Tag: Featured
Redrawing School District Lines
I have been on record saying that Delaware has too many school districts. 19 public/Vo-Tech school districts and 18 (and counting) charter districts. Each charter school is its own district. To me, that’s simply too much administrative overhead. Which brings us to the plan of reducing the number of districts in the city of Wilmington. Something I support, but know that the devil’s in the details.
When the Wilmington Education Advisory Committee (WEAC) submitted its report to the Governor, one of its suggestions was removing Christina and Colonial School Districts from the city and having the only two districts (Red Clay and Brandywine) serve the city.
As a city resident the idea of fewer school districts sounds wonderful. Having four districts fractured the city’s voice. It was hard to organize and advocate for city kids since school districts would only listen to people who lived in their district about concerns with their district. I do understand that, but it was extremely frustrating. Especially since 99% of our concerns applied to every district. But those district lines sent us off in four different directions, with less people, and were easily ignored. And, make no mistake, we were ignored. The districts’ go-to solution was always to form a committee to study the problem. Where all those committee reports ended up… I have no idea. And it was infuriating to keep bringing up the same concerns year after year only to have district administrators feign surprise and call for a new committee. So, most city residents would be happy with fewer school districts – if it’s handled correctly.
Delaware General Assembly Pre-Game Show: Week of March 24-26, 1015
Yet another sneaky maneuver from Markell’s Merciless Minions in their ongoing war on state employees. After agreeing to postpone their plan to screw state employees and retirees by shifting more health costs onto them, Ann Visalli and her henchpersons nevertheless convened a meeting of the ironically-named State Employee Benefits Commission to ‘temporarily’ increase premiums. In other words, shifting more costs onto the workers. And going back on their public promises. When it comes to state employees, Markell is taking his cues from Scott Walker. Or perhaps vice versa. From Day One, Markell has done little to hide his disdain for the worker bees. Guess he admires smooth-talking used car salesmen like himself much more. Right back at’cha, Jack. Glibness made you rich and made you governor. Hey, maybe that’s why Jack looks down on state employees…not glib enough for him and, of course, not wealthy enough for him. Memo to the General Assembly: We’re watching. It’s time to tax Jack’s pals. They collected all the spoils of the so-called economic recovery. Stop Markell’s transfer of more wealth to the wealthy. This. Is. Unconscionable.
The Delaware General Assembly has a new easy-to-navigate website. It’s really really good, but does not lend itself to linking as well as the previous website. Rather than doing a cut-and-paste of huge swaths of text, I’ll post highlights and encourage you to check out the site. It’s definitely much easier to access and search than it used to be, which makes me even less essential (I know, I know).
Our Choices for Raising New Revenue
Last week, the Delaware Economic and Financial Advisory Council or DEFAC released its latest revenue projections, reporting a $45 million dollar loss in revenue. Last Friday, the News Journal had a story on the Structural Revenue Review Committee and what they see as the reason for the revenue drop:
As the legal or corporate home for hundreds of thousands of businesses, Delaware is allowed to take intangible assets such as dormant checking and savings accounts, uncashed checks and unclaimed dividends and stocks after a certain number of years if the owners can’t be found. […] But corporations that are required to turn over their unclaimed property have challenged Delaware’s enforcement methods, including estimating the amounts due when no actual records can be found. Meanwhile, only a fraction of companies subject to the escheat laws are complying with the reporting requirements. [Secretary of State] Bullock noted that while increased compliance might bring in more abandoned property revenue, technology has made it easier for companies to track ownership of the assets, meaning there likely will be less for the state to claim in the future.
Meanwhile, the state also faces challenges when it comes to gambling revenue, as newer and bigger casinos in neighboring states continue to draw gamblers who used to come to Delaware’s three casinos, panel members were told. Lottery and gambling revenues contributed about $215 million to the general fund in fiscal 2014 but have declined steadily in recent years, with even more competition from other states on the horizon.
So the budget gimmickry that has allowed Delaware to operate on a half-flat income tax structure for decades is coming to an end. So what are our options?
Delaware General Assembly Pre-Game Show: Tues. March 17, 2015
The key question facing the Delaware General Assembly as it returns from its six-week hiatus for Joint Finance Committee hearings is: On what issues, and to what extent, will the General Assembly push back on Gov. Markell’s policies?
We already know that the House Democratic Caucus has raised the alarm over Markell’s efforts to impose more hardships on state employees and retirees when it comes to health care.
We already know that many legislators are pushing for a pay increase for state employees, something that Markell has refused to do during his time in office, (Memo to Jack: I heard your interview on the Al Mascitti Show on Friday. Cutting wages during a crisis, then restoring them, does not count as an increase.) I highly recommend you listen to the interview. Note the number of times that Markell dodges Al’s questions and goes off on a different tangent. One notable example. Al asks Markell about not proposing any raises for state employees. Just listen to his response. Something along the lines of, “Well, I’d really like to, but what parts of my sacrosanct budget would you have me cut?” In other words, he hasn’t spent one minute of his time in office seeking ways to pay state employees a living wage. He’s glib, and he’s got his lines down pat. But he only answered the questions he wanted to ask and answer, not the ones that Al posed.
We know that the Joint Sunset Committee, with Sen. Bryan Townsend taking the lead, is trying to determine just what the state has gotten for its $200 million-plus that they’ve given to business in one form or other over the past few years. (Memo to Jack: Asking whether we’d rather have the oil refinery or not, as you did during your response, is not answering the question. Fact is, your administration and the Delaware Economic Development Office have provided next to no empirical evidence to show that the preponderance of this money is paying off at all.) In fact, allow me to once again link to this New York Times survey which demonstrates that there is next to no verification nationwide, including in Delaware, that these dollars are doing anything more than acquiescing to extortion.
We know that we’re starting to reach a critical blowback on the Markell/Murphy team’s attempt to destroy public education in Delaware as we know it. Will the General Assembly intervene?
We know that the General Assembly has already stopped listening to Markell when it comes to funding infrastructure repairs and projects. Are both sides really gonna play ‘chicken’ again this year?
The Vote Tracker: Review the New Bills Introduced Last Week
Representative John Kowalko pre-filed a couple of bills last week that are worthy of mention. First, House Bill 42 calls for the University of Delaware and Delaware State University to be fully subject to the state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). House Bill 43 adds appointed members of the Cash Management Policy Board to the definition of “public officers.” This designation would subject the appointed members of the Board to annual financial disclosure requirements. Think of this as former Treasurer Chip Flowers’ legacy.
House Bill 44 seeks to phase out the use of three controversial flame retardants in children’s products or furniture sold in Delaware.
But the granddaddy of them all, the bill that will bring down an Administration’s education agenda, House Bill 50. This bill would give parents or guardians the right to opt their children out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment System.
Begun, the Education Wars Have.
Today’s News Journal Dialogue Delaware section dovetails nicely with the post I wrote on Friday. I’ve been told by multiple people, in and out of the education field, that it has the best headline ever. Sometimes cutting through the bullshit calling bullshit bullshit is the best way to garner attention to an important truth: all standardized testing is bullshit. At least in relation to the stated goal of helping students learn and gauging their learning progress.
Representative Sean Matthews, himself a teacher, has penned a wonderful op-ed in the above Dialogue Delaware section, and he uses more polite language to make the same point.
There are many ways to talk about the role standardized testing plays in our public schools, but there’s one question that we have to answer before we can debate the issue: Do these tests make our students smarter, more capable and more prepared to lead successful lives?
After decades of testing at all levels, with different standards, methods, benchmarks and outcomes, the answer to that question is not what we thought it would be. Overwhelming numbers of scholars, parents, statisticians and legislators are starting to realize, with evidence, that standardized testing and the policies that flow from testing are doing more harm than good.
Over the next three months, students in Delaware’s charter and traditional community schools will be asked to take a standardized test called the Smarter Balanced Assessment. The stated goal of this test is to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in our educational system.
But that’s not the whole story.
Most standardized tests are designed by for-profit companies that market their materials to states, which are required by federal law to test public school students in return for federal funding. Under this business relationship, the best interests of the testing firm are not aligned with the best interests of students, teachers and schools. Instead, there is great incentive to make students and their educators look like they’re “failing” so that these same firms can offer their own branded “reforms” and “solutions” to states and districts, for a worthy fee.
Testing. Performance. Assessment. It’s All Fucking Bullshit.
Governor Markell thinks that Delaware students are taking too many tests, probably because he required them to take too many tests, and so Governor Markell is going to reduce the number of tests so as to relieve the massive burden he placed on teachers and students. How nice of him. Of course, he is not eliminating tests immediately. He wants a review of the situation, another task force, to determine which state and district wide tests are redundant, and then we will do away with the duplicative tests. So it’s not that tests are bad, or that many tests are bad, so long as they are not duplicative. So this is a delaying tactic to respond to the rapidly growing movement that is opposed to a lot of Markell-based and Federal-based efforts to reform education. People are upset, so maybe this announcement will placate some.
To me, it ignores the core (no pun intended) of the issue.
Why are we testing?
Is Jack Markell Fighting His Ongoing War Against State Employees By Himself?
8-ball sez: Signs point to ‘yes’. From 2008 to today, Governor Jack Markell has never, repeat, never, proposed a raise for state employees and retirees. He has, on several occasions, proposed shifting costs from the state onto the workers and retirees. Jack Markell is a putative Democrat. When it comes to who gets rewarded and […]
DL Exclusive: Hundreds of Politicians/PACs in Violation of State Campaign Finance Law. Nobody’s Collecting the Fines.
Deadbeat campaigns, committees and PAC’s currently owe the Delaware Department of Elections (long pause to change the batteries in my calculator)…$769,240. I count 258 individual fines that have been assessed, but never collected.
Some of the outstanding fines are gargantuan. Some appear to have close correlation to key political events, so the committees involved not only owe the money, they have some ‘splainin’ to do.
Since the largest fines have been imposed on the Sussex County Democratic Executive Committee, and since they date back to the year (2008) when an incredible array of resources were poured into the race to elect John Atkins to the General Assembly, possibly cementing a D majority in the House, and since not a nickel has been paid back, I can only ask, “Why?”. Why no action? (Late-breaking news: According to both the Commissioner of Elections and the current Sussex County chair, that $160,000-plus fine has now been labeled an ‘error’. Because, as we all know, $160,000 fines are levied in error every day. Where is Rose Mary Woods when we need her?)
Here’s how the system is supposed to work, according to sources both within the State Department of Elections and the Office of the Attorney General. After about 60 days or so, uncollected fines/violations are turned over to the Attorney General’s office for follow-up, according to Elaine Manlove, Commissioner of Elections. It is clear that little to no follow-up has occurred since, well, 2008, at least. Multiple sources have told me that they have not even received any notification from the AG’s office that they are in violation. Not that they shouldn’t already know, but still…
Here’s what Carl Kanefsky of the AG’s office says of the way it’s supposed to work….
Kudos to Senator Carper, for once.
Today a foreign leader will interfere in the political affairs of the United States, and Senator Tom Carper has decided that he will not be part of it, thank you very much.
Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware will join about 40 Democrats in boycotting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial speech to Congress on Tuesday. Carper called the timing of Netanyahu’s speech “wholly inappropriate,” given that the prime minister is up for re-election in two weeks. He and the other Democrats say House Speaker John Boehner broke protocol by inviting Netanyahu without consulting with the White House.
“I cannot imagine an occasion when a U.S. president would invite a foreign leader — even one from some of our closest allies like France, Germany or Canada — to address Congress on the eve of elections in his or her home country,” Carper said in a statement. “Furthermore, this visit came together by completely bypassing President Obama and his administration, which breaks our country’s protocol for visiting heads of state and stands to weaken U.S.-Israel relations.”
I was afraid the good Senator was just going to leave his list of reasons at that, and granted, they are good reasons. But the truest reason to be angry about that bastard Netanyahu’s speech has everything to do with the fact that he wants to scuttle any possible deal with Iran and he wants the United States to send more of our American children to die in defense of Israel in an invasion of Iran. And to his credit, Carper says that such direct interference into the foreign policy of the United States is one of his reasons.
What about Carney and Coons?
Reverend Kilroy Delivers A Sunday Sermon
Last week my phone started ringing and emails/texts poured in. Almost everyone began with: “Have you heard?” Why no, no I hadn’t heard. Today Kilroy puts up a post addressing what’s going on. Go read the post.
Those who sit at the right and left hand of the Red Clay God (Merv) better take a hard look in the mirror. Though school superintendents make many request for school board approval it is the school board who makes the final approval with no veto power on the super’s part. In the big picture the super’s failures are the board’s failures. […]
I am dishearten to hear (rumor of course) some board members want to throw Merv overboard midstream (before the end of his contract). Those who think Merv may be the problem are just as much the problem.
Markell’s Supreme Court, and a Missed Opportunity.
Nothing explains the Delaware Way more than the recent nomination to the Supreme Court by Gov. Jack Markell (D) of corporate attorney and the son of a former Supreme Court Justice, Collins J. “C.J.” Seitz, Jr., Esquire. Seitz, when confirmed (because there is no if about it in this state), will replace retiring Justice Henry duPont Ridgely.
The Judicial Nominating Commission, in addition to Seitz, also recommended to Governor Markell Superior Court Judge Calvin Scott, who would have been the first African American Supreme Court Justice on the Delaware Supreme Court; and a former Superior Court judge and now an attorney in private practice, Joseph Sleights III.
I think the Delaware Supreme Court could have used a little color, and something more diverse than another corporate attorney.
Time for a Revolution
Last night, Oscar host Neil Patrick Harris noted that the gift bags that nominees and other special attendees and guests received had items in them that totaled over $100,000.00, and one of the items was a gift card for a Brinks security van to come pick the bearer up and to take him or her to safety once the Revolution comes.
Well, it is time for the Revolution to come. And by revolution, I do not mean the automatic beheadings of the wealthy by us were regular Americans (although that may be the next step if the wealthy prevent, in any way, what I am about to prescribe). No, by revolution, I mean adjusting the tax code such that this country and state can function once again. David Sirota calculates that, if we just tax the wealthy at the same relative rates as we tax the middle and lower classes, we would be able to raise hundreds of billions of dollars:
Roads are crumbling, bridges require repairs, schools need upgrades and public pension systems remain underfunded. How can states and cities find the money to address any of these problems? One way could be through their tax codes.
According to a new report, if the rich paid the same state and local tax rate as the middle class, states and cities would have hundreds of billions of dollars more a year in public revenue.
Last month, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that the poorest 20 percent of households pay on average more than twice the effective state and local tax rate (10.9 percent) as the richest 1 percent of taxpayers (5.4 percent).
Enter the Kavipsian Progressive Tax Fairness Plan of 2015, which I demand be enacted by the General Assembly forthwith!
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