Washington Policy Blog

National coverage of WPC vanpool study

From the National Center for Policy Analysis:

VANPOOLS IN THE PUGET SOUND REGION

OFM releases 2009 report on state boards and commissions

The Office of Financial Management (OFM) has published its 2009 Boards and Commissions Report. According to OFM:

"The 2009 BOARDS AND COMMISSIONS REPORT provides basic information about boards, commissions, and committees in state government. State law requires the report to assist in promoting legislative and executive oversight of these organizations. This is the sixteenth biennial edition of the publication.

The information in this report covers the period from July 1, 2007, through June 30, 2009. During the 2009 Legislative Session a number of boards were eliminated or consolidated by executive order or legislation. A list of those boards is attached and, if the board submitted a report for this period, a note is also included on that report . . .

In 2009, 449 boards, commissions, councils, committees, and similar groups in state government provided information for this report."

Boards and Commissions were required to provide the following information for the report:

• Year created
• Number of members
• Number of meetings held
• Legal authorization
• Appointing authority
• Summary of primary responsibilities
• Compensation
• Operating costs
• Fund source

Here are the details for each state board and commission.

Putting the principal in charge improves graduation rates and raises student achievement

As Washington State's legislators are distracted by the competition for federal Race to the Top funds, they ignore genuine, systemic reform in school districts across the country. These districts are putting their principals in charge so they can support their teachers.  Principals in charge of their budgets reallocate resources and schedules so that teachers are not inundated with students.  Teachers can then support their students, who then perform better on tests and graduate at higher rates. Here is the full text of the October 30, 2009 article by Professor Bill Ouchi in Education Week:

Accept No Substitutes for Real Decentralization

Is anyone recommending that General Motors repair itself by retraining its workers, or by adopting performance-based compensation for them? Are people advocating that we solve the nation’s health-care problems by altering the curriculum in schools of medicine?

The answer to both questions is no. Why, then, does it make sense for us to attack the problems of urban schools with equivalent measures: improving teacher training, adopting merit pay, or changing the curriculum and books?

General Motors got into trouble by being overcentralized in its management, and the debate over health-care reform is largely about whether centralization will make it better or worse. When big organizations get into real trouble, the issue is often about centralization.

Urban school districts are dysfunctionally centralized, and putting improved subsystems of selection, training, and compensation into them cannot overcome the larger problem. To see how inappropriate are the currently voguish palliatives, we need only to observe what happens when principals are given the freedom to spend their budgets as they see fit, staff their schools as they think best, and arrange curricula and schedules according to the desires of their teachers.

True decentralization is so difficult that there’s no reason to attempt it, except that it’s the only thing that works when a district is in a bad way.

My research team and I have now completed two studies of exactly that: what happens when principals are empowered to make the important instructional decisions on budget, staffing, curriculum, and schedule.

In 2003, my first book on this subject, Making Schools Work, reported on a study in which the team visited 223 schools in three traditional, centralized districts and compared them with three decentralized districts. We found that students in the decentralized districts outperformed their top-down counterparts.

In a new book, The Secret of TSL, and its companion statistical paper, we report on a study of 442 schools in eight U.S. districts that are now decentralizing in whole or in part, from New York City to St. Paul, Minn., to Oakland, Calif. The purpose of this new study was to find out what principals do when they are empowered, in comparison to what happens when all of the instructionally important decisions are mandated by the central office.

What we found is that empowered principals radically alter the staffing of their schools, greatly reducing the number of nonclassroom employees and hiring more classroom teachers instead. They also often use a combination of blocking and coring, combining English and history, for example, into a single two-period-long humanities course. In this arrangement, the same teacher might have 25 students for two periods of humanities (she teaches both English and history), followed by another humanities course for another 25 students, and then fill out her five-course requirement with an elective course for 25 more, thus having taught five periods but having a “total student load,” or TSL, of 75 students, rather than 125.

In our statistical analysis, we found that traditional forms of school improvement do not in fact have any effect on student performance, while reducing total student load is associated with a major improvement in performance. Thus, adopting new curricula, having more long-service teachers, reducing class size, and adding planning time or professional development have no effect, but giving principals full autonomy leads to lower TSL for teachers, and to significantly improved student performance. ("Management Guru Says 'Student Load' Key to Achievement," Sept. 30, 2009.)

It should come as no surprise that a lower TSL means better student achievement. Theodore R. Sizer, in his Horace books of the 1980s and ’90s, argued that in order to personalize instruction, no teacher should have a total student load larger than 80. Arthur G. Powell, in his 1996 book on private schools, Lessons From Privilege, said that a lower TSL, unlike lower class size, creates the free time for students to seek out their teachers for the kind of one-on-one coaching that, at the right time, can make all the difference.

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New York City, which fell into both of our studies, in 2001 and again in 2006, provides many examples of the effects of reducing TSL. In the first study, we interviewed 66 principals there and went over their budgets with them in detail. On average, we found that they controlled 6.1 percent of their budgets in 2001; most of the money was controlled by central-office dictates. In 2006, after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein had begun their decentralization, which has since spread to all 1,631 city schools, we found that the principals who had been empowered in 2004 and 2005 now controlled, on average, 85 percent of their budgets.

Some of these schools achieved administrative ratios (nonteaching employees to all employees) as low as 4 percent, compared with 44 percent in some traditional schools. As a result, average TSL in the empowered high schools was 87.7 students per teacher, and in middle schools 57.5—compared with the union-contract maximum of 170. After two years of principal empowerment, graduation rates in these schools had risen from 65.8 percent to 74.5 percent, and passing rates on the state Regents math exam had risen from 71 percent to 89 percent.

While we do not yet know whether the results for all 1,631 New York City schools will be of this same magnitude, other cities have shown similarly positive results. St. Paul, for example, achieved even greater decentralization than New York, with principals there controlling 87.2 percent of their budgets.

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This is real decentralization. Most studies of “decentralization” have neglected to measure whether principals have decisionmaking authority or not. We have not, for example, found any study of “site-based management” that did so, nor any measure of whether the policy of decentralization adopted in Chicago in 1988 actually produced any decentralization of decisions to principals.

It would be premature, to say the least, to conclude that many districts have tried decentralization and found it does not work. It seems more likely that many districts have announced decentralization policies but failed to actually decentralize. The evidence in our research shows that true decentralization works well.

We also have found in our studies that implementing decentralization is difficult. It’s clear why so few of the nation’s 14,000 school districts have tried to do so. It requires the creation of an extensive accountability system over principals, and new methods for attracting, training, and supporting principals of empowered schools. Central-office staffs and information systems must be completely re-engineered as well, to support a decentralized district. In fact, true decentralization is so difficult that there’s no reason to attempt it, except that it’s the only thing that works when a district is in a bad way.

Training teachers, improving compensation systems, and developing curricula will continue to be important. But first things first. Even the most dedicated and best-trained teachers will fail if they are inundated with students and subjected to extensive central-office restrictions. There isn’t more money available, but there is the real possibility, as our research reveals, of reallocating budgets, hiring more classroom teachers, and personalizing instruction through true decentralization.

William G. Ouchi is the Sanford and Betty Sigoloff distinguished professor in corporate renewal at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management. His latest book is The Secret of TSL (Simon and Schuster, 2009).

 

 

 

 

 

Election week begins

For most voters across the nation today is Election Day. In Washington State, however, today marks the beginning of election week(s) and the possibility for some close races, election month.

In most states mail-in ballots must either be received by Election Day or must be dropped off before the polls close. Washington, however, only requires that a ballot be postmarked by Election Day. This policy unnecessarily complicates the tabulation of votes and can leave the results of close races a mystery for weeks.

With the state's ongoing move to close all poll locations, it is time to require all ballots be received on Election Day. This is exactly what Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming require. North Carolina goes a step further requiring absentee ballots to be returned by 5 p.m. the day before the election.

Secretary of State Sam Reed supports requiring mail in ballots to be turned in by Election Day. Speaking on his behalf, Elections Director Nick Handy told the Associated Press last year “We believe it builds greater trust and confidence in the system.”

Despite having the Secretary of State’s support, bills introduced in the past to make this change have died. This year the Secretary of State's request bills (SB 5631 and HB 1623) were not acted on by the Legislature. Here is the bill summary for HB 1623:

"Absentee ballots must be received by the county auditor by 8:00 p.m. on the day of the primary or election in order to be valid. For out-of-state voters, overseas voters and service voters, the date on the return envelope to which the voter attested must be no later than the day of the primary or election in order for the ballot to be valid.

The tabulation of absentee ballots may commence at 8:00 a.m. on the Monday immediately before the day of the primary or election. The tabulation results must be held in secrecy until after 8:00 p.m. on the day of the primary or election."

This election reform should be considered again next year.

Although the numbers will change over the coming days, election results will be available on the Secretary of State's website starting at 8 p.m.

State Auditor's Office reviews its performance measures

The State Auditor's Office (SAO) acts as the eyes of citizens to help ensure state and local governments are operating in an accountable, transparent and effective manner. To help lead by example, staff at SAO met last week to focus on strategic planning and performance measures planning session for the agency.

I had the opportunity to sit in on the sessions and was very impressed with the direction SAO is heading.

Earlier this year the Office of Financial Management (OFM) issued an assessment of the performance measures SAO was using for its activities. OFM said:

With two possible exceptions, the current performance measures in the Performance Measure Tracking System (PMT) should be replaced with outcome/result measures that are more relevant to a budget/policy development audience. In particular, survey results and the cost of performing the audits in relation to the size of the audited entity, are better as internal performance management perspectives. This assessment offers suggestions about the types of measurement topics that would tell a more complete and compelling performance story.

SAO responded by holding the performance measure planning sessions last week. Here is some of the information discussed at that session:

A performance measure is a quantifiable expression of the amount, cost, or result of activities that indicate how well, and at what level, services are provided.

Performance measures provide a snapshot of current performance capabilities and track whether actual performance is getting better, staying the same, or getting worse over time.

What isn’t a performance measure?

• Statements of what you intend to do or how you intend to do it. (Goals, objectives, and strategies)

• Performance questions that can be answered with a “yes” or “no”

• A timeline of when something will be accomplished

• The responses from a survey

What are the Attributes of Good Performance Measures?

• Relevance - Useful to an external audience of stakeholders to assess the level of accomplishment

• Understandability - Clear, concise, and easy for a non-expert to understand

• Comparability - Do the data, targets, and footnotes provide the reader with enough context to tell whether performance is getting better, worse, or staying the same?

• Timeliness - Is the data current and reported frequently enough to be of value in assessing accountability and making decisions?

• Consistency - Is the data collection method standardized and is the operational definition for data calculations adhered to?

• Reliability - Is the information verifiable, free from bias, and a faithful representation of what it purports to represent?

• Performance - Is actual performance in reference to the stated targets getting better, worse, or staying the same over time?

All agencies (state and local) should undergo the same type of self-reflection as SAO to help improve their performance measures. Doing so will allow elected officials to have access to meaningful performance data to help guide budget decisions.

Final Vanpool Fact-of-the-Day #31

Vanpools are the safest, cheapest and most cost effective transit mode for connecting commuters with urban employment centers.

TVW Asks Constantine Campaign to Pull Ad that Misuses Footage

Washington’s non-partisan public affairs channel, TVW, has asked King County Executive candidate Dow Constantine to stop using TVW footage in his political campaign advertisements.  Constantine is running an ad that uses footage from Washington Policy Center's 2008 Annual Dinner.  Constantine refused to pull the ad.

TVW has a long-standing policy of not allowing its coverage of public events, which is copyrighted, to be used by political candidates to attack opponents.  The reason is obvious – TVW wants to stay professional and neutral in how it covers public events, and not be drawn into political campaigns.  The network’s copyright policy says:

“All content, including text, graphics, audio, video and applications on this site are protected by U.S. copyright and international treaties and may not be copied without the express permission of TVW, which reserves all rights. Re-use of any of TVW's content and graphics online for any purpose may be granted on a case-by-case basis provided the content and/or graphics are not modified in any way, all copyright and other notices on any copy are retained, and permission is granted by TVW. Re-use of any of TVW's content and graphics online for any commercial or political purpose is strictly prohibited.”

Vanpool Fact-of-the-Day #30

The PSRC estimates that if the Destination 2030 plan were fully implemented it would reduce Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) by about 4.1 percent for a cost of $40-$45 billion. If vanpools were expanded to reach their market potential, they could reduce VMT by up to 9.3 percent for only $2.5 billion.

Open Government Task Force Meeting Nov. 2

The Open Government Task Force created by State Auditor Brian Sonntag and Attorney General Rob McKenna will have its final meeting on November 2 to vote on recommendations to improve enforcement of the state's open government laws. Currently the only option available to citizens is to file a lawsuit if they disagree with an agency's opinion on whether a record should be disclosed.

State Auditor Brian Sonntag noted at the October 5 Task Force meeting that there has to be a better way for citizens to access government records without having to resort to lawsuits. Attorney General Rob McKenna agreed highlighting the fact that every other area of law has an administrative mechanism for addressing concerns. The reason is administrative mechanisms are faster and more cost effective than relying solely on court relief. Unfortunately, Washington lacks this type of recourse for enforcement of the state’s open government laws.

On the agenda for Monday's meeting:

• Presentations from the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs and Seattle Times

• Review of Materials Summarizing Concerns from October 5th Meeting

• Discussion of Draft Report

• Vote to Adopt Recommendations

Here are the findings from the draft report:

1) The Public Records Act and Open Public Meetings Act provide rights to the public for access to public records and meetings. The purpose of these laws is to allow the public access to public records and meetings. The courts are not always the best method for enforcing these rights and may be extremely expensive and slow. The added costs and uncertain liability of agencies subject to litigation are a growing concern.

2) There is a critical need for an independent administrative oversight agency to enforce the Public Records Act and Open Public Meetings Act with the purpose of providing an inexpensive, expedited, and clear process for resolving disputes.

3) The independent oversight agency should have authority to adopt rules pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act to provide clear guidelines for an appeal process, and to issue advisory opinions interpreting the laws to provide clarity on agency duties. The oversight agency should make this information available on its website with other relevant information. The oversight agency should submit an annual report to the legislature on its activities, and recommend legislative reform.

4) Training should be mandatory for designated agency officials for the Public Records Act and Open Public Meetings Act. It would greatly reduce the concern over litigation. The oversight agency should provide periodic training, and make training materials available free on its website.

5) The independent oversight agency may be governed either by:

a) A single independent director appointed by the Governor who hires appeals officers to manage and decide appeals, and has a term set by law and may only be removed for cause, or

b) It may be governed by a commission.

6) The process for utilizing an appeal to an oversight agency should be expedited. The oversight agency should have a short period set by law to issue a final ruling on any docketed appeal, and a process for requesting immediate rulings on simple issues in less than the period set by law. The oversight agency should have discretion on granting any request for a hearing, and/or conduct a confidential in camera review.

7) The existing legal right to initiating an action under the Public Records Act in superior court applies to any person having been denied an opportunity to inspect or copy a public record, and also for an agency or its representative, or a person who is named in the record or to whom the record specifically pertains. RCW 42.56.540 – 550. That existing legal right should be extended for any appeal to an oversight agency by a person denied a record, an agency or its representative, or a person who is named in the record or to whom the record specifically pertains.

8) The costs for using the appeals process of the oversight agency should be minimal or none for filing an appeal, and there should be no award of attorney fees, costs, or penalties to a prevailing party at the administrative level.

9) A ruling by the oversight agency is binding on the parties, enforceable in court, and subject to an appeal and de novo review by a court of general jurisdiction. The oversight agency should not be named as a defendant in any appeal to superior court.

10) Use of the administrative appeals process of the oversight agency should be encouraged to resolve disputes. There may still be a need in emergencies or for other fundamentally apparent reasons to initiate a lawsuit in superior court rather than filing an administrative appeal. A requirement to exhaust an administrative appeal with an oversight agency prior to appealing in superior court would end an existing legal right of the people created by initiative to bring an action directly before an independently elected judge. Therefore a process that allows the option of filing a direct action in superior court should be retained.

11) Adequate funding is vital to allow any oversight agency to successfully perform its work. Funding should be from a dedicated source.

While an administrative appeals option should be pursued, WPC believes it is very important that the right of citizens to go directly to court for relief not be infringed. Here is the video of our comments at the October 5 meeting:

Boeing's decision and what it says about Washington's Competitiveness

There's been a lot said over the past twenty-four hours about Boeing's decision to open its second 787 line in Charleston. Naturally, finger-pointing comes next. The Governor is dismayed, senators and representatives are now chiming in. This sure isn't pretty; hanging out in the loser's circle never is.

But OK, what now? Policymakers just got slapped upside the head by a corporation based out of Chicago. Boeing officials looked at Washington and sized us up and looked at Charleston and sized them up. They made a business decision and we lost. That should say something about what we are offering the business community.

Of course there is an internal labor/management dynamic that the state can't influence. Or can it? South Carolina is a right-to-work state, where workers do not have to be members of a union as a condition for employment (a novel concept). Of course, this will never fly in Washington state -- just as long as we're prepared to lose business over it apparently. Should we have the discussion on mandatory unionization if that is truly one of the big causes for Boeing's decision yesterday? If so, then the question really is, why shouldn't we discuss it?

There are many reasons why some states are more competitive than others. Some reasons cannot be helped -- natural resources and open-water access are some of the reasons why Washington is more competitive in lumber, shipping, and agriculture than, say, a Midwest state. Likewise, it would be a bit of a challenge for Washington to compete with Florida over oranges, or Alaska for oil or Louisiana for catfish.

However, beyond natural resource advantages, policymakers and entrepreneurs can make a difference in how a state is perceived viz a viz business friendliness or an infrastructure for innovation. Those are intangibles not decided upon by nature. Microsoft didn't grow and succeed here because of the air, water or lumber. Neither did Boeing, Amazon, T-Mobile, Costco, UPS or most of the other of hundreds of thousands of businesses that were founded in this state. 

This is just the type of issue we'll talk about at Washington Policy Center's 2009 Statewide Small Business Conference. We'll talk about the things that policymakers can control and can improve upon to make our state more attractive to people. Because that seems to be getting lost in the discussion. Businesses don't make these decisions, people make these decisions, often based upon what's best for the company so that it can continue to offer goods or services to its customers -- who just happen to be people as well.

Join us on November 10th at the SeaTac Hilton for discussions on competitiveness, health care, our state's tax system, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance, environmental regulations and more, including sessions on how to survive in this economy and why it's important small business owners remain involved in the political realm.

Find out more information or register online here.