6 The Hampton Roads Messenger Transportation FROM PAGE 1


engaged in some PPTA projects that are significantly larger than what had been anticipated when we were originally thinking about PPTA,” said Watkins, a member of the Senate Transportation Committee.


Virginia has completed only a


handful of P3 ventures since 1995, with about 17 more under way in some form. But Virginia taxpayers have funneled billions into those projects, the largest recent subsidy being a more than $1 billion contribution to the roughly $1.4 billion Route 460 between Suffolk and Petersburg. The partnership was pushed by Gov. Bob McDonnell in a move questioned by members of his own party.


“I realize the importance of that


road, but at some point, you know, you have to ask yourself, do we really have the adequate stream of traffic to warrant a billion dollars in taxpayer money?” Watkins asked.


Those sorts of questions prompted


Trip Pollard, senior attorney and leader of the land and community program at the Southern Environmental Law Center, along with other conservation advocates, to investigate public-private transportation policies. As the projects proliferated, conservation advocates became increasingly concerned by how quickly and opaquely the projects were rammed through the design and construction process.


“As a conservation group our


concern is the impact these projects have had on the community and the environment without going through adequate planning or public input,” said Pollard, whose organization is comprised of conservation-conscious lawyers from Alabama to Virginia.


That skepticism led to a 2004


study by Jim Regimbal, a consultant with Fiscal Analytics and a former staff member to the Virginia Senate Finance Committee with more than 30 years of experience in state policy analysis, on behalf of the SELC. That report’s findings prompted lawmakers to change the PPTA so all projects require an independent traffic analysis. Prior to that, private companies could make their own estimates.


Now, with a new study released


this week on flaws in the PPTA’s policy and practice, members of the SELC, along with the Virginia Conservation Network, say they have the ammunition to change lawmakers’ minds as the 2013 General Assembly session draws near.


“Some of the main reforms


are to provide more information for the public, and to increase the Legislature’s role,” Pollard said.


Regimbal’s findings in his report this time around boil down to this:


“What I found is a very


concentrated decision model with little checks and balances,” Regimbal told Watchdog.org.


Here are what he said are his


most problematic findings over the PPTA, in law and in practice:


The lack of a formula in doling


out things like subsidies concentrates the decision-making in the hands of a governor-appointed board (the Commonwealth


Board), which serves “at the pleasure of the governor.”


The law isn’t clear how the Transportation


Volume 7 Number 4


project development complies with the National Environmental Policy Act.


Important information like


risk premiums and a risk-adjusted, cost-benefit analysis isn’t publicly disclosed before a comprehensive agreement is signed, when there is virtually no room for public input.


Transportation leaders haven’t


“adequately informed” the public of all major business decisions as Virginia law requires before a final comprehensive agreement is signed. (For instance, the state is potentially liable for “damages” to the private parties if a competing route to the Midtown Tunnel (linking the cities of Portsmouth and Norfolk) is built.


The Downtown/Midtown Tunnel/


MLK project had one detailed project proposer, even though PPTA guidelines call for “competition among a small list of qualified proposers.”


No transparent process exists for


determining how much subsidy each project gets. The Midtown Tunnel — supposedly the No. 1 transportation priority of the Hampton Roads region — is getting far less from the state than the roughly $1 billion doled out for the lower-prioritized Route 460.


But not everyone agrees that the


level of transparency in the P3 process is troubling.


“I think there’s a lot of


information available on the project if the public chooses to look at it,” said Bob Chase, president of the Northern Virginia Transportation Alliance, a private-sector transportation advocacy group.


The state does post an array of


project-related documents on the Virginia Department of Transportation website.


Chase said the I-395


High-Occupancy Toll Lanes is a prime example of transparency. Several public meetings and hearings were held, and Transurban Inc. — one of the companies tasked with the project — agreed to meet with just about anyone, he said.


“I think the final agreements


and everything are certainly public information and subject to public review,” he said.


But perhaps no level of


transparency can necessarily sever the ties between the private companies seeking these large-scale public partnerships and the state leaders and lawmakers with the influence to select them.


Watchdog.org’s Virginia Bureau


in August revealed that, together, Transurban Group and the Fluor Corporation responsible for the I-395 Express Lanes, have doled out more than $800,000 in contributions to state lawmakers and McDonnell.


Aside from making the entire


process more transparent, Regimbal said state lawmakers should select Commonwealth Transportation Board members by way of a vote, to make sure the governor isn’t “strong-arming” them to favor certain companies or projects for political reasons. After all, not only can the governor appoint board members, he can dismiss them as well, Regimbal said.


“What I really want to suggest here


is the decision makers the CTB, they should have as much independence as possible — whether they want it or not,” he said.


Chase said there’s no way of TRANSPORTATION PAGE 14


December 2012


Researchers Challenge ‘Idea of Intelligence’ in the Classroom


BY KATE O’DONNELL


and minority middle school


For low-income students


across America the message is, all too often, “you can’t.” It’s reinforced in the classroom, in the media, among peers, and it’s also the message from education statistics: high school dropout rates are uneven by district, college grades remain stubbornly unequal.


But researchers from Stanford


are aiming to turn that message on its head by borrowing from an oft-heard expression: when you think you can, you can.


sessions,


In pairs of short, 25-minute or


“interventions,”


participating students learn that their brain is “like a muscle” -- it can get stronger the harder it trains. They begin with a quick survey, move on to an activity, and end with a writing exercise. In that process students hear stories from upperclassmen that started out with lower grades and fewer friends, only to turn things around. Or they write about their own personal values -- what they take pride in, inside and out of school. In each case, students finish with the same task: write a summary for a fellow peer.


Teachers, meanwhile, are told


to present this as a routine exercise, as opposed to an actual intervention. Studies show students respond more positively when they believe they are helping other students instead of being helped themselves.


“[Our research] shows how much


ability and potential is lying there latent in the kid that’s not being tapped,” says Geoffrey Cohen, who along with Carol Dweck and Greg Walton forms part of the team behind Stanford’s Project for Education Research That Scales, or PERTS. “All of these interventions show how resilient and how much the children have learned in spite of the adversity they face,” Cohen adds.


Indeed, changing poor-per-


forming students’ ideas and feelings about intelligence and belonging, they say, can have a dramatic impact on performance, both in and out of school. PERTS researchers say their interventions can help reduce the achievement gap for poor and minority middle school students by up to 30 percent, and cut college GPA disparities in half over two to three years.


The team is now looking to


expand their research by bringing these interventions to middle school, high school, and community college classrooms nationwide. Last school year, PERTS reached 5000 students; this year, 3,500 plus and counting; in future years it hopes to expand those numbers to hundreds of thousands.


To do that, PERTS set up online.


Web-based, the program is a largely automated system, letting teachers run the interventions in class themselves without researchers on-site. Middle school through college classes enroll on PERTS’s website, where teachers download instructions and activities.


PERTS researchers and staff provide teachers support, and results, by phone as needed.


Jan Kaay is superintendent of


Luther Burbank School District, located in San Jose. The district was o*ne of the first to incorporate PERTS interventions in its middle schools, where nearly 100 percent of students qualify for free or reduced meals. Kaay, who says she’s seen some improvement in grades, explains that one of her hopes for the program is to help students with their “emotional growth.”


Which speaks to the program’s


approach, says Walton, who teaches psychology at Stanford.


He stresses that each intervention


aims to address the psychological needs of an individual students’ classroom experience, whether it’s teaching them they can up their smarts or helping them dismiss concerns over ethnic or gender stereotypes. “If the kids’ ears aren’t open to the lesson they’re receiving, it doesn’t matter how good the lesson plan is,” he adds.


Similar ideas have come and gone


since the 1970s, but it’s only in more recent years that they have begun to make their way out of smaller study settings and into classrooms at large.


Former Department of Public


Welfare Secretary and early education policy expert Harriet Dichter says one reason for that has to do with Americans’ tendency to look for what she calls “silver bullets”: simple, often singular solutions to complex problems (standardized testing, anyone?). Such attitudes make advocating for a piece of a bigger puzzle difficult. “We often see people ‘pitting’ solutions against one another,” Dichter notes.


Still, both Cohen and Walton


acknowledge their interventions are not cure-alls, but more like “the third leg,” alongside curriculum and teaching, “upon which education rests.”


Cohen, who says expansion --


from controlled experiments to larger, school district settings -- has been the major obstacle to implementing earlier educational interventions, says PERTS is reinforcing strategies that have already proven effective. “I think what we’re doing is bottling what exceptional teachers already know.”


But how can such a brief


intervention have such a lasting impact years later?


“It’s not really a brief


intervention,” insists Cohen. “From the kid’s perspective it’s a big impactful experience to be assured that intelligence is malleable … It’s a powerful message. It’s brief but it’s continually relived, that message.”


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