Sheila – Page 93 – Sheila Kennedy

Another Day, Another Voucher Study…

Okay–I know it’s just one more time beating that horse (an animal quite probably dead by now…), but I can’t resist. Brookings has just issued yet another study confirming the educational downsides of voucher programs.

The study was prompted by the recent expansion of voucher programs and “education savings accounts,” (ESAs) which are functionally the same thing–the use of public money to allow parents to send their children to private schools. That expansion has occurred primarily in states that voted for Trump in 2020, which should be a clue that these programs are based on ideology; their proponents simply ignore that pesky inconvenient thing called evidence.

(The Brookings report has multiple links to the previous academic research on each of the following points; I’m not including them, but if you click through, you will be able to easily access them.)

This study confirms a number of the findings of previous research: for example, that after expansion of a voucher program or implementation of an ESA, pop-up schools immediately appear, many of which will close rather quickly, and that existing private schools raise their tuition.

The study notes that a decade of research has confirmed that vouchers reduce student academic achievement. Brookings cites studies from Louisiana and Indiana, among others, that found quite substantial declines in student test scores. (Indiana’s pathetic legislature simply ignored the fact that Indiana’s voucher program had demonstrably failed to perform as promised. In its recent session, the legislature made the program available to virtually all of Indiana’s schoolchildren, and is now promoting it heavily.)

Perhaps because the reality fails to match the rhetoric, exit rates from the private schools accepting vouchers are high; in Indiana, as in several other states, some 20% of students who use a voucher to enroll in a private school depart every year–and interestingly, their return to public schooling improves their academic performance.

The research also notes the high percentage of private schools that are religious, but fails to make a point that I consider pivotal: when students leave public educational institutions where–despite residential segregation–they are more likely to interact with children whose races, cultures and religions differ from their own than in the more racially and religiously segregated voucher schools, their “tribal” identities are strengthened. That lack of diversity not only hampers their later interactions in a diverse society, it fosters precisely the sorts of polarization that bedevil contemporary society.

A problem that was highlighted in the research was the lack of accountability of these private schools, both educational and fiscal. In Arizona, “educational” costs that have been reimbursed under their program have been, shall we say, questionable, and in North Carolina, schools have claimed payment for more vouchers than students actually used. (While this study didn’t mention the problem, others have noted that a lack of public reporting requirements makes it very difficult for parents to determine how well a given private school is really performing. Too often, they end up making a choice based upon surface impressions–or more frequently, PR and marketing.)

As the study concludes, recent expansions of these programs will test prior findings–one of which, interestingly, is that “the larger the program, the worse the results.”

What is so discouraging about the persistent Red state expansions of these voucher programs is that these legislatures utterly ignore credible research, and–rather than applying those millions of tax dollars to the improvement of public education–throw millions of dollars into programs that demonstrably do not improve academic outcomes.

When voucher programs were first introduced, they were promoted as a way to allow poor children to leave failing urban schools. Recent program expansions have given the lie to that original argument; virtually every child in Indiana (and elsewhere) now qualifies to use public money to attend private schools–very much including children who had never attended a public school, and whose parents had previously been paying private school tuition.

Perhaps some of the proponents of vouchers remain unaware of the mountains of evidence and truly believe the hype. But given the other research I’ve cited about the segregating effects of educational “choice,” you’ll forgive me if I am cynical.

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I Know Facts Don’t Matter…

Talk about “sucking all the oxygen out of the room…” The four indictments of Trump have consumed most of the media, masking what would otherwise be a greater emphasis on administration actions and policies, and overwhelming what ought to be applauded as the enormous success of “Bidenomics.”

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is one year old; it is central to “Bidenomics.” A recent Treasury Department analysis found that it has incentivized unusually strong business investment–investment Axios recently called a “tailwind for economic growth.”

Together with the bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the CHIPS and Science Act, the IRA has especially spurred investments in manufacturing and clean energy. According to Treasury officials, evidence shows that private investment has held up, even in the face of increases in interest rates. And the report also noted that most counties where IRA-related investments have been announced are areas where college graduation rate, employment and wages are lower. In other words, Republican, largely rural areas.

As Heather Cox Richardson noted in a recent daily Letter,

The IRA was the eventual form President Joe Biden’s initial “Build Back Better” plans took. It offered to lower Americans’ energy costs with a 30% tax credit for energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, or newer models of appliances; capped the cost of drugs at $2,000 per year for people on Medicare; and made healthcare premiums fall for certain Americans by expanding the Affordable Care Act.

By raising taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations and bringing the Internal Revenue Service back up to full strength so that it can crack down on tax cheating, as well as saving the government money by permitting it to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, the IRA was expected to raise $738 billion. That, plus about $891 billion from other sources, enabled the law to make the largest investment ever in addressing climate change while still bringing down the federal government’s annual deficit.

“This is a BFD,” former President Barack Obama tweeted a year ago.

It is a “BFD,” and it is extremely frustrating that reporting on its effects has been smothered by a combination of “it bleeds so it leads” reporting and the massive amounts of propaganda “flooding the zone” ala Bannon.

The law has driven so much investment in U.S. manufacturing that the CEO of U.S. Steel recently suggested renaming it the “Manufacturing Renaissance Act.” Manufacturers have been returning previously off-shored production to the U.S., bringing supply chains back to the U.S. And as Richardson emphasized,

These changes have meant new, well-paid manufacturing jobs that have been concentrated in Republican-dominated states and in historically disadvantaged communities.

The IRA has also been enormously consequential to the fight to tame climate change.

Scientists Alicia Zhao and Haewon McJeon, who recently published an article in Science, today wrote that the IRA “brings the US significantly closer to meeting its 2030 climate target [of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50–52% below 2005 levels], taking expected emissions from 25–31% below 2005 levels down to 33–40% below.”

Republican presidential candidates have—predictably–refused to credit the act with these results; Richardson quoted former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who called the IRA “a communist manifesto,” although, with their usual hypocrisy, “Republicans have been eager to take credit for IRA investments in their districts without mentioning either that they voted against the IRA or that they are still trying to repeal it.”

The Environmental Defense Fund recently issued a statement rebutting several of the Republican misrepresentations–okay, lies–about the IRA. The organization noted the difficulty of getting factual information out:

The truth takes about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as false stories do. Six. Times. Longer.

And this is from a study that is a few years old, before the global pandemic and the 2020 U.S. election — events that caused an explosion of lies online by Bad Actors.

A simple google search brings up dozens of reports from highly credible and nonpartisan sources, confirming the truly massive economic and environmental benefits triggered by the IRA, and the fact that those benefits are being felt in parts of the country that have previously been left behind.

Those reports won’t reach the millions of Americans glued to Faux News and its clones, or the other millions who have turned off the news because they no longer know what or who to believe–a situation that explains Biden’s low approval numbers.

My middle son said it best. In a conversation a while back, he said “Biden is the first President I’ve voted for who vastly exceeded my expectations.”

To quote Barack Obama, Biden’s Presidential performance has been a BFD. Too bad so few Americans understand that.

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Democrats Defeating Themselves

E.J. Dionne recently wrote about Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, whose re-opening of a collapsed highway in a mere twelve days made news. Dionne was (properly) impressed with Shapiro’s general approach to governing, and the article is interesting, but what leapt out to me was the following:

You’ve got to show up everywhere, and you’ve got to speak to everyone, and you’ve got to speak in plain language and in practical terms,” he told me in an interview last week in the final days of settling a tough state budget fight. He noted that in his 2022 campaign, “I went to counties the Democrats had written off a long time ago and spoke about workforce development and spoke about how we’re going to bring back the economy and talked about it in very tangible, practical ways.”

The emphasis in that paragraph is mine, because in states like Indiana, the biggest problem Democrats face is attitudinal–they’ve “written off” their chances before they even begin.

Here’s an example that still has me steaming–a discussion with my youngest son, a staunchly liberal Democrat who contributes generously to political campaigns. I told him I was enthusiastic about the US Senate candidacy of Marc Carmichael, and suggested he make a contribution. His response: he will send his money to candidates who “have a chance of winning.” He had written off Indiana as a lost cause.

My son isn’t the only presumably “savvy” political observer who begins with that defeatist attitude, and in my view, it is far and away the biggest barrier to Democratic victories in this state. It prevents otherwise intelligent observers from recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. (I have allowed him a rebuttal to my view, which you can read at the end of this post.)

Is Indiana a hard state for Democrats to win? Yes. Does this year offer unusual openings? Absolutely– especially in state-wide races where the GOP’s extreme gerrymandering is irrelevant. (By the way, the Republicans who drew those gerrymandered districts had a problem last time, because rural Indiana is emptying out–they were unable to add to their existing Red districts, and the margins in existing districts were narrower.)

Why do I see an opening for Democrats, especially in the Senate race?

It’s an open seat–no incumbency advantage.
Jim Banks will be the Republican nominee. Banks is a culture warrior far, far to the right of even conservative Republicans. His positions–he’s for permit-less carry and banning abortion and he’s a full-throated endorser of Donald Trump– are at odds with positions held by significant majorities of Hoosiers. His attacks on gay children have been ugly and mean-spirited, and his entire focus is on culture war. (He’s basically Indiana’s version of Marjorie Taylor Green.)
The Democrats have another excellent statewide candidate in Jennifer McCormick, whose gubernatorial campaign is likely to energize the state’s teachers and librarians.
Carmichael is politically knowledgable and an affable and engaging retail politician.
Trump–four indictments or no– is likely to be the Republicans’ Presidential nominee.
The abortion issue has energized women and Red state voters who otherwise don’t turn out–from Kansas to Kentucky to Ohio.

Does any of this guarantee victory? No, of course not.

Carmichael needs to raise enough money to get his message out; he needn’t match the resources that the Club for Growth and other far-Right PACs will give Banks. I think he is on his way to doing that–we’ll see when the next financial reports come out– but the biggest barrier he will face is the self-defeating conviction held by people who agree with him on the issues but believe that a Democratic victory in Indiana is beyond hope–a conviction that ignores the Democrats we’ve previously elected, and shrugs off the fact that the state voted for Obama in 2008.

That defeatist attitude permeates the state: in gerrymandered districts, all too often the party doesn’t even run a candidate. Political pundits routinely characterize campaigns by Democrats as “uphill.” Then we wonder why Democrats have problems with fundraising and turnout.

Democrats need to stop defeating themselves.

Son’s rebuttal:

First, mom, thanks for letting me respond within the body of your blog. Second, I agree with your core message that we Democrats cannot win if we don’t show up and get out the vote. Everyone should – and I will – vote! Where we differ is on our views of political reality, and where resources can be effectively deployed to maximize Democratic – and Democracy’s – chances of success.

You characterize my attitude as “defeatist” and as the biggest barrier to Democratic victories. Respectfully, the barriers to Democratic victories in Indiana – a poorly-educated electorate, lack of diversity in this State, a fractured media that prevents “our” messages from reaching those who might otherwise agree with us – are more complex and mountainous than my attitude (and that of others like me) can overcome in a single election cycle.

As you note, I DO give to political candidacies I see as viable, even if “underdogs.” In the last election, I gave money to Democratic Senate candidates in Wisconsin, Georgia, and a few others with “close” but winnable races. I also donated to organizations that “get out the vote.” Not all of these candidates won, but their base-line numbers were within a few percentage points, not more than 10 points, below their opponents. With due respect to Marc Carmichael, whom I don’t know but have heard is a great guy, notwithstanding how truly despicable Jim Banks is, I think there is only ONE Democratic candidate with a chance to win the upcoming U.S. Senate race here – Pete Buttigieg – and (sadly) I don’t see him coming back to run that race. (By the way, Mayor Pete, if you do come back to run, I will “max out” to your campaign!)

Unfortunately, in the absence of a high-profile, once-in-a-generation candidate like Pete, I see Democrats’ chances in Indiana through the lens of the Diego Morales/Destiny Wells race for Secretary of State in 2020. The Republican Morales, like Jim Banks, was a despicable, pathetic character: in the months leading up to the 2020 election, Morales – a Trumper and election-denier – was credibly accused of sexual assault, and it was reported that he had been “disciplined” and fired from the very office he was seeking, and had previously committed voter fraud by voting in a county where he lacked residency! The Democratic candidate, Wells, was well-regarded and had generally positive press. Notwithstanding, Morales won the race by more than 10 points. Winning 54% of the vote, he only slightly underperformed Governor Holcomb’s 56% and Trump’s 57%. (While I think Trump being the nominee helps Dems in many places, there’s no evidence yet that it does anything but help Republicans in Indiana. In other words, the Republican “baseline” advantage in Indiana requires more than a “can do” attitude to overcome. It requires a Mayor Pete-level candidacy.) And as for Governor Shapiro’s win in Pennsylvania, the political baseline there (according to Pew Research) is 46% Democrat/39% Republican, while the same source reports the political baselines here are 37% Dem/42% Republican (with 20% no-lean).

Now, I know you see the politics of abortion altering the political landscape (because moderate Republicans join us on this issue). And it is true – to a point. Where abortion is “on the ballot,” the side favoring abortion rights does win (see Ohio, Kansas, and even the State Supreme Court election in Wisconsin). But the data on how General Elections go, when abortion is just one of many issues, doesn’t (yet) tell the same story. And while Dems everywhere need to make it as central an issue as possible, I still see donations to statewide candidates in Indiana akin to buying a lottery ticket – if you don’t play, you can’t win, but the odds are pretty much the same for now (unfortunately).

Finally, I DO truly hope you are right and I am wrong! I would love nothing more than to see Indiana Democrats win the Governorship and the U.S. Senate race here – and while I will vote, I am still going to direct my limited resources to political candidacies which I view as more “winnable,” because we risk losing the entire country, not just Indiana, if Trump and his ilk win otherwise close races elsewhere.

Okay, readers–what say you about this argument?

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Hamilton County And An Age-Old Story…

Back in 1995, when I was still at Indiana’s ACLU, I wrote a column about a “recurring fantasy” of mine, which I described as follows: a caveman discovers that he can produce drawings of the animals he hunts on the walls of his cave. Excited by the possibilities of his art, energized by the creative act, he produces a drawing–only to have it rubbed angrily off the cave wall by someone in his tribe who declares that the depiction of animal genitalia is indecent.

The first artist encounters the first censor, and a dynamic is born that is with us still!

Here in Indiana, there has been a takeover of the Hamilton County library board by some current descendants of my imagined angry tribesman. (Hamilton County is one of the “doughnut counties” surrounding Indianapolis, which occupies all of Marion County.)The new board immediately moved to “protect” children by requiring the library staff to review all of the books available to teenagers in the Young Adult section (at an estimated cost to the taxpayers of $300,000 ). Reports are that, out of the 1,859 physical books examined thus far, 1,385 have been moved from the Young Adult section to the Adult or General section.

One of the book moved was John Green’s best-selling “The Fault in Our Stars,” and Green sent–and publicized– an appropriately outraged message to the Board, triggering a national outcry, and a local petition to “Stop Censorship at Hamilton East Public Library.” (When I last looked, that petition had garnered some 3500 signatures.) As I write this, the turmoil has resulted in the (welcome) replacement of the library board’s president, a strong supporter of “protecting” children from reading about things they can easily access on the internet and elsewhere.

The insistence that this exercise has been in furtherance of “parental rights” is equally ridiculous; a genuine concern for parental rights would respect the rights of all parents to determine what materials their children can access–not the right of some parents to determine what everyone else’s children can read.

No one said these people are smart. Just rabid.

I confess that I have never been able to understand the frantic need of so many of our fellow-citizens to control the habits and behaviors of the rest of us–habits and behaviors that do not affect them.

Nat Hentoff once wrote that the human animal’s urge to censor is stronger than its sex drive. In my days with the ACLU, I dealt regularly with folks who were absolutely convinced that they knew better than you and me what books we should read, what art we should see, and what musical lyrics the government should allow us to hear.

For those of us who believe that ideas matter, that literature and art are intensely important activities through which humans explore ideas, censorship poses a threat to our most important values. The government that can determine which ideas are worthy of consideration– and/or the age at which we should be allowed to consider them– is a government with power over the most important of all human functions–the power of the intellect.

In my long-ago fantasy, the caveman and his critic take their respective arguments to the leader of the cave clan. The censor insists that he and his friends find the drawing indecent, and argues that allowing smut in the cave will debauch the children and undermine the clan’s community standards. Another member argues the case for the artist: a society unwilling to consider all ideas will never leave the caves, will never reach the stars. A society willing to be ruled by the fears of the many will be deprived of the genius of the few.

In my dream, the leader considers the arguments and rules in favor of freedom of artistic expression. Civil liberties are born.

That, of course, was my fantasy. It remains to be seen whether civil liberties–not to mention common sense– will prevail in Hamilton County….Or, for that matter, elsewhere in Indiana.

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A Cost/Benefit Analysis

Freedom of the press isn’t just implied in the First Amendment’s Free Speech clause, although that clause clearly extends to the media. According to historians, the country’s founders wanted to explicitly protect press information-gathering, because democratic processes depend on an informed electorate.

That understanding–that constitutional principle–is what makes a police raid on a Kansas newspaper so appalling. (When a reader first alerted me to this, I was certain there had to be more to the story–that the initial reports must have been wrong. I was the one who was wrong.)

As NPR has reported:

The small-town Kansas newspaper raided by police officers on Friday had been looking into allegations of misconduct against the local chief just months ago, according to the paper’s publisher, raising further concerns about the law enforcement officers’ motives.

The Marion, Kansas police department confiscated computers, cell phones and a range of other reporting materials from the office of the Marion County Record — the sole local paper in a small city of about 2,000 residents. Officers spent hours in the newsroom. It also seized material from one of its journalist’s homes. Eric Meyer, the publisher and co-owner of the newspaper, said his 98-year-old mother passed away the day after police raided her house, where Meyer was staying at the time. He said he believes the stress from the raid contributed to her death.

The background to the raid is particularly telling: the Record had conducted “routine background checks” just before police chief Gideon Cody took office. That “routine check” was evidently informed by anonymous tips the paper received after it ran a story about his candidacy for the police chief position.

Cody was sworn in as Chief in June, after retiring from the Kansas City Police Department in late April. Meyer was quoted as saying that “It was alarming, to say the least, the number of people who came forward, and some of the allegations they made were fairly serious. We were simply looking into the question.”

When a reporter asked Cody to comment on the allegations, Cody threatened to sue the paper, and the department stopped providing routine information to the newspaper. And then,

County magistrate judge Laura Viar signed a search warrant on Friday morning, authorizing the Marion police department to raid the Record. The warrant cites suspected “identity theft” of a local restaurant owner as the reason for the raid.

On Friday, just after the raid, the Record requested access to the probable cause affidavit — the document that would outline why the judge saw reason to authorize the raid — from the Marion County District Court.

But the court’s written response, reviewed by NPR, indicates that document may not exist.

There’s more, and it will undoubtedly all come out as other media outlets investigate the threat posed to press freedom by this episode. But what is especially troubling is that this bit of official thuggery comes at a time when local newspapers are disappearing.

As an article in the Atlantic noted, local newspapers don’t just serve democracy–they also save tax dollars. The article cited a story in the Salt Lake Tribune, revealing that San Juan County, Utah, had paid a single law firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees. The story also reported that the firm had overcharged the county, the poorest in the state, by $109,500. Embarrassed, the firm paid the money back.

That one story retrieved for taxpayers a sum that was triple the reporter’s annual salary. As the author of the article noted, funding local news would more than pay for itself.

In addition to providing citizens with the information needed to make democracy work, in addition to the tax dollars saved when government is under the eye of media watchdogs, local newspaper reports feed community , especially in rural areas. A recent article from the Washington Post focused on that function.

At a time when hooligans have hijacked the national discourse with disinformation and paranoia, the Rappahannock News operates in a calmer place where the slow rhythms of rural life are newsworthy — and where, regardless of political views, its readers are unified by a powerful sense of community…

Similar newspapers once bound together communities everywhere. A century ago, The Post, too, carried items on the humdrum comings and goings of local residents. Though the news became impersonal in big cities, community papers continued to be at the core of rural and small-town America.“

As a Local News Initiative official puts it, local news organizations are the glue that hold the community together. When there’s a void of local news, people revert to the blue and red echo chambers and national news sources that confirm their own belief sets, and it aggravates partisanship.”

That Kansas sheriff obviously doesn’t care.

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