Why hide costs from education investment panel?: Editorial Agenda 2014
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| Gov. John Kitzhaber presides over the Oregon Education Investment Board in January 2012. (Michael Lloyd/The Oregonian) |
The Oregon Education Investment Board, created by the Legislature in 2011 at the governor's request, is so ... Kitzhaber. We mean that in a good way. Mostly.
As a key element of the governor's push to change the way Oregon funds education, from early childhood through college, the 13-member board is supposed to drive efficiency and rationality into a process that could use more of both. Improving upon a funding model that distributes money based largely on enrollment, the thinking goes, is necessary for the state to achieve its new and ambitious educational goals.
The very language of Senate Bill 909, which established the OEIB, is instructive. The legislation teems with words like "streamlined," "connected," "integrated," "targeted" and "strategic investments." It even calls for a data system that will "monitor expenditures and outcomes to determine returns on statewide education investments."
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All of this is characteristic of the governor in that it reflects the identification of a big issue (or problem), followed by the creation of ambitious processes and structures designed to make everything work more rationally and efficiently. The approach is smart, calculated and data-driven.
But reforms conceived at a 30,000-foot level have a maddening way of running into mountains as they approach the ground. We will not name the defining plane crash of the governor's current term, but only because doing so isn't necessary. Oregonians know well what happens when a complicated piece of bureaucratic machinery loses its bearings.
The OEIB isn't necessarily headed toward Mount Hood, but the flight recently hit a significant patch of turbulence involving, of all things, data – or the lack thereof. A five-member subcommittee, the Outcomes and Investments Subcommittee, spent many hours hearing and discussing potentially expensive educational proposals pitched by various agencies. After careful consideration, the committee was supposed to make recommendations to the full OEIB, which would affix its stamp of approval and send the lot to the governor, who will make budget recommendations for the 2015 Legislature.
Problem is, as The Oregonian's Betsy Hammond reported, the education officials pitching ideas to the investments subcommittee were prohibited from sharing cost information. Why withhold cost information from a subcommittee explicitly charged with weighing investments? Because, says, Kristin Gimbel, communications director for Chief Education Officer Nancy Golden, "the role of the OEIB is really to recommend a slate of investment concepts to the governor."
Actually, as spelled out by law, the role of the board is to provide, through the use of good data, strategic investment recommendations. How strategic can you be when nobody will tell you what anything costs? Among the subcommittee members who made this point was Ron Saxton, who told The Oregonian editorial board he's frustrated by "the inability to provide good advice and prioritization about what's the most cost-effective use of limited resources."
At one point during the committee process, as Hammond reported, a Kitzhaber education adviser urged members to weight proposals using "different intelligences" than a cost-benefit analysis. We've read SB 909 a couple of times and can't find "different intelligences" anywhere.
Echoing Saxton, OEIB member Julia Brim-Edwards told the editorial board she's "concerned that the board would be asked to make recommendations without really specific information about the cost per-student" of various programs. Brim-Edwards and other members of the full OEIB will soon vote on an unweighted laundry list of ideas approved by the investments committee.
The OEIB is still a relatively new entity, and it would be overly optimistic for the public to expect it to operate flawlessly. But deliberately denying cost information to a board expected to recommend strategic investments isn't the sort of thing that can be dismissed by saying "oops." It suggests that the process is heading off-course, and it demands some clear corrective action – or at least a believable explanation – from the guy who's supposed to be in the cockpit.
Otherwise, why should Oregonians believe that the governor has the ability, or commitment, to bring any other ambitious reform, no matter how intelligently conceived, to a safe landing?Why hide costs from education investment panel?: Editorial Agenda 2014 | OregonLive.com: