The power of tenacity and coordination

Anne and I like to recharge our mental and spiritual batteries by tossing our kayaks into our beater pick-up truck Steve and heading out to Pickerel Lake in the Pinckney State Recreation Area. It’s actually on a chain of three lakes that includes Crooked Lake, all connected by shallow channels.

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The wildlife on these lakes is abundant and, especially in kayaks, you can get startling close to the animals. For example, here is a mother Sandhill Crane sitting on her nest:

On Friday night, we whipped up a batch of margaritas and headed out for a sunset booze cruise. While we were paddling, we came across something I’ve never seen before: two Red-Winged Blackbirds systematically attacking and driving off two adult Sandhill Cranes who had strayed too close to their nest. Anne shot this video:

What you can’t see in the video is that the two cranes had a baby with them (craneling? cranelet?). You can the little one in this series of photos that Anne took with her iPhone which also shows the Red-Winged Blackbirds in action:

The audacity and brazen attitude of the Red-Wing Blackbirds defending their nest is a nice metaphor for those of us fighting against the well-financed corporatists that control our government at all levels these days, in my mind.

Last night, we headed back out with the kayaks and some more margaritas, this time with Anne’s camera on board. Below are a couple of more shots she took of the magnificent Sandhill Cranes. This one spent an inordinate amount of time digging around in the muck. Then it came up with something in its beak, probably a snail:

And here’s one of Anne in action:

Either we break up the big banks or the big banks break us

Attorney General Eric Holder made actual some news this week amid the GOP’s scandal frenzy: he told the House Judiciary committee that big banks are not too big too jail. He was willing to criminally prosecute the nation’s largest banks, though he hasn’t done so since the financial crisis.

“Let me be very, very, very clear… banks are not too big to jail,” Holder added.

This is a small relief because the fact remains that the big banks are bigger than ever, much bigger than they were when they were able to prevent the decent reforms that followed the financial crisis to take the the crucial step of breaking up the big banks.

Since the 1930s, Glass-Steagall prevented another depression by separating investment and commercial banks by law. In 1999, conservatives passed and Bill Clinton signed a repeal of this crucial New Deal reform. You know what happened less than a decade later.

Not restoring Glass-Steagall after the financial crisis is like sending the Space Shuttle up with the same flawed O-rings the Challenger had.

Despite the fact that a bipartisan bill from Sherrod Brown and David Vitter would force the banks to maintain much more reasonable level of capital has been introduced, this issue is far off the radar of most politicians except Brown, Vitter and Elizabeth Warren. And it will be until another bank bailout becomes inevitable and then it will be too late.

This is an issue the middle class has to become obsessed with and not just because the big banks are getting an $83 billion implied taxpayer subsidy — and not because another crisis will lead to trillions more in debt that the right will use to justify gutting our social safety net. The fact that we cannot fix this glaring injustice, this obvious flaw in our economy, is the worst symptom of a sick political system.

We will win this fight. The question is will we win it before or after we have to bail out the big banks again.

I hope you’ll share this video above and remind people what a real scandal looks like.

[Photo by David_Shankbone via Flickr]

Good people are fighting every day for Michigan’s students. This organization is among them.

Just when you begin to despair over the seemingly endless battles public education is facing in Michigan, you find a reason to feel optimistic.

In Pontiac, one of the Michigan school districts that’s struggling the most, an organization called Bound Together is providing an environment where children in grades 1 through 6 can come to learn, to express themselves and to gain confidence that can lead to a better future.

Established in 1994, Bound Together is an independent after-school program that offers tutoring in math, reading and reading comprehension three days a week, followed by a nutritious meal. Every other week, there’s also a one-day art group, filling a void left when the Pontiac schools cut their arts and music programs. There are currently 21 children enrolled in Bound Together

Executive Director Jane Porter, a soft-spoken yet passionate advocate for these children, describes what she considers the key mission of Bound Together.

It’s a multifaceted place where people are invested in what these children think and what they do. Children will often sit down next to me and start talking. We listen to them, and they know their life is valued.

Bound Together wants to help nurture these children so they can achieve academic excellence and believe in their ability to succeed. Porter says she gets goosebumps every time a child grins widely after being praised for working hard at his or her studies.

This kind of encouragement may seem like a small gesture, but it can mean everything to some of these children. Many are in single-parent homes with well-meaning but busy parents or aren’t getting the positive feedback they need at school. Porter shared the story of one fourth-grader who came in after school one day, upset that when she struggled to read out loud in class her teacher made her sit on the floor instead of in her chair.

Her tutor here asked, ‘How did that make you feel?’ and the little girl replied, ‘It just makes me want to stay home and have babies like my mama.’ For many of these children, that’s the point of least resistance. They think, ‘I can’t do the reading well and I see what my mom does so I’ll do that.’ But our tutor promised the little girl they’d work on her reading skills and assured her she could do well.

Bound Together runs on a ridiculously lean operating budget, and relies heavily on the contributions of volunteers like the tutors. They also partner with other community groups and receive donations, often from some unexpected sources.

Last Christmas, a motorcycle club in Pontiac donated a winter coat, boots and a gift to every single child. Porter says the children and their families were thrilled.

Here were the club members in their leather jackets and chains — all the kids wanted their pictures taken with them. The parents were so grateful for these gifts. We have three children here being raised by their grandmother, and she’s told us she couldn’t do it without the help of Bound Together.

Even though the program is closed over the summer, Bound Together is partnering with Christ Church Cranbrook and the Pontiac Creative Arts Center to give the children summer camp opportunities.

Porter is making plans for the upcoming school year, applying for grants and seeking more volunteer tutors. There’s no experience required; just a background check, an online training course, and a willingness to help children with their homework.

There’s nothing like the feeling of knowing you’ve really helped one of these children. These kids really want to be here — we’re like a second family to them. They know that even when they’re having a bad day, tomorrow will be better and we’ll still be here for them.

You can learn more here about Bound Together and opportunities to help, including volunteering.

[Photos courtesy of Bound Together]

Heartless is as heartless does

If you were a lawmaker and were given the chance to reduce the number of uninsured Michiganders by nearly half and save the state nearly a billion dollars over the next ten years, what would you do? If you were a Michigan Senate Republican, you would reject it. That’s what Michigan Senate Republicans did yesterday when they passed Department of Community Health budget without a provision to expand Medicaid as allowed by the Affordable Care Act.

They even killed a Democratic amendment to put Medicaid expansion back into the bill. It went down on a 13-25 vote.

It’s cruel. It’s asinine. It’s blatant anti-Obama politics. And it’s hurting some of our most vulnerable citizens, just to score points against Barack Obama.

It’s days like these that I think there ought to be an IQ test to be a lawmaker. The 25 senators that voted against the expansion of Medicaid in Michigan clearly would have failed.

[CC Image credit: SaMi | Wikimedia Commons]

Ooo-ooo, that smell…

Last month, after the Detroit News tore back the curtains on the secretive “skunk works” group, staffed by some of Gov. Snyder’s aides and aimed at destroying our public school system while funneling the proceeds to for-profit charter schools, the group was quickly reconfigured to be one that was more, shall we say, public? The Governor’s staffer was replaced with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Mike Flanagan who vowed any discussion of vouchers and the like would be “off the table”.

My pals at Progress Michigan endeavored to learn more about the group with a Freedom of Information Act request but were, in part, denied because “the Basecamp server that housed ‘Skunk Works’ discussions and files was shut down following the revelation of the group’s existence, making several files unavailable.”

They did receive some documents however.

The documents made it clear that the workgroup planned to implement their scheme as quickly as possible. One presentation (pg. 250) included a plan for a new legal authority to “remove regulatory barriers,” and indicated their new schools would require a request for an extra $4 million in funding. {…}

The documents also included a February 28 email indicating that Richard McLellan had collaborated with Michigan Virtual University (pg. 161), despite subsequent comments to the media from Snyder’s chief information officer David Behen that teachers had been intentionally excluded from the process.

McLellan also used the “Skunk Works” email listserv to criticize MSU President Lou Anna Simon, explaining he asked her to identify academics “primarily…from outside the College of Education” to contribute to the workgroup. He noted that she responded by sharing his request with the College of Education and “lecturing” him for “about 45 minutes… (if you know her, that is not unusual).”

Read more about the results of their FOIA request HERE.

Progress Michigan has now released a new video that gives a quick overview of what this super secret stinky group was up to.

Enjoy:

That’s gonna leave a mark

[State Board of Education President John Austin -- photo by Anne C. Savage for Eclectablog]

Republicans are going Code Red to defend their desire to exempt charter schools from any sort of additional scrutiny, including being held to the same educational standards as public schools are. Toward that effort, state Senator Phil Pavlov went on the attack against the State Board of Education for even suggesting it. Pavlov is the chair of the Senate Education Committee. He then went on to blame the State Board of Education for the dire financial situation schools like those in Buena Vista and Pontiac find themselves in:

The State Board of Education needs to stop their partisan obsession with charter schools and focus on the problems they are responsible for. Where has their oversight been in Pontiac and Buena Vista schools? The board should be working to find preventive solutions to the mismanagement and fraud in these districts where local boards have misspent millions of taxpayer dollars and cost thousands of children the education they deserve.”

State Board of Education President John Austin, someone whose name has been talked about as a terrific choice for Lt. Governor of Michigan given his experience in education, is not taking this lying down. He put out the following statement, slamming Sen. Pavlov for his blatant politicization of our education system in Michigan. It’s a thing of beauty.

Senator Phil Pavlov felt moved by State Board of Education recommendations to improve charter school transparency and oversight to lash out at the State Board over the Buena Vista and Pontiac Schools financial crisis. http://www.misenategop.com/readarticle_printable.asp?id=5905&District=25

The State Board is doing its job to provide oversight over all schools, charter and traditional. There is a well-developed process, under our State Superintendent, to review the finances of all schools, and intervene when a district’s finances are in trouble. At last count 49 districts are under close scrutiny and required to resolve deficits. When schools willfully misrepresent their finances, the plug gets pulled as we saw with Buena Vista.

But the Senator needs to acknowledge that a major contributor to the financial death spiral of so many school districts is Michigan’s new school and charter school expansion policy. When the legislature eliminated the cap on new university charters and expanded dramatically the number of new untested on-line school offerings in Michigan, Senator Pavlov and his colleagues purposefully rejected the State Board’s recommendations to ensure that any new schools deliver high-quality education. As a result, as reported by respected non-partisan education reform groups like Education Trust Midwest: Michigan is seeing a fast growth in charters and new schools that deliver poor education. As Ed Trust Director Amber Arrellano said: “Some of the worst operators in the state are the ones that are growing the fastest.” (See http://www.edtrust.org/midwest/press-room/press-release/charter-school-growth-in-michigan-brings-cautionary-tale-on-quality).

These new schools that don’t deliver the educational goods take students and resources from other public schools—contributing to their financial distress—and also hurt the reputation and ability to attract students of high-quality charters. Charter school advocates like myself and Michigan Future’s Lou Glazer believe the charter movement is hurt, not helped when the Legislature enables poor quality, poorly regulated charter schools. (See http://www.michiganfuture.org/09/2011/unlimited-charters-not-smart/)

The State Board of Education is doing its job to call for quality and transparency in all schools. The Legislature needs to do the same.

Senator Pavlov’s love of further privatizing of Michigan’s public schools, an effort to direct the 80% of state funding that pays for our schools into the bank accounts of for-profit corporations is obvious. However, it’s offensive that he would take a catastrophe like is happening in areas like Buena Vista and Pontiac, where our kids’ futures are being sacrificed on the altar of business tax cuts, and turn it into an attack on those who would attempt to hold charter schools accountable. We need the State Board of Education to stand up for our kids in all schools and that’s just what they are doing.

Senator Pavlov’s grandstanding is just one more piece of evidence that Michigan Republicans will fight tooth and nail until they have destroyed our public school system and turned our students into good little, poorly-educated workers and profit centers for the businesses and corporations that bankroll the Republicans in this state.

This is what a blue state state looks like

56.8 percent of Michigan residents support same-sex marriage, according to a new poll from the Glengariff Group. That’s up 12.5 percent from a year ago largely due to a shift in the views of Republicans and independents.

In 2004, the state approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, even as it voted for John Kerry.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a policy question move as quickly as this one,” said Richard Czuba, president of Glengariff.

On the heels of Minnesota becoming the 12th state to legalize equal marriage, it seems that a candidate named “same-sex marriage” would easily beat Republican Governor Rick Snyder in a head-to-head match-up.

When he last commented on the issue, Snyder was for civil unions but against marriage equality, which was President Obama’s stance just about a year ago. But the political landscape has shifted as quickly as ice in the Arctic is melting.

Whoever Democrats nominate to face Snyder will immediately put the nerd in a pickle by endorsing same-sex marriage. If the governor doesn’t do the same, he’s breaking with the majority. If he does endorse it, he lose the minority who oppose modernity, also known as GOP primary voters.

This sudden acceptance of same-sex marriage  is a huge victory for civil rights. But that it’s happening in Michigan, where 76.6 percent of voters were born and raised, shows that this isn’t some demographic shift.

This issue is becoming a comment on the role of government. For all their talk of smaller government, the GOP — especially in Michigan — wants to privatize the public and publicize your privates.

We can see that voters aren’t buying into the latter part of that formula. Now we just need to educate them about why the former is so dangerous for the middle class.

[Photo by ep_jhu | Flickr]

You don’t know what it’s like until it’s your life.

Clara Sanders-Stevens works hard every day, directing the Project 21 after-school program for the Oak Park School District. But, because she’s an independent contractor, she’s responsible for her own health insurance. And she just can’t afford it.

I don’t need help with food or rent, but I need health insurance — especially in the event I have to go to the emergency room or I’m hospitalized. But when you start talking about $400 or $500 a month for insurance, it’s just not going to happen for a lot of people like me.

This is why Sanders-Stevens is a staunch advocate for Medicaid expansion in Michigan. She sees the realities of families living without health insurance every day. Kids coming to school sick because their parents can’t afford the cost of a doctor’s appointment or staying home from work and not getting paid. The same is true for a lot of other self-employed people she knows, or people who don’t get insurance through their work.

Those of us out here working, we’re trying to make good things happen. If people get sick they can’t go to work. And if we’re not healthy, there are no business owners to create new opportunities.

It’s especially frustrating to see this happening to Sanders-Stevens and others like her, who are dedicated to public service. As she explains, for many of them the choice may come down to having to return to the corporate world just to get health insurance instead of doing the kind of ground work that can make a real difference to communities.

Sanders-Stevens considers herself relatively lucky because she can usually afford to pay for routine check-ups. Having had health insurance in the past, she knows what a difference preventive care can make.

My health wouldn’t be what it is today if I hadn’t had all those regular physicals back when I had insurance. When you don’t have health insurance, it’s easy to let things go too far and wind up with something that could have been prevented.

Working with so many families who don’t have health insurance, Sanders-Stevens has seen what happens when people are hospitalized. She says they don’t always get the same care that people with insurance do or they’re released from the hospital sooner than they should be.

Then there’s the cost, she says.

You wind up with $20,000 in medical bills and they come after you for that immediately. They don’t let you work it out, or they want you to make payments of $700 or $800 a month. If people could afford that, they’d have health insurance.

Sanders-Stevens worries about what would happen if she were ever hospitalized. When they take the kids in her program skating, she doesn’t participate for fear of falling and getting hurt. In fact, she says she prays if she’s ever injured that she’s in her car at the time because her car insurance is the only medical coverage she has.

She plans to contact her representatives and urge them to support Medicaid expansion in Michigan. And what does Sanders-Stevens plan to say?

They don’t see how important it is until it happens to them or someone in their family. Our legislators have insurance. I’d never wish harm on anyone, but it just doesn’t hit home until it affects you directly. I see it every day and I can tell you that having health insurance would give so many of us peace of mind we don’t have now, knowing we can be cared for and stay healthy.

Contact your legislators today and tell them to say YES to Medicaid expansion.

Follow your tax money (right into the pockets of for-profit school shareholders)

Yesterday, the same day that we learned that the Snyder administration had bowed to the suitable outrage and national media attention they had received over the closing of the Buena Vista school district due to lack of money and had released funds, we also learned that two Michigan high schools are closing as well. These to high schools, Albion and Inkster, won’t reopen in the fall because their school districts cannot afford to do so. In Albion, “officials hope to reach a deal with nearby Marshall for students to attend high school there”. In Inkster, the high school will be run by a charter.

And yet, in school districts across the state, we see new buildings and renovations going on. Flat-screen televisions in the hallways, brand new campuses, state-of-the-art sports facilities. How is this possible? How is it that students in one district can go to school in a cutting-edge, shiny new facility while students in other districts see their schools shuttered for lack of funding? It can be explained by how we fund our schools and the shiny new buildings and hallway televisions don’t always tell the full story.

In 1994, Michigan voters approved Proposal A which dramatically impacted how much of school funding came from local sources, primarily property taxes and how much from the state. Before Prop A, 63% of school funding depended on local sources. In 1995, that dropped to 20%. This was intended to equalize the disparity between the wealthiest districts and the poorest districts. And it did a very good job of doing that. Prop A created “foundation grants” meant to equalize per-pupil funding. However, because taxpayers can agree to tax themselves to increase school funding, some school districts get WAY more than others. Here’s the data from the 2011-12 school year:

[Source: Michigan House Fiscal Agency (pdf)]

As you can see here, the top funded schools received $11,854 versus the lowest receiving $6,846. That’s an over $5,000 PER STUDENT difference.

But the shiny new schools you see are the result of separate funding sources. These come from bonds and school districts must go to the voters to have additional taxes levied to pay for these as well. In some school districts, this happens. In my area, the Dexter voters passed a nearly $48 million infrastructure bond measure and now you see a newly refurbished sports complex just one block from where I live. New track. New football field. New concession stand and locker room facility. Lights bright enough to tan by and a sound system the drowns out my own. They bought a couple of houses to make way for their expansion.

Bloomfield Hills just passed a $58 million millage. In that area, you can get a sense of what that means when the article about it says, “A homeowner with a $400,000 home will likely pay $232 a year.” For most school districts, there aren’t many homes worth that much. In Bloomfield Hills, it’s “average”. In Waverly, near Lansing, 13% of the voters showed up recently and passed a $20 million millage that will be used for “security and technology upgrades, including wireless Internet access in all buildings and a digital video broadcast system at the high school”. This follows on the heels of a $49 million school building improvement bond they passed in 2000. My friend Mark Mudry, the secretary of the Eaton County Democratic Party, put it this way:

It’s sad that some school districts are broke and closing while some get everything they ask for. Its a case of the “Haves and the Have Nots”.

He’s absolutely right.

But, here’s the thing: these shiny new facilities don’t always tell the full story. They are the result of infrastructure bonds that are separate from school funding. And sometimes you can have a brand new school without the funds to operate it properly. The most glaring example of this is the William Parker High School in Howell, Michigan. Completed in 2007 to the tune of $70 million, it is a state-of-the-art facility equipped with cutting-edge technology. And it is vacant. The Howell school district does not have enough money to run it so, after opening for the 2007-2008 school year, they closed it and it remains vacant to this day.

What we’re seeing is a decades-old effort to defund schools to the point where charter schools that funnel money into private corporations become attractive. With a “parent trigger” bill under consideration by our state legislature, some of these brand new facilities could literally be turned over to a for-profit company to be used to educate kids for a profit. This legislation, S.B. 83, forces the school district to essentially give the school building to the charter school. Specifically, it says, “The school district that owns the school building shall lease the school building to the conversion school for $1.00 per year”. The most bitter irony is that the taxpayers would keep paying for the bond for years, even decades, while the for-profit charter school corporation gets to use nearly free of charge.

Please don’t allow yourself to see the demise of public education in Michigan as unintentional or accidental. What you are seeing is the result of decades of planning by those that fund the Mackinac Center — groups like the DeVos family, the Koch brothers and others — to end public education and shift all of that 80% of statewide revenues into private school bank accounts. The move to equalize funding under Prop A made every student, rich or poor, worth an equal amount of money or, more accurately, profit. The poorest school districts are the easiest targets which have far fewer resources to put up a fight. Yet the number of dollar signs on their students’ heads are the same as for wealthy students in brand spanking new schools. All of the pieces were in place to execute this plan. All the corporatists were waiting for was for the state House, Senate and Governor’s office to all be taken over by Republicans. And, in 2010, we handed them that gift.

Get ready for 2014. That’s when we retake control.

[CC image credit: ~kawaii-bubble-wrap | deviantART]

This took WAY too long

[Caricature by DonkeyHotey from photos by Anne C. Savage for Eclectablog]

Updated with a statement from Progress Michigan below.

Facing withering criticism from all fronts, the Snyder administration finally sorted out its priorities and has released money to reopen the Buena Vista schools that have been closed due to lack of funds.

State Superintendent Mike Flanagan has released money to the Buena Vista School District to allow the school to reopen and complete the school year.

The Saginaw County school district of 430 students has been closed for two weeks after the district could not make its May 24 payroll and laid off all but three employees.

Flanagan on Wednesday, May 15, approved the district’s third attempt at a deficit elimination plan, clearing the way for the Michigan Department of Education to release funding, the department announced. The district gets $7,776 per pupil.

The funding is Buena Vista’s normal state aid for May, June and July, allowing the district to meet payroll and recall 27 laid-off teachers, among other employees. The education department and district are working together to determine the amounts of the funding, the department stated.

“Now, I encourage the local school board, administration, and staff to get the schools open as soon as possible for the students,” Flanagan said in a statement.

For a technocrat who prides himself on his business acumen, Governor Snyder and his administration showed an offensive amount of hemming and hawing and excuse-making on this issue. Had they had their priorities straight in the first place, they would have advanced the money immediately and sorted out the details afterwards so that the students of Buena Vista, along with their parents and teachers, wouldn’t have been put through the wringer. There’s no doubt that the statewide and national attention this embarrassment has garnered had much to do with it.

Congressman Dan Kildee has been on the forefront of pushing the Snyder administration to act. He released the following statement this morning:

I am pleased to see that the State of Michigan will release state aid payments to the Buena Vista School District. This is certainly a promising development and it is my hope that the kids and teachers will immediately return to their classrooms and finish their school year.

It took great restraint on the Congressman’s part, I’m sure not to add, “What the hell took you so long?”

UPDATE: Jessica Tramontana, Communications Director for Progress Michigan, released the following statement:

The students of Buena Vista Schools have been out of classrooms for eight days while lawmakers in Lansing pointed fingers. There are hundreds of students in the Buena Vista school district who have been denied their constitutional right to a public education, and it should have never come to this. We applaud the decision to finally provide the funds for Buena Vista to reopen their doors, but it’s shameful children had to pay the price for political games in Lansing. It’s time we prioritize Michigan’s kids instead of playing the hot potato blame game, and that starts with Lansing politicians restoring the funding cuts they made to our public schools.