Cutting Lawmakers’ Pay is Good Politics
Quick quiz: What two things does John Chiang have in common
with Alan Cranston, Houston Flournoy, Gray Davis and Steve Westly?
Well, like the others, he’s state controller and, as his
decision Tuesday to cut off pay to the Legislature showed, Chiang also doesn’t
plan to end his political career as California’s bookkeeper-in-chief.
Right or wrong – and you’ll find people on both sides –
Chiang’s decision to jump into the middle of the state’s annual budget brawl
was as much a political choice as an economic one.
You won’t hear that from Chiang, of course.
"My job is not to substitute my policy judgment for that of
the Legislature and the Governor, rather it is to be the honest broker of the
numbers," Chiang said
in announcing that the budget Gov. Brown vetoed last week wasn’t balanced, so
lawmakers won’t get paid.
The All Powerful Controller
Congressman Tom McClintock ran for the state
controller’s job twice when he served in the California legislature. Both times
the vote count went past election night to discover he had lost. The reason he
wanted to gain the controller’s office, McClintock once told me, was that he
believed there was a lot of power in the office that wasn’t being utilized to
direct the fortunes of the state budget.
That suggestion seemed overblown until John
Chiang started flexing the muscles of that office.
A state controller McClintock undoubtedly would
be tackling budget issues differently than Controller Chiang – but it is clear
that Chiang, as the chief fiscal watchdog for the state government, is
enlarging the scope and power of the once relatively obscure office.
One year ago, Chiang battled
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger toe-to-toe over Schwarzenegger’s effort to
limit most state workers to a federal minimum wage during the last state budget
crisis.
Emergency Docs Fear Being Sued
A recent poll from the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) shows that emergency doctors are seriously concerned about being sued. More than half of the 1,768 physicians surveyed said that such concerns drive them to order more tests, and 44 percent said that fear of lawsuits is the biggest challenge to reducing emergency department costs. Even the President of ACEP, Sandra Schneider, MD., has said, “Medical liability reform is essential to meaningful healthcare reform. Without it, healthcare costs will continue to rise.”
What’s more fascinating is that these concerns have not been alleviated by last year’s passage of the health care reform. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said the law has not made specialists more willing to treat emergency patients. And while there are bills moving through the House of Representatives dealing with tort reform, they must overcome stiff opposition.
To me, question 12 of the survey is the biggest eye opener. The question asked, what is the reason you conduct the number of tests you do? More than 50 percent stated it was due to fear of lawsuits.
Grading the Teachers
Cross-posted at CityJournal.
California’s public school teachers are the highest paid in the country, earning about $63,000 a year on average, along with generous health-insurance and pension plans. Their salaries and benefits are funded with taxes paid by all of us—workers, consumers, homeowners, and businesses large and small. It’s useful to think of taxpayers as owners of our troubled public education franchise, which has a statewide high school dropout rate of about 30 percent. And for many of those who do graduate from high school and go on to college, remediation is essential. Value-added teacher evaluation—a method that estimates the contribution teachers make to student’s test-score gains—is a concept whose time has most definitely come. Californians are entitled to know precisely who is and isn’t delivering the goods for their children.
The Los Angeles Times last month published a much-anticipated follow-up to its path-breaking 2010 investigation, which ranked 6,000 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests year after year. The updated rankings include data for more than 11,500 teachers. Using the California Public Records Act, Times reporters Jason Felch, Jason Song, and Doug Smith obtained student math and language arts scores for the Los Angeles Unified School District from 2003 through 2009. The newspaper commissioned Richard Budden, a senior economist and education researcher with the Santa Monica–based RAND Corporation, to analyze the data. Using the value-added technique, he converted the scores into percentile ratings, and then divided them into five equal categories from “least effective” to “most effective.”