June 19, 2013

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Will Prosperity 2020 reach its goals? [Contributor]

May 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment

BluePrint_RhettWilkinson_ustRhett Wilkinson is a lead project manager for The Exoro Group, a public affairs firm in Salt Lake City. A senior in journalism and liberal arts at Utah State University, he has previously interned in Utah Congressional and Gubernatorial offices and for the Deseret News. Opinions are his own.

 

134919137119739_crop Prosperity 2020 has a few neat trappings, but can its members cobble them together to reach their goals in seven years?

Utah’s Speaker of the House doesn’t think that the group can get two-thirds of the state to have a postsecondary degree or certificate by 2020, as it has set to do.

“It’s a big, audacious goal,” Rebecca Lockhart said at Utah State University in late April. “To be honest, I don’t think we can make it. Maybe by 2028.”

It’s true: as stated on the Prosperity 2020 website, the state’s high school graduation rate is in the lower than half of the country. That count is the fourth-lowest for Latinos and second-lowest among Asian and Pacific Islander students.

Prosperity 2020 2013 PrioritiesSo the push. The business community behind the initiative got the state legislature this year to pass a joint resolution adopting the goals of 90 percent reading and math proficiency in elementary schools, along with 66 percent of adults starting postsecondary training by 2018.  The goal was set after Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce revealed that many individuals must obtain a postsecondary degree or certificate in order to stay in the middle class. Unfortunately, only 39 percent of Utahns currently hold an associate’s degree or higher, according to the Utah System of Higher Education.

Members of the initiative—including business executives and non-profit leaders—have also made “strategic investments,” according to the website, toward measurable goals. A variety of funds was recommended for new investments in education, including an action center for those pursuing schooling in science, technology, engineering and math, early intervention for children at risk, ACT exams for every high school student and full commitment to fund computer-adaptive testing in Utah schools.

Prosperity 2020 2013 spendingProjections for those funds have been prefaced by Prosperity 2020’s acknowledgment of the “budget challenges Utah faces.” That is certain: the amount of new revenue available for education funding dipped after Fiscal Year 2008 and is expected to rise to a similar level again for FY 2014, when nearly $2 out of every $3 in revenue is expected to go towards education.

The goals of Prosperity 2020 are commendable, but Lockhart may be correct in her assessment. Perhaps her assessment is most astute when considering the current percentage of Utahns holding an associate’s degree or higher and given the budget challenges Utah faces in the face of Prosperity 2020’s funding recommendations.

 

What is Prosperity 2020? According to the Salt Lake Chamber’s website:

The Salt Lake Chamber has partnered with chambers of commerce and business associations from all over Utah in a movement called Prosperity 2020 to strengthen our economy by improving education.

Learn more about it at the Salt Lake Chamber’s site.

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Our problem isn’t the taxes, but the spending

December 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

“Spending car” by Mike Lester

Is it time for Republicans trying to avert the fiscal cliff to give up on protecting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy in exchange for entitlement reform?

Maybe, says former Senator Bob Bennett in an opinion piece in the Deseret News.

President Barack Obama wants to raise revenue by increasing taxes on households earning more than $250,000. The financial arguments for his position are weak — there aren’t enough such households to have a big impact on the debt — but he will prevail because all he has to do to get his way is nothing.

No deal, and taxes go up automatically on Jan. 1, giving him what he wants for the rich. Then on Jan. 2, he can propose that Congress immediately pass a law putting rates back down for the non-rich. If Republicans don’t pass it and there is a new recession, he will claim that it was their fault.

Maybe a better question would be: do Republicans still have a choice?

In many respects, the debate over taxes–raise them on the rich! Lower on the poor! Middle class! Get rid of deductions! Close loopholes! Reform the tax code!–is important, but really misses the point of what is behind the fiscal problems our country is facing. At the root of it all, the problem isn’t the tax code–though I’m all for reforming it, simplifying it, and making it more flat–the problem is that we are spending more than we are paying in taxes.

Let me repeat that with some emphasis: we are spending more than we are paying in taxes.  It’s a national problem carried and caused by each and every American. It isn’t about the rich–who are paying more and more–or the poor–who aren’t paying at all, but are more reliant on the government than ever before: it’s about all of us.

  • The Democrats: “Raise taxes on the wealthy!” comes the hue and cry from the Left, regardless of the fact that taxes cannot be raised high enough to avert future fiscal crises. In fact, they may aggravate them. No matter how many times the left side of the political spectrum tries to attack the wealthy, to say that they are not paying their fair share, the fact is that the wealthy are paying an increasingly large percentage of all taxes received by the federal government.  As I’ve noted in an earlier post, the 1950s, which saw record high tax rates on the very wealthy, also saw the wealthy supporting only 27% of the government’s budget. Today, the wealthy support 51% of the federal budget.
  • The Republicans: “No tax hikes!” is a great slogan, and indeed, Republicans are right that taxes slow the economy and hurt entrepreneurs, employers, and families. But they can’t fight tax growth with one hand, and spend more with the other.  One of the major mistakes of Republicans during the George W. Bush Administration was the passage of Medicare Part D, a massive expansion of government spending without corresponding revenues (also known as “taxes”). It didn’t help that we decided to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. My point is that you can’t fight taxes and create spending at the same time and expect the books to balance at the end of the day.
  • And the rest of us Americans: Like it or not, whether you are political or not, whether you voted  or not, you too are part of the problem. Our culture’s changing priorities is a part of the problem. Think about your own spending and lifestyle habits:  do you go to the emergency room instead of the physician? Do your lifestyle choices keep you healthy and physically fit? Did you take a job–any job–during the recession, and then, when it wasn’t enough to pay the rent or put food on the table, seek help from family, church, or charity first, before seeking government aid?  Are you saving for your retirement or are you expecting that Social Security and Medicare will provide for you in your “golden” years? And to the wealthy: do you give to a lobbying group that assures your industry gets sweet-heart deals, tax carve-outs and deductions, or protection from competition? For all of us: do you make an effort to be aware of the effect local elected officials actions will have on your home, neighborhood, city, or state?

In large part, I believe that the growth of the mountain of debt our country faces in the coming decades is not merely the fault of politicians in Washington, D.C., but also the result of changes in American culture where we demand more, and more, and give less, less not to our country, but to our neighbors and to our communities. As we fail to prepare and practice self-reliance and interdependence with our neighbors, we hand government bureaucrats more responsibility for things that would have, just a generation ago, been handled by neighbors helping one another.

The costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are among the heaviest that our country will need to burden in the coming decades, but reforming them is the work of politicians, and work that they can feasibly accomplish. The long-term future of American prosperity depends on it.

On the other hand, the effects that are created by an American culture that creates people that ask “what can my country do for me?” is an effect that can be deterred only by asking “what you can do for your country.” And that question can only be answer by some serious introspection–and personal change.

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Taking a page from the Steve Jobs playbook to help education

September 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In case you missed it yesterday, the following is a piece I wrote for KSL.com.

_______________________________

While Americans are waiting to receive the first shipments of the iPhone 5, the Chicago teachers’ union strike continuesinto its second week. The teachers’ union is seeking a 29 percent salary increase over four years. For Chicago teachers who currently make anaverage of $74,839, compared to median household income in Cook County of $45,922, the increase would put teachers at an income level almost twice that of their students’ parents.

Meanwhile, those parents are at wits’ end trying to contain the more than 4,000 students running footloose and fancy free across Chicago while school is out. It’s enough to create empathy for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

What makes the strike most suspect, though, is not the union’s salary demands, but its opposition to merit pay. At a time when China is producing more than a thousand engineers for every one American engineer (China was expected to graduate over a million engineers in 2011), Chicago teachers are balking at any kind of measure that will examine whether their methods and skills are actually educating students. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Teachers won big, however, on what they really care about (other than money), which is limiting the degree to which student test scores count in teacher evaluations. Student performance will count for only 25 percent starting this year, moving up over the next two years to 35 percent. This leaves the rest of the evaluation to the kind of subjective judgment that has long kept the worst teachers firmly in place.

Teachers picket outside Morgan Park High School as a strike by the Chicago Teachers Union continues into its second week. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

In other words, there’s no penalty for poor teacher performance and no incentive to improve, either. On the other hand, there’s clearly plenty of motivation to take a week off for the picket lines. If the strike works, union teachers’ compensation will grow significantly.

What may not improve, however, is student learning. Maybe we should be taking a page from the Steve Jobs playbook that created the iPhone and how he wanted to apply revolutionary change to education to keep America competitive.

Steve Jobs, no conformist himself, saw the rise of teachers unions as directly in opposition to the purpose of schools and the breaking of the unions as the beginning of education reform.

In Utah, perennially short on education funding, the debate over raising teacher salaries is governed more by competition for state funds with other worthy projects. It should be no surprise, then, that Utah’s solutions have included a grab bag of innovative solutions that seek to integrate technology, on-the-job training and choice.

Earlier this year, the Utah legislature passed SB 248, the Smart School Technology Act. Developed in cooperation with the Governor’s Office of Economic Development, the idea behind the law was that using technology properly in Utah’s public schools will train students to be better prepared for the modern workforce and to enter higher education ready to compete. Further, a skilled workforce and quality schools are great branding for state business recruitment and retention efforts.

Under the Smart School Technology Act, Dixon Middle School, Gunnison Elementary School and North Sevier High School were selected to test a program that puts iPads in the hands of every student and teacher. Created by iSchool Campus, a Park City-based education technology company, the program involves a flat-screen TV and an Apple TV box that networks all of the devices. In addition to placing technology in students’ hands, the programs is school wide, provides training to teachers and has robust Internet security to protect students from harmful material.

Other innovations begin before children enter school. My daughter is in a preschool program called Upstart, a pilot designed to be used at home in the year before children start kindergarten. Participants are given a computer program on a dedicated external hard drive that plugs into a home computer. For 15 minutes a day, children use “Rusty and Rosy Learn with Me” to learn the alphabet, numbers, vocabulary and science. We are two weeks into Upstart and already my daughter is showing increased vocabulary, knowledge of letters and numbers and interest in learning. I see it as a direct result of the program.

In this Jan. 27, 2010 file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs shows off the new iPad during an event in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

On the other end of the spectrum, serving high school students, Granite School District has a career and technology education program that Granite spokesman Ben Horsley calls “world class.” Students work directly with businesses in highly technical career paths that “provide a boost into their college and career pathways.” Serving 3,000-plus students across Granite School District, the program introduces students to more than 55 specialized career pathways from bioengineering to robotics.

Lest we forget, Utah is at the forefront of language-immersion programs, with the National Security Administration providing supporting funding to start children learning Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and French as early as 1st grade.

From technology in the classroom to technology at home, each are innovations that Steve Jobs might admire and approve of, efforts by Utah educators and legislators to try new ideas and new technologies to increase student success.

At the end of the day, though, Jobs did not see technology, nor the lack of technology, as what would make or break a student’s education. It was choice. Technology won’t work to improve education until we solve politics to allow more choice in education. “It’s a political problem,” said Jobs.

“The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the National Education Association and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.”

Choice, then, is the last piece of the equation. A recent study by researchers at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University found that students involved in voucher programs were 24 percent more likely to enroll in college as a result of receiving a voucher. Teachers and schools who have incentive to compete, to use technology and to improve their skills are better educators. And better educators create better students. Why, then, does Utah lag behind other states in providing parents with choice in their children’s education?

The paradigm of a teacher standing in front of a classroom at a chalkboard is a relict of the past that the Chicago teachers union is fighting to retain. A great tool circa “Little House on the Prairie,” the blackboard should go the same way as the one-room school house. More pay alone, with insufficient merit requirements, does not improve schools. A better solution is found in merit pay, technology integration and school choice.

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Educational Saving Accounts for High School Students is Good Step

February 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Utah State Representative John Dougall of American Fork

Rep. John Dougall, known in Utah legislative circle as an “ideas guy”* and “freight train“** for the breadth and creativity of the bills he’s carrying this year, had a great idea: why not let high school students and their parents pick the public school solution that best meets their educational needs?

It’s a step in the right direction, if just a small step.

Every once in a while, a good idea comes along. One such idea was that parents should choose where and how their children get educated, and if that type of education means taking them out of the public education system, the tax dollars should, with reasonable restrictions, follow to the school of choice.

In Utah, voters put the kibosh on the school choice/vouchers idea, and we have since returned to the perennial debate about how to improve public education centered on, primarily, paying more of the state budget to public education. Never mind that dollars per student has not proven to be a very good indicator of student success…

The idea is still out there, but in lieu of flaunting the will of voters, Utah’s legislators have opted to, so to speak, let that sleeping dog lie until interest shifts.

Meanwhile,  we have Rep. Dougall’s step in the right direction.  The bill, appropriately named HB123, would “require the state to put most of the money it now sends to high schools into education savings accounts for students in grades 9-12. Bill sponsor Rep. John Dougall, R-American Fork, said that could equal about $6,400 per student per year.”

Could making public schools compete with each other drive quality up?

Where could that money be spent? The student couldn’t just drop out of high school and allocate the money to parents to “home school” him. Rather, the money is limited to public institutions and select private, nonprofit universities (sorry, University of Phoenix). That means charter schools, public online schools, public universities (USU, UVU, SLCC, UU, SUU, and Dixie State), as well as, perhaps BYU (it’s private, non-profit and, frankly, it’s pure awesome sauce; however, it wasn’t named specifically, so I’m just speculating that it is included).

Because it only shifts where money is spent, the bill does not dramatically increase ongoing costs. The fiscal note indicates that there is a one time cost for a financial accounting system and an annual cost of $2,000,000.

Even with a low fiscal impact, however, Utah legislators aren’t ready to allow even such a small step. On Friday the House Education Committee narrowed the scope of who could use the education savings accounts down to just 11th and 12th graders. Because, you know, so much education happens during that last year of high school.

Despite how much the money may be lost on those afflicted with senioritus, it is a step in the right direction and gives the state the opportunity to test the education savings accounts as a pilot program. Rep. Dougall said

Because no one wants their kids living at home forever.

“I think we can have more faith in students and parents in this state than some believe we should have [...] I think they’re much more capable and able to choose for themselves what education makes sense for them.”

‘Nuf said. Give the people who know the students best–their parents–the credit and the ability to choose where, and how, their children’s education is accomplished. No one has a better incentive to see that their dependents are well on the path to independence than parents. No one.

It’s good idea, and it’s a good step in the right direction. Take a moment and email or call your legislator to let them know that you support HB123.

[Salt Lake Tribune] [HB123 Fiscal Note] [HB123]

*Speaker Lockhart, Utah County Lincoln Day Dinner, 2011)

**Ok, that’s what I called him.

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Email Doug Stephens. On his government email. “In a confidential way…”

August 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

“Utah could break the back of the teachers’ union,” a friend told me over lunch. “They could do it tomorrow, if [legislators] wanted to. All they would have to do is look into the corruption, fraud and waste in the school .”

Well, now. That’s a bold statement. And it’s exactly the over-the-top type thing that a couple of guys say over lunch when it doesn’t matter and no one is listening (and no one has to back anything up with facts, those pesky little things).

On the other hand, what is it with unions, especially teachers’ union? If the (unions, generally) are really so fantastic, why do judges feel the need to prohibit unions from throwing feces?

I can’t help but wonder at the underlying threat of violence that seems to follow them.

Back to Utah and over-the-top statements and backbreaking and such.

A few months back (meaning last year), the Ogden School District decided it had had enough of unions breaking its back. Specifically, the Ogden Education Union (“OEA”), the local version of the Utah Education Association. The recession is still on, people are still having babies, and the number of students signing up for school is growing.

It gave Ogden teachers a choice: sign the contract we send you, or hasta la vista. Oh, and we’ll give you a 3% raise, almost double the Utah Consumer Price Index (CPI) and a third greater than the national CPI. In other words, inflation has only increased the cost of stuff by 1.7%, but we’ll pay you 3% more.

All you gotta do is sign the contract.

The OEA balked. It told the teachers to stick it to the man, and force the school district to negotiate with the union on the teachers behalf. Don’t sign those contracts with the 3% salary increase…

All but one teacher signed. See, they’re teachers. They can do the math. They know a good deal when they see one.

The upshot?

While several other school districts are passing new tax increases this year, including Alpine and Davis, the Ogden School District has not raised taxes. They were also able to give raises to their teachers without collective bargaining – imagine. They have not cut the school year, or reduced staff.

But unions aren’t interested in the general welfare of their clients–the children and parents and teachers of the district–they’re interested in themselves.

And so, on August 15, Doug Stephens, President of the OEA, sent an email to all those recently rehired teachers with the 3% salary increases. He wanted just one thing: money. (Well, not exactly. He also asked teachers to sign up for another year of ineffective collective bargaining, to join a protest, to exert peer pressure on “fellow teachers who are not O.E.A. members,” and to read a really bad poetry analysis, and but that’s beside the point…or is it?)

Courtesy of Holly “on the Hill” Richardson:

Our political battles will take large amounts of O.E.A/U.E.A.- P.A.C. dollars. We are asking each member to give at least $30.00 to our P.A.C. fund this year. That is less than $5.00 a month between now and when school ends in May 2012. All the money we raise this year in our P.A.C. will stay with us. To be able to give a candidate, that we select, for a school board race, thousands of dollars and hundreds of volunteers to help in a campaign is unbeatable in a local election.

That’s right. In other words, Doug is say that “We couldn’t help you last year, we’re in a state that loathes us, and we’re losing ground…all while you’re getting a raise higher than the rest of the population and ahead of inflation. But please: by all means, keep sending us your money!”

Seriously. Teachers would get a better return in the stock market than sending $30 to the OEA this year. Heck, they might get a better return in a lemonade stand.

To return to my friend’s comment over lunch: perhaps Utah legislators could break the back of the UEA and its mini-me local unions just by looking into the fraud and waste that goes on in the school system. I don’t know. I haven’t looked into if there is that much.

The reality is, however, that it may not matter. Utahns care about their kids and they care about their schools, and they are willing to pay what they can to prove it. In a baby rich, cash poor state like Utah, that Ogden was able to provide a 3% raise in the midst of a recession is proof positive.

But don’t tell that to Doug Stephens. Unless you want to. His email address, if you want to communicate with him “in a confidential way,” as he asked in his email, is dstephens1@weber.edu . (What is he doing giving out a government email for union promotion in what is clearly political work, anyway?)

(H/T to Holly Richardson for Ogden School District vs the union at hollyonthehill.wordpress.com)

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In California, anything is possible…maybe even “Fat History Month.”

July 18, 2011 by 7 Comments

Sometimes, laws don’t make sense. They’re the result of an agenda forced on the majority by a loud and influential minority. The law doesn’t reflect good public policy, just a successful lobbying effort.

California‘s recent dictate to schools to teach the benefits of gays and lesbians to history is one such law. If people thought the Utah legislature’s micromanagement of civics lessons was a little myopic and, well, unnecessary, then this is even more so.

The state has become the first in the nation to require textbooks and history classes to cover the contributions of gay, lesbian and transgendered Americans.

A good friend of mine, known to the world by her nom de plume Salt H2O, put it sarcastically well:

As a former four eyes who was bullied for her glasses I would like to push for ‘eyesight impaired’ history. I don’t want a whole month. I’d just like it to be pointed out in text books the great people of this nation who wore corrective lenses.

Another group that should be up in arms over SB 48 are the obese. Fat kids get teased at an earlier age than homosexuals, and there are exponentially more fat people than homosexuals in our country.  We need Fat History Month to appreciate the metabolically challenged that contributed to this great country so that our fat children will not get bullied because they have a hankering for a Twinkie.

via My Soapbox: Fat History Month.

Maybe she has a point. Certainly President William Howard Taft might get a page or two in the fat metabolically challenged history book. Weighing in at well over 300 pounds when he left office, there is no doubt that he would qualify to “fit” the requirements.

But wait, you say. He’s already well reported in history. He served as President of the United States, an Ohio Supreme Court justice, a US Circuit Court judge, as Governor of the Philippines, and Secretary of War under Theodore Roosevelt, not to mention Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the only former President to administer the oath of office to another President. He was a very accomplished man.

And he was, at 5’11″ and 290 pounds when he took office, very much in the obese category.

Why must history be revised and taught according to the gender, sexuality, race, or, for that matter, weight categorization? Why not just teach the history that matters, the history that affects us, and leave it at that? Leave out the classifications that label people, and let them be what they are: humans being humans, for better or for worse.

It should not matter if that human was white, black, gay or straight, skinny or fat, male or female. If that person has affected history, teach it.

And, in the meantime, spend more time in schools focusing on the skills that actually matter and that are being forgetting in the culture wars and agendas pushed by minority groups. I’m talking math, reading, writing, and science. It won’t really matter what people think about sexual orientation if they get to college and can’t write, or read, a complete sentence…if they can get in, at all.

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Do you really need all that education?

June 24, 2011 by 4 Comments

And now for something completely different, let’s ask ourselves the question: DO YOU REALLY NEED ALL THAT EDUCATION?

Arnold Kling doesn’t necessarily think so. Rather, education just separates the “wheat from the chaff. ”

There’s a great debate going on between a some economists over at Econlog.com.  Their question? Does more education endows more benefit, or is it just “signaling” to employers to select the smarter, harder working workers. It’s called “signal theory” and Bryan Caplan explains it like this:

If you haven’t heard, the signaling theory says that to a significant extent, education does not increase workers’ productivity. Instead, the fact that you obtain an education shows that you were more productive all along, which makes employers want to hire you.

Here’s a simple thought experiment to illustrate the distinction. Which would do more for your career: A Princeton education, but no diploma, or a Princeton diploma, but no education?

Does that mean we all take standardized tests in seventh grade and call it good? Enter the workforce at our level of IQ or productivity?  Not necessarily (though there are those who would say that standardized tests already do that):

Even firm believers in the signaling model like myself grant that schools teach some useful skills. But more importantly, this objection only works against specific kinds of signaling. Yes, if all that school signals is IQ, then a test is a cheap substitute. But what if school signals conscientiousness and/orconformism? Think about it this way: Would you want to hire a high school drop-out with a 150 IQ? Probably not, because you’d immediately think “This guy had the brains to do anything. Why didn’t he finish high school? What’s wrong with him?!”

But what about college? That graduate degree?  Necessary. Because it’s part of what differentiates the dumb from the smart, the lazy from the industrious. Academia may be so many hoops to jump through, result in a lot of social waste, but still provide the utility of helping employers find the best workers. It’s a conundrum, but not a contradiction.

You can believe that IQ matters quite a lot for earnings, but still think that education teaches nothing but bona fide job market skills. If this is so, then comparing the earnings of college graduates to high school graduates overstates the private benefit of education. Why? College graduates were smarter to begin with, so they would have earned more money than the typical high school graduate even if they didn’t go to college. Labor economists call this “ability bias.”

Similarly, you can believe that a lot of education is mere signaling, without thinking that IQ by itself puts money in your pocket. Suppose that the world is rigidly credentialist, so that no one will even consider a person without a degree for anything beyond a low-skilled job. If this is so, then comparing the earnings of college graduates to high school graduates overstates the social benefit of education. Why? Because part of the effect of education is just to make yourself look better compared to other people without increasing production.

As a high school drop out with less than a full five years of k-12 public education under my belt, I tend to lean towards the theory that much of public education is time wasted. Even as a high school dropout, I managed to earn a bachelors and a law degree. Neither degree came from Ivy League institutions, but nor were they bottom feeders, either. Quite the contrary. All without the full thirteen years of public education.

I don’t say this to toot my horn, but rather to note that it may not be necessary to attend the full gamut of public education to succeed. On the contrary, it is innate ability (aka IQ) and work ethic that is a greater indicator of success.

That said, I love learning, and I would never have turned down my years of study at Brigham Young or at the University of Utah’s College of Law for anything. Both were very enriching experiences, albeit a bit expensive, and I found them to be personally valuable.

High school, though, I could have done without. Even the year and a half I did attend. Waste. Of. Time.

Check out Bryan Caplan’s posts on the topic here and here.

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