The Cold, Mean Season

Seattle's only remaining daily newspaper went on a rampage against an income tax initiative that would have imposed a 5% tax on households earning more than $400,000 or single payers over $200,000 for single (At 5%, the wealthiest 5% among us would be paying less than they do in the people's republic of Idaho, less than in Oregon and less than in California) They argued vehemently that we need to cut programs not raise taxes. And they are argued just as vehemently that we need to increase education spending and for God's sake we need more funding for the University of Washington. What's left to cut? Well, according to the Times and many Democrats and Republicans alike, government waste and special interests.

Hardly. What is left is the Basic Health Plan which provides health care to low income working families. The Security Lifeline Program which provides heath care and a very small living stipend for the mentally ill and those at the very bottom. TANF which provides income support and more importantly child care so low income mothers can actually hold a job.

Apparently, the voters agreed with the Times and voted down the income tax which would have been dedicated to health care and education. They passed an initiative that would require a 2/3 vote for any tax increases. They vote to cut taxes on candy, and pop (equal to about the funding level for the security lifeline). No taxes screamed the conventional pundits. We need to reset to a new smaller government.

Hmmm. Smaller for who? Smaller for the least fortunate among us. Smaller for the sick who have lost jobs and their health care benefits. Smaller for the mentally ill who are wandering the streets without medication. Smaller for mothers who, without child care, who can't afford to work.

It's a cold, mean season in Washington State.

How did education reform ever get so anti-teacher?

I'm amazed at how most education reform efforts seem to neglect the importance of harnessing the ideas of teachers in turning many of our troubled schools around. The generic education reform argument seems to go that teachers and the school system they work in, have gotten so bureaucratic that we have to start over. We should provide state funding for the creation of new charter schools where stripped of union contracts and complex rules, we can start to gets things moving.

To me this is terribly ironic. After all, one of the first proponents of charter schools was Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers in 1988. Shanker's idea was that groups of teachers would be able to run their own school within regular schools and pursue innovative ways of educating disaffected students. Released from contradictory legislative dictates and complicated school district rules, teachers would be able to innovate and solve tough problems.

Shanker's idea was that a group of six or more teachers should be able to submit a proposal to start a new school. They would be able to try out different ways of teaching to reach students who weren't responding to what schools are currently doing. Proposals would be reviewed by a joint teacher and school district panel. The approved schools would be given 5 or 10 years to try out their ideas and progress in the programs would be shared with others. If a method was particularly successfull, districts could bring the new ideas to scale.

We need to turn this education reform equation around. Instead of measuring performance to reward and punish teachers, we need to harness the power of teachers to innovate and teach in new ways and bring what we learn to scale.

One Way to get the economy moving again

The Deficit Reduction Commission co-chairs have come up with a big solution to the long term budget deficit of the federal government. Their proposals simplifies tax rates but raises revenue by eliminating loopholes, it raises the retirement age, cuts Medicare and Medicaid spending, cuts the defense budget and slashes domestic spending. And most importantly it reduces the deficit from 8% to 2.2% of GDP.

This is a heavy lift but Democrats have done it before. The Clinton administration cut the Reagan/Bush deficit and left Bush II with a surplus.

And the details of a final package will not likely look like this one. But the co-chairs draft report puts a lot of major pieces on table where everyone shares the pain and lays out the parameters of the solution.

This is a big deal and could very quickly get our economy moving again for two reasons:

1) The long term solution should allow Congress to move forward on an immediate stimulus. We need a stimulus to get the economy moving. Insuring that the stimulus will be made up quickly with future cuts makes this feasible. It's all about timing. You can't cut spending now. That would be idiotic. That would lead to a double dip recession. But you have to close the deficit in the future in order to keep interest rates down and avoid inflation. So, you jump start the economy now and when it starts moving you start cutting.

2) Passage of the deficit reduction plan will assure markets that long term investments are a good bet. As our deficit grow bigger and government borrowing sops up a bigger supply of credit in the economy, we run the risk of ramping up interest rates and creating another recession.

A short term stimulus and a long term deficit reduction package are the key to avoiding a double dip recession and getting our economy moving again.

We need to pressure Congress to get this done and done quickly. Do we have the political courage to move forward?

Not a Republican tide, not 1994, not In Washington

Despite the deepest recession in 70 years, legislative Democrats evaded the sweep that impacted much of the rest of the country.

The simple fact of the matter is that while Democrats lost seats, 3 to 4 in the Senate and 4 to 5 in the House (one race in each is subject to recount), the change is far below average for off year elections for the part in power

With very few exceptions, since the founding of the state, the party of the President loses seats in the state house in the next off year election. The House is a better state weather vane since only half of Senate seats are up every two years.

At this point in time, under Democratic President Obama, House Democrats have lost 4 to 5 seats and still hold a commanding lead in the state house 57 to 41 - a sixteen vote margin.

In previous off year elections the party of the President has seen bigger losses. in 2006, the Republicans in the Bush era lost 7 seats and in 2002, 3 seats.

In the Clinton days, Democrats lost 27 seats in 1994 (1998 and 1990 appear to be anomalies probably because the previous tide was so big against the party of the President) . In 1986, under Reagan, Republicans lost 20 seats and in 1982 they lost 11 seats.

During the Carter year, 1978, Democrats lost 13 seats and in 1974 under Nixon, Republicans lost 5 seats. In 8 of the last 10 elections, the party of President has lost seats and the average is 10.4 significantly higher than 2010.

Despite the horrible recession and the off year election of the party of the President, Democrats did pretty well.

Who will take a risk for these kids?

Government risk taking sure sounds like an oxymoron and it's a damn shame that most of the time it is.

Several years ago, Dr. Norwood Brooks, President of Seattle Vocational Institute started the "Career Link" program that offered high school drop-outs an opportunity to go back to school and get their GED. More importantly, the program was integrated with getting these students a certificate in a trade that would lead to a good job. Students would go to school studying for their GED exam at the same time that they enrolled in a pre-apprenticeship, office or health care programs. Over half of the 400 students enrolled graduated - a major accomplishment since without the program none of them would have.

Enter the Seattle School District. An attorney with the district told the college that the program was a problem since since the students weren't enrolled in a "high school graduation" program (it was a GED/Trade program) that the students would count against them when calculating their results for No Child Left Behind. Scores were bad enough and the last thing they need is more penalties associated with failing schools (the accounting applies to the district the students would have been enrolled in rather than the college) They indicated they could no longer support the program. No risk takers there.

Elsewhere in the state the State Auditor enters the picture. His bean counters looked at the law and interpreted it to say that the program didn't lead to the statutorily defined high school degree consequently it was inconsistent with state law and could not utilize state funds. No risk takers here either.

Student advocates went to the legislature and worked on a bill that would have required school districts to enter into contracts for these program or the colleges could go elsewhere for approval. However, last year, the Senate Ways and Means Committee staff successfully argued that if the legislature passed the bill, that more students would be enrolled in school and that would cost the state more money. The bill died in committee. No risk takers here.

This year, to get around the Ways and Means staff, a watered down bill was sent to the committee. The bill doesn't require school district to allow drop-out retrieval programs but creates a process where it is more likely to be approved. The bill passed but college leaders were told that the process of just writing the rules and and going through the public process would take over a year. How long it would take to negotiate with the school districts beyond that is still and open question.

The bottom line here is that when it comes to taking care of our most at - risk kids, the adults aren't wiling to take any risks.

I think there is something more here I will explore in future blogs - how do you encourage risk taking by public servants? How do you allow people who care and work on the front lines to take the risks needed to solve real public problems?

This year

Washington State Ranks at the Bottom on College Continuation

We Washingtonians have a pretty high opinion of ourselves. We host some of the most knowledge intensive industries in the world from Amgen and Fred Hutch to Microsoft and Amazon. And we hang out in some of the swankiest coffee places in the world like the original Starbucks or Tullys.

Before I throw a bunch of statistics at you let me get to the point. We are doing very poorly when you look at the percentage of high school graduates who continue on to college. When you factor in high school graduation rates - it looks even worse. Only a third of the 9th graders in Washington end up as college Freshmen.

According to the National Center for Higher Ed Management Systems, we rank 44th in the country in college continuation. Less than 45% of public and private higher school graduates were enrolled as freshmen in any post secondary education program. If you want to take a longer look, like the percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in post-secondary education, we rank 45th.

Ok. Here is where it gets really depressing if you factor in high school graduation. Looking at number of fall first-time freshmen enrolled anywhere in the U.S. divided by the number of 9th graders four years earlier, we rank 47th. Only about a third of the freshmen are in college in year 13. The national average is 42% and the top 5 state average nearly 60%.

What do we do about this? A few years ago the legislature directed the workforce board to do a survey of financial aid specialists, employment office job staff and students themselves as to what the barriers are to post secondary enrollment and completion, the biggest barrier was financial aid followed by lack of information on how to navigate college and work.

There's been a lot of talk about providing a free 13th year of education at a community college or university and the House Economic Development Chair, Phyllis Kenney and Speaker Frank Chopp have created a program called Opportunity Grants that is designed to reach this goal of a universal 13th and 14th year with income support and navigations services. But budget cuts have stymied both of these efforts.

The City of Seattle working with our school district, community colleges, foundations, business, labor and community groups need to own this problem. Our whole community needs to own it. Perhaps we should set goals for our city schools and colleges, identify best practices to get there and combine our funds and see if we can make progress.

Educational Attainment - Years of Post-Secondary Education

Portland economist Joe Cortright has done some interesting work with a new measure of metropolitan educational attainment known as years of post-secondary education (YPSE). This measure provides a broad measure of education that includes people who have received associate degrees and professional certifications not just bachelor's degrees or higher.

The YPSE is defined as the average number of years post-secondary education completed by persons aged 25 and older and is based on the annual American Community Survey.

Seattle/King County fares pretty well using this measure. The average YPSE is 2 years as compared to 1.9 in Portland or 1.58 in Phoenix and we rank 8th among metropolitan areas in the country.

The weakness of this measure as a benchmark for success is that for an in-migration city like Seattle, we may end up taking credit for the attractiveness of our environment rather than the achievement of our own schools.