The QEO and all that

'Tis just before Christmas,
And all through the house,
The QEO draws attention
From man and from other man.

(There's no way to make that rhyme without being rude. Sorry.)

Here's the short story on the QEO: Back in the early 1990s, when Tommy Thompson, et al., did their part to appease the anti-taxers regarding school costs and property taxes, they implemented a trio of reforms. The QEO (qualified economic offer) law allowed school districts to impose a 3.8% cap on increases in public school teacher salaries and benefits without bargaining, given that bargaining first comes to an impasse. The second reform placed caps on how much revenue districts could raise from the local levy. The third was a promise--not a statutory requirement like the other two--that a full two-thirds of funding for schools would be paid out of the state's general fund, also to keep property taxes low.

District administrators and school boards hate the revenue caps; teachers hate the QEO; the legislature (when Republican-flavored, anyway) hates the 2/3 promise. And I'd bet 98% or more of the rest of the state probably couldn't even tell you what any of the three things are.

But the QEO is the most common target for criticism, mostly because my union has one of the loudest lobbying voices in the state. If the state's Association of School Boards had our budget, people would be talking about the revenue caps all the time. And the 2/3 promise is an issue for exactly how long it takes to pass the budget every other year.

The problem is that the trio of reforms has ultimately not done what was promised a decade and a half ago. School costs aren't down, property taxes haven't fallen, and the state's ability to keep up with the spending is rapidly diminishing. The problem is that the legislature went at the problem backwards; the silly geese in the legislature capped our ability to pay rather than engage in any serious cost-control efforts, and that's why we're in this mess.

Not coincidentally, that is also the primary flaw of any "Taxpayers' Bill of Rights" or whatever you want to call the contemporary genuflections to the anti-taxers: Such legislation hampers our ability to pay without decreasing costs. It would put us--much as the school-funding trio has done now almost fifteen years later--in the unenviable position of cutting services to stay within arbitrary spending limits. (I've a full-length TABOR post here.)

But, Jay, I hear you thinking, isn't the QEO a cost-control measure? And a reasonable question it is. But the answer is, not really. From the Wisconsin State Journal article linked above:

The QEO law exempts school districts in labor negotiations from going into arbitration--which can force schools to accept unwanted contract provisions--as long as they offer wage and benefit increases that total 3.8 percent or more. [. . .]

To avoid arbitration, the QEO mandates that districts maintain the same increasingly costly benefits for teachers, [Doyle spokesman Dan] Leistikow said. "Districts are put in a terrible box," Leistikow said. "Repealing the QEO will give school districts more flexibility in managing their benefits cost."

I've written before that the QEO is a double-edged sword, in that it provides incentives for both unions and district officials to hammer out bargains agreeable to both parties. For the teachers, it's a no-brainer that they would like to see something above 3.8%, so they'll keep doing what they can to avoid having the QEO applied. Which, when done in the past, has literally led to teachers having to pay money to districts in extreme cases. Such things have also been threatened (up to $3000 of paybacks in one case), and many teachers (one example) have seen their salaries decrease from one year to the next because of the QEO.

For districts, as the article quoted above indicates, imposing the QEO means that any expensive benefit plans have to remain in place. So if administrators have their eye on finding something cheaper, they have to do it with the cooperation of their teachers at the bargaining table, or else, by imposing the QEO, they'll be stuck with the expensive plan they don't like. In the examples I linked to in the previous paragraph, I doubt sincerely that any of the administrators actually relished demanding giant paybacks from their teachers. (If they did, they shouldn't be doing that job. Maybe if Alan Lasee succeeds in getting the death penalty back, they could sign up to flip the switch.)

So the QEO, in practice, has little effect on costs. Much of that, of course, is due to a particular quirk of the American Way, which is that our health care system (best system in the world!) has seen cost increases at many, many times the rate of inflation, well above 3.8% annually. There is nothing school districts or teachers unions can do about that. Hampering our ability to pay (as revenue caps do, as TABOR would) doesn't solve the problem.

But a national (even state-wide) solution to the health care crisis is just one part of the answer to this puzzle. The rest of it comes in a re-working of the school-funding formula. The people involved in Wisconsin's schools recognize that; both the WEAC and WASB representatives quoted by the WSJ call for broader reform than just nibbling at the edges with a QEO repeal. But Liestekow, Doyle's spokesman, doesn't get it. Incoming Assembly Speaker Mike Huebsch (R-West Salem) doesn't talk broad reform, either, though that may just be selective quoting or questioning on the part of the reporter.

Bottom line, though, is that the QEO has had a noticeable effect on Wisconsin's teachers. More from the WSJ:

Salaries for Wisconsin teachers in the 2003-04 school year averaged $42,882 and were 8.3 percent below the national average, according to a [Wisconsin] Taxpayers Alliance analysis. But the estimated value or cost of their benefits was 39.2 percent higher than the national average, ranking as the fifth-highest in the country.

Dad29, the "another man" linked above, siezes on this paragraph, with some supplemental data about Wisconsin's overall median income, to insist that the QEO doesn't need to go. We'll come back to that in a minute, but we should talk about those numbers anyway. The WisTax press release announcing their study back in September lacks the full context, but you can dig up a lot in other places.

This AFT study (.pdf), for example, is full of scary-but-true facts about Wisconsin's teachers. For example, we have the lowest salaries--and starting salaries--in the Midwest (page 25). Our starting salaries are, in fact, lowest in the nation (page 33), and barely above pay for the private sector (page 34). Do you think this has an effect on who decides to teach in this state? It probably does (see also pages 35-36). The trend is bad, too: Wisconsin's pay fell to 27th in 2003 from 23rd in 2001 (page 26) and 16th in 1993 (page 27), which makes us third-worst in the total percentage change in teacher salaries nationwide over the last decade.

We're also below average (27th) in our ratio of teacher salary to private sector salary (page 28), which makes us dead-frickin'-last in the percentage change of how well we've kept up with increases in private-sector wages (page 29). So when Dad29 complains, for example, about Wiconsin's teachers earning only 8% less than the median income in the state, it sounds a bit hollow. It also rings hollow when he tries to compare our salaries to the average Wisconsin salary--by far lower--of $36,660. Consider, for example,

As a work force, teachers are highly educated compared with the general public.

• Twenty-four percent of Wisconsin’s working population holds a bachelor’s degree or more compared with nearly 100% of teachers.
  
• Only 8% of the state’s work force holds a graduate degree, compared with 57% of teachers (U.S. Census Bureau 2003, “Status of the Wisconsin Public School Teacher 2004”).

Census Bureau data which measure earnings by educational attainment show that teachers are underpaid compared with private sector workers who have similar levels of education:

• The average full-time worker nationally with a bachelor’s degree over age 25 earned $60,664 in 2004—that’s $17,782 more than Wisconsin teachers, who earned an average of $42,882 (U.S. Census Bureau, “Earnings by Educational Attainment,” NEA “Rankings and Estimates”).
  
• The average full-time worker nationally with a master’s degree earned $73,024 in 2004—that’s $30,142 more than Wisconsin teachers earned who have a master’s degree and 10 year’s experience (U.S. Census Bureau, “Earnings by Educational Attainment,” WEAC salary data).
  
• Education Week magazine found that Wisconsin teachers earned $10,000 less than other workers in the state with college degrees (“Quality Counts 2000”).
  
• Wisconsin teachers with a master’s degree earned $17,250 less than other Wisconsin workers with the same degree (“Quality Counts 2000”).

There's more at the link. Let's compare apples to apples, shall we? A highly-qualified, well-educated Wisconsin teacher does not easily compare to your average worker. (First person who says "but you get summers off" gets smacked; I haven't had a summer off since I was 16.) There's also this:

Several types of analyses show that teachers earn significantly less than comparable workers, and this wage disadvantage has grown considerably over the last 10 years.

• An analysis of weekly wage trends shows that teachers' wages have fallen behind those of other workers since 1996, with teachers' inflation-adjusted weekly wages rising just 0.8%, far less than the 12% weekly wage growth of other college graduates and of all workers. [. . .]
  
• A comparison of teachers' wages to those of workers with comparable skill requirements, including accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors, shows that teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2%. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage was an even larger 14.1%.
  
• Teachers' weekly wages have grown far more slowly than those for these comparable occupations; teacher wages have deteriorated about 14.8% since 1993 and by 12.0% since 1983 relative to comparable occupations.
  
• Although teachers have somewhat better health and pension benefits than do other professionals, these are offset partly by lower payroll taxes paid by employers (since some teachers are not in the Social Security system). Teachers have less premium pay (overtime and shift pay, for example), less paid leave, and fewer wage bonuses than do other professionals. Teacher benefits have not improved relative to other professionals since 1994 (the earliest data we have on benefits), so the growth in the teacher wage disadvantage has not been offset by improved benefits.
  
• The extent to which teachers enjoy greater benefits depends on the particular wage measure employed to study teacher relative pay. Based on a commonly used wage measure that is similar to the W-2 wages reported to the IRS (and used in our analyses), teachers in 2002 received 19.3% of their total compensation in benefits, slightly more than the 17.9% benefit share of compensation of professionals. These better benefits somewhat offset the teacher wage disadvantage but only to a modest extent. For instance, in terms of the roughly 14% hourly wage disadvantage for teachers we found relative to other workers of similar education and experience, an adjustment for benefits would yield a total compensation disadvantage for teachers of 12.5%, 1.5 percentage points less.

Notice that this study compensates both for "time off" and makes an honest comparison of benefits, too.

Look, when it comes to repealing the QEO, I'm for it only in the sense that we need an absolute do-over when it comes to school reform. Picking off one element of the trio at a time will not ultimately solve anything. But to suggest, as Dad29 does, that teachers are demanding something unreasonable (the ability to freely negotiate the terms of our employment? Gasp!) is ridiculous.

Thanks, Gov. Doyle, belatedly

I'm a bit late to the party--what? I have a life--but I just finally looked at my property tax bill over the weekend. And, despite having seen another increase in our home's valuation, our tax bill was down. Only about $70, but still.

The Cheddarsphere buzzed quietly last week when Governor Doyle announced that the median home's tax increased just $7. I imagine the response was so muted because most Cheddarsphereans didn't see big increases themselves. The exception seems to be Michael Caughill:

Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle claims that the property tax bill for the “median” homeowner in Wisconsin is only going up $7 this year.

Mine went up $300 for the second year in a row.

I need to find out where Mr. Median lives and move in next door.

Clever joke indeed. But the only other complainer I can Google up--besides a commenter at Caughill's place--is Steveegg, who is just upset about taxes in general. (Talk to Barry Orton, Steve.) There is also some speculation about why median instead of mean as a measure, speculation which is not unwarranted (I'd like to see both numbers myself). But, really, it's been very quiet.

It is almost kind of funny to discover quite so many crickets, as rapping Doyle for his tax policy is as reflexive to conservatives in this state as, say, worshipping Charlie Sykes (who was also oddly silent on the tax issue last week).

Anyway, here's my point. Can you guess why, despite the increased valuation in our home, we're paying less in taxes? Is it the leadership of good Republican Scott Walker? No, our County taxes were up. Is it the lottery credit? That barely makes a dent. No, the big decreases came from the leadership of that horrible Democrat Tom Barrett (our city taxes were down more than $20) and a 5% drop in the school taxes--a drop directly attributable to Governor Doyle's budget vetoes two summers ago.

So, thank you Governor Doyle. A little late, I know, but it's better than the silence from your opponents who doubted you.

(Related: See Mike Plaisted on the Journal Sentinel's continuing anti-Doyle bias.)

Worst Photoshopping of the Year

Important UPDATE below!

The year is rapidly coming to a close, so the nomination period is almost over, but Carrie Lynch draws our attention to a doozy.

The doozy comes from the website of a candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Annette Ziegler. On her events page, Ziegler has some pictures, if you roll over particular counties on the big map. For example, if you roll over Florence County, you get a cute picture of Judge Ziegler standing in front of the rustic Florence County Courthouse sign. Mouse over Washington county, and you get this picture of her in front of the slightly less rustic Washington County Courthouse.

All very nice, right? Except keep going; hit Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Ozaukee counties. Notice anything . . . unusual about these?


Now, to get to any of the Milwaukee, Waukesha, or Ozaukee County courthouses from her homebase in Washington County, it might have taken Judge Ziegler no more than 45 minutes or so in the car. She probably could have hit all three in an afternoon. But, no. We get bad photoshop--she couldn't even match the font and color of the sign, let alone the angle of the words. Someone should probably get fired for this. Preferably the candidate.

For the record, I'm leaning toward Linda Clifford.

UPDATE: As of mid-morning, Monday December 18, Judge Ziegler has removed the photoshopped images from her page. You can still get the Florence County and Washington County photos, but the others as seen above have been removed. Good for her for moving quickly to change the site.

The photos do remain on her server (Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Waukesha), in case you think I made them up.

Living With Ed

I have never seen "The Osbournes." I will never watch "Being Bobby Brown." I refuse even to think about the Hulk Hogan show.

Ed Begley, Jr., though? I'm all over that.

Buh-Bayh

U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., announced early today he will not be a candidate for president in 2008.

His decision was made public in a statement released to The Indianapolis Star.

"As you know I have been exploring helping the people of my state and our country in a different capacity," he wrote. "After talking with family and friends over the past several days, I have decided that this is not the year for me to run for President and I will not be a candidate for the presidency in 2008.

"It wasn't an easy decision but it was the right one for my family, my friends and my state. I have always prided myself on putting my public responsibilities ahead of my own ambitions."

He conceded the odds were against him, describing himself as a "relatively unknown candidate."

With Bayh out, that leaves Tom Vilsack and Dennis Kucinich all alone in the race for the bottom of the pack.

Tommy!

Run, Tommy!, run!

Friday Random Ten

The it's beginning to NOT look a lot like Christmas Edition

1. "What Do You Want From Me" Pink Floyd from The Division Bell
2. "Solitary Man" Tracy Grammer from The Verdant Mile
3. "Zachary" Sonia Dada from E-Town Live 2
4. "Blue Guitar" Susan Werner from New Non-Fiction
5. "Everybody's Gotta" Sons of the Never Wrong from 4 Ever On
6. "Somewhere Out There" from Lucy Kaplansky
7. "For Sascha" Béla Fleck from Tales from the Acoustic Planet
8. "Everytime" Sarah Harmer from You Were Here
9. "The Restless Consumer" Neil Young from Living with War
10. "Dictator" The Nields from 'Mousse

Thursday Thumbs

Thursday Thumbs is a new regular feature wherein I express my approval or disapproval concerning news of the week, happenings, or other trivia through a cute graphic, rather than with my usual long, hard-to-follow, and humorless rants and rambling. Today's edition is the inaugural one. Be nice.

Thumbs up to going back to grad school. Scott's time will get tighter, but it will be well worth it in the end.

Thumbs down to AirTran. Midwest Airlines has something special about it, and it isn't AirTran's dirty airplanes and cramped seats.

Thumbs up to Mel Gibson. Yes, he's crazy, but at least he's able to own his insanity.

Thumbs down to Michael McGee, Jr. He can't seem to own his insanity.

Thumbs up to the McIlheran Watch growing ever wider. I'm telling you, he's a tricky one.

Thumbs down to everyone who over-hyped the "spying on Di" story.

Thumbs up to a swift recovery for Tim Johnson. Our thoughts are with him and his family.

Thumbs down to everyone waiting for Johnson to die. Really, FOX, that's low even for you.

Thumbs up to Dean, for crossing enemy lines.

Thumbs down to No Child Left Behind, which seems to be falling apart all over.

Thumbs down to Peter Pochowski, who said, "he estimates 25% to 30% of local teens are carrying" cell phones. That's about 70% to 75% off from reality.

110th Congress under Democrats: Not business as usual

First we had Nancy Pelosi's bold 100 hours agenda, and a promise to get to work on the people's business right away in January instead of the traditional wait-until-after-the-State-of-the-Union approach. Then we had Harry Reid's promise that the Senate would stay open in January, too, and that Senators might be expected to work more than two days a week.

Now comes word that Democrats will not only finish the unfinished mess the Republicans are leaving behind, they will do it without any of those pesky earmarks:

House and Senate Democrats have decided to complete this year’s unfinished appropriations process with a joint resolution keeping the government funded until the new fiscal year starts in October, vowing to ban all earmarks from the measure.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the incoming Appropriations Committee chairmen, issued a statement yesterday laying blame at the feet of departing GOP leaders for failing to pass nine of the 11 fiscal year 2007 appropriations bills, a criticism leveled by several Republicans in the waning days of the lame-duck session. [. . .]

Democrats had faced mounting pressure to forge a plan for completing the outstanding appropriations bills quickly, with several appropriators appearing inclined toward an omnibus that would combine versions of the spending bills already approved in committee. Yet members of the new majority acknowledged the difficult task of crafting an earmark-free omnibus that would avoid potential objections from conservatives and GOP appropriators. [. . .]

Byrd and Obey, in their statement, promised to work on a bipartisan basis to secure passage for the coming spending resolution. Earmarks in this year’s appropriations bills will be candidates for inclusion during the 2008 process, they said, “subject to new standards for transparency and accountability.”

Way to go, Obey!

This is the kind of move that establishes, in a major, major way to anyone watching and to anyone with their hands out hoping for special treatment, that the Democrats will not be pursuing business as usual. And it's the kind of move that's earning praise from both sides of the Cheddarsphere. Liberal Corey Liebmann is just one of the happy bloggers on my side; more surprising is conservative Jenna Pryor:

But when the party supposed to be the fiscally prudent party fails to do this for years, despite numerous pushes from the party faithful, and the Democrats manage to handle it (somewhat) almost immediately...it is more than a little disheartening.

Jenna has, basically, never known anything besides Republican rule in Washington; some of us are old enough to remember that Democrats used to get stuff done, like balance the budget and finish spending bills without having to shut down the federal government. Come on over to the light, Jenna.

In the meantime, despite the re-election of Democrat William "I always have $90,000 in my freezer!" Jefferson in Louisiana over the weekend, Democrats are showing some spine on ethics. Cheddarspherean DICTA points out that Nancy Pelosi has booted Jefferson from the influential Ways and Means Committee until he's either cleared or convicted. No "DeLay Rule" for us!

McIlheran Watch: Stroking his Dictator

The regular semi-regular feature of this blog (given that I've started a new feature) is the McIlheran Watch, wherein I examine what ridiculous ideas spring from the keyboard of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's conservative affirmative action recipient, the now-begoateed Patrick McIlheran. (I'm waiting for jsonline to update its picture of him, so to the right (hah!) there is the proverbial "artist's conception.")

The Brawler, who also takes great pleasure in dissecting McIlheran's pithed frog, has already gotten the ball rolling on the latest of McIlheran's abominations. And no, I'm not talking about McIlheran's repeat belief that Ward Churchill (whom no one had heard of until the right-wing echo chamber essentially created him) is a liberal icon. I'm talking about P-Mac's lionizing yesterday of brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who died over the weekend, at 91--an age many times that which his opponents ever lived to see.

(And what's the deal with this? McIlheran won't even link to the Associated Press story on Pinochet's death that ran in the newspaper he works for, choosing instead to link to the very same AP story in the conservative Washington Times. The Times is a loss-leader for Rev. Sun Myong Moon; is P-Mac that desperate to help the Moonies over the people who sign his paycheck? Maybe it's just some kind of passive-aggressive thing he's doing in his position as union steward, since management is squeezing employees. Either way, it's weird.)

McIlheran, I guess, kind of liked Pinochet. See, I thought uncontrollable nausea at the thought of herding human beings into soccer stadiums to torture and kill them was what separated us from the animals. McIlheran's standards are, apparently, lower:

Pinochet took power to overthrow an elected president that, he and others suspected, would drag Chile into Marxism. [. . .] Pinochet, for all his evil repression, liberated Chile’s economy, and now that he’s been out of power, Chile’s got a free, prosperous economy, generating about $11,900 of wealth per person in 2005. [. . .]

So, doubtless, we’ll hear again the wrong that Pinochet did. He did wrong. He was a bad man, a dictator. But he gave up power.

I ellipsized the parts where McIlheran speaks ill of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, not because I'm trying to gloss over the evils that Castro has done, but because I don't believe in playing, as McIlheran does, the Special Dictator Edition of Relativistic Pursuit. Rather, just consider what McIlheran has said about Pinochet; while qualified with an unavoidable "yeah, he did bad things," this is praise, people, praise for a man who led a coup against Salvadore Allende, the democratically elected leader, and who slaughtered thousands of his opponents in nearly twenty years of iron fisted rule. The U.S. has invaded to liberate other countries I could name for less heinous crimes.

The Brawler tells us that whatever boon Chile's economy may be seeing is due to Allende's having nationalized the copper industry, a slice of Marxism Pinochet never undid. This is assuming you give Pinochet any credit at all for how successful Chile is doing 16 years after he left office.

And McIlheran's pat-on-the-back to the guy because "he gave up power" is roughly like feeling relief that the Death Star is only half-built. Nearly two decades after he siezed power, Pinochet wrote a new constitution that set a date for an election eight years from its ratification, and left himself two years after that until he stepped down. Upon leaving the presidency, Pinochet assumed the title "Senator for Life," a position he created for himself in the constitution he wrote that guaranteed him immunity from investigation or prosecution for his crimes. That constitution passed a referendum under incredibly suspicious circumstances in 1980, and Pinochet was never indicted in Chile for any of his crimes until a couple of weeks ago, when, almost literally on his deathbed, he admitted that, yeah, he hadn't been a saint.

Way to go, man! You "gave up power"!

Perhaps McIlheran is building up the "it's okay to torture people if you aren't a communist" defense for President Bush. Or perhaps he's merely trying to cover for his occasional (example) attempts at rehabiltating Richard Nixon, who detested Allende and whose spooks fomented the 1973 coup that killed him. This country's long history of South American interventionism against people we don't like, elected or not, goes back to Wilson, and runs right up through recent history. I've been having some odd déjà vu of late knowing that Nicaragua just re-elected Daniel Ortega, and the US Senate just confirmed as Secretary of State one of the Reagan Administration's leading proponents of bombing Ortega's first administration back to the stone age. I want my MTV.

I'll end by noting that there must have been a memo going around that McIlheran got his hands on. As Matt Yglesias notes, the Washington Post ran an editorial today making many of the same points, including the favorable comparison of Pinochet to Castro. Googling up Pinochet on the blogs finds many conservatives taking the same line, as well. McIlheran himself claims inspiration from the conservative New York Sun.

Me? Yeah, I'm liberal. But it hardly seems a matter of liberal or conservative to say of Pinochet, as we will of Castro, as we do of Pol Pot and Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin, that there is nothing to praise about a brutal dictator. Nothing.

The Real Debate Wisconsin Money Quote

As long as we're blaming Mike Mathias for things, I've decided I want to start a new feature. Mathias has the "Boots and Sabers Money Quote" (most recent edition here), which he describes as "an occasional feature of Pundit Nation highlighting the high-minded intellectualism among the visitors leaving comments at" the conservative Wisconsin blog Boots and Sabers.

Knowing, of course, that good writers borrow while great writers steal, I decided to steal the idea and inaugurate my series in the same vein with the conservative Wisconsin blog Real Debate Wisconsin (there are two things wrong with that name; any guesses?). Just to be clear, I'm not nutpicking. I will be fully identifying who actually said it, rather than blaming the blog's proprietor for the vacuity of his commenters.

That is, unless the comment in question was left by the proprietor himself. Our first RDWMQ:

realdebate said...
Keep drawing lines boys.

You say it is bad that we look in on people who want to kill us, and make excuses for llistening into a foriegn Princess.

I don't care about the law, I'm talking right and wrong.

You guys will go to any legth to defend your boy and ignore reality.

11:00 AM

"realdebate" is the blog's owner and lead writer, Fred Dooley. Fred, it is good to finally learn, doesn't care about the law. Who's ignoring reality?

To be fair, I have a second-place finisher among the high-minded comments from RDW. The "Miss Congeniality," if you will, of our first RDWMQ:

RoseIndigo said...
We went after Saddam because he was the weakest link in the chain in that part of the world. And everyone seems to forget that Gulf War I never did have an end. There was simply a cease fire with conditions that Saddam was to have met, and which he never did meet and defied for 12 years. He was given plenty of time. Instead he played his cards like a bully, and so Bush Jr. simply finished the war his father had not finished because his father had promised the U.N. to leave as soon as Saddam was out of Kuwait. Bush Sr. kept his word. That's what one gets for listening to the U.N. Everyone knew it had to be finished sooner or later anyway.

Terrorism would have grown with or without this war, because the militant Islamic world is on a roll what with their oil prices and the fact that they never did get over getting kicked out of Europe in the middle ages. They are fanatics and will continue to test us. The only response is one I've said should have been done from the very beginning.

TURN THE WHOLE AREA INTO A SHEET OF GLASS!!! Mr. Bush began with the right intentions, but he was sidelined by the politically correct elements in this country, and that is no way to win a war. Until we do what we need to do we will have trouble in that part of the world which will lead to WWIII, sure as the sun will rise tomorrow.

This is all a repeat of the time before WWII when everyone thought appeasement was the way to go. All appeasement does is encourage the enemy to become worse, because tyranny works like that. It always has, always will.

2:09 PM

I quoted the whole thing because it left me speechless. Just . . . speechless.

Until next time.

It's worse!

Vikki Ortiz has now become Jackie Harvey. (I blame Mike Mathias. I didn't used to care.)

Cell Phones in School

This will be an interesting change of pace from the previous unofficial policy:

Milwaukee schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos says the school system must come up with a way to deal with the heavy use of cell phones when trouble breaks out at a school, an innovation that has increased the severity of incidents such as a fight Monday morning at Bradley Tech High School. [. . .]

The cell phone phenomenon has shown up in other schools in MPS, in the suburbs and nationwide: When trouble breaks out, students reach for the phones, and within moments, other youths are on their way to the scene, sometimes literally from miles around. [. . .]

Although use of cell phones is generally banned in schools, both in Milwaukee and the suburbs, it is obvious to anyone around a high school or middle school--and sometimes even elementaries--that a vast majority of students carry them and use them frequently. Sometimes when schools have tried to crack down on the phones, parents have been the ones to object the most, saying they want their children to be able to reach them during school hours.

For several years, MPS principals have been told--at least, they've told me they've been told--that there is little the district will do to back them up on any kind of large-scale cell phone enforcement policy, in part because of their ubiquity and in part because of parents' insistence that their children have them.

When I first started teaching in MPS, only a handful of students carried cell phones, and they were the ones who used them principally for their, um, business activities. You could find them, isolate them, confiscate them, and generally deal with the problem on that scale. But now, literally almost every student is carrying a phone--and all of them much nicer than the crappy little phone I have. It would take all day to get every phone and then the better part of a month dealing with parents to return them.

I generally subscribe to the "out of sight, out of mind" philosphy: Only when the phone comes out during class does it becomes a problem--even when, as is often the case, it's parents calling during the school day. (The occasional chat I get to have with a parent on these phones is always a bonus. "No," I say, "you can't call this number during school. Please call the school and we'll pass along any messages . . .")

So I'm curious to see what kind of new policy will come down. Officials quoted in the article talk wistfully of cell-phone jammers, but those puppies are both illegal and kind of expensive if you want to jam an entire school (I've looked into it). Reinforcing the phones' inappropriateness with parents doesn't seem to help, either in official school communications or in conversations in person, since the frequency with which we see them doesn't change no matter what we say. I'm not sure what else, outside of patting down every student every morning to collect them, we can do.

So I'll ask for the collected wisdom of the Cheddarsphere, here: What solutions do you have hiding in your pocket? How can we stop the cell phones?

Collective Sigh

Not only that Mandy Jenkins is back and posting, but that she survived the wrong-sided streets of London, shopping bags and smooth, smug syle intact.

Welcome home, homegirl!

Once more, with feeling

In comments to the post directly below this one, and elsewhere around the blogs (no offense, Game, but yours is just the most recent one of seen, though by no means the only one), I'm seeing confusion: People don't know the difference between public, charter, voucher, and private schools here in Wisconsin. (One commenter of mine even seems to think, despite the clear mention of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, I live in Michigan.) So, for the benefit of everyone--and not for the first time--I will do the list.

Schools in Wisconsin come in four basic flavors. Please don't confuse or conflate them.

1. Public schools. The public schools are required to have fully licensed ("highly qualified" is the No Child Left Behind terminology) teachers, assistants, and administrators. The public schools must administer standardized tests in grades three through eight, plus ten, and publish the results along with other NCLB-demanded data, such as attendance, graduation, and retention rates, and oodles of demographic data. The schools are fully funded through taxpayers' money (except for all the bake sales and fundraisers they have to hold to fill in the gaps). They are required by law to provide services to special education students, and students who are English language learners, regardless of cost. They are operated by about 420 districts throughout the state as mandated by Article X of the state Constitution, under various parts of state statutes 115-121.
   
   
2. Charter Schools. Charter schools are also public (and non-religious) schools. Really. Like public schools, they must have fully licensed professional staff, and they must administer the same tests and publish the same data as the traditional public schools. They are also fully funded by taxpayer dollars and authorized under state statute 118. The difference between charters and the traditional schools is who runs them: Charters are operated by independent, authorized groups who contract--or charter--with the local school district, currently only Milwaukee or Racine. (The Milwaukee Public Schools sometimes charters with itself to run its schools as charters; these are called instrumentality charter schools, as opposed to the non-instrumentality charters run by other groups.) The independence from districts theoretically allow charters to innovate and move more quickly in response to demands from parents. Read more on charters at the DPI.
   
   
3. Private Schools. These are schools, also covered by section 118, that get no (or almost no) taxpayer money at all. They can be established by pretty much anyone, can be staffed by pretty much anyone, can teach pretty much anything, and have only to meet minimum requirements to be allowed to function. They can admit whom they want, and are not required to admit or provide services to special-needs students. They don't have to give any tests at all or publish the results, or any other data about the school. Many private schools, though, choose to employ licensed teachers, teach special-education students, and to give standardized tests. See the DPI's page on private schools for more.
   
   
4. Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (Voucher) Schools. These are private schools, mostly religious in nature. These schools set a tuition rate, and can pick and choose who attends among the paying customers. They can also, if they appy to the DPI, accept students who meet certain economic criteria and receive a voucher to cover their tuition, currently $6,501 (or less if tuition is lower than that). The voucher program is limited only to schools in the city of Milwaukee, and schools that accept voucher students face a few more hurdles than the private schools described above. They still don't need licensed staff, and still are not required to give any particluar tests (though they must adminsiter something) or publish any data about themselves beyond the attendance data submitted to DPI as a prerequisite for getting their voucher payments. They are required to admit voucher students based on a lottery, rather than any selection criteria, but are not required to provide any special education (or other) services to students they admit who might need them. And they must prove to DPI by later this month that they either have accreditation, or are working on it. The DPI has a section on voucher schools, too. (Updated 12/12 for accuracy on the testing part.)

It's confusing, I know. But it is important that you don't--as some people have today and recently--mix up the different kinds of schools. Hope this helps.

No teaching license? No problem!

No driver's license? Shut the school down!

Okay, I'm exaggerating a little: Elijah's Brook God's Nation Children School was kicked out of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program technically for a lack of insurance. But the incident that led to the removal--a bus crash involving an unlicensed bus drivier--helps to illustrate one of the most frustrating things, for me, about the MPCP. The driver, had he been licensed, would have held more certification from the state to do his job than any other person associated with the school was required to. Running the school takes no license, and a search of the DPI's database this morning confirms the administrator doesn't have even an expired license. Of the other employees named in the stories about the bus crash, one seems to have a license, but she quit the school citing

high turnover in the teaching staff since the school year began, and that the school had almost no academic plan, curriculum, textbooks or other educational materials when the school year started. [. . .] She said she saw situations that concerned her, such as fifth- and sixth-grade students taking care of children in a day care center adjacent to the school during the school day.

The MPCP is just not working. Not all the schools in it are as bad as the one in question here, of course. And not all Milwaukee Public Schools are models of excellence. But people with experience in the schools--even die-hard conservative Republicans--recognize the futility of the program. The blogger I just linked to has the same complaints I do about the program, though we disagree on virtually everything else. But note what he says in the comments: "I have proof when I get kids from these schools and they are behind even the MPS kids and tell me they had no books or book that another school threw out, or that they watched movies all the time, or that I knew teachers that taught at those schools and were ALWAYS either the only one who had a teaching licence or one of two..." I could have written those words--have written words like them on these pages before.

Do you think any of the children from Elijah's Brook--now thrown into MPS with no additional funding--will be at the level of their new classmates? Do you think the fifth- and sixth-graders who used to spend their days watching toddlers in day care will be ready for fractions and geography?

And the only reason this school closed is because it lacked insurance!

***
Don't forget: We here at folkbum's rambles and rants are holding a virtual town hall meeting, asking everyone who comes by to help shape the MPS strategic plan. Follow that link and add your thoughts.

Worst President Ever? Or Merely Mediocre?

Yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Crossroads" section featured a series of op-eds that originally ran in the Washington Post the week before, by five historians trying to guage, three-qaurters of the way through, where George W. Bush falls when you rank the presidents.

Eric Foner says Worst. President. Ever. Douglas Brinkley says bad, but not a true villain. David Greenberg says he'll never be as bad as Nixon. Michael Lind puts him fifth from the bottom. And Vincent Cannato, fairly sensibly, argues that without the distance and perspective of time and history, it's really hard to judge. As an example, Cannato cites Harry S Truman, who was not well liked at the time but has gotten his props in more recent times.

(Bush must have taken Cannato's words to heart, as he tried to claim kinship with Truman this week--though forgetting that what he's done and what Truman did are nothing alike. He got kind of petulant when someone pointed that out to him. I don't think Truman was such a big baby, either.)

There's a lot more to say about all of those essays--you should read them all, of course--but I won't say it. Instead, I'll defer to the infinitely wiser Barbara O'Brien, who wrote about them when they appeared in the WaPo last week. Check out her take both on the Foner "Worst President Ever" piece and the other four. When what I want to say has already been said, may as well save us all the trouble, eh?

Oh, and for the record, I mostly agree with Cannato: It's too early to judge. However, Cannato seems optimistic that time will brighten Bush's star; I doubt that. Bush's star was never too bright to begin with.

Rahm Emanuel must go

There are so many reasons not to like Rahm Emanuel. Among the biggest is his refusal to buy into the 50-state strategy that won Democrats so many seats in the House last month--and the man was our elections chair. He wanted to sink a ton of money into just 20 or so seats, hoping to pick up the 15 we needed. Luckily, we ignored him, and won without him. Almost literally--he sank $6 million into the campaigns of two of his hand-selected candidates (people who ran in lieu of netroots favorites) that could have gone into a half-dozen other close races and won them handily.

He made who knows how much money teaming up with Bruce Reed to write The Plan, a book which, apparently offers no plan and is generally designed to distance himself from the party he's supposed to be a leader of.

Now comes word, through Congress's investigation of itself, that Emanuel knew of Mark Foley's emails in 2005, about the same time as Speaker Hastert and others. When asked about his knowledge of these emails, Emanuel repeatedly and forcefully lied to Democrats and the American people. There is no way around it. His choices in 2005, when he learned of the emails, included things like going to the FBI, or demanding a House investigation then into the matter. He didn't do those things; he leaked word of the emails to the Florida press, who refused to run the story.

It was only a year later, when additional emails were leaked to ABC news--by a Republican this time, remember--that any news organizations went after the truth of the matter, and we found that Hastert and other Republican leaders both knew of Foley's problems and helped to cover them up.

But Emanuel's conduct, both in 2005 and in lying to us this year, demands action. He should resign, and, failing that, he should be removed from the Democratic caucus. Should he be expelled? Maybe so. His actions are exactly the oppositie of the kind of leadership Democrats need to provide for the next year or so, the only time we'll have to establish ourselves as the party that can fulfill our promises. We promised no more corruption, voters supported that, and now it's time to be serious.

While we're at it, Democrats should kick the just re-elected William Jefferson out of the caucus, too.

They say not to speak ill of the dead.

So I won't.






















Pinochet is dead.

Subject to Podcast

in a wide-ranging conversation, I mopped the floor with Aaron and Jenna on everything form stem-cell research to the ISG report. The only question I flubbed was Aaron's first one, misunderstanding it and explaining the derivation of my blogonym rather than talking about myself. Anyway, you can find the podcast at the podcast home, or download it directly here.

Friday Random Ten

The brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Edition

1. "Road Buddy" Dar Williams from End of the Summer
2. "This Train Revised" Indigo Girls from 1200 Curfews
3. "Even Better Than the Real Thing" U2 from Achtung Baby
4. "Long Way Down" Luce from Live at the World Cafe
5. "Every Day I Write the Book" Elvis Costello from Punch the Clock
6. "On a Bad Day" Kasey Chambers from Barricades and Brick Walls
7. "Evening's Curtain" Mark Erelli from Hope & Other Casualties
8. "Weightless" Old 97s from Satellite Rides
9. "Move Over Mr. Gaugin" Michael Smith from Such Things are Finely Done
10. "The Beast in Me" Martin Sexton from The American

Mike Mathias is going to plotz

It seems that Vikki Ortiz has become--it was probably inevitable--Mandy Jenkins. You know what they say: Resistance is futile.

Falk Families Fund

This is the news I was waiting for before writing about the tragedy at the Falk complex yesterday:

Rexnord Corp., the parent company of Falk Corp., today announced that a support fund has been established for the families of the three Falk employees who died in the explosion Wednesday at its Milwaukee facility. The company is making an initial $100,000 contribution to the fund. [. . .]

Those interested in making contributions to the support fund can drop off donations at any M&I Branch or can send donations to: Rexnord Corp., Attention: Treasurer, 4701 W. Greenfield Avenue, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53214. Checks should me made out to: Falk Families Survivor Fund. Donations to this fund are not [tax] deductible.

Beyond that, there's little to say that hasn't been said already.

And the Republicans?

Big article in the paper today: "Wisconsin Democrats split on assessment of Iraq war: Some say it's more of the same; others applaud findings." The story details how different people have different reactions to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group's report. That, of course, means a "split."

Because, apparently, nothing makes for a good story quite so much as the "Democrats are in disarray" storyline, and its corollary, "Democrats have no plan." See, for example, every news story about Democrats for the last, oh, six years. The crap in the press lately about Nancy Pelosi, in particular, is symptomatic of exactly that frame of mind. (Read Greenwald.)

So my question: What about the Republicans? Where's our news story on them, and their reactions? I mean, I realize that starting next month, the Wisconsin Republican delegation will be a mere three (compared to Dems' seven), but they're not invisible or in hiding. Wouldn't we all like to know whether they agree with the panel's findings that the current situation in Iraq is grim, or with any of the panel's bazillion recommendations, or even with each other? Or is a story about possible dissent in the ranks of Republicans not newsworthy? Even raising the question about why none of those three Republicans have even issued statements at all (as of this morning) would be better than nothing.

Relatedly, Russ Feingold's not running for president, and it breaks my heart. Tell me how he's wrong in his assessment of both Iraq and the ISG.

I'm Podcastic

Despite my general belief that I have a voice made for blogging, tonight I'll be losing my podcast virginity, recording a show with Aaron and Jenna. There is no set agenda, though, so I ask you now: What do you want me to talk about? What subjects and issues, oh loyal readers, are you dying to hear me prattle on about? Leave your suggestions in the comments, please. Then watch this space for a link to the podcast once Aaron's got it processed.

McIlheran Watch: Tears for those poor, poor rich people

Oh, how I've missed my BFF Patrick McIlheran, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's conservative typist. He's back from vacation, and today's column is a doozy, a classic, a gem in P-Mac's crown of jewely brilliance. I'll spare you the foreplay and just give you the really shiny parts:

Perhaps [those bothered by displays of extravagance] should mind their own business instead of mapping someone else's budget. Maybe we all should. We'd be happier. That isn't the spirit of the moment, unfortunately. Obsessing about inequality is.

Debate over taxes illustrates this. Resurgent, Democrats say they'll let President Bush's tax cuts expire. Not all of them, though: They'll keep some breaks, they say, that help the meritoriously unrich. It may surprise you that there were any, since the left's unrelenting line has been that the cuts shafted the middle class.

They didn't. The non-partisan Tax Foundation reports that in 2000, people earning more than $200,000 a year, roughly the top 2%, paid 47% of all federal income taxes, including those on dividends and capital gains. In 2004, after the Bush cuts, those making over $200,000 paid 50% of federal income taxes. [. . .]

Nor is this a momentary quirk. In 1980, the top 5% of earners paid 37% of federal income taxes. In 2004, those in the top 5% paid 57% of the nation's income taxes. [. . .] These trends have run almost uninterrupted since then.

Excuse me for a minute while I get out my hanky. This is truly heartbreaking news, sadder than anything I've ever read that didn't involve orphan puppies with their big tearful puppy dog eyes. It almost makes me want to start up a telethon, right now, to raise money to help all those poor rich people pay their taxes.

What? Not buying it? Of course you're not; the other 95% of us are having a hard time, I imagine, summoning much sympathy for the top 5%--people with annual income in the $150,000+ range.

No, I'm not an economist, and I don't usually even play one on the internet. But I am a skeptical fellow, and I always ask--as I try to teach my students to ask--about the context. What else might be happening as the rich people's share of income taxes has increased over the last quarter-century or so?

One answer, which explains everything quite neatly, is that the wealthy have not only seen their share of taxes increase, but they've seen their share of all income rising as well. From the folks at The Economist earlier this year:

The figures are startling. According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Piketty of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, the share of aggregate income going to the highest-earning 1% of Americans has doubled from 8% in 1980 to over 16% in 2004. That going to the top tenth of 1% has tripled from 2% in 1980 to 7% today. And that going to the top one-hundredth of 1%--the 14,000 taxpayers at the very top of the income ladder--has quadrupled from 0.65% in 1980 to 2.87% in 2004.

Okay, now their numbers are for the top 1%, not the top 5%, as McIlheran uses. But in the same timeframe he employs, the data show that those top 1% have seen their share of national income more than double. Using P-Mac's own figures, the top 5%'s share of taxes has risen barely 1.5 times. In other words, their share of income is increasing faster than their share of taxes.

This next one seems to be from a pro-labor group, so take with whatever salt makes you happy:

In 1970 the richest 1% had incomes 100 times that of the average working American; today the richest 1% enjoy an income 560 times that of the average working class taxpayer in the U.S.--about equivalent to the share they enjoyed in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression.

Again, that's about 1%, not 5%. Still, that's the kind of stuff that does little to soften your heart to the complaints of all those rich people paying all those taxes.

Here, at long last, is something concerning the top 5%. Mark Thoma at Economist's view cites the New York Times last week:

Over all, average incomes rose 27 percent in real terms over the quarter-century from 1979 through 2004. But the gains were narrowly concentrated at the top and offset by losses for the bottom 60 percent of Americans, those making less than $38,761 in 2004. [. . .] Only those in the top 5 percent had significant gains. The average income of those on the 95th to 99th rungs of the income ladder rose by 53 percent, almost twice the average rate.

Confirmation: These people saw a doubling of their incomes. But it says nothing about their share of overall income.

Let's try one more, this time with graphs:

This graph can be a little tricky to read, I have the top income receiver at the bottom and the bottom at the top.  I did that so that you can more easily read the percentage of income received by the top receivers.  The blue, green, and red series together make up the top 10%, red and green comprise the top 5% and so on.  The bottom half of income receivers are represented by the aqua color, and as you can see they receive close to only 10% of the total National Income.  The graph shows which segments of the income receivers have been gaining and loosing share.  As you can see, the top 50% accounts for more income today than they did in 1980, but that does not mean that every segment of the top 50% has gained  a share of income.  In fact the only segments to actually have gained in share of national income are members of the top 5%.  This can more easily be seen in the summary table below the graph.

Share of National AGI by Percentile
	Top 1%	95 to 99	90 to 94	75 to 89	50 to 74	Bottom 49%
1980	8.46%	12.55%	11.12%	24.57%	25.62%	17.68%
2000	20.81%	14.49%	10.71%	21.14%	19.86%	12.99%
Share of National AGI by Group
	Top 1%	Top 5%	Top 10%	Top 25%	Top 50%	Bottom 49%
1980	8.46%	20.01%	32.13%	56.70%	82.32%	17.68%
2000	20.81%	35.30%	46.01%	67.15%	87.01%	12.99%

The two graphs below represent the data in the Share of National AGI [Adjusted Gross Income] by Percentile table above.  Although not completely useful in themselves, as a comparison between 1980 and 2000 the contrast becomes striking. 

No, this doesn't get us quite to the present, but the trends are startling: Over 20 years, the share of income earned by the top 5% grew tremendously. The question seems reasonable, then: Is it so surprising that as the wealthiest people earned a greater share of all income they paid a greater share of all taxes? And I think the answer has to be no, it isn't surprising. Nor is it so heartbreaking that McIlheran needs to devote a Wednesday column to it, or that any of the rest of us should feel even the tiniest bit sorry for these people who are making out far better than we.

Of course, the recognition that the distribution of all our national income is so top-heavy--and getting top-heavier--raises all sorts of other questions, but that should wait for another day. In the meantime, just remember this the next time the wealthy come begging for sympathy over how horrible it is to be them and to pay their taxes: They are the ones seeing the big boost from the modern economy; they can afford it. Just dig out that tiny violin and play them a tune as you walk away.

Update: Googling different search terms dug up a different page that has all of these data. You can see the growth in both share of AGI and share of taxes paid in tables 5 and 6 at this page from the Tax Foundation. It's clear that the share of taxes paid by the top 5% has increased at about the same rate as their share of income.

He Will Communicate in Code by Blinking

Can somebody please explain to me again why Ann Althouse is Wisconsin's most widely read blogger?

A few quick notes

Congrats to Scott on achieving his black belt. That's cool, and a Big Deal.

Yesterday, the American Federation of Teachers released a study (.pdf) on the sorry state of American public education infrastructure--the sad state our school buildings are in. I was supposed to blog it, and blog about my own school, but I didn't have time. However, my friend Ken Bernstein did over at the Daily Kos: Read it (and the report) and weep.

Anybody know what your score is? Anybody think a program like this is a good use of taxpayers' money?

And as long as I'm linking to Digby's blog, here is probably the most concise version of the How We Lost Iraq story I've read to date. If you read nothing else I link to this week, read it.

Have you added your ideas to the MPS strategic plan process, yet? Please, please do so.

Well, duh:

Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 100%

 

You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day.... in Guantanamo!

Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

(Via Nick)

Tax (Un)Fairness in the News. Kind of.

When the Wisconsin Taxpayers' Alliance or Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce release studies showing how awful the tax burden is for Wisconsin citizens, families, or businesses, those stories end up on the front page (sometimes the front of the metro section) with big giant headlines and scary pull-quotes like, "The sky is falling!" or "Cut my taxes now or the dog dies! I'm serious!" (Try this one, for example, and this one, and, from just a couple weeks back, this one.)

But when a study comes out showing that Wisconsin is not necessarily the tax hell that sells newspapers, where does the story go? Page D3:

More than two-thirds of corporations filing income tax returns with Wisconsin in 2003 owed the state nothing, according to a study released Monday.

The information came from an analysis of data compiled by the Wisconsin Department of Revenue, said Jack Norman, research director of the Institute for Wisconsin's Future, who did the study.

"It is no secret to the Wisconsin business community that their taxes are low," Norman said in a speech at Milwaukee's Central Library. He repeated the presentation Monday in Madison and Spring Green.

According to the data Norman presented, 67% of the 54,644 corporations that filed returns in 2003 paid no income taxes. That is the last year for which complete data are available, and Norman produced the Revenue Department tables upon which his conclusions were based.

So tell me again why they sky is falling?

SSDC Copiergate: Suckers!

Updated below.

So what effect did the Wisconsin blogs have on the election just passed? No one has formally asked me that question yet, but in a pique of blogotistical ego, I've had my answer prepared for some time, anyway, just on the off chance that someone would ask. That answer?

None.

And to defend that answer, I think of a couple of emblematic moments from the campaign season. Among the biggest and ugliest of the moments in mind is the State Senate Democratic Committee memo. To refresh your memory (note the last bit):

State Senate Republicans put their hands on the campaign plans of Democrats in June--strategic help they say they lucked into after a legislative aide found the political documents in a Capitol copier five months before the Nov. 7 election.

Keith Gilkes, executive director of the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate, said Wednesday that an aide to a Republican senator found copies of the political plans in the copier early this summer after duplicates had been made. Republicans plan to ask the state Elections Board today to review whether the documents showed an illegal coordination between the State Senate Democratic Committee and groups friendly to its cause, Gilkes said. [. . .] Gilkes provided copies of the documents to the Journal Sentinel but declined to name the aide who found them or the aide's boss. [. . .]

The documents themselves became a campaign issue after they were posted Wednesday on www.bootsandsabers.com and other political Web logs.

For me, this was always a shining example of how the blogs failed, utterly and spectacularly, to live up to their billing. Or their potential. Or anything, really.

Dig it: The Republicans found, back in June, the Democrats' Senate campaign plan. Mid-Octoberish, the Republicans were looking at the kind of numbers that make you call a hail mary, and they leaked the plan in the way that they could create the most noise--they gave it to the bloggers.

Owen at Boots and Sabers wasn't the only recipient. Owen tends to be relatively reasonable--the Republicans needed a respectable face on this--and his first post about the plan, indeed, is tame (breathless updates aside) compared to some others. Owen sees the potential illegality in the duplication of the documents on a state copier, and that's about it. But here's one ballistic leakee, shrieking at the top of his lungs. Another overreaction lies here, with very strong assertions of law-breaking and agitation for action. When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported the story, they linked only to Owen, which probably disappointed the Republicans who tried to leak strategically to the most easily excitable in the bunch.

And in the end, of course, not only were there no legal implications related to any possible coordination between the SSDC and third-party groups, the Republicans lost the Senate to Democrats--whose plan they had!--in pretty dramatic fashion. Total help from the blogs? None.

But the story got worse yesterday. You wouldn't think that it could, since it already comes complete with an anticlimactic fizzle despite the screaming nonsense from some of the least sensical of the Republicans' blogging allies. We now have the real story:

A Republican legislative aide looked through a Democrat's binder and made copies of campaign plans inside it five months before the election, a disclosure that shed new light Monday on how the GOP obtained the valuable political documents.

In the weeks before the Nov. 7 election, Keith Gilkes, executive director of the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate, said the aide had found the documents after they had been copied on a Capitol copier. But in a statement released Monday, Capitol aide John O'Brien said he found the originals in June and copied them over concerns they disclosed illegal campaign. [. . .]

Sen. Mark Miller (D-Monona) said he brought the plans into the Capitol after he mistakenly grabbed a binder that looked like his from Matt Swentkofske, director of the state Senate Democratic Committee. Miller said he left the binder in the copy room next to his office. He often leaves his coat and bag in the room, which doubles as a lunch area.

Dave Diamond has already addressed the disingenuousness of O'Brien's actions. But what struck me while reading of O'Brien's confession, reading about the cover-up of the document's true origins, and thinking back on the way this story played out on the blogs, was simply this:

The bloggers got played. Like an out-of-tune accordion.

One, the leakee bloggers were outright lied to. Owen's first post, for example, notes that he was told that "apparently, some Dem left the Wisconsin State Senate Dem campaign plan on a copier." The people who told Owen that lied to him. I don't know if Owen's source was Gilkes, or just someone on his staff, but what got passed on to Owen and the shriekier bloggers was known to be false when it was passed on. No doubt, Gilkes also lied to the media; but what does it say that the Republicans here didn't think to treat their blogging allies any better than they did the schlumps in the MSM?

Two, the Republicans knew what they wanted to get from the bloggers--hysteria--and they got it, right on cue. Consider, the Republicans had the SSDC memo in June! If they held any doubts about the legality of what was in that document--or of its appearance in a Capitol copy room--they could have gone public or to the State Elections Board right then. But they didn't; they held onto the stuff for four whole months. And even then, rather than go to the necessary authorities, they went to the bloggers. Why? Because the authorities would say, as indeed they later did, that no illegal coordination happened, and then Republicans wouldn't even have enough material for a solid press release. Instead, they released the documents to the bloggers, who did jump up and down and yell and scream that illegal activity was taking place. And, with just that little bit of smoke and mirrors, the story had become News.

Three, the Republicans clearly don't care if their putative allies in the Cheddarsphere look completely foolish. Owen--not to pick on him too much, because he's a nice guy and I feel bad for him (and only him) that he got played--actually drove out to the Capitol to look at and take pictures of the break room where the documents had been found. His conclusion? "Sorry, but I’m not buying Miller’s story." Turns out, by (the real culprit) O'Brien's own admission, Miller's story was 100% true.

Four, the Republicans have put the bloggers in the unenviable position of either having to call for the prosecution of O'Brien--for making copies of political rather than legislative documents on a Capitol copier--or look like hypocrites. All of these bloggers made it clear that they thought Miller or whichever of his aides made the copies should be going to jail. (I made the same call, even back when I thought it might be a Dem who was responsible. I'm nothing if not in favor of obeying the law.) Now that we know there were no Democrats involved, and it was a Republican aide who made the copies--not to mention a chain of Republicans who covered that up--we have to wait to see if those bloggers make the same demands for jail time. As of right now, admittedly an ungodly hour in the morning, I only hear crickets. (Update: In a well-written and poignant post, Owen (rightly) says he's upset and calls for O'Brien's prosecution.)

So there it is. Exhibit A in the case for "Wisconsin bloggers did squat in this election cycle." You got your sound and your fury, and you got nothing in return except a sour taste in your mouth.

For my part, again, I feel bad for someone like Owen in all of this. He probably doesn't need or want my sympathy, but he was duped, and you can't help but feel for the guy. In the end, I hope he was able to get a bit of a laugh: The news reports tell us that John O'Brien is spending some time away from the Capitol on "an extended medical leave." There's something deliciously ironic about someone in state government actually using their sick time--and for this!

Further update: Again, read Owen. Peter, too, is mad he was lied to, and demands legal repercussions. Also, Seth independently arrived at the same conclusion I did, and celebrates Sen. Miller's vindication in the matter.

Things to be read together:

Right-wing talk radio host Jessica McBride:

I thought something dramatic was happening: A fundamental shift of power from the government to the citizenry. Wrong. At the state level, the proposals to get more of your money are coming fast and furious.

Op-ed writer James Rowan

Milwaukee's right-wing radio jocks talked themselves out of their November election funk by bashing Gov. Jim Doyle over the state Transportation Department's proposed $25 increase in the Wisconsin passenger vehicle registration fee.

The talkers jumped on the proposal (Doyle later announced he favored a $10 bump) more to generate ratings among conservative listeners than to genuinely gripe about rising registration costs. That's because these conservative mouthpieces, having led the defeat of light rail here in the 1990s, know full well that their preferred transportation alternative - highway expansion - requires perpetual truckloads of fresh cash, and fees are an important piece of those budgets.

This is especially true in southeastern Wisconsin, where the Transportation Department is well on its way to committing $6.5 billion of our money for freeway expansion, though most of that funding is unbudgeted.

Brought to you--without taxpayer expense--by the Department of Curious Juxtapositions.

The Milwaukee Public Schools Strategic Plan: A Virtual Public Meeting

Last week I had an opportunity to attend a training session to be a "facilitator" for the meetings and listening sessions being held around the district, sponsored by the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Milwaukee Public Schools, the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, and more. (The list of public meetings is here.)

I know a lot of the people who read this blog are stakeholders in the Milwaukee Public Schools. Many of you live in the city, work in the schools, have children in the schools. Others of you live in Southeastern Wisconsin, and you know as well as I that the future of the region depends on the strength of the education children in Milwaukee receive. A bunch of you are also bloggers, which means of course you have something to say. Still others of you work at the state capital (I check my stats), either legislating or administrating or something else, but certainly our state government holds a stake in the process.

Knowing that about my readership, I asked after the training session whether I could hold a "virtual" meeting here for the Cheddarsphere, and got an enthusiastic yes! in response. So please, read through what I present here, check out the links with the background information, and then go ahead and fill out the feedback form I will link to towards the end. Your comments left online will be counted just as much as comments left by the people who brave the cold to attend an actual meeting. I consider, in fact, your participation here among the most important things you can do today while sitting around on your internet.

By the time you get to the end of this post, I hope you'll have a better understanding of what this process is, that you'll take the time to review the challenges and opportunities we in MPS face, and that you'll share your feedback in four key areas about how to improve every school.

If you do have your own blog, and feel your readership would want to participate, please direct them here, or to the consultant's web site linked below. Here we go:

***
I have been saying for a long time and to anyone who will listen that the problems of the Milwaukee Public Schools are not problems with the schools per se, but rather they are Milwaukee problems. Which is why it's encouraging to see some unity across the greater Milwaukee community on this issue, with the involvement in this work not just of those running MPS, but of members of the business community and civic leaders as well. The work being done right now represents a turning point for MPS, because never before--at least not in recent memory--has there been such a coming together with such a strong focus on developing a long-term strategic plan for how to see improvements in the preparation of all Milwaukee students for meaningful careers or post-secondary education. You can read more information about the process and the parts involved here, and I will be linking to other parts of that website as we go through this.

The work is being called Working Together, Achieving More, which reflects that unity and involvement across the community and among different interest groups. While the public keeps challenging us (MPS) to do better, we're challenging the public to play a key part in developing this seven-year strategic plan. We recognize the failures within MPS, and that's why we need a strategy that is efficient and effective, that includes short- and long-term goals, accountability monitoring, time frames, and specific plans of action. The strategy developed here will be backed by a level of rigor and accountability we've not seen before, and will remain regardless of changes in the Board or administration.

MPS, MTEA, and the GMC have developed the process for writing this strategic plan with a consultancy, a group called Focus on Results. The work is being funded by the generous folks at the GMC, who expect to pay $250k or more for the process and the 30+ meetings being held to get the stakeholders' input. No one wants this plan to develop in a vacuum--if any given communiy is left out, the document will not have legitimacy and may miss critical elements of needed reform. Everyone is hoping for a first working draft of the strategic plan by the beginning of March, 2007.

To be sure we're all on the same page about MPS, let's look at some data. Over at FoR's site, you can find the sobering statistics. The data there are all accurate, though they're not in any way every single thing we could tell you about MPS. The data are broken down into four areas: STUDENTS AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, LEADERS AND STAFF, THE DISTRICT AND ITS SCHOOLS, and MPS COMMUNITY AND GREATER MILWAUKEE. When you get to the feedback stage, those are the four areas you'll be asked to provide feedback for, as well.

You're all smart people, so I won't waste your time repeating everything here. But please take a moment to read through those pages of information about MPS and the challenges we face. If you don't have familiarity with these facts, it will be harder for you to provide relevant feedback in the next step.

Now that you've seen what's going on in and around the district, it's time to start thinking about that feedback. I'm guessing that as you read, you were probably thinking already of things to say about what the district is or is not doing, about how you think that we should stop doing things that aren't working or start doing things that would work. Well, now's your chance to put finger to keyboard and provide those responses.

If you click through to the feedback form, you'll see that you have the opportunity to respond to the data you just saw in each of the four areas: STUDENTS AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT, LEADERS AND STAFF, THE DISTRICT AND ITS SCHOOLS, and MPS COMMUNITY AND GREATER MILWUAKEE. For each of those categories, you see two text boxes where you can write out your thoughts.

The first is where you can write down some of the things MPS does (or has done to it) that you think should STOP. There is a link right there back to the data so you can refresh your memory. For example, you might remember that fully half of our ninth-grade students are suspended at least once; you might want to right down in the STOP box under STUDENTS AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT that we should STOP suspending so many kids. It's up to you what you want to write down to STOP for each of those four categories.

In addition, there is a second text box under each category for things you'd like MPS to START doing. What, to use my previous example, might we do instead of suspending half of our ninth-graders?

Once you've finished with the STOP and START text boxes, there is one thing at the top and one thing at the bottom of the feedback form that I'd like you to fill out before we finish. At the top, there's a drop-down menu for you to indicate what your role is, whether you're a parent in MPS or just someone in the community (even if you don't live in the city, you are still a part of our "community"). The process is entirely anonymous, but the people compliling these answers (and every answer will be compiled!) would like to know your relationship to the schools. Also, at the very bottom of the feedback form is a last text box for any additional comments you might like to make that don't easily fit into either STOP or START in any of the four categories. Please use that space to comment on anything else that may have struck you, or to provide any other ideas you may have.

***
When I sat in that training session last week, there was a lot of--I think justified--skepticism about whether or not this process would work, about whether or not any strategic plan that came out of it would either be followed through or even worth the paper it got printed on.

But the answer I got was encouraging. In the cramped little corner of the dining room where they squeezed the thirty or so of us in, we had both the president of the MTEA and the president of the school board. We had prinicpals, teachers, counselors, librarians, and students. We had community members, business leaders, communilty learning center coordinators, and central office personnel. The only thing missing, it seemed, was a partridge in a pear tree. And we all got along; we all agreed that believing in the potential of this process was a hell of a lot better than believing in nothing, that no improvement is ever possible.

And the fruit will bear soon: As I wrote above, everyone involved wants to see a working document by the beginning of March, just in time for the school board elections. It's worth witholding judgment at least until then.

Thanks for helping out, for clicking through and seeing what there is and contributing your feedback.

Snow Pics

Seth has a couple of nice pics with his daughter, Grace, taken by a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel photographer, that ended up in the on-line photo gallery. I thought I'd share a couple my wife took this morning:

A skeptical Maggie, who doesn't want to come in from the snow, which she loves.

A hawk stops to weather the storm in a neighbor's tree. We don't get many of them around here.

Friday Random Ten

The World AIDS Day Edition

1. "#253 in the Red Book/ Bridge Over Troubled Water" Sons of the Never Wrong from Consequence of Speech
2. "Red Heaven" Disappear Fear from Live at the Bottom Line
3. "Red = Luck" Patty Larkin from Red = Luck
4. "You Are Everything" Redbird from Redbird
5. "Cowboy Singer" Lucy Kaplansky from The Red Thread
6. "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" Elvis Costello from The Very Best of
7. "Red Man Sky" Don Conoscenti from Paradox of Grace
8. "The Red One" Jon Scofield and from I Can See Your House from Here
9. "Red Accordion" Patty Larkin from Perishable Fruit
10. "Red Moon" David Gray from Lost Songs

C'mon . . . Snow Day . . .

. . . C'mon . . .

. . . Yes! Snow day! (4:53 AM)

. . . by the time I got up, there looked to be already three or four inches on the ground here on the Sout' Side. And they've declared a blizzard warning for bleep's sake.

Be safe if you're driving. If you don't have to--don't.