No child in Flippin left behind

Interventionist Juanell Potter works with student Thomas Gravely.

Interventionist Juanell Potter works with student Thomas Gravely.

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

FLIPPIN – Superintendent Dale Query has spent more than four decades in education, and one thing that has remained constant is smart kids struggling in school and often becoming discipline problems.

He and his fellow educators in Flippin long have struggled to find the key to helping those students reach their potential. Now they think they’ve found it. Many of them have dyslexia.

The condition, which is surprisingly common at varying degrees, is a language-based learning challenge based on brain structure. The students often are smart – sometimes very smart – but they just can’t read well or put things on paper, so from their earliest days in school, they begin falling behind their peers. Teachers tell their parents they don’t apply themselves. Some students make frequent trips to the principal’s office.

A couple of years ago, a school employee brought her grandchild to the elementary office and said the child was dyslexic. Principal Tracie Luttrell, who in the past had dismissed the condition per her training, decided to attend a seminar, and something clicked. Inspired, she and others began researching the condition.

The north-central Arkansas district has made dyslexia a top priority. Many staff members attended a Saturday training on their own time as the program was starting. Six full-time interventionists work one-on-one with students. The district has 800 students, and 107 of them last year attended hourly summer school sessions twice a week. Many saw significant improvements.

The district relies on the Susan Barton method, which uses multiple senses – sight, sound, touch – to help students’ left and right brains make the proper connections to make reading easier. In a room dedicated to dyslexia, students drag tiles with letters down a magnetic board as they learn the sounds those letters make. Tiles for more advanced students have groups of letters so that those developing brains can make the connection that “o-l-d” always says “old” when it’s part of a longer word. Students also are drilled in English grammar rules until they know enough to put a newspaper editor to shame. Did you know there’s a reason why “truck” ends in “ck” but “milk” needs only a “k”? These students do.

Juanelle Potter, one of the interventionists working with students, has a special reason for working what she calls “by far the greatest job I’ve ever had.” Her husband, a math whiz, and two of her children have dyslexia. Homework was a nightly battle. Now, the daughter who would tell her, “I’m stupid” has been invited to the freshman honors banquet. Her fifth-grade son, Raymond, is no longer falling behind his peers. “I thought I wasn’t that smart,” he told me. He wants to be a mechanical engineer someday.

For some students, the program will be the difference between reading well and a lifetime of near illiteracy. But Luttrell said the benefits have gone far beyond that small population. For the first time in her educational career, she’s ready to move students out of special education, which will allow those teachers to focus on those remaining. Students are graduating out of speech therapy more quickly. Meanwhile, students with mild dyslexic characteristics who were making “C’s” – and therefore not drawing much attention – are doing better in school. Counselor Sherry Rainbolt says students she was counseling with dyslexia no longer struggle with anger or motivation issues.

“Once they’re told that there’s a reason, it’s instantaneous that they know, ‘Well, I’m not dumb. Nothing’s wrong with me, really.’ I mean, this is something that we can help them with, and they see hope,” she said.

Query uses a pretty strong descriptor: “cured for life.” Students who were being left behind in school are catching up to their peers and will never fall behind again. He sees it as the answer to a lot of problems. He says certain students no longer will need therapy, or medication, or, eventually, wind up in jail.

“When we spread those numbers out from Flippin, Arkansas, to the state of Arkansas to our nation, dyslexia intervention has the potential of reshaping our whole society,” he said.

Thanks to laws sponsored during the past two legislative sessions by Sen. Joyce Elliott, D-Little Rock, school districts across the state will screen students for dyslexia in grades K-2, and in other grades where appropriate. Then they’ll be required to intervene.

Will they look to Flippin’s example? They will if they’re smart.

Limit state lawmakers to 10 bills

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

During an 81-day session, Arkansas state legislators considered 2,200 bills and passed 1,288 of them into law. That’s a lot in a short amount of time.

The session was relatively brief. The legislative volume was not out of the ordinary, but were there really 1,288 ways Arkansas needed to be fixed – especially this way, this fast?

This is not a column bashing legislators, whom I find to be generally honorable and likable, with flaws like the rest of us. Many are idealists who spent months walking the streets of their hometowns campaigning for office with no guarantee they would win.

They want all that work to mean something, which is why they filed an average of 16.4 bills per legislator. (There are 135 legislative seats, but one was vacant this session.) Many lawmakers are reluctant to vote against each other’s bills for fear of offending someone they may need later for their own legislation – plus, it just feels kind of rude. As a result, many bills are passed with overwhelming majorities, at least in one chamber. Because there are so many bills – and because legislators don’t have staff members to read them – most of the important work happens in committee. There’s just too much to do in too little time.

The Legislature’s cooperative spirit enables it generally to get its work done – unlike Congress. Under the Revenue Stabilization Act, Arkansas state government will not run a deficit this upcoming fiscal year. In contrast, the Congressional Budget Office projects Uncle Sam will add $468 billion to the national debt in 2015 – the equivalent of about $1,459 per American, and this was a good year. In contrast to the Legislature’s 1,288 acts, Congress passed 296 laws over a two-year period in 2013-14 and 283 in 2011-12, according to the Pew Research Center. In other words, the Legislature passed more than twice as many laws in 81 days as Congress passed in four years.

Congress and the Legislature exist in very different universes. Congress deals in trillions while the Legislature deals in billions. Congress governs a vast, diverse country with significant regional and partisan differences. In the Arkansas Legislature, most Democrats and Republicans have similar viewpoints. The politics is less professional in Arkansas – though it’s moving in that direction.

Still, it probably would be best if Congress were more like the Legislature and if the Legislature were a little more like Congress. Passing 1,288 laws in 81 days – that’s just too many.

So here’s a modest proposal: Each legislator should be limited to filing about 10 bills per session. That would have cut the number to 1,340 this year, creating a more deliberate process and giving legislators a chance to focus on their priorities. If a bill is only 11th on their list, it can’t be that important to them.

This should start as a flexible rule of thumb enforced by the Legislature’s culture rather than a formal, legal limit enforced by law. Issues arise late in a session – for example, banning adoption “rehoming” – and legislators need to be able to file another bill if they are the best positioned to do so.

The downside would be that legislators would write longer, broader bills – try to get two for the price of one, in other words. Yes, that’s a danger, but the more a bill tries to do, the more likely it will contain provisions that draw opposition.

In 1,288 ways, legislators over the past three months have changed Arkansas through the force of government. Some of those laws were good and some weren’t, but all of them were passed in a hurried environment that places too much emphasis on passing bills for passing bills’ sake. Lawmakers should slow down and do less, but do it more deliberately.

•••

I need to make a correction. In a column about the Legislature’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act published around April 1, I wrote that I voted against the state’s 2004 amendment banning gay marriage. I had my elections confused. I voted in 2008 against a ban on unmarried couples adopting or fostering children, which also passed. It was aimed at gays and lesbians and also affected heterosexual unmarried couples.

I’m pretty sure I voted for the gay marriage ban in 2004. I would not vote that way today. Americans should not look to the government to define marriage. Let the government focus its attention elsewhere – and pass fewer laws at the state level thanks to a 10-bill limit. See above.

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.

Governor conducts legislative orchestra

Asa for webBy Steve Brawner
© 2015 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.

Arkansas’ state government was designed to have a weak governor, and that tradition has continued. The framers of the current 1874 Constitution ensured a veto could be overridden by a simple majority vote, and later amendments, such as the one that transferred the governor’s authority to the lieutenant governor when the governor leaves the state, have continued that tradition.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson pretty much took a sledgehammer to all of that during this recent legislative session.

On issue after issue, the Legislature gave him whatever he wanted. He wanted a middle class tax cut. It passed. He wanted to buy time on the Medicaid private option, so he asked legislators to extend it for two years while they study what to do with it. Even those who campaigned on an over-my-dead-body platform said yes. When the House Committee on Public Transportation advanced a bill transferring part of general revenues to highways, Hutchinson said it didn’t fit into his budget, so the sponsor killed it, though with a promise from Hutchinson to appoint a task force to study highway funding.

Then there were the constitutional amendments. Legislative leaders indicated they didn’t really care to refer any of those to the voters, so the process looked dead in its tracks. Then Hutchinson said he wanted two – one to end the aforementioned practice of giving up his powers to the lieutenant governor, and one to increase the fund Arkansas uses to attract economic superprojects like auto plants. Both now will be on the ballot in 2016.

How did a system designed to produce a weak governor instead produce an orchestra conductor like Hutchinson? One explanation is that he displayed extraordinary political skills this session. He took potential train wrecks like the private option and Common Core off the table by appointing task forces to study them, and when all heck broke loose with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he charted a middle ground that made him a hero to both sides even though he originally supported the bill.

History also was on his side. Hutchinson is the first Republican governor to hold office with a Legislature controlled by Republicans since shortly after the Civil War. His party wanted to govern effectively rather than look like the dog that caught the car and didn’t know what to do with it.

Hutchinson had another explanation during a sit-down session with reporters in his office last Thursday.

“The strength of the governor is from the respect of the office and the recognition that we need to have a leader, and also the desire to have the governor succeed,” he said. “And so that’s impressed me, and that’ s not a Republican thing. That’s a Republican and a Democrat thing. Democrats who opposed me, they not only said it, but they showed it in actions that it is important for Arkansas that the governor succeed.”

Contrast that attitude with this statement made by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, now majority leader, during an interview with National Journal on Oct. 29, 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Democrats often point to that statement. To be fair, according to the fact-checking site Politifact, he said it in the context of discussing historical elections and said in that same interview that Republicans were willing to work with Obama “if he’s willing to meet us halfway.”

Still, Republicans’ priority from day one of Obama’s administration clearly has been to position themselves for future elections – just as Democrats in Washington will behave if a Republican presidential candidate manages to beat Hillary Clinton. The days when the president had a “honeymoon” after being elected may be just a fading memory.

Of course, it’s not the job of Democrats and Republicans to help each other succeed – particularly not in Washington, where the parties have real differences in their stated goals. But Washington could use more of Arkansas’ spirit, and Arkansas probably could use a little of Washington’s. Very little, but a little.

The latter will happen in Arkansas over the course of the next two years. Hard decisions on issues like the private option must be made, and legislators in both parties increasingly will challenge the governor.

It will get tougher for Hutchinson, just as it did for previous governors after they had been in office for a while. Unlike in Washington, most legislators still will want him to succeed, but eventually the honeymoon will be over.

Can one person make a difference?

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

Political professionals are often cynical people, so it was surprising to hear lobbyist and Republican consultant Bill Vickery make this idealistic statement during a recent banquet speech: “There has also never been a time in American politics where one individual can have more of an impact than right at this very moment.”

Journalists can be cynical people, too, so one might say in response, “Yeah, if that individual is Sheldon Adelson.” Adelson is a Las Vegas casino magnate spending a chunk of his fortune on Republican Party presidential politics, so candidates approach him on their knees with hat in hand. In 2012, the process became known as the “Sheldon Adelson primary.”

Can one average person make a difference? In some ways, this democracy is becoming less democratic. Today’s campaign tactics, media landscape and digital data miners have sliced America into distinct electoral blocs that the political pros can manipulate. Moneymen like Adelson, who can make virtually unlimited donations, have tremendous influence over the process.

It’s impossible for normal citizens to compete toe to toe with that, but they do have some powerful weapons these days – their own ideas, their own energy, social media. A YouTube video that goes viral can have more impact than millions of dollars in commercials. Vickery said an energetic Cleveland campaign volunteer for Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign made such a difference in that city that her absence was felt when she was hospitalized. Vickery didn’t mention it, but four years earlier, how many volunteers would have been needed to erase Florida’s 537-vote margin between Bush and Vice President Al Gore? Not many.

In a democracy where the many are just grumbling and complaining, the few who actually act can have an outsized influence. In many counties, the tea party is composed of a small number of Arkansans, usually not bank president types, who together have far more sway than their neighbors because they are organized and involved. When a few hundred activists protesting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act lined the steps leading to the Arkansas House of Representatives, legislators who supported the bill found another route to the chamber, but they couldn’t ignore the crowd. The Legislature itself isn’t composed of members of the state’s elite. Instead it’s mostly average people who decided, “Why not me?” The powerful speaker of the House, Jeremy Gillam, R-Judsonia, owns a berry farm.

The thing that ties a lot of these people together is that they stopped just griping about the government and instead engaged in practical politics. The Cleveland woman was volunteering for the Democratic nominee, not a fringe candidate. Tea party members write letters to the editor, contact their legislators and vote in every Republican primary. Sometimes a Martin Luther King does come along who totally changes the way a nation thinks. But you’re probably not the next Martin Luther King, so get involved where it can matter.

It’s worth noting that Vickery made his comment at Heifer International’s headquarters in Little Rock. The hunger relief organization was started by farmer Dan West, a member of the Church of the Brethren who did some relief work during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and decided that country’s poorest people could be helped more by giving them a cow instead of just a cup of milk. Since then, Heifer International has provided farm animals and other services to 22.6 million families around the world.

Life is about expectations, and so is politics. If your definition of “making a difference” is “remaking the world to my liking, by myself and without much effort,” then this message isn’t for you. Adelson poured $15 million into Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign, and Gingrich didn’t come close to winning, so you will not fix the national debt with one letter to your congressman. But if you and those like you organize around a common, attainable goal, use the modern tools you have available, and stay committed despite a few setbacks, you’d be surprised at what you might accomplish.

That’s especially the case in state and local politics. At the State Capitol, there’s sort of a little familiar club of legislators, lobbyists, state employees and journalists – and then regular people come in and upset the apple cart sometimes.

That can be you. You can get a lot done, but not by yourself. So, no, generally one person can’t make a difference. But a few one persons can.