by Dick Morris
SIMPLE POLLING ACCURACY ANALYSIS
Senate and Gubernatorial Polls in Final 21 Days of Campaign
Average
Firm: Quinnipiac
Polls: 21
Error: 3.3
Bias: R+0.7
Firm: SurveyUSA
Polls: 30
Error: 3.5
Bias: R+0.8
Firm: YouGov
Polls: 35
Error: 3.5
Bias: R+1.1
Firm: Public Policy Polling
Polls: 45
Error: 3.8
Bias: R+0.3
Firm: Mason-Dixon
Polls: 20
Error: 4.6
Bias: D+0.4
Firm: Marist
Polls: 14
Error: 4.9
Bias: R+4.0
Firm: CNN/Opinion Research
Polls: 17
Error: 4.9
Bias: R+2.1
Firm: Rasmussen Reports*
Polls: 105
Error: 5.8
Bias: R+3.9
* * *
Were all these polls wrong? No way. They were right. But they did not take account of the potency of Democratic unions’ Election Day efforts to get out their vote.
Almost every poll, for example, had Sharron Angle defeating Harry Reid, usually by three or four points. Her five-point defeat on Election Day can only be attributed to the union-based Democratic effort.
The fiscal crises facing state and local governments and school boards make these unions and their political clout vulnerable, potentially at the mercy of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. We may, at long last, have a way to liberate our nation from the domination of those who should be our public servants, but instead are frequently our union masters and to free our politics from their financial power.
The House should create a federal bankruptcy procedure for states and require that state governments who are broke abrogate all their union contracts. The new state bankruptcy procedure should offer all states—and through them, their localities, counties, and school boards—the ability to reorganize their finances free of the demands and constraints of their union agreements.
Instead of offering cash or federal guarantees of their debt, offer states the ability to reform themselves by letting them get out of their straitjacket union agreements. The political dynamic in most of these liberal states is such that the voters and their children are the hostages of public employee unions whose voting strength, ability to strike and cripple essential services, and massive cash donations to political campaigns make them invulnerable. The only way to tame the unions and reduce their power is for the House to pass bankruptcy law changes that allow states to escape from their grip.
Then the inevitable shortfall of state revenues will force the issue.
This measure will return our state and local governments to the sovereignty of the people and take them away from the thugocracy of public employee unions.
In doing so, the House will be asking states and their localities to do what private sector corporations like airlines and steel companies did when they went belly-up. They had to sweep aside their union contracts and reorganize themselves into financially viable and going concerns.
Sometimes, the vote of the unions themselves will be legally required in the contract renunciation process. Then, the unions will be face-to-face with a clear choice: no contract or no jobs.
What about Obama’s veto—or the Senate’s possible refusal to pass—these bankruptcy law changes? Fine. The House should sit back and declare its job done and leave the states to deal with their own financial problems.
When states like California and New York come to Washington begging for relief, they will threaten us with the closure of their schools and the release of their prison inmates if we deny them subsidy. Liberals and President Obama will try to portray the battle as schoolchildren versus niggardly Republican legislators.
But the real fight will be between schoolchildren and citizens on the one hand and unions on the other. The House must shape the issue so that it exposes the real cause of the state shortfalls: the excessive agreements public employee unions have won over the years.
Obama will not be able to stand in the way of reform of the union contracts, nor will state governors be able to dissuade their people from making the needed reforms.
It will be just a matter of time until the House and the Republicans will force Obama and the Senate to give way and pass their bankruptcy law changes.
The unions are about to fall prey to what Margaret Thatcher identified as the terminal drawback of socialism—that eventually one runs out of other people’s money!169
And how will Republican congressmen, senators, state legislators, and governors from the bankrupt states justify to their electorates such a tough position? Won’t their voters hold it against them that they want to turn off the spigot of federal funding? They will succeed because their own voters know how culpable the unions are in their state’s financial mess.
The public will side with the Republicans and the House. We are totally fed up with public employee unions and clearly recognize their power and their negative influence over state and local governing bodies.
In California, for example, a Rasmussen Reports poll found that 52% of likely voters agree that “public employee unions place a significant strain” on the state’s budget, while only 24% disagree. By 53–43, they oppose unions even existing for public employees!170 And California is a very blue state!
In 1975, President Gerald Ford came under similar pressure to expand federal aid to New York City, then facing bankruptcy. He refused, leading the New York Daily News to run a famous front page headline: “Ford To New York: Drop Dead.”171 The resulting outcry may have cost him New York State in the presidential election.
Not anymore. Now a Congressional decision to demand reform rather than granting a bailout would be greeted with rave reviews by the affected states. Their voters realize—as we all do—that their state legislatures are out of control and that their money is being wasted by greedy public employee unions.
Inevitably, any discussion of state finances will focus on the two key areas that, together, account for the bulk of state spending: education (35%) and Medicaid (17%).172
REFORMING PUBLIC EDUCATION AND MEDICAID
Teachers’ unions have been especially successful in forcing contracts on their states, localities, and school boards that provide for ever higher wages, benefits, and pensions. Even as the November 2010 election results were being counted, teachers in a Pittsburgh suburb went on strike, claiming that their 4.5% annual wage increase is inadequate!
New teachers and good teachers are not represented by the teachers’ unions. In resisting demands for merit pay and offers of truly high salaries in return for demonstrated competence, the unions have shown that their focus is on their oldest and least able teachers.
And why should it not be? Young teachers come and go. One-third of all new teachers quit after two years. One-half leave after five.173 The stultification of the system, its bureaucracy, and its union-driven refusal to reward ability, dedication, application, and merit drive them away.
In New York State, the union went so far as to get the state legislature to pass a law actually prohibiting the use of student test scores in determining teacher pay. The law, in effect, made it illegal to consider the success or failure of the teacher in deciding how much to pay him or her!
As a result of the union power over education in New York City, it is virtually impossible to fire a teacher for cause. In the past decade, the former schools chancellor Joel Klein has been able to dismiss only two—yes, two—of his 80,000 teachers for cause.174
John Stossel, then of ABC News, reported that “it took years to fire a teacher [in New York City] who sent sexually oriented e-mails to ‘Cutie 101,’ a sixteen year old student.” Klein said that, while the teacher was suspended during the proceedings, “we have had t
o pay him anyway because that’s what’s required under the [union] contract.”175
After six years of litigation, the teacher was finally fired but only after he drew $300,000 in compensation while the proceedings unfolded.176
Every day, Klein herds principals, assistant principals, and hundreds of teachers into so-called “rubber rooms” where they sit all day, drawing full pay, doing nothing. It costs over $20 million a year.177 Why? Because the chancellor, in his wisdom, has determined that they are too incompetent, abusive, or insane to risk exposing them to students. But they cannot be fired.
The New York Post recently revealed that a “veteran school custodian” in New York City was paid more than $170,000 a year. “Several workers also accuse the Roosevelt HS campus custodian Trifon Radef…of splitting school funds with pals for whom he created no-show gigs.” Apparently, Radef, who owns ten homes in Queens, New York, also used school employees to fix up his properties. “He renovated all these houses—walls, ceilings, new bathrooms and kitchens—and all the people who did the work are getting paid by the school,” a former worker told the Post.178
The investigation is ongoing, and no charges have been made.
Frequently, the teachers’ union squanders public resources on noneducation spending. In Michigan, for example, the union runs its own health insurance company, MESSA, which has a virtual monopoly on providing health coverage for teachers in most of the state’s school districts, according to Kyle Olson of the Education Action Group (educationactiongroup.org). The coverage typically costs 20% more than an equivalent private or Blue Cross policy would, and the union pockets the difference to maintain its power. The members don’t care. The taxpayers foot the bill.
In 2007, the Kalamazoo Gazette reported a school district switched away from MESSA, saved over $200 per student, and the only loss of coverage was for “massages, sex change operations and a treatment for Christian Science practitioners.” More recently, the Saugatuck district opted for a MESSA competitor, giving employees similar coverage but saving $3,800 per teacher per year!179
Governors and localities will also find themselves turning more to contractors instead of unionized employees to perform custodial and transportation services for students. School districts have saved a mint and have found service to be better with private companies, according to Education Action Group. The Grand Rapids district (the third largest in Michigan) hired a private transportation company to bus its students. Over a five-year period, the company saved the district over $18 million.180 Elsewhere, the Clarenceville district outsourced ten custodial positions, saving $1.2 million over three years.181
It is to prevent abuses like these that the House of Representatives must step in and demand reform.
The ultimate solution to the defects in our education system is school choice. We must act to break the monopoly of unionized public schools and enable children of the middle class to do what kids of the wealthy can already do—go to private schools.
We need to expand the number of charter schools dramatically and to create statewide voucher and scholarship systems to let parents choose to send their children to private, charter, or church schools—or to home-school them. And when they do so, the state subsidy—usually about $7,500 per child—needs to follow the boy or girl to the new school.
It is not that these schools are always better than public schools. But parents deserve the right to make the choice and to know that we can close bad charter schools and replace them with good ones, They need not resign themselves to being stuck with bad public schools and their teachers forever.
Many Republican governors and state legislatures will move to programs to encourage school choice, permitting parents to opt for charter schools, private or church schools, or homeschooling instead of high-cost public schools.
Until now, efforts to extend school choice options have been crippled by the political opposition of teachers’ unions. But with the states facing draconian budget shortfalls, reforms that have not been adopted in the name of improving education might now see the light of day as part of efforts to trim education spending.
The fact is that private and church schools cost dramatically less than public schools. The Cato Institute researched costs at five municipalities and compared the cost of public and private education.
* * *
COST PER PUPIL OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS
City: Washington, D.C.
Public: $17,543
Private: $11,032
City: Los Angeles
Public: 10,053
Private: 8,378
City: New York City
Public: 17,696
Private: 10,586
City: Chicago
Public: 11,536
Private: 8,849
City: Phoenix
Public: 9,300
Private: 6,770
Source: Cato Institute182
* * *
With average per pupil spending, nationally, at just over $10,500,183 the lower average cost of charter schools, only $8,000,184 gives governors a very attractive alternative.
Of course, higher spending does nothing to guarantee better education. Hobbled by its teachers’ unions, New York State spends $17,696 per pupil but has one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation—only 70.8%. And the District of Columbia spends $17,543, but only 56% of its students graduate.185
Voucher programs and scholarships that allow students to go to private or church schools at public expense are only just beginning to grow in the United States. Only a handful of students are in such programs while only 1.7 million children go to charter schools.
(Charters are public schools not run by the state or local government, but by the local business, church group, parent association, or even union that set them up. Its teachers are not usually covered by union contracts and, as a result, their administrations are much freer to experiment with merit pay for teachers and innovative methods of instruction.)
* * *
CHARTER SCHOOL ENROLLMENT BY STATE
State: Alaska
Number of Students: 5,300
State: Arkansas
Number of Students: 5,237
State: Arizona
Number of Students: 95,853
State: California
Number of Students: 313,245
State: Connecticut
Number of Students: 4,898
State: Washington, D.C.
Number of Students: 27,595
State: Delaware
Number of Students: 9,141
State: Florida
Number of Students: 128,359
State: Georgia
Number of Students: 62,167
State: Hawaii
Number of Students: 7,741
State: Iowa
Number of Students: 928
State: Idaho
Number of Students: 13,812
State: Illinois
Number of Students: 36,750
State: Indiana
Number of Students: 19,253
State: Kansas
Number of Students: 4,902
State: Louisiana
Number of Students: 30,405
State: Massachusetts
Number of Students: 28,247
State: Maryland
Number of Students: 12,249
State: Michigan
Number of Students: 104,527
State: Minnesota
Number of Students: 36,404
State: Missouri
Number of Students: 19,783
State: North Carolina
Number of Students: 39,033
State: New Hampshire
Number of Students: 662
State: New Jersey
Number of Students: 22,206
State: New Mexico
Number of Students: 13,293
State: Nevada
Number of Students: 11,827
State: New York
Number of Students: 42,204
&nbs
p; State: Ohio
Number of Students: 96,967
State: Oklahoma
Number of Students: 5,984
State: Oregon
Number of Students: 16,725
State: Pennsylvania
Number of Students: 78,437
State: Rhode Island
Number of Students: 3,423
State: South Carolina
Number of Students: 11,142
State: Tennessee
Number of Students: 4,963
State: Utah
Number of Students: 32,253
State: Virginia
Number of Students: 250
State: Wisconsin
Number of Students: 38,005
State: Wyoming
Number of Students: 353186
* * *
Several jurisdictions have already enacted full school choice programs that permit students to attend private, charter, or church schools and provide that the funding will follow the children.
Under a program designed by Indiana’s Republican governor Mitch Daniels, for example, the state share of school spending would follow the student to the new schools.
School Choice Programs 187
Milwaukee: more than 20,000 children participate in this school choice program and each receives a grant of $6,500 for tuition.
Louisiana: serves 1,250 students in grades K–4 transferred from failing schools. Scholarships average $4,000.
Cleveland: 6,272 students attend 36 private schools funded by average scholarships of $2,782.
Ohio: provides 14,000 scholarships of about $5,000 for students in academically failing public schools to go to private institutions.
Washington, D.C.: 1,700 students get scholarships of up to $7,500.
What governor in his right mind, confronting a budget crisis of the present magnitude, would not opt for replacing public schools with vouchers to private schools to realize these cost savings?
Answer: a committed Democrat.
But with the Republicans taking over eleven governorships and twenty-one state legislative chambers in the 2010 election, GOP states will be flocking to realize these savings.
And those Democratic governors who don’t get the message and ask instead for federal bailouts to subsidize their big-spending ways will face irate voters who demand that they cut their costs instead. Both governors, McDonnell in Virginia and Christie in New Jersey, have shown us that it is possible!