The Advisory Board is composed of state House and Senate leaders who provide guidance to GOPAC on key legislative and political developments in addition to addressing elected officials, candidates, and GOPAC supporters at GOPAC events. Members of the board are selected for their exceptional leadership and dedication to implementing conservative principles that control spending, create lasting private sector jobs, and deliver essential public services in innovative ways.

“There is no doubt that the leaders in our states are the guiding light for real reform in America,” said Frank Donatelli, Chairman of GOPAC. “We are honored and excited to have these two innovative state legislators on our Advisory Board, and we look forward to working hand in hand with all of our Board Members to advance the solutions that create jobs and improve the personal freedom of our citizens.”

“I am honored to join my many distinguished colleagues on GOPAC’s Legislative Leaders Advisory Board,” said Leader Upmeyer. “I first learned of GOPAC through my father when he served as Speaker of the House and have been a supporter of the organization’s mission ever since. States like Iowa truly are the test labs for the reforms needed to move our country forward, and I’m excited to share best practices and common goals with dedicated leaders from other states.”

Upmeyer was first elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in 2002 and was elected to become Iowa’s first female House Majority Leader by her peers in 2010. She is also a cardiology nurse practitioner and serves as the Vice President on the Executive Board of the American Legislative Council.

The Upmeyer-for-Paulsen switch mirrors a similar move in North Carolina, where a state representative is replacing the speaker of the house on the GOPAC board as the speaker contemplates a U.S. Senate run.

The full Legislative Leaders Advisory Board can be viewed by clicking here.

Read the full GOPAC news release here.

Read the full Des Moines Register article here.

Congratulations, Leader Upmeyer!

(Source: Charter Pulse)

This session House Republicans passed House File 625, a bill that greatly improves school choice options.  You can see the bill analysis by clicking here.

From the Des Moines Register

By Jason Noble

Businesses as well as individuals will soon be able to take advantage of a tax credit for contributions to private-school scholarships. More money will be available for the credits under legislation signed into law Tuesday by Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad.

House File 625 expands the state’s existing school tuition organization tax credit, raising its annual cap to $12 million, from $8.75 million, and making it available to estates, trusts and businesses that are organized as partnerships, limited liability companies, s-corporations.

Under current law, only individuals can receive the tax credit.

The program provides a tax credit worth 65 percent of the amount a taxpayers gives to a student tuition organization that is set up to provide scholarships for students attending private schools.

The measure had wide and bipartisan support, passing unanimously in both the House and Senate last month.

By Stephen Goldsmith, Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School

Public officials committed to balancing their budgets in these difficult times understand that they have only so much political capital to deploy. They often concentrate exclusively on big cuts and larger structural changes, brushing off the opportunities for small savings that seem to be merely distractions.

Yet perhaps what we once thought of as trade-offs — “I can only do so much, so let’s concentrate on the big items” — is really a false choice. The right answer incorporates both: completely rebuilding some program budgets while transforming others through incremental efficiency improvements. Officials who force attention to harvesting small savings develop a culture intolerant of waste at any level, building a consciousness that every dollar spent comes out of someone else’s pocket. A culture of efficiency induces changes throughout the governmental entity that not only build up to real money but also increase the likelihood of big ideas emerging from emboldened employees.

Through partnerships and bottom-up initiatives, government can do more with less in ways that might have been impossible to push through without the mandate of lower tax revenues. As these small improvements set a new norm of constant reinvention, they will produce substantial savings and better services, culminating in better, faster, cheaper government.

I recently spoke with Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte, N.C., who has been doing exactly this. Rather than accepting tight times as a reason to scale back key services, Foxx is treating it as an opportunity to source innovation from multiple sectors to make his administration more efficient. These fixes aren’t fancy, but they are effective and have allowed the city to continue to provide the services expected by its residents.

Here’s just one example: A third-party study found that the city could improve its recycling program by combining bigger receptacles with less frequent pickups to both save money and improve participation.This small change was made, and now the system is working better than before. It’s expected to save the city about $40 million over 10 years.

Similarly, other cities have been able to produce significant savings by replacing their downtown trash cans with solar compactors. Philadelphia did this in 2009, saving $900,000 in the first year and repurposing 24 of its 33 downtown waste-pickup employees to a new citywide recycling program. Small efficiencies often offset what otherwise would be service cutbacks. As I’ve put it in the past, dieting, no matter how difficult, beats amputation as a weight-loss device every time.

Efficiency improvements need not come only from the outside. In Charlotte, city workers provide feedback and proposals for innovation, and the government cultivates a receptive culture that acts on their proposals. Employees doing the job possess valuable insights that can inform and improve processes. I saw this first-hand when I was mayor of Indianapolis, where city workers filling cracks in the road or picking up the trash invariably had usable ideas to improve their routes, trucks or other equipment. In Charlotte, Mayor Foxx has worked hard to promote a culture among managers and leadership to be receptive to these suggestions.

The public also can be a valuable resource for these kinds of improvements. When I was a deputy mayor of New York City, we placed an icon on the city’s website asking residents to send us their ideasto improve efficiency. Thousands of suggestions rolled in, many as simple as turning off the escalators in city-owned buildings at night.

Small savings that aggregate into big numbers also can be found through investments in administrative systems. When Houston was facing a budget crunch in 2010, the city decided to do what may have seemed counterintuitive: It invested $12.8 million in a new time-management system for its workforce. Among other advantages, the new system allows for previously impossible analysis of employees’ work time, yielding more effective scheduling and avoiding unnecessary and expensive hiring and overtime. I’ll be looking more closely in a subsequent column at how Houston is producing savings from this system, but the key is that by providing much better information, along with a culture that encourages supervisors to use that information, the city will produce continuing efficiencies in an area as straightforward as time and attendance.

A government that ignores small savings creates a culture that will miss the big opportunities as well. With a culture of openness to good ideas for efficiency regardless of the scale, coupled with the right data, constant improvement will become the norm rather than the exception.

Ben Weinryb Grohsgal contributed to the research and writing for this column. He is a research assistant at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and a student in the master’s in public policy program at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Governing.com article

From the Cato Institute

By Jason Bedrick

The unanimous decision of the Iowa legislature to expand the state’s scholarship tax credit (STC) program yesterday once again demonstrates that school choice programs grow even more popular once implemented.

Iowa’s STC expansion bill raises the credit cap from $8.75 million to $12 million and expands the types of corporations eligible to receive tax credits for donations to scholarship organizations. The bill adds no new regulations.

Six of the seven states with STC programs enacted before 2010 have subsequently voted to expand those programs. The chart below shows the legislative support and opposition in four of those states. (The expansions in Indiana and Pennsylvania were part of legislation covering other issues so they were excluded from this analysis. The chart includes information for Arizona’s corporate-donor STC program but not its individual-donor STC program, for a similar reason.)

The most dramatic shift was in Georgia’s State House, which moved in just a few years from a fairly even divide to overwhelming support. Support in Iowa went from overwhelming to unanimous. While Florida’s Senate barely moved, support has grown considerably in the House. Arizona has also had modest increases in support for school choice in both chambers.

A survey by Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance found that 72 percent of the American public already supports scholarship tax credit programs. The survey found even higher support among parents, African-Americans, Hispanics, and registered Independents and Democrats.

There have not yet been any studies measuring whether support in a given state increases after enacting an STC program, but if legislative support is a reliable proxy then the answer appears to be in the affirmative.

To see the staff analysis on Iowa’s STO bill click the link below:
House File 625 Bill Analysis

How Maryland overhauled schools while Iowa fell back

Principal: Maryland sets ‘very clear expectations’ for faculty, students. ‘There’s no room for excuses.’

By Mary Stegmeir

BALTIMORE — It’s 8:45 a.m. — just after the morning bell — and the youngsters in Noelle Hickok’s Liberty Elementary School class are hard at work.

The 4- and 5-year-olds take turns reciting alphabet letters and their phonetic pronunciations as Hickok nods approvingly.

“Perfect. My friends are ready to read,” she says.

The claim would have seemed unlikely just two decades ago.

At that time, Iowa students led the nation in reading proficiency. Maryland children performed below the national average, and students from inner-city Baltimore schools, like Liberty, posted abysmal scores on state tests.

Today, the tables have turned. After more than 20 years of statewide education reform, elementary and middle school students in Maryland outperform their Iowa counterparts in reading and math.

“Iowa is one of the sad stories of the nation,” said Eric Hanu­shek, an education researcher at Stanford University in California. “Your state had a long tradition of paying attention to schools. It was out in front. Then it sort of all just slipped away.”

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad has pushed for wide-ranging K-12 education reforms to reverse the slide. But as the General Assembly heads toward likely adjournment this week, legislation remains stalled.

Iowa Education Director Jason Glass and other reform supporters point to Maryland as a possible model for how Iowa can overhaul its system to boost student achievement.

“They put the right reforms in place, stuck with them and then worked to continually improve, never being satisfied with the results,” said Linda Fandel, a Branstad education adviser.

Iowa has tried education reforms in fits and starts over the past two decades. Policymakers tinkered with teacher pay, funneled money into professional development and lowered class sizes. The moves have largely failed to improve student test scores, education leaders acknowledge today.

“They weren’t systemic (changes),” Glass said. “As soon as the political will or the money ran out, those programs vanished.”

Iowa and Maryland statistics: Click to see more

From 1992 to 2011, Maryland recorded the fastest rate of improvement in math, reading and science when compared with 40 other states in a Harvard University report published in July. The study included states that have participated in a set of rigorous national tests since 1992.

Iowa finished last.

The policies governing school performance in each state can help explain the results, said Hanushek, one of the study’s authors.

“Iowa has long resisted accountability,” Hanushek said. “There’s been an attempt in recent years to make some changes that are productive, but over the long run, Iowa’s been slow to make any changes in its schools.”

Maryland’s requirements ‘put schools on notice’

Maryland was one of the first states in the country to demand better performance from teachers and students, adopting a law in 1972 that required students to demonstrate minimal proficiency in math, reading and writing to graduate from high school.

Statewide assessments were rolled out in 1993, and results of each school were reported to the public. Iowa wouldn’t follow suit until 2002-03, when the federal No Child Left Behind Act required all states to measure student performance in math and reading.

By that time, Maryland had closely monitored performance of its schools for nearly a decade. In 2000 and again in 2006, the state took over a handful of consistently low-performing schools — something Iowa has never done.

“We put schools on notice,” said Nancy Grasmick, Maryland’s state superintendent from 1991 to 2011. “We stopped letting children be the victims of underperforming schools, period.”

Later legislation linked student progress to increased funding and spending flexibility. By 2007, Maryland students were required to pass exams in English, algebra, biology and civics to graduate, an idea Iowa lawmakers explored last year but ultimately dismissed.

“There are very clear expectations for teachers and for students and for principals,” said Jason McCoy, who leads Cradlerock Elementary School in Columbia, Md. “The focus is always on improving. There’s no room for excuses.”

Teachers’ union challenges accountability reforms

Maryland’s climb to the top was not without its challenges.

Although reform initiatives have enjoyed largely bipartisan support, state leaders at times confronted political impasses similar to the ones tying up Iowa lawmakers this session.

Iowa’s Kids: View stories, videos and photos from a yearlong Register project about the unprecedented challenges facing the state’s children

The Baltimore teachers’ union challenged the state’s ability to restructure struggling schools — a case that made its way to Maryland’s highest court, where the practice was ruled legal. Exit exams for high school students also were initially a tough sell to both parents and lawmakers.

Yet Maryland’s multiyear school improvement plan has continued to receive support and increased funding over the past decade under both Democratic and Republican leadership.

“As a people, we made the decision that education was the most important economic development investment we could make,” said Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat who served as mayor of Baltimore from 1999 to 2007.

Early successes paved the way for continued state funding, he said.

At the local level, many school leaders received autonomy over their budgets, staffing and schedules. Their only objective: Raise achievement for all students.

McCoy, the Cradlerock principal, used that authority last year to rearrange his school’s schedule after 2010-11 test scores indicated students weren’t meeting state goals for growth in reading or math.

“We were bleeding red,” he said.

Physical education and music teachers at the suburban school now take responsibility for early morning duties, such as supervising the school cafeteria. That has allowed teachers in core academic areas an hour to collaborate, planning math, reading and science lessons.

Today, dry-erase boards in the school’s “war room” chart the progress of Cradlerock’s 499 students. A watch list tracks children receiving extra instruction in math or reading.

In 2011-12, Cradlerock students posted double-digit test score gains in both subjects.

Forty percent of Cradlerock students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, matching Iowa’s statewide rate. Iowa’s stagnating test scores over the past 20 years have coincided with increases in child poverty.

“If you look at best practices for (working with) kids in poverty, it’s just good teaching. It’s meeting kids where they need to be met,” said teacher Connie Conroy. “It’s a shift in how you think about what you’re doing.”

Former official: No school satisfied with status quo

In Maryland, even top-performing schools file an annual improvement plan with the state, former state superintendent Grasmick said.

“There is no system in Maryland where they don’t understand what needs to be happening, and where they are not ratcheting up efforts to achieve it,” she said. “No one wants to stand still. Everyone wants to push forward.”

Fandel said Maryland’s 20-year turnaround includes “a lot of lessons” for Iowa.

“Maryland is ahead of Iowa in every aspect of education reform,” she said.

Hanushek and others point to Maryland’s accountability as the lynchpin of its success. But Fandel said concurrent reforms that aligned the state’s curriculum, assessments and teaching standards were also key.

Iowa policymakers are just now beginning to develop a voluntary statewide curriculum, redesign student tests and improve measures of teachers — showing just how far Iowa has to go before it can reclaim its crown as an education leader, Fandel said.

Whether you agree with all the methods Maryland has used to improve its schools, Gov. O’Malley said, it’s hard to argue with the results.

Iowa and Maryland serve similar percentages of students who live in poverty and who are learning English as a second language.

“Public education in America doesn’t have to be one of those things where you throw your hands up and say: ‘This is way too complex to deal with’,” O’Malley said. “Yes, it’s hard and it’s not cheap; but it can be done.”

After decades of work, Maryland’s schools are enjoying accolades.

Education Week, the nation’s education newspaper of record, has ranked Maryland as the top provider of K-12 education in the U.S. for each of the past five years.

The state’s focus on college-readiness, in particular, has drawn national interest.

Nearly 28 percent of all Maryland seniors in the class of 2011 passed an Advanced Placement exam, showing mastery of college-level work. Only 9.7 percent of Iowa seniors achieved the same feat.

Maryland’s leaders acknowledge there’s plenty of work left to do. Large achievement gaps remain. Yet scores for all student groups have improved since the state began holding schools responsible for student scores.

From racial minorities to children living in poverty, all but one of Maryland’s student groups matched or outscored their Iowa counterparts on national math and reading tests. The only exception occurred on the eighth-grade math test, where low-income Iowa students performed better than their Maryland peers.

And unlike Iowa, Maryland has extra money to spend on reducing gaps between students. It won $250 million in federal funding awarded to states addressing issues such as improved teacher effectiveness. Iowa got shut out.

Maryland’s latest wave of school reform efforts focuses, in part, on reducing disparities between student groups and turning around struggling schools.

Maryland has pledged to cut in half the number of students scoring below grade level by 2017. Early results are positive.

Some of the highest-scoring schools in 2012 served populations where more than three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

“Kids are capable of overcoming all sorts of barriers, if we’re willing to support them,” O’Malley said. “Maryland’s story shows that if you make better choices, you get better results.”

Gaps between poor students and their peers, for example, triggered a statewide mandate in 2002 that schools provide preschool instruction for children from low-income families.

Hickok and her colleagues at Baltimore’s Liberty Elementary School see the program’s value every day.

In 2003, 34.2 percent of the school’s third-graders read at grade level. Last year, 87.5 percent of third-graders passed the state reading exam.

After reciting their ABCs on a recent morning, Hickok’s preschool students moved on to more sophisticated fare — combining sounds to make words like “cat,” “hen” and “pen.”

With a little coaching, the children then wrote simple sentences.

“Look at you; you’re so smart,” enthused Hickok, earning smiles from her young charges. “You’re ready to go.”

From the Cato Institute

By Michael F. Cannon

ObamaCare aims to cover 16 million poor uninsured adults through Medicaid, plus 16 million higher-income uninsured Americans through government-subsidized “private” insurance. Supporters portrayed these “reforms” as a matter of life and death, particularly for the poor. Yet a monumental new study finds that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes” for poor adults. These findings strengthen the case that states should stop implementing ObamaCare, and Congress should swiftly repeal it.

In 2008, Oregon launched an ObamaCare field test. The state handed out Medicaid slots via lottery to thousands of the very folks to whom ObamaCare opens Medicaid. Economists then studied the differences between the lottery winners and losers. The random assignment of subjects makes Oregon’s the most reliable study—indeed the only reliable study—ever conducted on the effects of Medicaid.

The results stunned and embarrassed ObamaCare supporters. Medicaid increased medical spending from $3,300 to $4,400 per person, but produced no discernible improvement in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar levels, or risk of heart attacks after two years. Medicaid should have had an immediate impact on these measures, especially among the poor. Its failure to do so also casts doubt on any supposed long-term benefits from Medicaid and even ObamaCare’s subsidies for higher-income households. (Government subsidies are even less likely to improve the health of people with higher baseline access to care.) As Nicholas Kristof admits, ObamaCare supporters “oversold benefits of health insurance.”

Some supporters complain Oregon’s sample size was small. That’s another way of saying the disease burden among this group is not as great as you might think. Others stress that Medicaid reduced depression and financial strain. But these protests miss the point. The absence of physical-health improvements indicts the entire enterprise. Supporters have an obligation to show that the $2 trillion entitlements ObamaCare will launch next year would actually improve enrollees’ health. The Oregon study shows they cannot meet their burden of proof. What part of “no discernible improvement” don’t they understand?

The notion that Medicaid should provide only catastrophic coverage likewise misses the point. Congress should have to produce evidence of benefit before it forces taxpayers to fund any such program. Yet there’s no reliable evidence that government-provided catastrophic coverage would improve enrollees’ health, either.

This landmark study’s findings strengthen the case for repealing ObamaCare. Until Congress acts, states can stop both the Medicaid expansion and ObamaCare’s health insurance “exchanges.”

Michael F. Cannon is director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute and co-editor of Replacing ObamaCare (2012).

Below is an article featured on Bloomberg Businessweek’s website on May 9th which discusses reforms made to New Haven, Connecticut public schools.  A big part of the reforms in Connecticut involved evaluations that were based on a teacher’s classroom performance as well as whether students master their subjects.

The result:  Higher test scores and higher graduation rates.

New Haven Shows How You Fix Public Schools

From Bloomberg Businessweek

By Devin Leonard

The end of the school year is usually a happy time, but not for David Cicarella, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers. He’s getting ready to have difficult conversations with some of his members, teachers who have flunked the Connecticut school district’s yearlong evaluation process. Cicarella will tell them the union won’t defend them, even if they have tenure. It’s time for them to look for another job.

Some of the teachers will yell at him. Others will tell him they have children to support and mortgages to pay. After one teacher received a termination notice, her husband tore into the union boss. “He said, ‘Our union would never let this s-‍-‍- happen,’ ” Cicarella recalls. “I said, ‘Your wife drinks on the job. What do you want us to do here?’ ”

In the last two years, 62 teachers left the New Haven school district after getting bad reviews. Cicarella, who taught math and reading for 28 years, didn’t fight to reinstate any of them. He reminds them that during their last contract negotiations with the district in 2009, New Haven’s 1,865 teachers agreed to abide by the results of the evaluations—which rate teachers based largely on classroom performance and whether students master their subjects. Cicarella helped write the rules. Instead of fighting each other, he and New Haven Superintendent of Schools Reginald Mayo are partners in improving the schools. “We’ve got the union right there saying, ‘We agree with the administration,’ ” Mayo says. “They’re saying, ‘We’re tired of supporting underperforming teachers, too.’ ”

The harmonious relationship between labor and management in New Haven is starkly different from many other large urban districts. Chicago teachers went on strike in September in part to protest Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s demand for evaluations. Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, frequently ridicules Emanuel in public, once calling him a “liar and a bully,” and says teachers will work to throw him out of office when he’s up for reelection in 2015. New York City schools lost $450 million in state and federal aid after Mayor Michael Bloomberg (founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek) and the city’s United Federation of Teachers couldn’t agree on an evaluation process in time to meet a state deadline.

Everybody seems to lose in these standoffs, but the public increasingly blames unions for protecting bad teachers at kids’ expense. In 2011, 47 percent of the people who responded to a PDK/Gallup Poll said they thought teachers unions had hurt the quality of public education in the U.S., up from 38 percent in 1976. Michael Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank, argues the unions themselves are responsible for their declining public support. “They’ve resisted every reform effort that’s come along,” he says.

New Haven shows what can happen when management and labor are willing to bend a little. The catalyst for school reform in the city was John DeStefano Jr., a Democrat who’s been New Haven’s mayor since 1994. He controls the school board and has a close relationship with Mayo, who’s been superintendent since 1992. The district has challenges similar to those in other urban areas: In 2011, 78 percent of New Haven’s students were eligible for subsidized lunches, compared with 34 percent statewide. The 20,759-student district has historically fallen far short of state goals in math and reading. Starting around a decade ago, New Haven’s privately managed charter schools were shown to be vastly outperforming its public ones. At first, DeStefano was defensive. By 2008, though, he admitted the public schools were badly in need of help. “We were failing our kids,” he says.

DeStefano recruited Garth Harries, a reformer who’d worked for former New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, to come up with a plan to overhaul New Haven’s schools. Harries recommended replacing the staff at failing schools and in some cases recruiting management companies from outside the district to run them. The plan also called for greater accountability for underperforming teachers. City leaders braced for a furious reaction from the union. “Let me assure you, we thought this would be a major world war,” Mayo says.

Not so long ago it would have been. The relationship between the New Haven Federation of Teachers and the school district was once poisonous. Cicarella recalls attending union meetings where labor leaders boasted of filing hundreds of grievances against the district, sometimes for trivial contract violations. Cicarella, elected president of the union in 2007, didn’t see the administration as the enemy and wasn’t reflexively hostile to reform. He believes unions have hurt themselves by fighting to keep mediocre teachers in the classroom. “I understand this is our livelihood,” he says. “We’ve got to protect our wages and benefits. There is always going to be that part of it. I get that. But we’re not dockworkers. We’ve got kids here that we’re responsible for.”

DeStefano shrewdly courted Cicarella, asking for his advice about how to reform the schools. The union president was flattered. The mayor also reached out to Randi Weingarten, the influential president of the American Federation of Teachers. “She was very helpful,” DeStefano says. Weingarten’s blessing made it easier for Cicarella to sell the terms to his members. The union leaders spent much of 2010 negotiating details of the evaluation system with Mayo and Harries. Teachers who received an exemplary rating could be rewarded with lighter class loads and be invited to help develop the schools’ curriculums, Cicarella says. Those who scored poorly would receive coaching and other special services to help them improve. If that failed, they’d be let go.

Cicarella had to persuade his members to go along. One thing that helped: Mayo agreed to a union demand that school principals be subject to similar evaluations. “There were some fractious meetings with teachers,” Cicarella says. “They would say, ‘What about the principals? Is it going to be the same for them?’ And I would say, ‘It will be.’ ” Cicarella sat on the committee that wrote the evaluations for principals, meaning union members have a say in judging their bosses’ performance. This is unusual, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. “Unions are easy to pick on,” says Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners, a consulting firm. “But school management is no picnic either.” Seven principals have left since 2011.

The new system seems to be having a positive effect on student achievement. The district’s graduation rate rose from 58 percent in 2009 to 71 percent last year. Student test scores have improved, too. According to ConnCAN, which advocates for school reform in the state, the number of New Haven students whose scores have met or exceeded the goals on state tests has risen from 31 percent in 2009 to 54 percent last year. “For the past couple of years, New Haven has been among the districts that have made greater gains in the state,” says ConnCAN President Jennifer Alexander.

The question, of course, is whether the New Haven experience can be replicated elsewhere. Rotherham isn’t so sure it can. He says Lewis, Chicago’s combative union boss, has inspired teachers in other cities to take a harder line with their school district leaders. “She’s become a star of the teachers union movement,” he says. “After the strike, a lot of teachers are saying, ‘Why should we capitulate on anything? We should fight.’ ”

Cicarella says he understands why so many union leaders play the part of rabble-rouser: It gets them elected. Yet his own experience shows that people in his position don’t have to pick fights to prove their loyalty to the rank and file. Despite Cicarella’s willingness to stand by as some of his members are shown the door, teachers reelected him to a third term in December. It wasn’t even a close race: He ran unopposed.

The bottom line: Since teachers in New Haven agreed to abide by performance evaluations, 62 have lost their jobs. Their union hasn’t appealed or sued.

Click here to view the Businessweek article.

by Dennis Jacobe, Chief Economist

Forty-one percent are holding off on hiring because of the Affordable Care Act

PRINCETON, NJ — Forty-eight percent of U.S. small-business owners say the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) is going to be bad for their business, compared with 9% who say it is going to be good, and 39% who expect no impact.

These findings are from a Gallup survey of 603 small-business owners, conducted April 1-5.

Similarly, 52% of owners say the ACA is going to reduce the quality of healthcare they and their employees receive. This contrasts with 13% who feel it will improve the quality of care their employees get, and 30% who see no impact.

In a separate question, 55% of small-business owners expect the money they pay for healthcare to increase. Five percent expect their healthcare costs to decline, while 37% say the health law will have no impact on what they pay for healthcare.

Owners Already Responding to Healthcare Law

When asked if they had taken any of five specific actions in response to the ACA, 41% of small-business owners say they have held off on hiring new employees and 38% have pulled back on plans to grow their business. One in five (19%) have reduced their number of employees and essentially the same number (18%) have cut employee hours in response to the healthcare law. One in four owners (24%) have thought about eliminating healthcare coverage for their employees.

Implications

Small-business owners are worried about the way the Affordable Care Act is going to affect their business, with about half believing the law is going to be bad for business, add to their healthcare costs, and simultaneously reduce the quality of care they and their employees receive. This overall impression of the ACA is consistent with owners’ tendency to be more Republican than Democratic, higher income, more against big government, more conservative, and less optimistic than Americans overall.

However, more important for the U.S. economy in the short term is what small-business owners say they are already doing in anticipation of the new law’s continuing implementation. About four in 10 say they are holding off on hiring and new growth plans. About one in five say they are letting people go or cutting employees’ hours. Even after discounting small-business owners’ political views, these actions suggest the ACA could be a significant drag on the U.S. economy — at least in the short term.

See the full survey on the Gallup website here.

By Representative Walt Rogers

I have the privilege of guiding the legislation pertaining to the Healthy Iowa Plan, the alternative to Medicaid expansion, in the Iowa House. Last week, the House passed the bill and sent it to the Senate. I read The Des Moines Resister’s editorial about the bill (“Branstad Plan Still Pales Next to Medicaid,” May 2) and it left me greatly disappointed that the largest newspaper in our state could write an opinion so biased and incomplete.

I, and every legislator in the House, understand the seriousness of this legislation. It doesn’t take an “expert” to do that. It takes caring, objective and discerning people to assess our situation economically and morally.

Medicaid is a flawed and inadequate system. Inadequate was the word used byproponents of Medicaid at the recent public hearing on the Healthy Iowa Plan.

Medicaid’s reimbursement rates are poor, it is wrought with fraud (100 billion dollars nationwide in some estimates), it only pays for service instead of inspiring healthy habits, and causes insurance and overall costs to skyrocket. It literally fuels an explosion of the federal budget and taxpayer debt.

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the federal government will spend almost a trillion dollars expanding Medicaid. States that do not agree to the expansion could potentially save the country $609 billion.

The Register’s editorial implies that House Republicans “fell in line” and backed the Healthy Iowa Plan, which is far from the reality. What we did is analyze the plan with discernment and seriousness and came to the same conclusion the governor did.

The Healthy Iowa Plan is a better option than Medicaid expansion at keeping low-income Iowans healthy while sustaining a thriving economy. It incentivizes members to take an active role in their own health and health plans, using modern accountability techniques, regional structures, local primary care facilities and personal reward health incentive accounts. Medicaid needs an overhaul and we all know it.

The Register points to an elephant in the room pertaining to the federal government’s apparent unwillingness to approve our plan. In my closing comments on the bill I highlighted a letter to Iowa Senate Democrats from the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ office that essentially said most of the tenets of the Healthy Iowa Plan are acceptable. While obtaining the waiver is not simple, according to this letter, it is a strong and viable option.

The Iowa House is committed to approving a plan that helps all Iowans become healthier while doing it in a fiscally and morally responsible way. Because of our good financial situation, Iowa can be a leader in the country by putting forth a responsible option to Medicaid expansion.

My challenge to the Register’s editorial board is to take off its blinders and look honestly at the whole landscape of this serious decision.

Representative Rogers is an Assistant Leader for House Republicans and the floor manager of the Healthy Iowa Plan.

Rep. Rogers editorial appeared in the May 8th Des Moines Register

From the Heritage Foundation

By Alyene Senger
As Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is being debated in the states, many myths are being perpetuated by its advocates. Here, Heritage provides the research to debunk such myths:

1. Myth: Expanding Medicaid is “free money” for the states.

Reality: The expansion adds an estimated $638 billion in new government spending from 2013–2023. New spending at the federal or state level is reckless in light of the country’s trillion dollar budget deficits and over $16 trillion in national debt. As Governor Rick Perry (R–TX)stated, “[T]here is no such thing as ‘free’ money. We know there’s only money that’s collected from taxpayers, and money borrowed from other countries like China against the good credit of our children and grandchildren.”

2. Myth: Expanding Medicaid will entail little to no costs to the states.

Reality: Within three years, costs would exceed any projected savings. Heritage research shows 40 of 50 states would see increases in costs due the Medicaid expansion. If all states expand, state spending on Medicaid would increase by an estimated $41 billion by 2022.

3. Myth: Medicaid expansion can bring savings to the states.

Reality: Analysis by Heritage shows that by 2022 any projected state savings are dwarfed by costs. Moreover, these projected savings assume states will further reduce payments to hospitals and clinics for uncompensated care. But, as Heritage’s Ed Haislmaier points out, it is more likely that hospitals will lobby state legislatures for more money rather than less.

4. Myth: States can opt out of the Medicaid expansion if they change their mind later.

Reality: Some proponents of the expansion claim that states could drop out of the expansion if the federal government reneges on its commitments. But as legal experts Robert Alt and Dan Greenberg state, “[I]n fact, there is substantial reason to believe that when a state chooses Medicaid expansion, it is something like a decision to go down a one-way street” and that “legislators are mistaken to ignore the possibility that expansion cannot be abandoned as easily as it was entered.”

5. Myth: States can circumvent Medicaid requirements for the expansion population.

Reality: In its recent Frequently Asked Questions, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) clearly states that beneficiaries under any premium support arrangement would still be Medicaid beneficiaries, “entitled to all benefits and cost-sharing protections,” and that states must provide “wrap around” to fill in any gaps. As Ed Haislmaier has pointed out, “[A]ny state that agrees to the Medicaid expansion will get exactly what the term expansion implies: simply a bigger version of the same expensive and dysfunctional program.”

6. Myth: States must act quickly before Obamacare cuts hospital payments.

Reality: Hospitals are pushing states to expand Medicaid coverage because Obamacare is going to reduce their payments for uncompensated care by $56 billion over 10 years. However, the President’s latest budget proposes delaying the Medicaid disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payment reductions until 2015, which raises questions over the future of the cuts. But regardless, as Heritage’s Nina Owcharenko points out, “[m]aybe it is time for the states to tell the hospitals to shift their attention to the real problem: Obamacare.”

7. Myth: Hospitals will go out of business if states do not expand Medicaid coverage.

Reality: Hospitals have been lobbying hard on the idea that without expansion, the Obamacare uncompensated care payment cuts will be unsustainable for their business. But according to Ohio Media Trackers, about 80 percent of Ohio hospitals would still net millions in profits if their charity care was cut.

8. Myth: States can trust the federal government to keep its funding promises.

Reality: “Although Obamacare stipulates the federal government will pay at least 90 percent of the benefit costs of the Medicaid expansion,” Heritage explains, “state lawmakers have no guarantee future Congresses will keep that promise.” In fact, the Obama Administration has already proposed changing the deal in its fiscal year 2013 budget proposal.

9. Myth: Medicaid expansion will help low-income workers out of poverty.

Reality: Medicaid expansion actually locks low-income workers in poverty because of its backward incentives that discourage work. As Dan Greenberg explains for Advance Arkansas, “[E]mployees who earn too much money—or who work too many hours—face a set of unpleasant choices. They can quit. They can work fewer hours. They can decline raises. Realistically, a large number of employees who face such choices will opt to preserve Medicaid coverage by reducing the hours they legally work.”

10. Myth: Medicaid is quality health coverage.

Reality: Research has consistently shown that Medicaid produces worse access and health outcomes than private insurance. As Heritage’s Kevin Dayaratna writes, “By further expanding this broken program, Obamacare only exacerbates the situation by adding millions of low-income Americans to a failing program.”