July 2006
July 27, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 24, 2006)Those were the good old days
Kansas Republicans might find themselves looking back at the “good old days” of 2002 when the smoke clears from next week’s gubernatorial primary election.
Those good old days? When former State Treasurer Tim Shallenburger, of Baxter Springs, walked off with more than 41 percent of the GOP vote.
That was a four-way race, in which Shallenburger took more than 121,000 votes from the roughly 295,000 votes cast in the primary election.
With seven candidates in the current GOP primary that will be decided Aug. 1, there are three high-profile candidates—Sen. Jim Barnett, R-Emporia, fatherhood guru Ken Canfield and former House Speaker Robin Jennison, R-Healy. Count the first two as the strict social conservatives with Jennison still pretty conservative on moral issues but, well, he’s been tumble-dried a time or two in his legislative service and is willing to cede a little moral ground to make things work in government.
The four other candidates? Former Rep. Rex Crowell, R-Longton, Tim Pickell, Prairie Village, Dennis Hawver, Ozawkie, and Richard Rodewald, Eudora. Pretty much ground clutter (Pickell recently is generating some interest), each worth a percentage point or two or three or maybe five, but some of the names are familiar and the group of four might just pull 8 or 9 or 10 percent of GOP primary votes from the front-runners.
And, it’s going to be tough for voters who take Republican ballots to sort out the names and unless they are tied into a political blog or something, the “bottom four” candidates might just turn out to be the equivalent of “none of the above.”
Or, there is the possibility that just the routine rotation of names on ballots might result in one of the group of four actually nearing 10 percent of the vote, further diminishing the pool of votes to be divvied up by the “Big 3.”
What’s the uptake? Unless someone is captured on tape pulling a child from a burning barn—that strategy worked for Lassie for years—the GOP nominee is likely to have maybe 25 percent to 35 percent of the GOP primary vote. That’s not exactly a ground-shaking mandate for a candidate who will undoubtedly be nearly broke and facing a dreadnaught of millions of dollars in campaign spending money that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius is going to have when she emerges from her no-primary Aug. 1 voting day and continues to roll up campaign cash.
So, it appears in the gubernatorial race that the top three Republicans are preaching to their own choirs, trying to get their voters out, and none of the top three can enjoy a “heart of the party” advantage in the primary.
Those voters probably aren’t assisted by the large numbers of signs that don’t mention which party the candidate belongs to. Yes, some of the signs don’t mention party, so the ballot may hold surprises for some voters.
Most interesting event of the GOP battle for the governorship may be checking off names of just who shows up if there is a morning-after solidarity breakfast, a tradition among Republicans but one that might be procedurally—even culturally—tough to assemble on Aug. 2 this year.
Is the Kansas gubernatorial race over even before the primary election? Not necessarily. “Lassie” scenarios are possible and there are still three months after the primary election for mistakes and misjudgments by Sebelius and whoever emerges as the GOP standard-bearer.
Or, we guess, there could be a general statewide hailstorm on Aug. 1, and then we’ll see what happens…
July 20, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 17, 2006)Boots on the ground...
While legislators—under the scrutiny of the Kansas Supreme Court—wrangle over school finance legislation, elementary and secondary education in Kansas is looking at another looming problem in the next few years: A teacher shortage…
A just-finished report by Legislative Post Audit—the Legislature’s key fact-finding agency—shows that while money is part of the problem, keeping teachers in the business of teaching is not solely a dollar deal.
And the issue of teacher shortage not only is one of bodies at the front of the classroom but the qualifications of those teachers…whether they are teaching subjects that they are certificated to teach.
Shortage? Maybe half a percent of all teaching positions in the state. That’s probably not a real big deal. A flu outbreak could likely produce on a couple-of-days basis the same shortage.
But there’s another key issue that Post Audit illuminated. There are more than 1,800 teachers who are teaching “out of field,” which is basically teaching subjects that they don’t have state certification to teach.
That’s probably a big deal that nobody is talking about much. It means that nearly 15 percent of teachers dealing with special education children aren’t specifically certified for that job. For foreign language, it’s about 10.5 percent out of field, for vocational education about 9.3 percent, science 7.7 percent and mathematics 5.8 percent.
Now, these are grown-ups, of course, and they probably know more about the subjects than their pupils and they have the pedagogy (that’s the word for teaching skills) to lead the classrooms. You lose fine points when teachers are teaching “out of field” and don’t have the specialized training that not only familiarizes them with the subject matter but also with the likely problems that pupils will have with those specific subjects.
No school administrator wants an out-of-field teacher leading a classroom, just as you wouldn’t want a plumber to show up when the problem is wiring or a roof leak.
That teaching out-of-field has implications for No Child Left Behind, the federal law which is a stickler for teachers teaching what they have been trained to teach.
Meanwhile, there’s another looming issue—retirements.
Post Audit says that almost 24 percent of Kansas schoolteachers will be eligible to retire in the next five years. Some of those teachers will be in their mid-50s, which seems a little young for most of us, but the state’s pension system generally allows retirement with full benefits when age and years of employment reach a total of 85. That, for example, is a 55-year old who has been teaching since he or she was 25.
Those retirees? Many likely will stay in the business, but many won’t, and that raises a separate problem of how to find a way to keep those teachers in the classroom. Just retirements with the relatively low number of people going into the teacher business raises yet another problem that sprawls beyond the year-to-year fights over how to finance education. Because money doesn’t teach pupils, teachers teach pupils.
If there’s something that Post Audit shows us, it is that this is more than just a short-term money deal. At some point, it becomes a “boots on the ground” in the classroom deal that isn’t getting much attention in the Statehouse and which will probably become as big an issue in the future as divvying up state money for education is now.
July 13, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 10, 2006)Who'd a thunk it?
Strange things happen in politics in Kansas. Probably one of the stranger things is that President George Bush’s Supreme Court, the conservative body that he has made it through his nominations of justices, may just have won Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius another term in office.
Huh?
Yes, when the U.S. Supreme Court last month decided that the Kansas death penalty statute was constitutional, it meant that one of the touchiest of political issues that would have bedeviled the governor just disappeared.
Because there has been a death penalty in Kansas since the days of Gov. Joan Finney—remember, she allowed the bill to become law without her signature—it doesn’t come up much in political or campaign discussions.
But Kansas is a death penalty state, make no mistake about it.
Overwhelming majorities of Kansans a decade ago when people were interested in polling the question favored the death penalty for the most grisly of murders. Most Kansans still do.
Had the U.S. Supreme Court held that the state’s death penalty law is unconstitutional, campaign e-mails and fax machines would have been sizzling. There would have been immediate calls for a special session of the Kansas Legislature to reenact a constitutional death penalty.
After all, nearly every Saturday night someone is murdered somewhere in Kansas, and whether the murder would have risen to the level of a capital crime doesn’t matter. Prosecutors want to be able to use the death penalty for the worst of murders and the threat of the death penalty to extract confessions to less grisly murder charges that don’t involve capital punishment.
Sebelius, like most recent Kansas governors, isn’t a fan of the death penalty and basically lucked out on the controversial issue because Kansas already has a death penalty. She didn’t have to do anything about it when she was elected governor. It was already there on the shelf.
Had the law been struck down, she would have—politically—been forced into calling a special session of the Legislature to enact a law that she doesn’t like. Any hesitation would have brought instant outrage from the field of Republicans vying for their party’s nomination to challenge her.
Or, she could have done nothing until the Legislature reconvenes in January. Not a pretty option for her politically.
Practically, if the Supreme Court had ruled at 10 a.m. that the death penalty was unconstitutional, Sebelius would have had to be ready by noon to call the Legislature back into special session. Any hesitation would have been politically suicidal.
And in this election year, the other option of the Legislature, by super-majority vote calling itself back into session, would have been impossible. There are two reasons—the angst between the House and Senate over the “Nuss Fuss” business and the probability that there wouldn’t have been enough votes in the Senate in a year in which senators don’t stand for reelection to hand the House a victory on returning to session.
Upshot of the state’s death penalty being held constitutional?
It is that the biggest, most explosive issue for the state was taken off the table.
Who would have guessed that President Bush and his conservative U.S. Supreme Court would derail an issue that might have cost Sebelius her job?
Not many of us, we’re guessing…
July 6, 2006
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers July 3, 2006)It's July now...
Interestingly, for those who spend their summers at the Statehouse, every day that the Kansas Supreme Court doesn’t release its opinion on whether the Legislature’s 2006 school finance bill is constitutional seems to tilt toward the presumption that the Kansas Legislature isn’t going to be hauled back into special session to re-argue school funding.
With the passing of July 1, the day that the school finance bill takes effect—unless it is declared unconstitutional by the court in whole or some parts, rejection of the finance plan squeezes school districts’ time to budget for the upcoming year and makes it more difficult and politically dangerous to reconvene the Legislature.
Remember the angst over the Legislature being unable to pass a school finance bill at the end of its regular session in early April? Remember the fretting that the delay meant the Legislature had essentially missed a “practice swing” on the basis that the court could consider the finance bill and have its decision announced before the wrap-up session in May, leaving the wrap-up to fine-tune the bill?
Well, whether it was legislative unwillingness to reach a decision, canny planning or just dumb luck, there was no “practice swing” at school finance. So the court received the school finance bill in June, had its hearing on June 22--a year to the day after the Special Session of 2005 convened--and hasn’t decided the issue yet.
We are now into the new fiscal year, money can be sent to school districts under the current law, and it appears that the only things that can derail the Legislature’s three-year school finance plan are the court and the Legislature itself.
The court, should it declare the plan unconstitutional and prohibit it from becoming effective, would create a terrible political problem for itself and literally challenge the Legislature to not only fix school finance but probably take some step to curtail the power of the court.
There is, of course, plenty of time for the court to critique the school finance bill and issue a stern warning that falls well short of declaring it unconstitutional. It might issue a user’s guide to Article 6 of the state constitution, and tell the Legislature to change provisions of years two and three of the school finance plan.
Who doesn’t think that the Legislature isn’t going to make changes in years two and three of the plan, anyway? Remember, the Legislature is primarily made up of, well, we guess “meddlers” is a good term, because there is virtually no portion of law that legislators don’t meddle with.
Whether you believe that the school finance bill this year is a good one or a bad one, the longer it takes the court to announce its decision, the better the chances are that it is going to pass constitutional muster this summer.
If legislators make it through their summer undisturbed by the court, there is still a giant issue looming for them in the next few years. It is the mathematics of providing education to children in rural areas, in small school districts where there are very few ways to achieve economies of scale that large districts enjoy. Unless those rural districts can attract multi-talented teachers, who can move from, say, English, to mathematics to French and other subjects, they are going to have to hire more teachers at more cost than urban districts where lots of pupils means specially trained teachers can move from classroom to classroom efficiently or even building to building to teach their subjects.
That just doesn’t happen in rural districts, where if there are just a dozen pupils who want to learn French, you may or may not be able to provide a teacher for them.
The issue looming for those small districts? No, it’s not rejiggering school finance payments to school districts: it’s reapportionment of the Legislature.
That’s the big school finance issue looming for the Legislature, as rural legislators’ numbers shrink and their ability to finance that inefficiency is diminished in the Statehouse.