Good Ideas Can Be Dressed Up in Bad Proposals

/ The Old Crank

I don’t have an opinion about this, or any useful information to share with you that might help you form your own opinion about it, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that questioning whether the people proposing this kind of financing know what they’re doing does not necessarily mean you are anti-technology or against computers in schools or don’t believe the future is our children etc. As this article notes, the interest alone on $2 billion in bonds could buy a lot of stuff.

One of the things I’m doing in my actual job is to better understand how communities identify the best ways for technology to drive what they are tryying to accomplish, and figure out how to pay for those tools they need in a responsible and effective way. Taking on a lot of debt to do so may not be the best approach. (Again, not saying it’s a bad idea, just that it may not be.)

 

Bring on the Pork!

/ The Old Crank

Homer Welcomes the Return of Pork Barrel SpendingI tweeted this earlier but in case you are walled out by their subscriber paywall, here’s a fair use except of an interesting article in the Legal Times from yesterday concerning the possible return of Congressional earmarks. An earmark is a legislative provision that allows members to direct approved funds for specific projects, usually to a particular organization or project in their home state or district. Earmarks are popularly portrayed as pork-barrel spending and often cited as a corrupting influence on our politics. The practice became enough of a public relations liability that the House instituted a ban on the practice in 2010, and the Senate soon followed suit. Now some lobbyists (who obviously have a vested interest in this) are going around telling people it might come back:

Former Republican Congressman James Walsh, now at K&L Gates, has predicted that federal earmarks could return to Congress next year. The change could revive the lobbying industry and spark a now-stagnant Congress by giving it more discretionary power after the mid-term elections Tuesday, he said during a webinar sponsored by his firm.

“I think it would make things move better up there,” he said. A highway funding plan, he added, could revive the earmark—a legislative procedure that ended in 2010.

His prediction was among many shared by a K&L Gates panel of former members of Congress and a top lobbyist Monday.

Despite earmarks’ bad reputation, there are some who have argued that an outright ban of the practice was actually a bad idea, claiming it has actually decreased transparency in the appropriations process and shifted the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches too far to the executive. Others argue that the ban removed who a useful tool for lawmakers to have at their disposal as a way to broker deals on legislation.

In the case of adult education, would the return of Congressional  earmarks provide advocates with more leverage over the administration on how money on adult education is spent? I have no idea. I do suspect that without strong, knowledgeable advocacy from the field, Congress could also come up with some really bad ways to earmark adult education funds. But it seems to me the opportunity for leverage is almost always a good thing to have. Right now the administration calls all the shots, and I’m not sure that Congressional language “urging” the Department to “increase the focus on adults with the lowest literacy and numeracy skills” or “work with national adult literacy organizations,” as they did in the FY 2014 omnibus budget bill, is taken that seriously.

Adult Literacy Programs at the Library of Congress Literacy Awards

/ The Old Crank

LOC Literacy Awards BookletI had the good luck to be in attendance at the presentation of the 2014 Library of Congress Literacy (LOC) Awards on October 8th. Now in its second year, this program, supported by philanthropist David Rubenstein, honors organizations that have made “outstanding contributions to increasing literacy in the United States or abroad.” This year’s top honors went to Room to Read, which was awarded the David M. Rubenstein Prize ($150,000); Start Making a Reader Today (SMART), winner of the American Prize ($50,000); and the Mother Child Education Foundation (AÇEV), winner of the International Prize ($50,000).

None of these organizations are adult-focused, although the AÇEV program provides adult literacy services for low-income mothers of the children they serve. (AÇEV also employs technology extensively in their program, using a mix of television and online materials. If you are at all interested in technology and adult education,  I suggest you check them out, although I should note that their Web site is in Turkish.)

I bring all of this to your attention because this year there was an increased emphasis on the other purpose of the program, which is the dissemination of effective practices, culled from not only the three prize-winners, but also a subset of the organizations that applied for an award this year but did not win. The LOC has published a Best Practices booklet summarizing those practices, and additional resources, such as symposia and webcasts, are in the works. Here, several adult education organizations are featured, including ProLiteracy, the Literacy Assistance Center of New York City, Literacy Volunteers of Greater Hartford, and California Library Literacy Services (CLLS).

 

Access to Health Care Doesn’t Eliminate Health Disadvantage of Poor Education

/ The Old Crank

Report Cover: Health Care Necessary But Not SufficientInteresting new brief from the VCU Center on Society and Health on the relationship between education and health. Most would find it unsurprising that people with less education tend to have poorer health outcomes. But does improved access to health care remove this disparity? Or as, they put it in this brief, “[w]ill health care reform make high school dropouts as healthy as college graduates?”

It won’t. According to this report, while access to health care has a bigger impact on people with limited education than for those with more education, access to health care isn’t enough to overcome the educational disadvantages associated with poor health: “People with fewer years of education have worse health than those with more education—even when they have the same access to health care.”

The authors go on to recommend that the adverse health consequences associated with a limited education “will require other policies that target factors outside of health care.”