Many Kansans fret that the state will drop another congressional seat when the 2010 U.S. Census numbers come in, as it did after the 1990 census. But Tim Storey, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, thinks Kansas’ four seats are safe for now. “I don’t think there’s a whole lot of concern at this point that Kansas would lose a seat,” Storey told the Harris News Service. Still, state leaders must be aggressive about pursuing economic growth, because Kansas’ increasing population growth — 2.8 percent since 2000, for a total 2.76 million — falls short of states such as Arizona and Nevada. As Rep. Jerry Moran, R-Hays, said, “The trend is against us.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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21 Comments
I could stand to lose Jerry Moran as a representative.
Kansas’s household population growth rate is lower than many states, not just Arizona and Nevada.
For instance, all four of Kansas’ next-door-neighbor states, Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri and Nebraska had higher growth rates between 2000 and 2005 than Kansas. (Source: Census Fact Finder)
Higher-growth-than-Kansas states within a 10-hour drive of Kansas include Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. (13 states)
The only states within a 10-hour drive of Kansas that have lower growth rates than Kansas are Iowa, North Dakota (losing population), Michigan, and Ohio. (4 states).
Higher-growth-rate more-distant states include Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, California, Hawaii, Alaska, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont and New Hampshire. (19 states)
Lower-growth-rate more-distant states include Louisiana, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. (6 states)
Relocations of displaced rural Kansans, combined newcomers from other states will shift Kansas’s representation to the Northeast quadrant, and reduce it in Western, South Central and Southeastern quadrants over the next two decades.
The biggest thing I hope to see after the next census is increased urban clout in the legislature; especially for the Wichita SMSA.
Ben, I suspect there will be more urban clout in the legislature post-2010 census, but the clout will be centered around the JoCo area, not Wichita, IMHO.
Ben,
If Wichita MSA picks up any legislative seats, it won’t be inner-city or urban seats; they’ll be in the outlying “white flight” areas of the MSA. By their very nature, the “white flight” areas, such as Andover, Maize, Valley Center, etc., are intensely more conservative than Wichita. They’re also more conservative than many of the traditional “rural” districts in western Kansas, where a “live and let live” attitude sometimes influences voters.
Vaughn,
There will almost certainly be a shift from rural seats to urban seats, and Joco/Douglas/Wyandotte/Leavenworth counties will probably pick up representation. But Wichita will also.
And while I’m sure you’re aware of this, for the rest of the readers: Kansas has 125 state House seats. That number won’t increase; any shift in seats comes out of rural districts. For every seat gained in an urban area, two rural districts get combined.
Tom, your points are well made. My post to which you responded should have included my thought that the bigger gain will be in the JoCo area, not that Wichita SMSA won’t also gain some representation. However, I was anticipating that you could read my mind and shorthanded the response. :-)
“And while I’m sure you’re aware of this, for the rest of the readers: Kansas has 125 state House seats. That number won’t increase; any shift in seats comes out of rural districts. For every seat gained in an urban area, two rural districts get combined.”
So… WTF? Why cant the “urban dominated” legislature get irrigation and ethanol water wasting under control?
It CANT be ’cause there is too much “rural power”.
Cowardly? Short sighted? Indifferent to the future? Focused on present gains?
Yep. Must be kansas….
And besides, there is always abortion to fiddle with while kansas’ water supply burns.
kfg, because that is not a clear and present danger to their water supplies, especially those in the northeastern part of this state.
Vaughn,
I practice my ESP daily, but it never seems to work.
I think mind-reading is a liberal conspiracy.
Won’t do much good if the urbans take over. Look at the Wichita delegation. Its members have never been able to get along. They catfight with each other while the business of Wichita is ignored. And with the JoCo Repubs electing RW Phill, I don’t see a lot of hope for that part of the state.We don’t have the political or business savvy that many states have because we’re still hung up with the glory of farm life motif, you know, rugged individualists sweating out there in the noonday sun, more moral than anybody from those stinky cities, so on and so on. Grew up sweating in that noonday sun, and their ain’t anything more noble about that than making a living in the city.
“Grew up sweating in that noonday sun, and their ain’t anything more noble about that than making a living in the city.”
heheheheheheheheheheheheheh….
Spoken like a REAL farmer. Not too many of us sweating in the “noonday” sun though. Only us veggie farmers and small farmers.
Most of the other “sweating” is done in air conditioned cabs and trucks these days. Nothing very romantic about that.
If Wichita wanted to grow, and see an improved economy, as opposed to magnetically capturing agrarian refugees from Kansas and Mexico, with real-value declining wages,the city would have to start focusing on developing 21st century technologies.
For example, Eclipse Aviation solicited a community-contribution bid from Wichita. City and county leaders said, “We’re not interested. We’re already supporting Boeing, Textron, and Raytheon.” Dumb, da dumb, dumb. Three years later Boeing dumped its civil aviation facility, and Raytheon abandoned general aviation. So now Wichita is supporting a Canadian company, rather than a new American company that has a very bright future.
Tesla, maker of a revolutionary electric car, saw Eclipse’s setting up shop in Albuquerque, realized that the city’s composite and electronics design and manuracturing expertise was growing, and decided that Albuquerque was reinventing itself to be a 21st century innovation center. We’ll see more and more new-generation companies setting up shop in Albuquerque over the next 40 years. New Mexico has some strong advantages over Kansas. It’s got beautiful mountains. It has two cutting-edge Department of Energy labs, some of whose staff are willing to move from federal jobs, to the private sector. The University of New Mexico received $18.5M in federal research funding in 2004, and with new companies setting up shop, it’s going to get a lot more money as time goes by. For example, in 1994 UNM got
In stark contrast, KSU got $8.1 M, WSU got $7.9 M, and KU got $7.4 M and in federal research funding in engineering in 2004. Wit, Albuquerque got more federal engineering funding than Kansas’s flagship engineering school in Manhattan and Wichita combined.
Well, MPS, no one has ever accused the leaders of Wichita or Sedgwick County of looking to the future when the “vision” didn’t involve Boeing, Beech or Cessna (and to a limited extent, Learjet). This also, in a more general way, fits the state leadership, given the attempts to vitiate the existing universities by funding cuts, or more correctly, cutting funding increases. “Education? We don’t need no stinking education” seems to be the mantra.
I want to be the representative for the borders of all states.
That imaginary line that exists dividing the states by borders. I’m sure if the government tallied the land would be quite substantial and the propositions of such a leadership position could be used to negotiate Interstate Commerce as well as laws.
Of course building an office would be a challenge as the physical structure would exceed the width of the district.
“”Education? We don’t need no stinking education” seems to be the mantra.”
And what makes the truth of that so sad, VT, is that in years past, Kansas was KNOWN for great education.
When I first started in e.d. some 23 years ago, it was noted by elected officials and voters alike that “Kansas’ biggest export is educated people”.
I guess that isnt a truism anymore. Sad that it was lost in 1 or 2 generations.
Does anybody understand what Kansas is talking about?
Or care?
Kansas is educating kids in a great K12 and higher ed system, and then they are leaving Kansas for states with real economic opportunity on the best roads in America.
Brilliant!
This year several hundred Kansas students took part in a two-test competition to identify students who were qualifiable for the USA Mathematics Olympiad.
The first test was the American Mathematics Competition-12, a very difficult test. Students who did well on this were invited to take the even harder American Invitational Mathematics Examination, containing 15 questions and 3 hours to try to solve as many as possible. (Only two students in America got all 15 right.)
On the AMC-12, 11 JoCo students and 9 Sedgwick County students earned qualifying scores to advance to the AIME.
Of the 11 JoCo students, all were public high school students.
Of the 9 Sedgwick students, 4 were from Collegiate, 2 from Independent, 1 from Bishop Carroll, and 2 from East High.
To wit, 0% of JoCo qualifiers were from private schools, vs. 78% for Sedgwick County.
Of JoCo’s AIME takers, 18% were Asian-American (2 of 11). For Sedgwick 56% were (5 of 9).
On AIME, 4 JoCo public students scored “5″ or higher, the lowest score to qualify for consideration for USA Math Olympiad invitation. Sedgwick had no public school student who scored “5″ or higher. However 1 from Independent and 1 from Collegiate did.
The Independent School student was the only student from Kansas to actually be invited to the USA Math Olympiad, based on his state-topping score of 7, as a 9th grader.
What is noteworthy is that this student, and his younger brother in middle school, have been acing math contests. Their mother is a mathematics graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, set up for the Indian government by Stanford University. She has taught several middle school and upper school students advanced mathematics for MathCounts and AMC-12/AIME contests.
Ironically, she is deemed “unqualified” to teach mathematics in any Wichita public school, or anywhere else in Kansas, even though Filipina women with degrees from ordinary teachers colleges are hirable to teach math.
Kansas’s 6 students who scored “5″ or better won’t be going to teachers colleges. But suppose a few of them wanted to join “Teach for America” for a couple years. With three months teaching-prep training, these super-bright young people could teach in Houston public schools, or in New York City, or many other cities, but not in Wichita.
You can take every National Merit Finalist in Kansas who scores a 99th percentile on the PSAT Math exam, or every student who scores a 32+ on the ACT, over the next ten years, and if they applied to teach math in Wichita public schools, they would be rejected for lack of an education degree.
What is the problem? Public education invented a paradigm that anyone can be trained to teach mathematics, through a math-education degree utrack, post-graduation summer classes, workshops and inservices, aided by teacher-edition textbooks filled with margin note explanations, problem examples and “Tips!” that are not contained in student-edition textbooks. Plus being given detailed solutions to textbook exercises, not to mention CD-ROM tests with answer keys that enable teachers print out “expert-made” exams and just follow the answer keys to grade the tests, even if they can’t solve all the test problems themselves.
This is an important part of why our kids don’t major in mathematics, engineering, computer science or the physical sciences, as earlier generations did, which is why we’ve had to import millions of Asians who have majored in these disciplines to fill our growing domestic shortfall. Schools are following a faulty paradigm that holds any person with average-range mathematics abilities, can teach math, if he or she is given a bevy of assisting tools.
Here is reality: if math is natural to you, such as that when you were 10 years old, you could not only solve problems like, “What is the number for the blank space 1, 5, 14, __, 55?” you really liked doing this, and you liked doing the Stanford Achievement Test-Math, because it was a mentally-challenging game to you, then, if you were taught in a strong mathematics curriculum, and you took the ACT and thought, “This is fun,” if you used to look at the odd-numbered-exercise answer keys, and seeing a different answer from your own, you spent 45 minutes working backwards to set up the problem correctly,if your teacher asked you to give blackboard presentations of your solutions that were not those contained in the teacher solution manual for difficult problems, if you qualified for Honors Calculus in college, which required expository presentation of complex solutions, you can teach math.
If you’ve been teaching algebra and geometry, and the math chair says, “Our precalculus teacher is leaving, can you take that class?” or “We want to offer AP statistics, would you be interested in teaching it?” you think “Oh that sounds like a lot of fun.” Then before you know it, you’re boning up, and doing exercises to test yourself because it’s a pleasurable game, then your a math teacher.
You don’t think, “Gosh I’ve never taught these courses, and I haven’t seen them since I took them. I’d rather not, if I don’t have to.”
If you understand mathematics, you reject the noodle-brain fad of getting every elementary school kid to make an effort, using whatever methods he or she wants to dream up, and saying, “Good effort, Kelly,” even if the work-product is tripe. If a swim instructor threw 4 year olds into a pool, watching most of them drown, and she said, “I just want to let them figure out how to swim for themselves; the fact that they try is the important thing,” she’d be committed to a long-term psychiatric facility. But it’s fine in school math, because nobody drowns, at least not physically.
This isn’t just me saying these things. Colleges and universities are getting fed up with the burden of teaching increasing numbers of freshmen college algebra. When the local math contest coach used to helped her young sons with math homework they told her, “This isn’t the way my teacher told me to do it.” (That’s because the teacher didn’t understand mathematics.) This also happens when college profs help their kids: “Don’t worry about what your teacher says, here’s how I want you to do this problem. I don’t want to do your homework for you. I’ll invent a similar problem and here’s how we solve it…now you do the homework problem.” I have a friend whose degrees are in mathematics and computer science. A private business college offered him an evening algebra class, so he took it to make some money. His mostly-Hispanic students were having difficulty as he adhered to the textbook. Rather than watch them flounder, he designed his own course, and lightbulbs started to go on. His students told him his was the first math class they had ever taken in which things made sense, and they subsequently stood out as the best students in quantitative business courses.
Schools are in denial of the fact that if you want kids to learn math well—and bearing in mind that mathematics is the gateway to all modern science fields—you need to have teachers who deeply understand mathematics, which is to say they showed exceptional ability at a young age.
I mentioned teacher solution manuals. If you understand mathematics, you don’t need them. Students on the other hand, could sorely use odd-numbered exercise solution manuals, which are now universal in college lower-division math and science courses, including algebra.
Mathematically able parents who provide intensive homework assistance basically present solutions that are what you find in solution manuals. Schools don’t stop these parents from conveying this information, but they refuse to let all kids have solution manuals for self-learning at home. Schools’ provision of detailed exercise solutions to teachers, who to reiterate, if they understand mathematics, don’t need them, while denying this aid to students who do need them to learn mathematics (if they don’t have knowledgeable help-providing parents) is precisely backwards—if the goal is to help more kids learn more math.
School math (a subject very different from real mathematics) is a very weird enterprise. For example, any member of the public can buy any college mathematics textbook, as well as its student solution manual, and supportive CD or online tutorial material. He or she can buy “Algebra for Dummies” and other aids. But try to buy a high school mathematics textbook. You can’t unless you work for a school. This is mind-boggling: Houghton Mifflin’s college textbook division will sell its college algebra textbook to anyone, but its school division will not sell the high school textbook, even though the subject matter is the same. This only makes sense to somebody whose “critical thinking skills” are not what you want your child to be exposed to, much less acquire.
Be a student and try to keep an algebra I book at the close of the year for future reference. Not allowed. Offer to pay for it. No dice. The only way for a student to keep a book for future reference use is to lie and say he lost it.
This represents an anti-mathematics-learning ethos. I have been told that private schools here dispense and collect textbooks, as though they were public schools. But in private schools in Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, (it appears not Nebraska) and the vast majority of states, private school students buy their books. This promotes responsibility for one’s books, it enables future reference use, and it enables gifted teachers to choose textbooks that they want to use, rather than be bound by an institutional choice made 4 years ago.
Why are these things important? Wichita imports a lot of engineers , accountants, IT people and doctors whose kids need a different kind of mathematics education than they are getting. Wichita has a lot of other kids who need it. If schools here were to be changed to provide it, combined with post-secondary research and education development and technical training in post-aviation fields, then it would become possible to retain young talent, rather than experience economy-weakening “brain drain”. Ultimately you get growth in local startups, some of them succeed and bring profit dollars from the outside world, not just payroll, and outside companies are more inclined to relocate here, because their executives can comfortably envision sending their own kids to Wichita schools, and with lower living costs here, that’s a great combination.
Informative post MPS.
I was shocked when I talk to my nieces, nephews and their friends about what they wanted to do in college. Lot of them said medicine, science and etc.
–The shocking part is that none of them have heard or had forgotten what the factor/label method is. I worried for their future physics and chemistry professors in college, although they probably see this a lot I can well imagine.
MPS, to add to your post a bit. Our elder, who majored in math in college, is not being licensed to teach math in Minnesota because the same is a “two year program” (she’s obtaining a Master’s in Ed to complement her Master’s in Biomedical Engineering), although as I understand it, she will be licensed to teach Biology and Chemistry, and with one more undergrad Physics course, will be able to “legally” teach that subject as well. So, WTF; if a one year program, or whatever, is sufficient to teach the natural sciences, why won’t that suffice for a math major, for goodness sake?
She developed her desire to teach while in a one-year break between undergrad and graduate school. When the funding for the PhD project in Biomedical Engineering was abruptly stopped, she determined that she would go the way described above rather than beginning a new four year research project for the doctorate. A little background.
I know the young folks from Independent, and the mother to which reference is made is most certainly qualified (but for the state requirements) to teach math, albeit I would say at the higher levels.
VT, thanks for that update.
Maybe your daughter could look at KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) academies, Teach for America public schools, or the most revolutionary charter school in the country, The Preuss School UCSD, which was created to overcome Prop 209’s affirmative-action prohibition for University of California admissions, by offering minority students a superb 7-year middle through high school college preparation, such as requiring every student to take 6 AP courses and tests. The faculty is very well-educated, mostly young, enthusiastic and relishing experimentation. It is an astonishing laboratory school for cultivating a new generation of schools and teachers.
In the future, public education of the 21st century will abandon late 19th/early 20th century paradigms, because if it doesn’t, it will disappear. So, a young person’s getting training experience in the new models of education is much smarter –not frustrating and discouraging–than trying to conform to an obsolete system.