Bluegrass Policy Blog

Kentucky's slow learners still moving slowly

Don't look now -- and certainly don't tell a Kentucky educrat -- but school choice for students and their parents is catching on.

Hey Governor Beshear, look at Michigan!

Michigan politicians were shocked to learn that last year's tax increases preceded this year's revenue shortfall. Others weren't so surprised.

Change for the better would be nice, thanks

A Lexington Herald Leader poll this morning suggests Kentuckians aren't very favorably inclined toward the legislature. And the leaders of both chambers claim to agree with them. Speaker Jody Richards is said to "not quibble" with the 66% disapproval and Senate President David Williams said he was "disappointed by the legislature."

Two things have to be at the heart of all this unhappiness: the unproductive, last-minute chaos in both chambers and the secretive nature of the budget conference committee.

Moving the candidate filing deadline past the end of the session in even-numbered years effectively doubles the length of the sixty day session. And that would leave plenty of time to hold the conference committee meetings openly and honestly.

Pending NCLB Rules May Force Kentucky to Get Honest on Graduation Rates

Last month the US Department of Education filed a sweeping notice of intent to tighten many of the loopholes in No Child Left Behind (NCLB). To see how Kentucky has been playing games with NCLB graduation rates, check out this You Tube.

Kentucky’s Graduation Rate Deception

Last month, the regulations that govern Kentucky’s CATS assessments and the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability program were quietly updated without any legislative review.

Among the many highly unsatisfactory provisions in this regulatory package is a highly deceptive set of provisions for the real goal to improve high school graduation rates in the state. When you look at these provisions, contained in Kentucky Administrative Regulation 703 KAR 5:001, you find this table of supposed graduation rate targets.

Well, printing that table is mostly a nice waste of trees, but the truth about our almost non-existent graduation rate standards is buried in the small print surrounding this table. That small print, found in Section 1, Paragraph 11 ( c ) provides that a school will be deemed to meet targets if its graduation rate improves from the previous year. How much improvement is cleverly not clearly specified.

So, take a look at the table above again. Notice that to use this table, graduation rates must be reported to the nearest 0.01 point. Thus, so long as a school increases its graduation rate by as little as 0.01 point each year, the school is immune from NCLB sanctions for its graduation performance.

Basically, that is virtually no goal for improvement what so ever. Technically, if a school were large enough, it could take 100 years just to raise its graduation rate by one percent.

Practically speaking, our high schools enroll somewhere around 100 to 400 students per class, so to show minimal progress each year they will have to raise their graduation rate by something like one-quarter to one percent per year. That still means the average high school in this state – where the average graduation rate is somewhere around 73 percent – can escape all sanctions in 2014 by raising that rate to only somewhere around 76 to 83 percent, depending upon the school’s enrollment. Do you really think that is acceptable?

Well, it looks like the feds don’t agree, either. Several weeks ago the US Department of Education announced proposed changes to NCLB that will make it a lot harder for states to use deceptive graduation rate loopholes like Kentucky’s. But, isn’t it a shame that our own educators didn’t come clean on their own and start to really demand decent high school performance?

That's it?

Governor Steve Beshear needs to take a break from these heady days that have Kentucky at the center of the presidential political world to pay some attention to issues at home. Yesterday, Governor Beshear took a minute to recognize and take a stab at defining a potential downgrade of Kentucky's bond rating.

But rather that take any positive action to prevent a costly downgrade, Beshear blamed the General Assembly's failure to address public employee fringe benefit reform, a $26 billion (and growing) problem, and he pushed again for tax increases.

But Kentucky's needs deserve much more than this feeble response. We have insufficient financial monitoring in our public education system in addition to the state's well-documented resistance to bureaucratic reform. Repealing Kentucky's out-moded Certificate of Need laws and reducing the gold-plated health benefits for government workers and retirees would save public health dollars. We pay too much for public building projects because of our Depression-era prevailing wage policies. And our corporate tax policies prevent us from growing our way out of these problems.

Governor Beshear has time left in his political career to recognize and start working for improvement in any of these areas. His initial response to the news on our bond rating, however, doesn't inspire much confidence.

Who is protected by government school monopoly?

The Economist has not one but two articles about charter schools in America this week (here and here). Given the way charters provide hope and educational success where government schools fail, Kentucky policymakers should be made to explain why they use their power to prohibit Kentucky children from having the same opportunities.

It is disgraceful that Kentucky's Charter School bill in 2008 had only three House sponsors and no companion bill in the Senate.

When your governor feels beholden to the unions

Fast-growth states Arizona and Nevada could give Kentucky a lesson in how to afford school facilities for its students. Nevada, which hates school choice, spends twice as much as Arizona per capita on school capital costs. By encouraging charter schools and scholarship tax credits to take some of the burden, Arizona doesn't need nearly as much for building or keeping up public schools.

Given Governor Steve Beshear's stupefying appointment of a teachers union official to the state school board, though, Kentucky will certainly have to wait for another governor before we can learn anything from this example.

I am teenager, hear me lobby

A reader checking up on teenagers in Campbell county in today's nky.com might wonder how young people ever stayed off drugs in the days before governments built skate parks, swimming pools and community centers.

We know they know how to play, but what happened to teaching kids to work?

Taxpayers fight back -- in Indiana

While Kentucky's General Assembly went sleep-walking through the 2008 session and failed to reform the $26 billion dollar public employee benefits program, taxpayers in Carmel, Indiana were getting some action:

"Sponsors of a proposal to provide City Council members up to $18,000 in city-funded health benefits are withdrawing the ordinance after hearing strong public outcry this week."

Part-time elected officials on city councils and county fiscal courts across Kentucky get substantial benefits as well. Like their brethren in Carmel, Kentucky's part-time officeholders should have to justify such taxpayer expense when everyone else is having to tighten up.

"During Monday's meeting, no council members defended giving themselves benefits on the city's dime. Luci Snyder said the concept is generally acceptable because other communities, such as Indianapolis and Noblesville, do so."

Michigan may get rid of income tax

Some people in Michigan are working to get 380,000 petition signers who want to get rid of the state's income tax and replace it with a state version of the federal FairTax proposal.

(Thanks for the tip, Grover Norquist.)

New Report Shows More Good News for Charter Schools

Education Week is reporting that a new study (subscription required) found charter school students in Chicago had high school graduation rates 7 points above their public school counterparts and were 11 percent more likely to enroll in college. Those are quite impressive differences.

Education Week says the growth in charters in Chicago has been “rapid.” The city already has 28 such schools in the system and will add two more next year. Clearly, Chicago must be happy with their charters.

The report comes from some pretty high power research groups. RAND corporation, the Mathematica group in Princeton, NJ, and Florida State University. It is being praised for some unique new innovations that try to control for the possibility that charter school students have more motivation than public school students.

The Chicago samples also controlled for the problem issues of differing racial mixes and the accusation that charters skim the best students. Even after all those controls were applied, the charters came out on top.

I just downloaded the report, so you can read together with me by clicking here.

Then, chime in with your own analysis in our comments feature.

How many politicians does it take to screw up a financial literacy program?

Two financial literacy programs. Two newspaper articles. One politician.

Sounds to me like the kids who didn't get a politician got a much better deal than those who did.

And until the state Treasurer's office is closed down, taxpayers are the real butt of the joke.

We are on our own in Kentucky for health care fix

While everyone is watching gas prices go up, health insurance reform is dying as a federal issue. Look at this article, which promotes a socialized medicine scheme as a viable bipartisan compromise.

"Under the Wyden-Bennett plan, people with an income of less than 400% of poverty would be eligible for subsidies, everyone would have access to guaranteed and community rated coverage, and the feds would oversee a system of private individual-based insurance and would collect the base-line premiums through the tax system.

In exchange for all of this consumer support, the Wyden-Bennett plan would also require individuals to have health insurance (an individual mandate) and that it must be purchased from a state-run purchasing pool that would require health policies have substantial benefits (rich benefit mandates) and offer a choice of private policies. There would be a flat personal tax deduction ($12,000 for a couple) for consumer insurance payments and low-income subsidies would be tied to the lowest cost policy available."

By the time this bill comes up in Congress, we will have even more data on the horrific mess Massachusetts has made with their similar plan. Emulating that kind of failure on a much larger scale will never get serious consideration.

The bottom line is Kentucky is going to have to improve its own health insurance market because Congress is too likely to stay stuck in its inaction. We are still too close to our 1994 experiment with guaranteed-issue nonsense to take another bite at the big-government health insurance apple any time soon. We need to look in the other direction for meaningful solutions.

If nearly everyone can agree more health insurers competing makes the market better for consumers, we need to consider loosening any regulations which might bring more companies back to the state. Here is one that would bring some companies back.

Man up, Trey Grayson

The effort to shine a little light on Frankfort's spendthrift ways drowned earlier this year in the stagnant swamp that is the House of Representatives. Rep. Jim DeCesare filed a decent bill that has been mentioned on this site many times and explored here. Rep. Don Pasley filed a joke of a transparency bill.

Michigan has had a similar experience. The notable difference is their Secretary of State is leading out by posting her expenditures online without waiting around for a government mandate. Kentucky's Secretary of State Trey Grayson would do very well to pay attention to the leadership of his colleague.