Month: August 2022

For families with the financial means, tutoring often is the intervention of choice to help a child catch up or get ahead in school.

About $42 billion is spent on it in a single year, Wendy Wallace noted in July as part of a presentation to the Midwestern Legislative Conference Education Committee.

“[It’s] more effective than any other kind of academic intervention that researchers have found,” she added, comparing it to practices such as class-size reductions and technology supports. “The effects are shown across grade levels and subject areas, and range from a half a year to more than a year of learning [growth] over one year of academic tutoring.”

Often, though, the child who needs the tutoring the most — one at risk of falling behind and failing academically — does not receive additional supports. The goal of groups such as the National Student Support Accelerator, a project of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform where Wallace works: Ensure every student has access to high-quality, high-impact tutoring.

Perhaps more than ever before, Wallace said, states have the opportunity to overcome the obstacles that traditionally have blocked the expansion of tutoring in their K-12 systems.

Schools have become more open to scheduling changes, and unprecedented amounts of federal assistance are available (via the American Rescue Plan Act). In addition, education leaders now have information on the essential elements of a high-impact tutoring program.

In the “No Child Left Behind” era of education policy, many students were offered, and participated in, government-backed tutoring initiatives. The problem was a lack of quality, Wallace said, causing the impact on student achievement to be “close to zero.”

What works?

Many of the essential elements can be found in long-running, successful programs run by ServeMinnesota, which oversees all AmeriCorps programs in that state. Through the organization’s early-learning, reading and math corps, tutors are embedded in schools across Minnesota.

People of all ages and backgrounds serve, Lindsay Dolce, chief advancement officer for ServeMinnesota, said to legislators.

“A lot of our tutors have never spent time in school and don’t have an education background, but they’re passionate about serving their community,” she added. “They want to give something back.”

Each tutor receives intensive, week-long training before ever stepping foot in a classroom. Then, he or she gets ongoing training and feedback, including from a staff person in the school building and from a “coaching specialist” at ServeMinnesota. Tutors also have access to high-quality materials and “scripts” to guide instruction.

Through the Reading Corps, students in kindergarten to third grade get 20 minutes of tutoring every school day. Math Corps provides a total of 90 minutes of tutoring each week to students in grades four through seven.

ServeMinnesota has expanded the reach of these tutoring programs, partnering with more schools in Minnesota while also spreading to states such as Iowa, Michigan, North Dakota and Wisconsin.

North Dakota Sen. Kyle Davison said the program has proven to be a “game changer” in parts of his state.

“We look at the kids on the bubble [of academic success or failure] and try to help them with this program,” he said. “One of the strengths of AmeriCorps is that these volunteers want to be in your schools, and the effect of a student’s relationship with that adult in that school every day, for 20 minutes [of tutoring], is just incredible.”

In Minnesota, the Legislature has gradually increased appropriations for these tutoring programs. (Most of the funding comes from federal AmeriCorps dollars; private donations help as well.)

Across the country, Wallace said, there has been an uptick in state support for high-quality tutoring — in the form of new grant programs and matching funds for schools. In addition, a handful of states now have laws defining “high-impact tutoring” and/or requiring that certain students have access to it.

Other options for states include training tutors that can be deployed in the schools, or bringing more college students into the classroom through new partnerships between K-12 and postsecondary systems.

On a recent visit to the western Kansas town of Garden City, Burke Griggs asked local leaders a question that may have first sounded like a joke. “Where do you plan on moving Garden City in 50 years?” asked Griggs, a leading expert on water law.

He was deadly serious, though, about a problem that the Washburn School of Law professor says a growing number of communities will face in the coming years and decades without shifts in how a state manages, allocates and conserves its resources, particularly groundwater.

“You can’t think about a hundred years of urban planning on 40 years of water,” he said. “And it’s a problem that’s facing the Great Plains as a whole. If we don’t start refocusing our water policy around our public, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

Kansas Rep. Ron Highland, who joined Griggs as a panelist in July at the Midwestern Legislative Conference Annual Meeting, echoed those concerns.

He said one county in his state is on pace to lose its groundwater in as little as seven years. In other areas, estimates show that a continued depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer means a total loss in 10, 14 or 50 years.

“All of this started with over-allocation [of water resources] back in the days when we didn’t know that this was a limited supply,” Highland said. “Nobody’s to blame. It happened.

“Now we’ve got to deal with it.”

‘Generational test of our democracy’

Addressing the problem of limited, and dwindling, groundwater resources was the focus of the recent MLC session.

Kansas Sen. Carolyn McGinn, who chose water policy to be the subject of her 2022 MLC Chair’s Initiative, joined three panelists in leading the discussion.

“It offers a generational test of our democracy,” Lucas Bessire said about the challenge of water scarcity.

He grew up in southwest Kansas, on a farm where generations of his family were raised and relied on what seemed like an endless supply of water from underground.

“My great-grandfather was an early pioneer in deep-well irrigation,” Bessire said. “He believed the water would never run out, and he pumped it like there was no tomorrow.”

To this day, Bessire added, some common “myths” persist, standing in the way of the policy adjustments needed to “cut groundwater consumption to sustainable levels.”

Among those myths: Family farmers are responsible for the problem and don’t want to address it, and only continued depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer makes economic sense for these producers.

“Farmers know it’s a problem; they know what to do about it,” said Bessire, author of the book “Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains.” “They also realize individual action is insufficient to [address] the scale of depletion.

“In other words, depletion cannot be solved by policies that only incentivize voluntary, individual actions by producers.”

According to Bessire, the interests of far-away agribusiness owners and commodity-market investors have held too much sway — at the expense of local farmers, business owners and residents.

“For independent producers, growing irrigated corn in a dry range can sometimes feel like betting against a stacked deck,” he said. “Most of our losses are papered over by farm subsidies, crop insurance and bank loans. Such aid can compel farmers to double down on wasteful practices, but even most of these short-term gains don’t stay in our communities.”

A framework for reshaping state water policy

A restructuring of farm finance was one of several ideas offered by Bessire to end what he called a current “race to the bottom.” He also said states must have policies and water-permitting systems that reflect “the real value of groundwater,” and must ensure that any incentives for reducing water use be tied to “collective, fair and enforceable benchmarks.”

Another priority of Bessire’s: ensuring that local groundwater districts (such as those in place in Kansas) represent all interests in the community, not just a select few water users.

In Kansas, Rep. Highland led the work of a special legislative committee that took a deep-dive into the state’s water challenges and future. That led to this year’s introduction of HB 2686. It did not pass, but Highland expects many of the proposals to reappear in future sessions — creating a cabinet-level Department of Water and Environment, imposing new or increased fees on water users to raise revenue for water conservation and recovery, requiring groundwater districts to develop plans to reduce groundwater declines by 50 percent, and demanding more reporting by these districts as well as additional state oversight.

“Good bills take time [to pass],”Highland said. “We all know that, and I think we’ve laid the groundwork.”

According to Griggs, groundwater depletion should no longer be thought of as only a “western” or “Great Plains” problem.

It is spreading.

For example, the most recent interstate disputes have involved Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi.

“If you’ve ever been to these regions, you know they’re not lacking for water, but what they’re lacking is regular precipitation,” Griggs said. “And one of the things that groundwater does is allow producers to irrigate when they need to.”

Within a state, he urged lawmakers to craft policies with the view of groundwater, just like surface water, as a public resource.

“Dairies move. Meat plants burn down and move. Farms move,” he said. “But cities can’t move. Neither can rural communities.”

Kansas Sen. Carolyn McGinn has chosen water policy as the focus of her Midwestern Legislative Conference Chair’s Initiative for 2022. A series of articles is appearing in Stateline Midwest this year in support of this initiative. A special session on this topic also was held during this year’s MLC Annual Meeting.

The best of fiscal times may be the ideal period for budget leaders to prepare for the worst, and smart planning means more than building up state rainy day funds and other reserves.

According to Airlie Loiaconi of the Pew Charitable Trusts, two emerging best practices in states stand out: long-term forecasting and budget “stress testing.”

“You already have the building blocks [to implement these practices]; it’s just a matter of bringing them all together,” Loiaconi said during a presentation in July at a meeting of the Midwestern Legislative Conference Fiscal Affairs Committee.

The session was held a few weeks after many states closed the books on a historically strong fiscal year. But legislators during the MLC session also expressed caution about what may soon lie ahead: a slowdown in consumer spending due to inflation and other factors, and a “fiscal cliff” when the additional federal dollars stop flowing to states.

Among the 50 states, Loiaconi singled out Utah as being the “gold standard” in fiscal planning and analysis. Thanks to a mix of statutorily required policies, she said, budget leaders get the information they need to “think long-term and avoid crisis-driven decisions.”

Every three years, for example, the Office of the Legislative Fiscal Analyst evaluates the budget impacts of a moderate recession, a severely adverse downturn and a protracted slump. A five-year time frame is used.

How much revenue should the state expect to lose under these scenarios? How much in contingency funding would be easy to access? How much would be available, but more difficult to access? How does the amount of recession-fueled losses compare to the value of the contingency funds?

These and other questions are addressed in Utah’s budget stress test.

The same office also is directed to produce triennial revenue volatility reports and long-term budget forecasts.

Loiaconi identified several principles for states to follow when implementing these forecasts. They include:

looking ahead at least three years (Utah’s time frame is five years);
distinguishing, and perhaps defining in statute, one-time vs. ongoing revenue streams;
establishing a “current services” baseline that shows how much money will be needed to maintain existing programs in the future;
accounting for any known policy changes, such as tax cuts or new state programs; and
identifying any looming structural budget deficits, as well as determining the specific causes.

With the caveat that “agriculture issues can change quickly,” a leading economist told the Midwest’s legislators in July that conditions in one of the region’s most important industry sectors point to continued growth — both for farmers and the states that rely on the tax revenue.

“Right now the ag economy remains strong, supported by high prices and a robust domestic and international demand for U.S. farm products,” Cortney Cowley, a senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said in July during a session led by the Midwestern Legislative Conference Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee.

That is good news for the Midwest, where the health of agriculture affects entire state economies: In 2020, for instance, the industry supported 9 million jobs in this 11-state region, while generating close to $150 million in tax revenue.

It has been a tumultuous, yet often unexpectedly prosperous period in U.S. agriculture. At the end of 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many forecasters were predicting the continuation of a recent decline in the agriculture economy in 2020.

Then a global pandemic disrupted the entire food production chain. That year, though, farm prices bounced back quickly for most commodities, and when combined with pandemic relief from the federal government, 2020 turned out to be a strong income year for most agriculture producers.

One outlier has been the cattle industry.

“That sector is still struggling, and cattle prices have been slow to recover,” Cortney said.

When COVID-19 hit, a large portion of the animal processing workforce got sick; at one point, as many as 500,000 cattle were awaiting processing. It was a buyers’ market, and live cattle prices dropped. On the consumer side, meanwhile, a store-level shortage of beef occurred, causing retail prices to skyrocket.

These factors resulted in a large spread between low cattle prices and high prices at the grocery store. Cowley explained that this gap is continuing because many people who work on the cutting floor at animal processing facilities did not come back to the labor force after leaving due to COVID.

Labor shortages on the cutting floor are keeping processing numbers down, she said. Droughts also have hit many cattle-raising areas, and producers are dealing with high (and rising) input costs, particularly for feed. As a result, some producers are liquidating herds, and overall, the number of beef cows in the United States has fallen — a drop of 2 percent in July 2022 compared to a year ago.

This is the fourth straight year of smaller beef cow numbers, with the biggest decreases in heifer and cow inventories. Higher cattle prices should be coming soon as a result of this downward trend.

Across the agriculture sector, net farm income, a broad measure of profits, is expected to drop 4.5 percent this year compared to 2021 numbers — down from $123.4 billion to $113.7 billion, with this year’s figure still being high relative to most recent years and above the 20-year average.

In part, farmers have been using their increased income to pay off loans, with rates of farm loan delinquencies decreasing and loan repayment rates improving.

According to Cowley, just as supply chains in the farm sector were recovering from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, labor challenges and the weather have impacted agriculture producers this summer. Because Russia and Ukraine account for a large share of the global production and export of grain and oil, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused historical increases in the price of oil and wheat similar to that seen during the Dust Bowl and the 1974 oil embargo.

The invasion caused broad disruptions in global commodity markets and large price increases, the latter exacerbated by already low inventories.

Markets have been dropping slowly, Cowley said, but higher commodity prices will continue to be supported by record-high exports through the remainder of the year.

For farmers, one concern continues to be a rapid rise in production costs, along with uncertainty about where input prices are headed. Right now, increases in input costs — particularly fertilizers, which are made from fossil fuels — are far outpacing rises in food prices. Between 2020 and 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that total production expenses will increase by more than 20 percent. This is leaving many farmers, particularly small and medium-sized producers, to question their ability to just break even this year, despite high commodity prices.

Cowley, in response to questions from legislators about how to help producers, said that states should look to increase access to credit and focus on strategies to ease the labor shortage.