Sign Up For Our Newsletter

Mike Cason
AL.com
January 16th, 2015

MONTGOMERY, Alabama — State Sen. Dick Brewbaker, a Republican from Montgomery who has advocated for school reforms for years, said he is working with others to revise a charter school proposal in preparation for the legislative session.

Charter school legislation was a high priority for the Republican-led Legislature in 2012 but did not pass.

Brewbaker said he won’t file a bill this year until he has all the advocates on the same page.

The session starts March 3.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools that aren’t bound by the rules and regulations of traditional schools. Instead, they are governed by a charter that spells out their purpose and goals.

“It’s just a way to put a lot of flexibility into public education that traditional schools don’t have,” Brewbaker said.

Forty-two states allow charter schools, according to The Center for Education Reform.

Brewbaker said there’s ample evidence that innovation is needed in public education.

Last month, the state Department of Education released statewide results of tougher standardized tests Alabama students took for the first time last spring.

Students in grades 3-8 took the ACT Aspire tests in reading and math.

Tests showed that fewer than half were on track to be  ready for college in both subject areas at almost every level.

Brewbaker said charter schools are not a “silver bullet” but can be part of the mix in improving education.

“Charters are a way to get different sets of eyes looking at these problems,” he said.

He said the bill will be limited in scope and would probably allow the creation of 10 charter schools a year over a five-year period statewide.

Brewbaker said they would be run by a nonprofit organization under rules spelled out in a charter that would have to be approved by a local school board or a statewide board.

They would receive public school tax dollars in amounts based on their enrollment.

The Alabama Education Association has been an opponent of charter schools.

In an email today, AEA Executive Secretary Henry Mabry said the organization supports improvements in public education and would be open to discussions this year.

“We look forward to reviewing what Sen. Brewbaker has to offer during this upcoming session, and we hope to be given the opportunity to have our comments heard as this legislation is considered,” Mabry said.

Brewbaker said another group, School Superintendents of Alabama, was most instrumental in blocking the charter school legislation in 2012.

Eric Mackey, executive director of the SSA, said the group, which represents 137 local superintendents, had concerns about the 2012 legislation but ultimately supported it, with reservations, after some changes were made.

Mackey said the SSA and other groups have been involved in discussions about this year’s version.

He said it’s important that a charter school plan be limited in scope and that charters be written to target a specific need.

“In states where you see hundreds of charter schools, a large number, often the majority are underperforming,” Mackey said.

Brewbaker acknowledges that results of charter schools have been mixed. He said charters that aren’t achieving their goals within four years should be closed.

But Brewbaker also said he can’t understand “defense of the status quo, especially some systems that clearly need to take a fresh look at what they’re doing”

Sen. Quinton Ross, D-Montgomery, said he could not comment specifically on Brewbaker’s legislation, but said he generally opposes charter schools.

Ross said local school systems can already apply for waivers from some state laws and policies to develop flexible programs that fit their own needs. That was part of the Alabama Accountability Act, passed in 2013.

Brewbaker said he’s not seeing many school systems take advantage of flexibility waivers.

By Leslee Kluba
January 12, 2015
The Tribune Papers

John Stossel recently appeared on the Fox Business channel in an Uncle Sam suit, throwing money out of a wheelbarrow to illustrate the absurdity of ObamaCare’s risk corridors. It was as funny as his famous video wherein he smashed cars sarcastically claiming Cash for Clunkers was good for the economy.

Stossel’s book, No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails – But Individuals Succeed proved fun reading as well. Anybody acquainted with fiscally-conservative economics would find nothing new but the clear and clever writing style. Stossel breezes through concepts like the tragedy of the commons, the Laffer curve, Smith’s invisible hand, Bastiat’s broken windows fallacy, market distortions, unintended consequences, opportunity costs, etc. in a manner that might even convince some die-hard progressives.

Stossel, who left a life of accolades from the neoliberal media, claims, “Milton Friedman once called me ‘that rare creature, a TV commentator who understands economics, in all its subtlety.’ I loved that quote. But it’s one of the few things Milton got wrong.”

Stossel drives home the fact that the differences in economic philosophy, as embraced by the major political parties, are a matter of education. Youthful hipsters, looking for a quick fix without much thought will gravitate toward one party. Those who have been around, making a habit of studying histories, public policy, and economics, gravitate toward the other. So much for thinking globally.

Lots of folks, even those in high stations, don’t know what an economy is. In simple terms, it is the production, trade, and consumption of goods and services in a particular region. It is not, as Stossel notes, “a machine that needs jump starting. The economy is people who have objectives they want to achieve.”

Missing in many modern discussions of economics is the concept of trade. Stossel illustrates this with somebody buying a cup of coffee. Both the buyer and seller say thank you because both acquired something they value more than what they surrendered. If the price weren’t right, the transaction would not occur in a free market. Even anarchists agree coercion, fraud, and theft are aberrations to be dealt with when resorted to in a free market.

Yet, low-information economists like to argue against capitalism. They believe prices are arbitrary, that employers can pay those they hire whatever they demand. They are like the child who thinks money is available in infinite supply. free from the banks; and they continually fall for government’s deceptive claim of creating wealth by printing more money, borrowing, or taxing.

The world has no shortage of essays on why price controls on anything from wages to housing tend to further disadvantage the populations they’re supposedly designed to serve. Stossel told how the ADA made people with disabilities “walking lawsuits” waiting to happen in the eyes of potential employers.

Stossel himself used interns to do things his former employers couldn’t justify in their budgets. It gave college kids valuable, real-world experience. Then, the Labor Department decreed he could only have interns if their labors supplied “no immediate advantage.” The department, in fact, said it would be even better if Stossel’s work “may be impeded” by having them around.

The word “cause” in government has long been a double-entendre. Traditional causes, like helping needy families, as well as causes like padding the bottom line of the failing business of campaign supporters, or saving the habitat of rare salamanders, give government an excuse to grow, or in other words, transfer funds and resources out of the productive sector. But in government, job security is achieved by never solving problems, justifying never-shrinking budgets, and adding underlings.

Returning to the basic definition of an economy, the problem is obvious. Except in socialist states where it actually owns businesses, government produces nothing. It only forces the redistribution of resources. Arguments about optimal resource placement are obviously bogus, but when government moves things around, it necessarily introduces market distortions.

Undistorted pricing gives buyers, sellers, and potential buyers and sellers information about what people really want and need. Tampering with the data by fixing prices fogs the landscape leaving traders less satisfied than they could have been. It also introduces inefficiencies, as bureaucrats must be hired, managed, given digs, and equipped.

The 99 Percent were not upset with the free market; rather, they mislabeled crony capitalism. Stossel describes how government helps make business look ugly to the low-information crowd. “The more power we give government to control businesses, the more businesses seek to control government. Instead of obsessing about inventing better products, they obsess about getting cozy with politicians and regulators. They invest in people who are clever at manipulating rules.”

In free markets, everything is for sale but government. In market economies, ideas that don’t work or are unpopular for other reasons can’t find enough buyers to support their production. Through bailouts and “economic development incentives,” bad products get foisted on people as competition is undercut. Stossel says of the Chevy Volt, “Such boondoggles exist only because of fat government favors, uh, I mean subsidies. Wait, no, silly me. ‘Investments’ is the euphemism du jour.”

Stories of exchanges of campaign contributions in return for regulation and certification programs that discourage lateral-entry competition are abundant. Stossel describes Las Vegas’ limousine licensing as a “shakedown operation” for campaign funds. Monopolies can’t exist for long without the help of government favors, and technological innovation is impeded when connected corporatists get their friends in Washington to support their ideas beyond their natural life cycles.

It is not difficult for the cronies to get useful idiots to campaign on their behalf. If protester can make a big enough scene, the media will then pitch-in for the cause because hysteria makes good copy. The line the cronies fed the 99 Percent was that banks and other industries needed bailouts because the fat cats’ greed ran rampant with deregulation. In one of many “give me a break” moments, Stossel counters that President Bush, who caught the blame, “spent more money on regulation and hired more new regulators than any president before him.”

Thanks to lobbyists, who prefer to keep business afloat more through the force of government than an innovative research and development department, “Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more – so many, in fact, that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible. State and local bureaucrats create their own sets of crimes on top of that.”

Outside of industry, the younger crowd likes to grow government by entrusting it with social problems. This sanitizes charity by leaving assistance in the hands of credentialed bureaucrats doing a job. Is it any wonder caseloads grow as the afflicted won’t look into the eyes of those who sacrifice as a vote of confidence in their potential?

But to paraphrase Mitt Romney, “Government is people, my friend.” It’s a bunch of people who are cute enough to win popularity contests. There is no reason to believe they are more immune to “chronic government problems, like waste, bribery, corruption, regional favoritism, bailouts for the politically connected, and so on.” But the beat goes on, and the beautiful ones stay relevant by making up more rules and “staffing up” an increasingly complex public sector.

Stossel quotes Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform as saying attempts to make the nation’s monopoly on education more efficient and impactful, “have run ‘smack into federations, alliances, departments, councils, boards, commissions, panels, herds, flocks, and convoys that make up the education industrial complex, or the BLOB. . . . Not really a wall – they always talk about change – but more like quicksand, or a tar pit where ideas slowly sink.’”

Although he admits understanding less about military operations than economics, he faults the government for throwing money at nation building in Iraq. Four hundred tons of shrink-wrapped $100 bills were tossed about like footballs and distributed to anything that could make an application. One example of a grant recipient was a guy with a “security” dog that laid down when people approached.

Government leaders tell the people their doings are transparent, but published budgets have vague captions for line items with values that rhyme with “Ashevillian.” Stossel quips none of them are labeled, “Pilot Program for Oppressing Common People While Spending Huge Amounts on Holiday Parties and New Office Furniture.” It is very difficult to pinpoint waste, but everybody knows it’s there.

Government toys with members of the public too busy or too frightened by obfuscation and insults to do the math. A famous game is presenting analyses that only mention pros for a project and no cons against it. Another is speaking of “cuts” which, in government jargon, mean reductions in wish lists rather than last year’s appropriations. “The government’s budget,” he says, “has little to do with bookkeeping, cost-benefit analysis, reality, or even sanity.”

In light of all this, Stossel asks why we are trusting the federal government with healthcare. First of all, ObamaCare is insurance, not healthcare. Second of all, “One of America’s biggest healthcare problems is not that 48 million people lack insurance – it’s that 250 million Americans have too much of it.” He says providing coverage for sniffles and tummy aches is like having automobile insurance that pays for gasoline and oil changes. Among a host of other problems is loss of liberty.

The national debt is so large, it is only discussed in terms of abstractions, like which planet the dollar bills needed to pay it off, stacked end to end, would be nearest. Worse than the annual deficits are the compounding entitlements of Social Security and Medicare. They’re pyramid schemes made unsustainable by their initial actuarial assumptions, which are deemed a third-rail for anybody seeking re-election. Arguments that seniors are only taking out what they put in are false. On average, they’re getting back about three times what they contributed.

In recent years, America has been slipping in the Economic Freedom Index published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. Bill Beach of the Heritage Foundation explained, “Our spending has been excessive. We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Government takeovers of industries, subsidizing industries, . . . these are the kinds of moves that happen in third-world countries.”

Claims that soaking the rich as government grows unchecked can fix the problem have long since been debunked. Stossel shows that since 1945 government revenues have remained pretty much between 17 and 20 percent of GDP, even though tax rates on America’s top producers have ranged between 40 and 90 percent.

Ideas that America’s most productive can be taxed to a pulp view people as pawns devoid of survival instinct. The rich always hire accountants to find loopholes or lobbyists to make them, or else they will just relocate. The Donald described tycoons as “international people. Whether they live here or live in a place like Switzerland doesn’t really matter to them.”

In order to avoid rioting or other internal chaos, the government pretty soon will have to take serious action. Leaders just need to put country before re-election and make the tough decisions about which programs will be cut.

Puerto Rico’s governor Luis Fortuno started by cutting his own salary. Then, he privatized what he could. To stimulate the economy, he cut corporate taxes from 35 to 25 percent and reduced personal income taxes. According to Stossel, “Fortuno’s cuts haven’t made him popular. He may save Puerto Rico’s economy, but most voters don’t yet understand that it’s a good thing when fewer people work for the state. It’s just not intuitive.”

A bigger hurdle is educating the public. Stossel notes, “Obama today is not all that out of step with the way most Americans think.” As proof, this edit made it to the final printing. Can you identify the changed word?

“Economics is complicated. That’s one more reason to be grateful for the Constitution: In its relative simplicity, its rules keep government within bounds, so that we need to engage in elaborate number crunching to try to prove that the bureaucrats’ pet programs will bring us to financial ruin.”

By Rishawn Biddle
January 12, 2015
Dropout Nation

Today’s speech by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, along with the entire circus over the latest efforts to pass a new version of the federal education law, have certainly garnered plenty of attention from Beltway school reformers and other policy wonks. But as your editor has noted over the past few months, the chances of a No Child reauthorization becoming reality are as likely as they were two years ago. That is, none at all. After all, Duncan and the Obama Administration have issued calls for reauthorizing No Child at various points over the past six years, as have Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill. Yet as Duncan’s speech shows, the president will not sign any reauthorization that doesn’t preserve his legacy on education policy, a demand by which congressional Republicans won’t abide. So the latest hub-bub will be as meaningless as all the sound and fury signifying nothing that has happened over the past eight years.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some positive things coming out of all the otherwise-useless action. Education Trust and a cadre of civil rights groups (including the United Negro College Fund and NAACP) deserve praise for issuing a statement today calling for a reauthorization of No Child that effectively keeps in place the Adequate Yearly Progress provisions that have shined light on the consequences of the nation’s education crisis on children from poor and minority households. Given the collapse of the Campaign for High School Equity (which once served as the convening body for civil rights-based reformers) and the efforts by the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers to co-opt such groups by peddling a version of accountability that lets states, school operators, and adults off the hook for failure, Ed Trust deserves praise for rallying so many civil rights players to stand up for our most-vulnerable children.

But if reformers are looking to actually advance systemic reform, they need to spend less time in the Beltway and more in the nation’s statehouses, where much of the action on education will play out. Especially with a cadre of new governors and legislators taking office, along with issues that intersect with education such as criminal justice reform on the agenda, reformers should use the time now to pass meaningful legislation that will help all of our children.

There are plenty of reasons for focusing on the states beyond the stalemate inside the Beltway that has been the norm for the past four years and will remain so for the time-being. One lies with the Obama Administration’s No Child waiver gambit, which has allowed 40 states and the District of Columbia to ignore No Child’s accountability provision. As Dropout Nation has reported ad nauseam over the past four years, the administration has engaged in an exercise of shoddy policymaking that has damaged systemic reform by encouraging traditionalists in states such as Texas and California to weaken and ditch accountability altogether. Just as importantly, the waiver gambit reaffirms the role of states in structuring education without holding them accountable for how they spend federal dollars (or for providing them with high-quality teaching, curricula, and school options); this includes the administration’s move through the waiver process to bless implementation of Plessy v. Ferguson-like proficiency targets that allow districts and other school operators to effectively ignore poor and minority students.

For the few states that haven’t been granted a No Child waiver, there’s the matter that the federal law itself. Contrary to arguments offered up by traditionalists and conservative reformers looking to ditch No Child, the law did little to expand the federal role, and actually confirmed the role of states as the controlling entities of public education within their respective boundaries. States may be required to improve graduation rates and test scores — including the aspirational goal that all students are proficient in reading, math and science by 2014 — but they are given plenty of leeway in developing their own solutions in order to achieve them. Because of this flexibility, which states have figured out how to game since No Child signed 13 years ago, reformers in states still under its provisions must work as hard as in waiver states to advance systemic reform.

Certainly No Child and the waivers are two reasons why reformers must focus on states. But not the only ones. There’s the battle over implementing Common Core reading and math standards will continue apace, especially in states where Republican-controlled legislatures are under pressure to halt that work from movement conservatives opposed to them. Certainly reformers who back the standards are heartened by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s latest flip-flop from demanding the halt of implementation to giving districts a choice on continuing the work (which they will all likely do). But with Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, a once-strong backer of Common Core, already calling for a review of them, and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal continuing his presidential ambition-motivated effort to stop implementation, reformers must work hard to keep them on the books.

Another fight will be over expanding school choice. In Massachusetts, a years-long battle over eliminating a cap on expanding public charter schools will become even more heated thanks to incoming Gov. Charlie Baker, who has signaled that he will support reformers on this issue through his appointment of former New Schools Venture Fund boss-turned-federal education official Jim Peyser as the state’s new superintendent. In Maryland, the small cadre of reformers there (including the Old Line State branch of 50 CAN and the Center for Education Reform) are looking to rewrite the state’s charter school law, which favors districts at children’s expense. And in Connecticut, Parent Power activists are looking to revise the state’s Parent Trigger law, building upon the petition model that has worked well in California.

But the battles extend beyond education. The uproar over the murders of black men such as Michael Brown and Eric Garner by police officers are leading criminal justice reform advocates to push legislatures and governors to enact new policies, including the creation of independent prosecutors for cases involving cops as well as the rewrite of use-of-force laws that allow rogue cops to get off scot-free. Concerns over the virtual insolvencies of public defined-benefit pensions are spurring pension reform activists to action; this will include efforts to pass laws that will move teachers and other civil servants into hybrid plans that feature aspects of defined-contribution plans along with a defined-benefit component with a guaranteed savings rate. On these and other issues, reformers can easily team up with advocates on those issues to address the matters that affect our children inside and outside of schools.Then there are other battles. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, emboldened by winning a second term without backing from the AFT’s Empire State affiliate, will likely team up with Republicans in control of the state senate to push to improve an array of reform measures, including a further revamp of the teacher evaluation system. There’s also Indiana, where the two-year-long battle between reformers on the state’s board of education and Supt. Glenda Ritz will likely come to a head with efforts in the state legislature to make the latter’s job a gubernatorial appointment as well as Gov. Mike Pence’s plan to clarify state law by allowing the body to appoint its own chair instead of having Ritz at its helm. [Modifying and restructuring governance of state education systems will likely be on the agenda in other states as well.] And back in the Bay State, advocates for ending the overuse of harsh school discipline will likely leverage a report released last week by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice to push legislators to go their way.

These fights matter because states are the battlegrounds from which reform efforts, especially at the federal level, are ultimately won or lost. Starting with 1960s, when NEA and AFT affiliates successfully convinced states to pass state laws forcing districts to bargain with them, states began reaffirming their constitutionally-mandated role overseeing and structuring public education. This continued into the 1970s, when school funding lawsuits and property tax reforms such as California’s Prop. 13, forced states to become the single-biggest source of funding for public school systems. By the end of that decade, southern governors and chambers of commerce successfully launched a wave of curricula standards, standardized testing regimes, and teacher quality efforts that would be at the heart of the school reform movement of today.

The policy wins in one statehouse end up being reflected in other statehouses. Why. Contrary to the longstanding argument by some that states are laboratories of democracy in which innovation is the norm, legislators and governors often duplicate efforts undertaken by counterparts elsewhere. This is because states differ little when it comes to the challenges they face on education and other issues. It is one reason why the American Legislative Exchange Council (with its success in developing model legislation passed in statehouses) has emerged as a leading policymaking force on the national level — and why progressives are trying to duplicate those efforts through the State Innovation Exchange. It is also why NEA and AFT affiliates, which have long-understood the importance of working statehouses, are stepping up their efforts on that level to preserve their influence.

Particularly when it comes to education, policy initiatives end up becoming embedded in federal law. This is because the federal government ultimately amplifies education policy decisions made at the state level, especially by those reform-minded governors and legislators (along with reformers) who also seek help from the federal level to beat back opposition to their efforts by entrenched traditionalist interests. If not for the reform efforts of governors at the end of the 1970s, there would be no A Nation at Risk. If not for moves by Florida and Texas during the 1990s, No Child wouldn’t have even become reality.

This is even clear now in discussions over revamping No Child; proposals by congressional Republicans to voucherize Title 1 funding originate from the passage of school voucher initiatives in states such as Indiana and Louisiana, while the Obama Administration’s initiative on reducing the overuse of harsh school discipline result in part from efforts by activists in states such as Maryland. When reformers succeed on the state level, they can then advance policy changes on the federal level that can, in turn, bolster existing efforts as well as move states bereft of strong reform constituencies.

Simply put, reformers must focus less on the bluster surrounding No Child reauthorization and more on what will (or won’t) be passed during state legislative sessions this year.

This starts with building stronger ties to chambers of commerce and other institutional groups who are as concerned as reformers about the consequences of the education crisis. It also takes embracing a bipartisan approach that accepts the reality that battles over reform have far less to do with political ideologies than with the power relationships that often exist at the state level. This includes building stronger ties with advocates on other issues that affect education; this includes criminal justice activists, who can help address overuse of out-of-school suspensions that (along with low-quality teaching and curricula) make schools way-stations into prisons for so children from poor and minority households. It involves long-term cultivation of grassroots support critical to making passage and implementation of reforms a reality. This must also include continually making the case to governors and legislators on why advancing reform matters — and holding them accountable when they go the wrong way. Finally, it means developing model legislation that reform-minded legislators and governors can build upon in their own policymaking work.

Sure, some attention should be paid to a No Child reauthorization that won’t likely happen. But a greater focus on statehouses will actually do more on the policy front for our children.