Voucher suit might trigger end of desegregation rationale

Gov. Bobby Jindal might not be exactly right on why the federal government wishes to throw up an artificial impediment to derail Louisiana’s scholarship voucher program, but he and opponents by keeping the pressure on against might make the suit’s supporters think twice about pursuing the matter.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice sued to have the state submit for review consequences of the program’s operation to federal courts in schools districts under desegregation orders to obtain clearance before implementation of these outcomes in them. The voucher program, which allows students in poor-to-failing schools the ability to have the state pay for their attendance at another qualifying public or private school, can have the effect of marginally increasing majority-race proportions at schools under orders to reduce the incidence of school populations that had heavy compositions of students of one race. As long as this segregation is not solely created by voluntary living patterns, in these districts with a history of intentional segregation under court orders would have to have court review of any outcomes of voluntary, individual decisions made where students desire to leave a public school courtesy of the program.

While procedurally this seems neutral, in reality it invites judicial mischief. Based upon criteria spelled out in the suit, DOJ argues even the most minute adjustments can be interpreted as retrogression in affirmative district action to bring as much racial diversity to schools as possible. There’s no reason a federal judge can’t declare such minutiae as critical and violating orders even as, Jindal and others have pointed out, the impact would be likely to improve educational delivery to minority race children.

Nonsmokers' rights preferred over smokers' choices

Alexandria started it, Ouachita Parish and its major cities may extend it, and that would leave Shreveport/Bossier as the last redoubt of permitted indoor smoking in north Louisiana.

The Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco-Free Living requested the cities of Monroe and West Monroe and the Ouachita Parish Police Jury to consider an ordinance that would ban entirely indoor smoking in places of public commerce, going beyond state law that does not ban it in establishments that primarily act as bars and in gambling locations. Apparently, private lodgings would not be covered. Monroe’s City Council will take up such an ordinance next week.

Often, the narrative surrounding the issue of where smoking should be permitted gets framed in terms of smokers having rights to light up, or in other to engage in a certain kind of behavior. Often ignored is the liberty of others not to have fumes from tobacco intrude upon their breathing. Opponents of these bans say the resolution is to let the market decide, for if there’s enough demand for smoke-free watering holes (places where the majority of sales are food already have smoking indoors banned) or bingo halls, they will be supplied.

Rainy day resolution might prompt meaningful cuts

If the Revenue Estimating Conference and Louisiana budget prognosticators are right, it looks like the state better start budgeting for the next couple of fiscal years on increases less than a rise in the cost of living, courtesy of a little-noticed provision in this past legislative session’s “funds sweep” bill, which might finally provide the impetus for historic major cutbacks heretofore absent in state budgeting.

For fiscal year 2010, the state took a dip out of the Budget Stabilization Fund, better known as the “rainy day fund,” to shore up the budget for that year. The problem was, under the BSF’s rules, it essentially required repayment during that fiscal year. That inconvenience was worked out by statute, essentially resetting the rules going forward. The unusual situation was that with sufficiently high mineral revenues that would force money into the BSF when it was below its cap of four percent of total most recent past state revenues, even as there was a declining state revenue picture, so the reset suspended repayment under those conditions.

But the problem with that was statute cannot override the Constitution, and some spoilsports sued to reinforce that reality. Meanwhile, lawmakers and Gov. Bobby Jindal hoped in 2011 to amend the Constitution to erase the conflict. That would have opened up the BSF to more trivial uses, and voters wisely rejected that. A court eventually initially sided with the statute, prompting the state to take another helping out of the BSF for FY 2013. But policy-makers realized that judgment was unlikely to survive informed judicial scrutiny, so the next year, this past spring, into Act 420 went language undoing the fix for the beginning of FY 2016.

Avoid derailing of coming LA long term care reform

Gov. Bobby Jindal apparently saved the best for last in his revamping of health care delivery for the indigent and developmentally disabled in the Louisiana, as his administration is poised to make changes to the provision of long term care in the state that will provoke controversy among a privileged class.

Recently, the Department of Health and Hospitals announced the formation of a group to advise in this area of policy, with a planned implementation date in 2015. Currently, the state pays $2.4 billion a year, or about a tenth of its budget, for long term care to about 70,000 individuals, or an average cost of almost $35,000 a year. The concept is to move administration of these services to a managed care concept that would better match needs to services, which probably would save taxpayers money as well, but with a primary goal of expanding access.

If there is one area of health policy that just begs for increased coordination, this is it. Basically, the elderly indigent qualify to have the state pay for their care, and the disabled also may receive services with a higher ceiling on assets and income to qualify. Until about 15 years ago, this garnered a single state response: chuck them in a nursing home and reimburse these providers day after day.

Jindal serves state by ushering out inept board members

Cluelessness does not qualify one to sit on an important state board, so Gov. Bobby Jindal does Louisiana a service by refusing to reappoint a pair of hapless members of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East.

Its current President Tim Doody and Vice President John Barry will not be reappointed by Jindal. Both supported (even as Doody, an accountant, abstained on the formal vote he said because the matter might involve his law firm) a lawsuit filed by the SLPAE in order to milk potentially billions of dollars from companies alleged to have violated agreements and knowingly caused environmental destruction that may have eroded the state’s coastline. Their terms expired, the governor must appoint individuals to serve from choices provided by professional and political groups, and the Jindal Administration has said even if these guys are recommended as part of that, he will pass them over.

That the pair was instrumental in bringing about the suit is more than enough reason to let their service lapse, as it is of questionable legality and its chances of success are dubious, but perhaps most consequentially is an attempt to arrogate state policy-making power to a local/regional subdivision of the state. But in remarks made by Barry since then and most recently in response to his non-reappointment, he shows he has no understanding about how public policy gets made and its consequences – hardly qualifications for service on it in the first place.

False alarm obscures hospital privatization savings

A false alarm should not detract from the fact that, to this point, privatization efforts of Louisiana’s charity hospital system are pulling in more revenue than predicted, although vigilance will be required to ensure the realized savings do not get overcommitted and prematurely in years to come.

Some unnecessary anxiety came from one media source when it breathlessly reported from an item in an in-house publication put out quarterly by the Legislative Fiscal Office, which is attached to the Legislature to analyze the fiscal impact of legislation. The LFO claimed that existing cooperative endeavor agreements signed with the operators of state hospitals were supposed to generate over $140 million for the state, but predicted only $101 million or so would materialized, leaving the actual intake $38.75 million short. This money was assigned to pay for several budgetary items out of a pool where 70 percent would go to higher education.

But the LFO report was dated and not privy to inside information, leaving an erroneous impression. First, it was not even sure about its figures because it printed that one CEA remained unresolved, that for Huey P. Long Medical Center in Pineville. But last week those details, apparently overlooked by LFO staff or happened too late to include in the online PDF version, were finalized, in that the takeover there would not occur until the beginning of FY 2015. Thus, the LFO printed estimated figure was “final.”

Subterfuge reduced by requiring teacher knowledge exams

For months we heard from union lackeys, their politician bootlickers, fellow-travelling ideologues, and substandard teachers about how the new COMPASS evaluation system for public school teachers in Louisiana was so deficient in erring, they asserted, about true teacher quality. They were right – for the wrong reason.

The party line from this crew was that the new system, which would base half of scoring on measured student learning progress and the other half on subjective evaluations similar to the past, would make good teachers appear substandard. Of course, we never heard complaints from these fiddlers that as the state continued to rank among the lowest in student achievement, and lower than many with similar demographic characteristics, about the fact that under the old completely subjective system that only one percent of all teachers were rated poorly enough to be subject to dismissal for incompetence and that only a little over two percent get fired for that reason.

Now the results are out and, contrary to all the hyperbole, the system computed that only four percent of teachers were judged “ineffective” and thus could be set up for dismissal in the next two years, while only eight percent fell into the category suggesting remediation before things got worse. That means more than seven-eighths of all teachers were found at least adequate, despite the state’s continued below-average showing – hardly the stuff of hyperventilating claims of a “war on public education.”

End govt handout to organization overseeing hospitals

After sucking up tens of millions of dollars in public funds over nearly two decades,  Shreveport’s Biomedical Research Foundation continues to hang on to taxpayers’ udders even as its new purpose transforms the organization away from its original that has not proven cost-effective for the citizenry.

An ordinance by Caddo Commissioner Ken Epperson that would have stripped public funding of the organization failed last week, falling four votes short of passage. By Oct. 1, the  BRF becomes the administrator of both the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center – Shreveport and E.A. Conway Medical Center in Monroe, including their clinics. The state is in the transition of finding non-government operators for all but one of its state-owned charity hospitals and while the others have been recommended to be managed by hospitals, the only entity that currently does not deliver in-patient health care tapped to take over management of a state facility is the BRF, which never has run any hospitals.

Its experience lies elsewhere. From its beginning, the 501(c)(3) tax entity was envisioned as instrument to provide facilities to small concerns in the area of biomedicine, where they could develop innovative products. Since then, it has expanded its purview to trying to attract any technology-related tenant to its portfolio of facilities worth $53 million and also has gotten into the providing of venture capital.

Obama reforms would not improve LA higher education

As if Louisiana higher education isn’t already going through significant changes, along comes the idea by Pres. Barack Obama to dole out federal dollars to schools on the basis of presumed accountability measures that would impact further the state’s higher education delivery. The problem is these changes don’t reform higher education so much as they empower bigger government, and miss the point of true, beneficial change.

Obama would want to tie federal aid to metrics such as how many students from disadvantaged backgrounds are served, average tuition, scholarships and loan debt, and graduation and employment outcomes. That would mean the lower the tuition, the more scholarship and grant monies exist, the higher the proportion of minority and poor students, the higher the graduation rate, and the higher post-graduation salaries are, the more money they would get, primarily through the federal loans students could get to attend that school. Other elements he supports would be creating a national scorecard of schools to publicize records, incentives to create competency-based and accelerated learning, and to cap loan paybacks to a percentage of income.

In some ways, the basic strategy of accountability mirrors what has been going on in Louisiana over the past few years, where state assistance is tied to its public universities and colleges abilities’ to reach performance targets. As such, it suffers from the same drawback that minimizes the effectiveness of this reform: gamesmanship by schools in setting reachable targets and pressure on them to lower standards in order to reach targets such as graduation and retention rates.

Blanco reminds of her unsuitability as governor

It’s been six years, so in case anybody needed a reminder of how unsuited former Gov. Kathleen Blanco was for that job, they got it courtesy of her remarks concerning the jackpot justice lawsuit filed by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority – East.

The suit, dubious both as to whether it was filed legally and whether there is any legal merit to it, wants to extract from about a hundred companies potentially billions of dollars in purported tort damages in order to fill the coffers of the agency to pursue an ambitious agenda decided solely by itself, which far exceeds its statutory resources. All of Gov. Bobby Jindal, apparently legislative majorities, and a number of other state and local agencies have expressed opposition to the suit on the basis of its merits and in how it subverts statewide coastal restoration and protection policy.

Yet some observers have praised its action, seemingly unperturbed that an agency with little accountability is trying to stretch its power to exercise that in ways never intended by the legislative majorities and in all likelihood Blanco herself when it was drafted into law seven years ago. Its members are selected by the governor for fixed terms from nominations provided by professional and political interests that may be removed only through impeachment, serving with confirmation of the Senate.