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Budget deal puts off tough talk

Uncle Sam hangs on for webBy Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

The good news regarding last week’s budget deal is that Congress didn’t wait until the last minute to work in a somewhat bipartisan fashion to avoid a fiscal crisis, and the results were not terrible.

You know there’s a “bad news” element to this, right?

Here’s what happened. The federal government was about to reach the debt ceiling, which is the statutory limit for how big the national debt is allowed to become. Congress reaches the ceiling every year or two, often squabbles about it, and then raises it. Outgoing Speaker John Boehner was determined to “clean out the barn” before new Speaker Paul Ryan took his place. So Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, a two-year budget deal that took the debt ceiling off the table until March 2017 – after the elections are over and everyone has been sworn into their new terms.

The act provides $80 billion in sequester relief over two years – meaning it increased spending. The sequester was a creation of the Budget Control Act of 2011, back when the government was adding $1 trillion in debt every year. (This year, thanks in large part to a better economy, it will be about half that.) Basically, if Congress didn’t come up with a plan to reduce those deficits on its own, spending automatically would be cut for the military and for domestic programs by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The idea was to make the provision unpleasant enough that Congress would do its job and create a better process. It didn’t.

The sequester has been the law of the land ever since. On the plus side, it has been the most effective method Congress has created to reduce spending in a long time. On the negative side, it’s not enough. The national debt has ballooned past $18 trillion, about $57,000 for every American. It 1980, it was $1 trillion. Also, the cuts do not represent a thoughtful, careful approach to deficit reduction. It’s kind of a hacksaw when what’s needed is a scalpel, though a big one. A lot of elected officials don’t like it because they want more spending for domestic programs, the military, or both.

So negotiators came up with that $80 billion while claiming that the extra spending was offset in other parts of the budget. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, that’s only partly correct. Meanwhile, Congress added another $31 billion in spending to the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations war-fighting account, which is exempt from the sequester.

Using a war-fighting account as a slush fund to get around the sequester and increase government spending – that’s bad policy on a lot of levels.

Five of the six members of Arkansas’ congressional delegation – Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton, and Reps. Rick Crawford, French Hill and Bruce Westerman – voted against the deal. Rep. Steve Womack in Northwest Arkansas’ 3rd District voted for it, saying the deal is imperfect but the debt ceiling must be raised, that the act would increase military spending, and that it would allow members of congressional Appropriations Committees to do their work in more regular order.

There are arguments to be made against having a debt ceiling, which periodically creates an avoidable crisis that brings the United States government to the brink of default and makes the markets and the rest of the world wonder when this country will ever get its act together.

On the other hand, for all its flaws, it forces elected officials to confront the national debt on a regular basis. Now Congress and President Obama have made it a little easier to avoid that awkward discussion – sort of like a family that’s going broke that always finds excuses to avoid the real issues because the time never seems to be right. And this happened during an election season, which is precisely when the time should be right.

That conversation will be difficult, if it ever occurs. It’s going to involve asking tough questions about Medicare, Social Security, the military, and other popular government programs that most Americans want more of, and taxes, which most Americans want less of. Like anything on a budget that’s not balanced, the solution will involve some combination of having less of what we like and more of what we don’t.

For now, that conversation will be limited to the campaign trail – not a place where elected officials like talking about tough choices in detail, but it will have to do.

Christie, doc fix: A little honesty in the national debt debate

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Uncle Sam hangs on for webA couple of things happened this past week that are worth noting because they concern senior citizens (today’s and tomorrow’s) and taxpayers (as usual, mostly tomorrow’s).

On Tuesday, the Senate sent to President Obama the long-awaited and much-discussed Medicare “doc fix.” Each of the past 17 years, Medicare payments to physicians have been scheduled to be cut automatically under something called the sustainable growth rate formula, and each of those years, Congress has suspended those cuts for one year. It’s been a charade, but one with real consequences because Medicare payments to doctors are low, and some doctors routinely threaten to stop treating those patients. Those who still do would like more certainty than these one-year fixes provide.

Now there will be no more last-minute reversals of the pretend spending cuts. The problem, as is usually the case, is that Congress did not offset the costs of the doc fix, either with spending cuts or higher taxes. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the legislation will add $141 billion to the national debt through 2025 – money that almost certainly would have been added anyway, just one year at a time.

Arkansas Sens. John Boozman and Tom Cotton voted for the doc fix, which passed 92-8. Earlier, they voted for an amendment that would have required Congress to offset the bill’s costs. That amendment failed, 58-42.

So we’re still burdening future generations with more debt, but at least we’re being more honest and transparent about it. Unfortunately, that qualifies as progress.

On the same day that the Senate passed the doc fix, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a probable presidential candidate, proposed in a speech a number of meaningful reforms to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Generally speaking, Medicare serves seniors, and Medicaid also serves seniors along with poor people and the disabled.

Christie’s proposals would affect Americans of all income classes. The retirement age would be raised to 69 very gradually (for Medicare, it would reach that age in 2064). Future senior citizens earning annual incomes above $200,000 from other sources no longer would receive Social Security benefits. Wealthier recipients would pay a higher percentage of Medicare premium costs than they do now. Christie would reform the qualification process for Social Security Disability Insurance, which has become a welfare program for younger recipients. Medicaid recipients above the poverty line would be required to pay co-pays rather than basically receive their health care for free.

Why is he talking about those popular programs? Because they are important contributors to the national debt, which has grown from less than $1 trillion in 1981 to more than $18 trillion today. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, $24.11 of every $100 the federal government spends goes to Social Security, while $14.42 goes to Medicare and $8.60 goes to Medicaid. That’s $47.13 of every $100, an amount that will grow as the baby boomers age.

What’s important about Christie’s speech is not whether he’s offered the right answers, but that he’s talking about the subject at all. Social Security has long been called the “third rail” of American politics: Like the electrified third rail on a subway system, if you touch it, you die. Politicians would rather talk about lowering taxes and increasing spending now because the young and unborn who will pay for those decisions don’t yet vote.

Hopefully, Christie’s plan will at least start a real discussion. A government that is $18 trillion in debt and adding more every year must cut spending, increase tax revenues, or do some combination of both. Other potential presidential candidates – including the two with Arkansas ties, Hillary Clinton and Mike Huckabee – should offer their own concrete proposals, not poll-tested platitudes. Those who want to keep the status quo, or increase spending, or cut taxes should show how they will make the numbers work.

At least then we’d have an honest debate – not just about how big the government should be, but also about how today’s taxpayers pay for the government we already have.

If Christie can’t win that debate, then hopefully someone else can with their own plan that preserves an appropriate social safety net without adding to the debt. We can’t just keep passing government’s costs to our children and grandchildren – like the doc fix does, albeit transparently.

New law saves good small schools

By Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Bruce Cozart sponsored Act 377.

Bruce Cozart sponsored Act 377.

Sometimes the Legislature gets it wrong, sometimes it gets it right, and sometimes it gets it right after getting it wrong for a while.

The last was the case with Act 377, signed last week by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, which lets the Arkansas State Board of Education grant waivers from consolidation to school districts that fall below the usual 350-student threshold. As a result of that bill by Rep. Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, a school district can remain open if it is not in fiscal, academic or facilities distress, and if keeping it open is in the best interest of students because of long bus rides.

The 350-student minimum was created in 2003 in response to court rulings in the Lake View case that put the state and its taxpayers firmly in charge of ensuring all students’ education opportunities are “adequate” and “equitable.” (The Arkansas Constitution uses the words “general, suitable and efficient.”)

The thinking was that districts must have at least that many students to provide the necessary economies of scale to accomplish those objectives, which is usually true. Generally, districts with less than 350 students cannot cost-effectively provide high-level math and science courses and other opportunities students need. Those districts typically are in declining communities that the rest of the state’s taxpayers are not responsible for propping up. Above all, policymakers feared that messing with the funding formula would land the state back in court. Every major education decision is made with that firmly in mind.

The result of all this is that, according to the Arkansas Rural Community Alliance, 53 high schools and 48 elementary schools have been closed. For the sake of both students and taxpayers, many of them probably should have been.

The problem with that arbitrary 350-student minimum is it confuses “impossible” with merely “difficult.” Against the odds, the Weiner School District was doing well. Its academics were among the best in the state. Its facilities were good. Its finances not only were sound, but its citizens recently had voted to raise their own taxes.

It didn’t matter. Because it fell below that magic number, it was forced to consolidate in 2010 with its larger neighbor, Harrisburg, whose students were not achieving at the same levels as students in Weiner. There’s still a Weiner Elementary School, but older students travel to Harrisburg now. To this day, taxpayers who live in Weiner pay higher millage rates than those who live in Harrisburg. So far, the district’s patrons have voted not to change that situation.

Michelle Cadle stood behind Hutchinson as he signed the bill into law and was handed one of the pens he used. Her family lives in what once was the Weiner School District. Her youngest child attends Weiner Elementary, but she drives her oldest to the Valley View School District 20 miles away.

The loss still stings, but she has chosen to channel her emotion into becoming an advocate for small schools. “We always said it was never about Weiner,” she said. “It was about doing what was right for all schools across Arkansas, so this was a victory day for us.”

Hutchinson made it clear that the law is “forward looking.” In other words, it can’t be used to reopen the Weiner district. Still, Cadle said the community is looking for alternatives.

There wasn’t strong opposition to this bill. It doesn’t do away with the 350-student minimum. It merely gives the State Board of Education a tool to use when there’s an exception to the rule, like Weiner. Districts in decline still will be consolidated.

More generally, education policymakers are concerned about the lack of institutional memory in the Capitol. Because of term limits, very few legislators were in office when the Lake View case was decided. The more the case shrinks in the rearview mirror, the more it will be forgotten – until somebody sues again.

That’s a valid concern. However, the fear of that happening shouldn’t lead the state to repeat a past mistake – or put more and more kids on long bus rides unnecessarily. Regardless of its size, if a district’s students are performing well, if its finances are sound, and if its facilities are in good shape, it shouldn’t be consolidated. It should be duplicated.

Website says Benton is America’s 10th best city for conservatives

By Steve Brawner
© 2014 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Benton is one of America’s “10 Best Cities for Conservatives” because of its conservative voting record, its lifestyle habits and because its House member is Rep. Tim Griffin, R-Ark.,, according to the website Livability.com.

The website recently listed the 10 best cities for liberals, conservatives and centrists. Benton was the only Arkansas city to make any of the lists.

The website says it used city, county and congressional district data. It also considered election records, a city’s congressional representative’s leanings, and political self-reporting by residents. It also looked at how shopping habits relate to political affiliation.

For Benton, the website noted that Saline County has voted Republican in presidential elections since supporting President Clinton in 1996. Mitt Romney won 70 percent of the vote in 2012. It said Griffin “is a Republican who leans far to the right on most social and financial issues.”

The site said the city’s residents are likely to drive a Buick, read “Good Housekeeping,” watch “The Bachelorette,” shop at Sam’s Club, and dine at Chic-fil-A – which is ironic because the closet Chic-fil-A is in the city’s neighbor and high school football rival, Bryant.

While Benton may be conservative, it’s shown itself to be willing to tax itself for various community projects in recent years. Mayor David Mattingly said that when he came into office in 2010, Benton’s 1.5 percent sales tax was the lowest of the state’s 50 largest communities. In November 2011, voters approved a bond issue financed by the city’s 1.5 percent advertising and promotion tax to build the Benton Event Center. In its first 13 months, the center has attracted 71,000 visitors, Mattingly said.

Then last November, Benton voters agreed by wide margins to continue the city’s 1.5 percent sales tax while adding a half-cent sales tax to pay for public safety improvements and another half cent to build the Riverside Park community center.

“I have spoken with and built consensus on a whole series of subjects with Republicans, Democrats and Tea Party people in the room together and individually, and my approach has always been, if you give someone a place at the table, even though you might not agree, they can’t say you never, ever gave them a place at the table,” Mattingly said.

Seven of the top 10 conservative cities were in SEC country, with the other three in Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. Alabaster, Ala., topped the list. None were big cities.

The best cities for liberals were more familiar. Berkeley, Calif., was number one, while Boulder, Colo., was number four. Spokane Valley, Wash., was the best city for centrists.

Here’s a link to the site.

Digital dilemma

Schools can’t take full advantage of the internet if they don’t have the broadband, but it’s not yet clear how best to get it to them – or how much it will cost

Inside those two orange wires beside Kendal Wells' shoulder and the yellow wire in front of him are fiber optic strands thinner than a human hair. Because of those wires, the Cabot School District has more than two gigabits of broadband access – enough to more than meet its needs. Many districts do not have that capability. Making sure they do is becoming one of the biggest issues in Arkansas public education.

Inside those two orange wires beside Kendal Wells’ shoulder and the yellow wire in front of him are fiber optic strands thinner than a human hair. Because of those wires, the Cabot School District has more than two gigabits of broadband access – enough to more than meet its needs. Many districts do not have that capability. Making sure they do is becoming one of the biggest issues in Arkansas public education.

By Steve Brawner
Note to readers, particularly subscribers – This is not a typical blog post but is instead a magazine cover story that appeared in Report Card, which I publish with the Arkansas School Boards Association. Just wanted to warn you.

Kendal Wells, technology director of the Cabot School District, and B.J. Brooks, director of instructional technology, show off a rack of flashing computer hardware in a walk-in closet near the district’s boardroom. It’s not that impressive a place, really, and the hardware isn’t all that new.

But this, Wells said, is “grand central station.” He points to two orange insulated wires, each containing a glass fiber optic cable thinner than a human hair. Each can carry 1 gigabit of information per second. Two more yellow wires increase the district’s total bandwidth to 2.2 gigabits per second, more than double what the district needs on its busiest days – for now. Because of that bandwidth, the entire district, 17 schools across Cabot, is a sprawling hotspot. Each classroom has its own wireless access point, ensuring no teacher ever has to worry about a slow connection or being bumped offline in the middle of a lesson.

“We can buy all these Chromebooks or iPads or desktops or anything else that we want, but if we don’t have the bandwidth, that really big pipe to deliver the information to the classroom where the teacher can use it, then it does us no good to have the devices,” Wells said.

The Cabot School District serves a growing, prosperous community. It’s centrally located on flat terrain half an hour northeast of Little Rock. Wells heads an IT department staff of 14.

In other words, Cabot is perhaps the perfect district to marry broadband and instruction. But what about less wealthy, isolated rural districts in the Ozarks? What about districts in the Delta far from population centers? How can Arkansas ensure those students receive an education that’s equitable to the one offered students in Cabot?

Those are questions with which education policymakers are grappling, and they don’t have much time to find the answers. Online testing for the Common Core is supposed to begin at the end of the upcoming school year, and a pilot test has already occurred. Last year, policymakers realized many schools do not have the bandwidth to perform the testing effectively. More important is what’s happening – or is failing to happen – in the classroom. Students and teachers without adequate bandwidth are missing out on a rich variety of instructional resources. It’s now possible for students in even the most far-flung districts to take classes not available to anyone just a few years ago. In fact, under the Digital Learning Act of 2013, every Arkansas student entering the ninth grade must complete an online class in order to graduate. But for many districts and many parts of Arkansas, the pipe just isn’t big enough.

To address this problem, a group of education policymakers, legislators and telecommunications providers known as the Quality Digital Learning Study (QDLS) Committee has been meeting since June 2013 as a result of the Digital Learning Act. On May 6, the committee released a report describing the state’s lack of broadband access and possible solutions.

 

“D” for “Digital”

The report makes clear the situation’s urgency. Arkansas received a “D” for digital learning opportunities in the 2013 “Digital Learning Now” report from the Foundation for Excellence in Education – an improvement over the “F” it received the year before, but still not nearly good enough. A 2011 survey by the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators found that 84.5 percent of respondents were forced to restrict access to useful sites because of a lack of bandwidth. The state has invested almost $160 million in vendor costs since 1992 on the Arkansas Public School Computer Network (APSCN). That network provides a bandwidth of five kilobits per second per student. In comparison, the State Educational Technology Directors Association recommends a minimum of 100 kilobits per second for each student and staff member in 2014-15.

Schools can and do supplement the connectivity they’re getting through APSCN. According to the report, 71 percent of bandwidth statewide is purchased by districts from local providers. But local costs vary widely. A 2013 survey by the Arkansas Department of Education found that the broadband cost of a megabit ranged from a low of $1.20 to a high of $280 depending on the location of the school and the service provided.

So what’s next? The report recommends that Arkansas public schools be allowed to connect to the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network, a statewide fiber optics system currently used by universities and medical providers. ARE-ON is currently off-limits to schools because Act 1050 of 2011 prohibits state and municipal entities from providing broadband, voice, data, video and wireless services – the exceptions being emergency services, law enforcement, higher education, and health care providers. That act was passed thanks to the efforts of Arkansas’ private broadband companies, who were spending billions of dollars laying an infrastructure across the state. “We made business decisions based on the fact that we did not have government competing with us, so that was the rationale in 2011 when that law was passed,” said Len Pitcock, chairman of the Arkansas Cable Association, during the May 6 release of the report.

According to the report, ARE-ON is the only one of 42 public fiber optic networks nationwide connecting to Internet2 that does not serve K-12 schools. Internet2 is a consortium serving academia, researchers, industry and government. The report says ARE-ON has 380 gigabits of unused bandwidth.

Gov. Mike Beebe expressed support for the ARE-ON solution through a press release issued by his office June 13, saying, “Whatever the reasons were behind the exemption passed in 2011, it has become clear that Act 1050 has impeded our progress in developing a reliable and efficient broadband infrastructure for Arkansas students. Giving K-12 schools the opportunity to access ARE-ON will provide better online availability for our students and save our taxpayers money.”

The report also recommends centralized management of statewide network support services, including network construction. Buying services in bulk instead of through individual school districts would reduce costs and increase scalability, allowing districts to have higher speeds during peak periods such as statewide testing, the report states.

 

How much?

No one knows how much any of this will cost. On July 7, the Arkansas Legislative Council, which is the group of legislators who meet when the full Legislature is not in session, approved a $71,500 contract with the consultants Picus Odden & Associates to try to develop cost figures.

The report encourages the state to better utilize E-rate, a program that collects fees through telecommunications providers to reimburse schools and libraries for up to 90 percent of the cost of obtaining Internet and other telecommunications services. One hundred percent of Arkansas public schools, not counting public charter schools, have participated in the program during the last five years. Schools and libraries have been provided almost $205 million in discounts during the past 15 years, and the average discount was 79 percent in 2012-13. The Cabot School District, for example, receives a 59 percent discount off the $13,500 per month it would pay for the broadband it is purchasing on its own outside of APSCN. But Arkansas has lagged some states, such as Oklahoma and Louisiana, in obtaining funding.

Most of the lines currently used by ARE-ON involve long-term leases with private telecommunications providers. Those providers do not support the Quality Digital Learning Study Committee’s findings and abstained from voting on the report. They say the report doesn’t provide cost estimates or identify a funding mechanism, that the issue hasn’t been sufficiently analyzed, and that its recommendations conflict with state law.

To communicate their message, telecommunications providers last year formed the Arkansas Broadband Coalition for Kids. Jordan Johnson, the group’s spokesperson, said ARE-ON would be “a redundant network” because the industry has already laid a fiber optics infrastructure that, if utilized, could serve most Arkansas students now. For whatever reasons, schools simply aren’t utilizing the service. Johnson said many educators have mistakenly assumed that ARE-ON will somehow be free.

“Regardless of what system is in play, there’s going to be a cost associated with getting broadband, period,” he said. “What you want is something that’s the most fair and efficient and productive way of getting the service, and my coalition believes that that’s through the private sector.”

The industry wants to be a part of the solution, he said.

“Collectively, the providers have spent billions of dollars in this infrastructure to provide accessibility to virtually all Arkansans, whether it be in the public sector, private sector, in the educational sector, the nonprofit sector,” he said. “Collectively, we have the state covered, and there is a tremendous amount of access there. And we think we can do this much more efficiently.”

When the QDLS Committee’s report was unveiled May 6, Rep. Charlotte Vining Douglas, R-Alma, told Chairman Ed Franklin that her school districts were telling her that access was available, but they had not been willing to pay for it. Franklin said some schools don’t have access to broadband and others aren’t using the access they have. “The reality is probably the school districts that are using it the least see the least need for it,” he said.

The report points to the need for broadband connectivity using an example from the Batesville School District. Clint Lucy, director of information technology, said students were taking an online placement assessment in a credit recovery class when the network shut down, forcing them to redo the test from the beginning. “In years past, a school would often be told their bandwidth wasn’t being managed properly if things were creepy-crawly slow,” he was quoted saying. “There’s a lot of truth in that – bandwidth management is critical, but our need for bandwidth has outgrown our ability to provide it. We have reached critical mass.”

That’s not been a problem in Cabot since December, when capacity was increased to 2.2 gigs from a relatively paltry 200. At the time, the district was bumping its head on its bandwidth ceiling. Sometimes the internet would slow to a crawl, which was unacceptable for students who have grown up in a digital world. Danielle Dinges, an educational technologist who teaches computer skills at Cabot Middle School, said speeds varied according to the weather. The internet shut down on her one day near the beginning of the year. According to Wells, the district doubled its internet usage within about a week of expanding its capacity.

The district has purchased 1,700 Chromebooks, but according to Tammy Tucker, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, it’s not in a hurry to become a one-to-one district where every student is assured of having a digital device. Buying everyone a laptop or tablet would be a huge expense in a district Cabot’s size, and besides, Tucker explained, “I think if you just give kids a computer without developing a plan and really knowing what your goals are for that computer, then you’ve put the cart before the horse. … I think before you put those in the hands of kids and teachers, you have a plan and a vision for what you want to accomplish.”

The district and the school board have made commitments not only in infrastructure but in training. Brooks, the director of instructional technology, has written a curriculum that starts students keyboarding in kindergarten and using Google Docs by the third grade. By the time they leave middle school, they’re proficient in the technology. Teachers have been trained on the devices since 2009. All attend a required three-hour summer course, Cabot Technology Academy for Teachers.

“Five years ago, we started out, ‘This is what the right mouse button does. This is what a shortcut is,’” Brooks said. “And in this last year, we were teaching them Google Docs, how to integrate their curriculum, and how to share documents with their students.”

The results could be seen in Deana Davis’ pre-AP eighth grade English class. On the day of a visit by a reporter, students were developing a fictional character who would have lived alongside Anne Frank, the author of the famous World War II diary. What would life be like? What would she eat for breakfast? What kind of games would she play? Students worked independently and had the power to display their work on screen in front of the class – a sharing of power that can be an adjustment for a teacher. But it has proved a powerful incentive. Students think more carefully about their work if their peers will see it, instructors have found.

Before she started teaching the class, Davis, the teacher, told Brooks that she was “technologically Amish.” Brooks helped her develop her curriculum and served as a sounding board for ideas. On the day of the visit, she enthusiastically described how the broadband was being used.

“You saw her a while ago,” Brooks said. “She was flitting back and forth between apps, between windows, giving kids directions on how to use different apps, sharing documents, using YouTube, just bam, bam, bam, bam with no hesitation. That’s incredible growth.”