Federal support for school choice

"Education choice exercises a powerful pull on parents of school children" begins a report this week from the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings on expanding school choice.

Current types of school choice include residential (choosing a place of residence for a school), magnet schools and other forms of intra-district choice, inter-district choice, charter schools, school vouchers, and virtual (online) education. The report does not favor a particular model but instead advocates for parents to have "the maximum degree of choice among education programs and schools." In order to achieve this, the report recommends federal funding at the school district level and for virtual schooling to increase choice and competition. At the school district level, providing parents with information on schools based on performance is vital. The authors argue for federal aid for "a new generation of web-based tools to support informed choice by parents."

The U. S. Dept of Education (ED) currently offers College Navigator for post-secondary school choice. The report proposes a similar K-12 search engine called School Navigator. Users would enter their preferences and the School Navigator would provide lists of schools not only in the local district but all schools and education programs to which students are entitled to enroll, including charter schools, private schools, and virtual schools.


Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education, Feb. 2010
      Report (pdf, 32pp/480kB)
      Executive Summary

Big data

From the Communications and Society Program
of the Aspen Institute comes The Promise and Peril of Big Data, on the challenges posed by large databases. The Internet is presently estimated to hold five hundred billion gigabytes of data, and even larger measures of terabytes or petabytes are being used.

The explosion of mobile networks, cloud computing and new technologies has given rise to incomprehensibly large worlds of information, often described as "Big Data."

Big Data's massive analytical ability raises such issues as:

(W)hat are the ethical considerations of governments or businesses using Big Data to target people without their knowledge? Does the ability to analyze massive amounts of data change the nature of scientific methodology? Does Big Data represent an evolution of knowledge, or is more actually less when it comes to information on such scales?

The report covers "making sense" of Big Data, the business and social implications, its relation to health care, and addressing abuses. It is a product of the 18th Annual Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology, held Aug. 4-7, 2009.


The Promise and Peril of Big Data (pdf, 66pp/356kB), Jan. 2010

Just in ... Environmental review in Hawaii

Report to the Legislature on Hawaii's Environmental Review System, by Karl Kim, Denise Antolini, and Peter Rappa, was prepared in response to the passage of Act 1 by the Legislature in 2008. Section 10 therein required the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) to contract with the University of Hawaii (UH) to study the State's environmental review process, specifically:

1. Examine the effectiveness of the current environmental review system created by chapters 341, 343, and 344, Hawaii Revised Statutes;
2. Assess the unique environmental, economic, social, and cultural issues in Hawaii that should be incorporated into an environmental review system;
3. Address larger concerns and interests related to sustainable development, global environmental change, and disaster-risk reduction; and
4. Develop a strategy, including legislative recommendations, for modernizing Hawaii's environmental review system so that it meets international and national best-practices standards.

From the report's executive summary:

Hawaii’s "trigger" and "exempt" approach is now archaic compared to the more efficient "discretionary approval" approach used in many other states and the focus on "major" actions under well-accepted federal law. The diverse group of stakeholders of the current system, of whom over 100 participated in this study, has different views about the specific problem and solutions, yet there is a shared sense that the system is in need of change.

The report proposes that Hawaii update, refocus, and streamline its environmental review system by replacing the current "project trigger" screen, which encourages late review and 11th hour public participation, with a new "earliest discretionary approval" screen to encourage early review and public participation.

An omnibus bill to amend chapters 341 and 343 is included.

Report to the Legislature on Hawaii's Environmental Review System (pdf, 180pp/1.6MB), Jan. 2010
KFH354 K55 2010

The UH Study Team has a blog on this project.

Historic Hawaii newspapers online

The University of Hawaii at Manoa Library announced that three Hawaii newspapers are now available online at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website. The Library is a participant in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Library of Congress, and state projects to provide access to U.S. newspapers published between 1836 and 1922.

The Hawaii papers are:

• The Daily Herald (Honolulu, 1886-1887)
• The Hawaiian Gazette (Honolulu, 1865-1916; online: 1877-1913)
• The Independent (Honolulu, 1895-1905)

According to the Library, The Daily Herald and The Hawaiian Gazette had "a conservative pro-American editorial viewpoint" and The Independent had "a strongly nationalistic Hawaiian viewpoint."

Chronicling America currently provides newspapers from 1880 to 1922 from the District of Columbia and 15 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. It aims to eventually have every state and U.S. territory represented.

Google snafu

So what happens when Google snafus? Seems Google insists on publishing the phone number to the smaller, special Legislative Reference Bureau Library (808-587-0690), which serves the Hawaii legislative community, as the number for the main Hawaii State Library. The methods Google has in place to correct inaccurate information seemingly do not work (at least for several months in this case), whether directly from the web search results page or from the map page. Phone call queries to Google by both libraries have also not resulted in correction of information.

Recently it has been noticed how Google is beginning to presume the user's actual wants. As a Google member, one may choose for Google to save all of one's web searches to build upon subsequent searches, no matter how seemingly irrelevant the later search might appear. However, when search history is not to be saved nor the user signed in as a member, even the most general of search queries usually lists the inquirer's IP location specific results high on the returned page, flavoring it with many local commercial sites not usually expected to rank so high.

The volume of indexed information on the Internet is too massive to imagine. How to manage the data or how to access the information without presuming too much knowledge would seem to be still in the future...and sometimes the data is just plain wrong.

Health reform and retiree benefits

In its January Issue Brief, the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) examines the impact of healthcare legislation now in Congress on retiree health benefits. The paper covers:

• Reinsurance program for early retirees
• Medicare drug benefits
• Tax treatment of employer subsidies under MMA
• Postretirement benefit changes

EBRI's summation:

Since the mid-1990s, there has been erosion in retiree health benefits. This has been driven by the excessive cost of offering this benefit due to new accounting rules and the increasing cost associated with providing the benefit. Fewer private-sector employers offer the benefits, both private- and public-sector employers have been increasing retiree premiums and cost sharing, and workers are finding it harder to qualify for a subsidized benefit....

However, current legislative proposals will increase the cost to employers of offering retiree health benefits. If these proposals pass...private-sector employment-based retiree health benefits are practically certain to decline: They will be less valuable to retirees in the future, and employers will find they are not as necessary to offer in the future, dramatically reducing the number of retirees enrolled in employment-based plans.

Implications of Health Reform for Retiree Health Benefits< jan. 2010
      Issue Brief (pdf, 20pp/428kB)
      Executive Summary

Who regulates whom?

In a recent paper, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) gives an overview of U.S. financial supervision. It notes: "Historically, major changes in financial regulation in the United States have often come in response to crisis. Thus, one could have predicted that the turmoil beginning in 2007 would lead to calls for reform." CRS did this report to provide a basis for evaluating such legislative proposals. It focuses on H.R.4173, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, which "would overhaul the financial regulatory structure." The paper includes discussions of capital requirements, federal financial regulators, and unregulated markets and institutions.

Who Regulates Whom? An Overview of U.S. Financial Supervision, R40249 (40pp/404kB), from Open CRS, Dec. 14, 2009

Public retiree health liabilities

Today the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study on state and local governments' retiree health liabilities, specifically: (1) what has been reported in their annual comprehensive annual financial reports (CAFR), (2) actions they have taken to address retiree health liabilities, and (3) the overall fiscal pressures they face.

Under accounting standards issued by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in 2004, governments are required to account for costs of other postemployment benefits (OPEB) when they are earned (during employment) and not when they are paid (during retirement). The largest component of OPEB is retiree health benefits. Historically, governments have not funded these benefits when they were earned, therefore much of their liability may be unfunded. According to GAO, the total unfunded OPEB liability in state and the largest local governments exceeds $530 billion.

For this study, GAO selected 10 governments and reviewed their actions in more detail: four states--Alaska, Nevada, New Jersey, and South Carolina; three counties--Montgomery County, MD; Harris County, TX; and Oakland County, MI; and three cities--Gainesville, FL, New York, NY; and Thousand Oaks, CA.

GAO found that some governments have addressed retiree health liabilities through prefunding using irrevocable trusts, and making benefit changes such as: (1) changing the type of health benefit plan, (2) changing the level of government contributions, and (3) changing eligibility requirements.

State and Local Government Retiree Health Benefits: Liabilities Are Largely Unfunded, but Some Governments Are Taking Action, GAO-10-61 (pdf, 49pp/772kB), Nov. 30, 2009

Restoring value to the minimum wage

In a paper issued today, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds that the current minimum wage of $7.25 is 20% lower than its real value 40 years ago. To restore its value, she proposes setting the minimum wage at 50% of the previous year's average wage and indexing it annually thereafter. According to her formula, the minimum wage would be $9.80 in 2012, with incremental increases over the next two years.

The paper divides workers who would benefit from the new minimum wage into two groups: those directly affected because they earn less than the new minimum wage, and those who would be indirectly affected because they earn a little above it but "would likely see a wage increase as employers preserve internal wage ladders." In Hawaii, of its total workforce of 557,415 (from EPI analysis of 2008 Current Population Survey data), 55,932 would be directly affected by the new minimum wage and 22,219 would be indirectly affected. Among the paper's conclusions:

(Indexing the minimum wage) will help to reverse the trends toward increasing inequality and to restore income growth for millions of working families. These new steps for the minimum wage are a crucial component in the effort to ensure that the benefits of economic growth are shared broadly across the workforce.

FIX IT AND FORGET IT, Index the Minimum Wage to Growth in Average Wages, Dec. 17, 2009
      Briefing Paper #251 (pdf, 24pp/408kB)
      Press Release

Jobs in the recession

Bruce Katz, Director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, testified yesterday before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Subcommittee on Economic Policy. "Creating Jobs in the Recession" presents highlights from his written testimony. Katz states three main points that would build on President Obama's Dec. 8 speech at Brookings and "try to connect Macro Economy Policy to Metro Economic Realities."

Katz's 3 points:

1. The American economy is a network of metropolitan economies. As a Metro nation, we need smart policies and targeted investments to enhance our competitiveness globally.
2. The Great Recession has affected different metro economies in radically different ways. There is no single American economy. Even with talk about a national recovery, many metro economies are mired in recession.
3. Federal efforts to bolster job creation need to connect "The Macro to the Metro." Metros need two kinds of federal responses:
   1. Quick intervention to prevent further job losses, e.g., direct fiscal assistance to local governments which employ 10% of the nation's workforce
   2. Creating jobs to build the next economy--low carbon, innovation fueled, and export oriented.

Creating Jobs in the Recession, Dec. 10, 2009