Jonathan Kantrowitz

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) today announced that new rules going into effect as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will put more focus on preventing disease and keeping people healthy.

The new rules will make preventive care more affordable for Americans. Insurance companies will now be required to provide proven services aimed at preventing and detecting diseases without additional cost to the patient.

“One of our goals throughout the health care reform debate was to improve our system in way that will keep more people healthy and help prevent chronic disease, especially in children,” said Dodd. “But too often, the high costs of preventive health services forced people to skip visits to the doctor for the tests and procedures needed to detect common diseases, such as breast or colon cancer. These new regulations will allow us to transition towards a new health care system that allows individuals to get the necessary screenings they need to live long and healthy lives.”

As Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families, Dodd has been a leader in efforts to improve the overall health of our youngest generation. He advocated strongly for the inclusion of the Bright Futures Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents in the new prevention benefit rolled out today. As a result of these new regulations, children will now have access to regular well-baby and well-child visits, screening and counseling to prevent, detect, and treat chronic conditions like childhood obesity, and immunizations for diseases like the flu, measles, and polio.

An estimated 41 million individuals will benefit from the implementation of these new regulations. And that number is expected to rise to a total of 88 million Americans who will have improved preventive care by 2013.

Dodd played a key role in writing and passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law by President Obama in March. Dodd led the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee’s consideration of health care reform legislation and worked closely with President Obama and leaders from the House and Senate on the final legislation.

Below are highlights of the new rules including, examples of the services that health insurance plans must now offer as part of their coverage plans:

· Preventive services like breast and colon cancer screenings; screening for vitamin deficiencies during pregnancy; screenings for diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure; and tobacco cessation counseling;
· Routine vaccinations ranging from childhood immunizations to booster shots for adults;
· Preventive care for children including regular pediatrician visits; vision and hearing screening; developmental assessments; and screening and counseling to address weight issues; and
· Preventive services for women such as counseling screening and vaccines for healthy pregnancies.

A complete list of covered services included in the new Preventive care regulations is available at www.healthcare.gov/center/regulations/prevention.html.

In addition to increasing coverage, the new regulations include a large unprecedented investment in prevention and public health initiatives. A $15 billion investment over 10 years will be made to the Prevention and Public Health Fund for health care programs and providers to prevent disease, detect it early and manage conditions before they come severe. For fiscal year 2010, $500 million is dedicated to improving prevention efforts, research and data collection and increasing the number of primary care health professionals.

Through the Recovery Act, $1 billion is also available for community-based initiatives, tobacco cessation activities, chronic disease reduction programs and efforts to reduce health-care-acquired infections.

by Gordon A. MacInnes, a fellow at The Century Foundation

(The title is my own -also see PS below)

Since July 1, three developments suggest that the first-year victories of the Obama-Duncan “transformational reform” effort may be in jeopardy. First, the House of Representatives adopted a supplemental appropriations bill that includes an emergency infusion of $10 billion for saving teachers’ jobs, $800 million of which is financed by modest reductions in Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and one other embryonic administration program. The White House threatens a veto.

The second and third developments were non-events: the annual conventions of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers excluded any speaker from the administration. Given the longstanding and symbiotic relationship of teacher unions and the Democratic Party, the double cold shoulder is an unmistakable warning about the health of the alliance.

The administration bet heavily on a clever tactic to leverage scarce dollars to entice states to change their rules about charter schools, teacher evaluation, and data-gathering. Many states enacted laws to qualify for Race to the Top grants in the competition for $4.3 billion, the largest discretionary fund ever administered by an education secretary. The administration hopes to extend its vision for reform by using competitive grants-as opposed to funds distributed by congressionally approved formulae-to encourage further policy compliance.

The problem is not the tactics. The problem is the strategy. Consider the nature of the administration’s policy aims, and why they miss the mark.

Blame Teachers

“Merit pay” and “teacher accountability” are two ideas that sound sensible and are popular. The problem is that, absent workable models, attempts to institute these ideas are premature.

The Teacher Incentive Fund is the federal program driving merit pay. It encourages experiments via locally designed collaborations with teachers to find better ways to incorporate student performance in the compensation of classroom teachers. No current model fairly and reliably can calibrate the contribution of individual teachers, particularly in schools with concentrations of students from poor families (in part because student turnover rates tend to be so high and so many students come from non-English literate families). Merit pay is a potentially useful idea in search of a workable, tested model.

Reasonable persons agree that teachers should be accountable. Secretary Duncan has asserted that the key to improving accountability is to tie teacher compensation to the performance of their students on standardized tests. For the same reasons merit pay is difficult to put in practice, so too is Secretary Duncan’s drive to connect test results with individual teachers. (See Gordon MacInnes, “Eight Reasons Not to Tie Teacher Compensation to Standardized Test Results“) . Encouraging more experimentation is welcome. However, insisting that every state be capable of tying test results to individual teachers should not be one of the four absolute preconditions for applying for a Race to the Top grant. By elevating this requirement, the administration suggests that classroom teachers are the major suspects in the poor academic performance of American students.

In recent months, Secretary Duncan has moderated his tone and publicly accepted that there are many other factors that need to be weighed in an improved teacher evaluation system. But by placing teacher accountability at the top of the list of “reforms,” he has implied that teachers know what to do when facing very challenging instructional problems, but hold back because of a faulty compensation and evaluation system.

Open More Charter Schools

After twenty years or so, charter schools educate about 2 percent of the nation’s public school students. The shared characteristics of effective charters is that they set very high standards for students and teachers and spend up to 50 percent more time on instruction than do their district counterparts. The strong emphasis given to the charter school movement by both President Obama and Secretary Duncan overlooks three major problems:

1. The best evidence to date suggests that less than one-fifth of charter school students perform academically better than similar students in district schools, but more than a third of them perform worse. See, for example, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). More importantly, charter schools typically do not enroll as many special education students as do their district counterparts, and practically no non-English-speaking ones. And, of course, they only enroll students from families that have sought alternatives to their district schools, a “selection bias” that cannot be easily measured.

2. The most important lesson from the high-performing charters-that more teaching time produces more learning-is not one easily adopted by school districts during the Great Recession. With teacher and staff layoffs cascading this year, there is no money to begin the transition from the standard six-hour day, 180-day school year to the eight-hour, 210-day school year found at KIPP and other highly effective charter schools.

3. Secretary Duncan’s notion that charter school management organizations that open only clean-slate schools with students from enterprising families and that have no labor contracts or bureaucracy to contend with are candidates to take over and transform failed schools in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods is a worthy experiment. Perhaps. However, to load such a difficult mission on relatively young and unproven organizations is risky business.

There Are Only Four Ways to Fix a Broken School

Secretary Duncan repeatedly asserts that one of three organizing principles to guide reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is to increase local control and flexibility. “We believe that states do not need a prescription for success,” is how he put it when giving testimony to the House Appropriations Committee.

Except, that is, when it comes to the most intractable problem of the past half-century: educating poor children in the poorest schools. Here, the U.S. Department of Education asserts certainty about the means to “turn-around” the bottom 5 percent of American schools, almost all of which are found in neighborhoods of deep and persistent poverty. The answer? Districts are “free” to choose from a menu of four options: “transform” the school (but not more than 50 percent of them in any district), “re-start” the school (by firing half the teachers), hand over the school to a for-profit education management organization or a charter management organization, or shut the school down (with no answer about what happens to its students).

There is no evidence whatsoever that adopting one of these approaches will elevate significantly the academic performance of most students in most schools. Instead, there is a clash of evidence colored by local circumstances, the role of the district, availability of teacher support, the inherited academic preparation of students, and so on. Moreover, the federal policy cuts out the district from taking leadership to improve all low-performing schools. The lesson from Montgomery County, Maryland, Union City, and several other New Jersey districts is that a coherent, relentless, district-led effort, based on evidence of student need and performance and high expectations and standards, can work.

There is one additional lesson from school districts that perform well across-the-board: they start early and intensively to prepare students from poor families to be strong readers and writers of English, including at least one year of high-quality preschool and full-day kindergarten. Yet this approach appears to be ineligible for School Improvement Grants precisely at the time that state and local resources for preschool and full-day kindergarten are diminishing. Instead of focusing on a stronger, earlier start for poor children, the federal policy concentrates disproportionate funds on high schools, the level least likely to respond to even well-financed intervention.

There is a reason why so many Obama supporters are bailing on their support for his educational initiatives-they focus on the wrong problems and ignore the less dramatic but most effective alternatives. There may still be time to return to the approach put forward by candidate Obama, with his consistent invocation of high-quality preschool as a cost-effective investment. Just as the president changed his tone and emphasis when addressing issues such as health care and the BP gusher, so can he redirect the conversation and policies on urban education.

P.S.

The author of the above article does not mention one other aspect of Federal Education Reform that, in my humble opinion, has turned into a total disaster (and believe me, I know – it’s the business I’m in) – new national standards for math and English which appear to be written by people who have never been in a classroom, and which classroom teachers won’t begin to be able to understand.

by Sumru Erkut, Ph.D., Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women.

The U.S. Supreme Court was an old boys’ club before Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed in 1981. O’Connor observed in a speech last year that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman passed on the chance to nominate a woman for fear of making male Justices uncomfortable! With Elena Kagan’s confirmation, we will now have three women Justices. How will this new gender composition affect the functioning of the high court? If corporate boards offer any indication, and I believe they do, the answer could well be that Kagan’s confirmation can make a significant difference. In 2006, my colleagues Vicki W. Kramer and Alison M. Konrad and I produced a report, “Critical Mass on Corporate Boards: Why Three or More Women Enhance Governance.” Our research indicated that three usually represents a tipping point. Having three or more women in a small decision-making group constitutes a critical mass that can transform the way that group operates.

Our research, based on interviews and discussions with women directors, CEOs, and corporate secretaries from Fortune 1000 companies, revealed that having three or more women on a board can enhance corporate governance. The female and male respondents noted that women often bring a collaborative leadership style that benefits boardroom dynamics by increasing listening, social support, and win-win problem-solving. And although women were described often as collaborative leaders, they did not shy away from controversial issues. Contrary to conventional wisdom, many of the men and women we interviewed believed that women are more likely than men to ask tough questions and demand direct and detailed answers. Women also bring new issues and perspectives to the table, broadening the content of boardroom discussions to include the perspectives of multiple stakeholders. Women of color add perspectives that further broaden boardroom discussions.

Why is three the magic number? A lone woman may make substantial contributions, and two women are generally more powerful than one, but reaching the threshold of three or more makes it more likely that women are heard — and that boardroom dynamics change substantially. The core finding is this: When three or more women serve on a board together, having women in the room becomes a normal state of affairs. No longer does any one woman represent the “woman’s point of view,” because the women express different views and often disagree with each other. Women are treated as individuals with different personalities, styles, and perspectives. As for women’s tendencies to be more collaborative and also more active in asking questions and raising tough issues, having three females pushes these qualities to become boardroom norms.

Are these findings relevant to the Supreme Court? Consider that both the high court and corporate boards are “small groups” in that the court has nine members and most corporate boards have between eight and 12. The presence of women has also been a rarity in both bodies. Even today, women hold only 15 percent of board seats among Fortune 500 companies. We don’t, of course, know for sure what a third female Justice will bring to the Supreme Court. We might expect to see wider perspectives and more incisive questions than those currently asked from the bench. But if the lesson of women’s inclusion on corporate boards represents any useful blueprint, we could find that Elena Kagan’s confirmation would once and for all put an end to talk about whether or not women have a place on the Supreme Court. The critical mass of three female Justices will make a woman’s presence the norm rather than the exception.

Overall, Connecticut saw slight improvements over the past year in closing America’s worst achievement gap. These changes were largely driven by improvements in the large cities of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport.

Three major findings came out of ConnCAN’s analysis of Thursday’s release of the 2010 Connecticut Mastery Test for elementary and middle school students:

•In ConnCAN’s measurement of the performance gains made by cohorts of students over the past year, New Haven far outpaced the statewide average with a 4.0 point gain in the percentage of students at goal, compared to a statewide gain of 2.8 points. Hartford (2.9) and Bridgeport (2.7) showed gains comparable to the statewide average, while Stamford (1.7) and Waterbury (-0.2) actually lost ground compared to the state.

• Overall district-level improvement saw similar trends in the five largest cities, with Hartford (2.5), New Haven (2.4) and Bridgeport (2.3) doubling the statewide average (1.2), while Waterbury (0.8) and Stamford (0.2) significantly underperformed compared to the changes statewide.

•On the strengths of the gains made by the three largest districts, Connecticut’s average achievement gap between minority and low-income students and their white and middle-class peers declined 0.5 points in elementary school and 2.6 points in middle school.

“These gains show us that we can make progress, but we continue to be dismayed by Connecticut’s worst-in-the-nation achievement gap,” said Alex Johnston, ConnCAN CEO. “The persistence of this gap underscores the need for bold leadership in the governor’s office and in the State Department of Education to drive comprehensive statewide reform so we can finally close this unacceptable achievement gap.”

These results come in the midst of a vigorous debate about education in this year’s race for governor. ConnCAN’s launch of its Vote for Ed! campaign yesterday is the first step in its push to ensure that education reform is front and center in the governor’s race. L

On May 27, Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate introduced legislation designed to advance the wide-scale deployment of electric vehicles and to develop the infrastructure needed to support them. The Senate bill, entitled the “Electric Vehicle Deployment Act of 2010,” was introduced by Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). The House legislation, entitled the “Electric Drive Vehicle Deployment Act of 2010,” was cosponsored by House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Chairman Ed Markey (D-MA), Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA).

The legislation echoes recommendations put forward by the Electrification Coalition, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit group of business leaders committed to promoting policies and actions that facilitate the deployment of electric vehicles on a mass scale in order to combat the economic, environmental, and national security dangers caused by our nation’s dependence on petroleum. The EC’s Electrification Roadmap, released in November 2009, proposed a set of policies in which geographic areas would compete to be selected as electrification deployment communities: specific areas in which targeted, temporary financial incentives are employed so that all of the elements of an electrified transportation system are deployed simultaneousl

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy released a new report yesterday on the economic impact of Recovery Act investments in advanced batteries and vehicles. The report, “Recovery Act Investments: Transforming America’s Transportation Sector,” documents how Recovery Act funds are being matched with private capital to create new jobs, construct new plants, add new manufacturing lines, install electric vehicle charging stations across the country and help build the emerging domestic electric vehicle industry from the ground up.

Among the key highlights of the report:

• For every dollar of the $2.4 billion in seed money the government provided through the Recovery Act advanced battery and electric vehicle grants, the companies have matched it at minimum dollar for dollar.

• Pre-Recovery Act, the U.S. produced just 2 percent of the world’s batteries for advanced vehicles, but due to Recovery Act investments, the U.S. will have the capacity to produce 20 percent of these batteries by 2012 and up to 40 percent by 2015 – that’s a jump from 2 percent to 40 percent in a span of just five years.

• Nine of the nine new battery plants opening as a result of Recovery Act investments will have started construction by Thursday – and four of those will be operational by the end of the year. In addition, twenty-one other plants will make battery or electric vehicle components with the help of Recovery Act grants.

• Before the Recovery Act, high battery costs meant a car with a 100 mile range would need a battery that cost $33,000. But because of the higher-volume domestic manufacturing the Recovery Act is spurring, the cost of such a battery could come down to $16,000 by the end of 2013 and $10,000 by the end of 2015, dramatically driving down the cost of an electric vehicle and greatly expanding the domestic market.

• Before the Recovery Act, there were less than 500 electric vehicle charging locations in the U.S., but as a result of Recovery Act investments, there will be over 20,000 by 2012.

Compact Power, which the President is scheduled to visit today, is the ninth of nine new advanced battery plants that will open as a result of the $2.4 billion in Recovery Act advanced battery and electric vehicle awards President Obama announced last August. Before the Recovery Act, there were no domestic factories doing high-volume manufacturing of batteries for electric vehicles, but due to Recovery Act investments, the U.S. will have the capacity to produce up to 40 percent of the world’s batteries by 2015. The $151 million Recovery Act grant awarded to Compact Power last August has been matched more than dollar-for-dollar by the company. As a result of this public-private partnership, the Compact project is expected to create and save hundreds of construction jobs in Holland and put hundreds of Michigan workers on the job at the new Compact Power plant once it is fully operational. The Compact Power plant in Holland will manufacture batteries to support 52,000 Chevy Volts a year and will also supply batteries for the new electric Ford Focus.