be paying attention to Rhode Island too, for obvious reasons, and am still available to a limited degree.  For example, just before Amigo de la Gente Miguel passed, he was bemoaning the City’s ruling that the owner of “So Fresh and So Clean” car wash was having their previously awarded bid denied: the owner’s past criminal record kept the company from washing police cars.  Miguel was going to send me paperwork on it, he wanted to know what we can do, and I wanted to know who was deciding it, and on what policy was this based.  My hope is that this discriminatory decision is in good hands.

I hope to see some of y’all at Direct Action for Rights & Equality’s 25th Anniversary Gala on October 14th.  I’ll be trying to keep up with national criminal justice issues on www.Unprison.com, and will continue to weigh in on the Wyatt For-Profit Prison saga in Central Falls (insiders keep me posted!)

I want to extend special thanks to Matt Jerzyk and Brian Hull for encouraging me to write on RIFuture, and for all the people who found it useful information.  300,000 hits later on this site and I can see people are hungry for diverse points of view.  Stay hungry, my friends.

P.S.  Good luck with your hurricane!

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Pichardo, Hassett, Doyle, Ruggiero: Possible Democratic Candidates for Secretary of State in 2014

Ted Nesi reports that 4 Democrats are eyeing the Secretary of State’s race in 2014:

It’s a down-ballot race more than three years away, but politicians are already angling to succeed Ralph Mollis as Rhode Island’s secretary of state when the term-limited incumbent completes his tenure in 2014.

At least three Democrats – Providence City Councilman Terrence Hassett and two state senators, Jamie Doyle of Pawtucket and Juan Pichardo of Providence – are seriously considering a run for the office, WPRI.com confirmed this week.

“I’m not going to say that I am running, and I’m not going to say that I’m not running,” said Doyle, 39, who leads a medical business and is the son of the six-term Pawtucket mayor. “My biggest concern is 2012, which is my Senate election. … That’s the first hurdle.”

Pichardo, 44, a self-employed consultant, also acknowledged eyeing Mollis’ job. ”I’m definitely interested,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Hassett, who survived a near-fatal car accident last fall, has already made clear he is likely to run for secretary of state. The councilman considered a bid for the office in 2006, the year Mollis won, and is “as serious as a heart attack” about it this time, a person close to him told WPRI.com.

Hassett, 51, starts out with a sizable financial advantage over Doyle and Pichardo. The councilman’s campaign war chest totaled $33,942 on June 30, while Doyle had $7,088. Pichardo had $3,105 on March 31, the last time he filed a report.

A fourth Democrat whom insiders think may consider entering the race – state Rep. Deborah Ruggiero of Jamestown – demurred but did not rule it out. “It is a long, long way away, and there’s an awful lot of ground to cover in between,” she said. “I’m certainly flattered that my name is being bandied about by people.” Ruggiero had $12,504 on June 30.

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Achievement First Secret #4 – Nothing Says 21st Century Education Like Segregation

Do charter schools have to teach all kids in the community equally? As they find them, as they are?  This blog post from Wait, What in Connecticut, looking at the enrollment data of several charter schools, including Achievement First schools, argues no.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that despite Connecticut’s urban areas having significant numbers of students coming from non-English speaking homes, charter schools have somehow managed to create learning environments in which virtually NONE OF THE STUDENTS who come from non-English speaking households end up in their schools.

As educators and policy makers know, one of the most significant challenges to educational achievement is language barriers particularly a problem when students take their homework (which is written in English) home to non-English speaking households.  Greater parental engagement in their children’s education is hard enough, but when the students are learning in a language that is not spoken at home it makes it virtually impossible to generate significant parental involvement.

In Bridgeport 40% of the students go home to a non-English speaking home.  That percentage increases to 44.7% in Hartford and in New Haven the percent of students coming from non-English speaking homes is 28.6%

In Connecticut, charter schools are required to ensure equal access to their schools.  Efforts must be made to recruit students from all racial and ethnic backgrounds and admission tests can’t be used.  In fact, entrance decisions must include a blind lottery system.  So that said, compare the percentage of students from non-English speaking homes with the numbers the charter school have reported to the State Department of Education:

School     (% students from non-English speaking homes)
Bridgeport Public Schools     (40%)
Achievement First – Bridgeport Academy (0.6%)
The Bridge Academy (14.9%)
New Beginnings     (0%)
Park City Prep     (0%)
HartfordPublic Schools     (44.7% )
Achievement First – Hartford (0%)
Jumoke     (0%)
New HavenPublic Schools     (28.6%)
Achievement First – Amistad     (0%)
Achievement First – Elm City Prep     (0%)
Common Ground School     (4.6%)
Highville Charter     (0%)

The data is certainly unsettling.  If Connecticut’s publically funded charter schools are supposed to be equally accessible to all and up to 4 in 10 students from those areas come from non-English speaking households then it is pretty unbelievable and completely unconscionable that almost no charter school students come from non-English speaking households.This follows along the lines of scholarly reports that have looked at whether charter schools are recreating the conditions of segregation.  As the LA Times reported:

The trend toward segregation was especially notable for African American students. Nationally, 70% of black charter students attend schools where at least 90% of students are minorities. That’s double the figure for traditional public schools. The typical black charter-school student attends a campus where nearly three in four students also are black, researchers with the Civil Rights Project at UCLA said Thursday.

The other researchers also focused on economic segregation, looking at private companies that manage schools, in most cases charters. The enrollments at most of these campuses exacerbated income extremes, they concluded. Charters tended to serve higher-income students or lower-income students. Charters also were likely to serve fewer disabled students and fewer English learners.Because nothing says Progressive like Segregationist policies!

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Achievement First Secret # 3 – Treat kids like scholars?

According to the Achievement First website, this person is part of their leadership team:

Chi Tschang – Regional Superintendent

Mr. Tschang is responsible for driving high student achievement by overseeing a portfolio of schools and supporting Achievement First principals in developing and implementing rigorous academic programs and positive school cultures. Previously, Mr. Tschang founded KIPP Academy Fresno, a 2008 Title I Distinguished School in California. In addition to serving as principal for five years, he also taught fifth-grade history, sixth-grade math and seventh-grade English. Prior to that experience, Mr. Tschang taught history for four years at Boston’s Academy of the Pacific Rim charter school. After college, he participated in City Year, where he lived in a housing project and tutored fourth graders in south Providence. For his work in Boston and in Providence, he was profiled on the Oprah Winfrey Show and in the New York Times #1 best-seller, What Should I Do With My Life? Mr. Tschang holds a B.A. in history from Yale University, and is the recipient of several distinctions including the Comcast National Leadership Award.

Now, this caused quite a stir in New York because after a few run in with parents, it was discovered that Mr. Tschang was run out of a KIPP school in Californa for a raft of bad treament of students.  From The New York Post:

A Brooklyn charter school administrator who gave up his old gig in California amid charges that he had been physically and emotionally abusive to students is at it again, fed-up parents told The Post.

Just over a year into Chi Tschang’s role as assistant superintendent of middle schools for the Achievement First charter school network in Brooklyn, a student’s mother said he aggressively grabbed an 11-year-old boy he was kicking out of class last month.

READ THE CALIFORNIA REPORT

“[Tschang’s] not supposed to do that,” said the AF Crown Heights mom, who asked to be identified only as Lorna. “He’s supposed to speak with his mouth, not grab him.”

Several other parents at the Crown Heights school questioned Achievement First’s judgment in hiring an educator who resigned as head of KIPP Fresno, part of the Knowledge Is Power Program charter network, in February 2009 after an investigation into his disciplinary practices.

Achievement First officials, who have fielded complaints about their strict discipline in the past, stood by Tschang, despite the ruckus raised earlier this year when he took a misbehaving Crown Heights student home in his car.

That incident prompted the network’s co-CEO, Doug McCurry, to write parents a six-page letter in May that qualified Tschang’s move as a misunderstanding of school policy.

The letter also said Achievement First’s review of Fresno’s investigation found it to be factually inaccurate, “bogus” and conducted by a district that was biased against charter schools.

“During his entire tenure in Fresno, Mr. Tschang never hurt a single child,” Dacia Toll, co-CEO of the Achievement First network, told The Post. “In fact, he was beloved by the students and parents at his school, so much so that hundreds of them took to the streets to protest his resignation.”

Tschang resigned following a report issued in December 2008 in which the school district of Fresno, Calif., found that he had pushed students against the wall, repeatedly yelled at them and instituted various forms of punishment that “exceeded the bounds of the law.”

This included a charge that he forced a student to crawl on his hands and knees and bark like a dog, according to the district probe.

Tschang had allegedly punished a whole fifth-grade class by stuffing them into two bathroom stalls and placed misbehaving kids outside the school building for hours at a time in extreme heat or rain.

He even channeled Oscar the Grouch on one occasion by dumping a garbage can over a student who was clowning around.

According to the Fresno investigation, Tschang admitted to placing “an empty, clean trash can over his head for a few minutes while I was talking to him.”

In response to an allegation that he had picked a student up, held him against the wall by his neck and dropped him, Tschang told probers, “I don’t remember picking up and dropping a student, I do remember shaking a kid.”

A message left at a number listed for Tschang Friday was not returned.

Fresno district officials dismissed the characterization of their probe as biased, noting it had been conducted by an independent investigator.

Additional reporting by Erin Calabrese
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/school_big_bullies_kids_tYDkSueDY2zXz7GDx6H70H#ixzz1VwfOyaSO


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Why do Big Banks care about Charter Schools?

Why Does JP MORGAN CHASE want to create a $325 million fund to invest in charter schools?  Because they can make money off of them silly.

JPMorgan Chase Creates $325 Million Funding Initiative For High-Performing Charter Schools$50 Million in Grants Crucial Amidst Challenging Credit Markets

New York, May 4, 2010 – JPMorgan Chase announced today a $325 million initiative to support the growth of high-performing U.S. charter schools in today’s challenging credit environment.

“Many charter schools have expanded access to academic opportunities for students in all types of communities, so we shouldn’t let tough economic times bring them down,” said JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon. “Improving educational opportunities is a cornerstone of JPMorgan Chase’s philanthropic giving.”

The bank will provide $50 million in grants to community development financial institutions (CDFIs) focused on funding charter schools. In turn, these institutions will use these grants as permanent equity, which they will leverage to fund top-performing charter schools.

Additionally, JPMorgan Chase will work with the CDFIs to provide about $175 million in debt and approximately $100 million in New Markets Tax Credit equity to support the development of charter school facilities. This will allow the CDFIs to access Obama Administration financing programs designed to help charter schools meet facility needs.

JPMorgan Chase estimates that this initiative will help underwrite about 40 charter schools, which will serve more than 50,000 students throughout the term of the loan.

Initial CDFI partners include The Reinvestment Fund of Philadelphia, The Low Income Investment Fund of San Francisco, and NCB Capital Impact of Arlington, Va. Additional partners will be announced later in the year.

“The Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) is proud to be one of the partners with JPMorgan Chase on this initiative. Through this financing initiative, JPMorgan Chase and LIIF will invest in exceptional educational opportunities for thousands of low income students,” noted Nancy O. Andrews, President and CEO of LIIF. “A key constraint to growth for many high performing public charter schools is their ability to finance facility development or enhancement. By providing an equity investment, JPMorgan Chase and LIIF will give schools access to affordable capital in a difficult credit environment.”

The grants to help charter schools are part of JPMorgan Chase’s larger $100 million grant initiative for CDFIs that also support small businesses, community healthcare centers, green initiatives and affordable housing. Details on the rest of the initiative will be announced later this year.

“JPMorgan Chase has been a committed partner to the CDFI industry by providing critical access to capital where it otherwise might not exist,” said Terry Simonette, President and CEO of NCB Capital Impact. “This new initiative continues that commitment by providing the critical capital that is required for charter schools to meet the need for access to quality education in low income and underserved communities.”

Despite the increasing demand by families across the country for charter schools, they have found it difficult to arrange financing for expanded and new facilities.

While public school districts can access the municipal bond market for long-term funding, charter schools almost always pay more for financing because lenders require higher interest rates from the relatively new industry.

“In these next seven years, this new investment by JPMorgan Chase in The Reinvestment Fund projects will allow us to create school opportunities for thousands of students,” said Jeremy Nowak, President and CEO of The Reinvestment Fund. “This major investment certainly positions the bank as a national leader supporting charter schools and meeting their significant unmet financial needs.”

JPMorgan Chase sees high potential for improving childhood education and community development through charter schools, and is committed to their development. The bank has been an active supporter of public school education, donating $181 million in education grants over the last five years. Additionally, the bank provided nearly $12 billion in financing to education institutions and school districts through lending and bond underwriting in 2009 alone.

Community development financial institutions that fund charter schools and are interested in applying for a grant through this new program should contact JPMorgan Chase at CharterSchools.CDFI@jpmchase.com.

About JPMorgan Chase
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) is a leading global financial services firm with assets of $2.1 trillion and operations in more than 60 countries. The firm is a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers, small business and commercial banking, financial transaction processing, asset management and private equity. A component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, JPMorgan Chase & Co. serves millions of consumers in the United States and many of the world’s most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands. Information about JPMorgan Chase & Co. is available at www.jpmorganchase.com.


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