Feature

Amazon Army, Southeast Kansas

Southeast Kansas is a proud place—a place of earth and agriculture, steeped in coal and hard work—the region covers nearly 7,500 square miles and is home to over 190,000 people. The land is punctuated with wooded hills surrounding deep waterways, scars left from strip mining coal with large steam shovels. One shovel, the second largest of its kind at the time it was in operation, still stands where it was last used, a silent sentinel on the prairie, reminding us of the sacrifice and toil of generations gone by.

We’ve done it before—the people of Southeast Kansas have stood up to their oppressors and caused change.

Around the turn of the century, fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons spent their waking hours in the dark of the coal mines, sacrificing their health, and sometimes their lives, so the rest of America could have coal. They were subjected to suppression and labor exploitation, and families were being destroyed. Finally, the mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters, of the miners unified, and in 1921, came to be known as the Amazon Army. Holding American flags high, two to six thousand women marched through the coalfields in protest of the unfair and unjust working conditions and labor laws that oppressed the people of the region.  Armed only with red pepper, these women stood toe-to-toe with rifle and shotgun-bearing militia, catapulting the plight of Southeast Kansas coal miners into national newspapers, and forever changing the history of the region. But when the coal ran dry, this place was forgotten. Abandoned by the national eye, it became just another corner of a “flyover state.”

However, people are still here, and we are not flyover people. Southeast Kansans toil in manufacturing, farming, service industries, and education. We have successful business entrepreneurs, quality community colleges, and a Regents University.  However, there is an economic divide that continues to grow. The overall poverty rate reaches up to 23% in one county; the child poverty rate is nearly 29%–as high as 38.8% in one county.  In most school systems, 50 to 75% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Low wages in the region make it difficult to find safe and affordable housing, and 55% of the housing stock is over 54 years old. Our elders are slipping into poverty after retirement, with nearly 10% currently living below the federal poverty line. And our average annual income from wages continues a ten-year declining trend. We are working so hard to make ends meet, that we have had little energy left to question why our economy isn’t growing, why our wages aren’t increasing, and why our civic voice isn’t being heard.

Without the leveraging power of coal, Southeast Kansans have found it difficult to stand up to the continuous attack on our future. The attack comes by way of monetary manipulation within our state legislature, which has passed one of largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever enacted by any state while leaving our schools underfunded, and our most vulnerable without medical access.  They claimed these cuts would boost our economy, but according to the Kansas Department of Revenue, tax revenue in April dropped 45 percent from the prior year—$92 million short of forecasts.

We have also faced the single largest cut to Kansas public education in state history, with more than $104 million sliced from Kansas classrooms; these cuts left school funding levels so low that the Kansas Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.  Another highly controversial school funding bill literally passed in the middle of the night, stripping teachers of due process rights and handing out corporate tax breaks by cutting funding for at-risk kids.  And most recently, legislators passed a last-minute budget deal to transfer $5 million from early childhood program funds to an agency that invests in bioscience companies.

At the same time that tax cuts for the wealthy are shrinking needed revenues, Kansas has also rejected federal Medicaid expansion, leaving one in six Kansas adults under 65 without health insurance; nearly 100,000 Kansans in more than 150 industries without access to affordable healthcare.

We’ve done it before—the people of Southeast Kansas have stood up to their oppressors and caused change. Today, we hear gunshots ring out as we harvest deer for the year’s meat.  We hear water lapping at the banks of the pits and rivers, as we search for fish to fill our freezers. And people are starting to organize. We are forming organizations and coalitions to take control of our future, grow our own businesses, promote equitable economic development, and solutions to poor health outcomes. Economic development initiatives like Project 17, spanning 17 counties—and the Joplin Regional Prosperity Initiative, spanning 7 counties—are focused on workforce development and living wage job creation. Pittsburg’s Downtown Group and Get Independence are determined to revitalize the central business districts, promoting music, art, and culture. Local farmers and ranchers are being supported through groups like Eat Well Crawford County and the Food Policy Council forming in Iola. And county health rankings are improving, along with our overall quality of life, thanks to groups like Thrive Allen County and Live Well Crawford County.

A movement is beginning to swell—a movement that will create our own version of the Amazon Army and stand toe-to-toe with the income inequality and injustice that is ruining our region, our state, and our country.

 

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Analysis

Getting Pre-K in the USA

We all know there’s a connection between fighting poverty and expanding access to early childhood education. Children who attend pre-K are more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, be employed at age 40 and earn higher wages. Indeed, economists estimate that for every $1 we invest in early childhood education, we yield $7 in return on investment.

Every kid deserves a fair shot in life and that starts with a quality education, early on. So how are we doing?

The short and immediate, look-just-beyond-your nose answer is: not good. Last year, for the first time in a decade, fewer 4-year-olds had access to pre-K than the year before – a modest nationwide decline of 9,000 kids in all, according to the 2013 State Preschool Yearbook, published by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

But the long-term forecast is a good deal rosier. In state after state, legislators are waking up to more favorable fiscal outlooks at the same time that new coalitions of educators, social scientists, law enforcement officials, pediatricians, nurses and others are singing the praises of early intervention.

The individual empowerment will happen as a result of neighbor talking to neighbor and groups that are fighting for pre-K...

The list of states that have made progress in establishing pre-K is growing longer: Alabama. Arizona. Georgia. Illinois. Maryland. Oklahoma. In other places, like Pennsylvania, the debate is raging. Pollsters Celinda Lake and Christine Matthews recently outlined the debate in an op-ed published in Pennsylvania:

“What we are seeing around the country in the campaigns of many candidates this election season is broad support for access to high-quality pre-k. It was a central issue in the recent New York City mayor’s race, and it’s a simmering one in the hotly contested race for governor in Texas. Why now? And why in such very different political environments?

“Voters strongly value education and believe that pre-K education helps children arrive to Kindergarten (and beyond) ready to learn. Voters believe pre-K can improve a child’s social skills, which helps them through grade school. They see the long-term benefits in terms of better test scores, graduation rates, and lifetime earnings and employment.

“They overwhelmingly agree that the more kids who have access to high-quality pre-k, the better it is for ALL students in kindergarten classrooms, so teachers aren’t stretched doing remediation and classrooms aren’t disrupted.”

Politically, the issue seems to have resonance for two reasons. First, at the local level, education historically has not been viewed as a partisan issue. In fact, if you look at the three states with the highest enrollment of 4-year-olds in pre-K, one state is decidedly red (Oklahoma), one state is decidedly blue (Vermont), and one state is decidedly mixed (Florida).

Second, bipartisan support has emerged – and is strengthening – for pre-K. Again we turn to Lake and Matthews:

“Why does this seem to be a political moment for pre-k? The political will to invest in high-quality pre-k around the nation may also reflect what our research in Pennsylvania tells us: there is broad bi-partisan support for pre-k.

“Eighty-three (83) percent of Democrats, 61 percent of Independents, and 56 percent of Republicans favor ensuring every 3 and 4 year old in Pennsylvania has access to voluntary, high quality pre-K programs. In fact a majority of Pennsylvania voters see the benefit as so clear that they support increased state funding for such programs (59 percent) – Pennsylvania voters, like those in many other states, recognize the results justify the investment.”

So how do we bring this home and make universal pre-K a reality in the U.S.? It is only going to happen through a combination of public education and individual empowerment. The public education is happening – we see it in the letters to the editor and op-eds that, with increased regularity, are appearing in publications across the country.

The individual empowerment will happen as a result of neighbor talking to neighbor and groups that are fighting for pre-K (like Fair Share Education Fund) providing ordinary Americans with a platform to demand action. And it will happen when Americans realize that the benefits of pre-K go well beyond childhood education – they’re good for families and good for the economy.

Just ask Jill McCain Santiago, a lawyer and mother of two who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Massachusetts Fair Share recruited McCain Santiago to tell her story of how pre-K allowed her to go back to work, expand her law practice and hire additional employees. “We’re so thankful to have both boys in safe, caring learning environments that are helping them prepare for kindergarten and beyond,” McCain Santiago said. “This has allowed me to grow my business … I’ve been able to hire two employees and serve more families.  I strongly believe that all families deserve the fair shot that we have been lucky enough to get.”

 

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First Person

Rebuilding Our Life in an Unfamiliar Town

In June of 2010, I found myself fleeing domestic violence without any money, unemployed, homeless, and with my two children. Scared for my safety and overwhelmed with the responsibility of rebuilding our life in an unfamiliar town, I had no idea where to begin.

A local crisis center referred me to the Blue Valley Community Action Partnership for assistance with food and housing. After listening to my situation, the staff treated me with dignity as they provided my family with nutritious food from the food pantry, clothing, household goods, and new backpacks full of school supplies for my children. My family was enrolled in the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program, which enabled me to find a safe home by providing temporary financial assistance for rent and utilities.

I enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, so I could buy groceries. And Medicaid provided us with vaccinations, medical and dental care, prescriptions, and counseling services, which allowed my kids to enroll in a new school.

The security of having a home, food, and medical care was a tremendous weight off my shoulders, allowing me to focus on finding employment in our small rural community. In August, two months after initially receiving help, I obtained a part-time job at a retail store. A few weeks later, I became a full-time employee as a case coordinator for the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program when it became available at the Blue Valley Community Action Partnership, the same program that originally helped me.

I have now been employed there for more than three years and gained the job skills needed to advance to my current position as a research and development officer.

It has been a struggle to become financially independent; at times I needed to work two jobs and had to rely on income tax credits to make ends meet, but I am fortunate to no longer need assistance for my family’s basic needs.

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Analysis

The Fair Food Program: Worker-Driven Social Responsibility for the 21st Century

When the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) announced its historic agreement with Wal-Mart on January 16, 2014, Alexandra Guaqueta, the Chairwoman of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, traveled from Bogota, Colombia, to Immokalee, Florida, and read a statement on behalf of the UN.  She said, “We are here to support the Immokalee workers and the Fair Food Program, which offers such promise for us all.”  She went on to praise the Program as a “ground-breaking accountability arrangement” comprised of a “smart mix of tools” and “closely aligned with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”  Finally, she expressed the UN’s eagerness to see the Fair Food Program “serve as a model elsewhere in the world.”

Since its inception in 2011, the Fair Food Program has been in operation in more than 90% of Florida’s $650 million tomato industry, and the changes it has achieved in just three years – identifying and eliminating the bad actors and bad practices that plagued Florida’s fields for decades, and establishing new practices and policies that promote a safer, more humane workplace – have been astonishing.

In a recent front-page feature in the New York Times, Rutgers labor studies professor Janice Fine called the Fair Food Program “the best workplace monitoring program” in the U.S., while Susan Marquis, Dean of the Pardee RAND Graduate School, noted, “Now the tomato fields in Immokalee are probably the best working environment in American agriculture. In the past three years, they’ve gone from being the worst to the best.” The contrast between the Florida tomato industry and other sectors of U.S. agriculture is now stark, a fact that workers themselves are quick to note as they move from crop to crop throughout the year.

Prior to the launch of the Fair Food Program, labor conditions in the Florida tomato industry – including stolen wages, forced labor and slavery, sexual harassment and rape, and endemic violence – were among the most abusive found anywhere. In 2008, Senator Bernie Sanders stated, “I think those workers are more ruthlessly exploited and treated with more contempt than any group of workers that I’ve ever seen and I suspect exist in the U.S.” He added, “the norm is a disaster, the extreme is slavery.”  Senator Sanders was right.  In the fifteen years before the inception of the Fair Food Program, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted nine cases of modern slavery in Florida, involving more than 1,200 workers and resulting in prison terms of up to 30 years.  Seven of those prosecutions were done with the help of the CIW.  Conditions were so bad that, in 2003, one federal prosecutor described Florida’s fields as “ground zero for modern-slavery.”

But there have been no cases of modern-day slavery on Fair Food Program farms since the inception of the program, thanks to the severe market consequences for violators of its zero tolerance policy for forced labor.  And today, the Fair Food Program is poised to expand.  Demands on the Program to share its many lessons for the effective protection of human rights in corporate supply chains – as well as to scale up and expand its reach – are growing daily, as news of the model makes its way out of the fields of Florida to communities of workers and human rights organizations from California to Bangladesh.

What is the Fair Food Program?

How did a program born in the small, hardscrabble farmworker community of Immokalee, Florida become a leading model for the protection of human rights on the global level?

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to ask another question: “What if workers designed a social responsibility program to protect their own human rights?”  What would such a worker-designed social responsibility program look like?

The Fair Food Program is the answer to that question.  Take a moment to think about workers in any labor-intensive industry – garment, assembly, agriculture – given the time and space to study past social responsibility efforts and to build their own from scratch; sitting together, arguing, agreeing, and ultimately constructing a program to protect their own rights from the bottom up.  Some of the elements that might emerge from such a process would likely include:

A Code of Conduct with real rights: With actual workers creating their own code of conduct, it would extend beyond requiring compliance with generic standards like those of the International Labor Organization or local laws and regulations. Workers would include concrete wage increases and identify industry-specific reforms that simply wouldn’t occur to outside architects of social accountability programs.  For example, requiring unpaid work – in agriculture, workers were forced to overfill buckets when paid by the piece – would be prohibited.  Only workers know the more subtle forms their exploitation has taken over the years – the schemes designed by their employers – which comprise the net that has trapped them in poverty for decades.

Enforcement as important as the standards themselves: Most corporate social responsibility programs pay lip service – at best – to the need to enforce their standards, but a worker-designed program would put the emphasis on enforcement, because the very reason for building the program is to end longstanding abuses, not just to elaborate an attractive set of new rights.  The enforcement system would feature an important, driving role for workers themselves, including: a grievance procedure with easy access for workers and an efficient and effective response to worker complaints; wall-to-wall worker education, so that workers themselves can be the 24-hour monitors needed to ensure compliance – if all workers are informed of their rights, abusers have nowhere to safely ply their trade; an audit process that gets behind closed doors, and into the records and policies that workers themselves can’t access, because there is always a percentage of abuses that are outside the sight of the workers, like systematic minimum wage theft through the doctoring of hours.

Enforcement with real teeth: Workers know that the most direct route to getting their employers’ attention is through their bottom line.  So workers would make sure there are real, measurable financial consequences for any human rights violations – market consequences – the ultimate hammer behind the enforcement of their rights.

These are some of the elements that a worker-developed social responsibility program would include, and those are the principal elements that comprise the Fair Food Program’s uniquely successful model.

Theory Meets Reality

Fortunately, we know that this theory of a worker-designed social responsibility program is not simply an idea – it’s now tested and proven to work. In the fields of Florida, a place once called “ground zero for modern-day slavery”, the Fair Food Program is now in its third season of operation, and the results are an unprecedented success.  To date:

  • The CIW has educated approximately 20,000 workers, face-to-face, on their rights within the program;
  • Workers have brought forth over 500 complaints under the Code of Conduct, resulting in the resolution of abuses ranging from sexual harassment and verbal abuse to wage violations;
  • The Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC) – the third-party created to monitor and enforce the Fair Food Program – has conducted over 100 comprehensive audits, visited 50 farm locations, and interviewed approximately 7,000 workers to assess Participating Growers’ implementation of the Fair Food Code of Conduct; and
  • Participating Buyers have paid over $14 million in Fair Food Premiums to boost workers’ sub-poverty wages.

Lastly, there have been no cases of slavery uncovered at Participating Growers’ operations. This absence of slavery cases has held despite the fact that the Fair Food Program has dramatically increased transparency at the farm level. FFSC investigators have significantly more access to workers than ever before, and workers now know their rights and have access to an effective complaint mechanism. In fact, it is precisely because of this significantly increased transparency – and because growers know they will lose the right to sell their tomatoes to twelve of the largest tomato buyers in the world if forced labor is found on their farm – that slavery is, finally, a thing of the past on Fair Food Program farms.

Wal-Mart’s entry into the Fair Food Program has set the stage for the Program’s expansion – both beyond the Florida border and into other crops – in the coming months and years.

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Analysis

Why Brown v Board Was Unsuccessful in Ensuring Equal Educational Outcomes

Sixty years ago, Brown v. Board of Education ended formal school segregation. Focusing attention on black subjugation, the ruling also sparked “freedom rides,” sit-ins, voter registration efforts, and other actions leading to civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and 1960s. But Brown was unsuccessful in its own mission—ensuring equal educational outcomes for blacks and whites.

There were initial integration gains following Brown, especially in the South, but these stalled after courts stopped enforcing desegregation in the 1980s. Low-income black children are more racially and socioeconomically isolated now than then. Segregation persists as a central feature of American schooling.

Certainly, African American student achievement has improved dramatically in recent decades, although politically popular and conventional commentary ignores this. We don’t have reliable achievement measures from 1954, but have good recent data from the federal sampled test of math and reading, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It shows, for example, that on average, black fourth-graders now do math as well as or better than whites did only a generation ago. Yet because white achievement has also improved, the black-white gap remains, making the Brown litigants’ hopes for equal employment qualification a distant goal. Average black students still perform better than only about 25 percent of whites.

Schools for black children had enormous resource shortages in 1954, especially in the South. Inequalities still exist, there and nationwide, but are relatively small overall. We now understand, however, that equality is itself insufficient; disadvantaged students require many more resources than middle class whites to prepare for school success.

Children with less literate parents are read to less frequently. Compensation requires high-quality early childhood programs, from birth. Public discussion has barely acknowledged this, mostly supporting prekindergarten classes beginning only at ages 3 or 4. Early childhood programs, as well as nurse home-visiting services that support more effective maternal caregiving, are necessary, but expensive.

The most important predictor of later academic success is young children’s general background knowledge. Having visited a zoo predicts reading ability better than knowing how to sound-out letters that spell animal names. For older youth, participation is necessary in after-school and summer programs that don’t stop at academic remediation and homework help, but include organized athletics, field trips, club activity and music, art, and dance, comparable to what middle-class children take for granted. This, too, is costly.

For young minority children from lower-social-class backgrounds, smaller classes can boost achievement, because in them, children get more adult attention. Class size reduction is also costly. So is ensuring that disadvantaged children have teachers more skilled (and with different skills) than typical, well-qualified teachers of middle-class children.

Racially isolated communities typically have fewer primary care physicians, so children receive less routine and preventive health care (even with Medicaid or private health insurance), contributing to greater absenteeism. They also have unique health problems contributing to lower achievement—for example, iron-deficiency anemia and lead poisoning, or asthma from living in less healthy environments. They tend not to get corrective lenses for vision problems. Putting full-service health clinics, with pediatric nurse practitioners, optometrists, dentists and dental hygienists, in schools serving disadvantaged students is an added component of narrowed achievement gaps.

All these added resources – early childhood care and education, after school and summer programs, smaller classes, better teachers, full service clinics – are expensive, yet even in the unlikely event we were prepared to make these investments, students will rarely be successful in racially and economically isolated schools where learning is disrupted because families’ unstable housing leads to frequent moves, disrupting learning; where involvement of more-educated parents is absent; and where students lack adult and peer models of educational success. When a few children in a classroom come from homes with less literacy, a skilled teacher can give those children special attention. But when most children have these disadvantages, the average instructional level must decline. When most or even many children are sorely stressed, having endured life in a violent neighborhood, teachers must devote more time to discipline, less to learning.

Schools remain segregated today because neighborhoods in which they are located are segregated. Raising achievement of low-income black children requires residential integration, from which school integration can follow.

What few, even among sophisticated policymakers, realize is that the segregation of our major metropolitan areas was the product of explicit public policy. These housing policies were as unconstitutional as separate-but-equal education, yet have never been remedied. Congress adopted the 1949 Housing Act, subsidizing public housing construction nationwide, only after voting to permit racial segregation of the projects. As a result, projects for African Americans were placed only in neighborhoods where the black population could be concentrated, while projects for middle class whites were placed outside the ghetto. With the black population increasingly encircled in central cities, federal policy complemented public housing for blacks with suburban single family homes for whites. This was also explicit policy. When the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration guaranteed construction loans for mass production suburban builders, an explicit condition was attached that no homes be sold to black families. Iconic developments like the Levittowns on the East Coast, Daly City south of San Francisco, and Lakewood south of Los Angeles received federal guarantees on condition that they be white-only. Similar racially homogenous suburbs were created by federal policy in many, perhaps most other metropolitan areas between the two coasts.

This history is not easily undone. White working class families that moved to these suburbs in the late 1940s and 1950s subsequently benefited from equity appreciation and used that equity to send children to college and to secure their places in the middle class. Working class African Americans not only lost the opportunity to gain housing wealth in the postwar boom, but were also excluded from job opportunities as industry moved to the suburbs in this period.

It will require public policy as aggressive to integrate suburbs as it was aggressive to segregate them. But Federal requirements that communities pursue residential integration have been unenforced, and federal programs to subsidize movement of low-income families to middle-class communities have been weak and ineffective. In most states, landlords are permitted to refuse rentals to families with housing vouchers, ensuring that those families typically remain in high poverty neighborhoods. Many suburbs have zoning ordinances that prohibit apartment or moderate income housing, effectively barring all but the most affluent families. Inadequate transportation infrastructure reinforces racial isolation because low income families who could move to middle class communities would then be without access to jobs.

Education policy is housing policy. In some small cities, or in some racial borderline areas where mostly black and mostly white neighborhoods touch, school integration can be accomplished with attendance zone modifications, magnet schools, or controlled choice programs. But most disadvantaged black children now live too far from middle class suburbs for such programs to do the job on their own. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to substantially narrow the black-white achievement gap without mobility programs that permit disadvantaged families locked in urban ghettos to integrate with the broader suburban population.

 

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