March 20, 2007
MAYOR DALEY MAY HAVE COMPANY:
Spitzer Nears Hospital Deal That Could Isolate Union (JACOB GERSHMAN, March 20, 2007, NY Sun)
Governor Spitzer is moving closer to brokering an agreement on a Medicaid budget framework with the state's largest hospital association, a development that would further isolate the health employees union at a critical stage of negotiations.A deal that is emerging between the Healthcare Association of New York State and Mr. Spitzer is likely to restore a sizable portion of the $1 billion cost-saving measures that the governor put into his executive budget. It's also likely to fall significantly short of the demands made by the 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, which has been leading the charge against Mr. Spitzer's Medicaid agenda.
Putting Students First (JACOB GERSHMAN, March 19, 2007, NY Sun)
Mr. Spitzer this year has made the strategic decision to pick a fight with only one special interest group: the hospital lobby. But without saying so, Mr. Spitzer may be quietly laying the groundwork for his next major battle. For if one follows the governor's logic of "patients first," it's an argument that could just as easily be applied to the education lobby. If it makes sense to distribute Medicaid money based on a principle of "patients first," why doesn't it make sense to distribute education money based on the principle of "students first"?After all, the return on New York's investment in education is just as dismal as its return on Medicaid spending. New York has the second highest per pupil spending rate in the nation, but, as Mr. Spitzer has noted, the state's students have the third lowest graduation rate, just better than Georgia and South Carolina.
It's not that difficult to imagine a Spitzer speech touting the idea of "students first." In January, the governor delivered a speech on his health care budget that began like this:
"Our agenda is based on a single premise: patients, not institutions, must be at the center of our health care system. That means that every decision, every initiative and every investment we make must be designed to suit the needs of patients first. The result will be a high-quality health care system at a price we can all afford."
With just a few adjustments, a "students first" speech would read like this:
"Our agenda is based on a single premise: students, not school districts and unions, must be at the center of our education system. That means that every decision, every initiative and every investment we make must be designed to suit the needs of students first. The result will be a high-quality education system at a price we can all afford."
Underpinning "students first" would be the idea that the money follows the student -- whether it be to a charter school or a private school -- instead of automatically flowing to the school districts and teachers.
New York does not -- at least not yet -- operate under this concept, which is freighted with an ideological "school choice" stigma that doesn't have a health care parallel. While student demand for charter schools has increased, the state tightly controls the supply of the schools.
A Democrat willing to break the public sector unions in order to Reform entitlements is an immediate presidential contender. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2007 7:58 AM
Except for said Democrat's total inability win the nomination of the party.
Posted by: Brandon at March 20, 2007 11:11 AMstudents, not school districts and unions...
and
Underpinning "students first" would be the idea that the money follows the student -- whether it be to a charter school or a private school -- instead of automatically flowing to the school districts and teachers.
Are variations on the meme that needs to be poured into the meme pool at an accellerated rate.
"Fund students, not systems." (or "Fund students, not districts" )
Over at my site (and on my show) I relentlessly promote those four words, and they resonate with everyone who bothers to think about them for longer than a few seconds.
They also provide a foundation upon which you can launch a rhetorical attack on our decrepit public education system. Further, as you go back and forth with debates and discussion, those words eventually chisel out the obvious and universal school choice answers, which are;
1. Abolish local property taxation for schools
2. Increase State level taxes as necessary to fund each child equally.
(in IL, this results in a net tax cut of $2 bill or so)
3. Abolish the school district, and the unnecessary bureaucracy that fuels cycles of ever increasing taxes for ever increaring staffing.
4. Convert every public school into an indenpendent charter (managed and run by the parents who choose the school, the teachers that work there, and the locally controlled principal they decide upon. (allow each to be a 501c(3) charter, which equalizes the playing field between rich and poor areas.)
5. Fund each child in the state equally at about $7,000/child, with a scholarship to ANY school that meets the testing requirements (see below). Index the amount for inflation, and allow any amount not spent on tuition to be saved for college, tutoring, or remediation.
(the dirty secret is that for what we waste on k-12, we could get K-16, and at a deeper level of knowledge to boot)
6. Create a testing entity independent of the schools and test for acquisition of a broad based, sequenced, and content rich curricula.
Details can be worked out in a complete rewrite of each state's school code - which manages the trasition from a education system that funds fake constructs (districts/bureaucracies) to one the funds children.
___
Note to Dems. Throw the stinking Teachers Unions and Administrator pigs off the bus and enact the above, and you will become the majority party for a generation.
Posted by: Bruno at March 20, 2007 7:29 PM