Embracing Equity: Project 2025 and PA School Funding

Lately I've been stumbling over references to something called Project 2025. I'm not big into conspiracy theories, so didn't pay much attention until I saw repeated mentions and warnings from columnists I respect. This week I tracked down the 900+ page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, released in April,
2023. As the introduction explains:

The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative‌ Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025. ...

History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days. To execute requires a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan and a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it... 

For conservatives to have a fighting chance to take on the Administrative State and reform our federal government, the work must start now. 

From start to finish, the Project 2025 mandate sets up an us-vs-them dynamic that mischaracterizes opponents and politicizes long-standing areas of settled bipartisan policy. The forward summary sets the tone: 

Contemporary elites ... repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening" .... The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.

Over 400 individuals, from dozens of conservative foundations and other institutions, contributed to detailed plans to dismantle federal infrastructure and roll back efforts to promote equity and inclusion. The word equity appears throughout the document as a prime indicator of "woke" agendas in schools, land conservation, military oversight, health care, even the Treasury Department.

I'm doubtful I'll read the entire 900 some pages, but the parts I have read suggest the authors believe "equity" is an anti-Christian, anti-conservative, radical, racist, destructive concept.

What's so bad about equity? Here's a derisive summary from one of the contributing organizations, the Center for Renewing America: 

Equity: A forced equality of outcomes and a rejection of equality of opportunity. Equity contradicts the basic constitutional promise of equality under the law and instead requires identity-based prioritization (oppressed) or discrimination (oppressor) in hiring, distribution of benefits, services, government contracts, and any aspect of society where opportunity, resources, and power can be redistributed. 

The document would suggest that equity was a fairly recent evil, launched in the radical seventies but brought to fruition by Barack Obama and, even more, by President Joe Biden.

But here's what I read in Psalm 99:4 this morning (scholar-endorsed NIV translation):

The King is mighty, he loves justice—
    you have established equity;
in Jacob you have done
    what is just and right.

The Hebrew word translated here as "equity" is meyshar (מֵישָׁר) an architectural term sometimes translated as level, at other times translated as fair. 

It's hard to be 100% certain of the translation of ancient words from a culture far different from our own. But read the prophetic books with a halfway open mind and you'll see very quickly that part of God's covenant involves treating others as we would want to be treated and ensuring that the least among us are provided for. 

Woe to those who mistreatment the poor, the defenseless, the needy, the stranger.

Woe to those who deprive workers their due, or hoard resources while others go hungry. 

That sounds like equity to me. Yet any hint of a leveled playing field seems offensive to the authors of Project 2025. 

I'll likely be writing more about Project 2025 and prophetic words that apply to current politics, but for today, to bring this closer to home: I've been grieving and praying this week about Pennsylvania budget discussions. The budget deadline was June 30. A final budget has yet to appear.

PA has had decades of inequitable, inadequate funding. A seven year school funding lawsuit ended over a year ago with a Commonwealth Court judge decision that current funding levels are inadequate and unlawful. A proposed budget would take partial steps toward a long-overdue remedy, but some PA leaders are holding out for a new voucher program, more money for tax credit scholarships, and a decrease in PA's flat income tax that would benefit PA's wealthiest earners while doing little to help lower wage earners. 

Press statements and social media posts rejecting proposed increases in funding insist instead on school choice and parent empowerment. 

Project 2025 lists that as the first agenda item in the section on education:

Advancing education freedom. Empowering families to choose among a diverse set of education options is key to reform and improved outcomes, and it can be achieved without establishing a new federal program. For example, portability of existing federal education spending to fund families directly or allowing federal tax credits to encourage voluntary contributions to K–12 education savings accounts managed by charitable nonprofits, could significantly advance education choice. (p322)

That all sounds great for hearts shaped by privilege and power. 

My own heart was shaped by loss, need and a deep gratitude for God's love for the poor and powerless.

I know, from my own experience and that of low-income friends: public funding of school choice may work well for families with two educated parents, ability to research and choose the best (elite) options, and finances available to make up the difference between funds provided and total funds needed.

Choice doesn't work so well for poor rural families where even the local public schools are a long bus ride away.

Or in regions where the only "choices" are small religious schools taught by uncertified teachers.

Or for English language learners whose parents don't speak English. 

Choice has little to offer special needs children rejected by private schools that can say "we don't serve kids like these."

It doesn't work well for children whose parents or guardians have no background or bandwidth to seek out options or fulfill private school requirements of volunteer hours.

There's plenty of evidence about the failures of vouchers and misuse of public dollars to provide parents with school choice. 

And when it comes to budget bottom lines? 

Every dollar spent on private school choice is a dollar less for Pennsylvania's hundreds of underfunded public schools. Many don't have libraries, auditoriums, music and art programs, full-time counselors or after school programs. 

Parents, teachers and PA school boards have been crying out for years for adequate, equitable school funding. Will they be heard this year, after decades of being ignored?

For today, NOW, as budget discussions continue, I ask your prayer. 

For wisdom for Pennsylvania's legislative leaders as they finalize the budget, for equity and justice in their school funding decisions, and, for us all, to see our own part in embracing equity and ensuring a more just future for every child, no matter who their parents are. 

What Are Workers Worth?

 “Don’t muzzle an ox when you are using it to grind grain.”

 “Workers are worth their pay.” (I Timothy 5:18)

Happy Labor Day!

Today I’m starting a series of posts about issues of importance in the upcoming state and local elections.

And today, in honor of Labor Day, the topic is labor law, wages, and our growing class of working poor.

It's a heavy, complicated topic, and I'm only scratching the surface. 

Even so, it's a topic worth struggling with.

For American workers, state elections are far more important than most of us realize.

Minimum wage, laws regulating overtime and sick leave, protections against wage theft, the role of unions: these are all heavily influenced by state legislators, many facing election on November 4.

Non-presidential elections often slip by with little attention, but for workers, state elections carry heavy consequences, and are often decided by just a handful of votes. A candidate for my own state senate race, canvassing door to door, reminded me that some area elections have been decided by single digit numbers; a look at Wikipedia’s list of “close elections” shows that some state elections have been decided by just one vote.

I may have said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m a registered Independent. There are aspects of every party platform that I can’t support, and I’m looking for candidates whose positions are shaped by wisdom, concern for justice,  personal courage and conviction, rather than dictated by the prevailing party machine.

So – in what way is my own vote shaped by my understanding of work and concern for the rights of workers?

I posted about work, and workers, several years ago, and still affirm my conclusions: 

Of all people, Christ’s followers should be first to advocate for fair pay, fair conditions, equal benefits for workers.

In the three years since posting that I've seen up close, through the lives of friends, the challenges of low-income workers. Aheadline just last week threw those challenges into sharp relief: a woman working four part-time jobs died while napping in her car between shifts.

An analysis by the non-profit, non-partisan Center forBudget and Policy Priorities describes the accumulating forces that have undermined earning power and put workers in jeopardy:

The federal minimum wage ($7.25) and minimum for tipped employees ($2.13) have not kept pace with worker productivity or cost of living:

It seems fair that the minimum wage should maintain some rough parity with productivity (a measure of how much the average worker produces each hour), because productivity increases determine the nation’s capacity to raise its income. By that measure, since productivity has increased by 80 percent since 1973, the minimum wage should be about 80 percent higher in real terms than it was in 1973; instead of $7.25, it
would be $15.15. . . .

Another indexing option is to set the minimum wage high enough to keep a full-time worker with a family out of poverty. In 2013, that would require $11.30 an hour. (Pathway to Full Employment, 2)

Waiting for Change:
The $2.13 Federal Subminimum Wage

While federal minimum wage discussions remain stalled in partisan gridlock, 21 states have passed legislation setting higher minimums wages. PA Senate Bill 1300, raising the minimum wage to $8.20, then to $9.15 on January 1, 2015, $10.10 on January 1, 2016, and tied to a cost-of-living adjustment in the years beyond that, appears to be lost in committee.

PA House Bill 1896, with a similar graduated increase to $10.10 and an increase in the tipping wage income from Pennsylvania's current minimum of $2.83 to $5.05, or 50% of the minimum wage, was dismissed by the Labor and Industry Committee, despite 70 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle.

Living wage ordinances tie public spending to a higher minimum, often termed a "living wage," an amount needed to keep a family from poverty in a particular area. A recent Philadelphia ordinance requires any contractor or subcontractor employed by the city to pay $10.86 an hour, increasing to $12.00 an hour in 2015, enough to put a family of four just above the poverty line.

Unrealistic salary tests for exempt employees allow employers to overwork and underpay a significant percentage of the US workforce:

“Exempt employees” don’t punch a clock and are not held to minimum wage standards or overtime regulation. From 1938 to the mid seventies, the “exempt employee” salary test was adjusted regularly to reflect inflation and increases in the cost of living. From 1975 to the present, that level has been adjusted only once, in 2004, to  $455 a week, or $23,660 a year, a poverty income, just under the poverty level for a family of four.

That unrealistic level allows employers to bypass both minimum wage and overtime regulation. 

“The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2000 reported that an increasing number of American workers — between 19 and 26 million (20 to 27 percent of the full-time workforce) in 1998 — were subject to the exemptions.” (Pathway 3-4)

Legislation weakening worker protections and bargaining rights mean less full-time jobs, erratic work schedules, less safe workplaces, less training, less job security, and lower wages: 

Burt P. Flickinger III, a consultant for the retail industry, says that, “Over the past two decades, many major retailers went from a quotient of 70 to 80 percent full time to at least 70 percent part time across the industry.”  David Ossip, a workforce scheduling software maker, says, “Many employers now schedule shifts as short as two or three hours, while historically they may have scheduled eight-hour shifts.” (Pathway 6) 

Business Insider, Labor Share of Corporate Profits 2012

I’ve seen the havoc on family life when workers’ schedules change from week to week, with shifts are
posted Sunday for the week ahead. I’ve also seen the financial hardship when employees can send workers home if work is slow, with no recourse on the part of the worker, and compensation for time and money spent in travel, or wages lost because of shortened shifts.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 provided workers avenues for weighing employee needs against employer profits: 

In the past, unions would protect workers from the abuse of erratic work schedules, but with the decline of unions in general and the weakness of union density in the service sector in particular, union protection is, at present, a limited solution. (Pathway 7)

Opinion about unions is sharply divided, in part due to poor behavior on the part of some union leaders in the past, in part due to apparent union inflexibility in the present. Yet, I go back to my conclusions of three years ago: 

Historically, churches, and people of faith, have stood with unions on behalf of workers. Whatever their failings, for the past century and a half unions have been the strongest advocates for fair pay, safe workplaces, reasonable hours. Without unions, workers in mills, mines, factories would still be pushed to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Unions helped win workmen’s compensation, workplace safety standards, child labor laws. . . . No unions have been perfect, and power and money always leave the door open to abuse, but all of us, union workers or not, owe a great debt to the work of unions. 

As I look at the November elections, I’ll be looking for candidates who affirm an increase in minimum wage, and for candidates who have creative solutions to the needs of workers.

Two League of Women Voter tools can help voters find out more about local candidates. In many states, Vote 411, and in others, (including Pennsylvania and California) Smart Voter provide sample ballots by zip code, and links to candidates own websites. 

This is the first is a series looking at specific issues of importance in state and local elections, as an extension of my 2012 series "What's Your Platform?"

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome. Just click on   __comments below to see the comment option.