Our weekly Top Five feature offers big stories or views from the past week with policy and legislative implications.
1. Education spending up, but still below recession levels, The Post and Courier, Oct. 24, 2016
“School districts in South Carolina still haven’t recovered from deep cuts of the Great Recession. Despite recent state investments in public education, a new report finds K-12 per-pupil funding remains below 2008 levels. South Carolina was one of 35 states spending less per student in the 2014 than in 2008, slashing K-12 education funding by 14.2 percent, one of the largest cuts in the nation, according to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.”
2. Seven things to know about childhood poverty, Urban Institute, Oct. 18, 2016
“Presidential candidates and pundits rarely talk about tackling poverty, and when they do, they’re not usually talking about children. But they should be: for millions of poor children, the United States is not the land of opportunity. Childhood poverty can have lifelong consequences, affecting future health, education, earnings, and more. These consequences can even stretch into future generations. Many poor children grow up to become poor adults, and as they have children of their own, the cycle of poverty continues.”
3. On being prepared and why agility may be overrated, Greg Satell in Harvard Business Review, Oct. 18, 2016
State government might learn lessons from this report – as it apparently did in dealing with Hurricane Matthew: It’s fine to be agile, but better to be prepared:
“While nimble startups chasing the next trend are exciting, the truth is that companies rarely succeed by adapting to market events. Rather, successful firms prevail by shaping the future. That can’t be done through agility alone, but takes years of preparation to achieve. The truth is that once you find yourself in a position where you need to adapt, it’s usually too late.”
4. How to reform election systems to attract millennials, Leonid Bershidsky in Bloomberg View, Oct. 23, 2016
“It may be that all that’s needed to revive faith in democracy is to reform the electoral systems to be both more inclusive and more meritocratic, shifting attention from candidates’ personalities and private lives to policies and issues. The rule changes needed for that don’t have to be particularly drastic: something as simple as ranked-choice voting could lead to progress. If millennials feel they are represented by smart people who understand their agenda and have the necessary expertise to implement it, they may like politics better than they do now. And so may the older generations: They, too, are not immune from the irritation caused by crude election battles such as this year’s.”
5. Africans chuckling about U.S. election, BBC, Oct. 26, 2016
This story doesn’t really have policy implications, but it is highly interesting nonetheless for those addicted to politics. Seems that people in Africa, often accused of bad electioneering, are a little amused at what’s going on in the U.S. presidential contest … and they’ve taken to social media to laugh. An excerpt:
“Nigerians in particular have found the irony of the world’s foremost democracy slipping into embarrassing feuds and demagogic threats too hilarious to resist. Thousands have been picking events apart on Twitter under the hashtag #Nov8AfricanEdition – a reference to the date of the election.”
- If you have a story you’d like to nominate for Top Five, please send it to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!