Pamlico County Education Budget

At last night's meeting of the Pamlico County Board of Commissioners, Dr. Coon, Superintendent of Education, presented a report on next year's budget.

The report was not only grim, but also uncertain. The bottom line is that the county's education budget for the coming year will be down to what it was in 2005. There will be layoffs. Some programs will be terminated. Class sizes will increase and many teacher's aides will be laid off. For the fourth year in a row, teacher salaries will decrease. On top of that, teacher take-home pay will be reduced $2800 to $3200 for health insurance deductions. Other staffing positions will be eliminated.

There is no way these reductions can help but reduce the quality of education in the county.

The new North Carolina state legislature has decided to reduce funding for education at all levels well beyond the governor's recommendation.

Even so, the situation need not be so dire if the US Congress would reestablish the stimulus program, and this time set it at a sufficiently high level to do some good. Not that the ARRA stimulus didn't create jobs and prevent others from being lost - it just wasn't big enough to create adequate demand to counter the effects of the Great Recession. And monetary policy can't help, since the short term interest rate is at the zero bound. Can't go lower.

What is really going on here? Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, calls attention to a study by two Dartmouth economists and explains:

"This is hugely important for macro-policy debates because it suggests that more stimulus would provide a further boost to the economy and reduction in unemployment. This means that the only reason that we are sitting here with 25 million people unemployed and underemployed is that the politicians in Washington are too intimidated by the Wall Street deficit hawks.

The deficit hawks have used their enormous political power and control over the media to shut down any further discussion of stimulus. They have managed to completely dominate public debate with their brand of flat-earth economics. They are using the crisis that was created through their greed and incompetence to reduce hugely valued public benefits, like Social Security and Medicare. And, now they are using the crisis that they have created for state and local governments to destroy public sector unions.

This looks really awful because it is. Our nations' leaders are deliberately inflicting enormous pain on tens of millions of people to advance their political agenda. This new study helps to prove this fact."

The leaders he is referring to are overwhelmingly Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures and governors' mansions.

Where Do All These Bills Come From?

The newly elected North Carolina legislature has pursued a frantic pace of new legislation.

Some observers have charged that the new legislators have no idea what the effect of their proposed legislation will be. That may be true.

Normally, anyone taking a new job spends a little time getting to know the ropes. Not these legislators.

So where are all the bills coming from? Did you ever hear of ALEC? That is, the American Legislative Exchange Council. You thought you elected your local candidate to the state House of Representatives and the state Senate? Actually, you elected ALEC.

How do I know? I have been following the bills introduced in the legislature, and I have looked at the ALEC web site. Here is a link to ALEC's model legislation. Just read ALEC's models and compare them to the bills introduced by the new legislators. Most of them are ALEC bills.

So who is ALEC? The nationwide voice of corporate interests seeking to get their way through uniform acts by all of the state legislatures. Their aims have nothing to do with North Carolina. Do they have the public interest at heart? Not Likely.

Here is a good backgrounder.

Brown v. Board of Education

Fifty-seven years ago today, a unanimous Supreme Court of the United States ruled that "separate but equal" schools are inherently unequal and violate the equal protection of the laws provided by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Let us celebrate.

Freedom Riders Documentary

The documentary on the 1961 freedom riders shown last night on public television revealed to the current generation the heroism of an earlier generation who fought to make this a better country for all Americans.

The documentary also showed the level of organized violence by the Klan and others, in collusion with law enforcement officials in Alabama and Mississippi. It took intervention by the federal government to protect citizens against state governments in the south in those days.

Governor Patterson of Alabama and Governor Barnett of Mississippi, like Arkansas Governor Faubus before them, paid no attention to decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The justification of "states' rights" was nothing more than a defense of the right of states to oppress a significant percentage of their own citizens and to deny them the rights of all Americans. It was a deplorable time in our national history. North Carolina under Governor Terry Sanford was, by comparison to Alabama and Mississippi, an outpost of freedom.

Let us never forget.

Remember Gary Hart and the Seven Dwarfs?

In 1988, there was an open primary for presidential nomination in both parties.

Among democrats, the leading candidate at the outset was Gary Hart of Colorado, pursued by seven other democrats. The press began calling the field "Gary Hart and the Seven Dwarfs," the implication being that the other candidates were lightweights

Who were the other candidates? Bruce Babbitt, former governor of Arizona and eventually Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton; Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, currently Vice President of the United States; former Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts; Reverend Jesse Jackson of South Carolina (and Chicago); Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, later Vice President under President Clinton and winner of the popular vote in 2000; Representative Dick Gephardt of Missouri; Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. Not a very lightweight field, after all.

Now we have the Republican field for 2011. Three more putative candidates withdrew over the weekend. So far, it looks like there may not be seven contenders for the Republican nomination this year.

Pundits keep seeking an explanation. I hope they succeed.

Freedom Riders

Fifty years ago, May 4, 1961, seven blacks and six whites left Washington, DC in two commercial buses enroute to the deep south. Their aim: to challenge segregation of facilities used in interstate transportation.

Monday night, May 16, 2011 at 9:00 pm, Public Television will broadcast a documentary about the event.

These young people showed remarkable courage and their peaceful, non-violent challenge transformed America.

We should all be grateful.

I strongly recommend everyone view the film.

Governing is Prediction

My last post called attention to W. Edwards Deming's observation that management is prediction.

This is true of government as well.

Ideally, both elected officials and civil servants would take into account during policy deliberations some prediction of the effects of the policies. But how can the public follow the issues and know what are the intended or probable outcomes of government measures?

We have prognosticators. Pundits. Professional explainers and predictors. Some write for newspapers and magazines and some talk on television. Surely the most influential of these pundits are the ones whose punditry is most accurate, right?

Not Exactly.

Recently a group of scholars in Public Policy at Hamilton University decided to examine the accuracy of prognostications by professional prognosticators, with interesting results.

This was not a ground breaking study. A more comprehensive twenty-year study of political and economic forecasting was summarized by Philip Tetlock in his book Expert Political Judgment. Tetlock's study was based on predictions by 284 experts on political and economic trends, and a subsequent analysis of the accuracy of the predictions. His findings:

-Extrapolation using mathematical models does better than human prediction
-Education and popularity increase the predictors' confidence but not their accuracy
-Prognosticators overpredict change and underpredict the status quo
-Extremists predict worse than moderates
-Some people predict better than others, even outside their area of expertise

The Hamilton study was more limited in time and scope, but focused on contemporary prognosticators. The most accurate prognosticator in their study was Paul Krugman of the New York Times. The least accurate was Cal Thomas. In general, they found that liberals were better prognosticators, especially if they had no law degree.

Management is Prediction

"The theory of knowledge helps us to understand that management in any form is prediction."

-W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics

Other Deming observations:

Knowledge is built on theory;

Use of Data requires prediction;

There is no true measurement without an operational definition;

Information is not knowledge.