Tag: Tennessee State Legislature

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Choosing Choice: The Great School Voucher Deception

Except for conversations about a woman’s right to control her physical destiny, “choice” is a popular word among Conservative politicians and policy makers. For the businessman, it’s a near synonym for freedom, and something Rhetoric professors might call a “god word,” with high propagandistic value. “Choice,” is the banner word on The Beacon Center of Tennessee‘s page advocating for Educational Savings Accounts, like Governor Bill Lee’s re-branded and Tennessee House of Representatives-approved school voucher program. In a similar vein, fear of losing the ability to “choose healthcare providers” is key to most narratives opposing anything approaching universal healthcare coverage, just as it was when the same Beacon Center took credit for defeating medicaid expansion in Tennessee.

“While stopping the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare was a necessary first step, it is still our responsibility as Tennesseans to find affordable healthcare solutions for our most vulnerable neighbors,” Beacon CEO Justin Owen told media. Instead of Medicaid access, Beacon supported  “right-to-try” legislation, allowing terminally ill patients access to choose certain unapproved FDA treatments. A Trump-backed Federal “right to try” bill was signed into law in 2018. As noted in The Atlantic, the catchy name and promise of personal autonomy disguised a decreased ability for people who aren’t medical experts to determine if treatments were effective or safe. 

If you don’t know The Beacon Center of Tennessee, previously called The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, they self-describe as “an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research and educational institute.” They’re the group that “exposed” former Vice President Al Gore’s energy use as part of an effort to counter “climate change alarmism.” They’re also affiliated with a right-wing cut-and-paste legislation web called the State Policy Network. It’s one of those places where movements to preserve and expand “choice” by way of free market insurance and publicly subsidized private schools are born. Tennessee’s decision not to expand medicaid didn’t make anybody more free, it put families at risk. Around 71,000 children were left without coverage. Now that Tennessee has moved a step closer toward embracing Education Savings Accounts (aka vouchers), another “choice”-forward initiative from the sewer of America’s policy factories, it’s important to understand how the word is paradoxical and may not always mean what it seems to mean.

Fred Hirsch, a former professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, wrote about the limits of choice. In his book The Social Limits of Growth, he showed how choice can’t be made available to everyone, no matter how clever we get with technology. This is particularly true in regard to superlatives; the best doctor, for example, or the best teachers. This sounds elitist at first, but means and privilege only mitigate the effects of scarcity, they can’t erase the fact of it. Hirsch calls these troublesome things “positional goods,” and Barry Schwartz, the  Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College, expanded on the concept in The Paradox of Choice: How the Culture of Abundance Robs us of Satisfaction.

“We might all agree that everyone would be better off if there were less positional competition,” Hirsch wrote, swimming against conventional wisdom that competition is good in every case. “It’s stressful, it’s wasteful, and it distorts people’s lives.”

“Parents wanting only the best for their child encourage her to study hard so she can get into a good college. But everyone is doing that. So the parents push harder. But so does everybody else. So they send their child to after-school enrichment programs and educational summer camps. And so does everyone else. So now they borrow money to switch to private school. Again others follow.”

Sometimes the supply of positional goods just runs out — There are only so many spots in the best teacher’s classroom. Value also decreases as the result of overcrowding. Schwartz illustrates his point with a metaphor made for sports fans:

“It’s like being in a crowded football stadium, watching the crucial play. A spectator several rows in front stands up to get a better view and a chain reaction follows. Soon everyone is standing just to be able to see as well as before. Everyone is on their feet rather than sitting, but no one’s position has improved.”

 Those not standing, by reason of choice or inability, might as well be somewhere else, Schwartz concludes. They aren’t in the game.

Whatever you choose to call them, voucher systems aren’t a new idea. The University of Chicago’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote about the role of government in education in 1955, and choice advocates have been inspired by his arguments ever since. He determined that government should fund schooling. It should not run schools. Friedman advocated vouchers as a means of increasing freedom through choice in the marketplace.

Educational policy analyst Diane Ravitch related this history in her data-laden 2010 mea culpa, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. While working on national education policy for President George H. W. Bush, Ravitch had gotten caught up in choice mania, but came to regret it. Advocates of voucher systems and charter schools, “were certain choice would produce higher achievement,” and “reduce the rising tide of mediocrity,” she wrote. The collected data told a conflicting story. After reviewing the 20-year history of a voucher program in Milwaukee, Ravitch determined “there was no evidence of dramatic improvement for the neediest students or the public schools they left behind.” As with the football stadium metaphor, everybody moved, but nobody’s position really improved.

“Business leaders like the idea of turning the schools into a marketplace where the consumer is king,” Ravitch wrote, taking on presumptions that choice and competition are necessarily a public good. “But the problem with the marketplace is that it dissolves communities and replaces them with consumers. Going to school is not the same as going shopping. Parents should not be burdened with locating a suitable school for their child. They should be able to take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program.”

Schwartz concludes that the scramble for positional goods creates what’s commonly called “the rat race.” That’s expressed here as “the burden of locating suitable schools” in a sea of “buyer beware.” That parents cannot “take their child to the neighborhood public school as a matter of course and expect that it has well-educated teachers and a sound educational program” isn’t a failure of teachers or public school systems or the communities where public schools are located. It’s an enduring expression of political and economic will backed by an unwarranted faith in market-based solutions.

“When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable,” Schwartz wrote in The Paradox of Choice.

“As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.” 

That’s the problem with punishing and stigmatizing needy schools and pumping public education money into private markets. Or, as Ravitch put it, “With so much money aligned against the neighborhood public school and against education as a profession, public education itself is placed at risk.”

That absolutely seems to be the goal. 

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Editorial Opinion

Veto the Guns-in-Parks Bill, Governor

Little by little, Governor Bill Haslam is getting used to asserting himself vis-à-vis the Tennessee General Assembly. That’s the clear lesson of Haslam’s second term,

which began auspiciously at the turn of the year with a proposal to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — a consummation (worth some $1 billion in federal health-care funds annually) devoutly to be wished by the state’s hospital community, facing financial hard times and intolerable strains upon their emergency-room capacity. 

That proposal, called Insure Tennessee, was made the subject of a special session by the governor but was nipped in the bud by an adverse vote of an ad hoc Health and Welfare Committee of the state Senate, hand-picked by Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, who had gotten used in Haslam’s first term to having his way with impunity. That did not deter Haslam from encouraging a bipartisan legislative coalition from bringing Insure Tennessee back up for another go-around. The proposal made it safely through two Senate committees but was next routed by Ramsey into a Commerce Committee known to contain sworn foes of the ACA (aka “Obamacare”), where it was killed again.  

When all else fails, though, the GOP’s ultras in Nashville put their energies behind whatever new bill they can find that extends even further the gun lobby’s efforts to shrink what remains of local governments’ effort to control unbridled firearms use within their jurisdictions. Here again, the governor is attempting to put the brakes on. 

The latest gun bill gathering steam in the General Assembly would not only strike down the prerogatives of local jurisdictions to restrict the presence of firearms in public areas — a clear assertion of the “less-government” party’s ongoing contempt for local authority — it would, as a result of a Senate amendment, allow gun-permit holders to strut around the state capitol grounds fully armed. Such is the reigning schizophrenia in Nashville that the shocking amendment was approved both by opponents of proliferating weaponry, who thought the amendment was so outrageous that it might sink the whole bill, and, at least in the Senate, by gun enthusiasts whose motto toward any extension of firearms seems to be the more, the merrier. 

To its credit, the state House of Representatives has thus far rejected the guns-on-capitol-grounds provision, and the bill is next due for a House-Senate conference committee, where an effort will be made to reconcile competitive versions. 

Once again, Haslam demurs. He has made explicit threats to veto the measure altogether and has said, sensibly enough, “This bill isn’t so much a Second Amendment issue. It’s a property issue,” and he has urged “mayors and county commissioners and park directors” to assert themselves regarding the pending measure. 

We’re all for this newly resolute version of our governor, and we hope he’s prepared to back up his words with the liberal use of his veto pen.

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Cover Feature News

The Prince of Nashville

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The one thing to remember about Mark Norris, the state Senate’s majority leader and a pivotal figure in the firmament of Tennessee’s ruling Republican Party, is that he always knows what he wants and is ultimately unyielding in his efforts to get it. However affable and accommodating he seems on the surface, in the end he intends to have his way.

A perfect case in point was the determination he exercised over the past three-plus years on behalf of Shelby County’s six incorporated suburbs in their effort to extricate themselves from an unwanted merger with the urban school system of Memphis.

Norris describes himself as a “problem-solver.” Though at various times, the cause of the suburbs had seemed bleak after the fateful December 2010 decision by the board of the Memphis City Schools (MCS) to surrender the MCS charter, thereby forcing a merger with what had been a suburban Shelby County Schools (SCS) system, Norris never deviated from his determination to solve that particular problem.

The first obstacle to overcome was resistance to change on the part of the Tennessee General Assembly, which in February 2011 was still committed to a generation-old prohibition against any new school districts statewide. Norris’ way of solving that problem was by drafting a bill that the rest of the political world came to know as Norris-Todd (after his cosponsorship with state representative Curry Todd, a fellow Collierville-area Republican), but that Norris himself invariably refers to as Public Chapter One.

Though the ostensible premise of the bill was, as Norris tirelessly repeated, to “facilitate” the city-county school merger that the MCS board’s action had made inevitable, the crux of it, as he now acknowledges, was in “two brief sentences” in the final clause of the bill abrogating the ban on new school districts — for Shelby County only.

It was the first measure taken up by the new, overwhelmingly Republican legislature elected in the Tea Party year of 2010, and it was rushed through the legislature with unprecedented speed, leap-frogging over the usual drawn-out process of examination by this or that committee. Norris turned the bill into a test case for GOP solidarity, and he mollified the concerns of potentially doubtful members by making the bill Shelby-County specific.

As a seasoned and able attorney (currently with the Memphis firm of Adams and Reese), Norris must have known the bill, as written, was constitutionally problematic. (Later follow-up bills to enable and expedite new districts in Shelby County alone were duly ruled invalid by U.S. District Judge Hardy Mays.) But Norris was playing for time.

The non-controversial initial sections of Norris-Todd had created that time — a two-year break-in period, during which a blue-ribbon intergovernmentally appointed body, later to be known as the Transition Planning Committee (TPC), would laboriously and conscientiously assemble the components of a merged city/county public-education system.

But Norris, looking beyond those efforts to the suburban school independence that his original bill’s final two sentences envisioned, would chastise the TPC for focusing on what he now famously described as “mere merger.”

Justin Fox Burks

Mark Norris

No more talk of “facilitating” any such thing as that. As Norris describes it today, what he had in mind with the original Norris-Todd bill was a “federated” system like that of the national government, under which the Shelby County suburbs would have roles similar to that of the states: “They would all have their autonomy, they would give up to the unified system whatever they would be comfortable giving up.”

The outcome of the Civil War, of course, had nullified any such concept for the American states — a concept which derived more from the loose and unwieldy post-Revolution Articles of Confederation than from the more centralized Constitution which followed in 1789, but the point was not so much logical consistency (conceding only such external authority as one is “comfortable giving up?” Really?). It was to solve the problem.

The long and the short of it is that Norris — on behalf of his suburban constituency — would ultimately have his way. Whenever existing law, or Judge Mays’ actual or potential interpretation of it, seemed to stand in the way, Norris would manage, through his position in the General Assembly and his mastery of the legislative process, to get the law changed.

Eventually, he prevailed on his Republican colleagues in the legislature to surrender their doubts and license new districts beyond the confines of Shelby County. What remained was the formidable problem for the independent suburban systems of prying existing school buildings loose from the residual “unified” Shelby County Schools system — which had legal ownership — at something less than prohibitive cost.

In the end, the six suburbs — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington — reached settlements with the SCS board in late 2013 and got the buildings (all but three in Germantown and one in Millington) at a de facto rate of ten cents on the dollar. Game. Set. Match.

How did that come about? Discussing the likelihood of passing new legislation regarding the school buildings during a leisurely meal at Houston’s restaurant last week in the company of his wife Chris and this reporter, Norris allowed himself a satisfied smile and a classic understatement: “I never ruled it out, and that served its purpose. It maintained a healthy degree of tension.”

But that victory smile would soon yield to a look of pure relief from the ordeal. “This was the first Christmas without crisis in three years,” he said. Norris recalled the many times “I’d end up with a kitchen full of a group of characters” — the suburbanites and their supporters — all clamoring for a solution.  

It took a while, but the main thing was that he delivered.

 

Norris delivers. That is the root fact, and it is why he sits at a pivotal spot in state government, where, in his words, he can “triangulate” between the governor of his party, Bill Haslam; the GOP lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, considered by many to be as powerful, if not more so, than the governor; and the members of the Republican legislative caucus.

The 2014 legislative session began this week with a number of unresolved issues — some of them as potentially thorny as the school-merger problem, but more general and less parochial, a fact welcomed by Norris, though the subject of education still looms large.

Among the matters to be dealt with: the question of school vouchers, determining to what extent public monies can and should be expended on students at private schools; a controversy over a “common core” curriculum for the schools; and a proposal to strengthen the state’s ability to override local school boards on new charter schools.

There are health care problems to attend to, including the matter, so far deferred, of whether and how to access federal funds for expanding Medicaid (TennCare); determining the rules of urban annexation; and the lingering matter of whether grocery stores should be allowed to sell wine in competition with liquor stores.

Norris, who began his political career by winning a Shelby County Commission seat in 1994, did not ascend to his present status without significant diplomatic ability. Though he was manifestly a conservative force (mainly concerned with the long-term county debt) on a commission body that was then ideologically balanced, he always managed to get along with his colleagues.

There was one exception, long-term Democratic commissioner Walter Bailey, an old-line liberal stalwart: “He was intransigent, tone-deaf, disinterested in what others thought, especially on budgetary matters. He never met a dollar he didn’t want to spend. It didn’t matter what anybody else thought,” Norris recalls, with the air of a would-be irresistible force discussing an immovable object.

That was then, before Norris acquired the knack, which he now possesses in spades, of appearing — even sometimes actually being — accommodating to his opposite numbers.

I am not suggesting that Norris is Machiavellian, but he is certainly crafty, and he long ago learned how to harness his considerable innate geniality in order to disarm opponents and achieve his ends — an ability that was increasingly obvious after his election to the state Senate in 2000.

Norris is one of those people who has no enemies. He gets along because he enjoys getting along, but, as he himself acknowledges, he is “unrelenting” in pursuing his goals.

There was a time, from 2007 to 2011, when the Senate was almost equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, and Norris and Memphis Democrat Jim Kyle, both newly ascendant as the leaders of their respective parties, functioned as what Norris now calls “plurality leaders.”

These days Kyle has few troops to command — only 7 out of 33 Senate members — and thus lacks the bargaining power that he once had. But he still praises Norris as someone who keeps his word and observes the amenities.

Norris is as aware as anyone that Democrats today count for very little in the politics of Tennessee, a result he attributes to people’s increasing unease with the federal government’s centralizing tendencies.

The pendulum may swing again, as Norris realizes: “They might pass an Endangered Species act or something. They’ll be back. They’re like the armadillo.”

Justin Fox Burks

Mark Norris and Electrolux CEO Jack Truong

Meanwhile, he says, backing away from the patronizing sound of that, “Democrats make valuable contributions on substantive issues. They can assist us on things like the budget, corrections, and the lottery.”

But Norris’ real task, and his real skill, is to perform a central function in the Republican hierarchy, which, with a two-to-one dominance in both chambers of the legislature and possession of the executive branch, is now and, for the foreseeable future, will be the fact of political life in Tennessee.

One of his major roles is to sponsor and shepherd through to passage, the legislative program of Governor Haslam. Norris maintains that he does not thereby surrender his own freedom of action. Does he ever question the governor’s agenda?

“I question the hell out of it all the time. I’m not going to sponsor anything I don’t believe in,” Norris says. “There’s more than you would ever get to see that ends up on the cutting room floor.” Norris says he is perfectly willing to confront the governor and say that such-and-such that the governor is contemplating won’t go. Nevertheless, he is the ultimate loyalist. Having pushed most of Haslam’s agenda last year, he is primed and ready to continue with gubernatorial bills that were left incomplete.

One in particular is Haslam’s proposal for a modest school-voucher program, confined to 5,000 low-income students in failing public schools. At Haslam’s request, Norris yanked the bill at the close of last year’s session in the face of persistent attempts by state senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) to modify it upward, both in funding and in the number of students covered.

Norris confesses to skepticism about Kelsey’s bill, which he regards as a “phantom,” an example of the famously brash senator’s “shadow-boxing” and says, wearily, “Kelsey is on my team, he wears my jersey, though sometimes it’s inside out,” and he makes a point of praising Kelsey’s research on vouchers: “He knows more on the subject than the rest of us.”

If Norris is obliged to a pro forma tolerance of some members of the GOP caucus, his regard for Senate speaker and lieutenant governor Ramsey is enthusiastic and unqualified. “I’m his wingman. That’s what he calls me,” Norris says with evident pride.

When Haslam introduced his educational reform agenda in 2011, the idea of abolishing teachers’ collective bargaining rights was not included. Ramsey thought it should be and ultimately prevailed over both the governor and House speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville. Norris supported Ramsey.

It is clear that Norris veers further right than the governor. He is frank to see Haslam’s much-vaunted “Tennessee Plan,” a private-sector-focused proposal for a federal waiver to acquire Medicaid expansion funds as “sort of like [Kelsey’s’ ‘opportunity scholarships.’ There is no plan.”

Norris expresses a convincing anguish about the thousands of people who were struck from the TennCare rolls for budgetary reasons by former governor Phil Bredesen a decade ago.” There was no hue and cry about it, except for those who were sentenced to death,” he says bluntly, adding, “They didn’t cry long. Those of us who went through that don’t want to go through that again. It was awful.”  

And yet Norris aligns himself with those who oppose acceptance of Medicaid funds under the Affordable Care Act, contending, “I don’t believe anybody believes for a second” that the federal government would keep a commitment to sustain at least 90 percent of expanded funding after the fully-funded first three years.

 

Norris is a leader in current efforts to call a “convention of the states” under Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution in order to challenge what he sees as an over-preponderance of federal authority. He is active in a number of pursuits relating to the shoring up of state powers. Currently, he serves as chairman of the national Council of State Governments, an organization for which he served as southern regional chair in 2011, presiding over a well-attended conference in Memphis. He also is the current chairman of the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (TACIR).

Justin Fox Burks

State Senate majority leader Mark Norris speaks with interim Chamber of Commerce chairman Dexter Muller at the grand opening of the new Electrolux plant on President’s Island.

Above all, he sees himself as someone who achieves results and professes to be proudest of achievement in several non-ideological areas, including helping complete the Winfield Dunn leg of Route 385 and the Wolf River Parkway, an Audubon Society-sanctioned thoroughfare. He also is proud of efforts he has made in workforce development and on behalf of causes like the Mid-South Food Bank and the Church Health Center.

Last week, when Norris joined Haslam and Mayors A C Wharton and Mark Luttrell for the ceremonial grand opening of the new Electrolux plant on President’s Island, Dexter Muller, the acting director of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, made a point of touting Norris’ role in attracting the industry to Memphis. “It wouldn’t have happened without him,” Muller said.

 

There is another Norris besides the able, affable, and determined man familiar to denizens of the civil and political universe. There is the gentleman farmer who owns a large spread out in the Fishersville community, has a modest livestock herd, and, like his wife, Chris, engages in spare-time horsemanship.

He is also a zealous advocate of Second Amendment rights and has a respectable armada of weaponry, including a bona fide cannon, built for him by his sons, that he fires off during holiday celebrations.     

He has a gun-carry permit and takes it seriously. Anyone used to seeing him in well-tailored business suits might take note of his comment that, where he personally is concerned, the default position is “to carry rather than not to carry.”

In more ways than one, Mark Norris is someone you have to take seriously.

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Politics Politics Feature

Game On

The Tennessee General Assembly has convened for its 2013 session, and, as we and everybody else have observed, it will open up with Republican “super-majorities” in both state House and state Senate, able to achieve any outcome the GOP majority desires without a thought to potential opposition from Democrats.

Moreover, such rhetorical objections as might be expected from the Democratic side may be offset to some degree by the committee appointments made by both speakers — Beth Harwell of Nashville in the House, Ron Ramsey of Blountville in the Senate, each reelected handily on Monday’s opening day of the session.

Among the dwindling band of Democrats — 7 in the 33-member House; 24 in the 99-member Senate — only a few are likely to play damn-the-torpedoes with the GOP leadership. Many, likely most, will play the hands they are dealt cautiously and will opt for a go-along-to-get-along strategy, leveraging such committee assignments as they can get to maximum benefit.

As was pointed out here last week in relation to pending firearms legislation, where significant differences exist among Republicans, such stalemates and conflicts as may ensue in the coming session will not be partisan ones per se but intra-party on the GOP side.

It is no secret that Senate majority leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) will, as before, play the role of point man for the continuing efforts of Shelby County’s suburban municipalities to exercise some degree of real independence — if not now, then later — from the forthcoming Unified School System.

Nor is it a secret as to the majority leader’s likely direction, given the decision rendered late last year by U.S. district judge Hardy Mays invalidating Norris-sponsored legislation of a year ago to enable and advance the speedy implementation of new suburban special school districts. Mays’ finding was that the key Norris bill of 2011 was unconstitutional, because it manifestly applied only to Shelby County and thus avoided statutory requirements for ratification by the local county’s chief legislative body — in this case, the Shelby County Commission, a clear majority of whom have opposed the suburban districts. Indeed, it was a commission lawsuit that was the basis for Mays’ ruling.

The route left open for Norris and his suburban allies in the Shelby delegation is that of legislation that would expand the state’s already burgeoning charter-school initiative while simultaneously diminishing the power of local school boards to reject charter school applications. But a bill broad enough to allow the county’s suburbs to form de facto charter-school districts would inevitably run into stout resistance from school boards elsewhere in Tennessee — including those (most of them these days) in areas that elect Republican legislators.

Nor is the way clear for another Shelby Republican legislator with ambitions for bills of a transformative kind. State senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) will once again try to advance his proposal, first attempted in 2011, to publicly fund vouchers on a limited basis for private schools.

That effort passed the Senate but, before being considered by the House, ended up in “summer study,” sometimes a euphemism for the graveyard but in this case a precursor for action by a specially convened gubernatorial task force, which met last summer to consider possible voucher legislation but reached no definite conclusion.

As in the case of charter school legislation, resistance of school boards statewide could prove significant, and partisan solidarity cannot be counted on to advance Kelsey’s bill, or any other piece of voucher legislation. Kelsey may also have difficulty with a bill that would prohibit the state from expanding TennCare in conformity with a provision of the Affordable Care Act.

Governor Bill Haslam has clearly not made up his mind to opt out of the provision, made optional by the Supreme Court, which would provide participating states with 100 percent of the funding for expanding their Medicaid operations, scaling that down to 90 percent over a period of years. Moreover, the governor is under pressure from representatives of the state’s hospitals and health-care industry to carry out the expansion, though there are many archconservatives like Kelsey in the legislature who oppose it on principle.

In any case, the governor wants time to consider the various possible combinations and does not want anyone to rush his judgment.

The bottom line: Despite the helplessness of Democrats as a body, there will be a sufficient number of issues regarding which conflict in this year’s General Assembly — of the intramural sort — will be inevitable.

It won’t be like Alabama vs. Notre Dame, in other words. More like Alabama’s varsity versus its taxi squad. Which is to say, closer and maybe more intense.

Norris on Tuesday at opening of 2013 legislative session