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Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Cowed? Not this President.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You have to admit that this is a President who declines to be cowed. Democrats just took control of Congress. Republican senators up for reelection in two years are starting to take flight on Iraq. And his standing in the polls is below 30 percent approval. So what does he do?
He comes to Congress with an olive branch and and ambitious plan to advance a conservative agenda. On health care and education, he invites free market competition in ways that could fundamentally change both. The current employer-based system is flawed in that corporations can deduct the expense, but individuals who aren’t covered in the workplace can’t. The President’s proposal make the benefit taxable income, but exclude the first $15,000 for families and $7,500 for singles. Everybody, then, would be treated alike, whether working for a corporation that provides the benefit or not. The incentive for individuals would be to shop price, thus inviting competition. Competition would come, too, in marketing insurance coverage to those with gold-plated benefits valued at more than $15,000. It’s revenue neutral, insists presidential spokesman Tony Snow. Federal funds would be directed, too, to states to develop pools for the high-risk and uninsured that would attract private-sector insurers. It is very much a free-market effort to provide coverage without creating a new entitlement or new federal spending.
On education, the President urged renewal of No Child Left Behind and a form of vouchers, called Promise scholarships that would give “children stuck in failing schools the right to choose some place better.” Neither the health care, nor the education proposal was warmly received by the Democratic majority.
He did set a goal of reducing U.S. gas consumption by 20 percent in 10 years and suggested updating Corporate Average Fuel Ecnomy (CAFE) standards for vehicles, while doubling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and getting on with nuclear power production. Acknowledging the new majority, he took note of “global climate change” as a problem that needed attention.
He warmed this fiscal conservative’s heart by calling for a balanced budget, something he said can be achieved, without raising taxes. He had a great line on earmark reform, which he asked to be cut in half within the year. Earmarks number more than 13,000 and cost about $18 billion this year. Yet 90 percent of them were added without floor action. “You didn’t vote them into law and I didn’t sign them into law,” said Bush — and yet they have the force of law.
Far less well received was his appeal on Iraq. The President did a superb job of explaining the stakes in Iraq. “Nothing is more important in our history now than to succeed in the Middle East, to succeed in Iraq and to spare the American people” from failure, the consequence of which “would be grievous and far-reaching,” he said. The second half of his speech, on Iraq, was low-key, but firm and clear-eyed. He answered “what’s the mission?” question that continues to crop up on this blog and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I kept looking for the Congresswoman in the red dress at center aisle positioned for face time on national television as the President entered the chamber. She wasn’t there. The election wasn’t all bad.
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Education starts to rise from rut
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
O ye of little faith, would-be reformers who dismay that no entrenched institution or cultural drift can be changed, take note:
The lieutenant governor of Georgia, Casey Cagle, roamed the state last week advancing the idea that not just schools, but entire school districts, can be “largely exempted from state and some federal mandates.” In return, they would agree to meet specified achievement standards.
In the Senate, too, the second-ranking official, President Pro Tem Eric Johnson (R-Savannah), has introduced legislation to give scholarships to special-needs children, something Florida has done for six years. It would allow parents of children with disabilities to buy education services from private schools using the sum of state and federal money spent on them in public schools. In Florida, scholarships range from $4,800 to $20,700.
There is talk, too, that reform-minded legislators might introduce tax credits as well, something akin to an Arizona law passed in 1998. That law has allowed taxpayers to take a tax credit for up to $625 donated to a “school tuition organization,” which is the school the taxpayer’s child attends.
Cagle’s leadership is important because he is a high-profile statewide official talking about a reform that has needed such a champion. As with any reform in education, it has been a long, uphill struggle.
Georgia has about 1,800 public schools, and only 58 of them are charters. Just 1.5 percent of the state’s public school children attend charters. The first charter schools — conversions of existing public schools — were permitted in 1995; a 1998 law allowed start-ups.
Phil Andrews, executive director of the Georgia Charter School Association, says about 10 to 15 new charters are being added every school year. “The schools that are opening continue to be of pretty good quality, so we don’t expect to see a lot of attrition along the way,” he said. Gov. Sonny Perdue and state School Superintendent Kathy Cox are supportive, too, he noted. Cox, in fact, appeared with Cagle to declare that allowing a whole system to become a charter district “would be a great innovation for the state of Georgia.”
The opposition historically has come from local school boards, which see charters as competition and as a threat to their funding and control. As a result, progress has come in very small increments. Funding formulas for operations still disadvantage charter schools by about 10-15 percent, Andrews estimates. They operate at a disadvantage, too, in capital funding, but the state two years ago acknowledged the need and made some provisions for funding, though it’s only about 20 percent or less of need. The story, though, is a good one, even if reform has been slow.
Charter school advocates and others from around the state will gather Thursday and Friday to compare notes at a conference Andrews’ group is sponsoring. About 200 people are expected, including representatives of six to eight school systems. Most of the systems sending representatives are in metro Atlanta.
Cagle’s ability to draw attention to charters, along with Johnson’s special-needs scholarship proposal, and other proposals that empower parents by giving them choice, are examples of the dual approaches conservatives must take. Certainly it’s vital to continue making all efforts to improve public schools as they are now structured — by providing, for example, better pay for teachers and funding for dropout prevention counselors in middle schools, as Perdue proposes in this year’s budget.
Reform, then, is a dual track: Empower parents with choice, so they gradually come to accept their obligation to take responsibility for their children’s education. Give them information on school performance. And then give them the means to act. The money should follow the child. That’s one reform track.
The other is to recognize that some parents are quite content to turn their children over to government with the expectation that the public schools will provide everything in a child’s developmental life that uninvolved parents choose to neglect.
We have an obligation to educate those children as best we can in a traditional public school setting — hoping, though, that through charters, educators will have the freedom and creativity to design schools for like-needs kids.
The existing public schools need champions. But so, too, do the alternatives. Be optimistic. The future has to be better than the recent past.
- Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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