Note to the ACLU: U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that vouchers are constitutional
This morning I was listening to KUNR's "Beyond the Headlines" program. Host Brandon Rittiman interviewed Gov. Sandoval's senior policy adviser, Dale Erquiaga, on Sandoval's education reforms, including vouchers. He then had on Craig Hulse, from the Washoe County School District, and Allen Lichtenstein, from the ACLU, to respond.
One of the first objections Lichtenstein made to the voucher program was that it would be unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution, because it would give public money to private schools. That assertion is wrong.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002) that a well-designed voucher program that gives public money to private, religious schools is constitutional.
Ohio's Pilot Project Scholarship Program gives educational choices to families in any Ohio school district that is under state control pursuant to a federal-court order. The program provides tuition aid for certain students in the Cleveland City School District, the only covered district, to attend participating public or private schools of their parent's choosing and tutorial aid for students who choose to remain enrolled in public school. Both religious and nonreligious schools in the district may participate, as may public schools in adjacent school districts. ...
Held: The program does not offend the Establishment Clause. Pp. 6-21.
(a) Because the program was enacted for the valid secular purpose of providing educational assistance to poor children in a demonstrably failing public school system, the question is whether the program nonetheless has the forbidden effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. See Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S. 203, 222-223. This Court's jurisprudence makes clear that a government aid program is not readily subject to challenge under the Establishment Clause if it is neutral with respect to religion and provides assistance directly to a broad class of citizens who, in turn, direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their own genuine and independent private choice. See, e.g., Mueller v. Allen, 463 U.S. 388. Under such a program, government aid reaches religious institutions only by way of the deliberate choices of numerous individual recipients. The incidental advancement of a religious mission, or the perceived endorsement of a religious message, is reasonably attributable to the individual aid recipients not the government, whose role ends with the disbursement of benefits. Pp. 6-11.While I'll refrain from making a joke about the ACLU's general counsel not being familiar with a major U.S. Supreme Court case on vouchers, the record does need to be clear and corrected.
(b) The instant program is one of true private choice, consistent with the Mueller line of cases, and thus constitutional. It is neutral in all respects towards religion, and is part of Ohio's general and multifaceted undertaking to provide educational opportunities to children in a failed school district.
A well-designed voucher program is constitutional under the U.S. Constitution.
Whether a voucher program is constitutional under the Nevada Constitution is a separate issue (I'd argue it is constitutional) and, at the moment, an irrelevant one, because Sandoval's voucher program would be passed as a constitutional amendment.
Read moreOverstating the impact of cuts to higher education (again!)
From the Reno Gazette-Journal:
Gov. Brian Sandoval's recommended budget calls for a 17.6 percent cut to higher education from the current biennium budget - a number disputed by Chancellor Dan Klaich, who told a legislative budget committee the cuts are actually 29 percent. Sandoval's cuts would subtract $162 million from the university system's annual budget of $558 million, Klaich told lawmakers.
While you can play around with the percentages, saying that the "the university system's annual budget" is $558 million is false. The university system's annual operating budget in Fiscal Year 2011 is $1.744 billion.
Don't believe me? See for yourself on TransparentNevada, where you can download the last 12 years of NSHE operating budgets.
Overstating the impact of budget cuts? Unfortunately, that seems to be standard operating procedure for those involved in NSHE. Maybe that's why, one month again, Chancellor Klaich said:
"I think we [NSHE] have been guilty of hyperbole in the past. Where we get the first dollar of a cut and we would like you to believe that the sky is falling in. And here we are a few years later and low and behold the sky is right where it started out. It has not fallen in."
I've previously praised Klaich for the honesty of the above statement, and I hope in the future, Klaich will do a better job of accurately reporting the facts.
How well does ending social promotion work?
We examined a policy in Florida that required third-grade student to perform at a certain level on the state's reading test to receive an automatic promotion to fourth grade. Students who performed below the required level and repeated third grade made significantly greater academic progress than similar students who were promoted despite their lack of skills. The benefit of being retained grew so that by the end of the second year the retained students entered fifth grade knowing more than the promoted students did leaving fifth grade - this despite the fact that the retained students had not yet been exposed to the fifth grade material. [Emphasis added]Read more here.
Credit where it's due: Horsford continues opposition to a corporate income tax
This isn't a new revelation since Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford came out against a corporate income tax last year, but it's worth highlighting this again.
Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford said Monday he no longer favors imposing a corporate income tax in Nevada, a sharp turnaround from a year ago when he railed in the Legislature against companies for not "paying their fair share."Horsford's stated problems with the corporate income tax are that corporate income taxes are extremely volatile and hard to administer.
"I've gone full circle," Horsford acknowledged in an interview with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
This stance doesn't mean Horsford's planning on honoring his promise to voters to not raise taxes during an economic downturn, however.
"I won't support tax increases -- not when the private sector is losing revenue and losing jobs," Horsford told the Review-Journal's editorial board in September [2008].It just means that he's looking for a less volatile and destructive tax. Two rumored alternatives are a gross receipts tax/franchise tax or a non-revenue neutral expansion of the sales tax.
"The general fund needs to be managed in a way that doesn't allow growth beyond population growth and inflation."
There are many problems with a gross receipts tax. In fact, the Tax Foundation finds that:
There is no sensible case for gross receipts taxation. The old turnover taxes--typically adopted as desperation measures in fiscal crisis--were replaced with taxes that created fewer economic problems. They do not belong in any program of tax reform.A non-revenue neutral expansion to the sales-tax could lead to government picking the winners and losers.
Horsford said he would consider a new sales tax on the $100 billion in services sold each year in Nevada.While it's great to see Horsford acknowledge the instability of the corporate income tax, taxpayers still need to be on the lookout.
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce argues the tax could target services relied upon by businesses and individuals with higher incomes, such as accounting and legal services. Depending on how it's structured, a sales tax on services could raise $500 million a year, supporters have said.
Nevada's leftists still want more of your money. They just aren't telling you how they want to take it yet.
Sandoval proposes proven and substantive education reforms
This is what real and substantive reforms look like.
The education reforms include a proposed constitutional amendment to offer private school vouchers and a system to grade schools based on student performance.Gov. Brian Sandoval's education plan also includes the following:
- An accountability bill that would eliminate teacher tenure and do away with so-called "last in, first out" priorities when it comes to teacher layoffs.
- A proposed constitutional amendment to provide vouchers for parents to send their children to private schools.
- A system of evaluating schools with letter grades and ending social promotion, similar to reforms made in Florida under former Gov. Jeb Bush.
That being said, similar education reforms in other states have produced dramatic results.
Evaluating schools with letter grades and ending social promotion are a couple of the policies Florida has instituted in the last 12 years. Florida's reforms have produced dramatic gains in student achievement. Nevada's students would benefit from these reforms as well.
Sandoval's proposal to eliminate teacher tenure and do away with "last-in, first-out" policies are especially important when you consider that teacher quality is the most important school-related factor in student achievement.
And Sandoval's voucher program is supported by overwhelming evidence that vouchers both save tax dollars and increase student achievement. Consider:
- Study after study has shown that choice-based education reforms (including vouchers and tuition tax-credit programs) improve student achievement.
- Ten high-quality, random assignment studies have been conducted on voucher programs. Nine found that some or all of the participants benefited academically from vouchers. One found no difference.
- Overview of the 10 studies and their results is here.
- No random assignment study has found students using vouchers did worse than students in public schools.
- In Washington, D.C., students who used a voucher increased their graduation rate by 21 percent.
- In Charlotte, N.C., students who used a $1,700 scholarship for one year scored 5.9 percentile points higher in math and 6.5 percentile points higher in reading than public school students who had not used the scholarship.
- Fifty-three percent of parents whose children used the scholarship gave their school an "A" compared to 26 percent of public-school parents.
- Parents love vouchers (and other school-choice programs).
- Of the five random assignment studies that have studied parental satisfaction, each has found large positive impacts.
How do you design the program correctly? Unfortunately, you have to exclude all the kids who are currently attending private schools. Fair? No, but financially necessary and worth it once those kids are let into the voucher system a few years down the road.
During the campaign, Sandoval's opponent estimated a voucher program would cost about $100 million, based on the number of children currently enrolled in private schools.There's a lot more to explore, including offering vouchers of greater value to low-income students, and we'll definitely be following this a whole lot more in the upcoming weeks.
"That number is a fallacy," he [Sandoval's senior adviser Dale Erquiaga] said. "It won't cost $100 million. That would assume every child currently in private school will take a voucher. Well, in our proposal they aren't all going to be eligible."
Reminder: NPRI tax study calls for revenue-neutral reform
Some on the left side of the political aisle
Report on impact of higher-education cuts is factually wrong
Strong words? Yes. Accurate? Yes. What the RJ's Richard Lake reported Tuesday:
"Pick any percentage you want and you can make it real," Klaich said. "But you can't run away from the fact that this means $162 million out of the budget of the Nevada System of Higher Education."A month ago, the general public would have had to take this assertion at face value. But since TransparentNevada is now hosting 12 years of operating budgets from NSHE, we can fact-check it. Here is the yearly state subsidy for each of the above institutions:
That amount equals the entire annual state support for:
- Nevada State College
- Great Basin College
- Western Nevada College
- UNLV's law and dental schools
- And virtually all of the University of Nevada, Reno, including the medical school.
- Nevada State College: $13 million
- Great Basin College: $16.5 million
- Western Nevada College: $18.5 million
- UNLV Law School: $7.8 million
- UNLV Dental School: $8.2 million
- UNR and Medical School only: $147.9 million (excluding $27 million for other UNR programs)
A less than 10 percent reduction (which doesn't include extra money from tuition increases) is a real cut, but the impact these reductions will have needs to be kept in perspective.
Fact-check what you read, and don't be manipulated by false claims.
Note: I e-mailed Richard Lake with these statistics on Tuesday. If he sends me a response clarifying or explaining the stats in his article, I will post it here.
Game-changer: All Republican senators sign letter supporting Sandoval's no-new-taxes budget; UPDATE: Letter added
Update: The full letter is here. It not only expresses the Republican Senate caucus' support for Gov. Sandoval's budget, but also for his education plan.
Wow.
A letter sent Wednesday to Sandoval and signed by all 10 Republican senators, including previously wavering Sen. Dean Rhoads, R-Tuscarora, promises, "unwavering support for your plan to balance the budget while fighting job-killing taxes."Senate Democrats would have needed to hold their own caucus, including Sen. Lee, who's previously hinted he would oppose tax increases, and get three Republican votes to pass a tax increase in the Senate.
Now it looks like there may be a majority, not a just a greater-than-one-third minority, of senators who oppose tax increases. And given that both major gubernatorial candidates opposed tax increases in the last election, and even Sen. Horsford has said he wouldn't support tax increases while the private sector is losing jobs, this shouldn't be a surprise.
Regardless of the current rhetorical spin, a no-new-taxes budget is what voters overwhelmingly supported in November. It shouldn't be surprising that elected officials are now reflective of the people who put them into office.
For those looking for alternatives that would maintain or increase results while saving money, NPRI's got you covered.
Update: Changed the title. After rereading the article, I think the new title is more accurate.
Tax Foundation study shows Nevada is not a 'low-tax' state
The Tax Foundation has just released in its annual report comparing the tax burden in the 50 states. The study ranks Nevada 28th in terms of state and local tax collections and 49th in terms of tax burden.
Leftists in the Legislature are already trying to use Nevada's tax burden ranking of 49th as proof that Nevada doesn't have enough tax money and that this is the cause of Nevada's budget problems.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and even a cursory reading of the Tax Foundation's study (specifically, page 11) destroys the myth that Nevada is a low-tax state in terms of per-capita tax collections.
As my colleague Geoffrey Lawrence explained today:
Already some Nevada leftists are pointing to the Tax Foundation's new report as "proof" that Nevada's budget problems are the result of having the country's second-lowest tax burden. The Tax Foundation report, however, makes a clear distinction between a state's tax burden and its tax collections.
The "tax burden" ranking measures the percentage of income that state residents pay directly in state and local taxes, which, in the case of Nevada, excludes all the money the state collects from taxes assessed on the tourism industry.
However, when it comes to combined state and local tax collections - how much money government actually has to spend - the Tax Foundation finds that Nevada ranked 28th-highest in the country for Fiscal Year 2009. Further, this ranking actually understates the current level of tax collections, because it does not include any revenues resulting from the largest tax increase in Nevada's history, which was passed by the 2009 legislature and impacted tax revenues in Fiscal Years 2010 and 2011.
To claim that this report shows Nevada doesn't collect enough in tax dollars is to misrepresent the report's clear findings. This report actually shows that Nevada is near the median of states when it comes to state and local tax collections - even before taking into account the largest tax increase in Nevada's history.
This study shows clearly that Nevada's budget problems are not the result of a lack of tax revenue. As the Nevada Policy Research Institute has highlighted repeatedly, the relatively low quality of K-12 education and other services in Nevada has resulted not from a lack of funding, but rather from poorly designed policies. ...
Regardless of who bears the burden of taxes, lawmakers still have the money to spend. Not including the largest tax hike in Nevada's history, the Tax Foundation report still shows that Nevada has more money to spend per capita than 22 other states.
As this report proves, in terms of tax collections, Nevada is not a "low-tax" state.
More proof that Nevada has a spending, not a revenue, problem.
Wasteful spending still characterizes LVCVA
Remember NPRI's transparency project on the taxpayer-funded Las Vegas Convention and Visitors' Authority that, among other things, revealed that LVCVA management had provided their no-bid media contractor, R&R Partners, with a literal rubber stamp to approve their own expenses with taxpayer dollars? Well, those who remember the hoopla that was generated by that effort will be extremely interested to see that the LVCVA's shenanigans continue.
Check out the story at Channel 8.
