New doubts about the Chicago Public School's performance pay system for teachers make it clearer that Colorado is desperately trying to recreate a failure.  

An early analysis of the system from Mathematica Policy Research "found no evidence that the program raised student test scores."    The system "did not have a detectable impact on rates of teacher retention" either, according to the study.

Why should we care in Colorado?  Because our entire anything-but-teaching education reform effort now centers on doing whatever U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan did while he was chief of Chicago's public schools.  He started the new performance pay system.

We already know that he misled America about the academic results he got in Chicago's schools.  This is just more evidence that his miraculous results in Chicago are no more real than the so-called Houston Miracle that led President Bush to pick Roderick Paige as his secretary of education.

The continuing and growing doubts about Chicago should get us thinking.  Maybe we should work on really improving our schools, rather than blindly following the latest "reform" fad.  

Not likely.  For one thing it would cost us money to make sure every child in Colorado gets a good education.  And we're broke.  Blindly following the Duncan Dream could actually make us money.  Last week the state reapplied for a Big Cash Prize in Duncan's Race for the Top contest.  Winning could get us $175 million.

There's a catch, of course.  We can use the money to restore any of our cuts or to teach students, it all has to go to "reform" administration costs.

On the plus side, wining doesn't require educating students, all we have to do is convince the Secretary that we'll adopt his free-market-solves-everything education ideology without asking any questions.

One question we're consistently not asking is "Race to the what?"

Colorado could get up to $350 million from the federal government to avoid laying off teachers, without having to enter a contest.  That amount could avoid nearly all of the cuts for next school year, if it comes through in time.

The money is in a bill the U.S. House will soon be debating.  As of now, the bill would divvy up $23 billion among all 50 states.  A preliminary estimate puts Colorado's share at about $350 million.

Of course the bill would have to pass for us to get the money, but at least it's a possibility.

The catch?  It's only for one year.  Our cuts to K-12 are permanent, so we'd still eliminate the jobs — just a year after we thought.  

The old comedy Caddyshack has a hilarious exchange between a kid who's hoping to get a scholarship and a judge (played by Ted Knight) who sits on the scholarship award committee.

If you don't feel like watching the clip, here's the gist of it:

Danny Noonan: I planned to go to law school after I graduated, but it looks like my folks won't have enough money to put me through college.
Judge Smails: Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.

I keep thinking of that when I hear about Race to the Top, the Obama Administration's nationwide contest for school funding.  States compete on a range of criteria and the winners get big cash awards from a $4.35 billion pot of prize money.  The losers?  Well, "the world needs ditch diggers too."

Apparently someone, probably Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, decided that all No Child Left Behind (NCLB) needed was prize money.  I guess we should have seen this coming.  When Duncan got the job he said he wanted to make NCLB less punitive. Now schools that don't measure up won't get punished, they just won't get rewarded. <!more>

The news media have greeted Duncan with the same kind of glorification they gave to George W. Bush's first education secretary, Roderick Paige.  Paige rode into Washington on the merits of his Houston Miracle, the incredible improvement in Houston schools while he was superintendent.  The excitement cooled when people discovered that the incredible results lacked credibility.  All Paige had done was induce his underlings to falsify results and lie; he did it by promising great rewards (thousands of dollars in cash bonuses) for reporting great results, and terrible consequences (quick termination) for reporting the truth.  He supported that policy by rigorously ignoring even the most obvious misrepresentations.

Paige may have been following the lead of Houston's previous miracle, Enron.  It's amazing what the promise of riches and the threat of punishment will get people to do.  Enron rewarded employees for adding zeros to inflate earnings, Paige rewarded employees for reporting zeros to hide dropouts.  The consequences in both cases encouraged employees to keep mum about the deceptions. 

Other school districts have been caught doing essentially the same thing.

In Duncan's case, the plaudits are based on his accomplishments as founder of an elementary school and then superintendent of schools in Chicago.  Duncan and the Administration never call his accomplishments the Chicago Miracle, but the comiarason might not be out of line.  The White House claims Duncan's school, Ariel Community Academy, is one of the best in Chicago and that, as superintendent, he improved student performance all over the district.  Chicago's a tough town.  It would be a miracle if he really turned around a district of that size is such a short period of time. 

Unfortunately, the hype isn't supported by the reality.  A new report by The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago pokes some holes in Duncan's record. The report's entitled "Still Left Behind," and it points out that  most students still drop out or fail.  It says the "general perception" that students are doing better has more to do with changes in the standardized tests than in the level of education.

A more troubling observation is that the students who are doing well are concentrated in "selective-enrollment" schools. 

Before becoming CEO of the district, Duncan started Ariel Community Academy. It's financially supported by (and named after) a mutual fund company.  In Black on the Block: the Politics of Race and Class in the City, Northwestern Professor Mary E. Pattillo notes that students at Ariel come from richer and better educated families than those at the public schools, and that Ariel has an admissions process that could keep struggling students out.  

If that's the case, Duncan's work just adds to the evidence that well-funded, exclusive schools score well on standardized tests.  Ignore, pushout or exclude the bottom 10% of students and any school will look pretty good.  

Duncan's credentials might not matter much if the Race to the Top rules reflected the president's pitch for it:

"This competition will not be based on politics, ideology, or the preferences of a particular interest group. Instead, it will be based on a simple principle—whether a state is ready to do what works." Obama said.

Nice thought, but the fine print doesn't fit the statement.  For instance, one key to qualifying for the grand prize is having the right "conditions for reform."  "Reform" in this case, means opening more charter schools and giving them more money.  It requires that people in school districts vote to give charter schools more tax money, even if their children can't attend the charter school.

There's a provision that is particularly painful in Colorado.  We, as a policy, don't help schools with capital costs, like building and repairing school buildings.  There are two exceptions.  As a settlement in a lawsuit we give some especially poor districts money to improve especially dangerous conditions in old school buildings.  And we give millions of dollars a year to charter schools for capital, whether they need it or not.

That last exception is a testament to the power of the charter school lobby and our general indifference to conditions under which students in poor districts spend their school days.  One might think that "reform" would reverse that, but Race to the Top reform makes it official, national policy.  One criteria for getting a grant is: 

The extent to which the State provides charter schools with facilities funding (for leasing facilities, purchasing facilities, or making tenant improvements), assistance with facilities acquisition, access to public facilities, the ability to share in bonds and mill levies, or other supports; and the extent to which the State does not impose any facility-related requirements on charter schools that are stricter than those applied to traditional public schools.

A non-ideological approach might make that work both ways.  It could require states to pay as much for capital projects at public schools as it does for capital projects at charter schools. Apparently helping regular public schools isn't real "reform." 

In fairness, there's another criteria that would seem to impose a little rigor on our charter schools:

The extent to which the State has statutes and guidelines regarding how charter school authorizers approve, monitor, hold accountable, reauthorize, and close charter schools, including the extent to which such statutes or guidelines require that student academic achievement be a factor in such activities and decisions, and the extent to which charter school authorizers in the State have closed or not renewed ineffective charter schools.

We've been through this in Colorado.  Charter schools are run by small groups of people and intentionally operate outside of the regular school system. Occasionally a parent or teacher will squeal when a charter school is cheating on tests or otherwise undermining accountability, but not always.  And even when evidence is clear there are often politically powerful people and groups who will come to the school's defense. In the end, a lack of achievement can be chalked up to a less-than-successful innovation without any consenquences for the school.

Ultimately, Race to the Top is just a new way of pushing states into the failed framework of NCLB.  The contest part adds a comic and less punitive element, but it's also adding onto, rather than replacing, the high-stakes testing and punishment that came with NCLB.  The combination of reward and punishment may get results, but it's more likely to get them the Houston Miracle way than by really improving education.

The so-called free-market approach to education is inherently contradictory.  The free market responds to people who can pay, people who can analyze the value of various choices take advantage of them.  The children of those people are already getting a good education.  The children who need help most often don't have the money or the resources to take advantage of choices.  The problem is exacerbated when there are incentives for schools to erect barriers and keep those kids out.

Failing to educate every child has always been wrong.  It's un-American.  It's even more wrong today.  There was a time when people without an education could work, earn a living and even build a career in America.  That's no longer true.  Today we really don't need very many ditch diggers.

Transportation in Colorado may be moving in a new direction.  The governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Transportation seems to have shaken white line fever and embraced greener ideas for keeping Colorado moving.

The Panel, officially the Governor’s Transportation Finance and Implementation Panel, is wrapping up 9 months of work and reporting it’s recommendations.

The Problem
If you haven’t noticed, our transportation system is deteriorating.  Bridges are aging and starting to crumble.  Highways are congested, cracked, or both.  And public transit isn’t keeping up with demand.  CDOT has been complaining for years that we’re headed for a disaster, but no one seems to care.

Last year Governor Ritter appointed 32 people to the panel with a main goal of making people care.  Officially its aim was to figure out how to finance transportation and prioritize the projects new money would buy.  In fact, there are only a few financing options out there and people who work on this are familiar with all of them.  The real reason for appointing a panel, and 32 people from across the state, and holding meetings all over the place, was to convince people we have a problem and soften them up on the idea of a tax increase to fix it.

It’s hard to say how well it worked, but the final report holds some progressive ideas.


Demand Change
For as long as I’ve been in the legislature, the big push has been to expand everything: more people, more homes, more businesses, more highways, more electricity, and so on.  The only thing we seemed to want less of was money, spedifically tax revenue.  Those two concepts had to collide, and they may have.  The governor’s Transportation Panel started out between a rock and a hard place: less money to pay for more transportation. 

Less is More
Last year we bucked the trend in building a foundation for the New Energy Economy.  Renewable energy got the most attention, things like wind turbines and solar panels.  But the fuller change is a lot less visible: a move toward managing demand rather than constantly increasing supply.  The cheapest, cleanest most secure energy is the energy we save by becoming more efficient.

That idea has taken root.  Now we have to move that concept — demand side management — to everything else.  We have to keep people healthy rather than expanding medical care, prevent crime and reduce recidivism rather than build new prisons and decreasing our driving rather than building new highways.

When the Panel first got appointed, it seemed tilted toward the old way of doing transportation.  A lot of concrete and asphalt interests and people who seemed pretty comfortable expanding highways.  A notable exception was Boulder County Commissioner Will Toor.  It seems as though he had a lot of influence.

For one thing, the Panel added a new insight to it’s description of our transportation mess.  The standard explanation has been a combination of more and less. 

Less Money
Colorado, like most states (and the federal government), pays for highways with money from the gas tax.  Unlike most states (and the federal government), Colorado can’t raise its gas tax to cover the growing cost of maintaining the transportation system.  Theoretically, as people drive more they buy more gas.  As they buy more gas, they pay more gas tax and that additional tax pays for expanding the transportation system.  It actually did work that way for a while, but 10 or 15 years something good started happening that had a bad effect on transportation funding: vehicles started getting more efficient.  As miles-per-gallon went up, people were able to drive a lot more miles without buying a lot more fuel.

Even Less Money
And, over the last ten years, our gas tax revenue has lost a lot of its value.

Our gas tax is 22 cents a gallon.  It doesn’t matter if that gallon of gas sells for $1.75 or $3.50, the state still takes in 22 cents.  And that 22 cent rate was set a long time ago.  It been the same since TABOR passed in 1992.  At the same time, the value of that 22 cents has been going down.  Since we started charging that amount, the Construction Cost Index (inflation as it applies to construction costs, as opposed to the Consumer Price Index which measure inflation in the cost of things families buy) has increased an average of more than 6% a year.  That’s eroded two-thirds of the value of the tax.

More Miles
Over the past 15 or so years, our population has grown by 44%.  That’s a lot, and it alone would put stress on our transportation system.  But it’s only part of the problem.  During that same period, the number of highway miles we drive went up 60% — almost a third more than the population.   Why?  Unlike a lot of past reports, this one includes a good, accurate answer to that question: “Because of development patterns, travel is growing at a rate faster than the population.”

It may not seem like much, but listing growth, and the way we grow, as a reason for our transportation trouble is a big deal.

And the recommendations go farther:

“There should be an emphasis on the management of demand, as well as building to keep pace with that demand.  Programs should focus on reducing trips and trip lengths, minimizing emissions, providing choices in modes of transportation and embracing technological innovations in fuels, vehicles and transit systems.  Travelers, in turn, should be persuaded to change their behavior.”


Raising Revenue
The recommendations don’t end with decreasing demand.  The whole point of the panel was to loosen people up on the idea of raising taxes or fees to pay for transportation improvements.  And the Panel apparently understood that.

“Panel members unanimously support an increased investment in transportation that would address a broad range of infrastructure needs, both roadway and transit,” according to their final report. 

That investment, of course, means money and the money has to come from somewhere.  The Panel mulled over nearly 40 money-raising suggestions and settled on five.

* a fee on vehicle registrations
* a fuel tax hike
* a fee on visitors
* a sales & use tax hike
* a severance tax hike

Each has its advantages and each has its disadvantages; the common disadvantage being a snowballs chance in hell (or mag chloride) it will happen.


Registration Fee
This would be a $100 fee you’d pay in addition to the current cost of registering a vehicle in Colorado.  It has one big advantage over most of the other ideas.  It’s a fee and not a tax.  Under TABOR, hiking taxes takes a vote of the public.  Hiking fees doesn’t.  Well, to be more specific, hiking a fee doesn’t require a public vote before it takes effect.  If we tack on a $100 fee to car registrations you can bet the public will vote on it; they’ll just have to wait until the next time their legislators run for reelection.  This idea was more popular amount Panel members than it’s been in the legislature.  It would bring in about $500 million a year.

Fuel Tax  Hike
This would add 13 cents a gallon to our fuel taxes, pushing the state gas tax up to 35 cents a gallon.  It would take a public vote.  And it would take a miracle to pass it.  In the unlikely event that someone puts it on the ballot and it passes, the 13-cent hike would bring in about $350 million a year.  The Panel suggested a couple of options to keep the revenue from falling behind our needs in the future: either indexing the tax to inflation or setting a schedule for regular increases.  Two more nails in the coffin.

Visitor Fee
This option has two obvious advantages: it’s a fee, so it doesn’t require a  vote, and it’s paid by people who won’t be able to vote against the legislators who impose it.  The “fee” would actually be a couple of fees, like one on hotel rooms and another on car rentals.  If it were $6 a night and $6 a day, it would bring in about $250 million a hear.  Of course it wouldn’t be without opposition.  Car rental agencies and hotel operators will certainly howl.

Sales & Use Tax Hike
This would be an across-the-board increase in the tax on things we buy and the things businesses use.  Right now our state sales and use tax rate is 2.9%.  Increasing it by a tenth of a percent, which is what the panel suggested, would generate more than $90 million a year.  Of course it would take a statewide vote.

Severance Tax Hike
This would take a public vote, but the public would be voting on a tax they wouldn’t have to pay.  Sounds neat, but you can bet the oil and gas industry would mount a multi-million dollar campaign to convince people they would have to pay it, through higher gas and heat bills.  Of course that’s not true.  The price we pay for energy has a lot more to do with hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, threats in the Middle East, the rantings of South American presidents and unnecessary wars than it does Colorado’s severance tax.  And our severance tax is lower than most states’.   But the industry has already threatened us with television ads accusing us of wanting to freeze elderly people in the dark.  Don’t laugh, it worked in California.  Increasing our severance tax by less than 2% would net more than $90 million a year.

The Total
The Panel suggested a combination of the revenue-raising ideas to raise one of four annual revenue levels:
* $500 million
* $1 billion
* $1.5 billion
* $2 billion

Why should we shoot for one of those four levels?  Would $1.3 billion be, well, wrong?  No idea.  But of those four possible levels, the Panel preferred two: $500 million or $1.5 billion.  Mostly $1.5 billion.


What We’d Buy
The Panel emphasized the need to maintain the system we have right now, especially when the aging infrastructure makes highways unsafe.  Repairing bridges, resurfacing roads and widening shoulders would be the top priority — and the only priority if we go for the $500 million/year plan.  If we get the extra billion, we could afford to finish the 28 strategic projects we started back in 1997, plus add some public transit and bicycle/pedestrian paths. 


What it Means
It this it?  The new paradigm?  The out-of-the-box thinking we hear so much about?  Are we really going to move toward an integrated system of land use and transportation planning that will add options and reduce the amount of driving we have to do?  It’s hard to say. 

A cynic might note that Referendum C passed because Boulder County contributed enough “yes” votes to overcome the “nos” from El Paso and Grand Counties.  And Referendum D died because Boulder County didn’t like it’s highway-only emphasis.  That history had to have been on the minds of the Panel members.  Since their main goal was getting more money, possibly through a statewide vote on a tax increase, it would make sense to appeal to liberal ideas.  Still, it’s hard to ignore the huge change in thinking.

In 2004 I tried to require cities and counties to plan ahead so people could anticipate growth.  Back then Republicans were running things and the bill died in the second committee.

In 2006, with Democrats in charge, I boldy ran a bill that went a step farther.  It would have required cities and counties to, among other things, plan for transportation as they’re planning new developments.  I had to gut the bill to get through the first committee in the House and it died in the Senate anyway. 

That’s why this recommendation in the Blue Ribbon Panel’s report caught my attention: “Provide incentives for the integration of transportation planning and local land use planning to minimize Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) growth and ensure efficient infrastructure investments for transportation.”

Of course not everybody’s on board.  I suggested efficiency during a budget committee hearing and it caused the Colorado Springs Gazette to attack me for — get this — not wanting to increase taxes.  It was startling, but encouraging too.  When right-wing editorialists are attacking a Boulder liberal for opposing a tax increase, something’s changing.

Maybe we’ll know what it all means when the first bills start moving through the legislature.  If we start to implement the Panel’s plan through better planning, it’s a signal that we’re moving in a new direction.   If we move toward raising the money first, and leave the planning part until later, it’s an indication we’re still on the highway to transportation hell.


If you’d like to read some more on the Blue Ribbon Panel’s plan, here’s a link to an executive summary of the report.  If you’d like to read a lot more, here’s a link to the full report.