Monday, February 27, 2006
Anti intellectualism and professionalism
Very interesting essay in the American Prospect on anti intellectualism and the roles of professionals.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
No benefit found in English-only instruction
No benefit found in English-only instruction
- Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Teaching overwhelmingly in English, as mandated by 1998's Proposition 227, has had no impact on how English learners are faring in California, a state-mandated study released Tuesday has found.
The ballot measure, approved by 61 percent of the state's voters, promised that immigrant children and others who don't speak English at home would assimilate much faster if all their classes were taught in English.
It fueled an emotional debate about how best to educate the state's growing population of immigrant children. California educates one-third of the nation's English learners.
Using test data, the five-year, $2.5 million study found little difference between students who were taught in English-immersion classrooms and those enrolled in bilingual programs.
"We've looked at the available data extensively over the past five years, and we don't find any compelling evidence for the premise underpinning 227: that a major switch to English-immersion would be a panacea for English learners," said Amy Merickel, co-author of the study. The study was conducted by the American Institutes for Research and WestEd, independent, nonpartisan research agencies, on behalf of the California Department of Education.
Researchers studied students' proficiency in English and in other academic subjects in state tests conducted from 1997 through 2004.
Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Ron Unz, who bankrolled the Proposition 227 campaign, said he considered the study worthless.
"I think it's garbage, and it's extremely expensive garbage," he said. "If you want to know if rocks fall upward or downward and you spend enough money, you can find someone to say 'Sometimes they fall upward.' "
Unz said his own analysis of state test scores for the four years after Proposition 227 passed found that English learners in bilingual classes did not improve at all, while those in English immersion programs tripled their performance.
Merickel said that because the state data provides only annual snapshots such an assessment doesn't show whether individual students are progressing over time. By definition, students who do well in a bilingual program and master English, are replaced by new English learners, she said.
To track the progress of individual students over time, Merickel and her colleagues looked at longitudinal test results from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which educates more than half the state's 1.7 million English learners.
Coming on the heels of Proposition 187, which banned public services for illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in public programs, the English-only measure brought race politics and the national debate on immigration into the classroom.
"We've been arguing about the wrong thing for a long time, and the needs of California's English learners are getting lost in that debate," Merickel said.
In line with the findings of several recent studies, including reports in 2004 and 2005 from the Public Policy Institute of California and the state Legislative Analyst's Office, the researchers said that how California educates English learners will play a significant role in the state's future.
"Given that English learners are such a large, growing and vital component of California's future, embracing the challenge of learning how to be more successful with this large population of students is essential to our state and national well-being," the authors wrote.
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a professor of education and head of the immigration project at New York University, said all students need much more sophisticated skills and the higher level of language skills needed for the job market of the future take longer to acquire.
"The data show very, very strongly that you learn English in two ways: one is you need good linguistic models, good teachers ...," he said. "And the better your foundation in your first language, the better you'll do in the second language."
The study's authors found that English learners have done better academically since the passage of Prop. 227. But all California students improved in the same period, and the performance gap between English learners and native English speakers has changed little.
The researchers noted that Prop 227's implementation coincided with other educational reforms -- including the federal No Child Left Behind Act, new state standards and assessments for English learners and new state funding for English language instruction -- making it hard to gauge which factors contributed to student success.
Many teachers and administrators told the researchers Prop. 227 was useful, however, in focusing attention on how -- and how well -- English learners are taught in California.
The study's authors identified nine schools across the state that were successfully educating English learners and interviewed their principals to find out the secrets to their success. The principals said what matters most are the quality of instruction, a school-wide commitment to teaching English learners and careful planning and assessment -- not the language of instruction.
The state education department's manager for language policy, Veronica Aguila, said the state will highlight effective practices. She also said officials will continue ensuring that districts tell parents they can demand that their school provide bilingual instruction, as several Bay Area districts do.
About 8 percent of current California students are in bilingual programs, down from 27 percent before Proposition 227 went into effect in fall 1998.
Previous findings
California state auditor's report, June 2005
-- Limited monitoring holds English learners back and makes it hard to assess performance statewide.
-- State tests don't reveal which programs best help English learners.
Public Policy Institute of California report, April 2005
-- No evidence that changes under Proposition 227 boost English learners' achievement.
-- Students in bilingual programs improve more slowly than those in English-only programs but they also tend to be poorer and less prepared.
California legislative analyst report, February 2004
-- About half of English learners who start California public school in kindergarten become proficient, but more than half of those who start later never do.
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 1 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/22/MNGSUHCJF51.DTL
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
- Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Teaching overwhelmingly in English, as mandated by 1998's Proposition 227, has had no impact on how English learners are faring in California, a state-mandated study released Tuesday has found.
The ballot measure, approved by 61 percent of the state's voters, promised that immigrant children and others who don't speak English at home would assimilate much faster if all their classes were taught in English.
It fueled an emotional debate about how best to educate the state's growing population of immigrant children. California educates one-third of the nation's English learners.
Using test data, the five-year, $2.5 million study found little difference between students who were taught in English-immersion classrooms and those enrolled in bilingual programs.
"We've looked at the available data extensively over the past five years, and we don't find any compelling evidence for the premise underpinning 227: that a major switch to English-immersion would be a panacea for English learners," said Amy Merickel, co-author of the study. The study was conducted by the American Institutes for Research and WestEd, independent, nonpartisan research agencies, on behalf of the California Department of Education.
Researchers studied students' proficiency in English and in other academic subjects in state tests conducted from 1997 through 2004.
Silicon Valley software entrepreneur Ron Unz, who bankrolled the Proposition 227 campaign, said he considered the study worthless.
"I think it's garbage, and it's extremely expensive garbage," he said. "If you want to know if rocks fall upward or downward and you spend enough money, you can find someone to say 'Sometimes they fall upward.' "
Unz said his own analysis of state test scores for the four years after Proposition 227 passed found that English learners in bilingual classes did not improve at all, while those in English immersion programs tripled their performance.
Merickel said that because the state data provides only annual snapshots such an assessment doesn't show whether individual students are progressing over time. By definition, students who do well in a bilingual program and master English, are replaced by new English learners, she said.
To track the progress of individual students over time, Merickel and her colleagues looked at longitudinal test results from the Los Angeles Unified School District, which educates more than half the state's 1.7 million English learners.
Coming on the heels of Proposition 187, which banned public services for illegal immigrants, and Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in public programs, the English-only measure brought race politics and the national debate on immigration into the classroom.
"We've been arguing about the wrong thing for a long time, and the needs of California's English learners are getting lost in that debate," Merickel said.
In line with the findings of several recent studies, including reports in 2004 and 2005 from the Public Policy Institute of California and the state Legislative Analyst's Office, the researchers said that how California educates English learners will play a significant role in the state's future.
"Given that English learners are such a large, growing and vital component of California's future, embracing the challenge of learning how to be more successful with this large population of students is essential to our state and national well-being," the authors wrote.
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, a professor of education and head of the immigration project at New York University, said all students need much more sophisticated skills and the higher level of language skills needed for the job market of the future take longer to acquire.
"The data show very, very strongly that you learn English in two ways: one is you need good linguistic models, good teachers ...," he said. "And the better your foundation in your first language, the better you'll do in the second language."
The study's authors found that English learners have done better academically since the passage of Prop. 227. But all California students improved in the same period, and the performance gap between English learners and native English speakers has changed little.
The researchers noted that Prop 227's implementation coincided with other educational reforms -- including the federal No Child Left Behind Act, new state standards and assessments for English learners and new state funding for English language instruction -- making it hard to gauge which factors contributed to student success.
Many teachers and administrators told the researchers Prop. 227 was useful, however, in focusing attention on how -- and how well -- English learners are taught in California.
The study's authors identified nine schools across the state that were successfully educating English learners and interviewed their principals to find out the secrets to their success. The principals said what matters most are the quality of instruction, a school-wide commitment to teaching English learners and careful planning and assessment -- not the language of instruction.
The state education department's manager for language policy, Veronica Aguila, said the state will highlight effective practices. She also said officials will continue ensuring that districts tell parents they can demand that their school provide bilingual instruction, as several Bay Area districts do.
About 8 percent of current California students are in bilingual programs, down from 27 percent before Proposition 227 went into effect in fall 1998.
Previous findings
California state auditor's report, June 2005
-- Limited monitoring holds English learners back and makes it hard to assess performance statewide.
-- State tests don't reveal which programs best help English learners.
Public Policy Institute of California report, April 2005
-- No evidence that changes under Proposition 227 boost English learners' achievement.
-- Students in bilingual programs improve more slowly than those in English-only programs but they also tend to be poorer and less prepared.
California legislative analyst report, February 2004
-- About half of English learners who start California public school in kindergarten become proficient, but more than half of those who start later never do.
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
Page A - 1 URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/02/22/MNGSUHCJF51.DTL
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, February 20, 2006
The Battle in the States: ie. California
Forget D.C. the Battle is in the States
By Nathan Newman and David Sirota February 20, 2006
Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn't talking about work they'd done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting was the 32nd annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership association for conservative lawmakers. As its chairman, Georgia State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, said of the president's speech: "It was like the governor of a state talking to his legislative leaders."
This is the critical point: The highest echelons of the conservative movement and corporate America treat state legislators not as members of 50 different institutions, but as a single set of leaders who can be mobilized on a national basis.
Recognizing this reality, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) was formed in fall 2005 to create a counterforce to the right in statehouses across the country. Supported by groups like MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, along with unions like SEIU, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO and the Steelworkers, PLAN is working with state legislators across the country to move both a united agenda and strategic plan to take on ALEC and its allies throughout the country.
The conservative march through the states
The need to challenge the right-wing movement in the states is clear. ALEC claims more than 2,400 state lawmakers as members--roughly one-third of all state legislators--and has become one of the critical fulcrums of conservative power in the United States. Backed by many of the largest corporations in the country--including Exxon Mobil, Coors Brewing, Pfizer and Phillip Morris--ALEC is networked into conservative think tanks and allied political operations such as the Heartland Institute and the corporate-backed American Tort Reform Association. At the center of this network, ALEC helps draft and promote legislation that has crippled social service budgets, deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor, and undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state.
In 2004 alone, 1,108 ALEC model bills were introduced and 178 were enacted into law, a legislative assault that ALEC and its conservative allies have been repeating year after year. Given the prominence of its legislative supporters--34 state speakers of the house, 25 state senate presidents, 31 state senate leaders and 33 state house leaders are ALEC members--this success is hardly surprising.
Sadly, in the face of this daunting right-wing machine, many progressive leaders and activists remain fixated on Capitol Hill and the White House, leaving state legislators, local political organizations and unions to battle ALEC all alone. The problem is compounded by a national media that barely covers these state struggles. Even the most sophisticated national political commentators typically see fights for control of state legislatures as important only insofar as they impact redistricting of federal congressional races. Except for the occasional media spasm around a particularly virulent state legislative proposal that hands out pork to a corporation or restricts civil rights, the overall march of conservative legislation in the statehouses gets relatively little attention from progressive activists fixated on "serious" politics at the federal level.
Yet the battle for our states is incredibly serious. The conservative strategy is to use the state political arena to leverage control of national policy, and unless progressives get focused and view the battle for the states as crucial to America's political future, no amount of change at the federal level will allow us to take our country back.
Why state policy matters
Most progressives fail to realize that state governments collectively have as much--and in some cases, more--power over the issues they care about as the federal government. State and local revenues are about equal to federal tax revenue, and in an era of "flexibility" and "waivers," federal money is increasingly handed over to the states with few strings attached. In explaining conservatives' focus on state legislation, ALEC's Medicaid specialist James Frogue observed, "Innovations and reforms in Medicaid will come from the states. They will not come from D.C."
Most federal civil rights, consumer and employment laws only modify the baseline of rights established by state governments. In fact, only a tiny minority of legal struggles are pursued under federal statutes. Instead, state courts handle roughly 17 million civil cases every year, including contract, tort and real property disputes, the outcome of which turn overwhelmingly on state, not federal, law. Through state law and liability rules, the states regulate trillions of dollars of commerce.
Similarly, while there were 170,535 federal prisoners in 2004, that number is dwarfed by the 1.9 million prisoners in state and local prisons and jails. The criminal sentencing decisions that have decimated a generation of young people in minority communities were made in statehouses, not on Capitol Hill. And one of the least-understood areas of increasing state power is that wielded by public pension funds, which now control $2.7 trillion in financial assets and can shape financial markets with their investment decisions--a fact that the right is all too aware of as they launch campaigns to privatize those pensions.
With all this power in the hands of the states, conservatives recognize that with a coordinated strategy, a movement can govern the nation from the statehouses. States have been vulnerable to this right-wing takeover because most state legislatures are made up of poorly paid, part-time lawmakers with few--if any--staff to research or evaluate the laws they are asked to approve. The lack of resources means there are few staffers in legislatures who can challenge the expertise presented by ALEC and other conservative operatives, or uncover the hidden payoffs for corporate interests contained in legislation. Thus ALEC provides a stealthy, tax-exempt front for corporate interests to sell their ideas directly to statehouse leaders across the country.
At the most obvious level, ALEC gives a "public interest" sheen to the raw special pleading of Big Money before state legislatures. Here are just a few of these recent corporate campaigns:
Backed by the oil industry, ALEC has lined up legislators to lower taxes on gasoline and to undermine regulations aimed at curbing the carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming.
Backed by the drug companies, ALEC has mounted a full-scale campaign to defeat initiatives by cities and states to promote importing lower-priced select medicines from Canada.
Backed by low-wage employers, ALEC has promoted legislation to block local governments from raising local minimum wages or even requiring government contractors to pay a fair wage to their employees.
Backed by the telephone companies, ALEC has worked to bar or hamstring cities that have sought to build cheaper or even free Internet services for their residents.
Backed by the insurance companies, ALEC has been promoting a campaign to stop state insurance commissioners from requiring insurance companies to meet the same accountability and auditing rules that were imposed on publicly-traded corporations in the wake of the Enron debacle.
And ALEC has been advocating cracking down on seniors who shelter income in a home while using Medicaid to finance long term care, a campaign that would force seniors to buy "reverse annuity mortgages," a new financial instrument promoted by ALEC's financial services industry funders.
The right's strategic agenda
Still, if the right-wing movement in the states only amounted to a series of individual profit-driven campaigns, the threat posed by ALEC would merely be one of a slick, well-funded public relations operation, albeit a nasty and effective one.
But the real danger from ALEC and its associated organizations comes from conservatives' aim to structurally undermine the very capacities of government that restrain corporate power and to fuel campaigns that fracture progressive alliances and political power.
Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably the premiere right-wing strategist, has famously described the conservative goal as cutting government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Key to that objective is cutting tax revenues and using constitutional limits on state taxing powers to make it politically impossible to fund social needs through government action. This strategy serves not just to limit progressive policy but, by creating a limited pool of funds, pits progressive groups against each other in a fight for resources.
Conservatives also aim to shut down the enforcement of business regulations across the states. The very success of state attorneys general in bringing tobacco and financial firms to heel has led to a backlash to limit the power of attorneys general. And where citizens have the ability to enforce regulations in the courts, the right has been gutting those citizens' legal powers. For example, one of the first acts of Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration was forcing through restrictions on the state labor code's Private Attorney General Act, which had given advocates greater power to enforce the state's labor laws.
In the last few years, no issue has consumed corporate America more than shutting the courtroom door to plaintiffs injured by corporate malfeasance under the campaign of "tort reform." Damage awards have been limited and judges have increasingly been granted the right to exclude evidence of corporate wrongdoing by limiting plaintiff witnesses. This is done through the banning of so-called "junk science," with an often-politically connected judge (rather than the jury) getting to decide which witnesses are credible. The end result of this campaign is to make it nearly impossible for poor plaintiffs to get a day in court or to prevent a judge from overturning any judgment in their favor.
Another key strategy for the corporate right is privatization, a strategy that both undermines labor standards for government services and opens the labor market to corporate profiteering. The conservative-induced budget crises in many states have served to help this process along. In 2002, ALEC co-wrote a report with the Manhattan Institute that made privatization a key solution for balancing state budgets. They proposed that Medicaid be replaced with private Medical Savings Accounts and public schools be funded with vouchers. Similarly, prison management would be privatized. Name an area of government and conservatives are seeking to hand its operations over to corporate allies who, in turn, can eliminate labor unions and use the profits to fund more campaign contributions to their political machine.
A special case of privatization has been the recent assault on state employee pension funds. In 2005, Alaska passed legislation ending guaranteed pensions for all newly hired state employees in favor of individual accounts, and legislators in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia are heading in the same direction.
The most obvious goal is to cut benefits for union workers by ending guaranteed benefits--using exactly the same rhetoric of "choice" that President Bush employed to sell his Social Security privatization scheme at the federal level. But what really enrages conservatives are decisions by trustees of these pension funds to use their shareholder voting power to challenge corporate abuses, such as the pension funds in Ohio, New York and California that voted to divest in firms involved in privatization. And of course, there is the direct payoff to the financial services firms who will end up administering the millions of private accounts in a privatized state pension system and collecting the billions of dollars in fees.
Defunding the left
The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right's campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations--and a few religious conservative allies--as the only forces with significant resources in politics.
Take the 2003 legislation passed in Texas that reserved family planning dollars, including those from the federal government, exclusively for healthcare providers that do not offer abortion services or referrals. This kind of proposal, coupled with "gag rules" and "abstinence only" legislation, not only shifts abortion policy, but strips resources from the broader pro-choice community. Similarly, the push for "faith based initiatives" shifts resources from nonprofits embedded in social justice networks to conservative organizations engaged in active conservative politics.
State-based "Right to Work" campaigns were conservatives' original weapons to cut off union dues, one of the primary sources of funding for political campaigns that oppose conservatives day-in and day-out. The present round of attacks is labeled "paycheck protection"--a nice-sounding term for crippling union workers' ability to donate political contributions through workplace deductions.
The whole right-wing attack on the civil justice system also has the effect of cutting the fees for employment and other trial lawyers, who have been strong sources of political funding for progressive causes. Passing tort reforms nationally, Grover Norquist argued back in 1999, takes "a $5-10 billion a year bite out of trial lawyer fees" and shuts down the progressive "get-out-the-vote effort, funded with money from trial lawyers."
By operating at the state level, Norquist et al have successfully avoided the glare of media attention and the full political focus of progressives. It's as if the right is tunneling under the foundation of progressives; by the time the ground--and financial resources--give way, it'll be too late to save the house.
How progressives fight back
So how should progressives respond to this coordinated assault on every level of progressive policy?
The key is to fight back, coordinate our own battles, think as strategically as ALEC and its allies and win back power at the state level. As People for the American Way said in a 2003 report about ALEC: "Progressives need a collaborative and equally coordinated effort to successfully counter ALEC's influence, expose its corporate and right-wing ties, and defeat dangerous proposals launched by this 'common enemy.'"
While many grassroots efforts have continued across the country since that report, progressives have not established the coordinated response that is needed to beat back the right. To do so, we must take three steps.
First, we need to develop a deep national network of progressive legislators supported by grassroots organizations. We have to establish partnerships between national organizations, grassroots activists and state legislators in each state to find state-specific ideas that represent home-grown progressivism. Not only will these networks help bring progressive-minded people together, but they also will serve as a hotbed of information exchange so progressive legislators can equip themselves with all of the information they need to promote progressive bills.
Second, we need to promote a set of popular issues that define the progressive state agenda in the minds of voters. This could include raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, promoting family issues like paid family leave and pre-K education for all children, protecting free speech in the workplace as well as the political realm, and developing an energy independence policy that creates jobs in each state.
Third, we must develop a set of policies that beat back the right-wing attack and turn the tables on conservatives. We should use legislation strategically to highlight the hypocrisy of groups like ALEC and put conservative legislators in the uncomfortable public position of voting either the interests of their corporate patrons or the desires of their constituents.
For instance, recent legislative initiatives in states ranging from Virginia to Michigan to preserve public lands and stop sprawl divide sprawl developers from a broader population that wants both livable communities and green areas for recreation. Similarly, targeting taxpayer subsidies specifically to entrepreneurial businesses that provide a living wage, as progressives have done in a number of cities, challenges conservatives to justify their fealty to low-wage companies. Supporting paid family leave and expanded child care for working parents forces legislators to confront empty "families values" rhetoric.
Ultimately, each strategic issue will reinforce the others, undercutting opposition coalitions while adding new allies to the progressive side, exposing the hypocrisy of the conservative agenda while clarifying the progressive program, and, step-by-step, entrenching progressive power in ways that the right wing will find harder and harder to dislodge.
Progressives need to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to build unity among our side's state legislators and deploy both strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives at their own game. Our overarching strategy: find the best public policies and champion them with effective and cohesive messaging. That is what the new Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) is all about. It's time to finally end conservatives' dominance of state policy. It is time for progressives to govern from the states.
This article is being published by In These Times in conjunction with the release of PLAN's report, "Governing the Nation from the Statehouses."
Nathan Newman is the policy director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN).
David Sirota is the co-chair of PLAN, and a senior editor at In These Times.
By Nathan Newman and David Sirota February 20, 2006
Speaking to a packed room of 2,000 state legislators and business lobbyists gathered in Grapevine, Texas, last fall, George W. Bush thanked the crowd for its work on behalf of the conservative agenda. He wasn't talking about work they'd done on Capitol Hill, but about their collaboration to push the corporate agenda forward in statehouses across the country. The meeting was the 32nd annual gathering of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a membership association for conservative lawmakers. As its chairman, Georgia State Rep. Earl Ehrhart, said of the president's speech: "It was like the governor of a state talking to his legislative leaders."
This is the critical point: The highest echelons of the conservative movement and corporate America treat state legislators not as members of 50 different institutions, but as a single set of leaders who can be mobilized on a national basis.
Recognizing this reality, the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) was formed in fall 2005 to create a counterforce to the right in statehouses across the country. Supported by groups like MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, along with unions like SEIU, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO and the Steelworkers, PLAN is working with state legislators across the country to move both a united agenda and strategic plan to take on ALEC and its allies throughout the country.
The conservative march through the states
The need to challenge the right-wing movement in the states is clear. ALEC claims more than 2,400 state lawmakers as members--roughly one-third of all state legislators--and has become one of the critical fulcrums of conservative power in the United States. Backed by many of the largest corporations in the country--including Exxon Mobil, Coors Brewing, Pfizer and Phillip Morris--ALEC is networked into conservative think tanks and allied political operations such as the Heartland Institute and the corporate-backed American Tort Reform Association. At the center of this network, ALEC helps draft and promote legislation that has crippled social service budgets, deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor, and undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state.
In 2004 alone, 1,108 ALEC model bills were introduced and 178 were enacted into law, a legislative assault that ALEC and its conservative allies have been repeating year after year. Given the prominence of its legislative supporters--34 state speakers of the house, 25 state senate presidents, 31 state senate leaders and 33 state house leaders are ALEC members--this success is hardly surprising.
Sadly, in the face of this daunting right-wing machine, many progressive leaders and activists remain fixated on Capitol Hill and the White House, leaving state legislators, local political organizations and unions to battle ALEC all alone. The problem is compounded by a national media that barely covers these state struggles. Even the most sophisticated national political commentators typically see fights for control of state legislatures as important only insofar as they impact redistricting of federal congressional races. Except for the occasional media spasm around a particularly virulent state legislative proposal that hands out pork to a corporation or restricts civil rights, the overall march of conservative legislation in the statehouses gets relatively little attention from progressive activists fixated on "serious" politics at the federal level.
Yet the battle for our states is incredibly serious. The conservative strategy is to use the state political arena to leverage control of national policy, and unless progressives get focused and view the battle for the states as crucial to America's political future, no amount of change at the federal level will allow us to take our country back.
Why state policy matters
Most progressives fail to realize that state governments collectively have as much--and in some cases, more--power over the issues they care about as the federal government. State and local revenues are about equal to federal tax revenue, and in an era of "flexibility" and "waivers," federal money is increasingly handed over to the states with few strings attached. In explaining conservatives' focus on state legislation, ALEC's Medicaid specialist James Frogue observed, "Innovations and reforms in Medicaid will come from the states. They will not come from D.C."
Most federal civil rights, consumer and employment laws only modify the baseline of rights established by state governments. In fact, only a tiny minority of legal struggles are pursued under federal statutes. Instead, state courts handle roughly 17 million civil cases every year, including contract, tort and real property disputes, the outcome of which turn overwhelmingly on state, not federal, law. Through state law and liability rules, the states regulate trillions of dollars of commerce.
Similarly, while there were 170,535 federal prisoners in 2004, that number is dwarfed by the 1.9 million prisoners in state and local prisons and jails. The criminal sentencing decisions that have decimated a generation of young people in minority communities were made in statehouses, not on Capitol Hill. And one of the least-understood areas of increasing state power is that wielded by public pension funds, which now control $2.7 trillion in financial assets and can shape financial markets with their investment decisions--a fact that the right is all too aware of as they launch campaigns to privatize those pensions.
With all this power in the hands of the states, conservatives recognize that with a coordinated strategy, a movement can govern the nation from the statehouses. States have been vulnerable to this right-wing takeover because most state legislatures are made up of poorly paid, part-time lawmakers with few--if any--staff to research or evaluate the laws they are asked to approve. The lack of resources means there are few staffers in legislatures who can challenge the expertise presented by ALEC and other conservative operatives, or uncover the hidden payoffs for corporate interests contained in legislation. Thus ALEC provides a stealthy, tax-exempt front for corporate interests to sell their ideas directly to statehouse leaders across the country.
At the most obvious level, ALEC gives a "public interest" sheen to the raw special pleading of Big Money before state legislatures. Here are just a few of these recent corporate campaigns:
Backed by the oil industry, ALEC has lined up legislators to lower taxes on gasoline and to undermine regulations aimed at curbing the carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming.
Backed by the drug companies, ALEC has mounted a full-scale campaign to defeat initiatives by cities and states to promote importing lower-priced select medicines from Canada.
Backed by low-wage employers, ALEC has promoted legislation to block local governments from raising local minimum wages or even requiring government contractors to pay a fair wage to their employees.
Backed by the telephone companies, ALEC has worked to bar or hamstring cities that have sought to build cheaper or even free Internet services for their residents.
Backed by the insurance companies, ALEC has been promoting a campaign to stop state insurance commissioners from requiring insurance companies to meet the same accountability and auditing rules that were imposed on publicly-traded corporations in the wake of the Enron debacle.
And ALEC has been advocating cracking down on seniors who shelter income in a home while using Medicaid to finance long term care, a campaign that would force seniors to buy "reverse annuity mortgages," a new financial instrument promoted by ALEC's financial services industry funders.
The right's strategic agenda
Still, if the right-wing movement in the states only amounted to a series of individual profit-driven campaigns, the threat posed by ALEC would merely be one of a slick, well-funded public relations operation, albeit a nasty and effective one.
But the real danger from ALEC and its associated organizations comes from conservatives' aim to structurally undermine the very capacities of government that restrain corporate power and to fuel campaigns that fracture progressive alliances and political power.
Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and arguably the premiere right-wing strategist, has famously described the conservative goal as cutting government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." Key to that objective is cutting tax revenues and using constitutional limits on state taxing powers to make it politically impossible to fund social needs through government action. This strategy serves not just to limit progressive policy but, by creating a limited pool of funds, pits progressive groups against each other in a fight for resources.
Conservatives also aim to shut down the enforcement of business regulations across the states. The very success of state attorneys general in bringing tobacco and financial firms to heel has led to a backlash to limit the power of attorneys general. And where citizens have the ability to enforce regulations in the courts, the right has been gutting those citizens' legal powers. For example, one of the first acts of Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration was forcing through restrictions on the state labor code's Private Attorney General Act, which had given advocates greater power to enforce the state's labor laws.
In the last few years, no issue has consumed corporate America more than shutting the courtroom door to plaintiffs injured by corporate malfeasance under the campaign of "tort reform." Damage awards have been limited and judges have increasingly been granted the right to exclude evidence of corporate wrongdoing by limiting plaintiff witnesses. This is done through the banning of so-called "junk science," with an often-politically connected judge (rather than the jury) getting to decide which witnesses are credible. The end result of this campaign is to make it nearly impossible for poor plaintiffs to get a day in court or to prevent a judge from overturning any judgment in their favor.
Another key strategy for the corporate right is privatization, a strategy that both undermines labor standards for government services and opens the labor market to corporate profiteering. The conservative-induced budget crises in many states have served to help this process along. In 2002, ALEC co-wrote a report with the Manhattan Institute that made privatization a key solution for balancing state budgets. They proposed that Medicaid be replaced with private Medical Savings Accounts and public schools be funded with vouchers. Similarly, prison management would be privatized. Name an area of government and conservatives are seeking to hand its operations over to corporate allies who, in turn, can eliminate labor unions and use the profits to fund more campaign contributions to their political machine.
A special case of privatization has been the recent assault on state employee pension funds. In 2005, Alaska passed legislation ending guaranteed pensions for all newly hired state employees in favor of individual accounts, and legislators in California, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Virginia are heading in the same direction.
The most obvious goal is to cut benefits for union workers by ending guaranteed benefits--using exactly the same rhetoric of "choice" that President Bush employed to sell his Social Security privatization scheme at the federal level. But what really enrages conservatives are decisions by trustees of these pension funds to use their shareholder voting power to challenge corporate abuses, such as the pension funds in Ohio, New York and California that voted to divest in firms involved in privatization. And of course, there is the direct payoff to the financial services firms who will end up administering the millions of private accounts in a privatized state pension system and collecting the billions of dollars in fees.
Defunding the left
The shift in control of financial assets from public trustees to private corporations highlights the most pervasive and dangerous goal of the right's campaign in the states: defunding progressive institutions and thereby leaving corporations--and a few religious conservative allies--as the only forces with significant resources in politics.
Take the 2003 legislation passed in Texas that reserved family planning dollars, including those from the federal government, exclusively for healthcare providers that do not offer abortion services or referrals. This kind of proposal, coupled with "gag rules" and "abstinence only" legislation, not only shifts abortion policy, but strips resources from the broader pro-choice community. Similarly, the push for "faith based initiatives" shifts resources from nonprofits embedded in social justice networks to conservative organizations engaged in active conservative politics.
State-based "Right to Work" campaigns were conservatives' original weapons to cut off union dues, one of the primary sources of funding for political campaigns that oppose conservatives day-in and day-out. The present round of attacks is labeled "paycheck protection"--a nice-sounding term for crippling union workers' ability to donate political contributions through workplace deductions.
The whole right-wing attack on the civil justice system also has the effect of cutting the fees for employment and other trial lawyers, who have been strong sources of political funding for progressive causes. Passing tort reforms nationally, Grover Norquist argued back in 1999, takes "a $5-10 billion a year bite out of trial lawyer fees" and shuts down the progressive "get-out-the-vote effort, funded with money from trial lawyers."
By operating at the state level, Norquist et al have successfully avoided the glare of media attention and the full political focus of progressives. It's as if the right is tunneling under the foundation of progressives; by the time the ground--and financial resources--give way, it'll be too late to save the house.
How progressives fight back
So how should progressives respond to this coordinated assault on every level of progressive policy?
The key is to fight back, coordinate our own battles, think as strategically as ALEC and its allies and win back power at the state level. As People for the American Way said in a 2003 report about ALEC: "Progressives need a collaborative and equally coordinated effort to successfully counter ALEC's influence, expose its corporate and right-wing ties, and defeat dangerous proposals launched by this 'common enemy.'"
While many grassroots efforts have continued across the country since that report, progressives have not established the coordinated response that is needed to beat back the right. To do so, we must take three steps.
First, we need to develop a deep national network of progressive legislators supported by grassroots organizations. We have to establish partnerships between national organizations, grassroots activists and state legislators in each state to find state-specific ideas that represent home-grown progressivism. Not only will these networks help bring progressive-minded people together, but they also will serve as a hotbed of information exchange so progressive legislators can equip themselves with all of the information they need to promote progressive bills.
Second, we need to promote a set of popular issues that define the progressive state agenda in the minds of voters. This could include raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, promoting family issues like paid family leave and pre-K education for all children, protecting free speech in the workplace as well as the political realm, and developing an energy independence policy that creates jobs in each state.
Third, we must develop a set of policies that beat back the right-wing attack and turn the tables on conservatives. We should use legislation strategically to highlight the hypocrisy of groups like ALEC and put conservative legislators in the uncomfortable public position of voting either the interests of their corporate patrons or the desires of their constituents.
For instance, recent legislative initiatives in states ranging from Virginia to Michigan to preserve public lands and stop sprawl divide sprawl developers from a broader population that wants both livable communities and green areas for recreation. Similarly, targeting taxpayer subsidies specifically to entrepreneurial businesses that provide a living wage, as progressives have done in a number of cities, challenges conservatives to justify their fealty to low-wage companies. Supporting paid family leave and expanded child care for working parents forces legislators to confront empty "families values" rhetoric.
Ultimately, each strategic issue will reinforce the others, undercutting opposition coalitions while adding new allies to the progressive side, exposing the hypocrisy of the conservative agenda while clarifying the progressive program, and, step-by-step, entrenching progressive power in ways that the right wing will find harder and harder to dislodge.
Progressives need to use every tool of grassroots mobilization to build unity among our side's state legislators and deploy both strong policies and innovative strategies to beat the conservatives at their own game. Our overarching strategy: find the best public policies and champion them with effective and cohesive messaging. That is what the new Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) is all about. It's time to finally end conservatives' dominance of state policy. It is time for progressives to govern from the states.
This article is being published by In These Times in conjunction with the release of PLAN's report, "Governing the Nation from the Statehouses."
Nathan Newman is the policy director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN).
David Sirota is the co-chair of PLAN, and a senior editor at In These Times.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
State needs to do more to keep teachers
Report: State needs to do more to keep teachers from quitting
By JULIET WILLIAMS, Associated Press Writer
Published 12:15 am PST Wednesday, February 15, 2006
SACRAMENTO (AP) - A moderate salary raise for new teachers boosts the chances they'll stay in the profession, but mentoring programs and training are even more effective, according to a new report.
Providing just $4,400 more in annual pay increases the chances an elementary teacher would stay by 17 percent, according to the report released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Teachers who were part of the state's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment program were 26 percent more likely to stay in teaching, according to the study, "Retention of New Teachers in California." The program costs the state about $3,370 per teacher.
The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which co-sponsors the beginning teacher program, has found similar results, said its director, Mike McKibbon.
"It makes an enormous difference in setting up the first two years as place to learn and grow and get better, rather than the way we used to do it, which was kind of a rite of passage," McKibbon said.
Still, money plays a role. The report said teachers in better-paid districts were less likely to leave their jobs or transfer to another district.
The policy institute said nearly a quarter of new hires in California leave the profession within five years, a rate that will make it even harder to fill an anticipated teacher shortage of 100,000 in the next decade.
Unless the state does something to reduce the departures, about one-fourth of new hires will simply be replacing other recently hired teachers who have left public schools. That will leave fewer experienced, highly qualified teachers, the report says.
The report's authors used data that tracked teachers who earned their California teaching certification during the 1990s.
The support program for beginning teachers received about $88 million in state funding this year and has been supported by Democrats and Republicans, McKibbon said.
"To their credit, they've seen beginning teachers as a place for investment," he said.
Other programs to integrate teachers also have shown promise, such as internships in hard-to-staff schools and a program that moves teachers' aides into programs where they can earn a teaching credential. That program has about 2,500 students this year, McKibbon said.
Sen. Jack Scott, D-Altadena, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he was not surprised that the study found mentoring and tutoring programs to be effective.
"I'm convinced that teachers generally are not in the profession for money, and I think the more strengthening we can do, the more mentoring from seasoned teachers, the better," Scott said.
Earlier this month, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said he will sponsor legislation to spend $53 million for teacher coaches in the state's lowest-performing schools.
He also encouraged financial incentives to recruit teachers to work in those schools and said the state should reopen teacher-recruitment centers that were closed during budget cuts several years ago.
####
Another thing the politicians could do is to stop blaming teachers for the failures of the Governor and the legislature to adequately fund the schools. When you finance the schools at 44th. in the nation, you are going to get achievement at about 44 in the nation. Then politicians, who have done nothing, particularly Republicans, trash the schools.
By JULIET WILLIAMS, Associated Press Writer
Published 12:15 am PST Wednesday, February 15, 2006
SACRAMENTO (AP) - A moderate salary raise for new teachers boosts the chances they'll stay in the profession, but mentoring programs and training are even more effective, according to a new report.
Providing just $4,400 more in annual pay increases the chances an elementary teacher would stay by 17 percent, according to the report released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Teachers who were part of the state's Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment program were 26 percent more likely to stay in teaching, according to the study, "Retention of New Teachers in California." The program costs the state about $3,370 per teacher.
The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which co-sponsors the beginning teacher program, has found similar results, said its director, Mike McKibbon.
"It makes an enormous difference in setting up the first two years as place to learn and grow and get better, rather than the way we used to do it, which was kind of a rite of passage," McKibbon said.
Still, money plays a role. The report said teachers in better-paid districts were less likely to leave their jobs or transfer to another district.
The policy institute said nearly a quarter of new hires in California leave the profession within five years, a rate that will make it even harder to fill an anticipated teacher shortage of 100,000 in the next decade.
Unless the state does something to reduce the departures, about one-fourth of new hires will simply be replacing other recently hired teachers who have left public schools. That will leave fewer experienced, highly qualified teachers, the report says.
The report's authors used data that tracked teachers who earned their California teaching certification during the 1990s.
The support program for beginning teachers received about $88 million in state funding this year and has been supported by Democrats and Republicans, McKibbon said.
"To their credit, they've seen beginning teachers as a place for investment," he said.
Other programs to integrate teachers also have shown promise, such as internships in hard-to-staff schools and a program that moves teachers' aides into programs where they can earn a teaching credential. That program has about 2,500 students this year, McKibbon said.
Sen. Jack Scott, D-Altadena, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he was not surprised that the study found mentoring and tutoring programs to be effective.
"I'm convinced that teachers generally are not in the profession for money, and I think the more strengthening we can do, the more mentoring from seasoned teachers, the better," Scott said.
Earlier this month, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said he will sponsor legislation to spend $53 million for teacher coaches in the state's lowest-performing schools.
He also encouraged financial incentives to recruit teachers to work in those schools and said the state should reopen teacher-recruitment centers that were closed during budget cuts several years ago.
####
Another thing the politicians could do is to stop blaming teachers for the failures of the Governor and the legislature to adequately fund the schools. When you finance the schools at 44th. in the nation, you are going to get achievement at about 44 in the nation. Then politicians, who have done nothing, particularly Republicans, trash the schools.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The State of California Schools: O'Connell
Here is the Superintendent's view of the state of California schools.
Worth reading.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/se/yr06stateofed.asp
Worth reading.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/eo/in/se/yr06stateofed.asp
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