I attended the dinner banquet at the Country Club of Jackson for the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. It was well attended and well organized.
Governor Tate Reeves and House Speaker Jason White were there. The big issue of the night was school choice.
Noticeably absent was Lieutenant Governor Delbert Hosemann, who is not a big fan of expanding school choice to private schools.
Get ready for school choice to be a big and divisive issue in Mississippi for the upcoming year. It’s a big deal and brings to the fore significant competing political ideologies of Mississippi voters.
To some extent, school choice supporters are idealistic compared to the pragmatism of those who oppose. The devil’s in the details and there’s no doubt dozens of problematic pitfalls involved with the implementation of maximum school choice.
Count me as one of the conservative ideologues. I’m for school choice because I believe in competition. I am profoundly anti-monopoly. But I will readily confess implementation will be a bear.
I have listened to our lieutenant governor vigorously argue that school choice is simply not supported by most Mississippians and will cause great problems and inefficiencies. He argues this issue with great skill and command of the subject.
My long time editorial colleague Tim Kalich is skeptical of school choice. Also, Luther Munford and Bill Crawford, both contributing columnists to the Sun whose opinions I respect.
Another frequent contributor, Douglas Carswell, whom I also respect, is making school choice a MCPP crusade.
I am either cursed or blessed with the ability to see both sides of this and many issues.
Meanwhile, all our surrounding states are plunging ahead on maximum school choice — meaning letting parents choose private schools and get a tax refund for not consuming public school resources.
Perhaps it would be wise to watch how the other states do it and learn from their mistakes. If they succeed, we follow. If they fail, we dodge a bullet.
One reason I am pro maximum school choice is because I have seen how the public school monopoly has hurt two places I have spent much of my life: the Mississippi Delta and the inner suburbs of Jackson. Both places have suffered a mass exodus of middle class parents with school age children because of limited public school options. School choice would be an economic boom for both places.
Ironically, the politics of school choice is complicated. You have one class of private school patrons who are perfectly fine with paying beaucuddles of money to have selectivity and control. The last thing they want is government interference or mass enrollment.
This affluent class finds themselves aligned with working class voters who see school choice as undermining the public schools.
Opposing this alignment of interests are both working class, middle class and upper class families who resent being trapped in bad public schools and would love help sending their children to better private schools.
Then there is the racial segregation issue. On one hand, school choice could enhance racial integration by giving more African American families affordable access to private schools. Or the reverse could happen, allowing white families to flee the public schools. There would probably be some of both.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out politically. The bets are cast. Reeves, White and Hosemann are all politically astute. Eventually, this will be decided at the ballot box.
Here’s another hotbed issue. This one local. The JXN Water billing strategy.
I’ve listened to numerous Northsiders fit to be tied over Jackson water billing problems. The stories are all the same. Crazy nonsensical bills that are impossible to fix because of horrible customer service with the billing personnel.
This problem has reached a crescendo now that JXN Water, desperate to pay its bills, has started cutting customers off for past-due balances.
The problem here seems to be that JXN Water is cutting everybody off regardless of their circumstances. People who have been erroneously billed and have tried to address the situation should be placed in another category. Before cutting those customers off, the billing department needs to properly credit their bill for past billing irregularities.
The problem here is that such a policy would require a tremendous amount of work and customer service skill —skills currently lacking. JXN Water czar Ted Henifin has been a master at fixing the water delivery infrastructure. That’s his skill set sweet spot. But the billing system is less so.
Henifin fixed the pipes and water plant in record time using top-notch third party contractors. But these same outside resources have not been brought in to fix the billing system.
I can personally testify. I received a new water meter a year or two ago. It was installed incorrectly and leaked. My water bill skyrocketed. JXN Water tried to repair it twice, failing both times. I finally hired a plumber to fix it with my own money, but I was still left with a big balance not of my doing.
I called and pleaded my case and got nowhere. So I just sucked it up and paid the bill.
Perhaps JXN Water figures most disgruntled customers will act like me and just pay up. Maybe so. But you can’t implement a policy like that without some major league political pushback.
