By Jim Stergios
July 24th, 2008
Check out the podcast of the “astonishing confessions about the lack of accountability in the union and how that’s affecting competition between public and charter schools” from George Parker, president of Washington DC’s Teachers Union in the John Merrow (PBS) segment called Not the Only Kid on the Block - Episode 6.
Yup. We know that. The Governor knows that. And that’s why he killed the state’s accountability office. Very forward thinking of him.
By Jim Stergios
July 24th, 2008
John Merrow of PBS did a follow-up last night on Michelle Rhee’s progress in the DC schools. In the report, Adrian Fenty, the DC Mayors says about Rhee:
We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make this school system excellent. And to the extent we can allow her to do that, as free from outside obstacles as humanly possible, the faster she will move.
Merrow notes that she has made some very controversial moves:
announc[ing] she would close the 23 chronically under-enrolled schools. Ongoing protests did not slow Rhee down. By the end of the school year, she had removed 36 principals, 22 assistant principals, and 121 employees in her central office.
She also revealed plans to overhaul 27 additional schools that had failed to meet federal standards for academic improvement.
Check it out, but also tonight on PBS, Merrow interview Paul Vallas who is pushing equally hard in New Orleans. As education leadership stalled out in Massachusetts, it is taking deep root elsewhere.
By Liam Day
July 24th, 2008
In response to the labor market, of course. Schools teach French because French teachers are easier to find than those who teach Mandarin or Arabic. Nevertheless, if one were to make a list of which foreign languages our children will need to make themselves as attractive as possible in a 21st century economy, Mandarin and Arabic would be close to, if not at the top of it and French much further down.
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette has a heartening feature today on the Mandarin classes now being offered in Shrewsbury’s public schools. But as Steve Ackley, spokesman for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, points out:
There aren’t enough qualified Chinese teachers to serve the growing demand.
What’s a school district to do?
Virtualize.
I think today there is an inherent bias against virtual education - in many ways similar to the one against online dating that was once so common. Many people hear virtual education and think immediately of a correspondence course, which, of course, doesn’t have the same academic rigor as a classroom based one. Or so the prevailing wisdom would have us believe. But, just as today online dating is not nearly the social stigma it once was, there is a similar move in the direction of normalizing virtual education.
For instance, we at Pioneer just recognized the Florida Virtual School as the winner of our 2008 Better Government Competition and one of the recommendations (granted, just one of a myriad of recommendations) in the Governor’s Readiness Project report is the creation of a virtual school.
Virtual schools have the potential to upend the delivery mechanism for education, which currently, in its classroom form, is labor intensive. In a labor shortage, therefore, the service does not get delivered at a pace to meet demand - a la Mandarin and Arabic instruction. Harnessing technology for more efficient delivery would allow us to overcome just such a predicament.
By Steve Poftak
July 24th, 2008
The Boston Municipal Research Bureau has a special report on the City of Boston’s staffing. It contains this interesting nugget:
The School Department’s increase of 658 positions since 2004 accounted for 64.1% of the four-year total of 1,026….The School Department is just 58 positions below its 2002 level while its
enrollment has dropped by 10.4% from 2002 to 2008.
By Liam Day
July 23rd, 2008
There is a terrific piece in the Globe today from the Reverend Ray Hammond of the Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain and Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods. In it, they extol the virtue of pilot schools and explore the civil rights implications of restricting minority students’ access to these schools of reform. As they rightly argue:
What cannot be accepted is the notion that anyone should be able to block the road to good jobs, decent pay, and citizen participation for the next generation of public school children. Of course the rights of unions, the rights of teachers, and the right to fair contracts should be supported. What should not be supported is the idea that children should be sacrificed on the altar of adult power politics and game-playing.
To what they refer, of course, is the Boston Teachers Union’s efforts to block the creation of the seven new pilot schools they agreed to in a compromise with the city and offering as an alternative instead what they call discovery schools. As the Reverend Hammond and Mr. Small point out, why endorse untested discovery schools, but block pilot schools, which studies have demonstrated succeed. Why indeed?
I think the answer lies in an erroneous assumption the authors put forth in the very first paragraph of the op-ed (the lone quibble I have with the piece). There they refer to pilot schools as “a bold experiment in public education”. Bold might be overstating it just a tad. It’s worth remembering that pilot schools were only created in the wake of charter school legislation. They represented a compromise between reformers and the unions, who, quite frankly, were spooked by the then new charter schools. My colleague Jamie Gass likes to refer to the current Governor’s proposed readiness schools as charter school lite; that is also what pilot schools are. Basically, in a political atmosphere the unions then deemed dangerous, they were scared into bellying up to the reform table.
So why, more than a decade later, block them? Apparently, the BTU no longer deems the political atmosphere dangerous to its interests.
By Liam Day
July 22nd, 2008
From the Springfield Republican: I suppose irony can be defined by the trial of Mike Franco, a Holyoke man who is accused of failing to report for jury duty. Why was the trial postponed, you ask. There weren’t enough jurors.
Mr. Franco insisted on a trial as a public display of the inefficiency of the state’s trial court system. I would say he succeeded in demonstrating his point. (By the way, he’s also right. Check out this Pioneer study from 2002.)
From the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise: a curious op-ed on the trans-Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta canal, which was originally to have been built as part of the 1960 California Water Plan. Curious, I say, because it struck me as odd that the Sentinal and Enterprise would pick it up. If, however, you are interested in reading more about the as-yet-to-be-constructed canal, the California Water Plan, or water policy in the western United States generally, I highly recommend Cadillac Desert. (I must also give a shout out here to my former colleague Alan Petrillo, who originally recommended the book to me.)
And, finally, from the editorial page of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune: an interesting take on national security, from the perspective of bridge inspections and repair. I don’t know, a bit of a hot topic around here lately.
It seems whole swaths of the inspection report on I-95’s John Greenleaf Whittier Bridge the state released earlier this month were blacked out because of provisions in the Patriot Act. As the Eagle-Tribune sensibly asks:
At what point does your right to know if you are taking your life into your hands as you cross that bridge supersede the broad-sweeping swath of the Patriot Act?
And if you’re in the mood to contemplate broad, sweeping governmental power, I suggest taking in the new Batman movie. Though a comic book adaptation and at times thematically heavy-handed, it does offer a surprisingly mature exploration of terrorism and government’s response to it.
By Jim Stergios
July 22nd, 2008
Tante grazie to Paul Levy for the nice things he opens with, but he has a less than sanguine reply to my op-ed in the Globe today on the viability of the health care reform act without further some level of reduction in the supplemental payments made to the Boston Medical Center and the Cambridge Health Alliance.
AdamG of the Universal Hub piles on citing Paul.
So, let’s start with niceties. Paul is one of our best public managers. Note BID, note that MWRA. You want Paul on your side. I want Paul on my side, but you can’t always get what you want. I also find a touch too much political spin in the fastball Paul throws my way in suggesting that I am in the long line of “attacks” on BMC and CHA.
On this one, quite simply my math differs from Paul’s:
· I don’t disagree that the expected costs of Chapter 58 are due to costs being underestimated at the start, but that does suggest that the legislation was, while not ill conceived, at least structured poorly. We should be willing to touch up the math so it works – we should not put the reform at risk.
· Paul cites the law’s purpose as providing “greater insured access to health care.” That is only half of the reform. The other half was how to get there—and, again, the reform was a move from supporting institutions to supporting individuals. Prior to the reform, I would not quibble with the extra support needed for BMC and CHA. I would not even quibble with some level of support even today being needed for these institutions. I just don’t think it is close to the $180 million it currently stands at.
· Paul cites insurers and taxpayers as needing to foot more of the bill. I appreciate Paul’s pushing this off to the insurers, but it would be constructive to hear what they can do besides provide affordable plans. I’ll wait to hear more on this. As far as the taxpayers are concerned, they are tapped out on health care: The proportion of the budget dedicated to health and human services is burying all other core services. As far as businesses are concerned, they are tapped out on health care and the recent increases in fees and other levees under Governors Romney and Patrick.
· As Rick Lord of AIM was quoted in the Lowell Sun over the weekend, “What we’ve failed to do in a serious way is address the cost of health insurance and unless we do that health care reform won’t be sustainable in the long term.” There are other things we can and must do over the long term, including some flexibility on mandates and providing clarity on outcome and pricing data to consumers (in an easy to understand way). But in the short term, there is little else we can do to get this waiver through.
· Finally, and most importantly, while I agree with Paul that there is a mouse going through the proverbial snake in terms of pent-up demand for services like mammograms by individuals heretofore uninsured, it is also true that there are more people signed up at this point than the crafters of the legislation foresaw. That should mean that there are fewer people accessing hospitals without insurance. Shouldn’t that mean that the overall costs to the hospitals of providing this care (which they had been providing to “free riders”) should be more predictable and less expensive for the BMC and CHA? Doesn’t that raise the question of whether we should reduce (I never said cut completely) the extra payments to these institutions? The reasonable answer is yes.
By Amy Dain
July 21st, 2008
Your bills for gas and food are going up. Your mortgage was high to begin with. Want to hear arguments for increasing your water bill? Actually, there are some good arguments…
Last week Fox ran a segment on how low water prices are leading to water shortages in many places.
Pioneer put out a piece by Professors Rob Stavins and Sheila Olmstead on this topic last year. They argue that public enterprises have the opportunity to accomplish what private markets cannot do for water: get the prices right. Today’s water prices do not signal scarcity.
We have all heard that it is wrong to waste water, but with prices so low, we have little incentive to conserve. People respond to prices. Look at what high gasoline prices are doing to the market for Hummers.
By Liam Day
July 21st, 2008
Reading Alan Sager’s and Deborah Socolar’s op-ed in the Globe this morning, I was reminded yet again how the dualistic view of the health care debate in this country is wrong. It simply can’t be an either/or proposition - either access or cost containment. As the authors point out about Massachusetts’ new universal health care legislation:
The law’s proponents underestimated costs and overestimated revenue. Redeeming the law’s promises has therefore obliged the state to spend more to subsidize insurance. This obligation imposes unsustainable financial and political stresses amid a growing budget deficit. Many health reform advocates therefore now declare cost controls crucial to the law’s survival.
Of course, in reality you can have access without cost containment, but politically the drive for universal access will ultimately be undermined by escalating costs. And, conversely, you can always contain costs by restricting access to the healthy, wealthy and wise, but that, too, is politically unpalatable to a lot of people (myself included).
I don’t know what the solution is (Sager and Socolar recommend pushing as much fiduciary responsibility as possible down to doctors, whom they claim control as much as 90% of health care spending), but I do know this: discussing universal access in a vacuum is a political non-starter.
By Jim Stergios
July 20th, 2008
From Andrew Coulson at CATO comes a new study of the budgetary impacts of the Institute’s education tax credit model legislation on five states.
It is estimated that, in its first 10 years of operation, savings from the PETC program would range from $1.1 billion for South Carolina to $15.9 billion for Texas. Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York are estimated to enjoy 10-year savings within that range.
Public Education Tax Credits reduce the state and local taxes owed by anyone who pays for the private schooling of an eligible child. Parents can claim credits for their own children’s educational costs, and other taxpayers (including businesses) can claim credits when they pay for the education of someone else’s child, either directly or by donating to a nonprofit scholarship-granting organization.
With the paper, Coulson presents a “generalized spreadsheet tool (”the Fiscal Impact Calculator”) that can estimate the program’s effect on any other state for which the necessary input data are supplied.”
For the full study, go here.
Previous Posts
