“…I think fundamentally there is just a group of folks who are troubled by the basic notion of public education. It’s, it’s not a free market thing. It’s very much a collective effort of our country and of our state. It’s saying, this is important, this is essential for Democracy, this is essential for everybody’s economic well being, we pool together our resources. There are folks who just don’t, that’s just not their approach to things, they don’t like the idea that we work together and we support and, and help everybody move forward together…”

In the last month or so we’ve received four separate very slick mailings from Michelle Rhee’s organization, Students First.

Yesterday in Jefferson City we had the opportunity to speak briefly with Otto Fajen, the Missouri National Education Association Legislative Director, about education issues at the Capitol:

Show Me Progress: What’s your assessment of the legislative session?

Otto Fajen, Legislative Director, MNEA: I think the assessment is that they are in danger of, uh, really dropping the ball when there was consensus on some common sense pieces because those have been held hostage to, uh, kind of an out of state well funded Wall Street, uh, agenda.

Show Me Progress: And, and this is, uh, in, in reference to, uh, sort of an education, uh, kind of reform movement that’s funded from out of state?

Otto Fajen: Right. Right, I’m talking about Students First. Uh, it’s a new, relatively new group. They set up shop in Missouri. They’re in about a dozen other states. Um, they’ve set up, within the last year or so, here in Missouri. And they’re pushing various versions of kind of an anti, uh, worker anti union agenda couched in terms of, oh, we’re all about the kids, uh, hence the name, Students First…

…Show Me Progress: And, and we’ve noticed it in, in our area, we’ve been getting a lot of mail from them.

Otto Fajen: Yeah, they’ve had a lot, they have the money to do a lot of media campaigns. And it’s interesting because they, they want to portray themselves as, um, you know, very progressive, you know, kind of, friendly to both parties and yet, when you look at their leadership, you look at Michelle Rhee, she’s kind of working in, in, uh, partnership with all of the usual figures, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, all the folks you see leading the charge in their respective states to try to take away rights for workers.

Show Me Progress: Uh, and, and do we have any idea who’s funding this?

Otto Fajen: Um, I think I, we’ve heard that indications that Eli Broad, uh, the Koch brothers, um, I think we’ve seen some indications that there’s a bit of an alliance with Rex Sinquefield, the Missouri, uh, funder of such causes. And I’m sure there are others.

Show Me Progress: And, and ultimately, what is their agenda?

Otto Fajen: Well, it, it’s hard to tell exactly what their specific policy desire is this year in Missouri ’cause their legislation has bounced all around. Um, but in general there’s a mistrust that, um, organization of workers can play a positive role, in particular in education. You know, when Americans come together with a collective voice somehow that’s gonna necessarily be something that’s to be distrusted and, and, uh, also, and I, the notion they communicate is that teachers get lazier and, and less, less productive as they get older. Uh, that there’s no value to experience, of learning how to really work your classroom and make sure that you’re taking care of the need of all the kids.

Show Me Progress: Uh, isn’t a big part of, uh, their agenda, this, sort of like standardized testing?

Otto Fajen: We’ve also seen that they want to really push that and it, it’s so the wrong direction for Missouri to overemphasize a very limited notion of the overall goal of public education. Uh, we’re really at risk of restricting, kind of dumbing down and confining the focus of public education. And it’s really, there’s no evidence whatsoever that this mania caused by No Child left Behind and, and state efforts that are leveraged by that has really produced anything beneficial. And in fact, most of the evidence is it’s a problem for school systems that left to their own devices would be better able, have more flexibility to really meet the needs of the kids and the parents and the district.

Show Me Progress: and, and isn’t this kind of ironic given, sort of, Michelle Rhee’s history?

Otto Fajen: Yes, it is kind of ironic. She has a kind of a dubious record I would say. Um, from the evidence we see from her history in D.C. public schools, uh, she was only there for a little over two years. Uh, she was very confrontational rather than trying to move the district forward together. She really wanted to attack the teachers, um, caused her to be un, her and the mayor to be unpopular. And now we’ve, you know, although she had touted that her kind of a hard line changes to the ay the district was running were great reforms that were producing great results. Now there’s a federal investigation going in to the, the test company flagged, uh, evidence that there was a lot of right to wrong test erasures. It’s an indicator of some kind of, uh, malfeasance going on in the, in the testing process. And so that, that, uh, kind of a systemic investigation is underway to determine if there, some of those gains were actually brought about because of improper conduct and cheating.

Show Me Progress: In, in the past when, uh, you know, I’ve seen the kind of polling data, when you ask people about their local public schools they have a very high opinion of them and the teachers that are in them. And yet, we get rhetoric that sort of demonizes teachers as, as a group, you know, collectively. Uh, how did we get there?

Otto Fajen: I think fundamentally there is just a group of folks who are troubled by the basic notion of public education. It’s, it’s not a free market thing. It’s very much a collective effort of our country and of our state. It’s saying, this is important, this is essential for Democracy, this is essential for everybody’s economic well being, we pool together our resources. There are folks who just don’t, that’s just not their approach to things, they don’t like the idea that we work together and we support and, and help everybody move forward together. And so the teachers are kind of at the center of the wok of doing that, and so they, unfortunately, have kind of become the target. Even though Gallup polling shows that right now, they’ve been polling on what people think about their local school district, and the support for the district, the teachers and, and the programs, it’s never been higher than it is now in twenty-five years they’ve polled.

Show Me Progress: well, thank you very much for your time.

Otto Fajen: You’re quite welcome.

Oh, and Michelle Rhee? She’s a registered lobbyist in the State of Missouri, via the Missouri Ethics Commission:

LOBID:L003301 Received Date:1/30/2012

Lobbyist’s Name Michelle Rhee Termination Date:

Lobbyist’s Address 825 K Street

Lobbyist’s Address2 2nd Floor

Lobbyist’s C/S/Z Sacramento, Ca 95814

[….]

Principal(s) listed by Lobbyist

[….]

STUDENTS FIRST

PO BOX 5280

SACRAMENTO CA 95817

(916) 287-9221 A 2/8/2012

Go figure.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of MNEA – Michael Bersin]

This afternoon Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) Legislative Director Otto Fajen and Senator David Pearce (R-31), chair of the Education Committee, spoke on the campus of the University of Central Missouri (UCM) about education issues in the current legislative session and took questions from the audience at an event sponsored by the UCM MNEA unit.

After that session we had the opportunity to speak with Otto Fajen:

Show Me Progress: Could you tell me in, in overall terms how this legislative session is going in Jefferson City, um, for K through twelve and for higher education? In general terms.

Otto Fajen, Legislative Director, MNEA: I’ll do the best I can. Uh, I think the first thing I would say is there’s still a lot of uncertainty about this session. Um, we, after the election, were very, in the, in the Senate leadership struggles, we were concerned that it was showing a real policy shift in the Senate. Um, and with the senate Democratic Caucus being so small we, we weren’t sure whether the Senate would still kind of be that voice of reason that it has typically been in the past on K twelve and higher education policy. But with the appointment of Senator David Pearce [R] to continue to be education chair, uh, where many of us were concerned that it was gonna be a far right person like Senator Jane Cunningham [R]. That kind of sent a signal that maybe the Senate wasn’t gonna kind of fall off the edge of the earth. And so we haven’t really seen that huge race of, uh, profoundly disturbing policy ideas through the Senate yet. And, in fact, the education committee doesn’t seem to be moving very quickly on much of anything. And so the session has been slower perhaps than we might have thought from what we heard on the first day of session. Um, obviously the House leadership has been more antagonistic toward K twelve education and, uh, kind of angry in their tone about, uh, firing bad teachers. But again, the action on the ground in the committee on that hasn’t really taken place. And we’re trying to be very proactive in saying, you know, we are not that happy with the status quo. We’ve got ideas on how to do something that would actually work rather than just throw up your hands and try to blame teachers, uh, for problems that go far beyond what goes on directly in schools…

MNEA Legislative Director Otto Fajen (left) and Senator David Pearce (R-31)(right), chair of the Education Committee,

taking questions at an MNEA event on the campus of the University of Central Missouri.

…Show Me Progress: Uh, from the, from the budget standpoint, uh, the, the hundred eighty-nine million dollars in, um, federal stimulus money for education, uh, how does that affect the, the upcoming state budget?

Otto Fajen: Well, it’s, it, it’s already had a profound effect because it had a profound effect on what the governor and the state budget office and State Budget Director Linda Luebbering could do, what they could try to propose to do.  Um, it helped them, for instance, in K twelve, not utterly eliminate the pupil transportation categorical. Um, and their proposal was to actually, based upon the federal guidance at the time, spend that money this year, make the formula whole, but have districts hold on to it and then basically spend it next year where the formula would un, unfortunately have then been kind of massively underfunded. And what the House folks in consultation with the Senate budget folks and the governor’s office is, the federal, uh, restrictions seem to have been melted slightly to where they can send the money out early next year and that really smoothes out, and it really lets that money build a bridge, save the transportation categorical. It also has a spillover effect in terms of what they were able to propose in their budget in other sectors, including higher ed. So, that money was a big win, uh, we’re gonna still have to fight, um, to make sure that the real far right ideologues in the Senate don’t try to hold that money up and not allow it to be spent.

Show Me Progress: And, and speaking of that, if, uh, if they hold up that money or, literally turn it back, it, it doesn’t have a net effect on the, the federal budget because…

Otto Fajen: No. No, that’s the irony, is that their rhetoric, oh, we’re, we need, we need to be off the federal dole and we’ll help, we’ll help finance the federal debt. But, this money, there’s a distribution mechanism. And if Missouri doesn’t spend it on our schools and our kids it will be redistributed to other states and they will be able to spend it on their kids and their schools.

Show Me Progress: And there are other states that are perfectly happy to do that.

Otto Fajen: California, Illinois, New York, Michigan, they’re gonna be delighted to have an extra hundred and eighty-nine million dollars split, you know, amongst the other states that sense enough to spend this money.

Show Me Progress: Um, what’s the long term outlook, do you think, for, uh, the financial stability of public higher education in the state?

Otto Fajen: It’s not good right now. Uh, we’re, we’re profoundly concern, and that’s, you know, we’re profoundly concerned about this particularly dangerous proposal, the fair tax. But, setting that aside for the moment, even if that, even if we’re able to keep that from coming in and really wrecking state finance, we don’t see the state’s finances being positive enough.  And higher ed is always the one that’s most at risk. K twelve education is written into the constitution at square one and has constitutional protection in terms of funding and adequacy. So, K twelve funding pretty much tracks on a graph with state money. Higher education is the one that’s most at risk when finances turn down. Aand we’re not really seeing a great outlook that things are gonna turn rapidly around in a positive direction where higher ed usually then receives kind of, you know, maybe a bounce back in the really good time. So, we’re profoundly concerned that absent real leadership, real action on revenues, um, we’re gonna continue to see, uh, the kinds of struggles and downsizing that we’re seeing right now in higher ed.

Show Me Progress: And, and in the long term, uh, that has, uh, uh, a definite effect on accessibility and, and, actually, economic outlook for the state.

Otto Fajen: But, at, you know, we, in, in, our folks in K, K twelve really set the stage, but higher ed is where the, the, that’s the capstone. That’s where the real action is in terms of economics. And so, if we’re not gonna make the investment now in terms of serving our kids with higher education they’re not gonna be positioned to be the people we need, um, down the road. And it’s gonna be much more expensive overall in the long run to not have, make, make that investment in higher ed. That’s really, we set the stage for that in K twelve, but the, well, the important action there in, in higher ed has a profound impact on where Missourians end up economically.

Show Me Progress: All right. Well, thank you very much.

Otto Fajen: You’re quite welcome.

From MNEA lobbyist Otto Fajen:

“We’re the people you hire to protect you from the people you elect.”

From Rep. Chris Kelly, D-Columbia:

“Oh, I’m sure we and all Missourians will be better off when we pass that “Freedom to pray” constitutional amendment.  After all, it is just a much simpler alternative to health care.”

From Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford, commenting on the House Republicans’ refusal to accept $100 million in free Medicaid funds a year because that would be offering “welfare” to “able bodied adults”:

“It’s funny what we call welfare and what we don’t. When we help millionaires and billionaires build a baseball stadium, we don’t call it welfare.”

Otto Fajen, Missouri NEA Legislative Director, at the capitol building in Jefferson City.

I spoke early this afternoon with Otto Fajen, Missouri NEA Legislative Director, in front of the capitol building in Jefferson City.

[transcription by cc]

Show Me Progress: So the, uh, the, uh, how would you assess the, the legislative session?

Otto Fajen: Uh, how would I assess? Well…

SMP: In, in, in large terms, in overall terms…  

Otto Fajen: Yeah, overall terms?  

SMP: And its success and the things that are obviously in your area of interest.

Otto Fajen: Yeah, in overall terms it really has been remarkably, for all of the heat and light and energy put into trying to move legislation, it’s been remarkably unproductive.

SMP: Wow.

Otto Fajen: You know if you look at, and it’s, in a certain way that’s predictable when you have a legislature controlled on both sides by one party and a governor of the other party. There’s going to be a natural inclination on the part of the legislature not to give the governor of the other party what he wants, not to give him his victories. So if you looked at the things he wanted, not all of which we, you know, necessarily took a strong position on but, the tax credit bill, the jobs, they call it the jobs bill, that was one of his big priorities. So that hasn’t passed. Let’s see what else have been there. The, the use of the federal money has come in and it was actually, in a certain sense, it allayed one of our biggest fears ’cause we, have been, we, we pay careful attention to the balance of state revenue. It’s why we spend so much time talking about tax justice and adequate taxation, it’s ’cause they can’t do anything in terms of investing if they don’t have the money.

SMP: If there’s no money or if there’s…

Otto Fajen: And we saw, as they’ve pointed out, if you didn’t have the federal money, we’d be looking at eight hundred million plus in general revenue deficit. We’d be looking at major cuts…[crosstalk]

SMP: In everything.

Otto Fajen: …In higher ed. be, You’d probably would really struggle not to cut K-12, which has a constitutional mandate protection and litigation going on right now. But even then they might be hard-pressed not to cut that. Higher ed would probably be getting slaughtered. Other, you know, social services, we’d be cutting funding there. Which in many cases would probably be also cutting federal matching money, it would be just a disaster…

…SMP: Where do the, uh, where does the use of tax credits come into, this kind of, does it exacerbate the problem?

Otto Fajen: It exacerbates the problem, and the problem, and, and what was interesting was some people that we are not always on the same page on, were really right on message on this, this session. People like Senator Crowell from Cape Girardeau, Senator Lager from up northwest, they really were speaking at enormous length on the fact that the tax credits are essentially equivalent mathematically to an appropriation but they’re done in a way that the legislature has no control over it. They off…, they pass this bill, they hand over control of this tax credit to say the Department of Economic Development and in some cases there are no limits. And so it’s, it’s kind of like writing a blank check. Things are going to happen, credits are going to be issued, things will happen and then when it comes time to collect revenues, “Oh, wait a minute, here’s a whole big chunk of revenue that we thought we were going to have, that we don’t have.” And obviously when it doesn’t come in you can’t appropriate it for what you thought you were going to appropriate it for. And so they pointed out that that has really undermined our ability to maintain funding for K-12 and higher ed.

SMP: In, uh, so now in more specific terms, what has happened with your agenda for, uh…

Otto Fajen: For education?  

SMP: Yeah, for education.

Otto Fajen: If you look at what’s across the goal line, so to speak, there’s not much. On the other hand, there is still, there are still some big bills in play which have a big mix of some pieces that are, would be helpful and some really dreadful ideas that are, that are not very workable. We got Senate Bill 291, seems to be kind of the, the rat ahead in the race to get through the House. And it, it has, it’s this book that I have here has like two hundred and seventy-five pages or so. All kinds of stuff, including improvements to school, modest improvements to school funding using the gambling stuff that we hope will come in. Other, other improvements to policy and one of the pieces is a clear statement on professional teaching standards in K-12 schools. So there’s some real positives there. There’s the Quality Rating System for early childcare. Some real positive pieces. Then they’ve got some real negative pieces stuck in there, too. They’ve got some really awful language that relates to the school employees that would make it basically to where school employees would be innocent until, er, guilty until proven innocent. When it comes to allegations against them. Really could allow a, a resentful student to take a school employee who is innocent of any wrongdoing out of public education for their whole life. So, we think that’s going to come out before the end of the day but it’s really, as it stands in the bill right now, it would be a huge problem.

SMP: So the b..the bill is…

Otto Fajen: Senate Bill 291.

SMP: It’s, but it’s, it’s got almost everything in it?

Otto Fajen: Just about everything you, that’s been talked about. [crosstalk]

SMP: And so it’s, it’s the kind of thing where somebody can literally vote for it and not know what they’re voting for?

Otto Fajen: Yeah, or I mean, you know, the vote on it almost, almost hardly becomes meaningful, yes or no, because there are things that you, you know, almost everybody has something they hate. We have several pieces we hate.  We have several pieces we really like. A governor, governor, bill like this were to come to his desk, what is he supposed to do with it? Does he sign it or veto it? You know, I, I, if I were, if I were governor, I would almost consider saying, you know, anything over a hundred pages I’m just going to veto because it’s got, you know, it’s not the proper legislative process. You know you really are supposed to try to send more identifiable things that you can have a clear vote on and whether vetoing it or not vetoing it means something.

SMP: And, and is this normal for the process? Or is this, is this bill in and of itself in the form that it’s taken something that’s unique?

Otto Fajen: It, it has become, it is always been a poss…possibility that you had a reliance on big bills but you’ve, we’ve seen a trend as we’ve seen more polarization in the people who are here, especially the people who are, like have a really extreme ideology that doesn’t fit with our basic Missouri values, that you start to see more things being blocked, more things that ought to be reasonable seem…you know, they get stym…stymied so when you can’t get the original bill, you find a way to glom it into the omnibus bill and then it gets pulled out towards the end of session. [wind noise] But we’ve seen, we’ve seen that increase and increase and we’ve seen the legislative, like the mile markers for when bills get to a certain point. Every year it kind of gets later and later and they’re working on, for instance working on their own bills, later and later in the session. And not turning to the other chamber until later and later in the session. Bickering between the chambers, even more than they used to, so.

SMP: All right,
well thank you very much.

“Your tax policy oughtta look like it was done on purpose,” said Otto Fajen of the MNEA. Speaking at the State of the State Budget Summit last week, he applied that bit of wisdom to school funding in Missouri and found our formula wanting.

One statistic illustrates the problem: Missouri is near the top in a category you don’t want to win. We rank fourth in the nation as far as high local spending on schools. In other words, if you got the hefty tax base in your community, then you get good schools. Otherwise, fuhgeddaboudit. The spread in what local districts spend is twenty to one. In other words, the Clayton school district in St. Louis County spends twenty times as much in local funding as the poorest districts in the state. Clayton residents feel they have to spend that kind of money to get the education they want for their students, and the state sure isn’t going to provide it.

I mean. Is such inequity the sort of tax policy a state would design on purpose?

We also have the dubious distinction of bucking a national trend. As a result of litigation in other states, the state share of funding for schools has been rising in many places.

There is hope, though, that Missouri will shift direction, because we too have litigation wending its way through our courts: litigation filed on January 6, 2004 asserting that our school funding has been inadequate and inequitable. It’s headed for the Supreme Court, and a decision should be handed down by June 30 of next year.

The Budget Summit speakers on Medicaid and transportation made the case that federal funds spent on their area of expertise would benefit the entire state economy. Likewise with Fajen.

He argues that it makes no sense to ratchet back school spending. If our state can’t provide a quality work force, then we don’t attract businesses. A qualified pool of employees is much more important to companies looking to relocate or deciding whether to stay than tax credits are. But if funding has already been inadequate, think what the withering state revenue will do to public education, which always takes a hit in hard times. On the other hand, if federal dollars come to our educational system, schools can help create an environment where businesses thrive. What’s more, those federal dollars will get spent at Shop ‘n Save, Target, and Home Depot by the thousands of school district employees.

Fajen warned that Amendment A and the repeal of loss limits for casinos was not designed to have much financial impact on schools in fiscal year 2009. Missouri’s schools need federal help this year–and presumably will get some in the form of capital improvements, according to the plan Obama has outlined.

They also need to win that litigation before the Supreme Court.