The New York City school system performed a fascinating experiment over the past three years. The goal: to see if paying bonuses to school teachers and staff might spur educators to change how they teach enough to improve students’ educational achievement. There are some object lessons for Virginia, where legislators bandy about the idea of performance bonuses as an option for school reform.
The city set aside a $50 million pot of money to be distributed over three years to 200 or so schools (the precise number varied from year to year). The goal was to test the proposition that an incentive pay system would motivate educators to change their practices to ones more likely to improve student achievement, explains the Rand Corporation in a report, “A Big Apple for Educators,” summarizing the program.
Three years and $50 million years later, the measured effect on student achievement was indiscernible. But that doesn’t mean the experiment was a failure — it yielded knowledge on how not to structure a performance plan.
Given the egalitarian ethos of educators in New York City schools, roughly two-thirds of the schools chose to divvy up their bonus, if they won it, between all teachers and staff, regardless of individual performance. Thus, the bonus amounted to roughly $3,000 per person. Even schools that differentiated between individuals on the basis of absences or unsatisfactory staff ratings “generally remained cautious about deviating from egalitarian awards,” Rand reports, and slated 74% of the staff for the modal award amount. In other words, nearly all the bonus money was paid for collective performance.
Here’s the real kicker: While teachers and staff expressed a strong desire to win bonuses, “many winners reported that, after taxes, the bonus seemed insignificant. In fact, almost one-half of the teachers … indicated that the bonus was not large enough to motivate extra effort.” Consequently, Rand reports, the bonuses had no effect on teacher-reported attitudes, perceptions and behaviors, and they had no effect on student standardized test scores.
Bacon’s bottom line: If you want to improve performance by motivating teacher to intensify their individual effort, you need to make the bonuses big enough to matter. Spreading around the bonuses to everyone in the school is plain idiocy if you don’t have a clear alternative model you’re coaxing them to buy into. Just handing out money and hoping for the best doesn’t work.
How Disadvantaged Schools Use Title I Funds Government Accountability Office
School districts mainly use their federal Title I funds for improving student-teacher ratios, extending instructional time, professional development and the purchase of technology.
Putting Washington Money to Work for Washington Demos
Parking state tax revenues in a Washington Investment Trust, not the big money center banks, will underwrite the expansion of business in the state of Washington.
I’m normally not one for sermonizing. Hellfire-and-damnation preachers have been lamenting the moral decline of America for the past, oh, 300 years, and yet we survive. But sometimes I wonder. Could our country be experiencing a moral decline? It certainly feels so.
Let me make one point really clear. I don’t equate “moral” decline with a decline in god-fearing religion. I am, after all, an atheistic-leaning agnostic. But one can be an atheist-agnostic and still lament the disparagement of the old bourgeois virtues as enshrined in the University of Virginia’s honor code — you shall not lie, cheat or steal — and find despair in the normalization of depraved behavior. Let me offer four data points from the headlines of today and yesterday that inspired this jeremiad.
Teachers in Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Houston stand accused of boosting standardized test scores by such means as correcting student papers and even helping students cheat themselves. As scary as the cheating itself is the excuse-making that followed. Said one Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, as quoted in the Washington Times: “The teachers and principals who changed test scores did something unethical and probably illegal, [but they were] caught between a rock and a hard place. We’ve created a climate that corrupted the educational process. The sole goal of education … became boosting scores by any mean necessary.”
That’s right — the cheaters are really victims of society’s unreasonable expectations. It comes as little surprise, then, that the American Association of School Administrators decided not to retract the “Superintendent of the Year” award given to Atlanta school superintendent, Beverly Hall, in 2009. “No charges have been brought,” said an AASA official. “There’s no conclusive evidence that she’s been found guilty of any kind of unethical behavior.”
A related phenomenon is the spread of plagiarism, which happens to be the topic of an essay by Thomas Bertonneau, a professor of comparative literature:
Plagiarism is one more index of the long- heralded Decline of the West. More and more students go to college; fewer and fewer of them are actually capable of rising to the higher learning. Colleges and universities, operating by the enrollment economy, actively seek students and bend or ignore admissions criteria to recruit them in numbers. Aggressively cynical and uncivilized, the popular culture promotes crass self-interest and narcissism.
The sitting vice president of the U.S.A. once, when a senator, plagiarized a campaign speech from his British member-of-Parliament counterpart, but he is the sitting vice president of the U.S.A. … Rampant plagiarism is an alarming moral problem. The destruction of shame makes theft and fraud thinkable options for an increasing number of students.
Ah, the destruction of shame. I think Bertonneau is on to something. The trait of being “non-judgmental” is widely deemed a prime virtue today. But when no one judges another’s behavior, shame disappears. When shame disappears, society loses its main sanction against all manner of vice.
Now, let’s move on to the normalization of depravity. The Huffington Post‘s “weird news” carries a story about the arrest of three brothers in a small Minnesota community for allegedly murdering their mother. States the account: “Jacob Cobb, 17, allegedly strangled mom Tamara Lee Mason on the living room floor when she suggested that her sons play the board game [Yahtzee] … last Christmas.” The boys hid their mother’s remains in a garbage can in a shed until the frozen ground softened enough to bury her in the backyard.
“It is very strange,” said Stevens County Sheriff Randy Willis. “She wanted to play Yahtzee and they didn’t. That seemed to be, in their minds, what expedited her sudden demise.”
Weird? Strange? It strikes me that we have raised a generation of sociopaths. These weren’t urban youth raised in a single-family household with a crack whore for a mother, whose despicable behavior would inspire all manner of excuse-making and cries for forgiveness. They were (to all appearances) small-town, middle class kids.
One final story, this one also from the HuffPo: A Southern California woman was arrested for cutting off the penis of her estranged husband. Catherine Kieu Becker allegedly prepared dinner for her husband and drugged him to make him drowsy. While he slept, she tied him to the bed. When he awakened, she cut his penis off with a knife — and here’s the piece de resistance — “threw it into the garbage disposal, turning it on as she did so.”
It has been nearly 20 years since the infamous Lorena Bobbitt chopped off her husband’s penis in a fit of spontaneous rage. A jury found her not guilty due to insanity arising from sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Her husband, Wayne Bobbitt, had his penis surgically reattached and proceeded to take a feature role in two porn movies. His brief porn career lead to a stint on World Wrestling Federation’s Monday Night Raw television program in the company of another porn star who had almost had his penis dismembered.
The Bobbitts gave us a two-fer — (1) a jury could not hold Lorena responsible for her action on the grounds of temporary insanity, and (2) the absence of shame in our culture enabled her violent, philandering husband to trade on his notoriety. After two decades of therapeutic blame avoidance, Ms. Becker’s case has not inspired anywhere near the shock and controversy that the Bobbitts’ did. Indeed, where Lorena threw her husband’s penis out the car window, she at least felt remorseful enough to later retrieve it. By contrast, Ms. Becker, tossed the offending organ in the garbage disposal, flipped the switch and then, when the police arrived, told them that her husband “deserved it.”
In mining the rich vein of dishonesty and corruption, I would be remiss not to mention Wall Street, a moral cesspool if ever there was one. The new ethic in America’s financial sector today: “If it’s not illegal, it’s OK.” Even if it is illegal, serve your time in jail, give a portion of your ill-gotten gains to charity and hire a publicist to get you on television. We are, after all, a country without shame. We will eagerly rehabilitate anyone’s reputation (unless the offender is a politician of the opposing party, in which case the old rules still apply).
What, then, becomes of a country in which educators set the most reprehensible example for our youth, in which the most successful know no bounds in their quest for the accumulation of wealth? What becomes of a society in which no one can be trusted and, therefore, no one trusts one another? What becomes of a country that has not only defined deviance down, but has all but abandoned the idea that deviance even exists? Is there any hope for us?
Standard & Poors takes Moody’s threat to downgrade U.S. debt if there’s no deal and goes a step further, saying, in effect, that while it believes the political class will come to some sort of deal, not all deals are created equal:
Congress and the Administration might also settle for a smaller increase in the debt ceiling, or they might agree on a plan that, while avoiding a near-term default, might not, in our view, materially improve our base case expectation for the future path of the net general government debt-to-GDP ratio. U.S. political debate is currently more focused on the need for medium-term fiscal consolidation than it has been for a decade. Based on this, we believe that an inability to reach an agreement now could indicate that an agreement will not be reached for several more years. We view an inability to timely agree and credibly implement medium-term fiscal consolidation policy as inconsistent with a ‘AAA’ sovereign rating, given the expected government debt trajectory noted above.
That would seem to indicate that if all parties concerned adopt Mitch McConnell’s “Plan B,” which would shift responsibility for debt ceiling increases to the President and avoid any serious changes to either spending or the tax code, S&P will likely downgrade U.S. debt within 90 days.
But one thing that has gotten lost in all the hand-waving, petulance and posturing over the debt ceiling is that none of the plans past, present or future would really cause spending to go down. As the Richmond Time-Dispatch reminds us this morning, even that draconian, world-ending plan from Rep. Paul Ryan would see federal spending continue to increase, though at a slower rate than that proposed by the President:
You might not have heard this from the president’s cheerleaders in the establishment media, but nobody in power has proposed to shrink the federal budget. Nobody. The current federal budget totals about $3.8 trillion. The Republican proposal, from Rep. Paul Ryan, would raise spending to $4.7 trillion over the next decade. Obama wants to raise it to $5.7 trillion. The fight is not over whether to raise spending — but by how much.
Mind you, those increases would come on top of the already staggering recent growth of the federal budget — which stood at $2.9 trillion just three years ago. Spending has ballooned 30 percent, and Republicans agree to grow it more.
In short, no one in Congress or the White House is talking about using honest math.
TANF Block Grants No Model for Entitlement Reform Center for Budgetary and Policy Priorities
Conservatives have lauded Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grants to the states as a model for entitlement reform. But the program has failed to keep up with needs during the recession and its aftermath.
For long-time followers of the Rebellion, Norm Leahy needs no introduction. But in case you’re relatively new to the blog, Norm is one Virginia’s longest-running and most illustrious bloggers, and the Rebellion had the good fortune to have him contribute columns in the days of yore. As part of our re-launch, we are expanding the number of contributors, and I invited Norm to join our stable of authors to add some libertarian heft to the commentary.
Along the way, Norm has blogged for One Man’s Trash and Tertium Quids before striking out on his own at The Score Radio Network. He will cross-post some of his posts from The Score.
(Norm, when you take a new photo of yourself with your hair combed…. let us know.)
States Will Save Money Under Obamacare Urban Institute
The Affordable Care Act is a good deal for the 50 states. Overall, they could save $90 billion over five years. But the specifics vary by state and region. Virginia will spend more $0.9 billion on Medicaid while savings from uncompensated care could range from $500 million to $1.1 billion.
Update on Documenting Violence against Women Government Accountability Office
You thought combating violence against women was hard? Just try coordinating the gathering of statistics about violence against women!
Peter Orszag, President Obama’s former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) chief, has finally come around to my way of thinking. His new thesis, explicated on Bloomberg.com, is almost identical to one of the core arguments I made in Boomergeddon, to wit, that the economy has entered a business cycle marked by tepid economic growth and that an anemic expansion will push budget deficits higher than forecast over the next several years.
Too bad he didn’t think that way back when he was running OMB and had some influence over President Obama, the stimulus package and health care reform. Oh, well. Better late than never.
Pardon me while I gloat. After all, gloating is really all I have. I’m not influencing national policy like Orszag did, nor am I making zillions of dollars on Wall Street, like Orszag, now vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, is now doing. I have to take my pleasures where I can find them.
In Boomergeddon, I critiqued the economic-growth assumptions embedded in the 10-year budget forecast that accompanied Obama’s proposed FY 2011 budget. I compared the projected growth rate of the United States economy, prepared by Orszag’s team, with that of previous business cycles under Reagan, Clinton and Bush. The Obama forecast assumed a business cycle that would almost equal those of the super-heated Reagan/Bush I and Clinton, Internet-era expansions. While most mainstream economists found that to be perfectly plausible at the time, I did not.
It was clear to me that the collapse of the real estate boom marked the end of massive consumer borrowing — the end of the era of mass overconsumption, to use a phrase bandied about this blog. Consumer spending, which had fueled the previous three economic expansions, would be a drag. It was equally clear that there was a massive overhang of bad debt in the real estate markets, both residential and commercial. Those critical sectors also would be laggards. I also foresaw that state/local government spending would remain depressed for longer than normal during the business cycle, and I predicted that inflation in commodity prices (energy, raw materials, food) would exercise a dampening effect on expansion earlier in the business cycle than in the past. Finally, as any doofus could have foretold, federal fiscal and monetary stimulus would have to end, and when it did, the economy would lose even more momentum.
That doesn’t sound especially prescient today — those are basically the factors that anyone would cite to explain the economy’s lackluster growth. Trouble is, back when I was writing Boomergeddon a year to a year-and-a-half ago, only a handful of gold bugs and other gloom mongers were paying attention to those indicators. Looking toward the longer term, I noted that slower population growth, the steady drift of corporate America toward rent-seeking behavior (competing in the political sphere by seeking subsidies, loan guarantees and favorable regulations instead of through market innovation), the uncertainties created by massive government indebtedness and turmoil in European sovereign bond markets also would depress growth.
What I underestimated, although I did allude to it, was the negative impact of Obama economic policies. For the most part, however, I left Obama’s policies out of the equation because I knew that advancing that argument would ignite the partisan passions of those who would defend the president to the death. It was enough to know, I said, that economic growth would remain depressed no matter who was in charge, and no matter what economic policies they pursued.
So, how did my analysis play out? Listen to Orszag: “If we are in for sluggish growth over the next few years, the labor market won’t be the only aspect of the economy that does worse than official projections; the budget deficit will be significantly bigger as well.” He continues:
The CBO paints a surprisingly auspicious picture of the fiscal shortfall, averaging 3.4 percent of gross domestic product over the next decade and dipping to about 3 percent by 2020. … [The Center for Budgetary and Policy Priorities] predicts a more realistic deficit for the next 10 years of 5.7 percent of GDP under current policies, and hovering around 6 percent toward the end of the decade. The dollar amount of the cumulative deficit over the next decade is projected to exceed $11 trillion.
But the actual picture could be even worse. Just as I asked Chmura Economics & Analytics, a Richmond-based consulting firm, to calculate the fiscal impact of slow economic growth and a late-2010s recession on the budget, Orszag asked Richard Kogan with the CBPP to run a similar exercise.
The CBO assumes economic growth will exceed 3 percent per year from 2012 to 2016 before gradually declining to a bit more than 2 percent in 2021. What if, instead, growth remains at 2 percent to 2.5 percent for the next decade? I asked Kogan to recalculate the budget numbers assuming a constant growth rate of 2.25 percent per year, which seems a plausible hard-slog scenario.
He found that the deficit then averages more than 7 percent of GDP. By 2021, it is more than 8.5 percent of GDP and increasing.
There you have it. All Orszag’s analysis now lacks is an understanding of what happens when interest rates start pushing higher than he was predicting a year and a half ago. That’s when the deficit really goes through the roof. All things considered, the economic thesis of Boomergeddon is holding up remarkably well. If you want to understand the economic dynamics driving the budget crisis today, try reading the analysis of someone (me) who saw what was coming. Order Boomergeddon today. It is incisive yet written in language that any well-read layman can understand.
Has the wave of illegal immigration into the United States crested? Is the flood of undocumented workers one of those problems that, if you wait long enough, just fades away? Michael Barone with the Washington Examiner makes a fascinating case that maybe, just maybe, this contentious matter has run its course.
Consider… The great American job machine is sputtering, which lessens demand for unskilled labor from across the border. Even if it picks back up, spreading use of the federal e-Verify system is cutting down on the hiring of undocumented workers. Meanwhile, the birth rate in Mexico has fallen from seven children per woman on average in 1971 to two in 2010, and living standards in Mexico are rapidly improving. Both trends tend to dry up supply.
Another factor, not noted in Barone’s article, is the increasing cost associated with crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. As violent criminal syndicates take over the business of smuggling workers across the border, Mexicans and Central Americans passing through Mexico run increasing risk of being robbed, kidnapped, extorted or even killed. The criminals create a fear factor that the U.S. Border Patrol never could.
It is entirely possible that more illegals are leaving the U.S. than entering it. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the 2010 illegal population at 11.2 million, down from 12 million at the peak in 2007.
Legal Hispanic migration to the U.S. undoubtedly will continue, and that’s just fine. Hopefully, the declining number of illegals will ease the financial strain on schools, health care facilities and social services. Even better, a shifting supply-and-demand nexus for labor will open up more job opportunities, and perhaps even higher wages, for unskilled Americans.
The budget drama in Washington is bringing out some disturbing character flaws, namely that of Richmond Golden Boy Eric Cantor.
Cantor, the House Majority Leader and a Main Street Republican from Henrico County, has been playing a dangerous game of chicken with Barack Obama and the Democrats over budget deals that would allow the absolutely necessary raising of the federal debt ceiling.
Yet Cantor seems so self-absorbed by his rising political clout, he’s pissing a lot of other people off, too, including, the media says, Speaker of the House John Boehner, a fellow Republican and Cantor’s senior who seems more willing to compromise, which is exactly what is needed at this point.
Cantor seems to love to play Peck’s Bad Boy. He walked out of critical meetings, saying they have to go to the Obama level. Then he declares that “Obama’s thinking is unfathomable to me.” As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank notes, Cantor has gone so far as to adopt the Cantor snarl, in which he raises his upper lip in disgust and snaps out, “That is laughable on its face.”
Boy Wonder is working hard to play to the Tea Party crowd that had dissed him in last year’s elections as a mere toadie to the big business interests which is exactly what he is. So, our “Young Gun” is trying to out-Tea Party the Tea Party by stubornly refusing any tax hikes which will be need to resolve the budget crisis. You can’t solve the problem through cuts along. That’s like denying a dying man blood.
What we’re now getting is Young Eric, the Spoiled Little Rich Boy of Richmond who was raised in such sheltered, privileged environments as Richmond’s private Collegiate School that oozes entitlement and provincial power. Cantor has never had to face a critical media — The Richmond Times-Dispatch is in his pocket. His wife is on the board of directors of Media General.
Apparently, back when he was graduating from Collegiate, Cantor chose for his yearbook quote: “I want what I want when I want it.”
His district, Virginia and the nation deserve a lot better than this behavior. The stakes are way too high.
In the 1990s, the “it” sector for state and regional economic development was semiconductors. In the 2000s, it was biotech. Today, it’s the “clean, “green,” or low-carbon sector, defined as businesses that produce goods and services with an environmental benefit. Everybody wants a piece of clean tech these days. And now a new Brookings Institution report not only extols the virtues of clean tech but advises state, local and federal governments on how to get more of it.
Clean tech matters for many reasons. It is manufacturing- and export-intensive, it pays well, and it creates opportunities for relatively low- and middle-skilled workers. It rides a wave of global demand, creating long-term growth opportunities. Moreover, clean tech is inherently virtuous: It can help solve the planet’s pressing environmental problems.
In “Sizing the Clean Economy: a National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment,” Brookings suggests that the federal government can encourage clean tech by (1) catalyzing domestic demand for low-carbon and environmentally oriented goods and services; (2) addressing the serious shortage of affordable, risk-tolerant and larger-scale capital that impedes the scale-up of clean economy industry segments; and (3) driving innovation by investing in the clean-economy innovation system.
States can improve the information base about local clean economy industry clusters and support regionally crafted initiatives for advancing them. Regions should seek to understand the local clean economy in detail, identify competitive strengths, and formulate “bottom up” strategies for overcoming constraints to cluster growth.
Before state and local governments jump onto the clean tech bandwagon, however, it helps to know if they are starting from scratch (not such a great idea) or building on existing strengths. According to Brookings, Virginia is not exactly a hotbed of clean-tech innovation. But it’s not a wasteland either. (Click on map to view more legible image of clean sector job clusters.) The main center of innovation is the Washington metro region — no surprise, there — but there are respectable centers of clean-sector activity in the Richmond and Hampton Roads regions.
Virginia has roughly 66,700 clean jobs, ranking it 15th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C. The clean economy contributes 1.7% of all jobs in the state, ranking it only 36th in intensity, however. Annual wages are $43,400 and exports per job are $11,000. (See details in this state profile.)
Take a closer look, and the details are less impressive. Waste management and treatment is our second largest jobs category. Mass transit is third, and “regulation and compliance” is fourth. In other words, we’re counting a lot of waste treatment plant workers, bus drivers and government administrators in our total. “Conservation,” whatever that is, is the No. 1 category. It sounds very Virginian.
The cool categories are pretty underwhelming: 142 jobs in the smart grid segment, 71 in green consumer goods, 103 in biofuels/biomass and 410 in wind. The one broad category that shows some potential is professional environmental services, which employs 4,642.
Maybe I’m getting old and cynical, but I’ve seen these economic development fads come and go. As a contrarian by nature, I’d be wary of chasing after the same limited number of companies and deals that everyone else is lusting for. Better to focus our attention on some under-appreciated or out-of-favor sector — like logistics, medical devices, or nuclear power — where a little bit of love goes a long way.
Putting State Funds to Work Demos Frustrated with too-big-to-fail banks that have pulled the plug on small business lending? Put state tax-revenue deposits in a locally owned bank willing to lend to small businesses in the state.
Getting the Facts on Child Abuse
Government Accountability Office According to government figures, nearly 1,800 children died last year of maltreatment. And those numbers probably under-state reality given the difficulty of local officials in compiling the data.
Enforce Sex-Offender Registration Heritage Foundation
Sex offenders are running loose. Uncle Sam needs to enforce state participation in the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.
Zombies work in concert better than administrators in Virginia's school system. Despite being brain dead, zombies manage to collaborate in their human-hunting rampages.
Last year, the state Senate directed the Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission (JLARC) to suggest how the Secretary Education could “improve the coordination” between state public schools, community colleges and four-year colleges. The result of such a vague directive has resulted in a new JLARC report that is, for the most part, utterly useless. I pity the four staff members who were assigned to investigate the topic. I would have rather spent the duration strapped to a chair with wild gerbils gnawing on my ankles.
Many aspects of the educational system are coordinated already, concluded the authors of the draft report, “Review of Coordination Needs within Virginia’s Education System,” but some are not. The authors detect insufficient coordination in the areas of college readiness, student transfers between community colleges and four-year colleges, teacher preparation, career readiness and the state’s longitudinal data system.
I will let others assess whether or not there is a coordination gap in the realm of the latter four items. I did not reach the detailed discussion of them during my perusal of the report. I got stuck on the narrative of the first problem area, college readiness, and could go no further.
There is a “college readiness gap” in Virginia, asserts the JLARC report. Upon that much, we can agree. In the commonwealth, 56% of entering community college students who completed high school the previous year wind up in a remedial English or math course, and about 24% of first-time college students do. This gap, which exists in most other states, is rightfully regarded as a national disgrace.
To any normal person not marinated in the logic of bureaucratic excuse-making, the reason for the gap is blindingly obvious: Schools are letting students graduate without acquiring basic skills in reading and math. There is no need to “coordinate” between Virginia school systems and state colleges about anything. High schools simply need to stop graduating students who can’t do the work their diplomas say they can.
But JLARC, drawing upon a 2006 Spellings Commission report, espies a more nuanced problem:
The continued growth of high school graduates who need remediation at the postsecondary level illustrates a need for better communication and coordination between high schools and colleges to address the issues of college readiness for recent Virginia public high school graduates.
High school grads aren’t ready for college? Perhaps better “coordination” can “clarify the expectations” about what colleges need from the K-12 system. What form might that coordination take — over and above appointing a Secretary Education to oversee the entire system, and supplementing his efforts with such initiatives as (I’m not making this up) the Joint Agreement on Virginia’s College and Career Ready Mathematics and English Performance Expectations?
Here’s a for instance of what JLARC has in mind: Get K-12 bureaucrats together with college bureaucrats to develop college readiness standards. States the report: “The higher education system needs to share its expectations of what students should know with the K-12 system, and the K-12 system should incorporate, as much as feasible, these expectations into the learning standards.”
What balderdash! The scandal of 56% of entering community college students being unable to compose a coherent sentence does not stem from unclear expectations about college. It comes from (1) the inability of schools to teach, and/or (2) the unwillingness of students to learn. Until we solve those two problems, getting bureaucrats to agree on readiness standards is like trying to win Biggest Losers by eating a Lean Cuisine for lunch.
Do we really need more educrats acting as “liaisons” between each others’ boards and agencies? How about all those high school guidance counselors — what do they do? Isn’t it their job to bone up on college standards and communicate them to students? Or, how about the people who design high school curricula and standardized tests? In an era when 60% of all high school grads go on to college and community college, are they so out of touch with college standards that nearly half of all high school grads fall short?
Will bolstering “coordination” between agencies do anything to address the fact that tens of thousands of children are failing to learn basic skills in school, that our education system is pushing them through to graduation anyway, and that everyone from our Republican governor to our Democratic president is urging them to attend college? I don’t think so. Virginia’s state senators are asking JLARC to answer the wrong questions. The findings are barely worth reading.
The Virginia Retirement System has recovered most of the losses it experienced during the 2008-2009 stock market crash, reaching $54.3 billion in assets as of March 31 after a 13% gain in its investment portfolio over the previous year, reports the Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission in the draft of a semi-annual oversight report.
While the fund has under-performed 3- and 5-year benchmarks, due mainly to the stock market crash of 2008 and 2009, it has earned a compounded return of 5.9% over the last 10 years. The annualized return from 1990 to the present was 8.5%. (Click on graph for more legible image.)
The board uses a 7% ROI investment in its actuarial projections for long-term performance. The state assumes an 8% return.
But an improving performance doesn’t let the state or state employees off the hook for making up unfunded liabilities. “You can’t invest your way out of these unfunded liabilities,” said Diana F. Cantor, chair of the VRS board of trustees, after a briefing of state legislators Monday. (See the Times-Dispatch report.)
State contributions this year are significantly lower than called for by sound actuarial practice, but the state will make up the difference for this year and last, about $620 million, with interest in future budgets.
The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….
This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
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by James A. Bacon
