bestdestiny

My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2010-02-08

Obvious School Funding Alternatives

I started a discussion a week ago about the sorry fiscal state my employer is in right now. I've spent a little time looking around for alternatives since then, and, frankly, the options are few. However, there are some pretty smart ideas that would help school districts maximize taxpayer dollars out there.

:build schools using a municipal/capital lease--have a private company build the school, and own it for a set period of time (say, 25 years); during that time, the school district can lease the builing from the company, and then buys it outright for a bargain price at the end of the lease contract

:private service contract for renovations--in this model, the private company assumes ownership of the facility for a short time; all costs for materials and supplies then becomes a tax break for the company, and the district gets to save substantially on the difference between a private contractor getting a job and having to send out in-house people to get it done.

:another model encourages nonprofit corps to house schools in external facilities like malls and offices; there the savings are realized through housing schools in existing facilities at much cheaper costs.

Obviously, all of these ideas deal with the construction end of school funding, not the operating end. And that is where you see a lot of the dramatic bad numbers on the news--operational deficits.

But if a school district can save money on construction, it can build and upgrade to better facilities that max educational opportunities. And if a district demonstrates to its public that it's being smart with their money, the public will respond through greater support (including, maybe, voting for a mill levy increase).

I'll work more for later on operational funding ideas.

Posted by: Michael / 2/08/2010 11:10:00 PM

2010-02-07

Kouric the Lightweight and Obama the Liar

Sorry if that's unseemly to call names, but that's simply the case. He said he wants Republicans to put their specific ideas on the table--they've been doing that for two years. Job creation is his first job and was last year?--then why did he backload so much of the "stimulus" for two and three and five years down the road? Eliminating lobbyists--other than the twenty that he appointed to posts in his first ten weeks. Stimulus transparency? how exactly do we track those expenditures through congressional districts that don't exist? So much for bipartisanship--blame the Republicans, and Couric actually tried to press him that Democrats voted against it. And, of course, let's take one more opportunity to blame his predecessor. Um . . . that's actually not what the CBO said about the deficit, at least once you factor in realistic growth projections (not the 7% that they built in to the bill). Oh . . .so now the story is that he clammed up first? I don't think that jives with anything that's been reported yet. That doesn't really make sense.

It's nice that he gets a four minute infomercial in the middle of the afternoon on the network that is carrying the top-watched program of the year. And that he gets handed questions without any follow-up from the weakest journalist in the business. I'm looking over her shoulder at a list of very neatly typed up questions--I wonder how far in advance he got to look at those questions.

That was a waste of four minutes of television--I wonder if there was any chance for a Republican to answer that. Wouldn't it have been great to cut from the President and Couric straight to Sarah Palin with some real journalist?

Posted by: Michael / 2/07/2010 02:36:00 PM

Deny the Premise, Hold The Administration Accountable for Dumb Luck

By now the "professional journalists" have all reported that, according to the administration, Abdulmutallab (the Christmas Bomber) has been talking to authorities. The administration seems to think that this should be the end of the conversation about the brilliance of giving this guy his Miranda after 50 minutes in custody.

EVERY single Republican of standing should be on the Sunday chats tomorrow saying "so what?" So he started singing like a bird after we pulled some strings on hime after five weeks in custody--what might have happened in those five weeks? And does anybody think his intel is still worth a damn after five weeks?

On December 25th, he knew the location of where he had been trained, and he knew the faces of the 0ther people he had gone through training with. By February 8th, that location is obsolete news, and the other people have absorbed into the local scene (perhaps of London and Paris, even). The point is that intel has a pretty short shelf life, and by giving this guy the means to put off giving us anything useful for five weeks, we've all but guaranteed that "useful" is not the best formulation for what he's giving us. We're very, very lucky that none of the other people he trained with tried to pull off an attack while he was lawyering up.

But this isn't news--or, at least, others a lot smarter than me have made these points already. I'm writing for the benefit of the people who are going to be on TV in the morning who (being Washington Republicans) are probably going to be tongue-tied and sheepish about this news. Don't BE!! Stay agressive and on the attack. This President, through the people who report directly to him, pulled a "knee-jerk liberal" move in handling this guy, and the opposition Party has a duty to hold his feet to the fire on this one. The "professional journalist" will try to dismiss this as a fait accompli, and whoever is from our side has to reject the premise outright and turn to the offense.

Posted by: Michael / 2/07/2010 12:51:00 AM

2010-02-02

We Should Be Able To Do Better Than This

The school district that I work for has announced recently that it is, based on different legislative actions that are shaping up right now, facing a budget deficit somewhere in the vicinity of $50 million this year.

$50 million. Just consider that for a moment. In a school district of roughly 84,000 students, that's a funding deficit of around $594 PER STUDENT.

The causes for this are multiple and varied, and they include the economic downturn and the crash of the real estate market.

But $50 million is a big number, and it has led to some pretty wild speculation, including everything from a four-day school week to teacher furlough days to a salary cut for teachers.

But nobody--at least nobody that I've heard from--is attacking the root of the problem. And that is this: the way we fund schools is inadequate to the needs of this world in this time. Schools are paid for from a combination of federal (7%), state and local monies in conjunction with local property taxes. When the real estate market crashed, school monies went down; when an area ages and decays (as areas are wont to do), school monies go down. When the legislature has too many mandates and too little money, school monies go down.

My contention is that as long as school funding is tied to property values, the system is designed to create and/or broaden the gap between high performers and low-income students. The system as it is currently designed practically guarantees that geography is destiny: your opportunity for a great education is largely tied to what neighborhood you live in.

I would love it if somebody would come up with a better way to fund school--and vouchers, if at all, are only part of the solution (vouchers would still be tied to property taxses). I welcome thoughts on the issue, and I will be offering a few thoughts of my own over the next few days.

If the future depends on the education of our children, then we had better start coming up with a better way to pay for that education.

Because I don't want to have to learn a new language . . .like German.

More on this in the days to come.

Posted by: Michael / 2/02/2010 01:26:00 AM

2010-01-27

Over/Under . . . (updating)

on President Obama saying "my predecessor" or "that we inherited" or some variant of that at 4-1/2. Because the buck stopped at the last guy.

--seriously?!? How does he say this with a straight face?!? "Do our work openly?" "excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs?" I'm waiting for a "Yeah . . .that's the ticket!"

--"powerful interests?" "foreign entities?" like, oh, I don't know . . .the AARP, PHarMA, insurance companies?? and the last knkown foreign entity that contributed to a campaign was, um . . let's see . . .China! and the recipient of that was, um . . .let's see, a Democrat (Clinton).
I'm amazed at the audacity--not surprised, just amazed

--(8:12 pm) sorry--too much of this just doesn't pass the laugh test, so I fell asleep. And yet, he. is. still.talking. This guy just loves the view of his own teleprompter.

--not exactly sure where the reputation for eloquence comes from. After just about twenty minutes he just starts to fade to wooden, almost Borg-like. Resistance is futile . . .

Gonna go away now. I'll have more thoughts a little later.

Posted by: Michael / 1/27/2010 07:03:00 PM

2010-01-24

Obama's Grade, addendum

Oh, yeah. I forgot. What's the President's second highest domestic priority? Climate change.

And the bad week continues:

. . . when it comes to unsubstantiated research it's hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers--which feed the rivers that in turn feed most of South Asia--were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. "The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers," it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, "can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emissionn of greenhouse gases."

It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment from by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnein from 1999. Mr. Hasnain now said he was "misquoted." Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in 2006 by leading glaciologist Georg Kaser that the 2035 forecast was baseless. "This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude," Mr. Kaser told the Agence France-Presse. "It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing."

Huh. Guess that priority number isn't looking all that important. Maybe it's time to move on to something really important to Mr. Obama . . . like "Card check" or trying terrorists in New York City civilian courts a couple miles from Ground Zero. And, I don't know, maybe someday he can get around to doing something useful like trying to create jobs.

Posted by: Michael / 1/24/2010 03:32:00 PM

2010-01-22

President Obama's Year One Grade

Yes, I'm doing this one day later than the rest of the world because this was a day whose realities were but emanations of the rest of the week. All the same, you don't really need to look to me for a grade (though I'm going to give one at the end, anyway); all you have to do is look at how his week has gone.

All in one week, the President has:

:travelled to Massachusetts for an improbable emergency campaign stop
:seen his legislature fail to craft a compromise that would have brought a health care bill to his desk before the improbably important election
:seen his supermajority in the Senate evaporate in, of all places, Massachusetts, and by a rather resounding margin
:seen the Supreme Court eliminate the massive funding advantage the left has with one seismic ruling
:try to recraft his message to include populist railing against banks, only to watch the stock market drop about 470 points in the 36 hours after that message
:been warned by some top economists that the recovery will likely be slower than first thought
:ticked off China, who owns about 4 gazillion dollars of our debt
:and is tonight watching our erstwhile closest allies in England scramble their resources to prevent a credible and present terrorist threat

So, let's see, what are the four things a President must manage: foreign policy, the economy, national security, and politics. On foreign policy, he's angered the one country that has the ability to collapse our economy with one phone call. On the economy, he continues to see his policies fail while actually doing stupid things that make the situation worse. On national security, it turns out the rest of the world doesn't suddenly love us just because of his effervescent brilliance, and they continue to plot to do us and our friends great harm. And he's now squandered both a legislative and a structural advantage, while facing the very real prospect that he's led his party down the road to massive electoral losses in nine months.

Being an educator, I like grading based on clearly defined understandings of what the expectations were going in to the assignment. I would say he has accomplished NONE of what he assigned himself to do, or of what the expectations of a President are. Based solely on that, he would have to get a grade of "F." But of course, being the politically mamby-pamby institutions schools are, we have to take into account his troubled childhood and the difficulty of the assignment for someone with as little experience as he has, and up that grade to a "D+."

But then, being me, I also take into account the insufferable arrogance of the Man and factor in the unprecedented degree of media support that he's received, and slap his grade firmly back down to an "F."

Here's the thing about a man like President Obama. Shortly after the Columbine Massacre, we teachers were treated to a series of inservices on student disaffection and spotting the potential loose cannon in our classes. And the one thing I still remember from that time was to look for the student who has an undeservedly elevated opinion of their own abilities, who, for whatever reason, is suddenly confronted with their own shortcomings.

Have you heard the clip of the President from his campaign stop in Ohio today? He seems . . . well, . . .angry. I wonder if he's had a few, well, pressure valve releases with his staff in the last few days. If a few of those happen at the wrong time in the wrong places, his whole persona could crumble right before our eyes. These could be dangerous times, my friends.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that the State of the Union is next week? I'll bet the speechwriting staff is going to have a very LONG weekend. Talk about "in the line of fire."

Heh.

Posted by: Michael / 1/22/2010 10:32:00 PM

2010-01-17

The Obama Learning Curve and W

I have written before that the beginning of the end for George W. Bush's presidency was Hurricane Katrina. This is nothing earth-shattering--I'm one of only about 40 million pundits who shared that opinion. But I thought it was about more than just failure to protect Americans, which was the dominant opinion. I thought there was a lot of it that could be attributed to the overall sense of incompetence that attached itself to the administration in both the actual handling of that disaster and the public relations effort that followed.

It took the Bush administration about 6 years to get to that point; Obama must be a lot smarter than Bush because he's already reached that point.

I think, in general, there are four different sentiments that the general public reaches about politicians: competent but wrong, competent and right, incompetent but right, and incompetent and wrong. The President is very close to falling towards that last category.

Look at how he's handled the last three major events that he's been dealt. Fort Hood, the Christmas bomber, and the Haiti earthquake have all landed in his lap through absolutely no choosing of his own. And in each case he has completely missed the oopportunity to serve a function that Americans look to the President for: comforter in chief. His response to Ft. Hood was wooden and highlit a pathological unwillingness to call a spade a spade; the Christmas bomber led to a comedy of errors from a team that seems like it's in WAY over its head; and now Haiti has found a ridiculously slow response (if the airport is down, why can't we airlift a few battalions of Marines in and follow that with C-130 after C-130 of supply drops?) that does nothing to inspire confidence.

At the beginning of his term, 40% of the electorate thought he was wrong but were scared about how competent he seemed to be; 45% of the electorate thought he was right and didn't care if he was competent or not; 15% of the electorate were simply relieved that the old was out and hoped that Obama could just manage competence. Now, I would say, there are still the diehard 25% who think he's right and don't care about competence; he's got his hard left 10% who think he's right but don't think he's competent; he's got now 45%-50% of the country who think he's wrong and are troubled that "competence", esp. vis-a-vis health care, rally means "arrogance;" and that leaves about 15% who are not particularly ideological but concerned that the President and his team are hyper-ideological and/or completely out of their depth. That makes for a very difficult political situation.

But worse for the country, every hard-bought victory for the Democrats leads to a heightened distrust of government. And, sadly, since the Republicans have so far proven ineffective, the country won't turn to them but will, instead, simply turn away from everybody.

A somewhat dangerous place for the country to be. Anybody who doesn't think its possible for this country to disintigrate is just naive.

Posted by: Michael / 1/17/2010 09:22:00 AM