Originally published in Washington City Paper on May 14, 2018.
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Parents had until May 1 to enroll their children in schools matched through D.C.’s high-stakes school lottery. But families that selected a new Rocketship charter school in Ward 5 were in for a rude awakening: After the enrollment deadline had passed they learned the school they had chosen would not actually be opening. Rocketship, which operates two schools in Ward 7 and 8, had been set to launch its third campus this fall.

City Paper first learned about the situation on May 9 after speaking with a Ward 5 parent who was still struggling to find a new school for their child.

The parent, who requested anonymity, says the day after the enrollment deadline passed she received a voicemail from Rocketship telling her to call them as soon as possible. “I called as soon as I got off work and they said the Ward 5 school wouldn’t be opening, that something happened with the building so they can no longer move into the space they had planned,” she says. “They didn’t say why or what the reason was.”

Rocketship had been planning to temporarily lease space in the LAMB Public Charter School building on 18th and Perry streets in Northeast. Children would attend school there for one or two years before Rocketship relocated into a more permanent Ward 5 location.

On May 3, the day after learning her daughter’s school would not open, the parent reached out to MySchoolDC—the agency which handles school choice enrollment—for help finding an alternative. “There was just no level of sympathy for my situation. They didn’t sound overly familiar, there was no sense of urgency,” she says. When the parent pressed MySchoolDC for help, she says she was told that Rocketship was giving all families the chance to enroll in their Ward 7 and 8 campuses.

“But I picked Ward 5 based off proximity to my home, and those other schools were extremely inconvenient,” she says, adding that she also had safety concerns about those options.

After making clear she was not interested in sending her child to a campus far from her home, she says MySchoolDC told her she could always enroll her child in her in-bound traditional public school. But the parent wasn’t satisfied with that choice either. “If I had wanted that then I wouldn’t have gone through the MySchoolDC lottery in the first place,” she says.

The parent had her child on two other Ward 5 charter waiting lists—Yu Ying and Stokes—and asked if MySchoolDC could help her child get into those schools given the circumstances.

“I asked them if there was anything they could do to help students who were displaced and they told me that each school makes their own waitlist decisions and they can’t force any school to let children in,” she says. The parent then called the Public Charter School Board, where she says she was also told that the waitlist situation is out of their control.

More than ten days after getting the news that Rocketship’s Ward 5 campus would not open as expected, the parent was still waiting for waitlist updates and was actively considering private school options.

Joyanna Smith, the Ombudsman for Public Education with the DC State Board of Education, had also been planning to send her son to Rocketship’s Ward 5 campus. Smith tells City Paper that her family didn’t learn the school would not actually be opening until three days after the MySchoolDC enrollment deadline had passed.

“Someone called us to tell us Rocketship would not be opening because of a permitting issue but that we could probably get off the waitlist at Perry Street Prep,” she says. Perry Street Prep is housed in the same LAMB Public Charter School building that Rocketship was set to be in, and Smith was able to enroll her child in the new school last week.

“I’m glad that we were able to settle things for my child, but in my role as SBOE ombudsman I feel there has been all this miscommunication,” she says. “If we had wanted we could have kept my son in private daycare, but for a lot of families they don’t have those same choices and that’s really frustrating.”

In an interview with City Paper, Jacque Patterson, the regional director for Rocketship DC, says 44 families had matched with Rocketship’s Ward 5 campus, and 22 families had enrolled. Their enrollment target had been 160 students (100 students in kindergarten through second grade, and 60 3 and 4-year-olds.)

But low enrollment numbers was not the reason why Rocketship decided to postpone opening its Ward 5 school, according to Patterson. He says that even if they had hit their enrollment goals, their temporary building location would have still required far more repairs than they had originally budgeted for.

Rocketship DC signed a letter of intent with Perry Street Prep in April to rent their third floor for the 2018-19 school year. Rocketship officials knew the third floor required a host of repairs, and toured the premises before they signed their letter of intent. Patterson tells City Paper that at the time, they concluded they could handle the scope of needed repairs. But, he says, “in the last two or three weeks” they brought in their own construction workers to assess the facility, and then determined the repairs would cost substantially more than what they had anticipated.

“The decision we made was that it’d be just impossible to open the school given the amount of construction and repairs that was needed for a one-year lease,” he says. “Even if we had enrolled all 160 children, it would not have been financially responsible and we wouldn’t have been able to provide all the programs and services we needed to.”

Patterson says the school will still be moving into a permanent Ward 5 building for the 2019-20 school year, though a precise location has not yet been finalized. He also says Rocketship worked with every family that had enrolled to help them find a new high-quality school. But the parent City Paper spoke with under the condition of anonymity says they still have yet to figure out what they’ll do next year.

City Paper asked the Public Charter School Board if Rocketship would face any consequence or penalty for its delayed opening. In 2014 the PCSB conditionally approved Rocketship to open eight schools throughout the city.

In a statement, Scott Pearson, executive director of the PCSB, says: “We’re very concerned any time a school fails to meet its charter commitment and that will be taken into consideration next time a school wishes to expand or open a new facility. We are particularly concerned about the students and their families which is why we required Rocketship PCS to work with MySchoolDC to help the affected families find alternate, quality education for this fall.”

Chloe Woodward-Magrane, a spokesperson for the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education, tells City Paper that this is the second time that a campus has not opened or has delayed opening in the five years that MySchoolDC has been in existence. Catherine Peretti, the executive director of MySchoolDC, tells City Paper that she first learned of Rocketship’s decision to delay its Ward 5 opening on May 3.

City Paper asked Woodward-Magrane what kind of response they’ve received from families left to find new schools. In a statement, she says:

“OSSE and My School DC realize this is a challenging time for families matched with the Rocketship Public Charter School campus in Ward 5. My School DC is working with families enrolled at the Rocketship campus that will not open in order to restore the families to waiting lists of other schools they identified during the lottery process. Rocketship is also providing assistance to help them re-enroll in their current school placement or another Rocketship campus.”

Patterson will be leaving his role as Rocketship DC’s regional director on June 1 to start as KIPP DC’s Chief Community Engagement and Growth Officer. He tells City Paper he will also be joining Rocketship’s board of directors, and that a search to find his replacement is currently underway.

Originally published in The American Prospect on May 8, 2018.
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Teachers are on the march across America. This year has seen a stunning eruption of invigorated teacher movements in states that rarely make this kind of political news—places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Though these mobilized teachers have been careful to frame their demands for higher pay in the context of increased spending for students and schools, there is no doubt that raising their own salaries has been a key priority.

Local and national media have worked hard to lift the voices of teachers taking to the streets. We’ve read about educators with virtually no savings or chance of affording a vacation. We’ve met teachers forced to moonlight as cashiers and Uber drivers. We’ve learned about educators’ stagnant or falling wages, and their spiking health-care premiums.

The stories have been infuriating.

That’s partly why the teacher movements have commanded such strong public support. A national poll released in late April found about 78 percent of surveyed adults felt schools don’t pay teachers enough, half said they’d pay more in taxes to fund teacher pay increases, and 52 percent said they’d back educators who strike for higher wages.

Looming behind this infectious momentum, though, are some other uncomfortable realities.

In 2016, the median annual income for a full-time worker stood at $45,860. Someone working full-time at $15 an hour—a minimum wage goal heralded by progressives—could earn an annual salary of just $31,200. And we know minimum wage earners are no longer just high school kids scooping ice cream in the summer. The average-age of a minimum-wage worker is 35, and more than a quarter have children.

Teachers, by comparison, are above-average earners. The average American public school teacher earned $58,950 in 2017. And while the states with active teacher movements have some of the lowest educator pay, those salaries still stack up reasonably well against the low level brought home by the average American. In 2016, West Virginia high school teachers earned an average of $45,240 per year, in a state where median earnings amounted to $27,543 . In Arizona, the high school teacher average stood at $48,020, where median earnings were just $30,096. And in Oklahoma, the average high school teacher earned $42,460, in a state where median earnings reached $29,038.

This is not to say that teachers have it fine—far from it. It’s certainly not a call for educators to go home or to stop protesting. But it does raise a question that needs to be on the table: if we think these teachers are not earning enough, where does that leave the millions earning even less?

What is the argument for raising teacher pay?

Some ground their support for higher teacher pay in education policy. They argue you’ll get the quality of teachers you pay for, and teacher pay lags behind other white-collar professionals. The Economic Policy Institute found that teachers’ weekly wages are 23 percent lower than those of other college graduates. If a teacher can’t earn enough to pay off their student loans, they’ll probably think twice before becoming an educator.

From this vantage point, if we want to do improve the quality of teaching, then we need to offer more competitive salaries to recruit and retain the most talented. And there is evidence that raising pay can reduce teacher turnover.

Others have a less technocratic view. Many Americans support raising teacher pay simply because they support teachers. We recognize teachers are doing important and often thankless work, and the idea that on top of all this they’d be struggling to make ends meet strikes us as cruel and outrageous.

And yet, teaching is just one of many important, thankless jobs in America. Does our outrage stem from full-time workers not being able to make ends meet—or teachers specifically? Have teachers successfully mobilized because people think they deserve different, and better, treatment than other workers?

There is evidence that schoolteachers are held in special regard by the public, in similar fashion to police, firefighters, and the military. Like those groups, support for teachers has remained consistently high over the years.

In other words, no matter how it’s framed, the idea that educators provide a special service and should be well compensated for it seems central to the teacher pay debate. The debate has not focused, more broadly, on what Americans need to live secure economic lives in 2018.

But paying workers based on public perceptions of their value to society raises thorny problems.

We can see these issues emerge in debates around early childhood education workers, who, unlike K-12 teachers, do not earn anything near an average wage. The national median income for child-care workers stands at $20,320; for preschool teachers, it’s $28,570.

This past January The New York Times ran a magazine feature headlined: “Why Are Our Most Important Teachers Paid The Least?” It reviewed social science research highlighting the economic and academic returns of high-quality preschool programs. As part of the emerging consensus around the value of early childhood education, policymakers and advocates have begun to ramp up pressure to raise the salaries of early childhood teachers.

But what if there weren’t studies showing preschool was so beneficial for students’ futures, and these teachers couldn’t be deemed “the most important”?

Would preschool teachers be condemned to live off $29,000 a year?

This is not just a hypothetical, because educators aren’t the only ones embroiled in this current movement. And indeed how and whether classroom teachers choose to stand up for other workers will surely shape the future of this education uprising. In West Virginia, teachers successfully pushed for wage increases not just for themselves, but also for bus drivers and school cooks. But when hundreds of school bus drivers in DeKalb County, Georgia went on strike in April to protest their low pay and working conditions, they did not meet real solidarity from local educators. These drivers, whose annual income is reportedly $23,500, were not making the case that their unique talents merit greater monetary reward. They simply argued that their current earnings were not enough live on. Eight school bus drivers were swiftly fired for their protests.

If we opt to pay some workers better because we’ve decided their services are more societally important, where does that leave everyone else?

This is not a call for everyone to be paid equally. But we need to consider whether we want economic stability to be the exclusive province of the groups we deem most deserving. If we can be outraged by teachers making $55,000 a year and still struggling to make ends meet, then there should be room for outrage over the millions of workers who are even less fortunate—and policy solutions that can help everyone.

Originally published in The Intercept on April 22, 2018.
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The red-state school uprising is spreading to educators around the country, with teachers in Colorado and Arizona now planning walkouts to demand better treatment from state and county governments. But the widespread public support that has helped carry the teachers to victories so far has been less present for blue-collar workers following in their footsteps. In Georgia, bus drivers who organized their own work stoppage last week were met with public condemnation and immediate firings.

On Thursday, the same day that the votes in favor of a walkout were tallied in Arizona, nearly 400 school bus drivers in DeKalb County, Georgia, stayed home from work, staging a “sickout” to protest their low salaries and meager benefits.

Whether the school bus drivers can succeed in winning their demands and maintaining broad popular support remains to be seen, but the protest provides an important test case on whether these teacher movements will lead to a broader working-class uprising or stay limited to organizing among a narrower band of white-collar professionals. The bus drivers are not building their case around the idea that their unique talents merit greater monetary reward, but that they simply need and deserve to be treated more fairly.

Bus drivers in DeKalb County have been raising concerns about their working conditions for the last several years, and since early March, driver representatives have been meeting with district officials to discuss their grievances. Among their list of demands are pay increases, better health insurance, better retirement plans, and a call to be reclassified as full-time employees rather than part-time workers.

A sickout is when a group of workers calls in sick en masse, to protest but also to avoid a formal strike that may be illegal. Two years ago, educators in Detroit staged large, mass-coordinated sickouts, shutting down more than half of the public schools in their city.

The bus drivers’ protests last week did not lead DeKalb County’s school district to shutter its schools. But on Thursday, 42 percent of the district’s bus drivers did not show up to work, causing disruption and delays. DeKalb Public School officials called for transportation help from outside the district, the bus drivers who did show up were asked to take on second routes, and parents had to find last-minute transportation alternatives.

The bus driver protest continued on Friday, with 25 percent of bus drivers refusing to show up for work. Organizers have called for the sickout to continue through Monday.

While the teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona have boasted the vocal support of local school boards and superintendents, the school district leadership in DeKalb County has offered no such solidarity to the school bus drivers. In fact, seven bus drivers were fired on Thursday, identified as “sickout ringleaders.”

“We started with those who were obviously, we have evidence that they were orchestrating or in many ways organizing this event, and that is illegal,” said DeKalb County Schools Superintendent Stephen Green on Thursday to CBS46, a local news station. A spokesperson for DeKalb Public Schools did not return The Intercept’s request for comment.

At a press conference held on Thursday, Green emphasized that the sickout “is not acceptable and will not be tolerated” and pointed to a state law that says it’s illegal for public employees in Georgia to “promote, encourage, or participate in any strike.” Green said DeKalb Public Schools would be “well within its rights to take adverse employment action” against any driver participating in a sickout, adding that for every day drivers miss due to the sickout, he would be requiring a doctor’s note as proof that they were actually ill.

In stressing that the drivers who protested their working conditions were putting children in danger, Green echoed the recent comments of Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who said teachers protesting at the state capitol likely contributed to an unsupervised child getting sexually assaulted at home. (Bevin later apologized for these remarks.) Bus drivers dismissed the superintendent’s assertion, emphasizing that student safety is paramount and that parents had been notified in advance of their protest. Families were notified earlier in the week by school district robo-call and email that there might be a three-day school bus strike, and that any student who arrived late would not be punished.

One of the seven fired drivers, Marion Payne, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that police officers from the school district dropped off a termination letter at his home Thursday night. Payne had helped pass out flyers for the sickout, and had been a school bus driver for five years.

“I’m a veteran, I’m a concerned for all the senior [drivers] … retiring and getting $210 or $210 a month,” he said. “But you know how it is, when they think you pose a threat.”

Shelia Bennett, another fired bus driver, pushed back on the narrative that she was a ringleader who organized a strike. “I would never organize a strike when I know this is a right-to-work state, and we cannot strike because we don’t have a union,” she said to Atlanta’s Fox 5 news station. Bennett has worked as a driver for the district for more than a decade, earning a salary of just $24,000 this year. She said she “never in a million years” expected she’d be terminated, and pointed out that she’s never had any sort of disciplinary issue in the past.

In the red states where teacher movements have erupted, school bus drivers have helped support the educators protesting their working conditions. In Oklahoma, for example, teachers walked off their jobs to protest at their state capitol for nine days, and bus drivers prepared and drove free meals to more than 100 designated pick-up points to make sure students were not left hungry. Some school bus drivers even helped transport their teachers to the state capitol to protest.

The school bus driver protest comes on the heels of a successful strike organized by Atlanta paratransit drivers, who staged the first-ever one-day protest on February 14. They were organizing against what they called unfair working conditions and safety concerns for disabled and elderly passengers. The second one-day strike was threatened to be held on April 18, but this effort was called off at the last minute after MARTA Mobility management agreed to make some compromises in their contract negotiations.

Originally published in CityLab on April 12, 2018.
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Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, and in Chicago, there’s a man who has spent all 50 of those years fighting to preserve and expand the vision behind it. His name is Alexander Polikoff. He’s 91 years old, and although he’s virtually unknown to most Americans, he’s been almost single-handedly shepherding one of the nation’s most consequential civil-rights lawsuits for more than half his life.

Polikoff was the lead attorney on a landmark case in the 1960s, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority. It was the first major desegregation case concerning public housing. The lawsuit charged the Chicago Housing Authority and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with violating the Constitution’s equal protection clause and the 1964 Civil Rights Act by concentrating thousands of public housing units in segregated black neighborhoods. It was named for Dorothy Gautreaux, an African-American public housing resident, community organizer, and activist.

Polikoff’s case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, and in the decades since he has overseen its settlement. That included a novel remedy: giving low-income Chicago residents vouchers to move into the suburbs. The nation’s first “housing mobility” program was born as a result of Gautreaux.

The results of these “mobility vouchers” were so unexpectedly positive that in the early 1990s, Congress decided to pilot an experiment dubbed “Moving to Opportunity,” which gave poor families in five cities similar opportunities to relocate to the suburbs.
Maryland’s Senator Barbara Mikulski ended up killing efforts to expand the pilot nationally when homeowners in suburban Baltimore County rebelled, but the debate over the promise and pitfalls of housing mobility has continued to this day.

The actual Gautreaux vouchers have ended (they ran from 1976 to 1998), but there is still an existing Chicago mobility program as a result of the case. And the Gautraeux lawyers, including Polikoff, are overseeing it in other ways—for example, by ensuring that new scattered-site developments of public housing aren’t racially concentrated.

Polikoff, a resident of the Highland Park suburb just outside of Chicago, works as a senior attorney at BPI, a public interest law firm. (Previously, he served as BPI’s executive director for nearly 30 years.) CityLab sat down with him to learn more about his life’s work—Gautreaux—and the mobility movement he helped to build.

I really enjoyed your book Waiting for Gautreaux, which traces the history of your lawsuit from the early 1960s up to 2006. Looking back now, has anything changed, or do you wish you did anything differently?

There’s some things I wish I made clearer in the book. For example, we always run into people who say, “You know, this mobility voucher business. It’s not going to deal with very many people, so what are you pushing that for? We’ve got to do something about the communities they already live in.”

And you also run into people who say, “Your mobility efforts are interfering with choice.” Those two points of view come up all the time, and one thing I wish I had done differently was respond more clearly to those objections in the book, because they’re both thoughtless.

How so?

With respect to the choice issue, housing mobility proponents are not proposing it as the solution. They’re not proposing it as right for everybody. What we are saying is that while we continue—for God knows how long—attempting to deal with what the high-poverty communities need, and while we’ve worked to death for 50 years and we still don’t have a way to address it effectively, while we’re doing that, should we be denying families the opportunity to get out?

The answer is obviously no. We should be offering mobility as a piece of the solution for those people who want it.

Mobility is purely voluntary, and what they don’t understand is that we’re not pushing it as the answer, but as a humane necessity for the people who want it.

So I understand that housing mobility advocates stress that they’re not forcing mobility, that they recognize it’s a voluntary option that’s not right for everyone. But don’t you and others also say we need to dismantle the segregated ghettos?

Of course! My whole book talks about using that word—dismantling. And nobody is arguing that mobility is going to dismantle the ghetto. You’ve got to dismantle the ghetto even if no one ever thought of the idea of mobility. The two are on different planets.

You’ve been doing this work for a long time. Does anything surprise you any more?

Yes, I actually got a call out of the blue two weeks ago from a woman who is a member of the Vermont legislature. Why was she calling me? To thank me. She [grew up in] one of the first families who moved in the 1970s through the Gautreaux housing program.

She and her sisters and her mother all moved from inner-city Chicago to the suburbs. They moved out there and lived for, I don’t remember exactly how long, four years maybe, and then they moved back because her mother felt she needed to spend her teenage years in an African-American community. But, she told me, those years out of Chicago made all the difference, and that’s why she says she’s the first African-American woman in the Vermont legislature.

How can we not provide something like that when we have the opportunity and the wherewithal to do so?

I see housing mobility as part fair housing, even though I know they began somewhat independently. Do you see those as part of the same movement today?

I do, but mobility is a small part of a much bigger picture. We could have a great housing mobility program, but if that’s all we had, it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough. And it’s partly because it isn’t right for large numbers of people, and partly because of the resource constraints. We’ll never have enough vouchers to make a difference, even if far more wanted to try it than I think will ever be the case. So it’s going to be a small, but vitally important, piece.

Why vitally important?

One, because of what I said before, about it being the right thing to give people who want it.

And two, because of the effect it can have on people’s psyches when they see poor African-American families having improved life chances and taking advantage of those improved life chances in opportunity—meaning white, affluent neighborhoods—and not bringing those neighborhoods down. Having a lot of examples of that is potentially significant.

It’s what Gunnar Myrdal called the “vicious cycle.” If all black people are kept in ghettos, where there’s high crime and high unemployment, and then we say, “Well, there’s someone committing crimes, not trying to work, and he’s black,” it paints a picture that that’s the way all black people are. It’s toxic, and it feeds on itself.

What is the state of housing mobility? Gautreaux was the first, but how much has it expanded? Are all housing authorities trying to do this now?

No, 99 percent are not. As of 2015 there were 15 mobility programs in the country, with seven of them coming from court-ordered settlements.

The two largest programs are in Baltimore and Dallas. Chicago’s is doing better than almost anywhere else except those two places, but it’s still very limited.

Why are there so few?

It’s because of the way HUD regulations are set up and administered. There is really a positive disincentive for housing authorities to do mobility right now.

HUD pays housing authorities administrative fees based on how many people they lease up. Well, it takes longer to lease up in an opportunity area, doesn’t it? It’s harder to do. So the more they spend money on trying to do mobility, the fewer lease-ups they’ll get for which they’d get paid administrative fees.

They really get hit twice—they need to spend more to try to do mobility, because the opportunity vouchers cost more, and then they’re also getting less back from HUD.

We could make it easier for housing authorities to do it, right?

Yes, HUD could.

What’s your relationship to the Gautreaux case now?

I’m still involved, and Gautreaux is a surprisingly active case. They tore down all the public housing high-rises and they’re replacing the high-rises slowly but steadily with mixed-income communities. But we’re seeing to it through Gautreaux that the public housing in the mixed-income communities is dispersed, and visually indistinguishable from the non-public housing. And that’s a lot of work.

Every two years we file complaints, because each one of these things must have a court order. Most of the time we work with the Chicago Housing Authority to reach an agreement, but occasionally we have a fight with them and go to the judge.

How are you feeling about everything after working on things for all this time?

I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful. I think the long arc of justice is a good metaphor, and I think post-Trump, maybe we’ll have an emerged progressive community. We’re moving so slowly, but in the right direction. This Trump period is a terrible setback, but I think history is going to view it as a big bump in the road.