Excerpts from recent Iowa editorials

Forays into private enterprise by government entities in the past decade have eroded a federal policy dating to the 1950s which states, “The federal government will not start or carry on any commercial activity to provide a service or product for its own use if such product or service can be procured from private enterprise through ordinary business channels.”

That common-sense policy keeps getting changed. Just ask the U. S. Postal Service.

As email and online services have diminished the volume and significance of the U.S. Mail, the embattled postal service has gone on the offensive to gain customers. Of particular interest to us, some of those efforts involve winning customers away from newspapers.

For example: In a small eastern Iowa town, the local grocery store discontinued distribution of its advertising inserts through the newspaper so it could use a new program that the U.S. Postal Service is pushing, Every Door Direct Mail. In the same town, the postmaster convinced the chamber of commerce to use the mail instead of the newspaper to distribute its annual member directory.

The promotion is a full-on, aggressive sales pitch competing with private enterprise. A postmaster in Missouri told a newspaper publisher that he had been told by his superiors that he had to go see businesses in person to push the direct-mail option.

No word yet whether the U.S. Postal Service, which is losing an estimated $25 million per day, plans to report and distribute the city council summary, obituaries and Little League scores once it puts the small-town newspaper out of business.

Newspapers aren’t afraid of competition — but it should be fair competition. We have plenty of it in the marketplace, and we’re accustomed to working for our customers’ business. But must newspapers — or any other private, taxpaying entity, for that matter — compete with federal, state and local governments, which in many aspects enjoy legally established monopolies over the private sector? Must we compete with an entity that loses money year after year but is kept afloat by public dollars?

Yes, to some extent, government has long competed with the private sector, from the placards on and inside city buses to soft-drink logos affixed to scoreboards in sports venues. But what once was fairly passive marketing has turned aggressive, where government is trying to take business revenue away from taxpaying private enterprise.

Newspapers aren’t alone in the battle. The state of Iowa wants more money in its transportation department coffers. What’s the solution? Sell advertising sponsors for its 40 interstate rest stops. That was the news out of Des Moines last week. Naming rights and sponsorships are becoming a popular funding source for government.

It is a troubling trend that government is putting itself into competition with the private sector when it should be working harder to become more efficient and operate within its means.

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Globe Gazette. June 18, 2012.

More school hours may play role in effective schooling

Sending our children to school makes then smarter. If we want them to be even smarter still, maybe we should send them to school longer.

That’s the simple reasoning behind efforts to extend either the number of days students attend school each year, the number of hours they attend each day, or even some combination of both.

On the surface that seems like a logical solution to the problem of our children falling behind the academic performance of kids in many other countries. Many of those countries require significantly more school hours than we do of American students.

But more hours may not be the total answer, nor do longer school days or school years come easily or inexpensively.

This country’s typical school calendar comes from a time when we were an agricultural society, when the kids were needed at home in the afternoon and during the summer to help with farm chores. That’s no longer a consideration for most students, even in an ag-centric state like Iowa, and it may no longer make sense if we want our children to be able to compete in a world economy.

The Iowa Afterschool Alliance put on an all-day symposium last Thursday in Des Moines that drew education experts from around the country, including representatives of the Iowa Department of Education.

Mike Cormack, policy liaison with the department, said, “I think the need is there.” He referred to evidence presented during the symposium that showed if you target efforts at meeting the needs of specific students, they respond well.

There is less evidence that expanded school hours in general help raise every student’s performance. The verdict of the symposium was that more school hours are a popular but expensive reform that works in some but not all cases.

Some of the experts made the point that if the ways we are teaching students now isn’t effective for some, then just doing it more isn’t going to help those students.

Evidence was presented that targeted efforts — Saturday programs or after-school programs designed to address specific needs — are often remarkably successful.

The principal at a junior high school in Cedar Falls said about 200 of the school’s 500 students attend an after-school program each week, and they have charted fewer attendance issues, fewer behavioral issues and better scholastic performance among the students who attend.

“We try to target interests the kids have, and those are ever-changing, as a hook to get them into the program,” said Principal Dave Welter.

Education reform will continue to be a priority in the next legislative session. Gov. Terry Branstad presented some lofty goals before the last session, and he has said he will be back with another plan for the 2013 session. The length of the school calendar may be part of that.

Cormack said a specific proposal for extended school hours needs to be ready for the Legislature by Oct. 15, and a task force needs to be formed to discuss after-school and extended learning program options.

As we noted, extra time doesn’t come inexpensively. Teachers, administrators and other staff would expect — and would deserve — to be compensated for required longer hours. School buildings that are open more days or more hours will consume more utilities and require more maintenance.

Schools, our children, teachers, taxes and government spending are all emotional issues that are embroiled in this topic. The way to address it most effectively is to do as they did at the symposium last week — looking at the research scientifically for evidence of what does and what doesn’t work.

It’s likely some combination of a modest increase in school time for all students and targeted extra time for some will prove to be the most effective. And that — effectively teaching all students so that they can meet the needs of our society now and in the future — is what we’re all after.

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Sioux City Journal. June 17, 2012.

Cellphone use while driving: ‘A national epidemic’

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood calls cellphone use, including texting, while driving “a national epidemic.” Statistics support his warning.

Consider these numbers:

— The No.1 source of driver inattention is use of a wireless device. (Virginia Tech Transportation Institute/National Highway Transportation Administration).

— At any given moment during daylight hours, more than 800,000 vehicles are being driven by someone using a hand-held cellphone (U.S. Department of Transportation).

— In 2011, the National Safety Council estimated use of cellphones while driving caused 1.3 million accidents. Cellphone-related crashes kill thousands each year, according to a Harvard Center for Risk Analysis study.

— A texting driver is 23 times more likely to get into a crash than a nontexting driver (VTTI).

— Some 58 percent of high school seniors and 43 percent of high school juniors said they have texted or emailed while driving during the last month, according to the results of a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of 15,000 public and private high school students across the nation. According to a HealthDay poll in November 2011, 37 percent of all drivers have sent or received text messages while driving and 18 percent said they do so regularly.

— Sending or receiving a text takes a driver’s eyes from the road for an average of 4.6 seconds, the equivalent at 55 mph of driving the length of an entire football field … blind, according to VTTI. According to the University of Utah, distraction from cellphone use while driving extends a driver’s reaction time as much as having a blood alcohol-content level of 0.08 percent.

We could go on, but you get the point. Or, you should get the point.

Given the sheer number of Americans who own them, the problem of wireless device use while driving may have surpassed drinking and driving as the biggest danger on our roads and highways today. According to a 2010 survey by The Wireless Association, 91 percent of Americans use cellphones; in June 2011, the association said, 196 billion text messages were sent or received by Americans, a 50 percent increase in two years.

It’s time for society to apply the same sense of purpose to the goal of reducing cellphone use while driving as we have in reducing drunken driving, which declined 30 percent between its peak in 2006 and 2011.

Clearly and accordingly, the issue is getting increased attention. The federal Department of Transportation (www.distraction.gov) and most state governments have enhanced and strengthened efforts to keep drivers from using wireless devices, particularly to text, while driving (Iowa is one of 39 states which have banned texting and driving). If as a parent, you recently sent a son or daughter through a local driver education class, you know the emphasis these instructors put on preventing cellphone use while driving.

In even more high-profile fashion, efforts to educate and warn drivers (particularly young, beginning drivers) about the dangers of using a wireless device while driving must continue. The private sector must partner with the public sector to spread and reinforce this message. All states should ban texting while driving and make sure penalties provide proper punishment and deterrent.

No amount of focus on and discussion of this issue is too much.

Finally, Americans collectively must embrace the message, heed the warnings and adopt a mindset through which cellphone use while driving is considered no different than drinking and driving.

Turn off the cellphone or place the phone out of your reach while driving. If you must make a call or send a text, pull off the road. Parents, set the proper example for your teen drivers. Don’t call or text while you are driving and don’t call or text your teen at times when you know they are behind the wheel.

We’re all out there on our roads together. Let’s all do our part to make them as safe as we can.

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Ames Tribune. June 16, 2012.

About that misunderstood tuition set-aside

Since March, a decades-old, little-noticed scholarship funding formula at Iowa’s Regents universities has fallen victim, like so many things do these days, to political posturing and partisanship.

It’s the “tuition set-aside” that since the 1980s has funded need-based and merit scholarships at the University of Iowa, Northern Iowa University and Iowa State University. Under the formula, dollars equal to about 22 percent of the amount of tuition collected are earmarked for scholarships.

Opponents of the formula, who seem to have just noticed it this year, are calling it wealth redistribution and a hidden tax. They describe it, unfairly, as taking money out of the pockets of hard-working middle class families and giving it to poorer students. The reasoning goes that if the set-aside is eliminated, tuition at the public universities will suddenly drop 22 percent.

That’s a simplistic view that plays well with the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-anything-public crowd. But it isn’t exactly accurate, and it feeds a destructive us-versus-them antipathy.

To say that 22 percent of every student’s tuition payment is siphoned off and handed to another student is simply incorrect. The tuition money, nearly $264 million at ISU in 2010-11, goes into the general fund along with state allocations and money from private sources such as the ISU Foundation. From that fund, salaries are paid, programs are run and scholarships are granted.

The scholarship money was keyed to tuition because tuition dollars reflect enrollment. As enrollment rises, so does tuition revenue, and so does the need for financial aid. And the reason the universities have to fund their own scholarships is that Iowa, unlike virtually every other state, does not have a state-funded scholarship program for its public universities.

Eliminating the set-aside, as the Regents voted to do earlier this month, puts the universities’ ability to fund scholarships in the hands of the Legislature instead of their own. They are hoping the Legislature will restore up to $40 million of the set-aside money, and that the university foundations will be able to raise more money for scholarships from private sources. But with a set-aside in 2011 of $144 million for the three universities, it’s overly optimistic to think private sources can fill in a $100 million gap.

If the set-aside money isn’t replaced, one of two things would happen. Either available financial aid would go down — putting college out of reach for some students and lowering enrollment, which would in turn lower tuition revenue, causing either program cuts or tuition increases for the remaining students — or financial aid would come out of operating funds without the set-aside — causing either program cuts or tuition increases.

What would not happen is a sudden 22 percent decrease in tuition for Iowa students, and it is naive or disingenuous to suggest that eliminating the set-aside will do that. As it is, in-state students paying full tuition already pay about $2,000 less per year than the actual cost of their education.

If, however, the Legislature were to create a viable financial aid program for students attending our public universities, like other states provide their students, the need for the set-aside would disappear. Interestingly, Iowa does have a state-funded scholarship program for students attending private universities, to the tune of nearly $50 million a year.

A state program for our public institutions should be equally robust. Access to higher education is essential for economic success, and our students deserve nothing less.