Month: August 2016

During one part of his blistering, but ill-informed take down on charter schools, HBO’s John Oliver zeroed in on what he called a track record of financial abuses by charter school executives.

After detailing how the CEOs of charter schools in Florida and Pennsylvania had recently been convicted of embezzling school funds to enrich themselves, Oliver stressed that the two incidents were not outliers.

“In Philadelphia alone, at least 10 executives or top administrators had pled guilty in the last decade to charges like fraud, misuse of funds or obstruction of justice,” he said.

The point—or at least of the points—Oliver was trying to make is one that charter school opponents have been pressing for years: charter schools, even when run as nonprofits, are conduits for greedy capitalists to siphon dollars from the public education system into their own pockets. Oliver is right that there have been some crony capitalists and outright crooks who have been caught using the charter school system to line their own pockets, and those people absolutely deserve to be punished for the damage they’ve done to public finances and to students’ lives.

As a matter of policy, though, we have to ask whether those abuses cancel out all the good charter schools have done for kids and for the public education system as a whole (Reason’s Nick Gillespie has a detailed look at all that).

If you think it does, then you’d have to apply the same standard to the traditional public school system—something that few charter critics seem willing to do.

You’d have to consider, for example, that the decade’s worth of crimes detailed in Oliver’s piece on charter schools are roughly equal to what’s happened just this year in the Detroit Public Schools system.

In March, federal prosecutors filed charges against 13 administrators in the Detroit Public Schools for taking bribes and kick-backs as part of a $2.7 million scam. For 13 years, a school supplies vending company run by Norman Shy was submitting fraudulent invoices to the DPS, causing the school system to pay for paper, pencils and other goods that were never delivered to the classrooms, prosecutors said. One of the people charged was Clara Flowers, a former principal who is now an assistant superintendent for the entire district.

Shy allegedly paid more than $900,000 in the form of checks, cash and prepaid gift cards to the 13 current and former principals who signed off on fraudulent invoices. While the scam was running, there were persistent stories in the Detroit media about schools running low on supplies and teachers being forced to dip into their own paychecks to cover basic classroom needs. That’s a noble thing for any educator to do, but it would be nice if they weren’t forced to do it because their principals were helping a vendor get rich off taxpayer money

“To enrich oneself at the expense of school children is bad enough, but to misapply public funds intended to educate kids in a district where overall needs are so deep, funding sources are so strained, and the need for better education is so crucial, is reprehensible and an insult to those educators working every day to make a better future for our children,” said David P. Gelios, special agent in charge of the bure FBI’s Detroit Division.

As Oliver might put it: “You can say ‘that’s an isolated incident,’ but it isn’t.“

In June, the former director of grant development for the Detroit Public Schools pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges after she was caught pocketing more than $1.2 million that was supposed to be used for tutoring services. Over the course of seven years, Carolyn Starkey-Darden created multiple fake companies and submitted phony invoices that included false test scores, forged signatures and fake individual learning plans, the Detroit Free Press reported. She will be sentenced in October and could face up to 10 years in prison.

She wasn’t even being all that creative about it. One of the fake businesses Starkey-Darden used to pay herself was called “Grants ‘N Stuff,” the paper reported.

Starkey-Darden’s guilty plea was filed just days after former Detroit principal Kenyatta Wilbourn Snapp was sentenced to a year in prison for her role in a separate bribery and kick-back scheme. Snapp pleaded guilty to conspiring to take school funds and laundering money after getting caught taking 11 bribes totaling $58,000 as part of a scam allowing two contractors to get paid for services they never delivered.

None of this is meant to forgive the crimes of charter school executives or suggest that abusing the public purse (and the public trust when it comes to educating kids) is a less serious offense because it happens in other public schools too.

Still, charter schools can be shut down. They can be held accountable in ways that the mainstream public school system will never be. It’s better for a student to be forced to leave a bad school because it’s being forced to close its doors than for that student to remain in a bad school because it’s part of an unassailable institution that will lumber onward no matter how poorly it is run or how many students it fails to educate.

Let’s go back to Oliver one more time. He joked about the fact that Philly Magazine has warned parents they should “Google any schools you’re looking at to make sure they weren’t once unexpectedly shut down or run by a CEO or pleaded guilty to theft.”

Sure, parents should check out any school where they might send their children. If that school has a bad history or has been run by a CEO who didn’t put students first, parents would be wise to avoid it. That’s part of the beauty of the charter school system: if schools are run like that, families can leave and seek a better education elsewhere.

That’s exactly what they are doing. In Detroit, for example, more than 55 percent of students are now attending charter schools.

With the recent crime wave in the Detroit Public Schools system, more might make the decision to leave. To paraphrase Oliver, parents in Detroit might want to start googling their local public school to make sure it wasn’t previously run by a principal who pleaded guilty to theft.

“We are used to war as a metaphor,” writes Bill McKibben in his new article on climate change at The New Republic. In “A World at War,” McKibben insists, “But this in no metaphor. By most ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal.” The trend toward higher average global temperatures is seizing territory, sowing panic, killing people, and even destabilizing governments. “It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing,” he declares. McKibben then suggests we must look to the vast mobilization that took place during the last world war in order “to assess, honestly and objectively, our odds of victory.”

Honesty and objectivity are certainly important when trying to devise policies aimed at addressing problems, especially wicked problems like man-made climate change. It is therefore disappointing to find that McKibben cites some context-less weather disaster data to press his case for a WWII-scale economic onslaught against man-made.

For example, with regard to Arctic sea ice trends, he quotes an unnamed climate scientist as saying, “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half.” The quotation evidently comes from Christian Haas, an Arctic sea ice geophysicist at York University, Toronto, talking about June 2016 Arctic sea trends cited in an article in Arctic Deeply. As it happens Arctic sea ice currently is melting at the third fastest rate in the satellite records starting in 1979. But what does Haas mean by “half?” The average extent of Arctic sea ice in the 37-year record in June is 11.9 square kilometers and the June 2016 extent was 10.6 million square kilometers – about 10 percent less.

Looking further in the article finds that Haas measures the average thickness of arctic sea ice of first year sea ice, which is apparently “more than 50 percent thinner than usual.” While that’s important data – thinner ice melts faster enabling the darker sea to absorb more warmth – it’s not the same thing as the extent of sea ice. Nevertheless, the extent of Arctic sea ice is falling at a rate of 7.4 percent per decade. Or perhaps Haas meant to reference calculated Arctic sea ice volume where May 2016 sea volume was 45 percent below the highest level in May 1979. If you’re trying to persuade people that there is a problem, accuracy matters.

McKibben cites the vast fire this past June in northern Alberta that forced the evacuation of the city of Fort McMurray as evidence of climate change. Drought conditions enabled that fire to burn nearly 600,000 hectares (2,300 square miles) of boreal forest. While certainly of unusual size, the Fort McMurray fire is not the biggest in the region. Also following drought conditions, the Chinchaga fire in 1950 burned 1,700,000 hectares (6,500 square miles) of boreal forest in northern British Columbia and Alberta.

McKibben points to the flooding of the Seine River earlier this year that threatened the storage basement of the Louvre Museum in Paris as further evidence for climate change. However, the Seine at flood was higher in 1982 (6.2 meters) and 1955 (7.1 meters), and its highest ever-recorded flood was in 1910, reaching 8.62 meters. But what about overall flood trends? The Dartmouth Flood Archive has been keeping track of floods only since 1985 reports that the numbers of large and extreme floods have trended upward, although they have dropped since peaking in 2007. The good news is that a 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found with respect to river floods that “rising per-capita income coincided with a global decline in vulnerability between 1980 and 2010, which is reflected in decreasing mortality and losses as a share of the people and gross domestic product exposed to inundation.”

As evidence that climate change is destabilizing governments, McKibben states that record-setting droughts fueled the rise of Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria and the ongoing civil war in Syria. With regard to Boko Haram, McKibben may be referencing a 2014 Mother Jones article that suggested that environmental disaster is making Boko Haram violence worse. Nigeria, like much of the rest of the world, has been warming. Interestingly, satellite data finds that the Sahel region of West Africa has been greening since the great droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. Rainfall seems to have been increasing over the past 30 years as well. Perusing Nigerian Meteorological Agency reports does show that some years have been drier than others but does not turn up instances of recent record-setting droughts. In his chapter, “Does Climate Change Lead to Conflicts in the Sahel?,” in The End of Desertification (2016), Norwegian University of Life Sciences researcher Tor Benjaminsen concludes that the conflicts between pastoralists and farmers “are primarily caused by politics, not climate change.”

Concerning Syria, McKibben is thinking of a 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that argued that climate change is “implicated in the current Syrian conflict.” University of East Anglia climatologist Mike Hulme and University of Sussex international relations scholar Jan Selby in their op-ed over at The Guardian point out the numerous flaws in the study including the vast overestimate of the number of “climate migrants” in Syria who supposedly sparked the unrest that led to the conflicts in Syria. “The case for international action on climate change is strong enough without relying on dubious evidence of its impacts on civil wars,” assert Hulme and Selby. “Claims such as these are mostly rhetorical moves to appeal to security interests or achieve sensational headlines, and should be recognised as such.”

Setting aside McKibben’s evidentiary problems, let’s look at what his prescription for World War II-sized climate mobilization would involve. “You would need to build a hell of a lot of factories to turn out thousands of acres of solar panels, and wind turbines the length of football fields, and millions and millions of electric cars and buses,” writes McKibben. He further notes, “American scientists have been engaged in a quiet but concentrated effort to figure out how quickly existing technology can be deployed to defeat global warming.”

The World War II models McKibben cites as examples of the kind of vast climate change manufacturing mobilization he advocates are the B-24 Liberator factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan and the tank factory in Warren, Michigan, so forth. It is certainly true that the United States was the arsenal of democracy that enabled the defeat of the Axis powers.

McKibben fails, however, to consider what happened to the “existing technology” in the aftermath of the war’s manufacturing frenzy. During the war, the United States built very nearly 300,000 warplanes, of which the majority survived and were scrapped as obsolete, including the 18,500 B-24 Liberators that were built. Tanks, armored vehicles, warships and more war materiel were similarly scrapped or abandoned as useless. Why? Of course, because the war was over, but also because more effective technologies, e.g., jets and nuclear bombs, were available. Mobilizing now to build current versions of existing solar and wind power could similarly lock us into outmoded, expensive and less effective technologies.

To give readers some idea of the scale of mobilization required, McKibben cites a study by researchers from Stanford University that outlines a pathway toward producing all U.S. energy using renewable technologies by 2050. They estimate the total cost of that transformation at $13.4 trillion, or about $400 billion annually for the next 35 years. For comparison, World War II cost the U.S. just over $4.1 trillion, or about $1 trillion per year.

One final observation: McKibben cites in passing the “mighty Manhattan Project” as an example of the kind concentrated technological effort toward solving urgent problems that he favors. But his only mention of the word “nuclear” comes in the context in which he suggests that climate change is more menacing than the prospects for nuclear war. Since McKibben believes that climate change is such an urgent problem, keeping the deployment of no-carbon nuclear power off the table is more than a little perverse. After all, he should take heart from a 2015 study in PLoS One that calculated that it would be possible to replace all fossil fuel energy with nuclear power in 25 to 34 years. If nuclear weapons helped win World War II, then surely nuclear power has a role to play in “winning” McKibben’s metaphorical war against climate change.

Instead of putting the country on top-down centralized control war-footing to address climate change, the better strategy is to free up entrepreneurs to encourage rapid economic growth and technological progress.

Disclosure: Bill McKibben very generously blurbed my book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution (2005).

In a 2015 speech at New York’s New School, Hillary Clinton swore to end what she derisively calls “the gig economy” by “crack[ing] down on bosses who exploit employees by misclassifying them as contractors.”

She had darlings of the sharing economy such as Uber and Lyft in mind. These companies, which are hugely popular with both workers and customers alike, provide not just a new model of delivering services more cheaply and efficiently but a new model for part-time employment. After passing various background requirements, drivers decide when they work, where, and for how long; they function as independent contractors and thus don’t get sick leave, health care, and other benefits that go with being technically designated an “employee” under various state and federal definitions. But like all disruptive businesses, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and others unsettle incumbent firms and their political protectors that don’t like competition. Strongly invested in 20th-century models of HOW STUFF GETS DONE, Clinton doesn’t like it one bit and equates any variance from past-century employment models with exploitation. You can do anything you want, that mind-set says, as long as you don’t do anything different from how we’ve always been doing it.

That said, she’s unlikely to use a recent New York state appellate court ruling to bolster her case against the gig economy. A New York appellate court has ruled that strippers at the go-go club Paradise Found are in fact employees and not contractors. The specific issue at hand in the court case was the covering of unemployment insurance premiums.

From the AP account:

The four Appellate Division justices have rejected the challenge to rulings of Unemployment Insurance Appeal Board by Greystoke Industries, operator of Paradise Found in Dewitt [a town near Syracuse].

They cite “substantial evidence” to support the finding that it exercised sufficient control over the dancers to establish an employment relationship, despite evidence that could support “a contrary result.”

They note that the dancers could set their schedules and provide their own music and costumes.

More here.

This ruling follows other cases that have ruled that dancers are traditional employees. Two years ago, dancers who worked at a New York City club were granted $10 million in back wages. The court ruled that charging the dancers “an appearance fee” and then letting them keep most of the money they made didn’t abrograte minimum wage and other responsibilities for the club owner.

It may be more than a short Uber ride from stripping to the sharing economy, but the distance is actually smaller than it might seem on first glance. Just as technology is changing how we live, there’s every reason to believe that new and more-fluid relationships in the workplace will develop in the workplace too. Businesses struggle to keep labor costs down so they can stay in business. But speaking as a manager myself, I know that businesses are also desperate to attract and keep good workers; you don’t stiff people who are helping to make you succeed. You negotiate to keep them happy and keep your business functioning. That might mean letting certain people work from home or set their own, unconventional hours; paying people as contractors if that’s what they want; reducing hours and overall pay if they only want a part-time gig; and more. The point is that our world is becoming more and more personalized, individualized, and responsive to different people’s needs and wants.

When it comes to jobs, the best way for that to happen isn’t to layer the workplace with requirements and regulations that were created in a very different world under very different circumstances. If every new and innovative businesss must not only struggle to find a profitable market but also adhere to government dictates created 50, 60, or 70 years ago, well, good luck with economic growth and innovation.

In this short video clip, Whole Foods co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey discusses how labor regulations make it more difficult to do business in a way that ends up punishing employers, employees, and customers of forward-looking businesses (disclosure: Mackey is a donor to Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website). Keep in mind that Mackey doesn’t run a shop like Paradise Found. He runs a business that has influenced all supermarkets in the country, even traditional ones, and he’s done it by being responsive both to customers and his workers. And he’s had to fight just about every step of the way to be free to try new ways of doing things.