Our Views: Ranking states on sunshine

There is encouraging news and bad news in a new national ranking of state and local governments according to their performance in advancing public transparency.

Louisiana’s state government got a B-minus grade for the quality of its government websites from the Sunshine Review, a Virginia-based nonprofit group that advocates for greater government transparency. However, Louisiana’s overall ranking fell to a C-plus, when the general quality of parish government websites was factored in to Louisiana’s cumulative grade. In another category, Louisiana rated a D-plus for the quality of the websites operated by its major school districts.

The nonpartisan group used 10 criteria in assessing how well government websites shine a light on government activities. These include ease of use, and to what degree the website includes information on budgeting, contracts, audits, contacting government officials and securing public documents.

No state scored a cumulative grade of A in the Sunshine Review rankings. The highest scores went to California, Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, which received a B-plus.

“State government websites outperformed local government websites,” the group noted in its report. “States continue to struggle with proactively disclosing lobbying data, how to obtain public records, and with increasing the ease of finding supplemental data. Both counties and cities struggled with reporting the cost of government sector lobbying costs, publishing contracts and disclosing how to obtain government records. School districts failed to comprehensively report contract agreements, how to obtain public records, publish audits, or provide state statements about their funding.”

Maintaining government websites with timely, detailed information costs time and money. At a time of tight budgets for state and local governments and school districts, there’s even more of a temptation to scrimp on this kind of communication with citizens.

But in the digital age, government at all levels must make this kind of public accountability a priority.

Government websites, however well-designed and utilized, can’t be the only method of advancing transparency. In a state such as Louisiana, where many citizens still lack Internet access, making government information available through more-traditional methods, such as paper documents, is also necessary.

The Sunshine Review report suggests that there is still much work to be done in making government more open and accountable. We hope public officials heed the call.

Comments

1) Comment by Scrooge - 07/02/2013

ah, jeffsadow, the self-proclaimed defender of the state where the sun don't shine.

2) Comment by Being_Stupid - 07/02/2013

We should be called the rain state. It rains here every other day.

3) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 07/02/2013

@jeffsadow is at his best here... totally slipping deep inside the hinter regions of his minders, no sense at all, just a blind obedience to his twisted ideology of ignorance to the facts. As pointed out by myself and others only yesterday in response to his idiotic comments, the data he references is worthless to researchers, and is NOT the data which was on the previous websites, all of which is now missing. Not available to the public. What is now on the website and related sites references by @JeffSadow is of of no use to researchers, but then, "Dr" Jeff Sadow has provided no evidence he is capabale of real research.. Only an idiot can fail to see the relationship between the points I made below regarding The Advocate's position on transparency and "sunshine." @JeffSadow, as was pointed out by numerous commenters on this site, is known for ***** and then running from the truth. I feel sorry for his students. As to his comments about "less effective" teachers disproportionately "bailing out this way, to receive fat pensions for all the years they have undeserved children" I have this to say. The "data" you are responding to, the BS put out to supposedly "counter" true facts and data about retirements, says NOTHING at all about the qualifications of retirees, you idiot. Anyone who still thinks that @JeffSadow has a brain should read the actual report and then invite "Dr" Jeff Sadow to explain why the statement in the report which reads, "For this reason, retirement is not analyzed separately in this report" did not cause a moment of intellectual pause when he made the demeaning statements in his comments without even understanding that the ***** in the report DOES NOT EVEN PROVIDE DATA ON THE QUALITY (perceived or real, based on a proven ideologically driven COMPASS program rife with problems) OF TEACHERS WHO ARE RETIRING. Again, to perhaps make it simple enough even for @JeffSadow to understand: White provided absolutely no data to call into question the number of teachers retiring, or the rate of retirement, and simply provided for a "muddying of the narrative" that was successful in making The Advocate editorial staff look like idiots. THAT, kind sir, is the point of my clear comments below.

4) Comment by jeffsadow - 07/02/2013

Let's look at facts rather than bitter, conspiratorial-minded rants. http://www.louisianaeducationresults.com has all of the latest data that I've ever needed to look up previously, so if there's any missing, I haven't seen it, and ther remainder is archived at http://www.louisianabelieves.com/data, which also has some current data. If DOE would add a "data" link to its navigation bar, access would be as easy as it was under the old site. What the retirement rate has to do with this opinion piece is anybody's guess, but something worth noting, according to the story, is that the less effective teachers are disproportionately bailing out this way, to receive fat pensions for all of the years they underserved children. This is to be celebrated (except we must pay the gravy train pensions) by all who care about the quality of education and who desire efficiency in delivery government services. But I suppose it's easier to rant about an imagined world unrelated to reality than it is to think for yourself.

5) Comment by Noel Hammatt - 07/02/2013

Sometimes one has to wonder if The Advocate Editorial Board writers actually read their own newspaper. Two cases in point. This current editorial deals with transparency and the quality of the state's websites, yet no mention is made of the fact that just yesterday The Advocate actually had a quality piece of journalism pointing out that the State Department of Education website was uniformly criticized by all but a rather suspicious "prepared statement" by a single teacher but introduced by a paid PR hack for the Department of Education. In some detail, it was plainly evident even in the short article that the state was making less data available. No question was asked about the purported "complaints of parents and teachers" that led to the totally hidden creation of the new website sans historical data on education in Louisiana, but filled with ideological puffery. So The Advocate writes one day about this obvious attempt by the Department of Education to deny access to detailed information, while using the taxpayer paid site to push the ideological message of a few "believers" and the next day does not even connect today's article to the clear pattern of practices intended to make questioning our government even more difficult. The State Department of Education is preparing to release ALL student data on our children, and all teacher data, to private industry and hand- picked plunderers and profiteers feeding at the public trough, and yet The Advocate doesn't even ask the question, why? The second case in point? Around two weeks ago The Advocate did a great job pointing out that the policies of this administration, according to a wide variety of school leaders, have led to a much higher rate of retirees in the past year, and with all indications being that the rate is increasing even more this year. See "Rate of Teacher Retiring Spikes" on Jan 14. Good, hard data, including the actual number of teachers retiring was included. You know, the kind of information you might could check on a website. Just two weeks later, The Advocate totally destroys any semblance of consistency and ethical journalism when it put out this an article on Jan 29th headlined "White countered data that indicates increase in number of teachers retiring." Did no one in the Editorial Board recognize that the information provided by the Department of Education to "counter" the earlier article failed to include actual data on retirees? Had they read the short report itself, they would have seen that they specifically DID NOT FOCUS ON RETIREES at all! Not one piece of the data had anything to do with the earlier article. Yet, the headline screamed that the earlier data was "countered." And, wouldn't you know it, not one bit of the new data is available on any website for The Advocate to check, were it in the least interested in why White felt the need to "muddy the narrative" by countering one set of data with another set of "secret data" that had nothing to do with the former. We used to call this "Baffling with BS" in the military. Would someone please wake me up when The Advocate Editorial Board wakes up?