Snake Oil

Courtesy Grand Prairie ISD

Kids and parents shop around at the

At Grand Prairie ISD headquarters today, administrators are prepping for an overnight occupation, clearing room in the parking lot for at least a few die-hard parents who’ll show up tonight and brave the cold to be first in line by 8 a.m. Friday.

That’s when the district throws open its doors and starts accepting applications for next year’s “programs of choice” in sports medicine, cosmetology and other enticing specialties. There’s a fifth-grade program focused on the STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering, and math) concentration that’s in such high demand today, and another in culinary arts.

Many of the parents in line will have already been through last weekend’s “GPISD Experience” open house, where parents were invited to “Experience the power of choice in GPISD.” That’s usually the sort of deal school reformers offer to coax parents away from traditional schools they try to paint as outmoded and clunky. Now, Grand Prairie hopes to turn the tables and use the promise of “choice” to reel parents in from private schools, charters, and even traditional public schools nearby.

The district passed out 2,000 applications to its new specialized programs on Saturday, according to district spokesman Sam Buchmeyer. They even mailed out postcards to parents outside their usual enrollment boundaries.

That marketing campaign aimed at parents outside GPISD won them a little free press early this month, when one of their mailers reached the Dallas Observer’s Robert Wilonsky at home, inviting his family to leave Dallas ISD for greener pastures to the west.

“GPISD is an open enrollment district,” the postcard read. “You don’t have to live in Grand Prairie to choose GPISD!”

Buchmeyer told Wilonsky the “choice” programs were growing this year because they’d had had such a good reception for the district’s first experiment last year at Garner Fine Arts Academy. The school’s sagging enrollment put it on the verge of being shut down, so parents came up with the idea of rebranding and marketing the school to help lure new kids. Now Buchmeyer says he’s heard of parents in McKinney commuting an hour each way to bring their kids to Garner.

“The game has changed for public schools,” Buchmeyer told the Observer. “Before you didn’t say words like ‘marketing’ a district.”

Today in Grand Prairie, that’s exactly what you do, Buchmeyer told me on the phone. Charters have, of course, been playing the PR game for years, so all they’re doing is leveling the scales. “Our main competition that we see right now is from those private and charter schools, because they’ve been doing this overt marketing for years now,” he said.

Of course, smooth P.R. isn’t the same as good instruction, and it can be dangerous when it drowns out more even-handed measures of a school’s quality. Commenters on the Observer story were quick to allege it’s all just a scam to help fill the schools and shore up the district’s finances. They said the district was overselling its product.

The district was rated “acceptable” each of the last eight years, apart from a one-year climb to “recognized” in 2010. As they expand, Buchmeyer said they’ll continue marketing to the district’s strong points, and areas, like STEM programs, with the most demand.

The “choice” campaign at Garner Elementary did start with money troubles. “We knew that things were going to get dire. Not only for us but for districts all over the state,” he said. “As these budgets are getting tighter and tighter, [some districts] want to lop off programs. We didn’t want to go down that road.”

Instead, beginning with Garner Fine Arts academy, they’re rebranding schools to highlight their strengths. With a new name, and a new focus developed by fine arts faculty and curriculum directors, Garner went from around 300 students to more than 500 this year.

“The academic rigor stays the same. They just add this other emphasis,” Buchmeyer said. Not that a school whose mascot is a red, white and blue “All Star” needs an ego boost, but the state rated Garner “exemplary” in its first year as a fine arts academy.

They’re like magnet schools in many ways, but some of Grand Prairie’s “schools of choice” automatically enroll neighborhood kids first, then fill remaining spots with outsiders in the order they apply. “We’re trying to take care of our Grand Prairie kids first,” he says. Between 50 and 55 students from outside Grand Prairie are enrolled at Garner today, he said.

“It may be such that parents are not aware of what we’re doing, maybe they’ve seen stories in the media,” he said—all that gloom and doom about the budgets. This way, parents can get excited about traditional public schools. Choice won’t have to mean leaving the local ISD.

Unless they don’t already live in Grand Prairie, of course.

“We’re not encouraging anybody to just up and leave their current districts,” Buchmeyer says. “If they’re happy with their school and their district that’s fantastic.”

But they did send out those mailers.

Even if it’s a rare arrangement today, Texas Education Agency spokesperson Debbie Ratcliffe said any district can accept students from other districts if they like.

If a student leaves, say, Dallas ISD, and enrolls in Grand Prairie, DISD would lose funding at its per-student rate, and the state would boost GPISD’s funding for that student, at its per-student rate.

”If we’ve got empty seats, we’re not getting the state funding for those empty seats. It actually benefits our taxpayers if we put [more] kids in.” The scale is too small to register much across the system, but if it’s good news for Grand Prairie, it’s probably not great news for public schools losing kids to the suburb next door.

Ultimately, Buchmeyer hopes he can sell the point that it’s a good arrangement for students.

An earlier version of this story misstated the financial implications of a student transferring between districts. Districts would not split the funding for a student who transferred from one to the other.

Late last year in our story on the many ways Gov. Rick Perry’s pals have had their way in Texas (“The V.I.P. Room,” December 2011), Abby Rapoport made an example of a fight between big health care corporations and independent pharmacists, and how lobbyists close to the governor helped tip the scales.

In the latest step in Texas’ march to public health care privatization, some lawmakers wanted to insert a private-sector middle man into the system for reimbursing pharmacists serving customers on Medicaid. As they wrote in our December issue:

That would mean handing over Medicaid prescription drug negotiations to a for-profit company that would ostensibly save money for the Medicaid program by negotiating lower payments to pharmacies. Advocates argued the state could save as much as $100 million. Independent pharmacists would likely bear the brunt of such savings, losing the money they made serving Medicaid clients.

With a little help from former Perry staffers Ann-Marie Price, Victoria Ford and Mike Toomey too, of course, those prescription benefit managers got the measure pushed through. It wasn’t long before the pharmacists got a taste of just how rough the new system would be. By October, many independents got a contract offer from one of those pharmacy benefit managers, Wisconsin-based Navitus, offering a dispensing fee of just $1.35—an 80 percent cut from the $6.50 fee Texas had been paying.

On Tuesday, a handful of those pharmacists waited out a long hearing at the Capitol to warn the House Public Health Committee that managed Medicaid looks just as dangerous as they’d warned it would be last summer. 
Ronald Louis Rumsey, who runs Elam Road Pharmacy in Dallas, told the committee that 75 percent of his business is Medicaid. He said he’s carved out a niche selling meds and equipment for kids with asthma.

“To be blunt, I will not be able to take care of these asthmatic children unless something is done about the plan.” Under the contracts offered by Navitus and CVS Caremark, he said, “Applying the reimbursement formula from Navitus, and applying the proposed formula from CVS Caremark, I’ve determined that I will literally go broke trying to keep my pharmacy open.”
“In my heart, I don’t believe that the Legislature intended this to happen,” Rumsey said.

Committee chair Lois Kolkhorst sounded sympathetic to their concerns. At the very least, she said, the new system makes it harder for the state to follow Medicaid spending through the system, because the PBMs are basically a “black box.”
“They can buy in bulk and they can do possibly a good job,” she said, but who knows? And if pharmacies go out of business, or won’t take a loss to serve Medicaid patients, then mailing prescriptions to rural and inner-city patients is the only way to reach them, Kolkhorst warned, and “we’re headed down not a cost-saving path” at all.

Pharmaceutical managed care backers helped sell the state on “modernizing the Texas Medicaid pharmacy program” by promising $1.2 billion savings over the next decade, backed by numbers from the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based free-market advocate.

Texas Health and Human Services Commission spokesperson Stephanie Goodman has said there are plenty of safeguards built in to protect patients while the state’s busy saving money with managed care. “Any company that sets the rates too low to ensure our clients have that access will end up losing its contract with the state.”

But pharmacists say there’s no protection for them. One after another, they pled with the committee, using as many magic buzzwords as they could. They’re small business owners, they reminded. Job creators. Once they start having to lay off employees, what happens to them? Unemployment and Medicaid for those folks too.

One group that represents them, the Texas Pharmacy Business Council, wants HHSC to guarantee a minimum rate for reimbursing pharmacies or give small pharmacies an exemption from the managed care system. President Richard Beck, told the Observer yesterday the group is asking the Legislature to move fast and ask HHSC to protect independents from the pharmaceutical benefit managers’ harsh terms.

“They’re all scared to death, I’ll tell you this. And they should be,” Beck said. “If we wait till the next Legislature, we’re gonna have pharmacies gone. And they don’t come back.”

Patrick Michels

Protesters from Occupy Austin, Texas AFL-CIO and other workers' groups met Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in downtown Austin last week.

Late last week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual policy orientation drew a few hundred lawmakers, staffers and lobbyists together with pro-business and small-government champions from around the country for inspiration. The conservative research group—the “brains behind the curtain” of Rick Perry’s policies as governor—has seen its profile rise in Austin over the past few years, and the two-day affair at the downtown Austin Hilton reflected as much. This year, they even drew a protest.

At one panel on eliminating unnecessary white-collar offenses from the books, the Texas District & County Attorney Association’s Shannon Edmonds warmed up the crowd with a joke about his new beard. He’d hoped it would help him blend in when he went to visit the Occupy Austin camp, he said, “But they don’t wear too much deodorant there, so that didn’t last long.”

Within an hour or so, though, the unwashed masses of Occupy were in a park across the street—not to defend their odor, but to join the Texas AFL-CIO and a handful of other labor groups in welcoming TPPF’s lunchtime speaker: Scott Walker, the polarizing governor of Wisconsin.

Walker’s first year in office has been a blitz of new policies meant to break the unions’ power in his state, and while he’s loved by pro-business conservatives—an heir to Perry, perhaps, as a favorite governor in Middle America—he’s also sparked bitter resentment and an effort to recall him this summer. Earlier today, the Wisconsin Democratic Party announced they’d turned in more than one million signatures on petitions to recall the governor, well more than the 540,000 they needed.

The most common signs in the crowd outside the hotel last week read, “Recall Walker!” over a blue Wisconsin-shaped fist. Members of the group shouted out their affiliated union groups—AFSCME, the American Postal Workers’ Union, the Screen Actors’ Guild and others—and joined together to repeat a few chants: “What’s disgusting? Union busting!”

At lunch upstairs, TPPF’s president and Chief Executive Officer Brooke Rollins welcomed her audience into the packed ballroom. “I’m glad everyone made it safely into the building,” Rollins said, then individually thanked all the elected officials in the audience—a long list. She invited Texas Railroad Commissioner David Porter onstage to bless the hotel lunch.

After a series of glowing introductions—one called Walker “a hero”—the stage belonged to the 44-year-old governor and his folksy, nasal Wisconsin accent.

Walker preached to the choir about freeing his state from “big government union bosses,” declaring his state “open for business” and doing away with labor organizations’ most powerful tool. “Collective bargaining is not a right. Collective bargaining is an expensive entitlement, and it’s time we put the power back in the hands of the people,” Walker told the crowd.

Of course, Texas crossed that bridge long ago, when it became a right-to-work state. He might as well have suggested Texas abolish its state income tax.

But Walker wasn’t there to suggest policy for Texas. He’d taken some cues from the Texas model already, he said. Now he hoped to make Wisconsin’s pro-business, tough-on-unions approach a model for other states. And for that, he’d need help.

Tea party groups around the country have lined to help challenge individual signatures on the recall petitions, and Walker’s already raised upwards of $5 million to fight the recall effort. More than half of that has come from donors outside Wisconsin—including 10 percent from Texas. Bob Perry chipped in with a cool quarter million.

With the momentum of a big Republican win this summer (his), Walker told the crowd his state might go Republican in the presidential election, too. It would break a 28-year Democratic streak.

“I’m not gonna make a direct solicitation here today,” Walker said midway through his speech, “but the reality is that those who care, you can make an impact.”

As the target of a recall, Walker can raise unlimited cash until there’s a date set for the vote. But Walker played the part of the optimist underdog, one man up against a rabble like the crowd outside the hotel, that well-organized union network that can mobilize resistance wherever he travels.

“They’ve got the money and they’ve got the energy behind them,” Walker said. “We can counter with the truth.”

The headline reads like a dream for voter ID backers here in Texas: “Dead man voting: Texas man tries to cast posthumous ballot.”

The Boston Herald‘s dispatch from last night at the New Hampshire primary is cooked-to-order perfect for King Street Patriots and other “voter integrity” operations around the country:

A man asks for a ballot, gives election workers a bogus name and disappears into the night when the election judge recognizes the alias as a man who’s recently passed on.

From the Boston Herald:

The man, dressed in a suit and tie, did not say why he was trying to vote as the recently deceased person and would not identify any group he was representing.

“He said, ‘You’ll soon find out,’” Pilotte said.

…

The man, who admitted being from Texas, almost got away with the fraud. He came in to the polling place and gave election officials the name of a man who was still on the voter list. Voters here don’t have to present ID if they are registered.

All the hard evidence you need that the voter fraud threat is real, that our elections will only be safe when voting requires a photo ID. Nevermind that election judges testifying about vote fraud consistently say voter impersonation is the least likely kind of trouble they encounter.

Austin attorney Buck Wood, who’s spent decades checking elections for fraud, says there’s a simple reason why: “It doesn’t make any difference,” he says. “Garden variety election fraud just doesn’t have any impact on elections in Texas, and nobody would organize such a thing.”

It’s an inefficient strategy for anyone serious about swinging an election. Faking mail-in ballots might still get you caught, but they’re easier to fudge—and voter ID laws don’t change that.

“It’s pretty easy to catch this stuff,” Wood says. ”The only thing voter ID would do is frighten those people away from the polls who don’t have ID’s, but are perfectly eligible to vote.”

Tea party groups like Houston’s King Street Patriots, though, are rushing to inflame fears about the voter integrity threat—and stories like this from New Hampshire certainly help.

After all, this wasn’t some crackpot YouTube special last night, right? This is hard evidence, and in the mainstream press, too, that Texans are impersonating dead voters across the country. Even CNN’s got the story.

Manchester City Clerk Matt Normand told them it’s the first time he’s seen this sort of thing. But the whole thing sounds pretty strange.

First, of all, nobody “admits” to being from Texas, especially when they’re breaking the law and riding off into the night like the Hamburglar.

It sounds so cartoonish. Asked who he’s working for, this guy says, “You’ll soon find out?” It could almost be some kind of James O’Keefe/ACORN sting operation.

Wait. What about the YouTubes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-uVhhIlPk0

Project Veritas is, in fact, an O’Keefe operation, the nonprofit he started in 2010, and it looks like they and their cameras had quite a time Tuesday in New Hampshire. Here’s The Daily Caller’s report on the “exclusive” video footage from O’Keefe’s group.

I can’t pick this mystery Texan’s footage out of the video, if he’s in there, but it sure seems like a fair bet they’re connected. Project Vertas’ video closes with an ominous “To Be Continued…” so there could be even more of these sting operations on the way in the name of election “integrity.”

Office of the Governor

Flanked by Sen. Dan Patrick and Rep. Sid Miller, Gov. Rick Perry signed Texas' mandatory sonogram bill last summer.

Texas can begin enforcing its new pre-abortion sonogram law now, following a ruling this morning from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The law says women seeking an abortion must have a sonogram done 24 hours prior, and their doctor must play audio of the fetal heartbeat and describe what’s on the screen. The New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights jumped into federal court to challenge the law this summer, and in August, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks in Austin put the law’s enforcement on hold, agreeing that many of its new requirements violated doctors’ and patients’ free speech rights.

Sparks wrote the law “compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree, regardless of any medical necessity, and irrespective of whether the pregnant women wish to listen.”

Fans of the new law quickly dismissed Sparks’ ruling as the word of a meddling Austin leftist—a Bush-41 appointee, no less—who’d already made up his mind. “It is clear to me, from the inflammatory language in the order, that Judge Sparks was predisposed to this decision,” state Sen. Dan Patrick, one of the bill’s sponsors, said.

Sparks conceded in his opinion that he “has grave doubts about the wisdom of the Act.” He went even further, too, calling out its supporters for their hypocrisy:

It is ironic that many of the same people who zealously defend the state’s righteous duty to become intimately involved in a woman’s decision to get an abortion are also positively scandalized at the government’s gross overreaching in the area of health care.

He’s got a point. But Sparks’ lively opinions have also gotten him in trouble with the judiciary fun police in the past. When Sparks invited lawyers to a “kindergarten party” to learn the basics of our American court system, Chief Justice Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals took him to task, in a letter addressed to Sparks and circulated far and wide:

“It has not escaped my attention, or that of my colleagues or, I am told, nationally known blog sites that you have issued several ‘cute’ orders in the past few weeks… Frankly, this kind of rhetoric is not funny,” Jones wrote. ”I urge you to think before you write.”

Today, Jones took issue with Sparks’ thinking too, in the appeals court’s opinion in the sonogram case.

Jones wrote the requirements in the new sonogram law weren’t free speech violations, after all, because they’re covered by the 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. Notably, it’s a case Texas’ lawyers cited in their defense. Casey opened the door to tougher new “informed consent” requirements from states, and tightened other standards after Roe v. Wade.

As it happens, Jones comes to this case with some predispositions of her own.

Back in 2004, Jones was part of an appellate panel that dismissed a suit from Roe plaintiff Norma McCorvey, who’d hoped to get a second opinion from the Supreme Court, after deciding abortion shouldn’t be legal. “McCorvey now argues that abortion harms women – both emotionally and physically – and that social norms have changed, making single motherhood a more palatable option,” the Austin Chronicle reported at the time.

Jones conceded that McCorvey’s suit wasn’t a live issue anymore, but wrote she hoped the Supreme Court would take up Roe again soon:

In sum, if courts were to delve into the facts underlying Roe … they might conclude that the woman’s ‘choice’ is far more risky and less beneficial… That the Court’s constitutional decision-making leaves our nation in a position of willful blindness to evolving knowledge should trouble any dispassionate observer.

In the appellate court’s opinion today, Jones follows the same logic that drove Perry, Patrick, and the law’s House author, Rep. Sid Miller: A woman going in for an abortion doesn’t really know what she wants. During the session, Patrick said the bill “empowers” women.

Jones cites a line from Casey, much-quoted by folks backing abortion restrictions, saying the government can’t just allow a woman to go through with an abortion, willy-nilly, “only to discover later, with devastating psychological consequences, that her decision was not fully informed.” The line plays into a popular myth that abortion comes with a greater risk of mental health problems.

Jones also points out that it’s important to mandate that the sonogram’s performed, precisely because the woman might change her mind:

The provision of sonograms and the fetal heartbeat are routine measures in pregnancy medicine today. They are viewed as “medically necessary” for the mother and fetus. Only if one assumes the conclusion of Appellees’ argument, that pregnancy is a condition to be terminated, can one assume that such information about the fetus is medically irrelevant.

Read another way, Jones is suggesting that what those meddling New Yorkers at the Center for Reproductive Rights really want is just to end all the pregnancies.

The group’s CEO, Nancy Northup, issued a statement this afternoon calling the decision “extreme,” and saying it “clears the way for the enforcement of an insulting and intrusive law.” Perry called it “a victory for all those who stand in defense of life.”

The case will go to trial in Austin next week in Sparks’ court, where the two sides will duke it out over the rest of the law’s requirements, not just the free speech questions. However that comes out, today’s ruling gives a good idea how it’ll be met on appeal.