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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > June > 24
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Guest column: Cuts to early education would harm Ohio’s long-term goals
Jenni Roer is a member of the Montgomery County Family and Children First Council executive committee.
Much debate has taken place during the last few weeks on how Ohio could have done a better job of keeping NCR and the 1,200 jobs that Dayton will lose when they are moved to Georgia. The truth is, Georgia started its plans to lure companies like NCR more than 10 years ago, when it instituted universal prekindergarten for every 4-year-old.
Georgians saw what Ohioans are having difficulty seeing — that children who receive high-quality early education are 20 percent more likely to graduate from high school, 23 percent more likely to attain higher education, 50 percent less likely to become a teen parent, and significantly less likely to participate in criminal activity and become incarcerated.
Georgia’s foresight paid off. Since instituting the prekindergarten program in 1995, high school graduation rates have spiked by 10 percentage points. It is now serving 75,000 4-year-olds in its quality prekindergarten program, and a recent study by Georgia State University showed that the children who participated in Georgia’s preschool program exceeded the national norms on their overall math skills, reading skills, expressive language and letter and word recognition by the first grade.
In Ohio, we serve 18,400 children in our Public Preschool and Early Learning Initiative programs. The Strickland administration has just proposed complete elimination of early learning programs. These initiatives have prepared 12,000 low-income 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds for kindergarten during the last two-year budget cycle.
The programs address the health and cognitive-development needs of low-income children in order to give them the comprehensive services they need to break the cycle of poverty. The elimination of early learning initiatives is an example of choices that will keep us in the same position we are in today — watching as companies flee our state and wondering why our last-minute scrambling to create incentives is not effective.
True incentives are thoughtful, long-term investments that focus on research-based results. According to research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, each dollar invested in high-quality early care and education for low-income children returns as much as $16 in savings by enabling children to graduate from high school, go on for higher education, become gainfully employed and fuel rather than hinder the economy.
Apparently this is a lesson that Georgia has already learned, at our expense. In Columbus, Gov. Ted Strickland and the legislature need to take a close look at this budget and fund — not eliminate — programs that will build the long-term incentives that Ohio needs to keep and attract companies like NCR.
High-quality early education, particularly Ohio’s Early Learning Initiative programs, needs to be at the top of that list.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Guest Columns, Ohio politics
Martin Gottlieb: (Relatively) good news: Ohio jobs stat stagnates
You might have heard that Ohio’s unemployment rate increased from 10.2 to 10.6 percent from April to May. You might not have heard, however, that the total number of jobs in the state didn’t really drop.
That’s a pretty important fact, given that the total number of jobs in the country is still shrinking, and given that Ohio has become used to seeing jobs shrink in number in this decade.
Richard Stock, economist at the University of Dayton, thinks the long-term decline in Ohio jobs may be the reason the short-term numbers aren’t so bad. Maybe Ohio got its worst news out of the way earlier.
OK. But why did the unemployment rate go up, if the number of jobs did not go down?
The answer is that the unemployment rate is not a measure of the number of people without jobs. It’s a measure of the people without jobs who say — in a survey — that they are looking for jobs.
So the rise in the unemployment rate was not a rise in the number of people losing jobs, but in the number entering the job market.
Why did that happen? Economists are not claiming to know for sure. Things just came together in a certain way.
A lot of people might have received bad news lately about a family member’s job being threatened, or about somebody’s hours being cut back, and might have decided it was time to look around.
Wright State University economist Robert Premus points out that retirees might be thinking about re-entering the job market as they see hear news about pensions. (Also, more graduates enter the job market in late spring, of course. Government stats are actually “seasonally adjusted” to account for that, but perhaps not perfectly.)
Anyway, what was happening in the Ohio job market was that, as the manufacturing sector continued to wane, the services sector added jobs, especially the medical and education fields.
Does the flat total indicate that a general turnaround is pending? Some think so, but it might not show up for a long time in unemployment rates. WSU’s Premus says that when business picks up, employers typically have plenty of workers to handle it for a while, because they’ve been conservative in cutting back.
Gov. Ted Strickland’s budget director, Pari Sabety, talks about a worst-case scenario unemployment rate of 15.4 in 2010 or 2011. That seems like an awfully high figure to some people. But Ohio’s unemployment rate did hit 13.8 percent in January, 1983. And this recession certainly seems worse than that one.
One thing that’s clear is that the generally bad economic news of the past few months is starting to figure into Ohio politics. Strickland’s popularity is looking less formidable.
One poll, by Public Policy Polling, shows roughly equal numbers of people approving as disapproving of his performance (with 15 percent being in neither category). A match-up between him and Republican contender John Kasich comes out basically as a draw, which is new.
Republicans certainly have their line of attack: Says party Chairman Kevin DeWine, of Fairborn, “Ohio has lost nearly 300,000 jobs on Ted Strickland’s watch. He promised to turn around Ohio’s economy … and he failed.”
It’s a strange thing. The politicians of both parties know that governors have limited impact on the economy. But they campaign on what they’ll do for the economy. Certainly Strickland did.
He didn’t propose anything dramatic; indeed, he proposed to let the big Republican initiative on that score — the tax-overhaul/tax cut plan of 2005 — remain in place.
He proposed nuts and bolts things, like nurturing his predecessor’s Third Frontier program, while reshaping the higher education system. He enacted a five-year “stimulus” that was designed to funnel money to new economy type projects; “green” stuff and all that.
These efforts — generally focused on the long term — were destined not to be a match for a dramatic, sudden national downturn, complete with a special collapse in the auto industry. No governor’s plans could be.
Still, the campaign for governor is likely to be about these issues (with the national scene playing a big role).
What the most recent economic stats suggest is that Strickland might actually have some good news to point to — if you call stagnant-job-numbers-while-other-states-are-losing-jobs good news.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Economy, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
Editorial: Husted holds his grudge too long
Consider how you might behave in this scenario:
You are a high-ranking official in a company that does business with another company. You agree to a meeting with the other company’s CEO to discuss important business that impacts both companies’ customers. But when the CEO arrives, he has with him the chairman of his board of directors, a guy you have had unpleasant dealings with in the past.
Do you:
(a) Bite your lip and go ahead with the meeting?
(b) Cancel the meeting?
(c) Refuse to meet with counterpart’s board chair present and call security to escort him from the building when he refuses to leave?
It’s hard to imagine too many people who would have the bad sense to choose option (c), but that’s pretty much what state Sen. Jon Husted, R-Kettering, did last week when Dayton school Superintendent Kurt Stanic showed up for a scheduled meeting with his boss, Dayton school board President Jeff Mims, unexpectedly at his side.
Sen. Husted’s temper tantrum was out of line and disrespectful to Mr. Mims. Regardless of the history between them, Mr. Husted has a responsibility to be cordial to Dayton’s school board president and attend to business that affects the Dayton region and Ohio taxpayers.
One issue Mr. Stanic and Sen. Husted were to discuss — a curious nixing by Republicans of a land swap between the district and the state that is a win-win — was too important to be overshadowed by petty grievances.
This story begins several years back, when Mr. Mims was still an employee of the school board. As the district’s legislative liaison, Mr. Mims spent much time in Columbus lobbying for urban schools. Democrats were generally more friendly to the cause, and Mr. Mims was a frequent critic of Republicans and their education policies, including complaining sharply about Sen. Husted (when he was still in the House) and other Dayton-area lawmakers and policies they supported (especially relating to charter schools).
This infuriated Sen. Husted and other local Republicans. The district, in their view, was paying Mr. Mims to act as a functionary of the Democratic Party by attacking them. Mr. Mims, a former union leader and lobbyist for teachers’ unions, viewed his role as that of an advocate for city schools. Mims is now retired and was elected to the board in 2007.
The only facts and history that should have been relevant in this meeting was that Dayton needs Senate sign-off for a deal it cut with the state that will clear the way for construction of the new Belmont High School. The current school building is badly placed at the back of a long property that faces Wayne Avenue. But adjacent is the state-owned, now-closed Twin Valley Behavioral Healthcare Center.
Under the deal, the two sides swap land so the new school can be built in a premium spot closer to the street. In return, the district razes former Twin Valley buildings for the state.
For some reason, language approving the deal was removed from the budget bill by Senate Republicans. A staffer for Republican Senate President Bill Harris said it was likely taken out because senators were unfamiliar with the deal and nobody was advocating for it.
If that’s true, that situation reflects badly on Sen. Husted and Sen. Fred Strahorn, D-Dayton. The school sits in Sen. Strahorn’s district, and Sen. Husted, as the well-connected former House speaker and now part of the Republican Senate caucus, ought to be asking questions when a Dayton project gets bumped. (Sen. Husted says he is now advocating for the swap, after Mr. Stanic explained the issue to him.)
It’s fair to ask why Mr. Mims, knowing full well that he and Sen. Husted aren’t exactly chummy and having been told Sen. Husted did not want him in the meeting, would insist on being present. But that doesn’t excuse Sen. Husted from putting personal grudges ahead of the people’s business.
The land swap deal is advantageous for the state, Dayton, the school district and taxpayers. Even if Sen. Husted doesn’t get along with Mr. Mims, he owes residents of the region’s central city the decency of treating the officials they elect with basic respect.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Education, Ohio politics, Scott Elliott
