By Steve Poftak
December 21st, 2011
The Salvation Army is struggling to raise money this year through its traditional red kettle/bell-ringing campaign, with donations down 22%. It might be due to a down economy. I know that my dependence on electronic transactions frequently leaves me without bills or coins to donate.
But new economic research suggests strategies to increase donations. A team of economists conducted a four day experiment at a Boston-area supermarket using two different approaches to the red kettle campaign.
The first approach was passive — just bell-ringing, no speaking, no eye contact. The second was active — bell-ringing plus a direct ask for a donation.
The result?
People avoid being asked verbally (as opposed to the implicit, passive ask that the presence of kettle suggests). About a third of the shoppers actively switched entrances to avoid the verbal ask.
But, the verbal ask increased donations by 75%.
So, bell ringers, it pays to ask.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
By Joshua Archambault
December 20th, 2011
This afternoon the Patrick Administration announced a new deal with Federal HHS on the Medicaid waiver that serves as the backbone of our reform law. The last waiver expired in June of 2011.
It is a 3-yr $26.75 billion deal.
I need some more details before I can figured out how exactly this waiver will mesh with the Governor’s payment reform bill. But until then, some early thoughts:
- The Patrick administration looks like they withdrew a number of requests to get this deal done.
- The Massachusetts waiver deal raises some interesting questions for the future of the national health reform law. [Even if I think the lessons to be learned from Massachusetts are somewhat limited to the national plan.]
- A foundational assumption of the Massachusetts reform was that as patients obtained insurance, the cost of care for individuals without insurance would go down. The record has been mixed on this front.
- If safety net hospitals in Massachusetts cannot transition to a new care model that allows them to be more self-sustaining with 98% coverage, how much will the PPACA ultimately cost when similar hospitals in 49 other states try to adjust? This waiver includes an additional $120 million a year to try to push a transition that was supposed to take place organically 3-5 years ago.
- The new PPACA entitlement is in part funded with reductions in payments to similar hospitals across the nation, but the precedent set here by the federal government should call into question that basic “savings” assumption.
- I am glad to see that CMS has included some benchmarks for the state to hit in order to receive funding.
- Massachusetts officials will be happy with more federal funding for the reform, as it means less of a future hit to the state budget, but taxpayers are smart enough to know they pay for both state and federal spending.
Find me on twitter: @josharchambault
By Joshua Archambault
December 20th, 2011
I was recently asked by a reporter for some trends that I expect to see in 2012. I thought I would share my bullet points on the Pioneer blog:
In no particular order.
- Continued provider consolidation, both locally and nationally.
- Greater cost-shifting from Medicare and Medicaid, as both federal and state government continue to cut reimbursement levels. On a related side note, I think over the next few years you will see cash-based pre-paid practices opening in Boston.
- Gains in the use of high-deductible and health savings account plans nationally. The question for 2012 is whether Massachusetts will break out of its status quo and catch up.
- The story I will be watching for in 2012: The interaction between cost saving reforms (global budgets, ACOs, limited networks, etc) and individuals that have put off care because of the economic downturn. When will these folks reenter the medical system in a meaningful way? And how will we pull apart and separate the impact of the economy from the reforms being implemented? In my mind, the true test for the sustainability of any reform will be revealed when the economy turns around and these patients start to return to receive the care they have been putting off. (Perhaps, I am a year off, and this will not be a full blown story until 2013, or even 2014, which if the ACA remains on the books, we could have a prefect storm brewing for 2014 as coverage is widely expanded and latent demand returns to the system)
You can find me on twitter: @josharchambault
By Jim Stergios
December 18th, 2011
With a wondrous display of British understatement, the state’s education commissioner recently announced his “concern” about Lawrence schools. Commissioner Mitch Chester noticed that the Lawrence Public Schools might have “a potential leadership gap” and that “[o]verall, the district is not yet where we expect it to be and want it to be.”
Noted “for his work in accountability and assessment,” one could complain (and I have) that the Commissioner should not have waited 3 ½ years to come to that conclusion. Especially with the financial and political missteps made by the previous superintendent.
So applause for the Commissioner’s decision to put into receivership city schools where, as I noted in the Lawrence Eagle Tribune,
10 percent of [the students] drop out each year, and only 30 and 40 percent of [students] are proficient or advanced in math and reading, respectively.
Unfortunately, the fact is that the state’s plan to appoint a single person to drive the Lawrence receivership operation is a one-size-fits-all strategy that has almost not chance of success. That’s because there is little evidence that state-driven, command and control efforts yield to anything but marginal improvements. And that is certainly not enough for the kids or even for the state, which currently picks up 95 percent of the education tab in Lawrence.
(Fact is, the state has owned this mess for a long time.)
As noted in the Eagle Tribune, researchers have ample evidence to work from in evaluating the possibility of a successful state-driven turnaround:
Andrew Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, has conducted research and concluded that “turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements.” He further notes that “turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.”
A few years ago, California targeted the lowest-performing 20 percent of its schools for intervention. Three years later, one of the 394 targeted high schools was categorized as having made “exemplary process.”
Rather than a receiver who will have “all the powers of the superintendent and school committee” to right Lawrence’s schools, what Lawrence families need is access to good options. Options with a proven track record of success.
Instead of the “Superman” strategy, which “has failed repeatedly across the country,” the best way forward is for state leaders (governor, his appointees in the ed bureaucracy, and state legislators from the Greater Lawrence area) need to sit down and craft a comprehensive plan that gives these four options to kids:
- More charters, faster. Charters in Lawrence are doing a great job, and parents need more of them. Opening failed urban districts to many more charters has worked quite well in New Orleans and Washington, DC, where 70 and 30 percent of kids are now attending charter schools. The state should go out of its way to invite networks like KIPP, SABIS, and so many others to come in with bold expansion proposals.
- Boston and Springfield have access to the METCO interdistrict choice program. Why not Lawrence?
- While the Greater Lawrence Vocational Technical School has shown some improvement, it could do better. Regional voc-techs around the state have improved significantly over the past decade (much higher MCAS scores and super low drop out rates). A team of voc-tech peers should be brought in to advise GLVT on how to make even more progress.
- Finally, give Lawrence families private options they can’t currently afford. Lawrence’s schools spend well beyond double the amount of tuition needed to attend good area private schools, many of which are Catholic. Archdiocesan schools are high-quality options academically, as well as in terms of teaching good social skills and safety.
Creating a tax credit for businesses that give to create scholarships for Lawrence’s kids would likely pass constitutional muster and it would show that our leaders are serious in trying everything possible to give these kids a chance. Now. Not in five or 10 years. They don’t have that luxury.
If the state sticks with the same old playbook of top-down reforms, somewhere approaching half the kids in the Lawrence public schools don’t have a prayer of a chance of making it into the middle class. It’s time to have the courage to try things that are politically hard but actually work.
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
By Michael Morisy
December 16th, 2011
In my last post, I took a look at how surprisingly credulous state executives were of Evergreen Solar’s business. Rarely, if ever, were concerns raised about whether Evergreen Solar was a good investment for the state to make, nor whether the solar industry in general was fundamentally sound. That green jobs had a bright future was, documents indicate, an article of faith.
It’s easy now, as much of the predicted “Green Boom” has gone bust, to second guess the decisions made. A question that should be answered, however, is why those decisions were made. The Patrick administration hasn’t been eager to answer that question. When quizzed about the bankruptcy, the governor insisted the company’s CEO was “out of the loop” while insisting the state would be able to clawback incentives paid out.
But while I once despaired of ever getting Evergreen Solar’s secrets, MassDevelopment has released almost a thousand pages that do shed light on why warning signs were ignored, and it looks like, Massachusetts fell victim of old-fashioned peer pressure.
The scene is all too familiar for anyone whose bought a car. Evergreen is a bargain, but you have to buy now because other suitors are calling and soon it will be going, going, gone. Or to quote directly from a Special Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency:
Amid aggressive competition from Mexico and Oregon and other states, Evergreen has chosen to remain in Massachusetts and to build a new facility, which the Governor hopes will attract other renewable energy companies thereby forming a cluster in Massachusetts. One criterion Evergreen cited in its decision to remain in Massachusetts is the Commonwealth’s ability to “move quickly” with expedited permitting at Devens.
Download the full meeting minutes here.
The specter of other states winning the bid is outlined again in a memo detailing MassDevelopment’s eventual grant to Evergreen Solar:
Because Massachusetts had already been in competition with the States of New York, Oregon, and New Mexico for the siting of this facility, the Massachusetts Office of Business Development (”MOBD”) quickly turned to Devens as a location that could meet Evergreen’s needs in the timeframe that they required.
Evergreen Solar executives had no qualms about playing off Massachusetts’s fear of losing out to help drive up the asking price. An e-mail from Massachusetts Office of Business Development:
[After discussing pooling funding and financing sources:] This would bring our total loan package up to $20 million and make us very competitive with other states on the financing front. New York, which is being considered along with Oregon and New Mexico, is making a serious run at it with a large loan package that is forgiveable (i.e. converts to a grant) if certain job creation benchmarks are achieved. New York also has identified an old IBM semiconductor facility in East Fishkill, NY that has a building and infrastructure in place and would significantly reduce Evergreen’s startup costs and timetable. Rich emphasized that the Massachusetts proposal is now very competitive and that the policy discussions with Ian Bowles’ team have been positively received by the Board. He also re-iterated that they are committed to a two-way dialog with Massachusetts and will let us know in advance whether our proposal will be adequate or inadequate to close the deal and give an opportunity for Massachusetts to address any potential areas of the proposal which need to be bolstered to close the deal.
This is all the normal bartering of business, the natural give and take of negotiating. But why were the right questions not asked about Evergreen Solar’s viability? Why was the focus so squarely on catering to Evergreen’s specific needs and demands, and not on more general incentives? Documents indicate peer pressure played a part, with executives caught up in the chase of landing a big (doomed) catch.
But that competitive pressure was ignited by what e-mails indicate was an equally powerful draw: The promise of a new economic dynamo, all powered by socially responsible green energy. As I’ll explore in my next post, it was a combination too powerful for state decision makers to pass up.
Because Massachusetts had already been in competition with the States of New York, Oregon, and New Mexico for the siting of this facility, the Massachusetts Office of Business Development (”MOBD”) quickly turned to Devens as a location that could meet Evergreen’s
needs in the timeframe that they required.
By Steve Poftak
December 16th, 2011
(What? I have to do policy wonk stuff all the time?)
Tim Tebow is all the rage right now, both for his spectacular late game comebacks and his very public professions of his faith. We’ll leave the latter alone and focus on his actions on the field.
His team, the Denver Broncos, turned to Tebow after a 1-4 start running a conventional offense under Kyle Orton. Over time, the Broncos have implemented a modified read-option offense that is built around the running and decision-making skills of Tebow.
For the uninitiated, the read-option is based around the counter-intuitive notion of not blocking at least one defender. That unblocked defender is then ‘read’ by the quarterback/ballcarrier, if the unblocked defender commits to tackling the QB, then the QB pitches the ball. If not, the QB runs it. That’s a vast simplification and Denver doesn’t run the read-option all the time, but it’s the basis for their offense.
An option offense has a few virtues – first, it leverages the skills of your best player (because that player touches the ball every play and can run, hand off, or, sometimes, pass). Next, the option offense is predicated on not blocking at least one opposing player at the point of attack, this allows your other blockers to either double-team other defenders or get advantageous blocking angles. These two reasons are why you still see the option offense run at smaller schools (that have fewer high skill players and undersized blockers). That’s why the service academies still run this offense.
So, what do the Pats need to do to neutralize Tebow?
First, stay disciplined and rotate players on defense. The option offense is frustrating to play against – its grueling to face a constant running attack and to stay disciplined enough to stick to assignments. Denver’s ability to pull off late game heroics is likely due, in part, to their ability wear out and frustrate opponents, causing mistakes. The Pats’ depth and system-oriented defense should serve them well in this game.
Second, use that high-powered offense. There are few things more painful than watching a run-first option team forced to try and play catch-up against the clock. Denver has an underrated defense that’s allowed them to keep games close while the offense wears down their opponents. If the Pats overcome that and pile up points early, this is going to be an ugly game for Denver’s offense. In addition, an out-of-sync option team can have a lot of 3-and-outs, putting further pressure on a defense which has little time to rest.
I wish Tebow nothing but the best (except for this game) and I love watching option football, but I’m skeptical this works out in the long-term for him or the Broncos. He may evolve into a more traditional QB or roleplayer, but there’s a reason you don’t see the option very often as a full-time offense in the NFL.
By Steve Poftak
December 14th, 2011
Achieving reading proficiency by 3rd Grade is a vital skill, closely correlated with important measures of academic achievement later. As one major study found:
- One in six children who are not reading proficiently in third grade do notgraduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers…
- For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently in third grade, the proportion that don’t finish school rose to 26 percent. That’s more than six times the rate for all proficient readers…
- Graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students who were not proficient readers in third grade lagged far behind those for White students with the same reading skills.
With this in mind, it’s important that BPS has set goals of getting 59% of students to proficient and advanced in the 3rd grade English Language Arts MCAS, as well as having all schools with at least 72% of their third graders proficient in reading.
Goals are important, but current performance is way behind what we want. Buried deep in a Globe article, that focused on the assets of various schools, was a troubling revelation:
Only Perkins and three other schools met or exceeded Johnson’s goal of having 72 percent of [3rd grade] students score proficient in reading on the MCAS.
A closer look at the available data yields more troubling information —
- 56 of the 80 schools (that had 2011 Grade 3 ELA data available) had fewer than 50% of students scoring proficient in reading.
- 24 of the 80 schools had fewer than 25%.
- Across the entire system, 63% of students in Grade 3 scored at a Needs Improvement or Warning/Failing (i.e. not proficient) level.
Given the implications of a lack of proficiency in 3rd grade reading, those are sobering statistics. Setting goals is good step, let’s hope BPS can raise proficiency levels and fast.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
By Michael Morisy
December 13th, 2011
In reviewing hundreds of pages of documents related to Massachusetts’ incentives for Evergreen Solar, decision makers made clear the risks of not investing: Passing on the proposal would lead to, officials stated, a loss of potential manufacturing jobs to other states or other countries while giving up a competitive position in an emerging manufacturing market that could set the Commonwealth back for years to come.
What is much less clear, however, is what concerns about Evergreen Solar’s viability were considered. For example, there is almost no mention made of rival Chinese solar manufacturers despite the fact that less than four years later the downward pressure these manufacturers placed on solar pricing would ultimately help push Evergreen Solar towards bankruptcy.
Reading through Evergreen Solar documents released by MassDevelopment in response to a public records request, the priority seemed to be focused instead on how well the publicly-traded company fit in with a loftier mission. From a special Massachusetts Development Finance Agency Board of Directors Meeting on August 22, 2007:
[The Secretary of EOHED] explained that the Governor has directed his Administration to enhance the renewable energy industry in the Commonwealth, for economic development purposes, as well as to further the expansion of clean energy use globally. Historically, Massachusetts has not had much presence in the clean, renewable energy industry and, as a result, has been unable to compete with other states. [...] He reminded everyone that clean, renewable energy is a top priority of the Administration and that, if the vote is successful today, a groundbreaking will be scheduled for September 12.
When questions were raised about the particulars of Evergreen Solar’s financial strength, they were brushed aside. From the same meeting:
The Vice Chair wanted to know if the Executive Office of Housing & Economic Development was comfortable with Evergreen’s financials, and whether this seemed to be a logical expansion for the company, and [the Secretary of EOHED] answered affirmatively. His office has researched the technology and is not worried.
In fact, nowhere in the 923 pages released by MassDevelopment could I find much concern about the actual health of the company at all nor the solar industry in general. A keyword search for China, for example, revealed just 3 mentions: Once as part of part of boilerplate legalese, once in a caption and finally in a section that illustrates China’s growing need for electrical power – highlighting it as a market opportunity for solar.
But it would be just four years later that Chinese competition would take a bulk of the blame for Evergreen Solar’s demise. Was this threat unforeseeable in 2007? Not quite: Even then, China’s solar energy boom was widely reported, with glowing features in the New York Times and Reuters. But even then, the cracks were starting to show: A Barron’s piece slammed the industry, even then, as a “red-hot bubble”.
It’s easy to say hindsight is 20/20, but why was the foresight willfully blind? Why was, after researching the technology and hopefully the industry, the Executive Office of Housing & Economic Development “not worried”? It’s impossible to say for certain, but another response to a public records request might provide some insight.
When we queried the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center for “documents, including resumes, for employees employed at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative at any point during 2007, that demonstrate previous direct or indirect work experience related to the solar energy industry,” the response was short and sweet:
MassCEC does not possess the records you have requested.
Going through the rest of the records I did receive, however, officials did have at least overriding concern regarding Evergreen Solar: Losing the bid to another state, a specter which urged the decision makers to move “quickly” on the deal even as they felt pressured to ensure public funding was used to ensure a competitive proposal. More on that in a follow up post.
By Jim Stergios
December 9th, 2011
“Understand, I am not for monopoly when we can help it,” Louis Brandeis said in 1912. “We intend to restore competition. We intend to do away with the conditions that make for monopoly.” (Wikipedia)
Brandeis had some inkling of what hare-brained schemes philanthropists could come up with. Remember the Simple Spelling Board Andrew Carnegie set up in 1906?
The New York Times noted that Carnegie was convinced that “English might be made the world language of the future” and an influence leading to universal peace, but that this role was obstructed by its “contradictory and difficult spelling.”
105 years later, Sam Dillon of The New York Times produced a terrific piece of journalism in a May 2011 Sunday article on the overweening ambitions of the Gates Foundation and its list of DC-based clients, vendors and trade organizations like the National Governors Association; the Chief State School Officers; the Fordham Institute; Achieve, Inc.; as well as the Gates Foundation’s strategy to leverage, really to drive, federal policy in the Obama Administration’s US Department of Education. In the May article, Dillon wrote:
For years, Bill Gates focused his education philanthropy on overhauling large schools and opening small ones. His new strategy is more ambitious: overhauling the nation’s education policies…In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups…[The Gates Foundation] is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.
Dillon continued:
The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy…Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency.
Yup. The Gates Foundation and the enormous financial interests associated with the Washington education lobby have decided that the U.S., despite its 222-year history to the contrary, needs a nationalized K-12 education system. No matter that the arguments for it are flimsy:
- Nations with national curricula do better than ones without on international tests. Not true.
- The national standards raise the bar set by states. For some, for some it’s a wash, and for some it is a step backwards. Prominent researchers and subject experts (Stotsky, Wurman, Milgram, Porter and others) find the standards lacking in comparison to international benchmarks. Basically the Gates folks are setting up a community college readiness set of standards.
- The new national standards will give us the ability to craft better tests. No one knows. They are not complete. And we have no idea where proficiency levels will be set, whether they will build off of Massachusetts’ content frame or the frame of other state tests, which are more skills-based.
- The new national standards will be serious content-based standards. Uh, no. The fact that one of the Gates Foundation allies, the Council of Chief State School Officers, absorbed the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is more than a whiff of evidence to the contrary.
- The new national standards will save money. Implementation of the standards, through textbook purchases and professional developments, as well as technology and other actions necessary to implement the tests will cost tens of billions of dollars. States and localities will pay for 90 percent of this if history is any guide.
- The new national standards will improve accountability. The reset of state standards means a loss of longitudinal data on student performance and will take at least half a decade to amass. Again, without the knowledge of where proficiency will be set and what the tests look like, this is fanciful thinking.
- The new national standards will help improve teacher quality. Huh? Not sure how they came up with this one. Perhaps it will cure the common cold as well. The fact for Massachusetts is that the new national test and standards will undermine one of the “secret sauces” of the Bay State’s success: the teacher test (MTEL) is aligned with student tests and the standards to ensure that teachers are able to teach the materials required in the state test. We will now have to refight that battle with the unions based on the new national standards – and it will be a tough battle drawing in national lobby groups. That’s going to be hard to win.
- The new national standards will drive innovation. Yeesh. I hear this from virtual learning providers all the time. Of course, if you set one set of standards, then your product development is easier and less costly in the short run. But this is the Zune argument (see below) and it’s stupid. Think about this: Most of the countries with national standards (think Finland) are the size of a state in the U.S. and often relatively homogeneous. Instead we are forging standards for 53 million kids from very diverse backgrounds.
We need one set of standards as much as we need one exclusive operating software, one keyboard for the world, and one Zune. You remember the Zune, right?
Thankfully, because consumers have the freedom to choose the products they buy, it got killed by the iPod. Curtis Cartier of The Seattle Weekly blog noted even this past March that
The Zune, Microsoft’s signature paperweight, hasn’t seen a significant upgrade, or really anything in the way of marketing or promotion, in almost two years . . . No, really, they still make the Zune. I know, right?
Microsoft bloodhound Mary Jo Foley writes at ZDNet about “Project Ventura,” a music- and video-based service that seems to be exactly what Zune and the Zune Store is, but thankfully, not the Zune.
Ventura, from what my tipsters tell me, is the name of a set of services being developed by Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices (E&D) unit. These services are focused on music and video discovery and consumption.
Wikipedia notes:
On October 3, 2011, Microsoft announced that it has discontinued all Zune hardware, encouraging users to transition to Windows Phone.
Aw, shucks. And I was waiting for the new and improved Zune. Just holding my breath. And I know we all have such high expectations for Ventura.
Then there is # 9. Experts creating the standards have built off state successes. That’s hardly the case with the Massachusetts standards or the California standards, which were among the best in the country. So, maybe they built off Bob Wise’s West Virginia standards, Gene Wilhoit’s Kentucky standards, Jeb Bush’s Florida, and Checker Finn’s Ohio state standards. These are all people who promote national standards. And their state standards were mediocre and worse. No wonder they look at the community college readiness standards as a step forward.
Make no mistake about it, this is an effort built from the mainframe developed in 1992 by Marc Tucker, then president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, who in his famous 18-page “Dear Hillary” letter called for
a seamless web that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone,” coordinated by “a system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels” where curriculum and “job matching” will be handled by counselors “accessing the integrated computer-based program.
Such words may please Bill Gates, given his less than warm view of the liberal arts. The drive to nationalize education is so important to the DC lobbying crowd and the Gates Foundation that they are willing to overlook some “niceties,” such as the fact that it violates provisions in three federal laws (including the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the US Department of Education’s 1979 enabling legislation, and No Child Left Behind). Perhaps understanding the rule of law is a 20th-century skill.
Only this time, the DC advocates for this sort of educational lobotomy (which places workforce development above the formation of free citizens) have learned lessons from the past, when national standards efforts died off because they were done in the light of day. As Pioneer’s Jamie Gass noted a year ago in The Providence Journal:
When it comes to the national standards, the line dividing public officials and trade organizations has become so murky that Pioneer Institute recently submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between state education officials and organizations like NGA, CCSSO, the Gates Foundation and the Common Core State Standards Initiative. It’s particularly unfortunate that public education is the setting for this circumvention of democracy and the public trust. Even as we teach our children about the sanctity of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, they watch adults develop ever-more-clever ways to brush aside the principles those documents exemplify.
Those comments are based on experience. A year after Pioneer submitted a basic Freedom of Information Act search of the national standards in Massachusetts we’ve received more delays and stonewalling than any concrete FOIA results.
What I want is a debate on the merits of this effort before we call the game over. And when we have that argument, the national standards folks lose. Consider the fact that in August the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an association of conservative legislators, debated the merits of model legislation to pull out of the national standards at their quarterly meeting in New Orleans. Given the fact that most state legislatures and legislators are Republican, this is an influential group.
At the last minute, as Kris Amundson of Education Sector noted, Jeb Bush wrote “to the ALEC delegates urging them to table the resolution.”
They did and instead set up a series of sessions debating the issue at the end of November in Scottsdale, Arizona. The debate was open and frank. And as Catherine Gewertz of EdWeek reported, and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation notes in her blog, the ALEC Education Task Force debated model legislation that would aid states seeking to “exit the national standards project and regain control over what is taught in local schools.”
The day after the ALEC conference in Arizona ended, Diane Ravitch tweeted that the Gates Foundation, for the first time in ALEC’s history, gave the Council a grant for $377,000.
Philanthropy is a wonderful American tradition. I wonder when the Gates Foundation is able to flood the education ideas market with dollars whether we have the institutional fortitude to withstand the stupid ideas GF is generating. The national standards effort is slightly more plausible than the Simple Spelling Board, but not by much. And worse, it is illegal.
A century ago, the “People’s Lawyer” Louis Brandeis took on monopolistic industries in order to ennoble democratic principles articulated in the Constitution. Today, no one in DC has the courage to stand up to our era’s education Robber Baron. That’s hardly a surprise. But do the states?
Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on twitter at @jimstergios, or visit Pioneer’s website.
By Steve Poftak
December 9th, 2011
There’s a state commission that’s currently examining all the so-called “tax expenditures” that the state offers.
The commission has said it wants to review the collection of tax expenditures and eliminate those that don’t make sense. Its also held out the possibility of a eliminating a number of targeted credits in exchange for a zero-sum cut to the overall tax rate (an outcome to be hoped for).
May I nominate one expenditure to make? The Film Tax Credit.
These credits have been controversial from the get-go. Proponents point to growth in employment due to the credits.
Opponents counter that any industry receiving millions in tax credits would likely see some improvement. Its also a relatively small number of jobs (~5,000 – 7,000, depending on the point in time). In addition, much film industry employment is short-term duration — for the length of a filming then over.
That’s not to say that these jobs aren’t important. But the broader question is whether targeted state incentives (a significant portion of which ends up in the pockets of wealthy film stars, who likely don’t spend much of that in-state) should be promoting these types of jobs.
Much as I enjoy the glamour of the stars coming to town, this is a classic case of inefficient and ineffective tax policy. Let’s hope the commission is paying attention.
Crossposted at Boston Daily.
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