Jindal to have battle over bold higher education policy

After some tinkering at the margins, Gov. Bobby Jindal seems to be stepping up with ways to stabilize funding for higher education in Louisiana with announcements of technocratic and revolutionary policy initiatives.

On the surface, his support of a constitutional amendment that would reshape the Millennium Trust Fund would seem to be more a technical adjustment than anything else yet its implication resonate more broadly. Established in the aftermath of the famous mid-1990s extortion by state governments of money from tobacco companies, which allegedly was their contribution to pay for health problems of state residents for which the states were paying, some of that settlement, earnings from it, and subsequent deposits into the MTF actually goes to pay for health care by the state, but two-thirds goes to educational purposes, half of that to pay for the Taylor Opportunity Program for Scholars.

Instead of money going into the fund or a third of investment earnings going to support TOPS, the MTF would be capped by this amendment at $1.38 billion and anything over that, by deposit (from the settlement, three-quarters of the annuity payment) or investment, would flow directly to TOPS instead of diversion into it and splitting it up there. Investment earnings presently pay for $15 million of the $134 million current cost of the program; with more money directed to TOPS, that would rise to $58 million upon enactment and by 2018 would increase further up to $128 million by 2030 (and then the amount would be changed in unknown ways as the securitized portion of the settlement, three-fifth, lapses under current arrangements).

Legislature can help court in preserving LA Constitution

That the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has accepted a case asking Louisiana to recognize a same-sex marriage for records purposes indicates the constitutionally correct solution may be on its way – to which state policy-makers should give an assist.

The case of Adar v. Smith was decided in late 2008 and then affirmed by a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, to which the state appealed. It concerns two males who were married under New York law adopting a child born in Louisiana and their desire to have both names placed on the child’s birth certificate as “parents.” But Louisiana law only allows adoptions to occur by a married couple, defined in the state Constitution as between one man and one woman, or a single individual, while the law regarding certificate issuance states that the adoptive parent or parents can have their name placed upon it (in this instance the actual birth parents, if known, are kept under seal). Because Louisiana states that by request the parents’ names be placed upon the document but that law does not prohibit two or more same-sex parents from being listed, despite the other statute and Constitution, the lower court ruled deference must be given to the “full faith and credit” clause of the U.S. Constitution to have both names put on it.

Wisely, Louisiana appealed because to allow this interpretation to stand attacks the state’s Constitution and erodes the concept of state general police powers (i.e., to regulate the health, safety and morals of the public) in the U.S. Constitution. That the Fifth Circuit is willing to examine it demonstrates a number of its judges question the lower court ruling. That ruling relied heavily on a prior precedent from the Tenth Circuit, but which the previous court admitted did not exactly fit the facts of this case. In essence, the ruling as it exists makes one state’s law take precedence over another state’s constitution, even if each state is supposed to be able to exercise its own police powers. 

Resistance to LA Medicaid reform to test Jindal resolve

By initial reactions, Louisiana will have to fight tooth-and-nail to bring efficiency to its bloated indigent children’s health care system – in the process demonstrating the utility of state reforms being pushed by the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration.

As previously noted, in order to continue a program dealing with coordinating pediatric care under Medicaid the state has gone from a flat $3/patient/month fee to one ranging from $1.50 to $3.75, depending upon how well the providers meet four performance benchmarks designed to ensure efficiency in the system, including how good of a job doctors are doing with their patients. This is a big deal, as the vast majority of Medicaid service recipients are children.

Under the previous system, if they wanted to, pediatric groups had to make next to no effort for efficiency sake in order to collect the funds. Even regardless of how much effort they put into care, there was no link between their efforts and outcomes. It was not much better than the previous system where clients showed up at a doctor’s office, emergency room, or charity hospital and were treated, with reimbursements to providers paid with few or no questions asked.

Taxpayers, Jindal win with prison privatization, sales

Taxpayer resources and Gov. Bobby Jindal’s political fortunes both receive a boost if Louisiana would just follow its own people’s advice regarding correctional policy.

As the state stares down an upcoming year of severe budget difficulty, among other things Jindal has suggested the sale of prisons, with his administration specifically citing the Allen and Winn Correctional Centers, in order to raise money, $64 million it predicts in these two cases. Consequently, two separate but related criticisms have emerged of the idea. One, among others voiced by Treasurer John Kennedy, is that an asset sale does not provide a long-term solution to budgetary pressures, with the implication that the state would have to find access to a similar kind of asset in the future. The other, articulated by state Sen. John Alario among others, is that without ownership of the asset the state may have insufficient control over its use to implement state policy without potentially higher costs than if owned.

These concerns reflect some truth. If Louisiana sold the prisons and found real need to house prisoners, in order to bid for services to do so it might end up paying more in contract costs than it does now through the alternative strategies of owning and operating its own or finding a lower-cost operator of sufficient quality (both Allen and Winn are owned by the state but have operations contracted out). Yet combining the privatization strategy with more innovative correctional techniques can moot these concerns.

Obama panel performs snow job on Jones Act fallout

Although the many ideologically-driven flaws of the final report of Pres. Barack Obama’s National Oil Spill Commission have been thoroughly covered, another attempt in the report to wipe egg off the Administration’s face concerns the role the Merchant Marine (Jones) Act of 1920 has received less attention, even as it confirms the political nature of the report.

The Jones Act prevents foreign vessels, such as skimmers that during the time the well remained uncapped were desperately needed, from operating out of U.S. ports (instead of in transshipment with a foreign port as a destination), in order to placate U.S. maritime unions. Foreign skimmers could find a way around the law by coming and going from the same U.S. port and skimming more than three miles offshore, but some skimming needed to be done where oil was hitting shore within three miles of the shoreline. At the time, the Obama Administration denied any requests had been made for the only other way around it, a waiver, even though one company had publicly revealed it had made such a request. Others foreign governments at the time reported offers of help that due to the Act were rebuffed, and one even engaged in subterfuge to get around the Act.

As now reported that wasn’t the only dishonesty coming from the Administration. It turns out that in fact, despite denials at the time, a number of waivers appear to have been ended up getting granted, perhaps then not admitted to save embarrassment from the implications of the Act. The word “appear” above is not accident; that’s exactly the verb used on pp. 142-43 on the report. The entirety of the report’s discussion deserves display, as it is so brief:

Foreign companies and countries also offered assistance in the form of response equipment and vessels. The Coast Guard and National Incident Command accepted some of these offers and rejected others.⁹⁸ News reports and politicians alleged that the federal government turned away foreign offers of assistance because of the Jones Act, a law preventing foreign vessels from participating in trade between U.S. ports.⁹⁹ While decisionmakers did decline to purchase some foreign equipment for operational reasons—for example, Dutch vessels that would have taken weeks to outfit and sail to the region, and a Taiwanese super-skimmer that was expensive and highly inefficient in the Gulf—they did not reject foreign ships because of Jones Act restrictions.¹⁰⁰ These restrictions did not even come into play for the vast majority of vessels operating at the wellhead, because the Act does not block foreign vessels from loading and then unloading oil more than three miles off the coast.¹⁰¹ When the Act did apply, the National Incident Commander appears to have granted waivers and exemptions when requested.¹⁰²

The footnotes above all cite as sources the National Incident Commander, Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, other subordinates of his, media releases from the Departments of State and Homeland Security and the White House, or media stories hewing to this viewpoint – in other words, featuring no real independent sources with inside knowledge of the events, and certainly no testimony or documents from foreign governments who publicly announced they had tried to offer assistance. The final footnote attached to where “appears” appears in the text relies upon “Non-public Coast Guard documents, June 29, 2010, June 30, 2010, and July 9, 2010.”

In other words, the Commission seemed satisfied with taking the word of just one side of the argument – the side that had created the Commission and selected its members – despite this wealth of information suggesting a plausible, if not absolutely convincing, alternative history. As such, that the report included what it did only confirms the general overall untrustworthiness of it and as a snow job outrivals recently blizzards that have struck the country.

Lack of political will crippling best LA budget solutions

Smoke signals emanating from important decision-makers concerning Louisiana’s 2011-12 budget suggest competing views on its formation, and that some degree of synthesis will end on shaping the plan.

At a panel set up by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, member of the Senate Finance Committee state Sen. Jack Donahue argued that the state needed more aggressively to pursue cost-cutting recommendations made by a commission he headed, which would include constitutional and statutory changes to add flexibility to state spending choices. As it stood, a forecast deficit of $1.6 billion (more guidance to be provided on that later today) would have to be removed from a pool of $2.6 billion because of the hundreds of dedicated funds existing in the state. Almost by default, this strategy removes rationality and prioritization as a goal from budgeting decisions.

However, it seems little enthusiasm exists for Donahue’s call to increase ability to plan by importance of function, at least in time for the upcoming budget. Because constitutional amending would have to occur, necessitating a vote of the people, these could make their way to the people in time to affect this budget cycle only by dealing with them in a special session. While one is on the way to deal with redistricting, no hint has emerged this other issue will come up during that.

LA higher education must plan mergers, closures now

Perhaps advocates of more efficiency in Louisiana higher education should take the recent retreat of Southern University Baton Rouge from raising admissions standards as a slap in the face. Then again, the new statewide 2012 admissions standards alone threaten creating greater system inefficiencies that must be addressed.

SUBR had plans to raise the average American College Test score to 22 by 2012 and increase its minimum grade point average in high school coursework from 2.0/4.0 to 2.5. This would have been on top the elevated state requirements that essentially changed the current standards that, relative to SUBR, mean students will have to have at least a 2.0 (they don’t have to now), that this be on core courses, and creates a minimum ACT subscore of 18 on English and 19 on math (by 2014 with no minimum required now). Instead, SUBR has decided to indefinitely postpone implementation of this.

Little wonder, since even the incoming state standards promise to trigger an alarming drop in enrollment when they go into effect. While the voluminous reporting of Louisiana higher education includes many things, one thing not regularly reported is average ACT scores for schools. But percentage of students on the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students gives a decent proxy of how many students may be denied admittance by 2014, as one of its requirements is a minimum ACT of 20 and core GPA of 2.5. This information also is not made directly available by the Board of Regents but can be found in their TOPS reports.

LA officials unwisely disregard looming pension crisis

As much deserved attention has gone to the budgetary difficulties Louisiana faces in fiscal year 2011-12, undeservedly pushed out of focus has been the ticking time bomb known as Louisiana’s unfunded accrued liability (UAL) for its pensions to state workers. State politicians and retirement systems officials don’t want people to think it’s a problem, but pesky watchdogs keep trying to counter that illusion.

The latest comes from an article in National Affairs that looks at the postures of all states on this matter and finds most of them having at least some problems (it also includes an analysis of expected health care-related forecast expenditures as well). Louisiana is ranked as having the tenth worst situation in per capita terms at a total between pensions and health care of around $24 billion or $6,000 per capita.

This comes on the heels of a report issued last year, again reviewing the sorry state of pension funding among states and which identified Louisiana as the sixth worst in fiscal shape, in that, at current rates, it would run out of money by 2020 and then present a bill for $4.3 billion or 27 percent of projected state revenues the next year (using a forecast of 8 percent return for and 3 percent revenue growth into the systems).

TX shows way for desirable LA higher education changes

As debate continues in Louisiana over how to make higher education deliver more efficiently in order to reduce budgetary pressures, Texas forges ahead with ideas with which Louisiana needs to take a good, long look.

Two approaches nationally drive the call for reform in higher education resource allocation, the linking of university performance to student outcome and greater transparency. Louisiana has more aggressively entertained the former with the implementation of the GRAD Act, but has not really engaged in the latter.

Not like Texas, and in particular Texas A&M University. While Louisiana State University Baton Rouge might have the defeated the Aggies in the Cotton Bowl, A&M puts the Tiger administrators to shame with its willingness not just to put some financial figures in the public domain, but for giving them some context and to use them in management decisions. For example, while in Louisiana it’s possible for the public to get access to public college faculty members’ salaries, in Texas schools must post online, in an easily-accessible way the budget of each academic department, the curriculum vitae of each instructor, full descriptions and reading lists for each course and student evaluations of each faculty member – and A&M has taken the further step of computing cost-benefit analyses for each faculty member in order to reward high performers with bonuses.

A&M’s pioneering effort wasn’t without problems. Originally, it also published salaries and cost per student for individual faculty members but the effort was rife with errors and provided inadequate context – for example, while by the numbers somebody pulling six figures who taught few students may have seemed far less efficient than another who taught a thousand at a much lower salary, the latter may have little chance to teach as effectively if given very large classes. As a result, A&M eventually pulled the report from public view.

Still, it was a step in the right direction and certainly the idea to use the data privately to reward productivity is solid. As always, the devil is in the details in terms of the definition of “productivity.” Using the above example, the likely reason one faculty member makes much more than another is a record of voluminous research (usually defined as number of publications and papers presented, with some subjective analysis of their quality factored in). And while research production is good for teaching ability because it further informs an instructor, often there is little correlation between teaching ability and research production, if in fact this is not a negative relationship. Further, courses offered may reflect more arcane research interests than in necessary offerings in a discipline. Yet this archetype reaps the highest rewards in academia, the exact opposite of the primary purpose for its existence: where the best teachers (meaning those whose students learn the most and the most useful information in a fashion that sharpens their critical thinking skills) should be expected to teach more students and receive the highest salaries.

As such, to some degree Louisiana should emulate Texas and A&M. Thus, even though it’ll be all busy dealing with redistricting and budgeting this spring, the Legislature would be wise to pass legislation that:

· Requires putting online (within three links of the home page is the Texas standard) the budget of each academic department, the curriculum vitae of each instructor, the salary of each instructor, the number of students taught by each in the previous year, the average salary cost (including fringe benefits) per student for each, the average grade point average for each class taught by each in the previous year, full descriptions and reading lists for each course from the previous year, and student evaluations of each faculty member from the previous year (with an explanation of the methods/instruments involved)

· Mandates each department require an assessment of its graduates of its majors offered, outline how that assessment is conducted, produce the aggregate scores of the assessments, compute the number of graduates in each major, and publish these previous years data online as well

· Put online, for the previous year, overall university profiles of faculty salaries, by mean and mean per quartile, numbers of tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, and adjunct faculty, list all administrative and staff positions with brief job descriptions and their salaries, the budget of each non-academic department, and ratio figures of administrative/staff costs to faculty costs, and ratio of the number of staff/administrators to full-time faculty equivalents

Not only would this produce information that can be used for innovative productivity enhancement plans as A&M is attempting and assist in budgeting and strategic planning, it also would increase transparency so students and their families can weigh the deployment of their (and maybe taxpayer) dollars in higher education decisions. As Louisiana’s public continues to become more skeptical about the utility of higher education spending in the state, these changes can restore its confidence in this area and lead to more efficient allocation of resources.

Informed consensus predicts demise of Third District

Maybe Gov. Bobby Jindal isn’t going to interject himself into the redistricting process, but myself and several other Louisiana political scientists – all of whom who have studied and/or participated in the process – were willing to when we were part of a panel devoted to the topic at the Southern Political Science Association meeting in New Orleans last Friday.

Speculation about the placement of the state’s Congressional districts, with their necessity of paring from seven to six due to population loss, we considered to some degree. We concluded the matter mostly open-and-shut that today’s Third District, running from Acadian parishes on the west in a swath curling all the way across to the most southerly and easterly parts of the state, was a goner, its spoils divided among several existing districts. Several reasons suggested this:

· It will produce five districts favorable to (with four absolutely safe for) Republicans and one to (and safe absent scandal for) a black Democrat, an important consideration where roughly three-quarters of each legislative chamber is composed of Republicans and black Democrats, with a governor from the GOP

· The population distribution by race in the state makes it about impossible to draw any more than one minority/majority district, but the requirement that at least one majority/minority district get drawn makes New Orleans the epicenter of that district, menaing to increase in size to get its additional population it only can move south or west – and west, as well as the Northshore, are constrained by the necessity of drawing a separate district grabbing at least part of Jefferson Parish, boxed in as this (currently the First District) is by geography (Mississippi to the north and east)

· The Third District’s representative of days-old tenure, Jeff Landry, has no seniority compared to all other majority/majority district holders nor any time in elective office – important because the more senior members have built up contacts among state legislators and have leverage over them even in this earmark-less era, none of which Landry has delivered

· Without Jindal applying little to no pressure, the two most important figures in the decision will be House and Governmental Affairs and Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, respectively, Chairmen state Rep. Rick Gallot and state Sen. Bob Kostelka – both from north Louisiana and almost neighbors, so it is unlikely they would look favorably on any remapping that, as the continuance of anything like the Third would require, would put all of north Louisiana in one district, as it now is split between the Fourth and Fifth in essence creating double representation

· It also seems that any plan that keeps something like today’s Third around would create any of odd shapes, non-compact districts, and make strange bedfellows of different areas of the state, at least relative to a plan of carving up today’s Third – these nebulous judicial standards of contiguity, compactness, and community

· More future political careers also might be better served by the division of the Third; for example, the state Senate district of Neil Riser makes up a good chunk of today’s Fifth District and if he harbored progressive ambition he would find something that preserved something like the Third would split his voting base

We agreed that both politically, because there might be Republican control of both legislative chambers by the time the process runs its course, and from a legal/judicial standpoint, given the criteria set forth above plus as there seemed to be no concerns of lack of equiproportionality (districts with fairly equivalent populations) to draw such a plan, that the dismembering of the Third would occur. That doesn’t mean alternatives won’t be offered and debate won’t occur over them, but the dynamics clearly favor this plan.

As for Jindal, we suspect he hasn’t completely detached himself from the process. If he does have a preference, as long as the Legislature seems headed in that direction, he’ll stay out of the process. But if he does and for whatever reason the Legislature doesn’t appear to head in that direction, we may not have heard the last from him on this subject.