Reagan’s Legacy? ‘Privatization’ Is a Dirty Word

May 26, 2017

In the era of a billionaire president (namely Donald Trump), any discussion of privatization turns nasty, and it’s Ronald Reagan’s legacy that is getting beat up in the process.

Reagan was big on running the federal government more like a business, and proposed broad ideas to get the private sector to take over some of the jobs government was doing. These public-private partnerships helped pump the economy, and it seemed to make more sense for these jobs to be done by companies whose business it was to do this kind of work. In a 1986 message to Congress, Reagan wrote:

In most cases, it would be better for the government to get out of the business and stop competing with the private sector, and in this budget I propose that we begin that process. Examples of such ‘privatization’ initiatives in this budget include sale of the power marketing administrations and the naval petroleum reserves; and implementation of housing and education voucher programs.

During the Reagan era, privatization began on a broad level, and private-public partnerships were instituted in a variety of areas. Today, these arrangements vary from prison administration to school vouchers. As Gerard Robinson, the former commissioner of education for Florida and secretary of education for Virginia, explains:

Public-private partnerships remain an important aspect of doing business in America; private prisons are still part of our state and federal corrections landscape; 26 school voucher programs are operating in 15 states and the District of Columbia; and 21 tax credit programs are operating in 17 states.

But in the age of Trump, Robinson says, much of the talk about private companies, which earn billions providing services to the government, has turned toward an anti-capitalistic tendency: namely arguments like, if a company has a contract with the government, it shouldn’t be allowed to profit.

But is that even remotely realistic? For one, these types of relationships have in fact been functioning for more than 100 years, not without flaws but certainly more efficiently than government could do alone. Two, what would be the incentive for companies to do business if they can’t benefit from the service? They already are doing it more more cheaply than could be done by a parallel company created by government to perform the same function without benefit.

Three, as Robinson points out, it’s just more feasible for some government agencies to contract out some educational services while doing others in-house. He uses examples from public school arrangements, for instance, in the area of technology support. Let Apple and Microsoft handle student computer services, not the schools. Or how about student transportation?

According to a recent report from Bellwether, district-managed public school buses account for approximately two-thirds of the 480,000 buses that transport 25 million students in urban and rural school districts each year. Private companies such as First Student, Inc., which has a contract with 1,200 school districts and employs 57,000 people to drive 6 million students to school each day, are among for-profit service providers that compose the remaining one-third. Why do districts outsource transportation? According to the National School Transportation Association, ‘School bus contracting benefits schools and school districts nationwide. Outsourcing transportation redirects attention and financial resources back into the schools that were overburdened by the expense and administrative commitment of providing their own student transportation.’

Robinson lastly makes the case that some anti-privatization groups may not want to admit: public employees benefit from investing in the private sector. If you remove that profit margin, public employees lose out, both in terms of an upper salary limit and by not having profitable companies into which they invest their retirement savings.

According to an American Investment Council report regarding the investments of over 155 public pension funds in various equity markets, funds invested in private equity produce a median 10-year annualized return rate nearly 4 percent higher than those invested in public equity. For example, the Teacher Retirement System of Texas invested $16.41 billion in private equity, and came away with a 15.4 percent increase in their annualized 10-year return. The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System invested $8.26 billion in private equity, and garnered a 13.2 percent increase in their return. The point is that these teachers, and countless more, will be able to retire with some comfort based on the investment of their public pensions in the private equity market.

So having profitable companies that provide valuable services seems like a smart choice that works on both sides of the coin, complementing government services while also providing a revenue stream for government investments. Seems like a viable course of action, one currently threatened by anti-capitalistic forces.

What do you think?

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Helping Communities With Large Populations of Ex-Prisoners

April 1, 2017

Do you know someone who has been in prison or have you ever been in prison? It’s not that rare anymore in this country to answer yes.

Though the U.S. recidivism rate is as high as 50-75 percent within five years, suggesting many of the same people end up in prison more than once, about 650,000 men and women are released from prison every year. They are returned to the communities from where they came with slightly less than what they had when they first went in, except now, they’re stigmatized, have less chance of getting a job, and few skills to keep up with changing educational requirements and work environments.

It’s enough to leave these people with a feeling they’re never going to get back on their feet or achieve more than the little they started with.

But to become prepared for a new day and reduce that chance of going back in, prisoners need to learn skills while locked up, and isn’t that what prison is supposed to do? Rehabilitate, not just punish and incarcerate?

And less face it, if prisoners don’t get the skills needed to begin the climb up the economic ladder, communities with large ex-prisoner populations are going to remain less safe and families in them will be less stable. The cycle that resulted in these people going into prison will repeat itself.

So what to do? Education is key. Getting lessons in new skills will make prisoners more employable upon release.

Writing for CNN, Gerard Robinson and Van Jones suggest ways to extend opportunities for people who are returning to communities that most need workers who can earn a decent income and be productive members of society.

First, we need to lift the ban on access to Pell Grants for incarcerated individuals. This approach provides motivated individuals an opportunity to turn their lives around. When the Pell Grant program began, all qualifying students including the incarcerated were eligible to receive small amounts of federal funding to help pay for college tuition.

Beginning with the enactment of the 1994 crime bill, incarcerated individuals were excluded from receiving federal funds. As a result, nearly 350 in-prison college programs across the country disintegrated.

In 2015, the Second Chance Pell pilot program was announced, which has already helped 12,000 incarcerated individuals receive grants to access higher education in state and federal facilities across the country. We should expand this pilot program, or make it permanent.

Second, we should expand access to all federal student loan programs for incarcerated juveniles and adults. Some believe this approach makes fiscal sense and will help make our streets safer and economy more prosperous. For example, a study from the RAND Corp. showed that a $1 investment in education yields $4 to $5 in public safety cost-savings. It also found that individuals who received education while behind bars were 43% less likely to end up back in prison and 13% more likely to obtain employment following their release.

Third, we must ensure that individuals convicted of drug-related crimes are not barred from financial aid or federal student loans if they choose to pursue a college degree. It is counterproductive to lock individuals out of opportunity for higher learning after they have paid their debt to society, especially when there has been a growing, bipartisan movement to ensure that individuals convicted of drug crimes receive access to treatment and rehabilitation, moving them toward a path to success. It is past time.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy is pushing these ideas in a new campaign called #CollegeNotPrison, and #cut50, the national bipartisan criminal justice reform organization founded by Jones, is trying to introduce these programs where they are most needed.

Helping the 95 percent of prisoners who return to the neighborhoods they started in not only gives purpose to the lives of those who went down the wrong path, but ultimately aids the communities to which they return.

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Prisoner Education: A Smart Investment of Federal Dollars?

October 19, 2016

Baltimore gets a bad rap for a lot that goes wrong in the city, but redemption is one of its favorite recurring themes. So it’s no surprise that the University of Baltimore is working at Jessup Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison near Baltimore, on improving prisoner education.

Specifically, the university is participating in a Department of Education pilot program intended to help prisoners pursue a higher education with federal grant money.

From Gerard Robinson and Elizabeth English.

In June 2016, the university was chosen among 67 colleges and universities nationwide to participate in the Obama administration’s $30 million Second Chance Pell Grant Experimental Sites Initiative. Under the program, approximately 12,000 of America’s 2.2 million incarcerated will receive federal aid to pursue a higher education. Upon release, they will retain the Pell funding to finish their program.

Since the university’s Second Chance College Program began at Jessup this fall, its students have been working toward a bachelor’s degree in community studies and civic engagement with a minor in entrepreneurship. To be eligible, prisoners had to have been enrolled in Jessup’s preexisting Scholars Program, which offers noncredit liberal arts courses; had a high school diploma or GED; and submitted two letters of recommendation and one personal essay. Preference was given to those with a parole eligibility date within five years of the program’s start. Program directors sent letters to 150 men at Jessup with information on how to apply. Over 100 of those men submitted an application, and 29 are enrolled in the program today.

Federal aid for higher education of prisoners is not a new idea, but it’s most certainly controversial.

Under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, those in prison were eligible to receive Pell Grant funding for college coursework. That changed with a provision in the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which prohibited the incarcerated from receiving the funding. At the time, lawmakers argued that it was unjust to provide federal aid to those behind bars while many law-abiding citizens could not afford higher education.

Twenty years later, the administration’s program has resurrected similar debates. Many lawmakers are again concerned about providing Pell dollars for those in prison, as evidenced by the 2015 Kids Before Cons Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., and Rep. Tom Reed, R-Calif., which would ban the Department of Education from providing Pell Grants to prisoners. The bill was written, in part, in response to the Restoring Education and Learning Act of 2015 sponsored by Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md. which would lift the Pell Grant Ban from 1994.

If the numbers add up, however, investing in prisoner education could be a wise use of dollars.

One meta-analysis found that prisoners who participated in correctional education were 43 percent less likely to recidivate and 13 percent more likely to be employed upon release. It also found that every dollar invested in correctional education generates $5 in cost savings.

For those who do get an education while in prison, the results can be life-saving. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that about 68 percent of prisoners in state prisons do not have a high school education. Over half of those in prison can be characterized as functionally illiterate. This makes it all the harder to stay out of prison once convicts are released because not only do ex-felons have the stigma of conviction, making it harder to find housing and work, but they are unable to operate as most others do in society. On top of that, many of the released return back to communities that are overwhelmed by financial and education needs.

Jessup already conducts a GED program, though the graduation rate is small. With higher demand for continuing education after high school, this new program is a testament to whether the prison system can actually rehabilitate, not just punish criminals. With the U.S. having the highest incarceration rate in the world — nearly 600,000 men and women are released each year back into society — making them functioning members of society can be a positive step toward lowering that prison rate and helping communities where these ex-prisoners live.

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School Choice Laws and the Parents They Ignore

June 6, 2016

At least 45 states and the District of Columbia have enacted 102 school choice laws, but those laws barely regard the role of parental rights and responsibilities, according to a new study of education statutes.

In all, the states and nation’s capital have 43 charter school laws, 25 voucher laws, 20 tax-credit laws, 9 tax-deduction laws, and 5 Education Savings Account (ESA) laws on the books, and many of these laws have been beneficial in helping students get out from under the yoke of ineffective education systems.

Nonetheless, says Gerard Robinson, a former commissioner of education for Florida and secretary of education for Virginia, the school choice laws really only pay lip service when it comes to the parents’ rights and responsibilities in their children’s education.

After analyzing results from 20 choice laws in particular, and reviewing 82 other choice laws in general, my research found that regrettably, existing choice laws demonstrate that parental rights and responsibilities in education statutes are little more than a dull roar. More often than not, when ‘parent’ is mentioned in a school choice law, it is about the legal structure of the program or is a brief hat tip toward parents — rather than language that empowers them when it comes to the education of their child.

The reason to involve parents in a child’s education is not just theoretical. Existing research has shown that parent involvement can boost the academic outcomes of students.”

This is not to say that parents are ignored in the laws. Robinson notes that parents are mentioned quite a bit, but mainly in the context of the authority to opt their children in or out of traditional schooling as well as in the funding of Education Savings Accounts.

Those mentions don’t really address the rights and responsibilities of parents in their children’s education, and to hear it told by mass media, students are better off if their parents don’t get involved. Googling “parental expectations” brings up an array of stories about the damage parental expectations can wreak on children’s performance and grades.

But really, that is a lot of hype.

Several studies show that not only do children assimilate better when they have behavioral norms placed on them by parents — punishment for bad behavior and reward for good — but involved parenting actually raises students’ performance in school by as much as four-tenths of a grade point across student age groups.

Several studies have shown how technology can play a role in enabling parents to participate in their children’s education, with a positive outcome. Programs already in existence in some areas include daily text updates to parents or portals for parents to review their kids’ assignments and their progress on curricula.

But the rights and responsibilities question goes beyond merely helping one’s child do his or her homework or keeping an eye on them while they’re out of sight. If parents are to be involved in raising their own children, why would they leave it to the state to determine what level of involvement they should have?

By insisting on greater rights and responsibilities in the educational system, Robinson contends and the evidence supports, schools are better equipped to teach, and parents are one step closer to improving their children’s outcomes.

Read Gerard Robinson’s survey on school choice laws and the acknowledgement of parents’ rights and responsibilities.

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