Fun with LTE's

Albert Gabel, a retired OSU professor, wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Dispatch that praised David Robinson for his campaign while decrying the fact that Pat Tiberi receives big chunks of money from the types of donors (PACs, Lobbyists, Corporate interests) who are looking for favors.

Today Debbie Koch responded with a Letter to the Editor chiding Gabel for implying that Tiberi wasn't representing all of the people in the district, and urging voters to do their homework.

So I did some homework. Deborah Koch of Dublin (43017) gave a few hundred bucks to Tiberi back in 2000. No big deal. I've donated to his opponent this year. What's more interesting is that Gary Koch of Dublin (43017) has given more than $13000 to Republicans over the last ten years, including about $5,000 to Tiberi alone.

Do you know what Gary Koch does for a living? He's a lobbyist. As his bio page on his current employer's site states:

Mr. Koch's government relations career began in 1977 when he joined the Ohio Council of Retail Merchants, a trade association that represents the retail industry before the Ohio Legislature. In September of 1982, he joined the Ohio Petroleum Council as Vice President, where he lobbied on behalf of the major oil companies. Three years later, Mr. Koch moved to AT&T where he worked not only in Columbus but in Washington, D.C. ...

Now, I don't know for sure that Gary and Deborah Koch share anything more than a last name, a zip code, and a penchant for Republicans, but for the sake of imagination, let's pretend they're married. If that's true, then the response to the letter saying that Pat Tiberi was the Representative of lobbyists and corporations was no more than 'no he isn't, don't be negative' written by... the homemaker wife of a corporate lobbyist. If it's not one household, well then I apologize to Mrs. Koch and thank her for inadvertently steering me to the name of another big lobbyist donor of Pat's.

Either way, like I said, homework is fun.

Rating Schools

Last week I threw out a comment about suburban school districts whining about State Report cards that don't let them coast on their demographic profiles. Paul from Save the Hilliard Schools took some exception in the comments, in part as I seemed to have implied that Bexley's success was as meaningful as Dublin's (and Hilliard's) shortcomings. It was a fair point, and what I really meant to say was that Dublin's shortfall this year was a) much more meaningful than the previous 'excellent' rating (or Bexley's currrent 'excellent' rating for that matter), and b) that the mere idea that Dublin and Cleveland deserved the same rating was not at all as ludicrous as the Dispatch tried to make it out to be.

As if in response (that's been happening a lot lately...), a press release has come out describing work on school ratings done by two OSU researchers:

Currently, most people believe that it is obvious which schools are the best – the ones with the highest achievement scores. But using achievement scores to measure school quality assumes that all schools have students with equivalent backgrounds and opportunities that will give them equal opportunities to succeed in school. And that's obviously not true, von Hippel said.

...

By comparing test scores at the end of kindergarten and the beginning of first grade, the researchers could measure learning rates during summer vacation.

Comparing test scores from the beginning and end of first grade allowed the researchers to see how much children learn during the school year.

They then were able to calculate how much faster students learned during the first-grade school year compared to when they were on summer vacation. This was the "impact" score that showed how much schools were actually helping students learn.

"If we evaluate schools that way, things change quite a bit as far as which ones we would identify as failing," Downey said.

...

Based on achievement scores, failing schools tend to be in urban areas, serve a higher percentage of children who qualify for a free lunch, and have a high minority population.

But if you look at impact scores, failing schools are not as concentrated in poor, urban areas with high minority populations.

"When you shift the focus from achievement to impact, there are still schools that do very well and some that do poorly," von Hippel said. "But they are not necessarily where you think they are. There are high-impact schools in every kind of neighborhood, serving every kind of child. The same is true of low-impact schools."

The research appears in the current issue of the journal Sociology of Education (for those who wonder about such things, it has an ISI impact of 1.4, putting it in the top 15-20% of journals in either Sociology or Education). I went back to the actual journal article (subscription only, no link) to answer a question I had and was satisfied both with the overall methodology (those sociologists certainly know how to isolate variance), and with the answer to my question:

A final concern is that impact-based evaluation may penalize schools with high achievement. It may be difficult for any school, no matter how good, to accelerate learning during the school year for high-achievement children. Our study, however, did not find a negative correlation between impact and achievement; to the contrary, the correlation between achievement and impact was positive, although small (see Table 3). And among schools in the top quintile on achievement, 26 percent were also in the top quintile on impact (see Table 4), suggesting that it is possible for a high-achieving school to have high impact as well.

I would love for Franklin County to pilot an impact-based evaluation model, and it would certainly be a chance for Dublin and Hilliard to show that they really are doing more for their students than Southwest or Whitehall are doing for theirs.

Picking up my Slack

Things I might normally blog, that you might normally be looking for, that are notably not here.

When I wrote about ballot length and voting lines earlier this week, I had not yet read the report commissioned by the Franklin County BOE on how to allocate voting machines. It is one of the more impressive pieces of consultant work I've seen. It has problems, but it is light years ahead of what anyone else is doing. Read it Here. Comment at the BOE meeting on Thursday 8/14 at 6:30pm. I've asked the authors for the tables they used in the report, but have heard nothing back. Next week I'll discuss where the potential problems are.

The Garland campaign office is up and running in Bexley. After I followed up on a PolitickerOH piece by commenting on the lack of campaigning by Garland's opponent, the Dispatch article that mirrored the content and format of the Politicker piece included a reference to the lack of respect McGregor's campaign intensity engenders. Following up on that, PolitickerOH interviewed McGregor, who declared his continued desire to hold the office. Garland's response is well documented at Ohio Daily Blog.

Ohio Daily Blog also has a mention of the upcoming fundraiser for David Robinson in New Albany featuring Chris Redfern, head of the ODP. This is hopefully the first of many helping hands the bigger names in the party will lend to help put this race more in the spotlight.

Robinson's opponent, Pat Tiberi, got knocked around a bit by another blogger last week, as Kelley Bell went off on PT's franking abuse.

Bexley Schools got another Excellent report card. The media has seen it but ODE doesn't have it up on the website, so no data/link here yet. By the way, Bexley hit all but one of the sub-group NCLB standards. Dublin didn't fare so well and lost its Excellent rating. Larry Wolpert (R-Hilliard), whose home district befell the same fate last year, is trying to get the report card system changed as a result. The Dispatch supports him. I strongly disagree with both of them. The CD asks:

...how meaningful is a ranking system that assigns the same verdict to Dublin City Schools, which met all 30 criteria, as that earned the year before by the Cleveland City Schools, which met four?

I'd say it's quite meaningful. If Cleveland's students were 90% White/Asian and 10% economically disadvantaged, and if Dublin's student body were 17% White/Asian and 100% (!!) economically disadvantaged, that 30 vs. 4 would be remarkable. As it stands, all I know is that the students who do well in every district do well in Dublin, and I know nothing about the quality of Dublin Schools per se. So spare me.

Speaking of Education, Bexley resident/Education Foundation Head/Former school board member Linda Kass was named by Ted Strickland to The Ohio OSU Board of Regents Trustees. Interesting thing about Linda Kass? She and her husband contributed at least $26,500 between 1990 and this year to Pat Tiberi, Deborah Pryce, John Kasich, George W. Bush, Bob Ney, Bernadine Healy, and the RNC. This spring, she made her first ever contribution to a Dem in a federal campaign, maxing out at $2.3k for Obama. I wonder what happened.

Columbus Ballot Buffer Overload

Not in the machine memory. In my memory. I need to write a really big post about the Columbus ballot. What you are reading is a big summary post, but not nearly big enough. The longer I go without posting, though, the longer the needed post gets, and the less likely I am to post anything. So...

As far as I'm concerned the 2004 Columbus ballot, which had eight municipal bond proposals, almost undoubtedly robbed Kerry of far more votes than caging, poll challenges, ID rules, and touch screens combined. Thankfully, the folks who can do something to prevent a repeat are trying to do so. There have been a number of developments on the Franklin County voting front in recent days, and each of them deserves an in-depth piece with links. First of all, FC will have more machines. Second of all, these machines will be supposedly be distributed based on data that is current as of the fall, rather than as of the spring. Third of all, the FC Board of Elections has been piloting test ballots with actual voters to determine the average voting time. This will be a factor in distributing machines. And finally, on a related note, SOS Brunner has issued an advisory to BOEs advising them to not strictly enforce the 5-minute statutory limit on time at the ballot for each voter. Each of these things is a piece of good news, and together they are VERY good news for Barack Obama, David Robinson, and Mary Jo Kilroy. The only thing marring this set of developments is Dennis L. White's declaration that the new systems in place in Franklin County are better than the procedures in 2004, because then "It was all gut instinct."

In case you don't remember, in the aftermath of the voting tragedy in Columbus in 2004, Director of Elections Matt Damschroder countered charges of racial discrimination in voting machine distribution by explaining each of the quantifiable factors that went into the allocation formula which was approved by a bi-partisan BOE. William Anthony, an African-American and then head of the BOE, gave cover when he was quoted as saying no racially-based disenfranchisement occurred, noting that he had signed off on the decisions and he had no reason to discriminate against Democrats and/or people of color. This quote was used by Republicans (including, IIRC, Pat Tiberi) to denounce Democrats during the floor speeches associated with the challenge to the electoral votes being counted.

It appears that Damschroder later waffled a bit on the degree to which the process was rigidly systematic:

I have been quoted as saying the 11/04 allocation decision was calculated using `a little bit of math and a little bit of art.' Because 90% of the allocation decision using the old machines had to be made well in advance of the election, there was not sufficient time to take into full account the significant change in registration. Therefore, midsummer, post primary active voter numbers were used as an objective baseline and then changed based upon subjective evaluations such as past turnout, new construction (which would indicate more provisional ballot demand), and local contests or issues that may drive turnout beyond what was expected for the balance of the county (i.e., school tax levy).

Dennis White, current BOE chair and the other Dem on the BOE in 2004 is either calling BS 4 years too late or he had no idea what was going on at the time. Or, I guess, it's possible that White is willing to stipulate the possibility that he was a witless accomplice to racial discrimination and voter disenfranchisement in 2004 if it makes him look smarter today. Any of these is a possibility. The Franklin County BOE has a better history of camaraderie than competence. For what it's worth, my money is on some version of that last one.

Anyway, what you really need to know is that the City of Columbus has another huge bond package on the ballot this year, which will most likely again be made up of a number of wordy proposals. Unless a Columbus voter comes in with a cheat-sheet, it will probably take them twice as long to vote as it will a suburban voter (the tests alluded to before show 9 vs. 6 minutes, but I'd estimate by November that'd be down to an average of 6 vs. 3 minutes, or thereabouts). Let's say that there are hypothetically three machines in my Bexley precinct, and four machines in the neighboring Columbus neighborhood of Berwick. Let us also say, hypothetically, that between 7 and 8 am voters come in at the rate of 1 per minute. In Bexley, the first voter is done as the fourth voter arrives. Between 7 and 8 there is never a line. In Berwick, the fifth voter arrives at 7:04, and has to wait two minutes for the first voter to finish before they get a machine (by which point two people will be in line behind her) at 8:00 am the 61st voter arrives and the 41st voter enters a booth. There are 20 people in line, and the wait is more than half an hour.

Even with the same number of voters and 33% more machines, voters in Berwick start to skip voting so they can get to work on time... Now imagine that absentee/early voting is occurring at higher rates in the suburbs and middle-class city neighborhoods like Berwick, while in-person turnout at precincts in neighborhoods like Driving Park and Weinland Park hits levels approaching 90%...

This is what all of the above measures are supposed to help avoid.

I want to believe.


UPDATE: 4 hours after I posted this, Barbara Carmen at the Dispatch posted an article that reads like a response. Matt Damschroder explains how wording will be limited to 600 characters per issue on the ballot, while Dan Williamson explains that the city is fine with the limit, although he disputes the notion that the ballot length was responsible for long lines in 2004. This isn't the first time I've thought Mr. Williamson was full of it, but it is the first time since he's gone to work for the mayor.

Bush Signs LaTourette Bill on Air Force One

Can you say Third Wheel?