Parents in Wisconsin had a tremendous victory last week when the legislature passed a change in the state’s open enrollment law making it easier for students to transfer from one school district to another. The change in the law expands the traditional window for parents to participate in the open enrollment program from three weeks to three months. The change in the law also includes a compromise that allows for year-round transfers of students between school districts if the students are welcomed and if the parents find it necessary.

These changes in the open enrollment law were a tremendous victory for supporters of public school choice in Wisconsin and the victory was the highlight of the annual “School Choice Week.”

The expansion in the allowed open enrollment time also comes at a time of renewed energy in reforming education under Governor Scott Walker and the legislature. Under ACT 10, the school districts in Wisconsin have greater flexibility in setting the work rules, including expected hours in the workday and with seniority.

The sweeping changes of ACT 10 are also allowing school districts to experiment with merit pay. As the MacIver Institute recently reported, the Cedarburg and Hartland-Lakeside School Districts will be among the first to try merit pay to see if it improves student performance.

The governor has also announced new legislation is coming that will rate all schools on proficiency and student progress, create a teacher and principal evaluation system, and implement the Read to Lead proposed reforms.

This is a dramatic change in direction from when school choice was on the defensive during the Jim Doyle era. Then Doyle and the teachers unions tried to prevent public online charter schools from using open enrollment, effectively shutting them down. When that was unsuccessful they capped enrollment just as they fought raising the caps on enrollment in the Milwaukee Choice Program.

The compromise legislation that just passed allows parents to move their children to another school district under the open enrollment program year-round provided the resident school district agrees it is in the child’s best interests. However, if the parents are unable to get the approval of the resident school district, they can appeal to the state Department of Public Instruction whose determination of what is in the child’s best interests would be final.

As a parent of two children in elementary school I understand the need for options. I went through a situation myself when it was no longer in my children’s best interests to continue in our ‘home’ public school district after it became clear that my newspaper columns for the Waukesha Freeman had made some unprofessional teachers hostile toward my kids.

Unfortunately I was not made aware of the situation until well after the open enrollment period had ended. It was too late for us to consider an online charter school in another district or switching my oldest son to a neighboring district. There was no way I could allow my children to be deprived of a proper education with parental involvement in their activities, so I had to make the decision to switch them to a private school. I might have made a different decision had those options been available to me at the time. Thank heavens we were able to afford it.

We can all imagine other scenarios under which a parent may discover, at an inconvenient time for the school bureaucrats, that the school system is inadequate for their child. For example, a child may find that the district’s reading program is incompatible with the child’s needs. While it may work for other children, for some reason it doesn’t work for that child, and the parents discover that it isn’t working after the school year has started. Wouldn’t it be preferable to move that child as soon as possible into a district that has a reading program more tailored to that child’s needs?

Before the passage of SB2, parents would have to wait until the following February to pursue other public school options for their kids, and would have to wait until the following September before their child would get into a new public school.

Thanks to SB2, students will no longer be able to be held captive by arcane regulations or an occasional inconsiderate administrator.

This is at the heart of the school choice movement—giving parents the ability to make the proper educational choices for their children.

There is still work to be done when it comes to educational choice. Just last week the National Alliance for Charter Public Schools ranked Wisconsin 36 out of the 42 states with public charter school laws. Wisconsin was faulted limiting the authorizers of public charter schools to local school boards and a few universities. They suggested Wisconsin needs a board that can authorize charter schools statewide.

However, the latest expansion of public school choice enrollment statewide, year wide is welcome news for parents looking for the best educational opportunities for their children. How fitting that this news came during School Choice Week. Kudos to Governor Walker, who is poised to sign SB2, and to members of both parties to voted for this reform.

The legislature may soon be on drugs. As a topic, I mean. A bipartisan group of legislators wants to repeal the minimum markup law for prescription drugs in Wisconsin, making Wisconsin the 46^th state in the country to allow retailers to sell drugs for below cost. It would be a free market approach to lowering health costs for many in Wisconsin.

In other states, large retailers like Target and Walmart are able to sell commonly prescribed prescription drugs for only four dollars. Under Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act that price for many drugs is illegal because the four-dollar price is below the retailer’s cost.

The proposed bill, SB 360, would exempt prescription drugs from the Unfair Sales Act. The bill passed the state assembly last year only to die from inaction by the senate. This time around, the assembly is waiting to see if the senate will take up the bill before they act on it. There has been a public hearing on the bill in the Senate Committee on Health.

In a very tense political season, it’s rare to see a bill that has such bipartisan support. Republicans State Representative Bill Kramer (Waukesha) and State Senator Leah Vukmir (Wauwatosa), and Democratic State Senator Tim Carpenter (Milwaukee) and State Representative Jon Richards (Milwaukee), are the sponsors of the bill.

In an interview Monday night, Kramer explained that they took provisions to protect “mom and pop” retailers from predatory pricing from his proposed legislation to end the Unfair Sales Act and added it to Richards’ and Carpenter’s bill from last year that would have repealed the Unfair Sales Act for prescription drugs.

“We’re taking a play out of the liberal playbook. We’re doing a little incrementalism. Last term it passed it passed the Assembly on a voice vote but it wasn’t taken up by the Senate,” Kramer said. “So this year we’re going to have the Senate act first. And then once they pass it we should have no problem in the Assembly.”

Asked if he was concerned if the recalls could bog the bill down, Kramer said, “Always concerned what the Senate is going to do. That’s why we’re not going to waste our time in the Assembly until we know that the Senate has passed it.”

At the public hearing, Kramer said that most of the questions seemed to come from Democratic Senator Jon Erpenbach who was “hung up on” the question of what happens when an insurance company’s co-pay is more than the cost of the prescription drug.

“I said, ‘Well, then I’m probably going to pay four dollars and I’m not going to tell my insurance I’ll send them another six.’ He was really, really hung up on that.”

When Erpenbach raised the question came up how the smaller pharmacy retailers would not be able to match the economies of scale of the larger retailers and therefore would not be able to compete, Kramer did not dispute the point.

However, Kramer said the law wasn’t helping anyone anyway. “Later testimony from one of the ‘mom and pop’ pharmacies basically said, ‘When I started there were 17 independent pharmacies,’ in the county he was from, ‘and now there’s two.’

“So Leah (Vukmir) asked him, ‘So, how is the current law helping you?’

“He said, ‘It’s really not.’”

Kramer said Vukmir asked, ‘So if we repeal it, you’re not losing anything? But we’re putting in these other protections about predatory pricing and using loss leaders to drive up the price on everything else. Don’t you think that would be better?”

“He replied, ‘Yeah, actually it does sound like it would be better.’ So if that testimony means anything then it sounds like the opposition does not have a leg to stand on.

“Walmart and Target have $4 generic prescription drug plans in 45 states, and I think hopefully by the end of the year Wisconsin could be the 46^th,” said Kramer.

Asked who else would be opposed to the bill, Kramer said the Wisconsin Petroleum Marketers & Convenience Store Association is registered against the bill. “They’re afraid of a slippery slope,” he said. “If we get prescription drugs then next we’ll go after gasoline.”

Asked if that wasn’t ultimately the goal, Kramer said, “That’s my goal. It would be my goal to go after gasoline and alcohol and tobacco and everything else right now. But I just don’t think we have the votes to get it done so this we get something.”

“We took a lot of the language from the bill that we’ve had in the last two terms so we get to try it on this one (issue),” Kramer said. “So it will be a little familiar I would think when we bring it back again when we think we can get more.”

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In the near future the final recommendations of three task forces dedicated to improving public education in Wisconsin are expected to be unveiled. This includes the work of the Wisconsin School Accountability Design Team, a group saddled with creating a metric by which the state’s schools will be graded.

The ultimate goal of this task force is to create a comprehensive and transparent system that helps parents, students, and citizens better understand the quality of their neighborhood schools. Ultimately, it would gauge the progress of both students and teachers and provide performance comparisons across districts, states, and even countries. It will take the place of the beleaguered No Child Left Behind program, a federal mandate that often failed to create meaningful positive change in the state’s public schools.

However, creating a metric to include all these goals is the difficult part. Issues like the inclusion of different subjects, determining which tests will be used to gauge progress, and how to weigh low-performing and underprivileged students has caused turmoil design team meetings that have occasionally become contentious. Some school leaders are concerned that they could be unfairly graded and carry the stigma of low-performance into the future. Others worry that a lax accountability system will offer little differentiation and obscure the transparency that the program is aiming to create.

Ideally, the school accountability program would include:

• Transparent grades that the public can easily digest. This means an A-F system that people can understand, rather than more cryptic terms. This will allow for an easy comparison across the state and across districts themselves. This will empower parents and help families find the right schools that fit their children best. While this will add an element of competition to the grading process, schools in danger of losing students thanks to low grades may find extra motivation for improvement.

• Extra attention – potentially through additional grading weight – for the lowest performing students. Florida’s school grading system, considered to be a model for Wisconsin’s school accountability program (or at least a starting point) emphasized the performance of the students that needed the most help. They essentially double-counted the reading and math scores of the pupils in the bottom 25 percent of their schools when factoring them into a school’s grade. This ensured an additional focus on students that are struggling without abandoning the performance of a school’s top students.

• Considerations to the amount of low-income students in a school. This would effectively curve the grading system to reward schools that are making progress with economically disadvantaged students. Wisconsin is a very unbalanced state when it comes to per capita income. The state’s 426 school districts often swing wildly from region to region when it comes to the economic backgrounds of students. Most often, areas with the highest concentrations of low-income pupils fare the worst when educational progress is measured.How to implement such a program has several moving parts. However, it’s clear that, in order to create comparisons that can be accurately gauged across the state, this is a necessary piece in ensuring fair, easily comparable grades from Milwaukee to Superior.

• Value-added testing data to gauge student progress and a teacher’s value over the course of a school year. Tests taken in the fall and spring could measure how students are learning at each grade within an institution. Not only would this show Wisconsinites how its students are progressing, but also fall in line with the upcoming Educator Effectiveness program, which will grade a teacher’s performance in the classroom. It would give parents a better idea of just what an educator has added to their child’s education.The idea behind value-added testing is that students that enter a grade behind their peers won’t drag down their classroom’s average. Instead of an overall grade level, this testing will measure the growth of a student – so if a student that has fallen behind is motivated and taught well enough to meet the class average, he or she would produce a higher value-added score than a student that maintains that average. In short, it rewards progression and penalizes regression beyond just what WKCE averages tell us.

• Proper standards for choice and charter schools. These schools should be held accountable as much as traditional public schools. The use of value-added testing and student data that tracks progress rather than benchmarks will ensure that these institutions are fairly graded and given more direct comparisons to the regular public schools in their regions.

• Turnaround measures for failing schools. So now that we know how schools are performing, what do we do with them? Policy needs to be put in place that allows these schools to remove ineffective educators and administrators and bring in the talent they need to make strides towards a better education. This should align with the upcoming teacher evaluation systems in order to help these schools identify which individuals are bringing value to their classrooms. This intervention will put an onus on underperforming institutions and highlight the need for real reform when students aren’t learning in Wisconsin’s schools.

• Data measurement systems that can sync with national and global rankings. This metric needs to be able to measure up from state to state and even across countries. Adopting Common Core of Data standards should help create a comparable and accurate system of measurement that allows us to compare Wisconsin’s schools with other across the country. Global comparisons are a bit trickier – but PISA or TIMSS testing, even on a limited basis, could provide valuable information when it comes to stacking Wisconsin’s public schools against those of worldwide leaders.

• Revisable options to accommodate a new breed of teachers and students. The accountability system has to have a dedicated board to track results and address any shortcomings the program may have. This includes adopting new measures and self-reporting flaws and problems that may arise and negatively affect schools.

Ideally, the school accountability design team will create a program that presents clear and understandable data for parents and students so they can better understand the quality of their public schools. This needs to go beyond an insulated neighborhood level to work beyond districts, into other states, and even to other countries. Wisconsin’s educational outcomes have hit a disappointing era of limited growth and even regression. Increasing the public’s awareness of just how strong their neighborhood schools are will not only empower parents, but pressure underperforming institutions to improve.

It will be a large task to undertake, and the debates that have raged at design team meetings suggest that consensus outside of major topics has been hard to find. Still, the successful implementation of a program that accurately grades Wisconsin’s public schools and delivers more information to citizens will be powerful. It will give legitimacy to the state’s more successful schools and spur improvement in ones that are falling behind. However, this metric must be comprehensive and fair to ensure that grades are earned properly rather than just being the product of a potentially gamed system.

This is a major task for the design team, but with members ranging from almost every aspect of Wisconsin’s public education, it’s something that can be done. If these groups can work together, we’ll soon have a comprehensive system by which we can grade schools. If these groups can’t agree or exercise too much caution in their system, we may just end up with another set of standards that tell us little about Wisconsin’s classrooms – almost like the WKCE.

If the system is well constructed and implemented properly, students, teachers, parents, and Wisconsinites everywhere will benefit.

Governor Scott Walker’s Waste, Fraud and Abuse Commission (WFAC) has issued their report and found a potential $445 million in savings for Wisconsin’s taxpayers annually. But as if to prove Weiss’ Law, Democrats in Madison are already complaining about the report.

Weiss’ Law was named after former New Berlin School Board member Matt Weiss who made the observation, “Nobody ever thanks you for not spending money.” Given the history of past efforts to root out waste and fraud in government including the Grace Commission and other commissions and reports, Weiss knew what he was talking about.

The Commission identified $82.6 million in local government savings and $373 million in state government savings annually. Hardly small change.

Some of the savings identified are already being implemented, such as changes in overtime for correctional officers. Those changes were made possible by the reforms in Act 10, which allowed the state to set the work rules outside of collective bargaining.

Other changes were spurred by the release of the interim report last year. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services is examining how they will implement Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act program integrity provisions. They will also be contracting with private auditors to conduct audits of Medicaid suppliers on a contingency fee basis.

But what seems to have inspired the ire of the Democrats on the Commission, Democratic State Representative Mark Pocan and Democratic State Senator Chris Larson, was the emphasis by the commission to focus on the waste, fraud and abuse in programs for the needy.

In an interview with WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, Larson said, “Where they go after people who are receiving food stamps and quest cards. They wouldn’t do the same thing for contracting or where money’s going to for the economic development corporation.”

But as the commission’s report makes clear, even as the amount of assistance spending has dramatically increased in Wisconsin, the amount spent on rooting out fraud has dramatically decreased. The report says, “At the same time benefit spending and recipient levels have risen, funding for recipient fraud prevention and detection has dropped.  In 2002, state spending on recipient fraud detection and program integrity efforts was $2.7 million. Between 2004 and 2009, funding to identify and 22 prevent recipient fraud decreased by 76 percent, from $2,340,000 to $561,892, while at the same time program eligibility expanded and new public assistance programs were created.”

As for why the Commission did look for savings in assistance programs, as Willie Sutton was famously misquoted, “That’s where the money is.” The Commission identified that increasing program integrity for assistance programs would result in $177,000,00 in savings.

Even Pocan and Larson recognized that’s where the money is in their alternative report. They suggested hiring more front line staff and administrative efficiency could result in $116.8 million to $177 million in savings each biennium.

One of the Commission’s recommendations for stopping fraud was the requirement of a photo id for aid recipients using Quest debit card for FoodShare. As the Commission says in the report, there have been a number of high profile cases of Quest card fraud, including the re-selling of Quest cards for cash. Requiring a photo id at the register (the same requirement if writing a check or purchasing decent cold medicine) would deter the reselling of Quest cards and their unauthorized use.

Pocan and Larson consider requiring a photo id to be an unnecessary burden on the state’s poor. Apparently the poor need not apply to assist Pocan’s and Larson’s fellow Democrats’ “Recall Processing Strike Force,” which also requires a photo id of participants.

Pocan and Larson also misstate in their report that the commission did not consider the question of using more in-house engineers at the Department of Transportation. “Unfortunately, these conversations were not part of the commission process.”

Actually, the question was dealt with quite extensively in section F on pages 50 – 57, including the Legislative Audit Bureau report that Pocan and Larson cite in their alternative report. The commission pointed out that the LAB report did not look at contractors vs. in-house engineers in the larger sense of continued pay and benefits even after a project was completed, only on the cost for a particular project to make the comparison. The Commission pointed out there was actually conflicting data and called for more study of the issue, even as the DOT is adding more in-house engineers to address the imbalance.

Perhaps that was because Pocan and Larson were in a hurry to try to score other partisan points. Seemingly forgetting the purpose of the commission, which is to ultimately reduce the burden on the taxpayers, as part of their alternative report on Waste, Fraud and Abuse, Pocan and Larson actually called for a tax increase on Wisconsin businesses. They complain that with the tax breaks given to businesses under Walker, “Wisconsin will loose (sic) $212 million in lost revenue.” Larson and Pocan call for raising taxes on Wisconsin businesses $46.4 million in the current biennium and $80 million in the biennium to follow.

But Pocan and Larson saw their alternative report as an opportunity to actually add back more waste in government spending. They call for the return of regional transit authorities that would raise taxes on local communities for passenger rail projects.

And if that was not enough, they also call on the state government to beg the federal government for the money for “high-speed rail.” While they see the $800 million in lost federal revenue, they are ignoring the long-term costs of the project and the likely additional burdens to the taxpayers.

California was a supposed beneficiary of Wisconsin’s refusal of federal stimulus “high-speed” rail money, but they are experiencing buyer’s remorse. California voters in 2008 approved selling $9.95 billion in bonds for the train’s costs. Recent polling indicates that the same referendum would not pass today. Costs are ballooning and the bonds aren’t selling.

Now the CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, Roelof van Ark, and the Chairman of the Board, Tom Umberg, are stepping down as calls mount to abandon the wasteful project.

Judging from the alternative report, Pocan, who made headlines last year claiming the state was not in a fiscal crisis, seems bound and determined to send Wisconsin back into one. The alternative report is a reminder of the thinking that led to the state’s fiscal crisis before the reforms enacted by Governor Scott Walker and the legislature in 2011.

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State Senator Rich Zipperer’s committee is again considering his bill to make budget “earmarks” transparent in the state budget process. Zipperer’s bill would not end budget earmarks, but legislators would have to defend the earmarks for their districts in the budget.

Earmarks are budget provisions for a specific beneficiary that would not be generally applicable, whether it’s expenditure or a benefit in the state tax code. Earmarks are often included in government budgets to win the support of legislators for passage of the budget bill.

Zipperer’s bill, SB 114, would end what he called “airdrops.” These are provisions inserted by the conference committee after the budget bill’s passage by the Joint Finance Committee and both houses of the legislature. This would stop last minute deals outside of the public eye. The conference committee would still have the ability to reduce the amount for a particular earmark.

The bill would also change the rules in the Joint Finance Committee regarding earmarks. Instead of requiring a majority to take an earmark provision out, the bill would require a majority vote to keep an earmark in. This would be especially important in those years when control of the legislature is split and there is equal representation of both parties.

The most important part of Zipperer’s bill is a requirement that the legislative fiscal bureau would create an “earmark transparency report.” The report would contain a list of all earmarks in the budget bill and the cost of each earmark. The bill would also identify the beneficiary of each earmark, including the Assembly and Senate District of the earmark beneficiary.

Both parties are guilty of including earmarks in the budget process. Zipperer says that the last state budget was better than most.  “It certainly wasn’t at the level of the previous budget.”

But there were still earmarks. For example, “There was $25,000 for Copper Falls with no explanation.” Zipperer explained, “It was not enough to make me oppose the budget,” but it showed that earmarks continued even under Republican control.

In the last budget under Governor Jim Doyle, perhaps the most infamous example of an earmark was $46,000 for recycling containers for Wrightstown, a town of 2000 people.

Other examples of earmarks in the last budget under Doyle include $5 million for the Bradley Center (part of which was spent on a new scoreboard) and $500,000 for the Oshkosh Opera House.

The argument for earmarks is that it allows the legislature to specify and set priorities for government spending. Zipperer says the higher the level of government, the more potential harm there is for earmarks.  Earmarks distort the real priorities for spending. They also mean that the state is making a spending decision that should have been made locally.

However, “Even if you support earmarks, you can still support this bill,” Zipperer said. After all, the bill does not stop earmarks, it only makes members of the legislature have to defend them.

Earmark transparency has been an interest of Zipperer’s since he was first elected to the Assembly and saw his first budget process. He says what makes this year’s bill more likely to pass than his past attempts is that the bill has been simplified to identifying the earmarks.  That way the legislature and the public will know about them before there is a vote on the budget.

Zipperer also claims bipartisan support for the bill this time. Senator Tim Carpenter of Milwaukee is a co-sponsor of the bill.

The bill has been through a public hearing and will soon be getting a committee vote. Despite the recalls that threaten to overshadow any work the legislature does, Zipperer is optimistic there will be enough floor time for his bill to pass.

If it passes, voters can expect to hear more about state grants for soybean crushers and climate change classrooms. Not because there are more or less earmarks like them, but because the legislative fiscal bureau will be required to list them before the legislature votes to approve them.

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On Wednesday, Governor Scott Walker and Superintendent Tony Evers unveiled the state’s plan to boost fading reading scores in Wisconsin’s public schools. The Read to Lead program will increase literacy in young students through a combination of early intervention and a better prepared teaching body.

But will it be enough?

Read to Lead is aimed to better educate students through early literacy screening and stronger professional development amongst teachers. It will emphasize reading at an early age and make it the cornerstone of Wisconsin’s public education.

The program is based off a series of successful reforms in Florida. There, students that couldn’t read proficiently by the end of the third grade were held back, effectively ending social promotion until a child could demonstrate that he or she was able to read well enough to learn other subjects. It fell in line with an old saying – by third grade, you are learning to read; after third grade, you are reading to learn.

In Wisconsin, the responsibility for greater reading standards will be placed firmly on the teachers without the increased threat of grade retention for students and families. The state is betting hard that early screening tests to gauge reading ability and that a comprehensive preparation system for reading teachers will be enough to overcome stagnant literacy growth over the past two decades.

While Wisconsin still ranks in the top half of all states when it comes to elementary school reading, they’ve fallen from 2^nd overall to 16^th between 1994 and 2010. While the state hasn’t gotten observably worse over this span, they’ve been passed by other states that have made big strides producing educational gains. After nearly two decades with statistically similar NAEP scores, it became clear that action needed to be taken.

Enter Read to Lead, which will provide extra attention in literacy techniques in early childhood. Students from pre-kindergarten to third grade will now focus more on their reading studies. Teachers in these grades will have more strenuous licensing procedures in order to ensure that they better understand how to gauge a child’s progress and incorporate new methods of teaching into their reading process. This includes more comprehensive professional development programs for current teachers and new coursework for potential teachers.

Indeed, the program is aimed at getting to students through their teachers. Read to Lead is a proactive program that is aimed at making all teachers experts in learning – something that some task force members suggested was a problem in Wisconsin’s classrooms. The new system is designed to give educators an answer for every problem that a student has in school, along with the methods to bring children of all reading levels to a point of better understanding. It will strengthen the core of the state’s public school teachers and introduce new techniques to a population of ever-diverse students.

This accountability will course across the state’s other educational task forces as well. The Read to Lead report recommends tying these higher reading standards into a pair of upcoming reforms. The Educator Effectiveness Design Team and the Wisconsin School Accountability Design team have both been encouraged to include reading outcomes to the way that they will grade teachers and schools, respectively. Best practices will include methods devised to help struggling students achieve more when it comes to reading.

However, failing to tie consequences that can reverberate back to a student’s home may represent a missed opportunity. Unlike the Florida model the plan is partially based on, Wisconsin’s literacy efforts don’t tie in social promotion concerns. While the task force discussed the retention of students that cannot read well in third grade at length, the plan was ultimately dismissed.

This takes some responsibility away from parents and children, and could allow for some underprepared pupils to advance through their elementary schools without the necessary reading background to succeed. While teachers will be better equipped than ever before, there is little beyond the current grading system to keep students any more accountable than they were before. A summer-school reading program is mentioned in the report’s findings, but is passively suggested as something that districts “should consider” rather than a requirement.

While parents will be engaged by programs sponsored by Read to Lead, such as Reach Out and Read and other programs targeted to help low-income families, there is little else that put more responsibility in the hands of students and parents.

This is a tricky subject to begin with. How do you engage parents and students when there is little support at home? Read to Lead is betting strongly that better informed teachers and early intervention are the key rather than holding the threat of grade retention over a student’s head. However, what happens when a students has the grades to progress through school but not the reading skills? What happens if parents refuse an optional booster course in summer school? Will this added focus lead more teachers to recommend holding students back a grade that they normally would pass? These are difficult questions – and ones that will have to be answered in Wisconsin’s classrooms in the 2012-2013 school year.

Read to Lead is going all-in on the strength of Wisconsin’s school teachers. If the program follows through with its promises of early intervention for students and unprecedented access to professional reading development for teachers, it will be a major asset for the state’s public schools. However, it will require buy-in from families as well to have a truly significant impact.

Will the program be enough to engage parents and students even without additional schooling for students that fail to grasp the concepts they need to learn in the later grades? Unfortunately, we won’t know for sure for years.

January 4, 2012

There are two questions that plague efforts to assess the green economy: What is a green job and how many of them are there?

While still a candidate, President Barack Obama promised to create 5 million green jobs over ten years. During his visit to ZBB Energy in Menomonie Falls in August 2010, he vowed to create 800,000 green jobs by 2012. The vagueness surrounding green jobs could aid him in claiming success in those goals.

Green jobs advocates have been quoted throughout the media trying to nail down some sort of definition.

Phil Angelides, Apollo Alliance Chair, says “It has to pay decent wages and benefits that can support a family. It has to be part of a real career path, with upward mobility. And it needs to reduce waste and pollution and benefit the environment.”

Former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones considers green jobs to be “Blue-collar employment that has been upgraded to better respect the environment; family-supporting, career-track, vocational, or trade-level employment in environmentally-friendly fields, such as electricians who install solar panels; plumbers who install solar water heaters; farmers engaged in organic agriculture and some bio-fuel production; and construction workers who build energy-efficient green buildings, wind power farms, solar farms and wave energy farms.”

Vice-President Joe Biden’s Middle Class Task Force put out a report called “Green Jobs: a Pathway to a Strong Middle Class.”

“They pay more, by 10 to 20 percent, depending on the definition, than other jobs,” reads the report. “Green jobs are more likely to be union jobs than other jobs.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides two definitions. “Jobs in businesses that produce goods or provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources,” or “Jobs in which workers’ duties involve making their establishment’s production processes more environmentally friendly or use fewer natural resources.”

The lack of a clear definition for green jobs led to a House Oversight Committee Hearing in September. Congressmen were surprised by what was being considered a green job.

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Florida) was floored to learn the driver of a hybrid bus was considered green.

“How can you call this a green job?” Mack asked Labor Secretary Hilda Solis during the exchange at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “If I’m sitting in a chair that’s made out of green material, does that make my job green?”

Mack might have been on to something. It turns out there is an actual comprehensive list of occupations considered to be green. O*NET is a dot-org website sponsored by the Labor Department, and considers itself to be “the nation’s primary source of occupational information.”

O*NET classifies 217 different professions as green.   Odds are you have a green job and don’t even realize it. Reporters and correspondents are listed. Some of the other highlights include: aerospace engineers, boilermakers, civil engineers, construction laborers, electricians, financial analysts, landscape architects, machinists, nuclear engineers, roofers, rough carpenters, sheet metal workers and software developers.

Given these generous classifications, it’s very likely Obama has reached his 5 million green jobs goal without having to create a single new job.

The Bureau of Labor statistics is in the process of conducting an official survey to determine the number of green jobs in the country. It hopes to have those results ready be the middle of this year.

In the meantime, the Brookings Institute released a report in July stating half a million green jobs were created between 2003 and 2010. It put the current number of green jobs at 2.7 million.

That would suggest over 2 million green jobs have been created since 2010. The problem is there were only 1.5 million more people employed as of November 2011 from 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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One of the more controversial stories to come out of last year’s protests in Madison was the handing out of notes excusing people from work by several doctors right in the Capitol Square. Working out of a tent, the doctors advertised they were handing out medical excuses to the protestors.

First reported by the MacIver News Service, the story of the doctors handing out medical excuses for missing work to protestors in Madison in such a brazen fashion made national news.

Many of the protestors were public school teachers who had been warned they could face disciplinary action for unexcused absences. Mass absences by teachers caused several school districts to close during the protests in February.

The Madison School District closed for four days as a result of the unplanned absences. An investigation by the Madison School District uncovered 84 teachers used what they considered fraudulent sick notes.

Spurred by reports from the MacIver Institute and other organizations about the doctors handing out excuses to the protestors, investigations were launched by the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and by the state Medical Examining Board into the doctors’ conduct.

The state Medical Examining Board disciplined seven doctors with a reprimand for poor record keeping and issued a warning to two other physicians. The board found that they could not determine whether a proper evaluation was done of the patients to justify handing them a medical excuse.

The UW School of Medicine and Public Health had a number of employees involved in handing out medical excuses at the protests but denied any involvement by the school. After an investigation, they told the Wisconsin State Journal that at least a dozen doctors were disciplined for their actions on the mall. The discipline “range from written reprimand to loss of pay and leadership position.”

A further investigation by the Wisconsin State Journal revealed that ten more doctors who were not disciplined by the state also signed sick notes that the district considered fraudulent for Madison School District teachers.

One of the people who saw the tent with doctors handing out medical excuses that day was Milwaukee-based personal injury attorney Kelin Olson.  Despite serious concerns about what he perceives as an anti-trial lawyer bias among Republicans controlling Madison, Olson attended an Americans for Prosperity Rally with family and friends before walking around the Capitol Square to check out the protests.

In an interview Saturday, Olson described his reaction when he saw the tent.

“My first reaction was, I can’t believe they’re doing it so openly. Really, I cannot believe they were so ballsy to just stand there. They’re wearing lab coats, they’ve got clipboards and they’re walking up to people saying, `Do you need an excuse?’”

Comparing them to, “street hawkers,” Olson was shocked at how casual it was.

“They were joking about, `Oh, no, Scott Walker’s got you so stressed you need a day to relax.’ I felt like this was a hippy festival and this was a big joke like you’re going to Woodstock and they’re writing prescriptions to stay off the brown acid or something.”

“I was like, really? You guys are professionals and you have a certain trust from the people of Wisconsin to do the right thing – and this isn’t the right thing. And maybe in their mind they thought it was but it clearly wasn’t the legal thing to do.”

In Olson’s practice as a personal injury attorney, one of the questions that he has to deal with is the credibility of witnesses. In the interview, Olson was asked about that issue with the doctors involved and how it would affect his decision making as an attorney.

Regarding the School of Medicine’s lack of openness regarding the discipline of the doctors involved, Olson said he understood that many disciplinary situations are kept confidential by employers.

However, “If I was going against a doctor in a legal proceeding I would want to know if he participated because it goes to his credibility as a witness. So that’s where my concern would come in.,” Olson said. “If I had a malpractice action or something against the UW doctor and if I didn’t think he was being truthful about what happened, I would want to know if he had lied in the past. Because that’s evidence of character, that’s evidence of, people that commit fraud, that’s a crime you can tell a jury about because it goes to the person’s veracity or credibility.”

“If there’s a doctor who is willing to lie about this, what else is he willing to lie about? People say that it isn’t that big of a deal but it’s still committing fraud.”

Whether Olson would feel comfortable using any of the doctors involved as witnesses, he said that while he would have to interview the doctor, it would be something that could benefit the other side. “If they have been disciplined for fraud, that would be something that I would want to know as an attorney because it does go into whether they would lie to benefit themselves or someone else.”

“Whether or not I would use one of them it depends on the person, depends on the situation, depends what I needed them for. I might, but then again I’d rather not have to deal with that issue.”

Olson also explained that it would depend on the venue. “If you’ve got a jury of people that supported the protesting, you may not mind that you’ve got this doctor because they may give him more credence. So it’s a two-edged sword.” Olson said that Madison, for example, would be more forgiving of the doctor’s actions, while he definitely would not want them as witnesses in Waukesha or Washington County.

In an article for Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Ford Vox said of the physicians handing out the excuses, “They’ve managed to belittle a public trust between physicians, employers and patients.” He added, “These doctors sacrificed a slice of the medical profession’s credibility for a political cause. Was it worth it?”

They also damaged their personal credibility in ways they might never have imagined. Just ask a lawyer.

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A new wind farm is complete in Columbia County and it will soon be killing more birds than a Sarah Palin Thanksgiving photo op. Or, for you heavy metal fans, more mosquito-eating bats than Ozzy Osbourne ever killed.

It’s the largest wind farm in Wisconsin, 90 turbines spread over 17,000 acres of farmland. It is expected to generate 162 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 45,000 homes.

WE Energies was expected to spend $363.7 million on the project, although it appears to have come under the target set by the Public Service Commission. Of course, the over $300 million in cost will soon be passed on to electricity rate payers as soon as 2013.

To be fair, WE Energies did not build the wind farm because it hates birds, bats or ratepayers. Nor did it build the wind farm because the company wanted to build a giant ice ball thrower.

And it certainly did not build the windmills because wind energy is cheaper than the alternatives. Because it is not.

The wind farm was built as part of a plan to increase WE Energies “renewable energy” portfolio. The company is mandated by the state of Wisconsin to increase its use of renewable energy sources from less than three percent of the electricity generated by WE Energies to 8.27% by 2015.

The mandated renewable share of total generation must be at least 6 percentage points above the average renewable share for WE Energies from 2001 to 2003. It’s part of a statewide renewable energy mandate of 10% by 2015.

Wind power is the most popular choice for filling the renewable energy mandates as it is closer to coal-generated electricity than other forms of renewable energy. However, wind is still unreliable in capacity because wind, while free fuel, is unreliable in providing a steady quantity, especially at peak demand times. As a previous report by the MacIver Institute has shown, Wisconsin is not even a good candidate for windmill siting, increasing the unreliability of wind power for our state.

Ironically, according to one environmentalist group, Clean Wisconsin, the windmill farm may not even further the goal of the renewable energy mandate, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, because WE Energies will still be reliant upon the coal-burning power plants for primary electrical generation.

Because wind is not a reliable source of energy here.

Renewable energy does not come cheap. If renewable energy were cost competitive, power companies and energy consumers would not need a mandate to prefer renewable energy sources over coal, oil and natural gas.

As the U.S. Energy Information Agency indicates in its 2011 Annual Energy Outlook projections, coal is already dropping as a share of the nation’s energy mix. However, it is naturally occurring due to the lower costs of natural gas generated electricity, including lower infrastructure costs.

The growth in renewable energy as a percentage of the nation’s energy portfolio (to 14% by 2035) is because of state renewable portfolio standard (RPS) requirements and federal tax credits.

It could be even worse. During the last session of the legislature, Wisconsin narrowly avoided imposing a new renewable energy mandate of 25% by 2025. Bipartisan opposition to the mandate, largely due to the weak economy, prevented its passage.

But as we have seen, the desire of the government to support a so-called green economy continues despite the costs to the public. Perhaps we can expect Department of Energy bureaucrats to tour the new windmill farm in new Chevrolet Volts.

Somebody has to buy them.

After all, President Barack Obama’s administration set a goal of one million electrified vehicles (including advanced hybrids) on the road by 2015. So far the Chevy Volt is going to fall short of the company’s goal of 10,000 vehicles sold by the end of this year, and USA Today reports interest in electric vehicles is declining.

After $3 billion in subsidies, Americans are showing that the only silent vehicle that doesn’t consume gas in which they have an interest is Santa’s sleigh at Christmastime. Good thing he managed to avoid the new windmill farm… this year.

“Go ahead, watch the video and decide for yourself. As you will clearly see, the Mickey Mouse/Hitler signature acceptance question was posed by a member of the GAB and answered by GAB staff at their hearing on December 13th. The GAB staff clearly states that as long as signatures are accompanied by the proper date and a plausible Wisconsin address, they are deemed acceptable, pending the outcome of any possible challenge. All we did was record the sequence and broadcast it to the world.

“The GAB explained that unless a successful challenge is mounted, all signatures, including those such as those of Mickey Mouse or Hitler, which are accompanied by an accurate date and a plausible Wisconsin address, WOULD be accepted if admitted by the recallers.

“I find it disappointing that the paper would specifically criticize our reporting, even though the AP and scores of other media outlets ran a similar story. Yet they ignored the underlying fundamental question; how can the GAB, the government agency entrusted to protect the sanctity of Wisconsin elections, not automatically strike obviously fraudulent signatures like Adolph Hitler or Mickey Mouse? It defies common sense–and judging by the intense reaction our story has generated, it has touched a nerve. Many Wisconsinites are asking if one of their most fundamental rights, their ability to cast a vote just like every other citizen in an orderly election free of manipulation, is in jeopardy.

“One organization has already promoted the notion it is ok to sign a petition more than once. WISN Channel 12 TV in Milwaukee broadcast an interview with a gentleman who said he signed “probably eighty times.” The GAB has said Adolph Hitler with a plausible Wisconsin address will be presumed valid.

“This would be truly comical if it weren’t so important.

“I stand by our reporting and our story. While the paper and the GAB may choose to ignore the problem, the MacIver News Service will continue to pursue the issue election fraud and report what we find.”

Brett Healy, President
The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy

See the original text story, here.

Watch the original video:

Read the PolitiFact opinion piece, here.

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