Vouchers absolutely are a voting issue... Selective memory and posturing aside

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The relevant summary:

Congressional or legislative incumbents generally tout their experience and “stand by their record,” trying to impress voters with the issues they supported and bills they sponsored. This is common and important. We judge whether the legislator represented us adequately and honestly and decide whether to vote for them or not. The current legislative races are following this pattern except for one thing which many incumbents just want you to forget as a “non-issue”…vouchers.

The polls showed that the public overwhelmingly rejected the concept of private school vouchers before, during, and after the referendum debate. The legislators who sponsored and voted for vouchers knew the public in general disliked the idea and knew who their dependable campaign donors were.

The legislators then strangely formed their own lobbying fund and lobbied the public using slick Utah Taxpayers Association materials, getting reimbursed for their time, mileage, etc. from the funds donated principally by Patrick Byrne.

In fact, due to lack of grassroots support, Patrick Byrne provided almost all of the funding for PCE’s entire pro-voucher campaign.

Many, many voucher supporters of all stripes based their financial arguments on falsehoods.

The public strongly rejected the flawed idea in the referendum vote. Voucher supporters, both within the legislature and from the general public, proceeded to insult 62% of Utah voters who just “didn’t understand” vouchers and were “afraid.”

The point:

But you are supposed to forget all that and just “move forward.” The voucher vote was a year ago and is not relevant to the election today. Punishing legislators would be wrong. Just look at their record…except for vouchers. After years of stagnation, they voted to actually educate the large percentage of new student growth as well as increase school funding during two of the three largest budget surplus years in the history of the state of Utah, so all that other stuff doesn’t matter…especially vouchers. Forget the fact that more moderate legislators would have voted for those same measures AND listened to their constituents by rejecting vouchers. And really, you shouldn’t evaluate many incumbents’ entire anti-public-education attitude continued by the omnibus bill, corporate-handout laptops for preschoolers, $190,000 a year spent on additional bureaucracy just to spite a State Board of Education employee who dared run for public office against Greg Hughes, and successful manipulation of the State School Board election process. Ignore the double standard when candidates rightly disagree with their opponents' records, but expect you to ignore theirs. (That is an affliction common to all politicians of all political parties, but especially prevalent this year in regards to vouchers.) And ignore the extremism dominating much of the public policy discussion in our legislature, such as Senator Stephenson believing public education is "socialism." (The last two paragraphs of the post.)

Speaker of the House Greg Curtis has said vouchers are dead under his watch. Senate President Valentine said he thinks Utah voters would “support vouchers with the right information.” (i.e. bad numbers and propaganda…) Both my House Rep. and my State Senator have told me they would vote for vouchers again if it came up. People in the audience at the Utah County Republican Convention this year agitated for vouchers, and the only organization I remember having a booth in the display room along with the candidates was Parents for Choice in Education. That group continues to pour out-of-state money into legislative races this year to further their agenda. But don’t worry. Just trust your legislator that it will be all right. House Majority Whip, Dave Clark, for example:

"I don't know why folks keep dragging (the issue) up," Clark said. "To waste so much time looking backward when we have so many challenges ahead of us is a poor, poor direction."

Learning from the past is poor judgment. Got it.

Education is a voting issue! It is a cornerstone of our democracy and accounts for over half of the tax money spent in this state. Vouchers are a wealthy subsidy that would erode that funding for public schools. Basing a large part of your voting decisions on the differences between candidates’ positions on education—including vouchers—is prudent morally and financially. Don’t listen to vague name-calling and discussions of “one-issue” voters meant to divert attention from the many dismal legislative records in support of public education.

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September Tribune article detailing some of PCE's donations to candidates in '08 legislative races

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All of the underlined passages, italic text, and the extra comment in brackets were added by me:


http://www.sltrib.com/ci_10432268

Voucher battle carries into this year's elections

By Robert Gehrke
The Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated: 09/10/2008 10:10:45 PM MDT

Posted: 9:40 PM- The echoes of last year's voucher fight are still ringing, as both sides in that pitched battle continue to slug it out in this election.
Parents For Choice in Education, the leading backer of the failed voucher proposal, has spent nearly $200,000 on expenses such as polling, mailers and fundraising in an effort to defend legislators who championed their cause, including endangered House Speaker Greg Curtis.
"We continue to be supportive of legislators who work for [education] solutions and vouchers are one of them," said Judi Clark, executive director of Parents for Choice in Education. "We don't want last year's defeat . . . to be a catalyst to stop them from doing the great work they are doing."
Nearly 99 percent of the $222,000 Parents for Choice raised came from two sources: Overstock.com entrepreneur Patrick Byrne and Michigan-based advocacy group All Children Matter.[I.E. Patrick Byrne, Amway, and Wal-Mart are still fighting for vouchers in Utah.]
The Utah Education Association, meantime, has invested nearly $100,000 this year, much of it going to the campaigns of challengers looking to knock off the same legislators PCE is defending, and mobilizing its troops for the ground war.
"We're going to be as active as we can afford to be and we're going to play in races where we feel our involvement can make a difference," said Vik Arnold, director of government affairs for the teachers' union.
Parents For Choice, meantime, spent thousands of dollars on phone banks to identify potential voters and raise funds for their legislative backers. The group provided more than $5,000 in phone banks and voter lists to Curtis and gave a $2,000 contribution to Senate President John Valentine.
Legislators like Reps. Craig Frank, Steve Sandstrom, Steve Urquhart and others received phone bank services, and more than a dozen others received direct contributions to their campaign.
The group's biggest expenditure was $105,000 spent on polling between the months of February and June. Clark said the group was testing the public's response to various education reforms and also doing some voter identification work.
"We were really seeing in Utah what are people's major concerns and what are some ideas" they would be receptive to, she said.
The group provided more than $7,000 in phone bank calls to try to get out the vote for Rep. Glen Donnelson and Rep. Paul Neuenschwander, but it wasn't enough for either to make it through the primaries. Each lost to his UEA-backed Republican opponent, Ryan Wilcox and Becky Edwards, respectively.
"We're obviously sad to lose Representatives Donnelson and Neunschwander. They'd done good things for education as well as all of their constituents," said Clark.
Rep. Carl Wimmer said Parents for Choice set up phone banks to help his campaign raise money to help stave off a challenge from Dave Hogue, a former Republican legislator who changed parties to run for his old seat.
Wimmer said he expects Hogue to try to beat him up over his support for vouchers, but he says it will "be a non-issue."
"I won my last election with 66 percent of the vote and I campaigned in favor of school choice. Everyone in my district knew I supported school choice and they voted for me," he said. "So its obviously not as big of a wedge issue as the Democrats and my opponent think it is."
UEA, meantime, bought $1,000 worth of signs to help Hogue's campaign.
In many cases, the UEA-backed candidate was running against an incumbent who had voted for vouchers.
"For the most part, it is fair to say that [the voucher vote] was a litmus test, it always has been and it will continue to be," said Arnold.

Education is a voting issue in local 2008 races!

I generally agree with the idea that our state is generally well-run fiscally. I am very happy that we have a Rainy Day Fund earning interest and that $100 million in education money was set aside last session. I was fully supportive of the special session and saving the money through ongoing cuts when the forecasts are for state revenues to only get worse.

That said, how would voting for non-incumbents in local races lessen that emphasis on fiscal responsibility? In my opinion—not much at all. The moderate Republicans and many of the Democrats in this state would be hardcore Republicans in other states, while many local Republican legislators like Howard Stephenson and Craig Frank would be marginalized Libertarians. And most of the challengers can only be more trustworthy, more courteous, and more representative than Stephenson, Frank, Curtis, Hughes, Bramble, Buttars, etc.

Thus I feel free to search for candidates who more closely represent my views. It is possible to find legislators who better represent moderate viewpoints and avoid silly partisan power games. It is possible to find legislators who are both supportive of the ideals of public education AND fiscally responsible. Don’t buy into the false dichotomy being preached by many local incumbents: vote for me or Utah’s government will fall to Godless, spend-happy socialists.

Many legislators speak out of both sides of their mouth, constantly explaining how they are handcuffed because the state invests a high percentage of its revenue in education, but then dismissively trying to label voters who prioritize education as “single-issue voters.” Education spending accounts for over half of the money spent by the state government, so why shouldn’t it be at least half of voters’ criteria when selecting candidates? If new legislators would continue the good policies of our current legislature, but support public schools rather then attack them or manipulate their funding through suspect bills, I view it as a moral duty to vote for them.

These are some education issues that I believe are important both in their specific implementation and their longterm ramifications:

1. The voucher debacle willingly undertaken against the wishes of the people.

2. The omnibus education bill passed last session, SB 2, which abused all notions of good government ( besides being unconstitutional according to the Utah State Constitution) by stockpiling popular bills, and then rolling them together with pet projects of the influential Howard Stephenson on the 2nd to last day of the legislative session and passing the whole lot with little debate on the last day.

3. The constant chipping away of the citizens’ right to bypass or overrule those elected to represent them through initiatives and referendums like the one that overturned the voucher law. One of those unconstitutional laws passed this year, SB 53, which took away the right of the people to contest political bodies’ decisions on land use and was just overturned by the state supreme court, could also cost tens of thousands of dollars beyond what the state already wasted defending it if the complainants get their money reimbursed. I fear they have a great case.

4. Legislators lying about voucher opponents and costs (The USU Study), current school expenditures, and their views on public education.

5. Legislators not reading relevant materials to bills they’re discussing or actually visiting schools with programs they are discussing, but instead making decisions about education in Utah based on kook, conspiracist websites for information.

Get informed! Vote!


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School Board District 1 candidate oddities and redux on the fraudulent USU tuition tax study commissioned by the legislature to cook the voucher #'s

When reviewing a Paul Rolly article column this weekend for my discussion of District 8, I saw another little detail I had forgotten. He said that one of the authors of the USU tuition tax study from 2004 was running for state school board in District 1. Checking the state election site shows that Roberta Herzberg was supposedly "eliminated," but Sara Brate's rundown of the committee votes shows that she dropped out sometime previous to the June 2 committee meeting. The Rolly column is from April 16th, so she was assumably still in the race then. (No guarantees with Rolly...) Does anyone know what happened or why she dropped out?

FYI paragraph: District 1 incumbent Teresa Theurer was given a low score by the voting committee, despite getting 64% of the public vote in 2006. As that last link explains, Governor Huntsman in June just cut the person scored lowest by his biased committee from the ballot. I don't personally know anything about Teresa Theurer. Tom at KVNU, whose commentary I valued even when I didn't agree with him, said "Teresa is one of the most brilliant public officials I’ve ever met." I think a public official should be able to stand for re-election. A politically appointed committee filtering the candidates has corrupted the process in my opinion. You can listen to a podcast of a KVNU interview with Theurer on June 3rd here--I think I remember it's in the 2nd hour. I'll try and listen again soon and find what minute the interview starts.

So I found the entire process in District 1 frustrating. I'm personally glad Roberta Herzberg dropped out, and I want to highlight her study again. Here's the link to the study, posted at the Parent's for Choice in Education website. The authoring information is on page 4. The Executive summary begins by explaining the fight over vouchers and tuition tax credits in 2003 and 2004. It argues the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's (LFA) estimates of "switch rates" and cost are faulty. They said the LFA set the variable or marginal cost per student in 2003 at $2,793.

The next paragraph reads:

While these estimates flowed from the best existing information available under the time constraints, they were deemed inadequate to inform debate on such a critical issue. Based on the desire to have a more complete measure of the impact of the proposed policy change, Utah’s Legislative Management Committee commissioned this study. Over the course of the last four months, a team of scholars from Utah State University and Southern Utah University designed an econometric simulation model and qualitative studies of the effects of implementing tuition tax credits (TTC) on Utah educational demand and supply decisions. This report contains the results of that effort.

Translation: The legislature didn't like the truth so casually stated by their own employees (the legislative fiscal analysts), so they found some professors willing to cook up something a little more complicated. I don't know what exactly an econometric simulation model is, but I do know "qualitative" studies are not appropriate measures of exact figures of dollars and cents. "Quantitative" studies, as you might guess from the name, are the types of studies that can measure exact numbers and figures.

Focusing just on the financial aspects of the study, here is the cost conclusion from the Executive Summary (I underlined two sentences for emphasis):

A second consideration critical to good decision making with respect to this policy is an estimate of the costs associated with a student coming into or leaving the public school system. The legislature needs to know how much will be saved, at the margin, if a student is induced to make an educational choice outside of the Utah public school system. This value is known to economists as marginal cost. We estimate marginal cost per weighted pupil unit (WPU) in 2002-2003 to be $8,675 for the typical Utah school district. All Utah school districts have estimated marginal costs in the range of $7,700 to $10,350. It is a testament to the worthiness of our schools that they invest so much in each additional student. But, this is then also the value that the state and local districts can be expected to save from public school appropriations if a single student leaves a publicly funded school. This figure significantly exceeds per student spending (which was about $6,500 in 2002) or spending per WPU which was just under $6,000 in 2003 (economists call these measures average total cost). This is to be expected and is a natural result of school district managers doing their job well. The principle behind marginal cost is the cost of producing one additional (or one less) unit of output from the current level of production. This is critical to decision making because all decisions are fundamentally about changing production from one level to another. In this case, Utah is concerned about how a tuition tax credit will change enrollments and costs from their current level. The cost of those changes is the basis for making decisions. Costs not related to that change are irrelevant to a decision about change; however, they may be important for evaluating overall business performance.

The authors throw around the term WPU very casually. To clarify, the Weighted Pupil Unit (WPU) is the amount the state government sends each district per student. (Be sure to read the 2nd paragraph of that link closely. In 2002, it was $2116 per student. Substantially more is sent for Special Ed. and ESL students. The $6500 per student spending figure above is calculated the same way the Utah Taxpayer’s Association calculated the $7200 per student for the voucher debate last year: it includes money not gathered by the state and costs spent on every imaginable expense related to education, including fixed costs such as those incurred by individual districts to build new schools. For example, they divide out the $20 million or so being spent to build the new high school in Saratoga Springs into a portion per student for the entire state and pretend that the state somehow saves that money by a kid from St. George going to private school.

So follow the logic. In 2002, the state of Utah sent each district $2116 for the average student. If you throw in all of the federal, district, and trustlands money NOT sent by the state, but spent on fixed cost programs throughout the entire state, you can get a total spent per student figure of $6200. (See the argument about school construction above, or think of this: when the school buys a computer for a lab, it does not get a pro-rated refund when one of the hundreds of kids who use that computer leaves the school. The money is spent.) This study actually claimed that when that same student left the district to attend private school, the district magically saved $8675. Wow. It’s easy!! Just enroll kids in the district and pay them $2116. Then take the kids back out and charge the district $8675. Budget crisis solved, plenty of money to fund vouchers, and public school system severely weakened or dissolved as this “magic money” keeps being deducted. If you want to see the abstracted figures the authors use to destroy logic, it starts around page 45 of the study.

I saw the $1 billion savings figure floated regularly in PCE ads and in letters from Senator Valentine and Representative Curtis. (The blog that had the copy of the letter deleted all of its voucher stuff. Does anyone have a link or copy of that letter lying around? The one in the last day or two before the vote.) They were based on these lies. Many voucher supporters believe them still today. Senator Dayton never read the study. I'm doubting many other legislators did either. I used a strong word in my title and I stand by it: educational fraud.

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The Tribune's excellent editorial on Legislative Lawyer Legerdermain (Omnibus lawsuit)

This worries me. Did any of the legislature's lawyers voice concerns about the constitutionality of SB2 before it ran? Could they be called to testify under oath and reveal what discussions they had while drafting the bill? Not if they are safely under the shield as part of the defense's legal team.

The Tribune clearly and rationally explained various possible ramifications of a seemingly small decision about which lawyers can participate in the defense of the SB2 lawsuit. Amen, Trib editorial board...amen.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_10356916

More machinations: Legislators should stay out of SB2 lawsuit
Tribune Editorial
Article Last Updated: 09/02/2008 08:55:59 AM MDT

A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of an omnibus education bill passed by this year's Legislature has been delayed and muddied by a legislative committee, headed by Senate President John Valentine and House Speaker Greg Curtis, who want to get legislative attorneys involved.
It's a complicated legal maneuver, and we don't pretend to understand all its ramifications and the legal underpinnings. But two things are clear: A legislative committee cannot speak for the entire Legislature (some legislators are plaintiffs in the suit), and the state attorney general needs no help defending the case. Further, involving legislative attorneys in defending Senate Bill 2 could unfairly undermine the lawsuit.
For these reasons, we feel the attorney general's office, alone, should defend the case. After all, the attorney general is, according to the Utah Constitution, the lead defense attorney when a Utah law is challenged. Furthermore, Mark Shurtleff, in his capacity as attorney general, is named as a defendant.
Legislative attorneys work for the Legislature to craft legislation, and their testimony might be valuable to determine the history of SB2 as the lawsuit goes forward. If they are part of the defense team, they probably would be barred from testifying.
And we can believe that might be the motive behind the move by the legislative management committee, since the history of SB2 has been one of back-room political maneuvering from the beginning. Its sponsors have an interest in keeping that history from public view.
Congress has long used omnibus bills to hide undesirable initiatives among many others thrown together at the last minute. Utah legislators unwisely followed that model, introducing the huge education bill two days before the session ended.
Many of its 12 portions had already been debated and voted on as separate bills before SB2 lumped them together. There was no good reason to package them except as a way for the legislative leadership to get unpopular bills passed that otherwise would have been, or already had been, defeated.
Omnibus legislation is a devious way to govern, lumping bills together so they are not debated and voted upon on their own merits. The way this omnibus bill was passed is an underhanded way to make public policy, and so is the attempt to thwart the legal challenge against it.