BuckeyeBlog

The Columbus Dispatch ran a front page story by Dan Gearino today on a report being released by the Economic Policy Institute:

The trade deficit with China has cost Ohio more than 100,000 jobs since 2001, and the greatest losses have been in manufacturing, according to a study being issued today.

The report by the Economic Policy Institute, an advocacy group in Washington, D.C., was timed for release days before China hosts the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

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I’m lucky enough to be in the great city of Chicago at the ALEC convention, listening to former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist speak on school choice. You want a city where people want to live? Let them stay in the city with their kids, by allowing them to place their child AND their tax money in a school they choose.

One of the best parts, Norquist says, is that suddenly teachers unions bargain less for severance and pension, the things that most affect teachers about to leave, and start to negotiate working conditions for teachers who are staying.

Ohio state representative Chris Widener was featured on CBS’s “Eye to Eye” segment discussing Ohio’s ban on payday lending. As we saw during the debate on this issue, state legislators like Widener just don’t understand the economics behind payday lending. For instance, he repeatedly refers to some sort of “cycle of debt” seemingy caused by payday lending. I have no doubt that Rep. Widener believes that payday lending causes such a cycle of debt. However, outside of the flawed research by the advocacy group the Center for Responsible Lending, you’ll have a hard time finding any academic who studies this issue agree that payday lending causes this.

As testimony from Dr. Tom Lehman pointed out, those “studies” which show that payday lending causes a debt trap are so full of methodological errors that they are worthless. Unbiased research clearly shows that payday loans do not cause economic problems; instead, people who are already having economic problems turn to them. Eliminating these loans will do nothing to stop the “cycle of debt” that Rep. Widener discusses. In fact, as Dr. Lehman’s testimony illustrates, it is likely to cause even more problem for these folks as they turn to even less attractive alternatives.

Unfortunately, Ohio legislators like Rep. Widener ignored the hard data and instead relied on anecdotes and ideologically-driven “research” upon which to base their votes. And it really seems they believe these falsehoods about payday lending and payday borrowers. The banning of payday lending was a shameful expample of legislators failing to do their job. It’s sad that Rep. Widener feels so proud of this abdication of duty that he goes on TV to brag about it.

Many states are worrying about the effect increasing gas mileage of cars will have on their gas tax revenues, which they use to pay those people in yellow vests you often see standing around in construction zones smoking a cigarette, supposedly maintaining the roads. Apparently the idea of raising the tax rate is too simple, because according to Gongwer News, the National Conference of State Legislatures advocated a scary new form of tax for highway maintenance at its conference last week:

The bipartisan legislators’ policy also encourages Congress to move toward new funding concepts, such as one that charges a vehicle based on the number of miles driven in a state. NCSL said a pilot program in Oregon proved the system viable.

If one were to go to the link above and look at the presentation, he might notice how the government determines the number of miles a vehicle has driven in a state: a GPS location device planted in each vehicle. That’s right, the government would track every vehicles’ movements. Don’t worry, legislators would put laws in place limiting the types of data the government is allowed to collect and store regarding your movements. That puts my mind at ease, anyway.

Here’s another idea: why don’t we privatize our road network? Privately managed toll roads have been proven to be both viable and successful, showing that major arteries can be maintained privately. Other countries have taken that concept to greater levels, extending it to lower volume roadways. Two-thirds of Sweden’s road network is managed privately; upkeep is estimated at half the cost of a comparable public system and service is better.

Of course, that’s a much more drastic and radical solution than simply having the government track each citizen’s daily movements and real-time location.

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity has released a video by the Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell that discusses the economic problems that would follow adoption of Senator Barack Obama’s idea to impose Social Security taxes on incomes over $250,000. There’s a lot of good information in this video about tax rates, economic growth, Social Security, and proper tax policy:

Frank S. Meyer is a somewhat forgotten figure in the conservative movement today (compared to, say, William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater). But he was an important conservative philosopher who did his best to unite the libertarian and traditionalist wings of the conservative movement by showing how a belief in God and a respect for human liberty come from the same source and cannot be separated.

I’m reading his book The Conservative Mainstream right now. There are nuggets of wisdom on every page and I’d urge everyone to find a copy and read it closely. In lieu of that, I feel obliged to share these two quotes with readers of this blog because they seem especially relevant to the present political debate, although they were written decades ago. The first, written in 1965, seems a perfect prediction of what has happened to the GOP under the Bush Administration and the recent leadership in Congress:

If the [conservative movement] allows fascination with methods and techniques to become primary in its thinking, it will inevitably succumb to the temptation of gaining power for the sake of gaining power. If it wins, those who achieve power will be the prisoners of their methods, little different in essentials from the men who hold power today. Concentration on method without the greater emphasis on transforming popular consciousness can only lead to rivaly with the Liberals in appealing to the baser instincts of the people. The conservative movement has a more difficult task: to appeal to the higher instincts and beliefs that survive, half smothered, in the American people. This is the only foundation for a victory worth winning.

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So, when is it ok to admit, on the front page of a major newspaper, that you are a cheater?  The answer, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is when you are the principal of a well regarded public school.  Last week, columnist Regina Brett recounted the lamentations/accusations of a Rocky River middle school principal about the state’s testing and accountability system.  The school he oversees scored well on the state exams, but the principal wants us to know the high cost of that success. 

Rocky River Middle School passed the 2008 Ohio Achievement Tests, earned an Excellent rating from the state and met the requirements for Annual Yearly Progress.

 

For all of those accomplishments, Principal David Root has only one thing to say to the students, staff and citizens of Rocky River: He’s sorry.

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About those school report cards. Your district is rated in one of five categories. Excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch, academic emergency. Once in awhile you’ll see these compared to grades, A, B, C, etc.

This is pure nonsense, a substitute for thought. Presumably it’s a shorthand, allowing parents and anyone else who is interested (usually people selling things to parents) to rank a school to the nearest good or bad, but it’s still nonsense. Maybe if the categories were excellent, good, average, poor, failing, then it might be worth something, but even then it’s not much use. Unless you’re able to say what the elements of these things include, it gives you no idea what is really happening, and worse, it gives you a false impression of what is truly relevant to your child or indeed any individual child.

What our federal, state and bureaucratic officers are doing mucking around in here bears no relation to any student’s performance. It does, however, relate closely to whether that politician or bureaucrat takes credit for the good things others do, while ensuring that the responsibility for the bad things lands elsewhere.

Each day George Bush, Ted Kennedy and the lot of them must wake up and think, “I was excellent yesterday, and I’m going to do be so again today.”

Dublin Schools will soon be rated “continuous improvement“.

Of course that means nothing whatever, so you have to know that one of the alternative ratings is “excellent,” which Dublin is accustomed to receiving.

At the same time, the state has 30 benchmarks that it scores, and Dublin hit all 30 of them. So what gives?

Two things. The state has a different scale than the feds, and the feds require that the schools measure various subgroups to see how they are performing. This is all well and good, since schools will be quick to tout their excellent performance while forgetting to mention untold numbers of individual students who simply aren’t receiving an education. Shame on the state for not doing a better job emphasizing that. No Child Left Behind, indeed.

But the federal law has a bit of silliness in it concocted by Ted Kennedy and George Bush: by 2014, 100 percent of students in each group must meet benchmarks, which is another way of saying there can be no failing students.

This is silly. People are going to fail all the time. My wife can set the benchmark that I’ll look like Tom Cruise, but it isn’t going to happen.

On the other hand, the schools shouldn’t be allowed to ignore those failing students, and assuredly if you leave it up to them to tell you about those failing students, you’re not going to hear about them.

There might be a role here for the federal government to require truth in advertising, and require schools to disclose certain information, such as failure rates. But that’s about the extent of it. There’s no role for federal funding, and there’s no role for federal mandates beyond disclosure, including requirements to close schools or take other remedial action.

Dennis J. Willard of the Akron Beacon Journal writes today that Governor Strickland’s “Conversations on Education” appear to be a sincere attempt to bring about meaningful reform:

It would be easy to dismiss Gov. Ted Strickland’s 12-city tour on education reform as a dog-and-pony show.

To do so, however, would be to prematurely demean the governor’s sincere intentions to seriously address Ohio’s woeful education funding system.

And we should at least give the governor an unimpeded path as he attempts to listen to Ohio.

On Tuesday, Strickland kicked off his ”Conversations on Education” in Columbus before an audience of about 200 people representing educators, parents, students, business owners and others.

The crowd talked about infusing students with passion, making school fun, crafting individual education plans to meet the student’s needs and talents, longer school years, all-day kindergarten, the return of the arts and physical fitness, and less emphasis on testing…

…Still, Strickland admitted afterward that he didn’t hear anything particularly new.

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