“When Republicans Were Problem-Solvers”: The Idea Of Politics As All-Ideology, All-The-Time Is A Relatively Recent GOP Invention
We interrupt this highly partisan and ideological moment with some contrarian news: President Obama is not the only politician who thinks that expanding access to pre-kindergarten is a good investment.
In Alabama, Republican Gov. Robert Bentley urged a 60 percent increase in preschool funding in his state, with the goal of having a universal preschool system in place within 10 years. “I truly believe by allowing greater access to a voluntary pre-K education,” Bentley declared this month in his State of the State message, “we will change the lives of children in Alabama.” The state Bentley leads is not a notoriously liberal place.
In Michigan, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder just proposed a large increase in preschool funding — from $109 million this fiscal year to $174 million in 2014 and $239 million in 2015.
Nobody should pretend that the president has found in pre-K education the key that will unlock bipartisanship. Right out of the box, Andrew J. Coulson of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom told the New York Times that Obama’s plan “just doesn’t make any sense” while Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, sounded a skeptical note in saying the president “needs to explain how this program will be different.”
But by today’s partisan standards, Kline’s comment was remarkably restrained. So it’s worth pausing to wonder if we might be slowly opening an era when Republicans will be feeling a little less pressure to mouth tea-party attacks on government and more incentive to say that they, too, want to solve problems that concern the vast majority of Americans.
In pushing universal pre-K, Obama made a shrewd choice in both political and policy terms. There are enough studies to show that early childhood education programs make a real difference, which is why Republicans such as Snyder and Bentley embrace them. And Obama is structuring his initiative to work with the states to build on what many of them are already doing or would like to do.
This beachhead of cooperation might also serve as a reminder to Republicans that the idea of politics as all-ideology, all-the-time is a relatively recent invention. Education reform was a thoroughly bipartisan cause in the 1980s. Governors such as Democrats Bill Clinton in Arkansas and Richard Riley in South Carolina and Republican Lamar Alexander in Tennessee teamed up to push for higher standards. Alexander, who is now in the Senate, was willing to raise taxes to finance his education initiatives.
There is also the tale of Tommy Thompson, who as governor of Wisconsin in the 1990s tried to broaden health insurance coverage with his “BadgerCare” program. Early in the debate over Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Thompson called it “another important step” toward achieving reform.
Thompson had to eat those words when he sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate last year in the face of tea party opposition. The rebuke of Thompson from Chris Chocola, president of the conservative Club for Growth, was representative. “The world has changed since he was elected to office,” said Chocola, who had endorsed one of Thompson’s primary opponents. “Now we’re talking about how much less we’ll spend rather than how much more we’ll spend.” That was right-wing ideology speaking.
Thompson survived the primary but was then defeated by Democrat Tammy Baldwin. While liberals cheered Baldwin’s victory, there was something poignant in Thompson’s losing, in part because he traded in his problem-solving past for a new anti-government disposition that didn’t really fit him.
Despite the abuse of the rules on Chuck Hagel’s confirmation, you sense that Republicans such as Thompson and Alexander (there are many others) are exasperated with the view that the only point of seeking public office is to shrink government. But it will take considerable courage for such Republicans to move their party back to a time when conservatives and progressives did not have to disagree on everything — when causes such as helping 4-year-olds to learn and thrive could encourage politicians to lay down their arms at least momentarily.
There are other issues that ought to be like this: training and education programs to restore mobility and ease inequalities; immigration reform; and at least parts of Obama’s agenda to curb gun violence. But progress will require conservatives to give up certain recent habits and remember when they, too, believed that government could successfully remedy some of the nation’s ills.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 17, 2013
“Schools In The Crosshairs”: Parent-Trigger Laws Effort Has Become A Stealth Means To Privatize Public Schools
When her dyslexic second-grader landed in a failing public elementary school in Pittsburgh, single mother Jamie Fitzpatrick spotted trouble right away. Her daughter’s teacher spent class time shopping online for clothes while the kids bullied one another. Though other teachers wanted to do right by the kids, their union wouldn’t allow it; teachers were forbidden to offer any extra help to the students outside of class, and because their pay was based on seniority, some of the worst made the most. So despite working two jobs, Fitzpatrick somehow found the time to persuade other parents to sign a petition to turn the school into a nonunion charter. Most teachers joined the effort, perfectly content to give up their union protections. At the new charter school, magic happened. The kids began to get a proper education. Fitzpatrick’s daughter learned to read almost immediately.
It’s an inspiring tale. It’s also fiction—the plot of Won’t Back Down, a film released this fall starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as the supermom and Viola Davis as a frustrated teacher who becomes her ally. Like most people, you probably steered clear of this critically panned box-office flop. If so, you didn’t miss much—except a revealing glimpse into the Hollywood-style fantasies of education reformers who believe they have found a new panacea for saving public education: parent-trigger laws.
These laws sound appealingly straightforward. If enough parents sign a petition, they can get their children’s failing school shut down or converted into a charter. Seven states have passed a parent trigger over the last two years; more will likely follow suit next year. These laws are designed to make public education increasingly look like the free marketplace of parental “choice” that reformers long to see. The idea has powerful backers, including conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—best known for “stand your ground” self-defense laws—and the Heartland Institute, famous for challenging climate science. Walden Media, which produced Won’t Back Down and funded the charter—school documentary Waiting for Superman, is owned by Philip Anschutz, an ALEC supporter and prominent Tea Party funder.
Parent trigger is not solely a right-wing cause. Democratic legislatures in Connecticut and California have passed these laws, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has unanimously endorsed them, and 70 percent of Americans view them favorably. The broad support is no surprise. If parents organize to make radical changes to a failing school, who would want to stop them? But many who back parent-trigger laws don’t realize that the effort has become a stealth means to privatize public schools. Heartland, which owns the website theparenttrigger.com, has crafted model legislation for trigger laws that apply to all schools—not just those that are failing. That might be a logical, if drastic, response if public schools were mired in the deep “crisis” that education reformers constantly cite. But they’re not: Many achievement gaps have narrowed substantially, test scores have risen, and high-school completion rates are at all-time highs.
Won’t Back Down, like the movement it champions, begins from the assumption that public schools are a hopeless mess. The complicated challenges that public educators grapple with—severe budget cuts, for instance, or health problems that make learning a particular challenge for low-income kids—are nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, parents are exempted from responsibility. Jamie Fitzpatrick never volunteers to help out at the school. She doesn’t go to PTA meetings. She never even asks about her daughter’s homework. Gyllenhaal’s character is not so much a parent as an unhappy customer demanding a better school.
Anyone who believes in the school-reform fairy tale of Won’t Back Down should be required to watch another film released this fall to much less fanfare. This one doesn’t feature an Academy Award winner or a soundtrack of No. 1 hits. Instead, Brooklyn Castle chronicles a messy reality—that of Intermediate School 318, a Brooklyn middle school where 70 percent of the kids live below the poverty line, and where funding cuts are threatening the after-school activities that are key to getting many of them engaged. That includes the school’s chess team, which is, improbably, among the best in the country.
In most respects, I.S. 318 is ordinary. It’s not a magnet school or a charter, but it’s also not failing. The kids featured in Brooklyn Castle have real problems: They struggle with ADHD, asthma, and hunger, and many must work after school to help their parents make ends meet. Teachers and administrators encourage the students, helping to set goals for each one. When after-school programs are endangered, the parents rally, launching a letter–writing campaign to state officials and organizing a walkathon to raise money. I.S. 318, like most public schools, succeeds because the community invests in it, without expecting perfection.
“I think this is a good thing for kids to be exposed to—the idea that truth isn’t quite so simple as right and wrong,” I.S. 318 teacher and chess-team coach Elizabeth Vicary says. “The answers aren’t really clear to anybody.” She’s talking about chess. She could just as well be talking about our entire approach to education. The quest for easy fixes is seductive. But the more we look for Hollywood-style magic bullets, the less we focus on what makes public schools work.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, November 30, 2012
“Fueled, Serviced, And Collected”: How Wall Street Profits From The College Loan Mess
Five years after Wall Street crashed the economy by irresponsibly securitizing and peddling mortgage debt, the financial industry is coming under growing scrutiny for its shady involvement in student loan debt.
For a host of reasons, including a major decline in public dollars for higher education, going to college today means borrowing—and all that borrowing has resulted in a growing and heavy hand for Wall Street in the lending, packaging, buying, servicing, and collection of student loans. Now, with $1 trillion of student loans currently outstanding, it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of the same problems found in the subprime mortgage market—rapacious and predatory lending practices, sloppy and inefficient customer service and aggressive debt collection practices—are also cropping up in the student loan industrial complex.
This similarity is especially striking in the market for private student loans—which currently make up $150 billion of the $1 trillion of existing student loans.
As detailed in a July 2012 report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education, private student loans mushroomed over the last decade, fueled by the very same forces that drove subprime mortgages through the roof: Wall Street’s seemingly endless appetite for new ways to make profit. In this case, investor demand for student loan asset backed securities (SLABS) resulted in private student lenders—primarily Sallie Mae, Citi, Wells Fargo, and the other big banks—to relax lending standards and aggressively begin marketing these loans directly to students.
Unlike federal student loans, private loans have higher and fluctuating interest rates and come without any flexibility for tailoring payments based on income. Before the SLABS binge, most private student loans were actually made in connection with the college financial aid office, which helped ensure students weren’t taken for a ride, or weren’t borrowing more than they needed to. Between 2005 and 2007, the percentage of loans to students made without any school involvement grew from 40 percent to over 70 percent. And the volume of private student loans mushroomed from less than $5 billion in 2001 to over $20 billion in 2008. The market shrunk back to $6 billion after the financial crisis as lenders tightened standards.
And just like the subprime mortgage market, not all students were aggressively targeted by these rapacious lenders. The largest percentage of private loans taken out in 2008 were by students at for-profit colleges. In 2008, just 14 percent of all undergrads took out a private loan while 42 percent of students at for-profit colleges took them out. And as we now know, these loans are sinking borrowers—with absolutely no ability to discharge these loans by filing bankruptcy.
The latest student loan default rates issued by the Department of Education show that the three-year default rates for those who started repayment between October 2008 and September 2009 was 13 percent nationally—an average masking sharp differences depending on the type of school the borrower attended. For-profit institutions had the highest average with nearly 1 out of 4 borrowers in default, compared with 11 percent from public institutions and 7.5 percent at private, non-profit institutions.
All these statistics mean that close to 6 million borrowers are in default (almost 1 in 6 borrowers) to the tune of a combined $76 billion, more than the combined annual tuition for all students attending public two- and four-year colleges.
And for the borrower who can’t make payments, the student loan industrial complex is not a good place to be. And it’s costly for taxpayers: the Department of Education paid $1.4 billion last year to debt collectors and guaranty agencies to chase down borrowers who weren’t paying their loans. And here’s where Wall Street grabs another slice of the debt-for-diploma system pie. As reported in The New York Times, of the $1.4 billion paid out last year, about $355 million went to 23 private debt collectors. The remaining $1.06 billion was paid to the guarantee agencies to collect on defaulted loans made under the old federal loan system, which they in turn often outsource to private collectors.
But wait, there’s more! It turns out that two of the nation’s biggest banks own debt collection agencies that have contracts with the Department of Education to collect on federal student debt that’s gone bad: NCO Group, owned by One Equity Partners, the private equity arm of JP Morgan Chase and Allied Interstate, owned by Citi Venture Capital International, the private equity arm of Citigroup. Both of these debt collection agencies are distinctive in that according to a comprehensive report by the National Consumer Law Center, they have received the most complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau in a three-year period. At the same time, NCOs performance in recovering past-due loans has made it one of the top performers for the DOE.
The new cop on the beat—the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—is now going to be providing federal oversight of the nation’s largest debt collectors, which is welcome news. The Department of Education could also play an important role in rewarding good behavior by their debt collectors. As NCLC recommends in its report, they could incentivize humane treatment of debtors by penalizing agencies for large numbers of complaints filed against them and reward agencies with few complaints.
Over the last two decades, our nation—in a major shift from its historical roots—slowly privatized and financialized the responsibility of paying for college. The result is a system in which the entire pipeline of student loans—now the largest source of “aid” for most students—is fueled, serviced, and collected by Wall Street.
The student loan industrial complex invites a more profound question: given the billions in profit generated by federal and private student loans, along with the billions in administrative costs absorbed by tax payers, is debt the most efficient and equitable way to provide access to higher education?
By: Tamara Draut, The American Prospect, November 16, 2012
“Selective Accountability”: Louisiana Gives Us A Taste Of Mitt Romney’s Education Policy
Ed Kilgore has been sounding the alarms over Mitt Romney’s education proposals for a couple of months now, and I keep meaning — but somehow forgetting — to link to his posts about this. It’s probably all part of my love-hate relationship with education policy in general. But today he’s got another post up on the subject, so let’s take a look. He’s riffing on a TPM piece about the kudzu-like growth of Bobby Jindal’s voucher program in Louisiana:
In heading his state in the direction of universally available vouchers rationalized by public school failure, Jindal is not, of course, holding any of the private school beneficiaries accountable for results, or for common curricula, or, it appears, for much of anything.A big chunk of the money already out there is being snapped up by conservative evangelical schools with exotic and hardly public-minded curricular offerings, with the theory being that any public oversight would interfere with the accountability provided by “the market.” So if you want your kid to attend, at public expense, the Christian Nationalist Academy for Servant-Leader Boys & Fecund Submissive Girls, that’s okay by Bobby.
Does that last sentence sound a wee bit unfair? Well, here’s a Reuters report from a few weeks ago about where kids with vouchers are actually likely to end up:
The top schools [] have just a handful of slots open….Far more openings are available at smaller, less prestigious religious schools, including some that are just a few years old and others that have struggled to attract tuition-paying students.
The school willing to accept the most voucher students — 314 — is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.
….At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children,” Carrier said.
But let’s not be too hasty. If these kids are doing well, maybe we shouldn’t care if they get their lessons from DVDs liberally sprinkled with Bible verses. The problem is that while public schools — and, increasingly, public school teachers — are being held rigidly accountable for their students’ test scores, most voucher schools aren’t. Here’s the Louisiana Budget Project:
Louisiana requires almost no accountability from voucher schools….While voucher students are required to take the same assessment tests as public school students, there are no penalties for private schools if they fail to measure up to their public counterparts. In fact, Gov. Jindal vetoed language in a 2011 appropriations bill that would have removed participating schools if their students’ scores lagged those in the lowest performing schools in the Recovery School District, which incorporates most New Orleans public schools.
So if public schools have lousy test scores, they’re failures and their students all get vouchers. But if the private schools have lousy test scores, then….nothing. Presumably the magic of the free market will fix them up.
And maybe it will. But this has always been the Achilles’ Heel of the voucher movement: its virulent opposition to holding private schools to the same standards as public schools. In some places this means not requiring students to take standardized tests at all, while in other places — like Louisiana — it means requiring the tests but not using them to evaluate how well schools are doing. In other words, they want taxpayer dollars without being accountable to taxpayers.
To the best of my knowledge, research on school choice remains inconclusive. Some studies show benefits from voucher and charter schools, others don’t. Part of the reason for this is that test data on voucher schools just isn’t always available, largely thanks to lawmakers who are afraid of what it might show. So if Mitt Romney plans to adopt vouchers as his main education proposal — and he does — it would be nice to hear a little bit about accountability from him to go along with it. Unfortunately, because the true core of the voucher movement is made up of social conservatives who just want taxpayer help sending their kids to Bible schools and consider “accountability” to be a code word for an assault on religious freedom, he’s not likely to do anything of the sort.
By: Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, July 2, 2012
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