Delaware General Assembly Post-Game Wrap-Up: Week of April 21-23, 2015

Common Corporate, Race To the Top, No Textbook Publisher Left Behind, these will be legacies of a lost decade-plus in education reform.  Bloated bureaucracies full of bean-counters will hopefully shrink and vanish.

Make no mistake, while HB 50 is just one bill in one small state, it reflects a burgeoning movement nationally to reject the K-12 reform that was foisted on us by people with next to no experience in, you know, educating children.

Thinkers like Nicholas Kristof are already focusing on where our efforts would be best allocated in the post-reform era.  Yes, the notion of reform was well-intended, still is, for that matter, in a time when there continue to be inequities in education.  However, charter schools and one-size-fits-all testing have proven to help perpetuate and accelerate those inequities, as opposed to alleviating them.  Which is what happens when there are huge piles of money thrown at the issue, and greedy corporations and individuals looking to pocket the proceeds. In fact, one could argue (and I will) that the most vocal proponents for this reform were those who (or in the case of Dubya, his family) stood to gain the most financially from the reforms.

HB 50(Kowalko) is important less for what it would do, than for what it represents.  The bill serves as a reflection of the mounting dissatisfaction with both the disastrous education reform policies of the past decade and also the Bigfoot approach that this governor and his corporate comrade cum  Secretary of Education have tried to impose/inflict on those with the nerve to fight back.  “We may be wrong (although we’re not), but we have the power to crush you like a bug” does very little to win friends and influence people.  With knowledgeable education-oriented legislators joining the likes of John Kowalko in the General Assembly recently (Kim Williams, Bryan Townsend, and Sean Matthews, among others), legislators are starting to understand how bad the current policies are.  Plus, teachers, parents, and students have found their voices on these issues. Which is why getting HB 50 out of committee is/was important.  There is also a bipartisan coalition forming on this issue, with many conservative legislators joining their progressive counterparts in support of HB 50.  The question is whether the Chamber of Commerce types still have the numbers to outvote them. Might I point out that the Chamber of Commerce has embraced this disastrous reform going back to Phase One during the unlamented Carper years? If you support this bill, it is absolutely essential that you contact your legislators, especially, for now, your state representative.  Kevin Ohlandt has done all the work for us, so click on this to get your specific marching orders. BTW, thanks, Kevin, for your contribution to the cause! Exceptional Delaware is an exceptional blog.

Memo to the administrators for the new General Assembly homepage.  Could you please provide links to, say, for example, the daily session activity reports?  It’s tougher to share info if the links are not provided. The links were previously provided, could you please restore them? BTW, the links that you do provide to the bills in the session activity reports do not link to the bills in question.  I still love the new website, just trying to help iron out some of the bugs.

This week’s other highlights:

The Senate passed SB26(Peterson), which “provides for recording and maintaining a record of all deliberations made by public bodies during public hearings, including any discussion made “off the record.” The vote was almost unanimous.  Predictably, ‘Gov.’ Bonini was absent for the  roll call.  One note of caution. The bill has been assigned to the House House Administration Committee.  That’s Pete’s and Val’s committee.  I hope that no dick moves are in the offing…

HB 78(Miro),  which would have prohibited “any child under the age of 12 from being left alone without adequate supervision”, was stricken by the sponsor.  Don’t know if a substitute is in the offing.

HB 5, which adds e-cigarettes to the list of prohibited items under the Clean Indoor Air Act, was released from house committee. I think it only makes sense to add an amendment to carve out an exception for specific areas in a ‘vape shop’.  Such exceptions are already in place for ‘smoke shops’, so, unless one deems cigar smoke less harmful than, uh, vapes, it’s only fair to add such an amendment.

Here’s an interesting bill that was introduced by Sen. Townsend this week. SB 66 “will allow any Delaware jurisdiction with a long-term residential vacancy rate above 3%, including a county, to form a land bank, where such jurisdiction determines that a land bank would help it address the problem of vacant and abandoned real property within its jurisdiction. A land bank is a non-profit organization created by a political subdivision of the State, or through an intergovernmental agreement between two or more political subdivisions of the State, and would serve as the repository for vacant, abandoned and tax-delinquent properties that, left unaddressed, can contribute to crime, depress the local real estate market, and deplete the tax base of Delaware’s communities.”

This looks like an innovative way to address chronic housing vacancies.  I like it, I like it a lot.

Legislation permitting the New Castle County Vo-Tech District to raise taxes w/o a referendum, which had already passed the House, was released from the Senate Education Committee this week. There were two unfavorable votes. The new legislative system doesn’t let us find out how the senators voted.  It should. The bill then passed the Senate, 17 Y, 2 N (Bonini & Richardson), 1 NV(Townsend), and 1 absent (Henry, who was a sponsor). Upon the governor’s signature, we’ll pay more education taxes in NCC with no say as to whether we supported the tax increase.  Legislators did the work for us.

On Thursday, the Senate passed SB 37(Peterson), which “requires a mammography service provider to provide specific notice to a patient if that patient presents with dense breast tissue.” Unanimous, one absent.

The House passed HB 100(Schwartzkopf), which enables the Sussex County Vo-Tech District to raise taxes w/o a referendum, but with the proviso that those increases be sunsetted in three years, and that permissible district enrollment decrease during those years.  The bill is apparently designed to address an immediate funding shortfall in the district, while reining in the district’s expansion. 36 Y, 1 N (K. Williams), 3 NV (Bennett, Collins, Matthews), 1 A (Keeley).

Finally, two Rethuglican campaign brochure bills were buried in assigned to the House House Administration.  Likely never to be heard from again (well, until the next legislative session). The bills are: The Extreme Right Rev. Rep. Dukes’ HB 87, which creates the right to create right to work (for less) zones in Delaware; and HB 104(Gray), which ‘ places a constitutional limitation on base general fund operating appropriations.’  Unserious proposals by unserious legislators.

Seriously.

See ya next week!