Education reform opponents hypocritically resist transparency

One of the red herring arguments used by opponents to recent education reform efforts in Louisiana has been the process has lacked openness and transparency. Perhaps this has proven a popular line of attack out for its familiarity, because some of these opponents themselves come up far short in this category.

A group leading the charge has been the Coalition for Progress in Louisiana, which now holds itself out as “Louisiana Progress.” The affiliate of the far-left Center for American Progress is according to its website and IRS letter of determination for 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit status domiciled in Baton Rouge with former Shreveport state Rep. Melissa Flournoy as its executive director. Within the past year she has had several opinion pieces that ran in the Shreveport Times about education and other issues, and recently the organization with The Times sponsored a forum on coming challenges in education, and also the same with a couple of other Gannett publications.

Also being involved in other political outreach efforts, one would think this costs some money. The group appears to be able to attract some donors: the web site for Razoo, a foundation to channel money to groups, in the middle of July gave a total of 108 donors and three separate “fundraisers” that indirectly had money donated to it. The Form 990 that some nonprofit groups are required annually to submit to the Internal Revenue Service from Razoo showed in 2011 it shunted $6,453 to the organization.

Bossier Jury violates taxpayers, spirit of public service

The good news is that the leeches on the Bossier Parish Police Jury could have stuck it to taxpayers three years ago. The bad news is they’re going to stick it to them now anyway – continuing a long-time pattern of living the high life at taxpayer expense

A majority of jurors wasted little time after fall elections to help themselves to other people’s money that could be spent on genuine parish concerns, courtesy of a state law passed in 2008 that allowed an increase in members’ salary from the maximum $1,200 per month if salaried to $1,600. They followed the notice procedures in the law and then as one of their first acts of 2012 jacked up salaries to the maximum. The greediest voting affirmative were Wanda Bennett, Jimmy Cochran, Jerome Darby, Wayne Hammack, and Mac Plummer, as all will continue in office beginning their next terms this week, while the defeated Winfred Johnston, Barry Butler, and Brad Cummings perhaps decided to give citizens the middle-fingered salute for getting ousted by presenting their opponents with this gift.

Not that the minority, comprised of the departing Hank Meachum and Bill Altimus, and returning Glen Benton and Rick Avery, seemed that resistant to the idea. Avery didn’t seem to disagree that they should have the one-third increase, just that the time wasn’t right, while Altimus, who will stay parish administrator, thought it could have been handled during budgeting.

Rebel flag leaves courthouse area with deserved whimper

The last significant forces of the Confederate States of America surrendered last month in history, who had been stationed around the last state capital of the Confederacy, Shreveport. But another significant surrender happened quietly months ago in Caddo Parish.

Without warning, late last year, with a vote one short of unanimity, the Caddo Parish Commission ordered the (Third) Confederate (Battle) flag from its perch on a monument honoring Confederate forces very near the Courthouse. Hours later it had been removed. Thus quietly ended a long-running, sometimes heated, controversy, and rightfully so.

Six decades ago the United Daughters of the Confederacy placed the flag in an apparent response to the burgeoning civil rights movement, on the monument that now has sat for over a century in the square block encompassing the Courthouse. Both objects remained as society drastically changed around them, spawning several relatively recent attempts to have the flag taken down, but never legally so because of the presumed ownership of the small plot around the northwest corner of the lot by the UDC …

Manageable aid cut to hasten charity system demise

The Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration continues to make lemonade out of lemons, as the hit the state takes from Congress deciding to stop favoring it on Medicaid reimbursement provides another opportunity for the governor to push along the needed revamp of care to the indigent, and even finally wean the state off its inefficient model that makes government the primary provider of health care.

As head of the Department of Health and Hospitals 15 years ago, Jindal saw firsthand the tremendous inefficiency of a health care system based upon primary care provided large institutions – the country’s only such system where a number of state-owned hospitals provided this for those on Medicaid. Then as now dealing with a budgetary imperative, he began to wrench efficiency into the system, the process of which would continue under the oversight of others when he left the job, although very slowly if at all under the appointees of his predecessor to him as governor.

The pace picked up again when he became governor. Although he could created more efficiencies by making it smaller, the replacement for the state’s hospital in New Orleans, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, at least was downsized from earlier versions in some recognition of the smaller role the state should play in direct provision of indigent care beyond that needed for its use as a teaching hospital. He also got the Legislature, which must approve of closures, to go along with closing the aging hospital in Baton Rouge, having its service performed by private providers contracted to the state.

Program symptomatic of LA higher education deterioration

It’s not really the content of what’s termed a “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender” minor to which Louisiana taxpayers ought to object. Rather, it’s just the symptom of a larger disease in the state’s higher education delivery system, a malady that must be treated if the system is to evolve into an efficient and effective producer of economic development and in its capacity to assist in advancing knowledge of the human condition.

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette seems to have instituted this kind of minor, which is a selection of coursework often about 18 hours of study that are in addition to a student’s major area of study. Often, courses in these can serve double duty in fulfilling university requirements past the roughly one-third of hours required for all baccalaureate students in Louisiana. Noted on completer’s transcripts, this one is said to cull courses from sociology, cultural anthropology, child and family studies and human sexuality. As is typical of most minors, it does not require any additional startup costs, as existing courses and resources are used to deliver it.

Naturally, it has little practical use out in the real world. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because while one purpose of a college degree is to impart a useful skill set, which has particular import in the hard sciences and related areas such as in business, the other is, to put it maybe tritely, to broaden horizons. This is accomplished by exposing students to a spectrum of the human condition, as expressed through a number of different activities and end-products of them, with the end goal being to get students to understand the basics and then use those as a jumping off point to encourage them to be able to think successfully critically about them, to form their own meritorious ideas, and to explicate them in a way others can understand.

Even if never used, "parent trigger" helpful school reform

In all of the excitement surrounding far-reaching school reform legislation that stormed its way out of the Legislature, one thing unnoticed in all of it was institution of the “parent trigger,” which allows parents of a low-performing school to petition that the current governorship of that school be sacked in favor of the Recovery School District. If other states’ experiences are a guide, it will help, but perhaps not much.

Three other states currently have laws like this in place. In Louisiana’s version, a school ranked as failing or the grade above that for three consecutive years, if half plus one of the parents or guardians of children in it sign a petition in the 90-day period after the release of school scores, then the RSD will take it over to decide to run the school as a traditional school or make it into a charter school.

The experience of the innovator of the law, California, has yet to have the device work. A few attempts have been made, but the relative strictness of the process and the somewhat vague nature of the options has doomed each of these. By contrast, Louisiana’s is relatively straightforward, with the only real hurdle being getting fifty percent plus one signatures within 90 days after reporting.

Playing race card damages ability of Court to operate

So, according to National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a number of Louisiana politicians, and one justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, all of the other members of the Court are stark, raving racists prejudiced against black people. And the damage they bring to the Court will last for a long time.

That’s the only logical implication that can be taken away from a lawsuit filed by Associate Justice Bernette Johnson, a letter forwarded by New Orleans-area politicians, and a resolution passed at its annual convention by the NAACP. Seemingly the most racist of all would be the Chief Justice Kitty Kimball, who ordered a legal review of who her successor will be when she retires in a few months.

The Louisiana Constitution’s Art. V Sec. 6 reads simply, “The judge oldest in point of service on the supreme court shall be chief justice.” But it seems to depend on what “point of service” means. Does it mean “longest continuous service elected from a Supreme Court district,” or “longest continuous period sitting as a member of or with the Court?” Kimball felt the need to create a process to decide this because of unusual circumstances.

Medical economics confirm wisdom of Jindal opt-out choice

Among others, to date exclusively Republican state chief executives, Gov. Bobby Jindal has declared that his state will not pursue expansion of Medicaid coverage mandated without penalty by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). While uncertainty surrounds the law’s implementation, from a financial standpoint Jindal’s decision will save Louisiana money without impacting the level of care delivered.

As of yet the state has not been able to estimate how many residents would be newly covered if the expansion went through so that the bare minimum required, those families making 133 percent of the poverty level, would be put on state insurance rolls that currently are not covered, but one private sector entity has estimated the figure at 337,000 by 2019. Nor have the additional costs to the state been calculated by it, but the same group estimates that in 2017-19 prior to 2020 when the state must bear 10 percent of the costs the cost will be $337 million, thus presumably over $125 million a year from 2020 on.

Jindal says this is too much yet others argue that to forgo the expansion could cost the state more. They contend that these people will remain uninsured, who will be forced to pay a penalty incorrectly labeled as a “tax” by the U.S. Supreme Court if they don’t get insurance, and then rely upon hospitals and their emergency rooms, which either the state must pay for or it comes out of the pockets of those providers. The federal government subsidizes a lot of this through its Disproportionate Share (DSH) program in Medicaid, but Obamacare ratchets down these payments, staring slowly in 2014 at $500 million across all states but by 2019 hitting $5.6 billion (half the current level) before a reduction of $4 billion a year from current levels hits in 2020 and beyond. Louisiana hospitals, with much of this going to the state’s charity system, got about $732 million of these in 2011, or about 6.5 percent of the nation’s total, ranking it fourth overall in total dollars received and the highest per capita.

Only Angelle's political career tarnished by tax credit flub

Whether oversight or political calculation, the revelation that Department of Natural Resources Secretary Scott Angelle was informed a month and a half before his boss found out about a controversial tax credit interpretation cannot help his presumed incipient political career as a state or federal elected official.

Back in 2009, then-state Rep. Jane Smith got passed a law that put a tax break on alternative fuel vehicles. Smith, who after a defeat to move into the Senate was appointed to be deputy secretary in the Department of Revenue, has stated that it was intended to help the burgeoning natural gas industry in the state, but the wording of it plausibly could have it applied to any alternative fuel-powered vehicle. That interpretation earlier this year was taken by then-Department of Revenue Secretary Cynthia Bridges, with tax revenue collection consequences that could hit $100 million to the state.

Apparently, key state legislators got into the know shortly thereafter, and did not seem overly concerned that anybody else should know about it – maybe because they knew it could make their budgeting task more miserable. But about a month after the ruling’s issuance, it seems one of Angelle’s subordinates sent along information that, had Angelle studied it to some degree, should have revealed to him the presence of the ruling. It was not for another month-and-a-half that Angelle, who also operates as Gov. Bobby Jindal’s legislative liaison, seems to have figured out the implications of the ruling when the chief budgetary legislator who also had prior knowledge of the ruling, state Rep. Jim Fannin, put him onto it – 10 days after the session’s end. That day, Jindal reversed the decision, and the day after, Bridges resigned with Smith ascending to that job believing Bridges had not explicitly contacted Jindal about her decision two-and-a-half months previous.

Shortfall doesn't need revenue for revenue's sake approach

Such are the fortunes of politics when sometimes you get lucky in the budgeting process, and other times you don’t. As previously noted, in order for Louisiana to receive big backing for conservation and transportation, it had to sacrifice bonus payments into its Medicaid system that unfortunately have an immediate impact on this fiscal year. Suggestions for a special session of the Legislature to deal with that, if done correctly, can help with the sudden crisis.

The $651 million lost as a result of the change in federal law cannot be solved entirely with infusions of additional revenues, for both reasons practical and philosophical. Principally, while the panoply of various credits and exemptions create a patchwork of inefficiency in promoting economic development, they still manage to achieve it with its benefits exceeding costs. Therefore, the primary goal of strategy dealing with these exceptions must be with an eye towards flattening and lowering overall tax rates.

Nor is it necessary, for the notion of eliminating breaks and subsidies just to capture revenue flies in the face of the reality that Louisiana, even after some contractions, continues to have a spending, not revenue, problem. Thus, any additional revenue brought in from the expunging of these must be only at the expense of programs that cost the state greatly with little in the way of benefits concentrated among individuals or corporations.