PIRG

- Sujatha Jahagirdar, Student PIRGs

Textbook prices are way out of control and professors are joining the fight to bring them down. Students spend an average of $900 a year on textbooks, which is equal to 20% of tuition at an average university and 50% of tuition at a community college. Textbook companies manipulate the market to drive prices as high as possible and students end up footing the bill.

The Student PIRGs have spent the past year organizing professors to sign the Open Textbooks Statement which is a commitment to consider using free, open source textbooks, instead of expensive, traditional textbooks. As of this week, about 2,000 professors have added their names to the statement, with more joining every day.

--Sujatha Jahagirdar, Student PIRGs

For folks who are following the stimulus package and its effects on students and the cost on education, below is a statement that USPIRG put out on college affordability provisions in the stimulus package.

"Today the U.S. House of Representatives released details of its Economic Recovery package. The proposal contains meaningful policies that help to keep college affordable and accessible during tough economic times.

The provisions that will help keep college within reach include: a $15.6 billion increase to the Pell grant program which increases the maximum grant award by $500, from $4,731 to $5,350; an increase in work study funds that provides more on-campus jobs for low and moderate income students in return for grant aid; and a partially refundable tax credit for higher education. Families and independent students can use the tax credit to offset tuition, fees, and textbook costs after taxes, and up to $1,000 of the credit is refundable.

However, the bill also includes language that increases federal student loan limits by $2,000 each year over four years. This plan comes after a similar increase of $2,000 was passed last year, and, taken together, could increase student loan debt by $10,000. These measures would be harmful for students and the economy - increasing student debt decreases the broader economic benefits of a college degree."

For more on the stimulus package and issues important to young people, check out

With the economy in a serious slump, state systems of higher education are on the chopping block again, as governors and state legislatures trim the "fat." Private schools have seen large chunks of their endowments vanish. Who is the biggest loser? Students. As endowments and costs are slashed, tuition rates and fees for incoming students increase.

Citing the strains on lower- and middle-class families who are trying to send sons and daughters to college, a coalition of higher education and consumer advocacy groups sent a letter Thursday to Speaker Pelosi arguing for some assistance for students in the upcoming stimulus package. Campus Progress, the U.S. PIRGs, and the Project on Student Debt were all involved in this effort. The letter proposed some actions Congress could take in the new stimulus bill to help college students:

• Raise the maximum Pell Grant to $7,000
• Increase funding for the Federal Work-Study Program by 25 percent.
• Improve access to Parent PLUS loans.
• Provide a limited “emergency access” student loan pool for colleges that commit to providing adequate need-based aid.

While there are those families too poor to realistically consider college right now who we should never forget, these lower- to middle-class prospective students should absolutely be remembered as Congress prepares to draft this legislation.

As the last point in the proposal indicates, one way to honor the blue-collar student is to substantially decrease merit-based aid in favor of need-based aid. Ben Miller, at Higher Ed Watch, explains why:

Every single public college contacted for a recent survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling said it provided non-need based assistance, or "merit aid." The same survey found that merit aid made up 41.9 percent of public institutional funds, only slightly less than the 46.6 percent devoted to need-based institutional aid. This is troubling because "merit aid" is not targeted at low-income students, and is instead used to compete for the best (and sometimes the wealthiest) students to boost prestige and fundraising. Schools should not be allowed to continue to spend their limited financial aid budgets on non-needy students when low- and moderate-income students are being asked to shoulder ever-larger tuition burdens.

Miller's post as a whole is instructive. Too often institutions of higher education pass on their financial troubles, in the form of tuition increases and student fee hikes, to the students. Perhaps the institutions could look at possible cuts they could be making from within and examine opportunities for streamlining instead of erecting barriers to a college education, a critical piece of the American Dream for many families.

Congress could help my incorporating most, if not all, of this proposal into the new economic stimulus legislation.

(h/t to Pedro de la Torre at pushback)

Bumped. This post is by Sujatha Jahagirdar of Student PIRGs New Voters Project. —Mike

As registration deadlines pass across the country, the focus of young voter mobilization groups is shifting to ‘get out the vote’ . As with any grassroots mobilization effort, there is a science behind a successful effort to drive young voters to the polls. Below is a listing of various studies done over the past decade that point to the effectiveness of get out the vote tactics such as canvassing, phone banking and text messaging. The Student PIRGs New Voters Project will use these tactics in the largest non-partisan on-the- ground effort to turn out student voters – targeting students on 100 campuses in 17 states.

Pounding the Pavement

Studies conducted by a range of experts indicate that multiple peer-to-peer contacts through canvass, phone-banking and other traditional grassroots organizing methods can significantly increase young voter turnout.

Get out the Vote canvasses and phone banks work. A 2000 Yale University Study found that turnout by individuals canvassed by the Student PIRGs New Voters Project before Election Day was between 10.9 and 12.3 percentage points higher than the control group. A second 2000 Yale University study found that turnout among individuals called by a Student PIRG volunteer before Election Day were 5 percentage points higher than the control group.

Multiple peer-to-peer contact increases an individuals’ likelihood to vote. An additional study of the Student PIRGs New Voters Project by Polimetrix in 2004 found that contacting voters multiple times increases an individual’s likelihood of voting – for example, individuals who were contacted at least three times turned out at a rate of 83.4 percent, compared to a 76.4 percent rate among those contacted just once.

Contacts close to Election Day matter most. The Polimetrix study also found that individuals contacted in the 72 hours before the close of polls turned out at a rate of 81 to 85 percent (depending on the timing of contact) versus 79 percent for those individuals last contacted 4-8 days beforehand, and 69 percent for those last contacted nine or more days beforehand.

Wiring the Web

Technology can also increase young voter turnout. A study released by the Student PIRGs New Voters Project, Credo Mobile and researchers at Princeton University and the University of Michigan found that text message reminders sent the eve of an election can increase youth turnout by four percent.

With this in mind, the Student PIRGs are organizing ‘text out the vote’ tables across the country, where thousands of students will be urged to text their friends ‘get out the vote’ reminders.

A new Facebook application will allow students to send vote reminders to their friend list and set goals to get their friends out to vote.

Over the next twenty days, the Student PIRGs New Voters Project will merge the on-the-ground and on-line tactics described above on one hundred campuses across the country to maximize young voter turnout on Election Day. In the three remaining weeks before Election Day, we will establish 190,000 contacts with young voters, urging them to the polls. A detailed outline of our model is available at www.newvotersproject.org

• PBS did a huge segment on the youth vote with Heather Smith of Rock the Vote, Sujatha Jahagirdar of PIRG, and three students each supporting one of the remaining candidates. For my money, Sujatha had the best line in the piece:
  
  But the real story here is that young people have been turning out for many election cycles. In fact, in 2004, youth turnout increased by more than 11 percent, which was almost triple the increase we saw in the general population.

  So what we hope we see this election cycle is the permanent death of the notion that young people don't vote and young people don't matter. - PBS

• The National Campus Voter Registration Project has launched Your Vote, Your Voice, a project to help students register their peers on campus. - Chronicle of Higher Education
• Scotty McClellan's new book is the talk of the town and everyone has blogged it today. For my money, Glenn Greenwald has the best take in this post which skewers the media reaction. - Salon
• All three remaining candidates have joined forces to release a (toothless) statement about Darfur. - TPM Election Central
• Clinton backers plan to protest at the game-deciding Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting this Saturday. - Washington Post
• With less than one week to go, Obama appears to be "banking" super delegates for a big announcement. - Political Wire
• Whatever happened to the Jena 6? - AlterNet
• The VA continues to downplay the seriousness of PTSD. - Vet Voice
• Declare Yourself has released a book in which celebrities discuss why they will vote. Not too sure how I feel about this. Seems a little silly and superficial, but if it sells copies and convinces people to go to the polls then yay on them. - Declare Yourself
• The latest craze at Oberlin College? Competitive sustainable living. - New York Times
• GRITtv interviews a soldier who was stop-lossed. - FireDogLake

From a press release I just received from Student PIRG:

Student PIRG New Voters Project staff stationed at polling locations near Indiana campuses today are beginning to hear from young voters turned away at the polls for a failure to meet voter identification laws upheld by the Supreme Court last week. The law, which requires voters to possess in-state or federal identification, such as an Indiana Driver’s License or federal passport, has been widely criticized for creating additional voting barriers. Three incidents of student voters turned away from the polls documented by Student PIRG staff in past two hours are included below. To contact profiled voters, please contact Sujatha Jahagirdar at (323) 309 6120.

19-year old Angela Hiss, a sophomore and computer science major at the University of Notre Dame, was turned away from the polls this afternoon as she attempted to vote in her first election. After arriving at her polling location, she presented several forms of identification - her school ID, a piece of mail that showed her campus address and an Illinois driver’s license – but was misinformed that she could not vote because she could not show in-state ID. Poll-workers, according to Hiss, also did not advise her that she could cast a provisional ballot, as required by state and federal law. Instead, they suggested visiting local Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain the in-state identification required by Indiana’s newly-upheld law, an endeavor that could take hours, she explained. Furthermore, while the law allows her ten days to obtain the required ID from the DMV, Hiss’s travel plans will not give her time. As a result, she said, she will not be able to vote in the primary.

19-year old Allyson Miller, a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame and volunteer at a local children’s clinic was similarly turned away from the polls today. An Indiana resident since the age of five, Miller left her driver’s license in her dorm room, and arrived straight from class at the polls with her school ID and registration confirmation papers from the County Registrar. Upon arriving, however, poll-workers did not allow her to vote without a state-issued ID. “I plan to come back because voting is a big deal to me,” said Miller, “but it’s a huge inconvenience, especially with a final tomorrow.”

19-year old Becky Jenkins, a sophomore and member of the tennis team at Butler University was also unable to vote in her first election today. “I didn’t know that I had to have an Indiana ID,” she said after she was turned away from the polls for attempting to cast her ballot using a driver’s licenses issued by the State of Illinois. When asked if she would instead cast a provisional ballot, Jenkins also said her travel plans wouldn’t allow her to.

A number of job openings I've been meaning to post about.

Rock the Vote is hiring for a number of positions. Full descriptions are also available at http://www.rockthevote.com/rtv_jobs.php Interested applicants should check out the job descriptions and, if interested, email jobs@rockthevote.com by March 28th.

Mobile Program Manager
Rock the Vote is seeking a Mobile Program Manager to oversee RTV’s mobile outreach program. Qualified candidates will have a proven track record developing and managing successful mobile and/or new media programs. She/he will have exceptional project management and communication skills and will be passionate about using new technologies to organize and turn-out young voters.

Online Organizer
Rock the Vote is seeking an Online Organizing Manager to oversee all online organizing activities. Qualified candidates will have a proven track record developing and managing successful online organizing campaigns. She/he will have exceptional written communication skills and will be passionate about using new technologies to organize and turn-out young voters.

Digital Associate
Rock the Vote is seeking a Digital Associate to support and assist the Digital Media Department. The successful candidate should be passionate about using new technologies to organize and turn-out young voters.

Media Relations Associate
Rock the Vote is seeking a Media Relations Associate to support and assist the Communications Department. The successful candidate should have experience working with the press and strong research and writing skills.

The Center for Progressive Leadership is looking to place a number of Fellows in entry-level jobs in the progressive movement. Job openings are available in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and D.C. There are also paid internships (10 weeks in length) available in D.C.

More information here. Get the application here.

US PIRG is also hiring a campus organizer and for a number of fellowship positions all over the country.

Finally, the Young Democrats are looking to hire Executive Directors in California, Utah, and Virginia. They are also looking for a new Director of Development. More details here. Deadlines are March 21st.

This post is by Wes Morgan, an online organizer for U.S. PIRG. Projects like Code for Change and CiviCRM and incredibly valuable as they teach young coders about the nuts and bolts of politics, young organizers of the value of open source tools, and provide free, high-quality tools for youth organizations which, as we all know, are frequently strapped for cash. Thanks to Wes for all his work and for guest blogging about it at FM. --Mike

As of last Friday (August 17), the first Code for Change summer has officially come to a close. We set out to turn CiviCRM into a better system for helping organizers spend more time organizing and less time shuffling things around on their computers. CiviCRM is a constituent relationship management system, but that's just a nerdy way of saying that it's a program to save you from spreadsheets-pasted-into-Outlook hell when it comes to keeping track of and in touch with all of your contacts. I'm pretty excited about what we got done.

Code for Change is my brainchild, so I'm a little biased. However, other people seem to think it's cool too. The basic idea behind Code for Change is that by putting a little effort into an existing open source project, we get a lot more out of it than if we wrote something ourselves from scratch or paid someone else to modify an off-the-shelf system. We hired some computer science interns--current students and recent grads, downloaded the source code to CiviCRM, and set about turning it into a system that everyone can use (from large, complex organizations all they way down to my mom who sends out a regular newsletter to her home-based business contacts). In the true spirit of openness, all our work is open source and is planned to be released with the CiviCRM 2.0 release later this year.

From June 4 to August 17, we hacked away at it. We had a lot of help from others in the CiviCRM developer and user community, and their contributions were invaluable. Here's what we all accomplished:

• We made CiviCRM a standalone system. This means you no longer need Drupal or Joomla to use it. (Those are web content management systems, and not everyone who wants to use CiviCRM uses those.) For people who just need a CRM, this makes it much easier to get CiviCRM up and running and doesn't put a lot of unnecessary CMS functionality between you and your contacts.
• We added OpenID logins. OpenID is a pretty cool new technology that allows you to use one login for all systems that use it. No more having to remember umpteen different passwords for every system you have to login to.
• We added support for complex groups and organizational structures. The organization I work for, U.S. PIRG, is a national network of state-based organizations. This means we need a system that can keep all its data separate for each state, but still allow those of us who work centrally for all the organizations (I'm an online organizer, for example) to aggregate that data when necessary. Other organizations (such as political parties) have similar geographic and departmental structures that they need a CRM system to model. CiviCRM is now pretty powerful in this regard. You can put groups inside other groups (inside other groups, inside...) and you can affiliate groups with organizations and sub-organizations.

I'll be working over the next few weeks to actually roll out CiviCRM as the new system that U.S. PIRG uses for its online organizing, so we'll be eating our own dog food. If you want to give it a try now (instead of waiting for the official 2.0 release), you can download a preview release of CiviCRM Standalone here.

And we're not done there. We're looking to hire an intern for the current fall semester and another in the spring to continue working on CiviCRM. If you or anyone you know is interested in applying, let me know.

It has been more than six months since I last wrote about this subject. Recent events warrant an epilogue of sorts.

The Fund for Public Interest Research (FFPIR, or 'the Fund,' as it is commonly known) deploys thousands of canvassers each year onto streets and at doors to raise money for dozens of liberal non-profit organizations. Its 'sister' company, Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), has major contracts with the DNC, the ACLU, MoveOn, and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Fund is also being sued by a class of its former employees for systemic labor infractions.

Now before we really dive in here, it's important to establish two more facts.

1. FFPIR has already been found in violation of labor law by the California State Labor Commission. You can find the Commission's ruling here (in PDF).

2. Soon after the canvasser class action suit was filed, the Fund changed its labor policies. Reportedly, the policies now ensure that all canvassers get paid at least minimum wage, plus overtime for all hours of work over 40 a week. The policies now ensure its employees have a half hour lunch break, and short breaks during the day. All additional "campaign work" is now made explicitly clear to be volunteer. (Maggie Mead broke this news yesterday, but as they say, she buried the lede.)

It is good to know that the largest direct fundraising apparatus on the Left now adheres to fundamental labor laws. Of course, the sudden and explicit establishment of these policies is also a tacit admission that for many years--up to two decades or more--the largest employer on the Left has been breaking these laws.

How could this have happened for so long?

What does it mean for the future of these organizations?

In this piece, I am going to posit some answers to those questions. If you want to learn more about the Fund's operation, about the story of the canvassers who demanded change to it and ultimately filed suit, or about the for-profit sister Grassroots Campaigns Inc, please look to the reporting I did last year on MyDD and DailyKos.

It took me a while to pick up on this whole Facebook business, but when I finally did... WOO what a blast! While it lasted anyway.

See, not so long after I logged on for the first time, Facebook shut down my account.
But I don't hold it against them. I wasn't playing by their rules -- it's fair, and it's square.
So I got some explaining to do.

Now, I was virtually dragged into Facebook--and when I finally joined it, it wasn't just to post silly pictures and update my status. I joined to organize.

I was organizing a group of people who have been institutionally exploited for years, but who have not previously had any viable way to speak up for themselves. This group is comprised of young, progressive activists--fellow veterans of the Fund for Public Interest Research, Public Interest Research Groups, and Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated.

SOME BACKGROUND!

The Fund, PIRGs, and GCI are interconnected organizations that run fundraising canvasses for a huge chunk of the progressive world. Veterans of these organizations have taken to the internet before to call for change to their notorious labor conditions, and there were a number of groups on Facebook that had already been started in protest of their policies. But these were just scattered outbursts of frutration leading nowhere. The organizers needed organizing.

If I may say so myself, I was good at organizing my fellow veterans. I have many years of experience as an "organizer" for the Fund and GCI; I'd worked in every town, I'd worked on every campaign. I'd trained hundreds of people and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, lied to my staff about how our campaigns worked, fired people for any old reason just to get rid of them, and taught young idealists to think about grassroots activism in terms of cold, inhuman numbers. And when the situations arose, I busted up the early formations of what could have become a...shhh...union. Eventually it all reached a certain point when I stopped to think about it all and decided that no, this isn't how a progressive movement is built, and yes, I was finally pissed off.

Yes, I announced on my new Facebook profile, I am still pissed off. There's a lot to be pissed off about.

See, over the course of the second half of 2006, I'd watched with budding interest as some of these GCI and Fund veterans turned to the blogosphere to expose these practices and explain how they are harmful to the progressive movement. I'd watched with even more interest as they were dismissed, derided, and demeaned by defenders of the Fund and GCI. But the defenders always lost the argument. Many of them even ended up agreeing with the protesters in the end. I did as well. The point was very much made: these organizations, the ones I'd sacrificed years of my life for, were hurting the progressive grassroots. Not because they were staffed by bad people; but because they were being led by a handful of prideful, fearful, haughty leaders who retain power under the dangerous condition of being simultaneously out of touch and wholly unaccountable.

Almost every single person I knew, inside the organization and out, had been personally burned by this crisis of leadership - whether they were willing to admit to it or not. Now that it was all being blogged about in public, people openly wondered whether anything could ever be done to fix the system.

Eventually, the blog posts died down. My friends in PIRG and GCI pretended they didn't exist any more. If the posts were ever brought up, they were quickly dismissed as the delusional rantings of a rabid few losers in pajamas.

And yet, the unrest continued to brew. People kept reading the blog posts and spreading the word among themselves. This year, a group of canvassers from the Fund filed a class action lawsuit seeking to recover unpaid wages. A group from GCI sought to do the same thing. They needed to spread the word and recruit others.

And so I was selected to go to the place where the people were: Facebook.