If you mandate it, why not fund it?

As I was doing my morning reading last week, I did a quick check of my Facebook page to discover a post by a friend and member of a local school board. It linked to a KMA story about the Iowa Senate passing a school radon bill. My friend’s comment noted without the funding, the bill wasn’t much help to schools.

In other words, it’s just another “unfunded mandate.”

From my years tracking state education legislation, I can say this follows the usual pattern of picking issues and pushing through one-size-fits-all fixes. These fixes often turn into political theater, giving legislators issues on which to run their next campaign. But they create headaches for local level officials charged with implementation because they are passed without the funding that would make them work.

In this case, without additional funding to help schools pay for installation of any needed radon mitigation system, requiring it becomes a burden more likely to erode a district’s education program by taking money away from kids’ learning or other district needs. Currently, that’s how the legislation reads.

And such legislation distracts from the real responsibility of legislators to tax and spend for the common good. Their job, first and foremost, is to provide the means (money) for public services, not the details of their operation.

As one southwest Iowa legislator noted when I made a visit to the Capitol in February, from the beginning of his legislative career, he specialized, serving on agricultural and human service committees. Too many issues come before the legislature for him to be an expert in all, he said.

Which leads me to ask why legislators are passing legislation at this level of detail, instead of appropriating adequate education funds to allow local officials to do the job of providing safe schools? Ironically, this same legislator registered a similar complaint about working with the federal government on water quality standards in Iowa.

But getting back to radon, it is very definitely a public health issue, and we want to protect our children. If it’s a priority, then it’s the legislature’s job to appropriate the funds to pay for this public safety law. However, without the funding, it’s simply marketing for the next election.

If legislators are serious about public needs, they need to be willing to fund them. That’s why Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to tax. And our state constitution states: “Government is instituted for the protection, security, and benefit of the people.” No government can perform these duties without funds.

Likewise, schools can’t fix a radon problem without funds.

So if state legislators really want to protect our schools from radon, they need to provide the funds for it. Either attach appropriations to the radon bill or increase allowable growth to cover it instead of asking schools to cut already tight budgets or local property taxpayers to pick up the bill.

Basic skills testing: What’s in a number?

Education has been on my mind a lot lately. But then, I live with a teacher and student, so it is always front and center at my house.

The past week, my daughter has been sharing about the annual run-up to basic skills testing. We’ve shared conversations about the importance of the tests, how the results affect not only her, but her teachers, school and, by virtue of the school being one of the largest employers, our entire community. We’ve searched the house for pencils to be sure she has a ready supply to thoroughly fill each answer bubble. And it’s been early to bed with a healthy breakfast every morning.

But this year, as I do every year, I wonder what my daughter and her teachers are missing out on while they go through this data-collection process? How many irreplaceable opportunities to experience the joy of learning are missed in the quest for some numbers?

In addition, I’ve been tracking our Iowa legislature as they debate what the governor has termed his education “reform” package and, once again, missed the deadline to pass funding for the next year. This deadline was missed not just because of disagreement about how much the state can afford. It’s also because the governor tied his reform plan (which is really just a repackaging of things many schools are already doing) to the money in an effort to push it through. Some of this plan includes which assessments or tests we’ll be using to evaluate Iowa schools.

That’s when I came across an article comparing our military and education systems. Written by Professor William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, and entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Read or Win Wars,” this article took a closer look at the misperceptions created when we reduce the results of our actions to numbers. His example compares the use of the body count during recent wars to the new penchant for test scores in education.

“What’s missing is the old-fashioned sense of education as a public good, as essential to democracy,” he writes. “ . . . Instead, today’s ultimate metric of educational success is not empowerment but rather employment. Education is reduced to training and success is measured by a post-college paycheck. Call it another form of body count: the number of (student) bodies who graduate with jobs. Never mind the ideals or morals of those students. Never mind their virtue. Those qualities can’t be readily measured, so we’ll ignore or dismiss them.”

I read this a week after I watched my daughter’s teachers and older school mates band together to provide for the immediate necessities of a student who lost everything in a house fire. What’s the measure for that?

As Astore concludes, it’s up to us to decide whether we want to churn out workers for jobs or people who can think critically, solve problems and lead.

Will guns protect us from government?

Since the events in Newtown last December, I’ve engaged in a number of conversations about public safety, specifically about how to responsibly regulate gun ownership. And I’m always amazed at the people who are convinced we need those guns to protect ourselves from our own government.

First, if we are truly a democracy, “we the people” are ultimately the government. So to paraphrase a Frank Zappa song, “If government is the problem, then we’re the problem . . . and maybe even a little ugly on the side.”

Next, these folks never seem to acknowledge that weapons rarely have been the key to resisting government tyranny. Plenty of bloodless coups have occurred via the use of other means. And I propose that, to some degree, folks who are paranoid about our government have already missed the boat.

Why? While they were watching FOX News, a handful of mega-wealthy corporate moguls bought up our press and rigged our system via campaign contributions and lobbying and have already taken over the government.

And to add insult to injury, via groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), they’ve been taking citizens’ membership and purchase dollars to write laws that further decrease our ability to get ahead and lead a secure life. Not only do we serve their interests when we unquestioningly consume the information they present, but we pay the bill for them when we pay our dues or purchase their products. How’s that for a deal?

Government is just the straw man they’ve set up to take the blame while they shift our tax dollars to offshore accounts and steal our resources. We’ve been lulled to sleep with their slogans and infotainment, and we mutely accept that nothing we do can change it.

Poppycock!

The power of people uniting for action has always countered these powerful minorities. Why do you think corporate powers hate unions?

As one reader noted in a response to an earlier column, less than 10 percent of workers belong to unions today. But when media repeats the same tired stories of egregious union workplace requirements without providing the context of labor history in this country, people come to view unions negatively. The more isolated workers feel, the easier it is for business to limit wages, benefits and health and safety regulations. If workers fear losing their job, they’ll be easier to control. And these lowered expectations then extend to other workers in non-union industries.

So you can holler about keeping your guns to fight the tyranny of the government. But I say you’ve already lost the battle to the real power in the U.S. – corporate special interests. And your guns won’t protect you from that – only a united and well informed populace willing to speak up will.

How did I miss this?

That was my reaction last Wednesday morning when I stumbled across a blog post by 2009 National Teacher of the Year (NTOY) Anthony Mullen entitled, “Teachers Should be Seen and Not Heard.” I’d been contemplating the state of education in Iowa as our governor and statehouse Republicans hold education funding (called allowable growth) hostage in an effort to fast-track Governor Branstad’s education reform plan. Mullen’s post, though old, describes what’s wrong with education reform efforts across the nation.

Prior to the NTOY honor, Mullen, a former New York City police officer, taught at an alternative high school in Connecticut, where he worked with students one step away from dropping out. As National Teacher of the Year, Mullen spent a year travelling the country and speaking to educators and reformers about this country’s high dropout rate. Mullen blogged about his experiences.

In his January 2010 post, Mullen describes participating in a small group meeting about education. Around the table with Mullen were three governors, one state senator, a Harvard professor/author and a moderator.

Mullen, who described himself as a “fly on the wall,” recounted the conversation around the table as the politicians and professor expressed their opinions. The politicians swapped comments about the quality of teachers, the need for accountability and the supposed benefits of running a school like a business. The Harvard professor contributed a mini-lesson about chaos theory in education.

Eventually the discussion anticipated teacherless classrooms, in which technology replaces teachers and schools.

Mullen narrated his thoughts as he listened to these ideas from people whose last experience in a K-12 classroom was their final year in high school. People, I’d add, whose own kids were probably grown and out of the house.

Finally, the senator asked Mullen, “What do you think?”

So Mullen shared his thoughts about the health care debate and wondered if he could sit on a panel to create a core curriculum of medical procedures to be used in emergency rooms. Suddenly he had everyone’s attention.

Mullen continued that he knows he’s unqualified for such a role as he’s not a doctor, never worked in an emergency room, nor treated a patient, but so what? “Today I have listened to people who are not teachers, have never worked in a classroom, and have never taught a single student tell me how to teach,” he concluded.

That’s the trouble with education reform – it’s being driven by people who know nothing about teaching. Meanwhile in Iowa, the resources our children and their schools need to continue their work is being held hostage while amateurs argue about reform.

By law (one signed by Governor Branstad during his first round as governor), the Iowa Legislature must pass school funding within the first 30 days of the session to allow schools to plan, certify their budgets and issue contracts. But for the last two years, he and statehouse Republicans have held school funding hostage in an effort to pass his education reform package.

What’s the hurry? Legislators’ job is to publicly and thoroughly examine and debate new policies. It is also to tax and spend for the common good. And first and foremost, it is to uphold state law.

Pass allowable growth for our children and schools. Then look at education reform, building it on the input of the experts and stakeholders – teachers, parents and students.

If we cut spending, what gets fixed?

While working his first job out of graduate school in Texas, my husband came home with a story about a co-worker at the sheltered workshop where he was employed. This young man had married his high school sweetheart, and they’d recently had their first child. They were very traditional – while Tom was working, his wife focused on the home and child. Even back then, living on a single salary was a challenge.

Unfortunately for Tom, his wife’s parents had never placed any emphasis on her learning to manage money. He soon discovered while she knew how to spend it, she had no idea when the bills came, she and Tom were obligated to pay them. Instead, she thought if she threw them in the garbage, they would go away.

Needless to say, they didn’t. And by the time, Tom discovered what was happening, they had a serious problem. The marriage didn’t survive it either.

I was reminded of this young couple reading a New York Times piece by David Bornstein entitled, “When Paying It Forward Pays Us Back.” Bornstein writes: “But while it’s easy for budget hawks to call for the axe, we have to remember that cutting a program doesn’t make the problem go away. We’ll still have people who are unemployed, unskilled, aging, chronically ill, disabled, living in substandard housing and so forth. In many cases, their problems, if ignored, will become more costly for society over time.”

I’d add calling for more personal responsibility doesn’t make these problems disappear either.

But solutions are out there. Bornstein’s article focuses on the transitional care model (TCM) and its potential to cut Medicare costs for a projected savings of up to $10 billion per year – without cutting benefits. Transitional care saves money by preventing return visits to the hospital through home visits by specially trained nurses. According to the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy, multiple studies of TCM support its potential to not only save money, but effectively care for our seniors.

And the latter is what gets lost when policy matters are reduced to the budget. As a society, we’re too quick to evaluate programs and people based on numbers like a dollar amount or a test score — without looking at more qualitative measures. We want a simple or easy reference.

But people are not numbers. We remember that when it’s personal, but not when we’re talking about policy. Special interest groups have used this tendency to promote policies that have us fighting over crumbs instead of calling for policies that care for people.

As Congress gears up for the next round of budget debates, I encourage everyone to do their homework. Take a look at Bornstein’s article and the work of the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy. Ask yourself what outcomes you want your government to help provide instead of focusing solely on the costs.

Because if all we do is cut spending, nothing will get fixed.

Will cutting taxes really benefit Iowa’s economy?

Now the New Year has arrived, I’m preparing for the Iowa Legislature to convene. And surveying the preliminary media coverage, it looks like the usual battle over taxes vs. spending. The rub this year is an $800 million budget surplus.

Many of our state’s Republican legislators are set to give that money back to the taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, even though the surplus is largely the result of major cutbacks in state services.

But of course there’s the question of which taxpayers benefit. Will cuts benefit working Iowans who really have tightened their belts? Or will it be turned over to corporate interests under the guise of stimulating economic growth? I’ve been hearing about tax cuts stimulating economic growth since I was a kid, and I’m still waiting.

Ronald Reagan promised the miracles of supply-side or trickle-down economics when I was finishing high school. Those tax cuts led to a huge deficit when he left office in 1989. Yet I heard the same thing from state legislators when I served as a school board director after my return to Iowa in 2001. Instead of maintaining a reliable revenue stream to adequately fund state services like education, legislators were more concerned with cutting taxes, often via tax exemptions or deductions for special interests.

This left local public officials like me the task of making up the difference either by cutting services or asking for local tax increases – in most cases via property taxes.

And we’ve all seen the results of the cuts – personnel and positions eliminated in our schools; county services consolidated, limited or discontinued. It’s the flip side of the cutting taxes to create prosperity coin – cutting taxes means less services for the public. The real question is who really prospers from those cuts?

Too often I’ve found it means fatter profits for corporations who’ve used the tax issue as leverage to settle in our state. And as many communities can attest, that doesn’t mean these corporations will stay.

No, my research throughout the last 30 years has indicated that tax cuts, especially on the upper income brackets and corporations do little to stimulate growth. In fact, some of America’s periods of greatest growth were when taxes were much higher than the current rates. Those taxes built the infrastructure we benefit from today. Unfortunately, too many taxpayers accept the line that all taxes and government spending are bad.

One of the most recent studies of income tax rates by the Congressional Research Service [http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/PDF/0915taxesandeconomy.pdf] concluded: “The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth.”

So as our state legislators prepare to debate what to do with Iowa’s budget surplus, I hope citizens will pay attention and ask, “Who’s going to benefit?”

Personally, I’d like to see that money reinvested in Iowa to rebuild infrastructure and restore funding to agencies and services previously cut, like education. And instead of more tax cuts, I’d like to see us bring in more revenue by closing corporate tax loopholes.

This year, let’s not fall for the usual “tax cuts stimulate growth” line.

Look at whole picture to solve violence problem

Since the Newtown, Conn. school shooting, I’ve observed you cannot say the phrase “gun control” without someone launching a hissy fit about Second Amendment Rights and regulations leading to all guns being banned.

Calm down, people.

First, let’s admit we have a problem with violence in this country, and gun violence is part of that. When guns are everywhere (and they are), they become part of the problem. As researchers at Harvard found, more guns equal more homicide. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html

Next, let’s be honest about the fact that we’re looking for a solution – any solution. And human nature being what it is, we want that solution to be simple. Just give us the Staples “Easy” button.

It ain’t gonna happen. Did your parents ever tell you life was simple? Or as I like to ask, “Do you see in color?”

See, I studied drawing, which is really the practice of observing, analyzing and problem solving to create, in traditional studio drawing, a two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional objects. One of the first things you learn is you can’t create a realistic depiction with only black and white. The two extremes alone create an abstraction.

So, you introduce every shade of gray from black to white. With the full range of values, you can create an amazing reproduction of reality.

Except, to complicate things further, we also see in color.

The gun “control” battle is like that. We want to blame one thing for events like the Sandy Hook massacre: guns; mentally ill, crazy or evil people; poor mental healthcare; violent video games and movies; unequal economic opportunity . . . and so on.

But reality is more complicated. The ugly truth is probably that ALL these things contribute to violence in America. Unfortunately, as a consumer society, we’ve had black/white, either/or dichotomies sold to us via infotainment and advertising – to the point we accept them as reality.

As Exhibit A, I give you our Congressional Republicans who determined, with the help of Newt Gingrich in the 90s, Democrats are the enemy. Perhaps this is why Congress can’t pass a budget.

And as Exhibit B, I’d present gun control. Or perhaps it might be better to call it public safety.

Because that’s really the issue – how can we keep each other safe in a society that values, and in many places, needs its guns? How do we balance public safety with regulations to ensure responsible gun ownership?

A full range of options exist, from registration and liscensure, limits on certain types of weapons, buy-back programs, etc. -- or everything from black to white. I like Iowa author Jane Smiley’s suggestion to require liability insurance on guns. She writes: “According to the Public Services Research Institute ‘the average cost of a gunshot related death is $33,000, while gun-related injuries total more than $300,000 for each occurrence,’ some 4.7 billion smackers every year. You and I are paying for most of these costs.”

Smiley has a couple of other suggestions worth reading, too, as she kicks off this conversation. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/a-few-remedies-for-the-ri_b_2323494.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false]

Solving this problem will mean calming down and talking to each other.

It will mean balancing individual rights of gun ownership with the common good of public safety. As Smiley notes, there are remedies, if you’re willing to see them.

So I repeat, “Do you see in color?”