By Gary Cohn

Sandy Hellebrand was concerned. She needed to find a school that could educate her son Gabriel, who has autism and was about to enter high school.

Hellebrand thought she had found the perfect solution: She would enroll Gabriel and her two younger children in Sky Mountain Charter School, one of a rapidly-growing number of virtual schools in California and across the country.

After all, she reasoned, the school would provide excellent online instructional materials and instructors to guide Gabriel’s individual needs. Since Sky Mountain is a publicly funded school – although not a traditional brick-and-mortar one – the state of California would pay for her children’s education. And Hellebrand and her husband Rob, a public high school teacher, would receive about $1,800 a year for each of their children to help defray their costs of educating them at home.

“The idea is fantastic,” she says in an interview with Frying Pan News. Hellebrand, who lives in Oak Hills, in the northern high desert of San Bernardino County, ticks off the benefits of virtual schools and the education specialist she knew Sky Mountain would provide for Gabriel: “The resources, the supplies, another brain and another set of eyes. It gives the ability to tailor [an education program] to each kid.”

The only problem was that Sky Mountain never accepted Gabriel.

“We have received your Student’s Enrollment Application, and are honored that you are considering our school for your child’s education,” Sky Mountain wrote the Hellebrands in February 2012. “Unfortunately, we were not able to place your student with an Educational Specialist for the school year.”

Hellebrand says that this was just the latest brush-off Sky Mountain had given her efforts to enroll Gabriel during two years and believes Gabriel’s autism played a role in the school’s decision.

“I feel very disappointed and burned,” Hellebrand says. “It’s a school that takes tax money. If you do that, you need to serve the community. I don’t know how they can pick and choose like that.”

When asked about Hellebrand’s comments, Randy Gaschler, founder and president of Innovative Education Management, which manages Sky Mountain and other virtual schools, said he didn’t have the specifics on her son’s case. Gaschler denies his schools bar students with disabilities.

“We don’t have any sort of policy like that,” Gaschler says. “We have hundreds of special-education students in our schools. We do everything we can do to make sure we are in compliance. We don’t deny any student admissions to our schools because they are a special education student.”

According to the National Education Policy Center, there are 311 full-time virtual schools nationwide with an estimated 200,000 students. Supporters claim online schooling will revolutionize teaching and learning, reducing the cost and increasing the availability of high-quality education. Virtual education has grown rapidly over the past decade to become an integral part of the education reform movement.

It has also emerged as a tool of choice in the bitterly partisan campaign to privatize education. One key player in this campaign has been the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-controlled generator of far-right legislation, including Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground gun law and a 2012 Michigan law that hobbled unions’ ability to collect membership dues. The expansion of virtual schools has been made possible by numerous bills passed by state legislatures across the country and has been fueled partly by ALEC. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC-crafted legislation promoting virtual schools has been adopted in Tennessee and Florida.

Virtual education has many formats. They include full-time kindergarten through 12th grade schools, as well as single courses that allow students to explore a subject not available in their brick-and-mortar schools – say, a high school student who wants to take calculus in a rural high school that doesn’t otherwise offer the subject.

Some virtual education programs require students and teachers to be online at the same time; others allow students and teachers to visit online courses at their own convenience. Another format, known as blended education, combines online work with traditional in-person classroom education.

Sandy Hellebrand’s disappointing experience with virtual schools is far from unique and questions are increasingly being voiced about the performance and accountability of virtual schools. Adequate Yearly Progress – or AYP – is an accountability measure required by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 that determines how every public school and school district in the United States is performing academically. In California, only six of 31 virtual schools met the Adequate Yearly Progress measure.

Interviews with people who have studied the performance of virtual schools have revealed concerns about their performance and accountability, and about whether some of their operators are making big profits while failing to deliver a good education. Particularly damning are charges that such schools either refuse to accept children like Gabriel Hellebrand or troll for disadvantaged students in order to pad out enrollment.

“The virtual schools are gaming the system,” says Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University whose expertise is evaluating school reforms and education policies. “They get [public] funding based on the number of students they get in the door. Then many of these students struggle and fail and leave.”

Miron was one of the authors of an exhaustive 2013 study of virtual education published by the National Education Policy Center, an influential research center located at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Luis Huerta, an associate professor of education and public policy at Teachers College, Columbia University, says that in their efforts to drive up profits, many cyber schools target high-risk students who will benefit the least from a virtual education.

“The existing structure simply does not work for high-risk kids,” he says. “They demand the least in services. That yields the highest profit margin for providers.” In other words, some virtual schools covet high-risk and inner city students because they bring in revenue from states while typically requiring fewer teaching resources.

The NEPC report said that in the 2011-2012 school year, K12 Inc., the largest for-profit operator of virtual schools, enrolled 77,000 students. Yet as the number of virtual schools nationwide continues to grow, so do questions about their performance and practices. “On the common metrics of Adequate Yearly Progress, state performance rankings and graduation rates, full-time virtual schools lag significantly behind traditional brick-and-mortar schools,” the NEPC report states.

“Across the board, we found very poor performance,” says Miron.

Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a Vienna, Virginia-based organization that supports online and blended learning, agrees that more accountability is needed.

“Some students are being served really well and find [virtual schools] a lifeline,” says Patrick, a former director of the Office of Education Technology at the U.S. Department of Education. “Some are not being served well. The programs not doing a good job should be shut down.”

She adds, “We are calling for highest measures of accountability and performance metrics that look at outcomes based on individual student learning.”

In most states, virtual schools are funded at a similar level to that of traditional brick-and-mortar public and charter schools.

Luis Huerta and others say there is a need to examine whether those funding formulas are fair – or whether they unduly enrich the operators of virtual schools.

“There’s a significant difference in overhead in running a traditional brick and mortar school and running a virtual school,” says Huerta.

Nearly everyone who has studied virtual education agrees on two points. Virtual education, in some format, is likely to expand in the years ahead. And as it does, there is a crucial need for better research, accountability and transparency.

“It’s an exciting model that not going to disappear,” says Miron of Western Michigan. “We need to stop the growth so we can figure out why performance is so bad, and so we can get the right funding and accountability [mechanisms] in place.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

In a move to slash the retirement benefits of public employees in California, a group of mostly conservative policy advocates has been working behind the scenes on a possible 2014 ballot initiative. A copy of the still-secret draft initiative, which could dramatically impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of Californians and send a signal nationwide, has been obtained by Frying Pan News. (See the document’s text following this article or click here.)

If enacted, the proposed law would allow the state and local governments to cut back retirement benefits for current employees for the years of work they perform after the changes go into effect. Previous efforts to curb retirement benefits for public employees have largely focused on newly hired workers, but the initiative would shrink pensions for workers who are currently on the job.

“This initiative defines that a government employee’s ‘vested rights’ only applies to pension and retiree healthcare benefits earned for service already rendered, and explicitly empowers government employers and the voters to amend pension and retiree healthcare benefits for an employee’s future years of service,” the private draft states.

In other words, current state and municipal workers’ retirement benefits will only be partially guaranteed by the number of years they have already worked; from the time the initiative becomes law, the accrual of those benefits will be drastically curtailed.

One of the rationales provided by the draft ballot to justify its unprecedented reach into the lives of public employees is the ongoing funding shortfalls that California and many of its cities find themselves confronting. But, while pledging to help the state “maintain retirement plans that are sustainable, fiscally sound and able to meet the commitments to its employees,” the draft also claims its reduction of pension benefits is being carried out “[i]n order to protect the government’s ability to provide essential services to the public.”

The draft initiative is being circulated by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, who successfully pushed a pension-busting ballot initiative in his city’s 2012 election. That law, like a similar one passed the same year in San Diego, is currently being challenged in court. Reed, according to several sources, has been circulating the draft among other mayors, public officials and others in California who believe that public employee pensions should be scaled back.

Following repeated attempts to reach Reed for comment on the draft ballot, Frying Pan News received what appeared to be confirmation of its authenticity in an email sent by a Reed press aide:

“Throughout this process, there have been numerous discussions about policy options and multiple versions of draft language, so it’s impossible to tell what it is you may have. However, the substance of that statement is consistent with what the Mayor has advocated for more than a year.”

Marcia Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, goes further and says, “I’ve seen the draft – I don’t know if it’s final yet. I’ve been asked to weigh in on it.”

Dave Low, chairman of Californians for Retirement Security, a coalition that represents more than 1.5 million public employees, says that the draft measure being circulated by Mayor Reed and others would “take promised retirement benefits away from teachers, nurses, firefighters and other public employees.” He adds that courts have consistently decided that it is not permissible to cut promised retirement benefits to public employees. “A promise made should be a promise kept,” Low says.

Chuck Reed, a Democrat, has increasingly been seen as the public, bipartisan face of a nationwide effort to scale back retirement benefits for public employees. But behind the scenes, this effort is quietly spearheaded by a host of largely conservative individuals and organizations.

In May, for example, Reed was only one of dozens of people present at a closed-door pension summit held at a Sacramento hotel, where strategies to limit public retirement benefits were discussed. And earlier this week, Frying Pan News reported that the Pew Center on the States, an arm of the respected Pew Charitable Trusts, had formed an unusual partnership with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in an effort to curb public employee pensions in several states.

The movement to curtail public employee pension benefits in California is being watched closely around the nation. Both those who favor curbing pensions and those who oppose it agree that any ballot initiative, such as the one laid out in Reed’s blueprint, will involve a lengthy and costly fight.

“The problem with initiatives is that public employee labor unions are very strong in fighting them,” says Jeff Adachi, the elected Public Defender in San Francisco and the man behind an unsuccessful initiative to curb pension benefits in that city. “It’s a tough route to go.”

That would seem to be borne out by reactions to Reed’s initiative from organized labor, whose representatives blame politicians’ inability to find the resources to give retirees the benefits they promised workers in the form of negotiated contracts. They also point to figures put out by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) showing that the average public employee retires on only $2,629 a month.

Others decry what they regard as the naked unfairness of having rules changed on them in mid-career. One such person is Lori Adams, a 46-year-old Burbank High School math teacher. She has been a public school teacher for 16 years and is planning to teach for at least another 14 years.

“If you went to a bank and made an agreement for a car loan or a house loan, and then in the middle years they decide to change your rate – that’s not fair,” says Adams, who is also president of the Burbank Teachers Association. “It’s making a deal when you sign it and in the middle of the game changing the rules. You make life decisions based on it.”

Marcia Fritz and others, however, see the ballot initiative as an opportunity to clarify what they regard as murky rules regarding state and municipal workers’ retirement plans.

“It’s putting public employees on the same page as employees in the private sector,” says Fritz. Yet initiative opponents, including Jennifer Baker, a retirement expert with the California Teachers Association, see no reason why public employees should be placed in the same category as workers in the traditionally more lucrative private sector.

“If individuals don’t make high salaries,” Baker says of public employees, “at least they have modest retirement benefits. If you’re going to cut that, you’re going to discourage potential teachers – people with bachelor’s or master’s degrees – from even considering entering the profession.”

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Text of draft ballot initiative:

OBJECTIVE:

In order to protect the government’s ability to: a) provide essential services to the public, and b) maintain retirement plans that are sustainable, fiscally-sound and able to meet the commitments to its employees, this initiative empowers the people of California to take the actions necessary to control the escalating costs of public employee retirement benefits.

INITIATIVE PROVISIONS:

This initiative defines that a government employee’s “vested rights” only applies to pension and retiree healthcare benefits earned for service already rendered, and explicitly empowers government employers and the voters to amend pension and retiree healthcare benefits for an employee’s future years of service.

– These provisions would apply to all future government employees.

– These provisions would apply to all current government employees, unless there is clear and convincing evidence that his/her employer intended to create a vested right to a particular level of retirement benefits for future years of service.

– The initiative would also allow all government employers to temporarily amend its retirement benefits for all employees’ future years of service if: a) they are facing a fiscal emergency or b) their retirement plan is “at-risk” according to the standards established by the federal government for private pension plans.

[Note: this provision remains subject to further refinement and discussion] For any public employee plan that is “at-risk” as defined by federal laws governing private pension plans, the government employer will be required to prospectively modify its employee pension benefits in such a way that will lift the plan out of “at-risk” status within XX years. If such action is not taken within two years, the government employer would be required to… (Potential Options: require employees to pay 50% of all pension costs, increase employee and/or employer contributions into the plan by XX, etc.)

Nothing in this initiative affects the retirement benefits that a government employee has earned and accrued for prior years of service.

Government employers and/or the voters would be required to wait until current labor contracts expire before adopting any changes to employee retirement benefits.

This initiative prohibits the State of California, CalPERS, and other government boards from interfering with elected leaders’ or voters’ ability to amend their public employee pension plans for employee’ future years of service (this includes prohibiting CalPERS from charging exorbitant termination fees to government employers who wish to amend their pension plans).

This initiative would apply to the State of California and all political subdivisions of the state, including, but not limited to, counties, cities, school districts, special districts, boards, commissions, the University of California, and California State University.

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

When Kentucky’s legislature adopted a bill intended to transform the Bluegrass State’s troubled pension system last spring, state officials were ecstatic. Signing the bill into law on April 4, Democratic governor Steve Beshear hailed it as groundbreaking legislation that would “solve the most pressing financial problem facing our state – our monstrous unfunded pension liability and the financial instability of our pension fund.”

Not everyone was convinced.

Critics, who include pension-fund experts, lawmakers and AARP Kentucky, claim the new law will hurt workers, taxpayers and retirees. What’s more, they say the law was largely crafted behind the scenes by an unusual alliance between two out-of-state organizations: the Pew Center on the States and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Some detractors go further and assert that the Arnold Foundation is using Pew’s sterling reputation for academic integrity as a fig leaf to hide its own free-market agenda.

According to its website, the Center on the States focuses on policy initiatives that include early education, prison sentencing and corrections, and the electoral process. The center is one of seven arms of the influential Pew Charitable Trusts, which is headquartered Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with offices in Washington, D.C. The Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation is in the vanguard of nationwide efforts to limit pensions for state and municipal workers; it was founded by billionaire John Arnold, a onetime Enron trader who later made his fortune as a hedge-fund manager.

“We want to bring to your attention . . . the deceptive work that the Pew Center on the States is engaged in across the country in order to promote their cash balance overhaul policy,” a group of 10 Kentucky state senators and representatives cautioned in an open letter to legislators in other states. The letter warned lawmakers “about the ramifications of letting Pew into your state,” as well as “its unholy alliance with the Arnold Foundation.”

Critics of that alliance charge that Pew and Arnold share a mission for giving an academic veneer to a partisan belief that the nation’s massive public employee pension funds should be invested directly in costly “cash balance” plans rather than be professionally managed as traditional defined benefit plans by the public agencies that currently administer them.

Jordan Marks, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Public Pension Coalition, says that the cash-balance plans promoted by Pew could dramatically reduce the pensions of workers. Under such plans, Marks says, employee pensions would be based on an average of all years of an employee’s service, instead of the highest three to five years of earnings – which is currently the norm. Moreover, in Kentucky new workers covered under the plan would be guaranteed only a modest four percent rate of return on investments. “It’s an extraordinary loss for middle class workers,” Marks says.

Pew may be mostly known for its financial support of PBS programs, which has given the foundation the kind of publicity that reflects the self-described “non-partisan and non-ideological” nature of Pew’s work.

Yet Pew has become a key player in one of America’s most partisan issues as cities and states tackle the complex problems involving public worker pensions. Pension reformers present their cause as a bipartisan good-government crusade, but a visitor landing on the website of nearly any one of this movement’s myriad organizations quickly falls down a rabbit hole of interlocking conservative organizations – whose unifying theme seems to be reflexive hostility toward workplace protections and the union contracts that guarantee them.

As a battle cry, “pension reform” has joined the ranks of “paycheck protection” (see 2012’s Proposition 32 in California) and “educational choice” (i.e., national parent-trigger laws). All three movements aim to seriously weaken organized labor and the benefits it has won for all employees. And, as the economy stumbles along in the wake of the 2009 recession, activists from these causes have exploited fears of diminished state and municipal coffers to create a climate of crisis in which their various “reforms” are presented as painful but necessary solutions.

Earlier this month Pew senior researcher David Draine spoke in Florida before the Jacksonville Retirement Task Force and offered his organization’s help in dealing with that city’s public employee retirement plan.

Draine, the lead researcher on several studies looking at state-run public employee retirement systems, strongly defends Pew’s involvement with states and municipalities that are confronting pension issues, on the grounds that Pew is serving the public interest. He also justifies Pew’s partnership with the Arnold Foundation.

“While pension reform is arguably one of the most daunting financial problems facing states and cities today, we do not have a one-size-fits-all solution,” Draine wrote Frying Pan News in an email.  “Every city and state has a unique set of policy preferences and budgetary challenges; what is critical to achieving lasting reform is an open, inclusive, data-driven process.”

He added:

“Pew has partnered with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to help states and municipalities face their growing pension liabilities and continuing funding challenges. In some states, if changes are not made every retiree, worker and taxpayer will be burdened with rising costs and unpaid promises for years to come. Our partnership supports efforts to pursue data-driven reform of pension systems that will be fair, affordable, and fiscally sustainable.”

While few budget experts would deny there are problems with funding public employee pensions, there is nothing resembling a consensus that supports the solutions proposed by Pew and the Arnold Foundation – whose warnings of imminent pension bankruptcy complement similar apocalyptic scenarios sketched by conservatives about Social Security’s future.

Marks says that the Pew-Arnold axis threatens Pew’s longstanding reputation for non-ideological work in the public sphere.  “The Arnold Foundation is using Pew’s brand to take on retirement security,” he says.

And the head of the largest trade association for public sector plans finds serious flaws in Pew’s figures. Hank Kim, executive director and counsel of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, says that “generally our position is that we are very disappointed in Pew. Since 2010, we’ve expressed to Pew that its methodology for reports is flawed. Their reports incite fear.”

Kim says that the cash balance plans being pushed are complex and somewhat hard to understand, but that they will cost states more to administer and provide employees with lesser pensions than defined benefit plans. He sees the former as opening the door for 401(k) plans, which are known as “defined contribution plans” and not to be confused with the current defined benefit plans.

“Pew and Arnold will not be satisfied with cash balance plans,” he says. “That’s the first step toward defined contribution plans.”

With its $5.6 billion endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts ranks number 19 on a list of the world’s wealthiest charitable foundations. Originally called the Pew Memorial Trust, the foundation was created in 1948 by the heirs to the Joseph N. Pew Sun Oil fortune and hewed far more closely to the family’s conservative, small-government political beliefs.

Pew first thrust itself into the national debate on public sector pensions when its Center on the States released a headline-grabbing 2010 study claiming that the combined pension shortfall for all the states was a staggering $1 trillion.

“It’s an eye-popping number,” Kim says of Pew’s claim. “But that trillion dollar deficit covers both pension and health care costs, and health care costs are at least 60 percent of that figure.”

Whether the report reflected actual history or hyperbole, it launched Pew into the public-sector fixit business in a big way.

To date, Pew has partnered with the Arnold Foundation in Illinois, Montana, Kentucky and Rhode Island, wading in with actuarial studies and polling data to prod municipal and state lawmakers into incorporating Pew-authored restructuring plans.

In the case of Kentucky, Pew’s efforts resulted in bill language calling for a so-called “hybrid plan design” employing costly 401(k)-styled cash balance accounts that would be substantially more expensive for new workers than the state’s existing defined benefit plans.

Pew’s promotion of technocratic-sounding solutions to pension shortfalls, especially its mantra about “data-driven” problem-solving, lends its white papers the texture of dispassionate scholarship. Its partnership with the Arnold Foundation, however, has created intense controversy and provided ammunition to its critics.

Jim Wayne (D-Louisville), who has been a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives since 1991, says that Pew played a crucial role throughout the legislative process.

“They had a tremendous influence,” says Wayne. “The parties interested in change needed to rely on an outside source. Pew drew up the proposal, they did the analysis and presented the information to a [legislative] task force.”

Wayne says that Pew generally pushed the positions favored by his state’s Chamber of Commerce and League of Cities, working both behind the scenes and publicly.

“Pew gave them credibility,” Wayne says of these two groups. “Pew is recognized nationally as experts, with facts and figures.” As a result of Pew’s work, Wayne adds, “new workers have a much weaker pension program.”

If Pew embodies the image of an objective social scientist, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation has unambiguously embraced the role of partisan pit-bull in its nationwide efforts to curtail public worker pensions. The latter’s website identifies pension reform as one of its key initiatives and provides position papers supporting its stances – papers that frequently cite Pew studies.

Last year in California, the Arnold Foundation contributed to anti-worker pension measures passed by voters in San Jose and San Diego. Two years ago, the Center for Investigative Reporting disclosed that the Arnold Foundation had given a $150,000 grant to the conservative California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility for a series of reports seeking to limit public employee pensions.

The Arnold Foundation’s 2011 tax return, a public record, vividly reveals an ideological agenda in its contributions made to organizations around the country “to research and promote education on public retirement plans.” The recipients of Arnold’s largess have included the James Madison Institute, based in Tallahassee ($265,000); the Kansas Policy Institute, based in Wichita ($10,000); the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MIPR), based in New York City ($15,612), and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, headquartered in Washington, D.C. ($52,500).

The first two groups present themselves as free-market, pro-privatization think tanks, while MIPR, a right-wing nonprofit founded by the late Cold Warrior and Reagan CIA chief William J. Casey, has called for the complete elimination of public-sector defined benefit pension plans. The Fordham Institute is a right-wing education think tank whose agenda has recently broadened to include studies that scapegoat public teacher pensions for diverting precious public education money away from the classroom.

Pew’s relationship with Arnold began only recently, when the two groups joined forces to aid in furthering each other’s reach. Josh McGee, a vice president at the Arnold Foundation and Draine, the Pew Center’s lead pension researcher, have appeared together at informal meetings and before state legislatures and city councils around the country. McGee and Draine typically turn up with studies and PowerPoint presentations that support scrapping defined benefit pensions in favor of 401(k)-styled contribution plans, cash-balance accounts or hybrid plans.

“The fact is that they [Pew] go into states arguing they are non-partisan and then proceed to make recommendations and undermine and dismantle [public employee] pension plans,” says Hank Kim. “They have a bias – that bias is that public plans ought to be closed or frozen.”

Pew has called for transparency in other groups that conduct public surveys and the Arnold Foundation boasts about its research transparency. Yet both have given vague answers to specific questions about whether the Laura and John Arnold foundation has given financial support to Pew relating to work on public employee pensions.

The collaboration between the two organizations, says Jordan Marks, could ultimately undermine Pew’s reputation for good works and non-ideologically driven research.

“If Pew had its way,” Marks says, “it would retire teachers and firefighters and others into poverty.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News. Bill Raden contributed to this story.)

By Gary Cohn

Benjamin Gamboa doesn’t know John Arnold, but they are linked by a shared concern over the fate of public-employee pensions in California.

“I’m proud to have a pension,” the 30-year-old Gamboa says. “I believe every American should have a pension.”

The two men live in very different worlds. Gamboa is a research analyst at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, California. Arnold is a hedge-fund billionaire from Houston, Texas.

There’s another difference between them: Arnold recently had a representative present at a secret “pension summit” held at a Sacramento hotel, where strategies to limit public employee retirement benefits were discussed; Gamboa, a union member, did not – representatives of labor were specifically not invited.

“Pension reform” has become the latest battle cry in a seemingly endless war that has ostensibly been declared against tax-dollar waste, but whose single-minded purpose has been to slash the job protections and benefits enjoyed by California’s working middle class. Pension-cutting advocates have filled airwaves, websites and op-ed pages with stories about employees retiring in early middle age on six-figure pensions. The reality is that the average state and municipal worker retires on about $26,000 a year.

The Sacramento summit took place May 22 at the Citizen Hotel, a luxury boutique inn two blocks from the state capitol. It was hosted by the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based conservative and libertarian public policy group that embraces privatizing government functions and cutting public employee pensions. The foundation’s most prominent trustee is billionaire businessman David Koch, a longtime advocate of reducing public sector retirement benefits.

The meeting’s agenda – a copy of which was obtained by Frying Pan News – was written in the terse, opaque prose of event planners, but still offers a glimpse into the group’s plans. Among other items, it  lists an hour-long session on “Overcoming Opposition: Anticipating and Addressing Government and Union Opposition.” Perhaps the agenda was even more important for what it did not say: That the attack on public sector pensions may soon be transformed into a state ballot initiative that would change California’s constitution.

The participants in the closed-door meeting were Republicans and Democrats, and included public officials and representatives of numerous foundations and think tanks intent on reducing pensions for public employees.

Among those attending were San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed; former San Diego city councilman Carl DeMaio; Josh McGee, a vice president at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation; Marcia Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility; Dan Pellissier, president of California Pension Reform; Ed Ring, executive director of the California Public Policy Center (CPPC) and editor of UnionWatch.org; Jack Dean, executive director at the Reason Foundation and editor of PensionTsunami.com, and Steven Greenhut, a journalist and author of the book Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation.

Their gathering received no media coverage, with the exception of a brief mention in a column Greenhut wrote for the San Diego Union-Tribune. Despite the pension-cutting movement’s talk of the cause’s bipartisan pedigree, it seems to rely upon transfusions of money from wealthy rightwing personalities and nonprofits. Apart from the Reason Foundation’s close ties to David Koch, Greenhut’s own online hobby, CalWatchdog, is the creation of the Pacific Research Institute, a libertarian think tank with deep pockets.

Both the Reason Foundation and Pacific Research Institute are allied with the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been writing corporatist model legislation for about 30 years. More locally, however, the nexus for pension-cutting is the Tustin-headquartered California Public Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit led by Ed Ring, who worked to promote the anti-union Proposition 32 last year. CPPC’s advisors include Marcia Fritz and Jack Dean; its president is Mark W. Bucher who helped qualify and pass 2000’s Proposition 22, which effectively banned same-sex marriage in California. (Bucher is also a board member of Family Action, a rightwing Orange County political action committee.) Another CPPC board member, Robert Loewen, also serves as president of the ultraconservative Lincoln Club of Orange County.)

The Sacramento meeting apparently helped set the stage for moves that are now occurring largely behind the scenes.

In an interview, Reed confirmed that he attended the pension summit and that he has been working on a statewide ballot initiative that would allow the state and local governments to reduce retirement benefits for current employees for the years of work they performed after his proposed reforms would go into effect. He says that such statewide reform is necessary for California’s fiscal health, to ensure that the state and local governments can provide a reasonable level of services to the public and to protect public employees.

“What we need to do statewide is make it possible for local governments to change future accruals for work not performed,” he says. He adds that his proposed ballot measure could be voted on as early as November, 2014.

Reed, a Democrat who has opposed same-sex marriage and the raising of the minimum wage of his city’s workers, seems to be what pension-cutters have in mind when they speak of their movement’s bipartisan makeup. (The gathering’s other politician, Carl DeMaio, is a Republican – and Reason Foundation senior fellow – who has advocated replacing San Diego city employees’ pensions with a 401(k)-type substitute.) Last year Reed pushed a ballot measure in San Jose to reduce that city’s retirement costs for its public employees. The measure passed, but is now tied up in the courts. He acknowledges that any such measure is likely to provoke an all-out fight with the state’s public-employee unions. Interviews with labor officials and their representatives seem to bear him out.

A ballot initiative to cut back pensions for existing employees would “change the constitution and would be a horrible thing,” says Steven Maviglio, a publisher of the California Majority Report and a Sacramento-based political consultant whose clients include Californians for Retirement Security, a labor coalition representing 1.5 million public employees and retirees.

Maviglio says that many employees have worked for years at jobs where they were promised certain benefits and that it would be a breach of faith to “throw out that understanding and break that trust. That’s the whole foundation of pension benefits.”

He adds, “If someone is teaching for 25 years and somebody changes the rules of the game, that’s hardly fair.”

Any statewide ballot measure campaign aimed at cutting back public employee benefits would provoke an expensive fight with unions. “It would cost tens of millions of dollars – $30 or $40 million,” Reed says. Fritz, president of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (whose vice president is the CPPC’s Jack Dean), says that the backers would likely look for funding from the Arnold Foundation, among other sources.

The Arnold Foundation has funded similar efforts in the past. Two years ago, for example, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that the Arnold Foundation had given a $150,000 grant to Fritz’s group for a series of reports seeking to limit public employee pensions. Last year, another of the foundation’s checks made headlines when it was revealed that the Arnold Foundation was a major backer of Engage Rhode Island, the group that pushed through that state’s pension overhaul law.

The Arnold Foundation is clearly in the forefront of nationwide efforts to scale back pensions for state and municipal workers. On its website, the foundation identifies pension reform as one of its key initiatives, and it provides position papers supporting its stances.

“The current system has allowed politicians to promise one level of benefits without fully funding them,” the Arnold Foundation’s McGee told Frying Pan News in an email last week. “Across the U.S., state and local governments have underfunded workers’ benefits by at least $1 trillion.”

The Arnold Foundation, McGee wrote, works with state and local communities to provide policy information and technical assistance to help them develop pension reforms. He said that a ballot initiative is just one tool to improve the retirement system, and added that the foundation “does not promote or fund ballot initiatives.” He also acknowledged that he attended the pension summit in Sacramento.

“We discussed the need to deal responsibly with accumulated pension debt, secure benefits that have already been earned, and create a system that is affordable, sustainable, and secure,” McGee stated.

Others believe the Arnold Foundation has its eye on California in order to promote public employee pension cutbacks across the nation. The foundation’s thinking, Maviglio says, is that “if liberal California can do it, it can happen anywhere.”

In many ways, Benjamin Gamboa, the 30-year-old research analyst at Crafton Hills College, is typical of those employees who find themselves in the pension-cutters’ crosshairs. Working at a community college, he believes, is serving the public good by helping students to reach their goals.

“I love what I do, and I love the security of my job,” he says. “My plan is to retire with a pension just large enough to spoil my grandkids.” He says that his hope and expectation will be for a pension of about $30,000 a year. “I want to enjoy the simple things,” he says. “There are no European vacations in my future.”

He adds that he is concerned to hear about the continuing efforts to limit his and other workers’ pensions.

“To attack the work I do and the security I treasure . . .” he says, then pauses. “It’s heart-wrenching. It’s demoralizing.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

Maria Guevara had been trying to get pregnant for three years when she saw a doctor at Los Angeles County General hospital in 2008. She was understandably thrilled, then, to learn she was indeed three months pregnant at the time of her visit. As Guevara later recalled, when the doctor asked her in English if she wanted to keep the baby, “without hesitation I replied ‘yes’ to his question. Before leaving the hospital, the doctor prescribed me medication that I thought was prenatal care. That lack of communication between the doctor and me has changed my life forever.”

Guevara took the prescribed medication, and experienced violent pain and bleeding. She returned to the hospital, where another doctor told her the bleeding was the result of a miscarriage.

“My baby was dead. The medication the initial doctor prescribed to me was not prenatal care but medication to induce an abortion,” she told a press conference in April at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. “Not speaking any English, I was unable to understand his question to me. He did not speak Spanish and no interpreter was provided.”

This occurred at the largest single health care provider for a county where 37 percent of the population is comprised of Spanish-speakers.

“Losing my baby forced me into a deep depression,” Guevara said. “I could not bear looking at or holding babies because the thought brought back painful emotions.”

Although California has some of the strongest laws in the nation spelling out a patient’s right to an interpreter, stories like Guevara’s are far from unique. Day after day, non-English speaking patients are seeing doctors and nurses throughout California without the aid of medical interpreters, sometimes with tragic results, a Frying Pan News investigation has found.

Hardly a day goes by when Julio Perez doesn’t think about his joyful little brother Aldo, an energetic five-year-old who loved watching cartoons – and how Aldo might be alive today if his parents had been able to communicate with doctors.

Both brothers got sick one day in March 2008, and their mother first took them to a clinic with a Spanish-speaking doctor in South Gate, about seven miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Each of the boys was given a shot. Julio got better; Aldo did not. Their mother took Aldo back to the clinic, then to two hospitals. At the second hospital, Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, which had more sophisticated medical care available, an interpreter was summoned to explain the liability forms. Once the forms were signed, Julio recalls, the interpreter left and never returned.

None of the doctors or nurses the family dealt with at LBMMC spoke fluent Spanish.

“I had to be the interpreter,” Julio says. As he remembers, doctors said that his brother had a serious bacterial infection. Numerous medical procedures followed, as doctors tried to save Aldo’s life. He died on April 14, 2008.

“I feel that my baby brother’s death was an injustice,” says Julio Perez, now 24. He believes the hospital kept his family in the dark about Aldo’s condition. “If we had proper interpreting services . . . my parents could have asked questions.”

California Assemblyman Dr. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), a pediatrician and chairman of the Assembly’s Health Committee, says that Maria Guevara’s story, which he heard firsthand in April, epitomizes the need for an effective statewide system of medical interpreters. “That story tells you the horrendous consequences of not being able to communicate between a patient and a health care provider,” he says in an interview.

Such problems are systemic and widespread. In a month-long investigation, Frying Pan News has reviewed 75 case studies from across California in which a qualified medical interpreter was not present. In all of the cases, the health professionals were fluent only in English; the patients spoke a variety of languages, including Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Samoan, Vietnamese, Khmer and Hmong.

California is the most ethnically diverse state in the nation, and an estimated 40 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home. The need for qualified medical interpreters, moreover, is expected to increase when millions of people who don’t speak English become eligible for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Experts stress that many of those newly enrolled won’t be able to communicate with their doctors and other health professionals unless interpreters are readily available.

“The Affordable Care Act will exacerbate this issue,” says Dr. George Flores, program manager for prevention at the California Endowment, a Los Angeles-based private statewide health foundation that works to expand quality health care for underserved individuals and communities in California. “A good portion of those eligible speak a language other than English. This will put more pressure on a system already bereft of language capability.”

State Assemblyman Philip Y. Ting (D-San Francisco), who held a forum on language access last week, agrees.

“This issue will become even more critical in the coming years,” says Ting, “as three million new patients who speak only limited English enter the health system .”

To address the problem, Assembly Speaker John A. Perez (D-Los Angeles) has authored a bill, AB 1263, that would significantly expand trained medical interpreters. The measure was passed by the Assembly in May and is expected to be voted on by the state Senate soon. If it passes the Senate, it would likely land on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk in September.

The bill would require the state Department of Health Care Services to seek federal matching funds to create a state-certified interpreter system. Under the bill, California would spend $200,000 to gain access to $270 million in federal funds authorized under the Affordable Care Act to fund interpreter services. It would create about 7,000 interpreter jobs over a 10-year period.

“For a relatively small investment of state dollars, we will be able to tap into federal dollars,” says Dr. Pan. “AB 1263 will ensure that all Californians are able to obtain quality care by ensuring good communication between patients and their health care professionals.”

Opposition to the bill is coming from the Virginia-based National Right to Work Committee, according to a legislative fact sheet distributed by Speaker Perez’s office. The National Right to Work Committee, a conservative nonprofit that fights trade unionism, did not respond to queries for this article.

In the absence of available interpreters, many people now use their children, other family members or friends to interpret for them. But physicians, government officials and other experts say this is almost always a bad idea.

“Children do not have the maturity to understand the importance and seriousness of medical discussions,” says Dr. Flores of the California Endowment. “There could be misunderstandings that could lead to very serious problems. Imagine a boy interpreting for a mother having menstrual problems. Parents might withhold information and think they were protecting the child, but this would hurt the medical encounter. It’s never appropriate to depend on a child to interpret.”

When things go wrong, the child interpreters are often left with lifelong scars. Poulinna Po was 15 when she was often pressed into service as an interpreter for her Cambodian father, who spoke Khmer. The elder Po had diabetes and could not understand how to take his medicine. He was reluctant to see doctors or go to the hospital because he felt there was no one who could help him. Poulinna Po could understand what the doctor was saying, but she did not know words in her native tongue to convey the medical information back to her father.

Po’s father ultimately died from a brain tumor and complications from a stroke. Now 17, Poulinna Po blames herself for her father’s death. She tearfully told her story last June at a town hall meeting on language access held at the University of Southern California.

As the Affordable Care Act’s full implementation proceeds, the need for medical interpreters will increase – and so will problems unless the system is fixed. Julio Perez now lives in Norwalk and graduated this spring from California State University, Fullerton with a degree in political science and Chicano Studies. He says he is speaking out to shine a spotlight on the problems caused by the lack of medical interpreters and the need for a solution. He has also testified before the state Assembly Health Committee.

“I’m putting so much effort into this because my little brother passed away and I do not want his suffering to be in vain,” Perez says. “I want people to see that the lack of medical interpreters has had detrimental effects on families and that innocent lives have been lost as well. If the governor signs AB1263, then I will feel that I accomplished what I was hoping for, and saved some lives in the process.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

Last November unions won a resounding victory when voters defeated Proposition 32, a ballot measure that would have crippled labor’s political influence in California, partly by barring public-employee unions from using payroll-deducted funds for political purposes. The initiative, which enjoyed a huge lead in early opinion polls, was heavily funded by wealthy conservatives and far-right groups.

Union leaders were overjoyed by its defeat.

“You can’t buy California,” Dean Vogel, president of the California Teachers Association (CTA), told an election-night victory party in Sacramento. “We’re not for sale.”

The celebration hasn’t been long lived. In a little-noticed move in April, a conservative legal organization that has pushed to overturn the 1964 Voting Rights Act filed a lawsuit in federal court in Santa Ana that could accomplish in the courts what Prop. 32 couldn’t at the ballot box. The players behind the suit may not be household names but the millionaires and private foundations covering their legal fees represent a familiar klatch of extreme libertarians who, since the 1980s, have been attempting to move the country in a hard-right direction.

The main plaintiff, the Christian Educators Association International (CEAI), firmly opposes reproductive rights and marriage equality – two of the same movements opposed by Prop. 32′s various backers. CEAI also supports school voucher programs and the teaching of Creationism – also causes championed by some of Prop. 32′s supporters, who saw unions as an obstacle to imposing their political will on California when it came to these and other issues.

The lawsuit, known as Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, challenges the constitutionality of laws that allow teachers’ unions to collect fees from teachers who don’t want to be members. The lawsuit also seeks to outlaw an automatic payroll deduction process, under which teachers who don’t want a portion of their fees to go for political activities must “opt out” of funding those activities. It claims that California’s “agency shop” law violates the First Amendment by compelling public school teachers to pay fees to teachers unions involved in political activities.

Comments made by the lawsuit’s supporters suggest that they are hoping for an ultimate victory before the U.S. Supreme Court that would be applied to all public-sector unions. Could this happen?

“It’s a little unclear from the papers the plaintiffs have filed,” says Jacob Rukeyser, a CTA staff attorney working on the case. “The novel legal theory they are using would directly affect public educators. Read broadly, it seems like a possibility that other unions could be affected.”

Nevertheless, at the very minimum the lawsuit would require teachers wishing to support their unions’ political activities to now “opt in” to fund them – a change whose largest practical effect would be to greatly reduce the unions’ money for political activities and to erode their influence.

“It would be a national Prop. 32,” says J. Felix De La Torre, chief counsel of the Service Employees International Union Local 1000, California’s largest state employee union.

Says Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition: “For public employee unions, it’s the biggest thing to come down the pike in 20 years.”

The lawsuit’s supporters agree.

“If this lawsuit is successful, it conceivably could make California into a right to work state,” says Larry Sand, a retired middle school history teacher and president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. “It goes beyond California – this case could be a huge deal. It would affect workers, union political spending and ultimately children because unions are the number-one impediment to education reform. This definitely could go further than Proposition 32.”

The lawsuit was filed by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Individual Rights (CIR) on behalf of CEAI and 10 California teachers. Besides the California Teachers Association, the suit names the National Education Association, 10 affiliated union locals and 10 local school officials as defendants.

“There is no Constitutional right to have mandatory public-sector bargaining,” says Patrick J. Wright, a senior legal analyst for the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy. “We think voluntarism is a better public policy because it enhances peoples’ freedom of choice.”

The plaintiff-teachers include case namesake Rebecca Friedrichs, who has been a public school teacher in Anaheim’s Savanna School District for 25 years. She resigned her union membership in 2012 and opted out of paying the portion of her fees that were earmarked for political-type activities, paying only the required base fee.

“But for California’s ‘agency shop’ arrangement, Ms. Friedrichs would not pay fees to or otherwise subsidize the teachers’ union,” the lawsuit states.

Michael Carvin, a partner at the Washington, D.C. firm of Jones Day and lead counsel for CIR in the lawsuit, said that the issue involves free speech rights. “Forcing educators to financially support causes that run contrary to their political and policy beliefs violates their First Amendment rights to free expression and cannot withstand First Amendment scrutiny,” Carvin said, according to a CIR press release.

However, John Logan, director of the San Francisco State University’s labor studies program, says that given the current ease with which employees can opt out, “The purpose of the legal challenge is not to protect the rights of individual employees. The real purpose is to diminish the political voice of public-sector unions.”

On this point Patrick Wright agrees with Logan.

“Obviously, the public policy impact is [that] people would be more free,” Wright says. “The practical effect of it would be a detrimental impact on public-sector unions’ abilities to influence political campaigns. Public-sector unions are some of the strongest supporters of the Democratic Party.”

Over the years the U.S. Supreme Court has generally upheld union practices that require public-sector employees to first pay dues and then opt out if they don’t support a union’s political activities. The practice was upheld in a two-decade old case known as Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. But in an unrelated 2012 case, the Supreme Court suggested that the high court’s earlier Abood decision may have been a mistake.

“Justice [Samuel Alito], writing for five justices, went out of his way to raise doubts about the Abood decision and, in effect, to invite a test case to overturn it,” wrote Peter Scheer in the Huffington Post. “The Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association lawsuit is an RSVP to that invitation.”

The Center for Individual Rights, Friedrichs’ legal sponsor, is backed by numerous right-wing foundations, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Randolph Foundation and the Carthage and Sarah Scaife foundations (both controlled by ALEC-bankrolling billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife). If CIR’s lawsuit is successful, the relatively modest investment in backing the suit could accomplish what the $60.5 million effort to pass Prop. 32 could not – the erosion of public-sector unions as a political force. (Prop. 32′s opponents were forced to spend about $75 million to defeat that measure.)

Throughout its 20-plus years of existence, CIR has been best known for aggressively pursuing court nullification of affirmative action programs on campuses, most notably through 1996’s Hopwood v. Texas case, in which CIR successfully represented a white woman denied admission to the University of Texas Law School. More recently, it played a key role in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger case, in which the Supreme Court eventually upheld the student-diversity goals of University of Michigan Law School’s admission policies.

But CIR has also been at the center of the legal battle to overturn key provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1964. In LaRoque v. Holder, the firm targeted the same pre-clearance requirements governed by Section 5 of the law that were effectively gutted last month when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Shelby County v. Holder. Here in California, CIR went to bat on behalf of Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot initiative that effectively ended affirmative action in the Golden State and has defended Tea Party video provocateur James O’Keefe in an effort to strike down California’s anti-tape recording statute. And CIR has also represented right-wing columnist and ACORN apostate Anita MonCrief, in her countersuit against a civil suit for damages brought by the community-organizing group.

CIR’s primary client in Friedrichs, the Christian Educators Association International, is run by its executive director, former public school teacher Finn Laursen, from his home in Amherst, Ohio. Positioning itself as a professional teachers association and an alternative to membership in the National Education Association, the CEAI provides some union-like benefits for its members, such as professional liability insurance.

But CEAI also apparently offers its public school teacher members training in how to proselytize their evangelical beliefs to their students. In a video on the website for CEAI’s 40-day seminar in Minnesota called the Daniel Leadership Institute, Laursen says part of the group’s mission is to “change the public education system from within.” Elsewhere on the promotional clip, various California public school teachers are seen praising the retreat for teaching them “how we can share God’s love and truth with our students,” how “to bring them to truth,” and “how to express [the teachers’] Christian lifestyles and biblical values in the classroom.”

In response to a request for an interview, Laursen replied by email, “would love to accommodate, but I am at 40 day teacher training in the wilderness of MN with no phone access…just came out of woods for brief internet access.” He forwarded a copy of CEAI’s press release issued at the time the lawsuit was filed.

Although marbled with phrases about Constitutional rights and personal choice, the CIR lawsuit is clearly about more than the First Amendment. Friedrichs v. CTA comes at a time when California’s Republican Party is shrinking into electoral irrelevance, while at the same time many corporations are pushing Congress to nullify the state’s pioneering laws regulating workplace safety, consumer protection and the environment.

“What this litigation is trying to do by judicial decree is what Prop. 32 and many other ballot initiatives have failed to do,” says Catherine Fisk, a professor at the University of California at Irvine School of Law and an expert in labor relations. “It’s essentially an end-run around legislative or ballot initiatives by trying to get courts to decide what the California legislature and people of California, through their initiative process, have refused to do.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

For more than 30 years each, Cheryl Smith-Vincent and Cheryl Ortega have shared a passion for teaching public school in Southern California. Smith-Vincent teaches third grade at Miles Avenue Elementary School in Huntington Park; before retiring, Ortega taught kindergarten at Logan Street Elementary School in Echo Park. Both women have been jolted by experiences with a little-known statewide policy that requires traditional public schools to share their facilities with charter schools. Ortega says she has seen charter-school children warned against greeting non-charter students who attend the same campus. Smith-Vincent reports that she and her students were pushed out of their classroom prior to a round of important student tests – just to accommodate a charter school that needed the space.

“It was extremely disruptive,” Smith-Vincent says of the incident.

The practice of housing a traditional public school and a charter school on the same campus is known as “co-location.” Charters are publicly funded yet independently operated, and are intended to encourage innovation and improve student performance. Under Proposition 39, a school-funding ballot initiative adopted by California voters in 2000, charter schools were given the right to use empty classrooms and share in underutilized public school facilities.

Proponents of the measure, including the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA), claim that it ensures that all public school students, including those enrolled in charter schools, share equally in school district facilities. But critics contend that co-locating siphons key resources from the already-underfunded traditional public schools, depriving students of playground space, library time and other resources.

“One of the difficult things about having a charter school co-located on a district public school campus is that . . . the two schools end up competing for those things that are necessary to provide a quality education for the students,” says Robin Potash, an elementary school teacher and chair of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Proposition 39 Committee. “That includes competing for the same students.”

“We’ve collected lots of anecdotal stories [about] the inequitable use of space, disparity of resources, use of school personnel, lack of services for special education students and English-language learners, and the meals that are provided – pre-packaged versus hot gourmet,” Potash continues. Her last point refers to some charter students receiving their lunches from Whole Foods.

Though the practice of co-location is little known to the general public, it is not uncommon in California. Co-locations exist or have been approved in San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego and in Kern County in California’s Central Valley. In the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) alone, there are 65 co-locations involving traditional public schools and charters, with the district’s charter schools typically requesting space for about 25,000 students to be co-located.

“That’s the equivalent of finding space for the entire Pasadena Unified School District,” says Jose Cole-Gutierrez, LAUSD’s director of charter schools.

It’s not easy to house two separate schools on the same campus and it can be particularly difficult when the schools have separate and disparate cultures, educational philosophies and traditions. Charter school students sometimes wear uniforms, traditional public school students do not. Sometimes all of the students come from the neighborhood, other times many of the charter’s students are from different parts of Los Angeles. Sometimes the administrators at the schools cooperate; other times they compete. To be sure, some co-locations operate smoothly, with teachers, administrators and parents working together to minimize disruptions, although co-locations have also become controversial in New York City, for similar reasons as in California.

Ricardo Soto, the CCSA’s senior vice president for legal advocacy and general counsel, defends co-locations as a way to ensure that all public school students have access to facilities. He says that in many cases co-location makes sense because of declining enrollment in traditional public schools and increasing enrollment in charters.

Asked whether the co-locations set up a two-tier system, Soto says that “too often [traditional public schools] try to cordon off students from the charter school . . . Our experience is that charter school students at [co-location] sites tend to get the leftover space,” and that their access to amenities such as bathrooms, playgrounds and cafeterias is an “afterthought.”

News that a charter school is going to be sharing a traditional public school campus often provokes protests and hard feelings. Last year the Silver Lake community became divided after the Citizens of the World Charter was allowed to share the campus of the Micheltorena Elementary School.

“It was terrible,” says Kurt Bier, the father of a student at Micheltorena. “People didn’t want the charter to co-locate because it would draw resources away from students [already] attending Micheltorena. It divided the community. It pitted people against each other.”

The two schools are not scheduled to share space this fall, with Citizens of the World acquiring co-location status at Stoner Avenue Elementary School in Culver City.

This past June, parents and teachers at Boyle Heights’ Lorena Street Elementary School held a protest after it was announced that Extera Public Schools, a charter operation, would be sharing the campus for 2013-2014. The announcement was made five days before the end of the last school year, and protesters said this didn’t leave enough time for rational planning of how to share the space.

Extera was founded by former Hollywood talent agent Tom Strickler and is headed by veteran LAUSD educator Jim Kennedy; one of its stated goals is to introduce children to nature.

Eddie Rivas has taught at Breed Street Elementary School for the past three years, the last two of which was shared with an Extera charter. His fears of co-locations creating two-tiered systems are based on experience.

“The charter kids sense they are better than the public school kids,” says Rivas. “I’ll say good morning to charter school kids. They don’t know if it’s okay to say hello to me. The message is that they are better than us.”

Rivas’ worries are well-founded, according to Cheryl Ortega.

“I was walking my children up the ramp to go to recess and we were passing by the Gabriella campus,” says Ortega, recalling an incident she witnessed at Logan Elementary when she was subbing at the school not long after her retirement. Logan shares its campus with Gabriella Charter School under a lease agreement.

“One of my little girls called out to a little girl [from the charter]. A teacher told the little girl in the charter to come away and said, ‘We don’t talk to Logan.’ It was as sad as could be. They are telling children they can’t mix or even speak to each other!”

Others say the problems of co-location involve more than snobbery.

John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA, worries that Proposition 39 creates conflict and derails sound public planning.

“One of the consequences of Proposition 39 is that it prevents thoughtful public planning about how to make use of public space,” Rogers says. “There’s a strong incentive for charter schools to use co-location as a way to get less expensive facilities.”

The CCSA’s Soto doesn’t dispute the charge that charter schools can often get less expensive facilities by co-locating.

“We believe charter school students are entitled to have equitable access to public school facilities,” he says.

Cheryl Smith-Vincent says that construction repairs forced her to move out of her third-grade classroom at Miles Avenue Elementary School in April and relocate to a new room. She says that the repairs had long been needed, but were only scheduled once a decision had been made to give that space to a charter school co-locating at Miles in the fall.

“The classroom lost instructional time the week before testing,” Smith-Vincent says.

Smith-Vincent expressed her concerns in a letter to L.A. schools superintendent John Deasy and instructional area superintendent Robert Bravo.

“Our students lost six days of instruction and valuable final preparation time for testing,” Smith-Vincent wrote. “Instead of learning and teaching, teachers and students were moving materials up and down stairs from one building to another . . . It is inconceivable that the week before the administration of the STAR [Standardized Testing and Reporting] test that is so valued by this district, that students and teachers would be uprooted and moved with minimal assistance from the district.”

The letter continued, “Initially we could not understand the urgency . . . It then occurred to us that our original rooms were in the building that is slotted to be given to a charter.”

Bravo replied that he had asked an aide to look into Smith-Vincent’s concerns and that the aide “could not find any connection between the timing of the repairs in question and the selection of Miles for a charter school relocation.”

As Miles Elementary prepares for a co-location with a charter school this fall, Smith-Vincent and other teachers are worried. In a list of talking points titled, “Potential Negative Impact of Charter Co-Location,” they say that playground space is limited; that the custodial staff is currently insufficient for the current school population and that co-location would result in unclean bathrooms and unswept classrooms; that computer labs and library space is already full, and that Miles students will have reduced access to books and library staff;  and that parent volunteers will no longer have full access to the school’s Parent Center.

“It undermines what we can and should be doing for traditional schools,” Smith-Vincent says of the scheduled co-location. “It takes resources away and prevents us from being able to meet all the needs of our students.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

For days before Thanksgiving, 2009, Santa Ana winds had been blowing up ash and dust from the massive Station Fire that recently burned north of Los Angeles. The scorching, high-pressure weather system seemed a suitable climate for L.A.’s financial meltdown as the city entered the third year of America’s recessionary slump. Inside City Hall on that Wednesday before the holiday, government representatives and members of the news media listened to the testimony of a man who was on his way to becoming one of Los Angeles’ most powerful figures. He was only 40, held no elective office and had started his job as the City Administrative Officer just three months before.

Yet on this Thanksgiving eve Miguel Santana held the rapt attention of the City Council and journalists as he delivered shocking news: Los Angeles faced an imminent shortfall of $98 million and, based on his projections, the city could be burdened by a $1 billion debt by 2013.

One billion dollars. The city had two choices, it seemed: It could try to maintain its current level of services and die a slow, painful death, or it could submit to radical surgery and stay afloat; Miguel Santana would be the surgeon.  

The announcement jolted city government, which had no experience in managing such an economic calamity, into accepting remedies that Santana, who is the city’s top budget officer, would soon propose – remedies that resulted in draconian austerity measures, the dismissal of about 5,000 city workers and renegotiation of employee pension and medical benefits.

In the following four years Santana would deliver more doomsday predictions: that bankruptcy lurked around the corner; that approval of a ballot measure to inject money into the city’s libraries would blow open a $6 million budget hole, and that the city would lose 500 police officers unless voters passed a regressive sales tax.  A 2012 report by Santana scolded the City Council for relying on one-time budget fixes and warned that ignoring his proposals could send Los Angeles down the same road as Stockton. By invoking the name of that bankrupt San Joaquin Valley city, Santana helped spread a fear of insolvency in City Hall. Yet despite Santana’s warning of bankruptcy, last April Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed a budget for Fiscal Year 2013-2014 that included a one-time surplus of $119 million. While some of that surplus would rely on additional pay and benefit reductions for city workers, even without such cuts the city would have a projected surplus of close to $100 million.

Throughout his tenure, though, few in City Hall or in the media have questioned the veracity of Santana’s predictions or, for that matter, Santana’s competency. After four years Santana’s reputation as a straight-talking technocrat remains intact. He may very well, in fact, be reappointed by incoming Mayor Eric Garcetti to his current position, from which he has consistently portrayed Los Angeles’ future in the bleakest terms imaginable.

Veteran City Hall observers say Santana has injected politics and his personal ideology into the CAO’s office, acting more as an antagonist than a neutral fact-finder on progressive ordinances involving banking transparency and waste-hauling reform – all the while doggedly exaggerating L.A.’s financial problems. Rather than serving as an objective presenter of facts to the Mayor and City Council, they say, Santana has pushed hard for solutions predicated on slashing city services and privatizing city functions.

“From the beginning of the financial crisis, he’s adopted a posture of instilling panic into elected officials,” says one City Hall insider who, like several sources interviewed for this article, requested anonymity. “He doesn’t respect the city or its officials enough to tell the truth. It’s a game of brinkmanship – ‘My way or bankruptcy.’ He’s done damage to the city by beating the bankruptcy drum instead of looking for rational solutions.”

Santana’s supporters deny these charges and say that he has done a good job during extremely difficult economic times.

“I’ve watched this poor guy get beat up,” says Keith Comrie, who served as CAO from 1979 to 1999. “You don’t go through the worst recession without huge problems.”

Perhaps most important, Santana also appears to have the support of City Council president Herb Wesson, who has said that he would fight any efforts to remove Santana. The Council has the authority to override any move by the Mayor to replace the CAO.

The City Administrative Officer is appointed by the Mayor, and reports to both the Mayor and City Council. The position has been filled in the past by influential and respected officials, including Comrie, C. Erwin Piper and Bill Fujioka, L.A. County’s current Chief Executive Officer. For the system to work, the CAO must present the facts of the city’s financial picture in an impartial manner, so the Mayor and the Council can make informed decisions.

“People have to believe in the CAO’s numbers,” says Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University. Sonenshein, who has served as executive director of the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission, says the office of the CAO is little known to the general public but crucial to the efficient working of city government. “I think it’s quite important,” he says. “Hopefully, [he] brings professionalism and analytical skills to City Hall.”

Critics, including many in the labor movement and others inside City Hall, say that Santana’s job performance has been lacking, and they urge an open debate about whether he should continue in the job. Specific allegations include:

   Inaccurate Financial Projections – When trying to sell Measure A, the proposed half-cent sales tax increase, Santana earlier this year released a report titled “City at the Crossroads,” in which Santana appeared to overstate the consequences of not passing the measure. He said cuts to public safety would be “unavoidable,” warning of the loss of 500 police officers as well as cuts in park hours and closure of swimming pools. He also said the city faced a budget shortfall of almost $220 million and that the sales tax hike would erase the majority of it. In February, less than a month before the crucial vote, a former budget advisor to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the Los Angeles Times that Santana’s warnings were exaggerated. “If we’re making an argument that failure to pass a tax increase will result in drastic cuts, then the numbers the city uses had better be accurate,” said Matt Szabo, during his unsuccessful campaign for Eric Garcetti’s Council seat. “And I don’t think they are. The question people need to ask is, is [the shortfall] being overstated for the purpose of passing the sales tax?” The day after Measure A failed, Santana clarified that the actual deficit was only around $108 million –  and that it was unlikely the city would lay off any police officers. Critics say that Santana intentionally exaggerated the proposed deficit for the purpose of trying to pass the sales tax increase, an inappropriate use of the CAO’s office.

   Failure to provide accurate financial information to the Mayor and City Council – Critics say that before the Mayor submitted his 2013 budget, Santana knew of, but failed to report nearly $49 million in additional revenue to the city. The majority of this amount, $31.4 million, came from increased property tax revenues due to the statewide Community Redevelopment Agency dissolution, and was based on recent estimates from the state Department of Finance. Santana’s opponents say he should have known this windfall was coming, if not its exact amount. They claim he could have made an accurate projection by talking to state finance officials and reporting that to the Mayor’s office.

   Inaccurate reporting of federal economic stimulus data to the City Council – An audit by the city controller’s office, dated April 11, 2013 found that Santana’s office delivered inaccurate data to the City Council relating to federal economic stimulus grants to the city’s bureaus of Sanitation and Street Services, and the Department of Transportation, with a systematic underreporting of costs. Among other things, the audit shows a failure to source appropriate documents and an inability to uniformly manage communication within departments. “Especially during this time of staffing and budget challenges,” the audit states, “the City cannot afford to compromise ARRA [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] grant funds that have the potential to provide significant benefit to our local economy.”

    Failure to aggressively pursue new revenue opportunities – Santana’s detractors claim he has also failed to aggressively pursue new sources of revenue, including millions of dollars in potential revenue identified by the Commission on Revenue Efficiency. One CORE report found that the city loses an additional $21 to $25 million a year in revenue because rogue parking operators who collect the money from customers fail to turn it over to the city. Critics say Santana has failed to move quickly enough to collect an estimated $60 to $80 million owed to the city that is collectable and has ignored calls to centralize the collections process.

In an interview with Frying Pan News, Santana vigorously defended his job performance.

“We didn’t know about it at the time because it’s a very unpredictable and uncertain process,” he said of the windfall resulting from the CRA’s dissolution. Among other things, he said he has provided accurate financial information, analyses and recommendations to the Mayor, the City Council and the public.

“The city has gone through this traumatic period,” he said. “We were in a very dangerous place four years ago and we’ve made slow and steady progress. There’s no exaggeration – the facts are what they are.”

Talking about his support for the controversial sales tax hike, Santana said, “Had Measure A passed, the structural deficit would have been eliminated and we’d be talking about restoring services in a significant way.”

Referring to himself and his staff, he said, “We feel very proud of the work we’ve done.”

In addition to the criticism of Santana’s projections, he has faced scrutiny over his role in labor negotiations and his difficult relationship with union leaders. While it’s not unusual for CAOs to have a rocky rapport with labor, Santana’s dealings with union leaders seem exceptionally contentious. During the Mayor’s race union officials pushed the candidates to state whether they would retain Santana if elected. None of the candidates, including Eric Garcetti, declared at the time that they would choose a new CAO.

City Hall sources say that questions have been raised about Santana’s effectiveness. In early 2011, with labor talks stalled, responsibility for the negotiations were quietly transferred to officials in the Mayor’s offices and then council president Garcetti’s office, according to one insider. An agreement was reached with labor in March 2011 that called for thousands of city workers to increase their health-care and pension contributions in exchange for an end to furloughs caused by the financial crisis.

Santana acknowledges that he has had an up-and-down relationship with labor.

“Overall, my relationship with labor is that what normally exists between management and labor . . . There’s always moments in time when each side is not happy with each other.”

Beyond his contested financial projections and controversial relationship with labor, Santana has also come under fire for his aggressive efforts to privatize government operations. Typically in such scenarios, government gives control of public functions and services to a private company. A city or state pays a private company to perform public services. Supporters of privatization claim that private companies can be more efficient. Opponents say there is no evidence of this and that there are serious risks involved.

Privatization means giving up important controls and safeguards, as well as transparency over public functions. Also, once the service is privatized, the public loses its ability to examine crucial information relating to that service – and is shut out of the decision-making process. There are numerous documented examples in which privatization has resulted in diminished services, cost increases, reduced access to services and inadequate safeguards against corruption.

Santana says he believes that certain city services and functions – particularly the zoo, Convention Center and ambulance billing and collection – can best be performed by the private sector:

“If you look at what’s most successful, in terms of zoos, 80 percent are run by private foundations . . . The three most successful [convention centers] are privately managed.”

“It’s not a wholesale agenda to privatize government,” he says of his economic strategy for L.A.  “I’m the biggest believer in government. My whole career has been in public service and government. I believe government has a big role to play. I also understand we have limitations.” He said that privatizing selected operations such as the zoo and Convention Center would better allow city government to focus on its core services, including public safety, libraries and quality of life services.

Steve Koffroth, a business representative for Council 36 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), is critical of Santana’s privatization proposals.

“His efforts to contract out shows he is willing to sacrifice protection of public services for profit,” says Koffroth. AFSCME Council 36 represents public sector workers in Southern California – many of whom in the city of Los Angeles have been directly affected by Santana’s positions.

As the new Mayor prepares to take office, one of his key decisions is whether to re-appoint Santana as the city’s top budget official.

“I report to both the Mayor and the City Council,” Santana said. “Part of my job is to raise issues and make recommendations that are often difficult for them to confront. Some people may criticize the messenger in that process. At the end of the day, I’m not the one that makes the final decisions.”

AFSCME’s Steve Koffroth remains unconvinced that incumbency should be its own reward.

“The question in my mind about keeping Santana in that position,” Koffroth says, “is whether he is really there to serve the public good.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)

By Gary Cohn

For five years a chorus of voices has been predicting bankruptcy for Los Angeles, while often calling for deeper cuts to city employee pensions. Yesterday, however, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed a budget for Fiscal Year 2013-2014 that includes a one-time surplus of $119 million. While some of that surplus would rely on additional pay and benefit reductions for city workers, even without such cuts the city would have a projected surplus of close to $100 million.

“It’s better than seeing the light at the end of the tunnel – we’re almost out of the tunnel!” Matt Szabo, Mayor Villaraigosa’s deputy chief of staff, told Frying Pan News in an interview last week. Szabo discussed the city’s financial picture and said that dire financial warnings have been largely overblown.

“One of the issues that’s highly irritating is the ease with which some people have thrown around the bankruptcy term,” Szabo said. “That’s not going to happen.”

Only last year City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, Los Angeles’ top budget official, cautioned that the city could face bankruptcy or a breakdown in essential city services, unless it adopted new taxes, laid off city workers and privatized certain city services. Among other options, he said the city should consider contracting out management of the Convention Center and zoo, and hiring private companies to take over ambulance service from the Fire Department.

Santana’s gloomy prophesies have been just one part of a steady drumbeat of warnings about bankruptcy and other potential disasters allegedly facing the city – warnings that usually circle back to a supposed need to curb city employee pensions.

“Los Angeles is facing a terminal fiscal crisis: Between now and 2014 the city will likely declare bankruptcy,” wrote former mayor Richard Riordan and Alexander Rubalcava, the president of an investment advisory firm, in a 2010 Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Two years later, Riordan promoted a ballot initiative to get voters to approve “pension reform” that would have made changes to employee pensions that were more radical than city unions have already agreed to.

Riordan’s measure never made it onto the 2013 ballot, but its motivating fear of insolvency – accompanied by fingerpointing at employee pensions — remains a potent mantra in some quarters.

More recently, Mayor Villaraigosa and other officials warned of cutbacks in services and layoffs of police officers if voters didn’t approve a sales-tax increase. The day after the proposal lost, however, Villaraigosa acknowledged that the budget shortfall was far less than what he had been claiming it was. (While some observers were critical of the mayor’s initial claims about the shortfall, they continue to support the need for new revenues.)

The city’s financial situation – and bankruptcy panic — has dominated the mayor’s race, with some candidates in the winter primary arguing that the city is on the brink of ruin. The city’s budget problems took center stage at Royce Hall during a January mayoral debate at UCLA.

“Bankruptcy doesn’t happen overnight,” pro-business mayoral candidate Kevin James said during the debate. “This happened over a period of time because of a series of bad decisions.” James later told Frying Pan News that if elected, he “would seek a temporary revision of [employee] raises” and would “ask our city employees to invest in our future by foregoing . . . future raises.”

Sitting in his third-floor City Hall office, Szabo said city workers have been unfairly singled out over the past several years for Los Angeles’ financial difficulties.

“It’s an easy argument to make, it’s easy to scapegoat the employees and say city employees get paid too much,” Szabo said. “I don’t buy into demonizing city employees. It’s counterproductive in every way.”

Szabo suggested that the bankruptcy projections may have come from people with political agendas, such as those favoring the privatization or contracting out of city services. “It’s to the advantage of those that have an interest in the dismantlement of public sector work to cry bankruptcy,” he said.

“Some people have tried to use city and state [fiscal difficulties] for a political agenda, and have often tried to blame public sector workers for the financial problems,” says David Madland, director of the American Worker Project at Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. “They’ve particularly gone after public sector pensions.” He adds: “When you have one side pushing the extreme argument that city governments are collapsing and blaming it on public sector workers, it permeates into more centrist [thinking].”

Nationally such efforts are largely being pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is heavily funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.

“There is an ideological and self-interest agenda.” says Madland. “They get a scapegoat for budget problems instead of raising taxes on the wealthy.”

Like most cities across the country, Los Angeles was hit hard by the recession. But studies by the respected Pew Charitable Trusts have consistently found that Los Angeles is in relatively good financial shape.

In a study released this year, Pew found that cites have seriously underfunded pension and retiree health plans. But among the cities surveyed, Los Angeles had a relatively healthy pension funding level of 89 percent as of fiscal year 2009 (the most recent year for which numbers were available) and was near the top in terms of money set aside for retiree health costs, though it had put aside only 55 percent of the funds it will need for retiree health costs.

The reasons for Los Angeles’ comparatively good financial condition include a legal groundwork laid years ago that required specific funding safeguards, recent give-backs from public sector unions and an improving economy.

Some of Los Angeles’ financial problems, moreover, can be traced to lost revenue opportunities. For instance, the city currently collects about $85 million a year in taxes from parking lot operators. But, according to a report last year from the Commission on Revenue Efficiency, it is losing out on an additional $21 to $25 million a year in revenue because rogue parking lot operators who collect the money from customers fail to turn it over to the city.

A prime cause is that many parking lot operators accept only cash. The situation is made worse by the fact that city officials don’t even know how many parking lots are operating in the city, according to the commission and a separate city audit. The problem could be easily fixed, at least partly, by requiring parking lot operators to accept credit and debit cards, so the tax revenue can be traced or funneled directly to the city, the commission found.

The financial problems of the past five years have taken their toll on city residents and neighborhoods. City libraries had their hours reduced, street and sidewalk repairs were deferred, and swimming pool repairs were put off. With the exception of emergencies, there was a decades-long waiting list for tree trimming.

City officials and budget documents cite several factors for the turnaround, including anticipated growth in property, sales and other tax revenues, pension savings and reductions in certain city services.

The mayor’s budget anticipates that the $119 million surplus will go toward sidewalk repair, tree trimming services, replacement of police cars, fixing public pools, graffiti removal and citywide arts funding. It also proposes restoring seven-day service at the Central Library, while avoiding layoffs and furloughs of city employees.

However, an accompanying budget summary notes that the mayor’s budget

“Proposes the elimination of 5.5 percent pay raises scheduled for January 1, 2014 for 60 percent of the City’s civilian workforce

Proposes that all civilian City employees cover 10 percent of their health benefit premium costs on an on-going basis”

Cheryl Parisi, whose American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union represents 9,000 city workers, deferred comment on the new budget until the Coalition of LA City Unions, of which AFSCME District Council 36 is a member, has time to review its details. In the meantime she released a statement which said of the budget:

“After looking it over briefly, we are glad to see that the Mayor is putting some much-needed money back into funding critical city services such as road repair and tree trimming. Our concern is that this budget does not go far enough to protect the people of Los Angeles now and in the future as our city continues to recover from the recession of the past few years.”

Last week Szabo, sounding a cautiously optimistic note, said, “The next administration is going to have a tremendous opportunity – and a tremendous responsibility – to build back the city we had to break down. The next mayor is going to have an opportunity to do things to make people believe we are on a comeback.”

(Gary Cohn writes for Frying Pan News.)