Cape Girardeau County is the only first-class, non-charter county in Missouri without countywide planning and zoning. That fact, reported recently by Rick Fahr in the Southeast Missourian, is often cast as a deficiency waiting to be corrected. It shouldn’t be. It’s the result of voters being asked directly, more than once, and saying no both times.
Cape Girardeau County had a zoning framework once. Voters approved county planning in 1972, and officials spent the next two decades building it out: subdivision and mobile home park rules in 1975, a master plan for unincorporated areas in 1977, a setback ordinance in 1988. Then, in 1992, a proposed zoning ordinance failed at the ballot box, and its failure voided the planning structure built since 1972 along with it. When county leaders tried again in 2000, voters rejected it a second time, by 69%. Twice, nearly a decade apart, the county had this exact conversation and reached the same conclusion.
Missouri isn’t the only place this has happened, and the country’s best example of it working out fine is also its most extreme: Houston. Voters there rejected zoning in 1948, in 1962, and again in 1993, and Houston is now the fourth-largest city in the country. In his book Arbitrary Lines, planner M. Nolan Gray makes the case that most people, including many local officials, quietly assume zoning and land-use planning are the same thing. They aren’t. Houston handles the genuine conflicts—a slaughterhouse next to a school, a concrete plant near a hospital—through targeted nuisance ordinances and privately negotiated deed restrictions, not a citywide permission system. Gray argues zoning was never really designed to solve those problems in the first place; it was designed to inflate property values and slow the pace of new development by giving existing residents a formal veto over what gets built near them.
That’s worth considering, because the case for zoning usually sounds reasonable on its face. Todd Wiesehan, who runs planning and zoning for Christian County in Missouri, told the Southeast Missourian that zoning provides tools for orderly development and helps a community avoid the friction that comes as an area fills in. That’s a fair description of what zoning is supposed to do. It’s a much less accurate description of what it actually does. Springfield is proving the point this year: city planners and neighborhood residents spent a year identifying roughly 3,600 single-family lots for modest housing—duplexes, small multi-unit homes, and other similar “starter” housing Springfield says it needs. Planning commissioners, facing objections from residents in the affected neighborhoods, scaled that number down to just over 1,000 lots limited to major corridors. So much for “orderly development”—the outcome was decided by whichever property owners were organized enough to show up, not by any neutral planning principle.
Cape Girardeau County is facing its own version of this test right now, albeit without a zoning code. Rumors of data center development nearby have put the question back on the table. At a June candidate forum, all three candidates for presiding commissioner raised real concerns about drainage, infrastructure, and unregulated subdivision growth, and every one of them still leaned against full zoning, grounding their answers in property rights. Asked directly for the county’s current position, the three sitting commissioners gave about as clean an answer as government offers: “There are no plans at this time for planning or zoning.”
That restraint isn’t free. Clinton County’s zoning administrator, Tricia Knight, told the Southeast Missourian her office fields property line disputes, drainage complaints, and neighbor conflicts that would otherwise have nowhere to go. Cape Girardeau County doesn’t have that apparatus, and residents there will have to work out some of those disputes through civil courts or informal means instead. That’s a real trade-off, not an oversight, and it’s one the county’s voters have now made twice, with their eyes open.
Not all heroes wear capes, but plenty of them live and vote in Cape Girardeau County! They didn’t forget to adopt zoning. They considered the question, twice, and to their credit turned it down both times.
Susan Pendergrass speaks with Brian Kisida, associate professor in the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs and director of Mizzou’s Open Minds Initiative, about what’s missing from civics education in America. They discuss why current civics assessments test trivia rather than real understanding, why comparing the U.S. to authoritarian regimes could improve civic knowledge, whether teachers are to blame for declining faith in America among young people, and how Missouri could build better civics assessments and reporting.
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Brian Kisida, you are the associate professor in the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at Mizzou, and also director of Mizzou’s Open Minds Initiative. We just talked briefly before we started recording that we’d like to have you come back and just talk about the Open Minds Initiative, because civic discourse on higher ed is certainly another thing that we’re very interested in. So thanks for coming on.
Brian Kisida (00:23): Yeah, and when we get to that topic, I’ll be a huge critic of the civic discourse movement in higher ed, and I’ll tell you how we’re doing it better.
Susan Pendergrass (00:31): Great, that’s even better. I love that. Meanwhile, this is part of a sort of an ongoing series of podcasts we’ve had, because prompted by a couple months ago, Pew and Gallup was putting out some survey data, and Cato, that shows, with the election of some primary elections of some folks from the DSA party, that there’s a rising opinion of socialism and a falling opinion of capitalism. And in the conversations we’ve had at the Show-Me Institute about this, and about how kind of surprising that is, we’ve been trying to pinpoint, is it because people don’t know what socialism and capitalism are, or is it really that they do like it better? And trying to understand, what do people know. I spoke to somebody on the podcast from Cato, and part of their survey was, how many branches of the federal government are there, and only, I think, forty percent got that right. So we know that people don’t really know a lot of stuff. But then I started looking into Missouri K-12 education, if I could kind of get a feel for how Missouri students are doing on history, government, civics, whatever is tested, social studies. And in the NAEP, at the national level, they have some test score data, but not at the state level. And I was trying to find some state-level information about maybe trends on what Missouri kids know, and I really couldn’t find much at all. And so I really want to talk to you today about this idea of what could states be doing in K-12 education to do a better job of teaching these subjects, and what to do about the fact that we don’t even really have test score data to know how we’re doing. So a long lead into that, but thank you very much, because I know you’ve written about this, and I would just love to get your thoughts on that.
Brian Kisida (02:21): Yeah, there is a lot to unpack there. I want to start by just saying that
Brian Kisida (02:26): I think we are missing the plot here. I think that a lot of these types of things that you’re citing, I think, are focused on the wrong things. So you mentioned some of these things, we see these sort of alarmist reports all the time. Students don’t know the branches of government. I remember there was a headline a couple years ago, one of these alarmist headlines, it reads: “A new national poll finds that most Americans don’t know that the Constitution was written in 1787. Nearly two-thirds of Americans named 1776,”
Brian Kisida (03:08): when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and to that I say, I do not care. I think you’ve
Brian Kisida (03:17): already centered on one of the things, which is, what we actually measure tends to be trivia. So let’s look at the broader landscape. Roughly half of states in the United States actually have some sort of civics exam. Fewer than those have it as a course, as a graduation requirement. For a lot of them, it’s just, like, complete it. Missouri, it’s complete it. You can take it as many times as you want until you pass. It won’t bar you from graduation. But even among those, outside of a few outliers, like Florida, who’s developed a really strong, I think, civics knowledge test, even among the ones that do have exams, it tends to be trivia. So the majority of states that are testing this stuff are borrowing questions from the U.S. citizenship exam. And the U.S. citizenship exam has questions like, what is the name of the national anthem, name one of the two longest rivers in the United States,
Brian Kisida (04:16): where is the Statue of Liberty. These are not questions, if I look at the world and I look at the sort of breakdown in civic attitudes and dispositions that we have been witnessing from the right and the left, on the extremes, I don’t see how knowing these things is going to help us. So focusing merely on how bad we’re doing on these performance measures, kind of, I believe, misses the point of what actually should we be measuring, and what actually do we want students to come away learning.
Susan Pendergrass (04:50): And what should we be measuring? I mean, and what should we be measuring, especially for high school students. It feels to me like if they don’t even know the trivia, how are they going to know the underlying concept?
Brian Kisida (05:01): Yeah, so I’ve been working on this. I’m in the middle of a two-year project, I got a nice
Susan Pendergrass (05:01): Okay.
Brian Kisida (05:01): fellowship to pursue this stuff from the Carnegie Foundation. And my thesis is that we need to focus more on measuring civic values and dispositions. But let’s hold that thought for a minute. First let me dispense with
Susan Pendergrass (05:23): Okay.
Brian Kisida (05:23): sort of, I think, the three ways that we can try to improve civic capacities in this country, or in school systems, or in districts. One, I think, is just a no-brainer: quantity. So what are most states requiring? One semester. One semester of government studies. That’s just simply not enough. So we can talk about quality all we want, but there’s only so much quality you can put into one semester. So quantity has to be addressed. We need more of it. It should be integrated from K to 12. You can integrate lessons about government and politics in literature classes, starting in elementary school. So quantity, I think, is issue number one. The second way that people tend to want to approach this is they think that if we write stronger standards and requirements in state departments of education, that that is going to trickle down into the classroom. One, I don’t believe that that’s how reform works, and lots of research has found that it doesn’t. You might help give teachers a better guiding framework, but we know that people respond to incentives, and if there’s not some assessment framework tied to the standards that people write in state departments of education, we can’t expect it to be done. The common adage to think about this is, what gets measured gets done. So I think it’s great to get together and talk about and write down into laws whatever it is that we think students should be learning, but I do not think that we should expect that to translate into classroom practice. So I end up at the third thing, which is, I think we need stronger assessments.
So within that framework, okay,
Susan Pendergrass (07:09): Okay.
Brian Kisida (07:09): what should assessments look like? Again, there are variations and types of trivia that we might ask. Knowing where the Statue of Liberty is located, I don’t think adds to our sense of civic values and dispositions. I think we need to reform it in two basic ways, in the ways that we measure these things. One is, there are certain things that you just kind of need to know to have an informed attitude and disposition. So you mentioned communism and socialism. Why don’t we have civic knowledge exams and items that ask students, how do these countries differ from the United States? What happened? I ask my students all the time, have they ever heard of the Cultural Revolution in China? None have. And this is really one of, I think, the most
Brian Kisida (08:03): important ways that we could improve our civic knowledge database, is to actually put the United States in a comparative perspective. Because it’s not just that students today are perhaps having very uninformed opinions about bad ideas, but
they don’t actually, we have no sense that they have the knowledge to form those opinions better. So think about what it is when a student has an idea that you and I might think is completely uninformed, and we can actually measure that. We can say, how does the United States differ in the ways that it protects constitutional rights and liberties compared to country X, Y, and Z? What did happen under Soviet rule, under communism? What does free speech look like in China? And then you actually have, so I think that’s a way to embed knowledge questions within a framework that still leads to,
can we expect students to have informed values and dispositions when it comes to democracy? And one of the things that we’ve seen, not just the general sense of students’ beliefs, but what we’ve seen is a real decline in faith in America. Poll after poll of young people finds that they
Susan Pendergrass (09:27): Right. Yeah. Wanted to bring that up.
Brian Kisida (09:29): are not necessarily committed to democracy, they’re not necessarily proud to be an American, and if you don’t know much about how America differs from the rest of the world, it might be understandable that you would think that. And I think that Americans are admirably self-critical.
I did a recent look at the NAEP civic items, in terms
Brian Kisida (09:56): of which ones are critical. And the number of NAEP civic items that are critical of America versus items that are critical of other countries is like 10 to 1. Good, good for us, like we’re critical of ourselves. We should be self-critical, but we should
Susan Pendergrass (10:08): Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Brian Kisida (10:11): not be so self-critical to the point that we undermine the things that we do that are good. So that’s one way that I think we can use knowledge-based civic assessment. And this requires states to take on this task, build task forces, start working groups, and figure out how to reform this. The other thing that I believe in is that we actually should directly measure attitudes and dispositions. So these aren’t knowledge tests, maybe there’s not a right or wrong answer, but as a way to have a good check on what students are coming out of schools believing, I think that we should ask students questions that measure
their sense of tolerance for difference. We should ask students their respect for the rule of law. If we’re upset when we see too many students, too many young people on social media celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or something like that,
I don’t know how to understand that. What I would like to know is, I would like to be able to look at school systems and say, okay, of your graduates, how many actually are committed to the views of tolerance and pluralism and the rule of law and individual rights. And those are a little bit difficult, because we kind of have an aversion in this country to asking students about their opinions, but I think that there’s ways that we can get there.
Susan Pendergrass (11:40): Yeah. What do you think about going upstream a little bit to the colleges of education, and what teachers are now being prepped for when they go out into their careers, ’cause it seems to me that some of this could be due to, I want to say this carefully, but this idea that the teachers in charge of their classroom, and they can teach facts and opinions and culture in whichever way they choose to do so, and I think that has contributed to this idea that a lot fewer young people are proud to be Americans. They’re proud of this country, because I feel like they must be getting something from the classroom that suggests that. What do you think?
Brian Kisida (12:23): I’m not convinced of that.
Susan Pendergrass (12:26): You’re not. Great.
Brian Kisida (12:28): But I don’t want to say it’s not a problem. So let’s take colleges of education first and then take teachers second. Colleges of education, absolutely, I think, tend to be some of the most leftward-leaning, echo-chamber sort of spots on college campuses. Of course that varies. If we’re talking about Columbia or Harvard, it’s going to be different than if we’re talking about the University of Missouri. But I don’t really believe that they have the power to brainwash teachers into a particular way. I do believe that there’s a missed opportunity to give teachers more good preparation. But I gave a talk at the most recent Missouri Social Studies Conference, a statewide conference of social studies educators, and I didn’t know what I was going in to expect. I thought, is this going to be a super woke, whatever the media narrative might lead me
Susan Pendergrass (13:36): Sure, sure.
Brian Kisida (13:36): to expect. It was excellent. I met social studies teacher after social studies teacher that was committed to American values and pluralism and democracy. It was a breath of fresh air. And I’ve also done my own research,
Susan Pendergrass (13:54): That’s great.
Brian Kisida (13:56): a study that we published in Education Next recently, where we actually pulled a representative sample of teachers in the United States, a representative sample of parents, and a representative sample of the general public. And we asked them very basic questions. One of the questions that was just very straightforward was, should schools teach that America is fundamentally good. And teachers scored higher on that than parents and the general public.
Brian Kisida (14:26): You have these pockets of San Francisco or Seattle or Massachusetts,
Susan Pendergrass (14:35): Sure, sure.
Brian Kisida (14:36): where teachers, and teachers unions and the like, are engaging in politics in a way that most of the public does not want them to. But I think they are outliers. That is what countless numbers of research, Jay Greene at the Heritage Foundation did a similar study, where they polled teachers and they came to the same conclusion. Teachers mostly look like Americans, because they are. You have teachers in rural places all over this country who are trying to do their best. So I do think that placing the blame on teachers is misguided. I think we really need to focus on the places where we can actually make change.
Susan Pendergrass (15:16): Yeah, I say that because I’m not really trying to bash teachers, but I have pushed back a little bit on this reforming how we teach civics and social studies, because in Missouri anyway, we have not yet nailed how to teach kids to read. We are really falling short, especially with our little kids, and we have some forty percent who are scoring below basic on NAEP, which means they’re functionally illiterate by third and fourth grade, and that does not bode well for their lives. And so I tend to want to just go back, and we’re going to start talking about math more and more, because now we know about the UCSD problem and all of that. We’re going to start talking about math more, and I don’t think we’re really getting the basics right, and civics feels like sort of down the road from those two. And with the reading in Missouri, there are some disproven methods of teaching reading, like three-cueing, where teachers unions and rural teachers have pushed back and said, nope, you can’t tell us what we cannot teach, what method we cannot use, if we want to use that method and we deem it necessary in our classroom on that day, then we will use it, you can’t ban it. And that pushback is surprising to me, because I did a podcast with Chad Aldeman, who said it’s been proven to be harmful, it’s a harmful teaching method. And yet teachers in Missouri have pushed back and said, you can’t tell us how we’re not going to teach. So that’s where that’s coming from for me. You certainly know the civics and social studies part of that much better than I do, but I’m like, if they won’t accept a ban on that, then how do we get to this next
Brian Kisida (16:51): I think
Susan Pendergrass (16:51): level?
Brian Kisida (16:51): the only thing I would add, and I’m sure you saw the Wall Street Journal piece a couple of days ago, where it was correlating union strength with reading scores.
Susan Pendergrass (17:01): Sure did. Wasn’t good. Yeah.
Brian Kisida (17:05): I think the only thing I would add to that is, I just don’t think teachers, in the way you phrased it, it made it sound like teachers’ unions represent and speak for teachers, and I don’t think they do. I think that we accept
Brian Kisida (17:15): that narrative, but you talk to a teacher, my wife is one, they’re in the union
Susan Pendergrass (17:20): Right, right.
Brian Kisida (17:22): because they want legal protection if somebody, if some parent tries to sue them wrongly, or if their principal tries to fire them or retaliate against them wrongly. And this is the problem with teachers’ unions, is that they’ve become political beasts instead of just advocating for employees and
Susan Pendergrass (17:37): Yes.
Brian Kisida (17:38): employees’ rights. And that’s a huge problem, especially in states where union dues are required, but also in states where union dues are voluntary, but it’s still the only way teachers feel that they’re protected, just in terms of normal workplace
Susan Pendergrass (17:52): Right.
Brian Kisida (17:53): things. Yeah, that’s a problem. In terms of the reading thing, I’m with you in a sense, but I wouldn’t put civics so far downstream, maybe, as you. I do think that
Brian Kisida (18:07): preserving what we have here is the most important thing that we have going on in public education. That’s me. But I think there’s a compromise here.
Brian Kisida (18:16): If students need to learn to read better, can we have them read the Constitution and Animal Farm,
Susan Pendergrass (18:24): Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Brian Kisida (18:24): and other things that we think can serve double duty. That sounds like a perfect scenario for me. In fact, I talked to a teacher
Brian Kisida (18:31): at that social studies conference, and I was actually curious, I was like, so do kids still read Animal Farm? And he said, yes, my students read it every year.
Susan Pendergrass (18:41): Yeah, yeah. That’s one of my favorites. Yeah, absolutely. I hope kids are still reading books. Yeah,
Brian Kisida (18:46): Not as much as we need them to, for sure.
Susan Pendergrass (18:48): So yeah, I was looking at the Missouri standards on social studies, and I know, going back to the original survey data we talked about, the standards on economics are very thin. Economic systems, very thin. So if I understand, we would have to sort of beef up, not put an emphasis on those, but those need to be good, but then we need better assessments, and then we need those assessments to count. Right?
Brian Kisida (19:15): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (19:17): So how do we make that happen? That feels like a long game in Missouri.
Brian Kisida (19:20): I think that it’s a long game generally. The process of building assessments is years, it’ll take years. But what are we waiting for? We can do this.
Brian Kisida (19:33): And when you say those assessments should count,
I know that you can run into political opposition, especially from the unions, if you make tests high stakes. But I think another thing that we’ve seen
Brian Kisida (19:47): is that a test doesn’t have to be high stakes in a particular accountability system with carrots and sticks to be effective. Stigma and shame does a lot. We’ve seen this through research all over the place. David Figlio, right? So Missouri’s about to do
school grades, letter grades, and
Susan Pendergrass (20:09): Yes.
Brian Kisida (20:10): when they implemented this in Florida, I’m pretty sure this was David Figlio’s research, they found that there were some real repercussions if your school got an F, or maybe a D or whatever. But they found that schools improved
Brian Kisida (20:28): even if they were given a C instead of a B, if they were there on the threshold. So I’m not, because I also believe in school choice and not too much government coercion, because I think government can get it wrong so often. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make this information publicly available. I would like every school’s report card
Brian Kisida (20:51): to not just include some sort of amorphous letter grade or test score averages, or whatever proficiency means, that most people don’t really understand. I would also like it to say,
Susan Pendergrass (21:02): Right.
Brian Kisida (21:02): here’s how they performed on the civics, here’s how they performed on the civic values and dispositions test, survey, we can call it. We don’t even have to call it a test.
Brian Kisida (21:14): Because those things give parents and the public and policymakers information that they can use to figure out what’s going wrong in places, to figure out what’s going right in other places. The bottom line is, we need data, because you can’t solve a problem unless you can identify it. But I don’t know if I’d be super
Brian Kisida (21:33): draconian about assessments.
Susan Pendergrass (21:40): So do you see any appetite for this in Missouri? For starting to focus on social studies and civics?
Brian Kisida (21:47): Not as much as I would like to see. Other states have made this a real priority. Florida, Texas,
Susan Pendergrass (21:54): You mentioned Florida.
Brian Kisida (21:55): Iowa, Utah. There’s kind of a growing list.
Susan Pendergrass (22:00): All choice states. Yeah.
Brian Kisida (22:01): of states that have really made this a key feature of what they’re doing. I would like to see this be something that would move forward
more squarely on Missouri’s agenda, at the state level. I’m part of a group called the Missouri Coalition for Civic Learning. We’re doing what we can as volunteers, members of our organization go down to Jefferson City and they’ll testify and meet with legislators. We’ve held several meetings with legislators to try to get this on the agenda. Missouri’s legislature doesn’t
typically work super smoothly, and things don’t happen quickly, but by all means, if you’re a listener out there and you want to be involved, let’s make this happen.
Susan Pendergrass (22:47): So let’s just talk for a minute about NAEP. We’ve been throwing that term around, can you tell me a little bit about what that is, or tell listeners what that is? And I’m curious to know, is there consideration for changing the social studies exams?
Brian Kisida (23:01): Yes, so NAEP is the National Assessment for Education Progress. It is typically referred to in shorthand as the nation’s report card. And NAEP is the way that we see and track how students are learning. NAEP civics has always been the redheaded stepchild.
We need to reform NAEP civics, we need to fund NAEP civics, we need to be serious about this. Back to my pushback
on what I think is the most important function of publicly funded education. And I am happy to say that I know that the National Assessment Governing Board that informs how NAEP works, I know that they’re building a task force right now to revamp NAEP and reassess what we’re measuring, and I’m excited to see where that goes.
Susan Pendergrass (23:52): That’s great. All right, great. Well, thank you so much again. We’re going to keep talking about this, because I do believe math, reading, and civics are all important at the state level. We’re going to keep talking about it all the time. But I really hope that with this push toward more accountability in the state from the governor, that we can include social studies in the conversation, at least, so that number one, I’d just like to know how the kids are doing.
Brian Kisida (24:18): Yeah, yeah, no, let’s make it happen. Listeners, let’s do it. Thank you.
Susan Pendergrass (24:22): I appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brian.
St. Louis County Executive Sam Page is asking the St. Louis County Council to raise the county’s property tax rate this year. Local governments have authority to make small changes in rates without a vote of the people, and Page claims this is needed to avoid cuts to county services. (The power to adjust rates without a vote is legitimate enough when it’s used for small, short-term changes. Town & Country shows how it can be abused.)
While the cuts might come in multiple areas, there seems to be consensus that the potential cuts would be focused on the county police department, since that is the largest general budget item. (In most other counties, we would be referring to it as the sheriff’s department.) As the council’s budget coordinator said, “There is no scenario in which you don’t cut the police.”
But here is the tricky part. Within a state or within a city, services are spread out within the entire state or city. MoDOT serves transportation needs throughout Missouri. The Kansas City Fire Department serves all of Kansas City. But within counties, some services are countywide, but many other services are focused on the unincorporated parts of the county, even though most taxes are countywide. So what you have here is a proposed property tax increase on all one million people of St. Louis County that will primarily fund police officers who mostly serve the 300,000 people of unincorporated St. Louis County.
Why would a resident of Brentwood want to pay higher taxes for police who don’t serve Brentwood? Brentwood has its own police to pay for. (Note: I am well aware that the county police contract to provide policing in some cities, such as Wildwood, but those cities pay for that service directly out of city revenues, not out of general county taxes.)
There are services in Missouri counties that are countywide, meaning that you get the same service whether you live in a municipality or not. These include public health, most revenue offices (collector, assessor, recorder of deeds, etc.), and parks and recreation (counties operate parks inside and outside of cities). Some county services are only for the unincorporated areas. For example, regulations of county planning and zoning departments don’t apply within municipalities. Some departments serve both cities and unincorporated areas but in different ways. A county road department will maintain arterial roads that serve everyone, but also the neighborhood streets in an unincorporated subdivision.
These differences also vary by county. For a rural county with only a few small towns in it that provide limited services, the county will be the dominant provider of local government and county taxes will serve everyone more or less equally. For a large urban county that is almost entirely composed of cities and towns, such as Jackson and Clay counties, the various municipalities are the dominant provider of local services and the portion of county taxes that go to the unincorporated parts tends to be small. St. Louis County is the largest county in the state and while it has many municipalities, it also has a very large unincorporated population, which creates a difficult tax situation.
St. Louis County residents just rejected a countywide use tax. Sam Page wants a countywide property tax increase. In my opinion, the county council is unlikely to agree to it. Is there an option that would allow county taxes to be raised but have it fall mostly on the county residents who receive the services?
Yes, there is. The utility tax (also called a franchise tax or a gross receipts tax) is simply a sales tax on your utility bill. There is a special law for St. Louis County that imposes the tax only in unincorporated areas. (It also applies to Jackson County, but I don’t think it has been enacted there.) Residents of St. Louis County pay a five percent tax on their utility bills. If the county executive and county council truly believe that revenue increases are necessary to fund county police (and I am not saying they are) then the county should propose a franchise tax increase. That would impact the taxes paid and the services received by residents of unincorporated St. Louis County, and I think that would be the fairest and efficient approach.
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thanks so much for joining us on the Show Me Institute podcast. I’m being joined by Avery Frank of the Show Me Institute and Dr. James Shuls of the Institute for, and I already forgot, Civics and Liberty at Florida State University.
James V. Shuls (00:13): The Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University.
Susan Pendergrass (00:18): Mine wasn’t bad. I mean, yeah.
James V. Shuls (00:21): We can start a new institute.
Susan Pendergrass (00:22): And also a senior fellow at the Show Me Institute, and you’ve certainly done a lot around Missouri education for a long time. And one of the things that I know you’ve worked on, and you as well, Avery, over the years, is the idea of the headlines around the teacher shortage crisis. That it is a crisis, regardless of what’s happening with K-12 enrollment. Regardless of what has happened with teacher salaries in the state of Missouri, I feel like every year we find out that there is a crisis. Is that right, Avery?
Avery Frank (00:58): Yeah, and that’s honestly what’s been said a lot, and most of it revolves around, we’re not paying teachers enough. They usually point at our low salary, that it’s one of the worst in the nation, and say, well, if we had a higher average teacher’s salary then these things would be fixed. And even after we supposedly fixed them in twenty twenty-five when we raised the minimum teacher salary to forty thousand, we’re still seeing the same complaints. I believe I saw a few op-eds about the topic this year,
Avery Frank (01:25): and, as we’ll discuss in the paper, I won’t spoil the whole podcast, but there’s a reason
Susan Pendergrass (01:31): Go right ahead.
Avery Frank (01:32): that we’re still feeling that pressure even after making these general, broad changes.
Susan Pendergrass (01:37): Yeah, I mean, the state recently, within the last few years, had a blue ribbon commission to study it, and I think this is the time of year when teachers are making their decisions if they’re going back or not, and they have these empty spots to fill. But I guess the first question is, is there a crisis-level teacher shortage in Missouri? Go ahead, James.
James V. Shuls (01:55): So what happens oftentimes is there are problems, for sure. There are some districts that struggle to find teachers. There are some subject areas where it’s hard to find teachers. And what happens is, whether it’s the media or the teachers union or some group that really would benefit or really would like to see us pay teachers more or increase education funding, they latch on to those stories and they latch on to those narratives. And they make it sound as if there’s this huge, broad crisis across the state. It would be kind of like, if I had ants in my kitchen and I said, my gosh, there’s ants, and you came and looked and you said, there are ants in your kitchen, James, there’s a crisis in this neighborhood, there’s ants
Susan Pendergrass (02:38): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (02:38): everywhere. It’s like, well, there’s a localized problem in my kitchen, or in my school, or in some school, right? That doesn’t necessarily make it a statewide problem. And it doesn’t make it necessary for us to have statewide solutions. That’s part of the point that Avery and I drive home in this paper: when you actually look at the data throughout the state, there are isolated problems. There are certainly things where some government intervention could potentially help. But what happens is the people, like I said, who would benefit, or who want to see broad education policies, or who want to see increased teacher pay overall, latch onto those isolated stories and blow them out of proportion.
Susan Pendergrass (03:18): Yeah, and I might be doing the same thing here, but from a macro level, at the state level, I talk about this all the time, that K-12 enrollment is declining and it’s going to continue to decline. There’s no forecast that turns that around. We’ve had smaller and smaller kindergarten classes for fifteen years. So we will be looking at smaller and smaller K-12 enrollment for a long time. Yet the number of public school teachers has actually increased at the state level by several thousand teachers. Now that doesn’t mean that every district is necessarily hiring, but what about, in addition to teachers, Avery, hasn’t there been massive hiring in support staff at the school level?
Avery Frank (04:00): Yes, there’s been a huge boom both in administrator full time equivalent and staff as well as teachers. James and I, we just tried to unwind it a little bit for just teachers, and we look at, okay, there’s about, if we assume there’s twenty kids per classroom, there’s about twenty eight thousand fewer students, we’d expect there to be about fourteen hundred fewer teachers, but when we look at it, over that same time period we’ve lost all those students, we actually have four thousand more teachers. So we’re seeing some very strong upward trends for administrators especially, but teachers as well, while our students continue to lose enrollment, and that’s gonna have a lot of pressure financially. But I also do think it kind of shows up in the shortage data, ’cause a lot of our districts don’t really have any problems with shortage, and how could they, with all these teachers? But that doesn’t change the fact that we still have some districts that, even when we have a huge influx of teachers and staff, still have some schools and subject areas that are struggling, because they’re not being paid a market wage that they should be, because the teacher profession still is not as market oriented as a lot of other professions.
Susan Pendergrass (05:18): Yeah, so you mentioned this as a solution, James, in the paper: teachers are paid on a step and ladder, and to pay one teacher a higher base salary you have to pay every teacher basically a higher base salary, you have to shift the step and ladder. What about differential pay? I thought Missouri passed that a few years ago.
James V. Shuls (05:37): Well, I wanna hammer home the point that Avery just made for a moment first. While we’re losing students, we’re adding teachers. And that gets left out of the narrative around teacher shortages. If you continue to hire more and more and more, even when you don’t need more and more and more, that puts pressure on the system. And if a high performing district or high-paying district starts hiring more teachers, and let’s say the colleges of education aren’t producing more teachers, where are those teachers going to come from? Well, they’re going to come from the hard-to-staff places that are hard to work in, where teachers don’t want to be there. So if you think about this in the St. Louis context, if Rockwood goes on a hiring spree, hiring more teachers, teachers might leave Normandy, they might leave Riverview Gardens and head over to work in Rockwood. You could see the same sort of thing throughout the state. So when districts are hiring more and more teachers, that puts pressure on the market and helps to contribute to this idea that there’s a shortage. But to ask your question about differential pay, think about that scenario I just mentioned. If you increase overall pay across the board and every district now pays teachers more because you’ve raised the base or whatever it is, well, you’ve not helped those disadvantaged districts at all. What you’ve done is simply made everyone get paid more, which may be good, and maybe in the long run, if we paid everyone more, maybe more people might want to come into the profession. But that’s a solution way down the road and it’s very expensive. It doesn’t lead to any solutions today for the districts that are struggling to attract teachers today.
Susan Pendergrass (07:26): So tell me a little bit more about this pipeline, Avery. The teachers in Missouri public schools in the St. Louis, Kansas City area, they probably come out of UMSL and UMKC programs. Are the universities and colleges across Missouri supplying as many teachers as they used to?
Avery Frank (07:46): Most of our universities are seeing fewer completers. Some are pretty extreme. If you look at Lindenwood or MOBAP or UMSL,
Susan Pendergrass (07:55): What’s MOBAP?
Avery Frank (07:56): Missouri Baptist, sorry, that’s a local
Susan Pendergrass (07:58): Okay, well, that
Avery Frank (08:00): locals saying. If
Susan Pendergrass (08:01): Yeah.
Avery Frank (08:02): you look at Rockhurst University, I believe in Kansas City, you see a lot of pretty significant downturns, and I do think part of that is because there’s less students in the city and all of that. But we’re seeing a lot of downward pressure on that, but at the same time we’re actually seeing a lot of upward growth in non-university teacher preparation programs. So when you look at the American Board, Certification of Teacher Excellence is a long title, but they’re actually the biggest producer of new teachers in twenty twenty-five. They had about five hundred teacher completers, and that program is basically for career switchers that want to take online classes, and then they come and take a few tests and they’re ready to teach, as long as they show they have subject expertise and they can handle a classroom. So that’s not a four-year path, that’s a go-at-your-own-pace kind of path. And it seems like that is growing a lot more in Missouri, while our traditional programs, even though enrollment is up, enrollment is up a lot in a lot of these programs, completion is still down, which is interesting.
Susan Pendergrass (09:09): Why do you suppose?
Avery Frank (09:11): There’s definitely a lag, because there was a big trough a few years ago, but now it’s on the upward trend. So I do anticipate there to be some increase in teacher completion, but at the same time I would have to look deeper into why exactly completion rates are dropping even though enrollment is going up.
Susan Pendergrass (09:34): Well, you taught at UMSL, James. Did you see a declining demand for these degree programs? I just thought of your point, Avery, that if we have fewer high school graduates, and it’s the high school graduates in St. Louis that maybe go on to be the students in the teacher prep programs in the metro area colleges, so if there’s fewer high school students there’ll be fewer of them. But did you perceive a drop in the demand for these, James?
James V. Shuls (10:03): Well, one of the challenges that a university like UMSL, University of Missouri St. Louis, has, is that they just don’t get a lot of first time freshmen. Most of
Susan Pendergrass (10:11): Yeah, yeah.
James V. Shuls (10:11): the teacher candidates that they would get would be going to a community college first and then transfer to UMSL. UMKC I would say is probably in a similar boat. So one of the interesting things you see in our paper is a table that lists the number of completers in Missouri teacher preparation programs by area. And
Susan Pendergrass (10:28): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (10:29): you would think, with St. Louis and Kansas City being the biggest areas of the state, that they would have the most teachers being produced there. But that’s not the case at all. It’s southwest Missouri, central Missouri, that are producing the most teachers. St. Louis is in third. Kansas City produces fewer teachers than northern Missouri, and almost the same number as southeast Missouri. So if we want to do something at the university level, then targeting funding to specific areas where there are significant needs would be an appropriate strategy, again, rather than a statewide sort of program. But what I saw at UMSL in my time there was significant growth, as Avery said, in our alternative programs. So while the traditional
Susan Pendergrass (11:19): Hmm.
James V. Shuls (11:20): program, I don’t want to say limped along, but went along and struggled to attract students, especially first-time students at the university, the alternative programs for students who already had a bachelor’s degree and now wanted to go back and get certification to become a teacher, those programs were significantly growing. And that’s where we’re seeing,
Susan Pendergrass (11:41): Okay.
James V. Shuls (11:42): as Avery suggested, some of the uptick in the number of people who are able to be certified, through these alternative type of programs, both university based and non-university based.
Susan Pendergrass (11:56): So Avery, I wanna back up a little bit on the crisis, the shortage. You mentioned that it’s not across the board, it’s in certain subjects. What subjects do we know to be experiencing a shortage?
Avery Frank (12:11): So it’s not just in our paper, but when you look at the literature on the teacher shortage, because a lot of other states have faced this as well, our paper finds similar results. We think of high need subject areas, we think of special education, we think of the STEM subjects, higher mathematics, physics, chemistry, earth science. Interestingly, in Missouri, industrial technology was the highest of teach positions left vacant and or inappropriately certified. But then when you look at the other side you see elementary education, early childhood education, English, social studies, those have the least amount of shortage pressure. And it’s kind of what you’d expect. I’m not trying to say they’re easier subjects to teach, but there are more people that go in to teach those subjects that have more interest in those. A physics teacher is a little more specialized. A special education teacher takes a certain type of demeanor and care for that kind of student. And when we go and we see that in most school districts, and Missouri hopefully addressed it with pay differentiation a little bit, it depends if they’re actually implementing it or not, but when you’re paying all those teachers the same for something where you have enough supply and demand, you have a higher supply, you’re not paying them their market wage ’cause you have less people wanting to work in those jobs, but you’re paying them the same, and some would probably argue it’s harder to teach physics than elementary education, although I know that it’s very hard to deal with little kids, as I’ve experienced leading in my church. But you
Susan Pendergrass (13:50): Yeah.
Avery Frank (13:50): know, it’s just, you have to think about market wages and everything. And when you look at the literature, we noted at the beginning of our paper that in states where special education teachers were paid more, not relative to others, not just more overall, more relative to other subjects, shortages in special education were much lower, because teachers were getting a reward for teaching in those high need areas.
Susan Pendergrass (14:14): And you have looked at the number of applications per open spot, right?
Avery Frank (14:19): Yes. And there’s lower applications in the high needs subject areas.
Susan Pendergrass (14:21): And so, with some of those subjects that you mentioned, like elementary, social studies, elementary ed, open spots get multiple applications, right? That’s not really a shortage or a crisis.
Avery Frank (14:32): Yeah, just looking at, I can just give you one number, I won’t overload you with numbers, but when you look at physics, we found an average of seven applications per vacancy. And then when you look at social science, you get seventeen and a half applications per vacancy on average.
Susan Pendergrass (14:47): Notable.
Avery Frank (14:48): So you can see the big difference in the number, and just the interest in positions based on differences.
James V. Shuls (14:56): I have now, I have like two points that I want to make that are kind of different from one another, but both are
Susan Pendergrass (14:59): Sure.
James V. Shuls (15:00): market related. So, if I forget, one is related to universities, and one is related to this last point that Avery was making about applications. So maybe I’ll start there, on applicants for positions. The way the state talks about shortages is different from the way anyone else would talk about shortages, right? So usually when you think of a shortage, you think that there isn’t anyone, right? I can’t find someone to fill this position. Whereas what the state means is there were seven people who applied, but I didn’t really like the seven, or maybe they didn’t have the right degree or something along those lines. But it’s not that they didn’t fill the position, or it’s not that they didn’t have people apply for the position. So the state’s definition, and the way that they use the term around shortage, is very different. But going back to the numbers Avery was talking about in the shortage areas, this is another market-related point, it’s something one of our board members, Mike Podgursky, likes to rail against, that we
James V. Shuls (16:02): have so many certification areas. And maybe the reason we see industrial technology as one of our highest or hardest areas to fill is there are like no preparation programs. You probably couldn’t find a degree program in the state, at one of our universities, that specializes in industrial technology. So getting someone who can go into that program as a traditionally trained industrial technology teacher is going to be almost impossible, because it’s a certification area with no degree, or very few degree preparation programs. But almost every college has an elementary education degree program. Because, think about that, school districts need to have lots of elementary education teachers. Maybe they need one industrial technology teacher, and maybe not every district even has one, right? So the market doesn’t give the universities enough reason to create programs for these things. And then we artificially create shortages by having a ton of different little certifications. So one solution could be to get rid of some of these certification areas, or broaden them, or make it easier for people without traditional degrees to get certified to teach in those areas.
Susan Pendergrass (17:21): It seems, though, that generally speaking, the attractiveness of education as a career, when you’re selecting your major at a four year university, and tuition’s expensive, and the idea of majoring in elementary education, when you know that, relative to probably most people you know, your salary’s gonna be lower, you’re gonna be locked into this organized labor career field where somebody has to negotiate your salary every year regardless of your performance, and you’re gonna get kind of an old school pension at the end of it, which is gonna require you to stay in Missouri, either in one of our two cities or in the state of Missouri, for your full twenty five to thirty year career, it does not seem like a good fit for the people coming out of college today. James, it seems to me you’ve got people in this age range too. If you are working really hard in your first two, three, four years as a teacher, and staying late and pouring your heart and soul into it, and you see people pulling out of the parking lot at three oh five every day and getting the same salary or more, I just think it’s a disheartening field for our brightest, recent college grads. What do you think?
James V. Shuls (18:42): You know, I think back to myself, when I selected, when I wanted to go into teaching, I was an elementary education major. I did it really partly because I wanted to coach. You get a teaching
Susan Pendergrass (18:50): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (18:51): degree and I could coach. But I chose elementary because I like kids and I wanted to work with kids, right? So most of the other majors, though, people don’t pursue. I’m looking at our shortage list, the highest shortage we have: industrial technology, business, biology, technology education. I think it’s rare for someone to say, I really love kids and want to work with kids, so I’m gonna pursue an industrial technology degree. No, rather people are gonna pursue a career in those fields and somewhere along the way figure out, man, I think I’d like to teach, I would like to take my expertise and bring it into the classroom. I think
Susan Pendergrass (19:30): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (19:30): about that great quote, I think it’s Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters, who says, I’ve been in the private sector, they demand results, right? So you think about someone who’s been out there working in the private sector in one of these fields, and it’s a grind, and then they start thinking, you know, I could teach, get a stable salary, have a great schedule that aligns with my kids’ schedules, summers off, where I could do other things, consulting on the side, whatever it is, this could be a great career switch for me. Now, programs like Avery mentioned, ABCTE, American Certified Board Teachers of Excellence, is that right, Avery, have programs that allow
James V. Shuls (20:14): people to switch and get the certifications that they need. We need to expand those types of programs and not think of those as like a substandard certification, because what they’re doing is allowing us to bring in those experts with years of experience in different fields, and bring that into the classroom, and bring something to the students that a teacher who comes straight out of high school, gets a degree in business, isn’t gonna be able to bring in the same way.
Susan Pendergrass (20:45): So finally, James, do you think it matters if the education people within public education continue to talk about this as a crisis? ‘Cause I think from a PR point of view this is what you want to do, right? You want to raise the alarm bells as much as possible to draw attention to something. So I suspect that it will continue to be discussed as a crisis, as the teacher shortage crisis. Does it make sense to fight against that?
James V. Shuls (21:13): Well, we should be fighting against this with facts. This is the strategy of the unions, is to make you think this is a crisis. And you think about the public perception of education, they have done a very good job of making us think that teaching is an undervalued field where teachers aren’t paid enough, and they’ve pushed this line so long and so hard that I think a lot of people believe it. And I think it’s a weird strategy. Their strategy is, make everyone think teaching’s terrible so people don’t want to become teachers, and we could say there’s a shortage, and then we can get more money out of the legislature. That’s a really weird long game for unions to play.
Susan Pendergrass (21:57): Yeah.
James V. Shuls (21:58): I think teaching’s great. I would encourage people to go into teaching. I was a teacher myself. I encourage my own kids to go into teaching. I think it’s a wonderful profession with lots of terrific benefits, but we’ve got to approach it with facts. And one of the facts is, and this is what we hope to get out to the public and to legislators, is that the problems that we’re seeing, that we lay out in this paper, are not going to be solved with widespread state intervention across the board. They need targeted solutions, and we provide those ideas in the paper.
Susan Pendergrass (22:28): Every last word.
Avery Frank (22:29): I think when we talk about just the teacher shortage in general, we really need a lot better data reporting, and I know that’s just a policy
Susan Pendergrass (22:38): Yeah.
Avery Frank (22:39): analyst kind of thing to say, but when we’re looking at the teacher shortage data, St. Louis City didn’t report anything. There’s no data on St. Louis City on how their shortages are, and how they’re filled. There is data on other ones, but that’s a big deal. And it makes it harder to find and target these actual shortage areas. In our paper I do believe we identified the shortage areas, the trends, the overall trends. But if we had better data, I think we could do that. And just briefly to mention, on one of the policy solutions, James was talking about there’s not really any room for climbers, and people who are a little bit ambitious, in teaching. And that’s why I think one of the targeted policy solutions we have is crisis pay for districts and schools with severe shortages. So just to take St. Louis City, the St. Louis area, you have Riverview Gardens and Normandy that have around thirty percent of their positions being left vacant. About the whole rest of
Susan Pendergrass (23:40): Come on.
Avery Frank (23:41): the region is zero percent, or less than five percent. So we’re not thinking of the shortage pressure for Rockwood or Clayton. We’re thinking about how can we get teachers in Riverview Gardens, and Normandy, and Jennings. Those are the ones we’re worried about, those are the ones we need to help. And crisis pay, paying these teachers, saying, okay, you’re one of the best teachers in the state, we would need a good teacher evaluation system to do that, and you’re saying, okay, you’re one of the best teachers in the state, you can go make, I don’t know, a hundred twenty thousand dollars in Riverview Gardens, and see if you can get these kids from some of the lowest performers in the state to some of the best performers in the state. And Dallas, the Dallas School District, they tried this, and they saw significant growth for the students in their worst schools. And they were able to actually staff their worst schools in the
Susan Pendergrass (24:32): Dallas, Texas.
Avery Frank (24:33): state. Yes, Dallas, Texas, not Dallas, Missouri. And
Susan Pendergrass (24:36): Yeah, just want to qualify. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (24:39): Yeah, I think that’s right. I’ve seen this being floated a lot, pay teachers, I’ve heard it called combat pay, which I hate that term, but crisis pay, I think that’s absolutely a great idea. And then that does raise the profile of the profession. But I suspect we’re going to be hearing more about the teacher shortage crisis in coming years, even as enrollment continues to go down. If folks want to find your paper, what’s the title and where can they find it?
Avery Frank (25:07): The title is Evaluating Missouri’s Teacher Pipeline, and you can find it on the Show Me Institute website, and there are a lot of graphs and tables, so feel free to dig into it and look at everything yourselves.
Susan Pendergrass (25:19): Appreciate it. Thank you both for joining us.
Except the actual teacher shortage problem is different from what many people assume.
In our new paper on Missouri’s teacher pipeline, James Shuls and I show that the state’s teacher labor market does not indicate a broad shortage of teachers. Since 2013, Missouri has hired 4,000 teachers while public school enrollment has fallen by almost 30,000 students. The shortage pressure appears to be coming from specific high-need subject areas and schools.
Broad policy solutions like raising the statewide minimum teacher salary will not effectively address the problems in Missouri’s teacher labor market. Targeted policy solutions are needed. One such solution is paying excellent teachers to work in high-need schools.
Before making the case for this policy, it’s worth acknowledging how narrow the shortage really is. The St. Louis region is a clear example. Most of the region appeared to face very low shortage pressure. But the Riverview Gardens, Normandy, and Jennings school districts faced strong shortage pressure. These three districts are also among the lowest performing in the state, and as of 2022, these schools ranked 549th, 544th, and 502nd out of 552 school districts in academic performance, respectively.
These districts are struggling disproportionately to attract and retain teachers, and their students are struggling to learn.
A form of “crisis pay” for excellent teachers willing to work in these districts could help attract and retain teachers and improve academic outcomes. It would function much like differential pay, which is already used in healthcare to draw providers to higher-need hospitals.
Paying excellent teachers, of course, requires an evaluation system that meaningfully and fairly differentiates teacher performance. A notable example is right next door in Tennessee: the Tennessee Educator Accelerator Model (TEAM).
This idea is not unprecedented.
When the Dallas Independent School District offered sizable financial incentives to reassign top-rated teachers to high-need elementary schools through its ACE program, there was immediate improvement in student achievement that had “dramatic, lasting, positive effects on student learning through middle school.”
For districts like Riverview Gardens, which had just 5.1% of its almost 5,000 students score proficient in mathematics, this type of policy could help many children get help from excellent teachers.
There is a growing desire to put market forces to work in Missouri’s long-monopolized public education system. Paying excellent teachers to work in high-need schools would be a meaningful step toward that goal.
It’s a fair question. District administrators, school leaders, and especially teachers are disproportionately women, and it is not hard to imagine that schools could develop blind spots about what boys need to succeed.
The data certainly point toward something going awry. Boys graduate from high school at lower rates, earn lower grades, and are much less likely to attend college than girls. The gender gap in bachelor’s degree attainment is wider today—15 percentage points in favor of women—than it was in the opposite direction when Title IX was passed in 1972, when the gap was 13 percentage points in favor of men.
To put it lightly, boys are not thriving in school.
It is easy to imagine how boys might get inadvertently left behind. Take reading as an example. Boys are interested in boy-oriented topics—competition, fighting, adventure, even violence. These topics may be less appealing to the overwhelmingly female elementary teaching workforce, which could subtly steer students toward different kinds of books. Some boys might learn the wrong lesson: reading is boring.
But maybe they would like reading if they were reading the right things.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m speculating. But it does not take much imagination to see how a school environment poorly matched to boys’ interests and dispositions could cause them to check out. Whatever the explanation, the larger pattern in the data is clear: boys are falling behind.
What can be done?
I would welcome education technocrats taking a more thoughtful approach to designing schools, including greater recognition of how boys’ needs are overlooked. But I am more optimistic about addressing this problem through school choice. If parents have options, the fact that some schools are a poor fit for boys would be less of a concern. But most parents in Missouri have just one option: their residentially zoned public school.
With a more robust school-choice system, parents could choose schools that better serve their sons. More recess. Comic books. More opportunities to build things and work with their hands. Not every boy would want these things, of course, but that’s precisely the point of choice.
The first and most tangible prong of The Foundry’s mission is to teach practical skills to boys. Boys 9-17 are divided into groups according to age or skill level and taught basics like the names of tools, how to safely use them, how to fix faucets, how to jump start a car and how to grill burgers.
I am not aware of any hard evidence on The Foundry’s effectiveness. But the anecdotes are compelling, and I can see how it could be a great fit for some boys. More broadly, we should push for policies that give families access to a richer array of educational options built around different ideas about what children need.
Instead, for most Missouri families, it is still the local public school or bust. And the data are telling us that, for too many boys, the current system is a bust.
Susan Pendergrass speaks with Colyn Ritter, research analyst at EdChoice, about the annual Schooling in America survey. They discuss why public confidence in K-12 education has been declining, the real reasons parents switch their kids’ schools, why open enrollment polls at 80 percent support among parents, and what parents think about AI and cell phones in the classroom.
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thanks so much for joining us this morning, Colyn Ritter from EdChoice. You guys once a year put out your Schooling in America survey, is that right?
Colyn Ritter (00:08): That’s right, and thank you so much for having me, Susan. So we do an annual survey with Braun Research, who is our partner on this project, and it is called Schooling in America. We’ve been doing it since 2013. And I’d say about 75% of the survey is dedicated to questions that we ask each year so that we’re able to trend them and see how things change over time. And then I’d say about a quarter of the survey is dedicated to newer, more timely questions, depending on what’s happening. I know a few years ago we were asking about school safety. In 2020 we asked about COVID-related things. We dedicated some questions in the last few years to AI and technology. This year we spent some time looking at the federal tax credit program.
Susan Pendergrass (00:49): Yeah, I definitely want to dig in on some of those. But the big thing that I think, I don’t know, it seems to be an emerging issue, and there’s a Gallup poll that you and I were just chatting about offline a little bit, is that the general feeling of positivity toward public education in the United States seems to be suffering. And in fact, in your poll you show that when you look at, not necessarily just parents, but the general population, about sixty percent of folks say that public education is on the wrong track and forty percent say it’s on the right track. What do you think’s going on there?
Colyn Ritter (01:23): So yeah, we did talk a little bit about it offline. The public is more pessimistic than parents. Like you said, sixty-two percent of the public say it’s on the wrong track compared to fifty-six percent of parents. We did see that peak for both groups in twenty twenty-four, and it has come down slightly since that point. My personal belief is that K-12 education news is not widely covered in mainstream media, especially with other things going on, when there’s a war going on and an election year and things like that.
Susan Pendergrass (01:57): We are hearing a lot, I think it’s hitting mainstream media, that young kids can’t read. And there was a little stuff in the media, or maybe just in my corner of the media, and some podcasts and whatnot about the University of California San Diego kids who can’t do math. They showed up
Colyn Ritter (02:12): That’s right. Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (02:13): and they needed to take elementary-level remedial math. And then a
Colyn Ritter (02:17): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (02:17): few days ago some new international test scores were released, PISA, and they showed
Colyn Ritter (02:21): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (02:22): that our fifteen-year-olds’ reading skills are at the lowest level since the turn of the century, I think. I mean, tanking, and not COVID-related, just tanking on reading. So I think it’s possible that people are blaming the public school system for some of that.
Colyn Ritter (02:37): Yeah, and to round out my thought, when K-12 education news does hit mainstream media, it’s almost always going to be negative, at least in my experience following it. And rightfully so in some cases, like you said, with the test scores and things. So I think that contributes a lot to why the public feels that K-12 education is on the wrong track, and parents as well. But it is something to monitor when it comes to the new developments in K-12 ed, what does kind of break through. Some part of what we’ve thought about asking is following up with a why. Why do they feel K-12 education is headed on the wrong track, especially from the parents’ perspective, because we kind of want to dive into what’s different about their own kids’ education that they do feel satisfied with, which we see constantly in Schooling in America and in our other polling. Nearly, over two-thirds, nearly three-fourths of parents are at least somewhat satisfied with their kids’ education, public,
Susan Pendergrass (03:33): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (03:34): private, across sector. But why that is compared to their feelings about the overall landscape of K-12 ed. And I think, the stories about test scores, the NAEP scores over the past few years, those
Susan Pendergrass (03:44): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (03:45): definitely hit, hearing that an entire grade level across the country is struggling to read or do basic math is going to stick with you, and that will kind of contrast with what you’re seeing with your own kid. Parents aren’t going to be happy if their kid can’t read or do math.
Susan Pendergrass (04:02): Right. And also the public school system seemed to have, well, it has in fact entered into the culture wars in some ways.
Colyn Ritter (04:09): No doubt.
Susan Pendergrass (04:09): We got into the 1619 Project and CRT and all of that, and I think that even people without kids in school were being very concerned about what was happening in the schools, in general. But what I
Colyn Ritter (04:23): I also think there’s a lack of engagement from the public school system. I
Susan Pendergrass (04:26): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (04:27): was listening to a story about the Texas ESA program and how a lot of kids with special needs are moving. There were, they highlighted a specific school district in Texas, and in part they asked, they reached out to that school district for comment as to why these families are leaving, and there was just no reaction, no response. And I think, if you’re a public school system that is saying we need more money, school choice is sucking funds from the public school, I would expect to at least hear how much money, or for what, or maybe answering the question why they’re leaving, which we look at a little bit in the survey with school switchers, but I don’t want to derail the conversation completely.
Susan Pendergrass (05:11): No, I want to get to switchers, ’cause that’s really kind of why I wanted to talk to you. But, you know, I was gonna say, certainly you guys at EdChoice, you work in this policy area similar to us at the Show-Me Institute, where we want to get parents, every parent, at least a handful of high-quality options for their child. And I’m also agnostic about what they pick, but I don’t want any one child to be forced into a school that is either a failing school or failing for that kid for whatever reason. And as long as people have options, I feel like when parents choose they get a little bit more invested and they are more likely to be a little bit more satisfied, right? But in a lot of places, Missouri is one of them, ninety-five percent of our parents have no choice. They only have their one assigned public school and that’s it, unless they want to do virtual. But
Colyn Ritter (05:58): Right.
Susan Pendergrass (05:59): that’s got to be, to me that would reduce the overall satisfaction rate with the system, because everyone whose kid doesn’t want to get on the bus in the morning, or thinks the teachers don’t
Colyn Ritter (06:09): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (06:10): like them, whatever their reason is, they have to go anyway. They don’t have any choices. So that’s not going to lead to a very positive outcome. So let’s talk about the questions that you asked about switchers, ’cause I think this is very interesting. Do you think people are surprised at the percentage of parents who do switch their kid’s school at least once?
Colyn Ritter (06:31): Yeah, I do think it’s more than what most people would expect. We’ve asked this question in our other polls through the Morning Consult public opinion tracker, which is more monthly, and that’s a whole other operation that we have that I’m happy to touch on.
Susan Pendergrass (06:45): You guys are a great source for polling data, for sure.
Colyn Ritter (06:48): That’s very kind. Sometimes it feels like we’re throwing too much out there. We might be overloading people. But I agree that it’s very fun to look through all the different types of questions and the different subgroups and crosstabs. But with school switchers, we’ve seen roughly a quarter, it usually hovers between twenty to twenty-five percent, but twenty-eight percent in Schooling in America said that they’ve switched their child’s school types. And we were keen in the wording of the question to say besides switching from elementary to middle or middle to high school, some more traditional types of switching that you’d expect to see. And it was 28% who say that yes, their child has changed school types. And then we asked, not so much directly why they switched, but what issues the child was struggling with at their previous schooling environment. And the reasons were similar to what we’ve seen in the past. The top reasons were excessive stress or anxiety at thirty percent, academic needs not being met at thirty percent, and then bullying at twenty-eight percent. And those are typically the three that we see. So, from what I’ve heard and listened to and learned from talking to people about this data is that most people think when parents switch schools it’s because their kid’s not learning. Which, we see here certainly with the academic needs not being met, but it can be happening for other reasons like stress or anxiety, mental health, or a safety thing like bullying. And I think that’s kind of where my issue with the overall discussion around choice, it falls flat in the sense that people might think it’s very transactional, my kid’s not learning best here, so I want to move. But it’s more than just that. It always has been. It’s about safety, it’s about mental health, it’s about special needs not being met, issues with teachers, too-big class sizes, lack of personalized or individualized learning. And so I think that’s sort of where this conversation around choice needs to start, and it has started in a lot of states. Parents are diverse, students’ learning is quite diverse and it’s changing rapidly, especially with the introduction of technology and all these new ways to learn. And we should take it seriously that not all kids are alike, and the reason they’re leaving is similarly diverse.
Susan Pendergrass (09:05): Yeah, we have discussed the idea of open enrollment, public school open enrollment, in Missouri now for I don’t know, five, six, seven years, and it’s never gotten anywhere.
Colyn Ritter (09:13): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (09:14): And even when we do talk about it, it’s generally a system where districts would get to opt in, they wouldn’t have to participate, they wouldn’t have to take kids. And the conversation around it is always so disheartening to me, because I think people are like, well the only reason kids will switch is X, like they want to go from poor schools to rich schools. I’m like, that does not play out in the data. That’s not what we know about parents. And if you just think about it, I have three kids who went through the public school system. One kid, one year, just not getting along with whatever’s happening there, or the youngest kid having to put up with whatever the older kid did with the teachers. There’s so many reasons, and it’s not anyone’s job to try to figure out what those are. You don’t need to justify that. You just need to have a place that your child wants to go to in the morning and wants to learn when they get there. And that’s what we’re trying to guard for. But it’s always like, well they’ll just all want to go to the rich districts. That’s nowhere on your list.
Colyn Ritter (10:08): Yeah. It’s more than just that. And I think parents are looking at their other options. It might be the fact that they do want to go to rich schools, but it might be the fact that they’re far away, or that their kid has some need that that school can’t offer. And I think, like you said, if we give parents more options, they’ll be more engaged in their child’s learning, and I think that is an overall win-win for everyone. We talk about student engagement a lot, but I think parent engagement with their kids’ learning is a very underappreciated, underrated aspect of this whole thing. EdChoice has looked at studies around parent engagement for parents that participate in a school choice program versus parents that aren’t, and it’s higher, and that might seem practical and make sense, but that’s what we’re really trying to do here, is just get parents more engaged, and hopefully their students will be more engaged as well. And to do that we need to deliver high-quality options and have a marketplace that’s reflective and can help provide the types of options that parents say their child needs. And that is changing all the time.
Susan Pendergrass (11:19): That’s right.
Colyn Ritter (11:20): We’re not looking at schools the way we should, in the sense of what is changing in the future that schools need to be preparing students for. We’re still looking at things like, can your child read and can they do math. Absolutely, those are
Susan Pendergrass (11:39): Yes.
Colyn Ritter (11:40): paramount. Those are the bottom of the pyramid in terms of hierarchy of needs. But now we’re kind of looking toward the top and saying, all right, well, what if my kid wants to learn a trade? What if my kid wants to be an engineer, what if they want to be a welder? Is this something that the school can offer? Are these skills that this school can offer my child if they’re pursuing something like this? And we’ve seen this in data, not so much in Schooling in America, but what are parents looking for for their child after high school. And the traditional graduate high school, go to a four-year college, get a scholarship, it’s still the most prominent option chosen by parents, but it is decreasing year over year. And I think that’s reflective of the cost of higher ed, what’s
Susan Pendergrass (12:22): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (12:23): required, the skills required. And it starts from K-12. And so we need to have a robust marketplace with a good supply side of education that parents know how to navigate. And so that’s sort of what we’re trying to embark on, and you know that well, obviously.
Susan Pendergrass (12:38): Yeah, I think the model of the last century was, well, we’ll just make every school fit every kid, basically. So we’ll just put it
Colyn Ritter (12:45): Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Susan Pendergrass (12:46): all under one roof, and we’ll try to get every school, we’ll have every vo-tech program, every college prep program. And sometimes people who are against school choice will say, we have to take every kid that shows up. And I’m like, that’s the whole point. It
Colyn Ritter (12:56): Mm-hmm.
Susan Pendergrass (12:58): that is an ineffective and inefficient way to go about this. You shouldn’t have to take every kid that shows up when they state what their needs are. We could have a robust marketplace, a pluralist system of schools, and they can gravitate to the one that’s the best fit for them, rather than trying to make every school fit every kid.
Colyn Ritter (13:16): No doubt. And that impacts teachers, it impacts administrators, it impacts parents. I mean, no wonder we’re looking at a reading, a literacy crisis and a math crisis, because we’ve flown too close to the sun in that regard, in my mind. We’ve asked schools, teachers, administrators to do way too much with too many kids, because we’re stuck in the zip-code-assigned schooling model that has been around forever. And school choice has existed forever, for those who can afford to pick up and move their house to a different school district. But we have to adapt. How many signs do we need staring us right in the face before we say, hey, we need to kind of rethink this thing? And credit to a bunch of states across the country, and not just any, it’s a very diverse list of states with very robust school choice programs. I’m talking about a Florida, an Arizona, Iowa, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Arkansas as well.
Susan Pendergrass (14:14): Arkansas. Alabama, right? Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (14:17): Indiana, Ohio. You cannot just group these states in one bucket, red, blue, South, north type of thing. It’s happening because they’re listening to parents, and parents are very clear in what they’re saying. And that’s kind of what we’ve seen constantly in Schooling in America, is that parents have very diverse schooling preferences. And the reasons this year we’ve seen why their kid left or they switched their kid’s school are also diverse, and it’s
Susan Pendergrass (14:43): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (14:43): staring us in the face again.
Susan Pendergrass (14:45): Well when we look at open enrollment in particular, ’cause this is an issue that’s near and dear to us Missourians, that
Colyn Ritter (14:52): Of course.
Susan Pendergrass (14:52): has always had extremely high favorability, both among parents and among the general population. When you put this idea, when Minnesota started it thirty-five years ago, I think nineteen-ninety-ish, some states have just been doing this for decades basically, people are like, yeah, absolutely. What’s the seventy-some percent support of the general population for open enrollment? And is it eighty for parents in your data?
Colyn Ritter (15:15): Eighty-three percent for parents, which we don’t see eighty percent support for much today,
Susan Pendergrass (15:20): Yeah.
Colyn Ritter (15:21): but especially in these surveys it’s ESAs and open enrollment that see eighty-ish percent support. And one thing I’d add on open enrollment, Susan, is that we ask parents if they’re aware of the policy in their state. We ask about ESAs, vouchers, charter schools, open enrollment. Charter schools, now granted, they’ve been around for longer, but over half of parents are able to say whether their state has open enrollment. Another eleven percent say no. But the fact that the unsure percentage is lower than the others is interesting and worth harping on, the fact that people are more aware of open enrollment than other types of choice policies. Now whether or not they’re accurate or not, that’s still something I’m working on, and the sample sizes from all states aren’t the best. But
Susan Pendergrass (16:07): Mm-hmm.
Colyn Ritter (16:08): it’s a fun little exercise with this data to see, all right, they’re aware of these policies, now how accurate are they based on where they responded from. I believe last year we were at, like sixty percent accuracy with open enrollment overall,
Susan Pendergrass (16:22): Like.
Colyn Ritter (16:22): which I think is pretty great.
Susan Pendergrass (16:24): Yeah, I’ll usually have, in late summer, a handful of parents reach out to say, hey, can I, I’m just checking, can I switch my kid to a different public school? And I
Colyn Ritter (16:33): Yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (16:33): always have to say, I’m sorry, you cannot, take it up with your legislator, but not yet.
Colyn Ritter (16:35): Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Susan Pendergrass (16:38): We’d love to see it happen, but we’re one of the last holdouts, certainly in our region. Iowa,
Colyn Ritter (16:43): Mm-hmm.
Susan Pendergrass (16:43): you can pick public or private. Arkansas, public or private. Oklahoma, public or private. We’re just surrounded by school choice, and we are somehow keeping a stake in the ground that we’re going to be the last bastion of zip-code assignment.
Colyn Ritter (16:56): Yeah, it’s kind of, Kansas and Missouri are constantly trying to be the last one. I live in Kansas. I went to school in Missouri.
Susan Pendergrass (17:02): Yeah, I don’t know. Well, Kansas, you live in Kansas now?
Colyn Ritter (17:06): I do. I went to school at Saint Louis University and now I live in Kansas City, Kansas, which, the border is two minutes from us.
Susan Pendergrass (17:14): But I mean Kansas has a robust public open enrollment policy.
Colyn Ritter (17:19): They do have good open enrollment. I’m more so thinking about private school choice. They have a very limited tax credit scholarship program, but you’re
Susan Pendergrass (17:26): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Colyn Ritter (17:28): right that there is a distinction between Kansas and Missouri with open enrollment.
Susan Pendergrass (17:32): So real quick, what are you finding? You said you did last year some questions around technology and AI.
Colyn Ritter (17:39): Mm-hmm. That’s right.
Susan Pendergrass (17:40): What are you finding with parents there?
Colyn Ritter (17:43): It’s interesting, so, and this is last year’s data, I’m happy to share it with anyone that’s interested.
Susan Pendergrass (17:49): Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Colyn Ritter (17:51): We kind of break it into two molds, there’s AI and then there’s cell phones. Cell phone bans are a very prominent topic in K-12 education discourse now, with more states looking to experiment with cell phone bans, whether it’s bell-to-bell or just during instructional time. We ask parents whether or not they support the use of such technology in their child’s classes. They’re very okay with laptops and online learning platforms like Canvas, things like that. They’re about 50-50 with AI, which is decreasing actually, which is interesting. And then cell phones, it’s about, only the support for AI is decreasing in classrooms,
Susan Pendergrass (18:27): Which is decreasing, people who want it? Yeah. Sure it is.
Colyn Ritter (18:33): which is worth monitoring, obviously. So we asked, do you support the teaching of responsible use of AI in schools? And parents are very supportive of that. So while they’re skeptical of AI being used, they do still want schools to teach how to use AI responsibly. So it’s a little bit of a contradiction there, but I think we’re all trying to
Susan Pendergrass (18:52): We’re all trying to figure it out.
Colyn Ritter (18:54): figure it out. Schools certainly are, but I do think that second bullet point is more important, that parents are keen to have their kids learn how to use it responsibly, and they feel that schools can help in that. It’s tough, because that’s adding another thing that schools need to sort of, we’re trying to figure out, schools are trying to figure out their AI policy. But tech and AI, the questions around that are only going to expand. So we’re going to keep asking those as well, just to keep a finger on the pulse.
Susan Pendergrass (19:23): Well, I do want to make a plug for this, because this is, number one, a very great survey, and you’ve been doing it for over a decade now. But also you’ve got a great website that’s very interactive. Folks can look at all of these full questions by category, you’ve got cool charts that move around. Where can anyone find this information?
Colyn Ritter (19:41): That’s very kind. We have an absolutely amazing communications and graphic design team who do it all. If
Susan Pendergrass (19:46): Yeah, it’s really great.
Colyn Ritter (19:47): I was in charge of it, it would look way, way less nice. So
Susan Pendergrass (19:50): No.
Colyn Ritter (19:52): edchoice.org is where you should go. Then the research library, where you’ll see on our banner tab, you’ll see the research library where you can find all the reports by my great colleagues and our fellows, like Susan.
Susan Pendergrass (20:07): Uh-huh.
Colyn Ritter (20:07): And then we also have a Schooling in America tab where we have an online dashboard, so if you just want a quick set, you can find that very
Susan Pendergrass (20:12): Really cool. And what’s your monthly survey, or your other survey?
Colyn Ritter (20:18): Yes, so right under the Schooling in America tab, you’ll see the Public Opinion Tracker, which is in partnership with Morning Consult. That is our monthly polling that we use for more state-specific topics. We still ask questions like right direction, wrong track for education, support for school choice policies, things like that. We do it more monthly because we want to be more reflexive to what’s going on in K-12 education, because a once-a-year survey only gives you one shot at that. And we survey teachers there as well, so it’s not just parents in the gen pop. But we’re always looking for questions, for ideas to poll to include in our polls, so feel free to reach out. My email is [email protected], or just
Susan Pendergrass (21:00): Great.
Colyn Ritter (21:01): type it into the contact us at edchoice.org, and one of us will reach out. But yeah, we’re always trying to
Susan Pendergrass (21:07): Yeah, it’s really great.
Colyn Ritter (21:08): better understand what parents and the gen pop are saying about K-12 ed.
Susan Pendergrass (21:12): Well, thanks for coming on and explaining it to us. I really appreciate it.
There are several school districts in the St. Louis region seeking property tax increases on the November ballot. Parkway ($0.46) and Webster Groves ($0.65) both have substantial tax increases before voters, but the Hillsboro school district tax proposal takes the cake. The Hillsboro R-3 School District is asking for an increase of $1.39 per $100 of assessed value, or a 37 percent increase. I have honestly not seen a tax increase proposal this large in my time following local government.
(An AI-assisted review of tax increases in Missouri tells me there have been a few larger ones over the past 20 years, but they were in much smaller districts with much lower total assessed valuations. The Blackwater school district, for example, passed a $1.50 increase in 2021, but the increase was split over two years to offset the impact slightly.)
The average home value in Hillsboro is $324,000. This means an average tax increase of $855 if the measure passes. However you want to put it, that is a lot of money to most people.
The district is telling people it is controlling costs and it needs the tax increase for a variety of reasons. Here is the part that interested me the most:
He [the superintendent] also pointed to lower administrative spending as proof that Hillsboro has worked to control costs.
According to the figures presented, the district spent about $1.5 million on executive administrative salaries in 2018. That amount fell to about $739,000 in 2025. Benefit costs in that category fell from about $426,000 to $194,000 during the same period.
Hillsboro also reported having one administrator for every 186 students. The statewide average is one administrator for every 156 students.
The Show-Me Institute just released a report on the public school personnel boom in Missouri. What did our research find about Hillsboro school district? From 2000 to 2025, student enrollment declined 13 percent. The total number of teachers increased only slightly, three percent, but average teacher salary went down 18 percent. How about the administration? From 2000 to 2025, the total number of administrators increased by 42 percent. The average administrator salary has declined by 11 percent, but with so many more administrators the total spending on administrators has increased by 25 percent. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation.)
The fact is that Hillsboro schools are like most other school districts in Missouri. Student enrollment is declining. Teacher salaries are holding flat or declining. But spending on administrators? That has increased significantly.
Of course, Hillsboro may have legitimate cause to increase administrator spending and staffing at this level. After all, its staffing-to-student ratios were relatively high before. But when a tax increase of this size is on the ballot, it is imperative to have transparency and accountability on spending.
It’s easy to argue that a program’s benefits outweigh its costs. But if you never measure the benefits, how can you know that’s true?
As Missouri lawmakers prepare for upcoming years of tighter budgets, this is one question that needs to be asked. Earlier this year, one lawmaker looking for places to cut in the budget asked the Department of Social Services (DSS) to identify potential savings in Medicaid, the state’s most expensive program. The department pointed to chiropractic care, an optional benefit, because it had not found evidence of the supposed savings that were used to justify adding it nearly a decade ago. The funding was removed from the budget, and Missouri stopped covering the benefit on July 1.
On its face, this looks like a story of good governance. A program was adopted at least partly based on expected savings elsewhere in the budget, but once the state couldn’t show those savings occurred, lawmakers reconsidered it. But the chiropractic story raises a bigger question about what happens to fiscal estimates after a bill becomes law.
Back in 2018, when Missouri approved Medicaid coverage for chiropractic care, I was working on the state’s Medicaid budget, attending hearings and reviewing fiscal notes. Lawmakers had proposed covering chiropractic care for several years, but the fiscal notes showed it would cost the state millions of dollars. Supporters argued the benefit could save money elsewhere in Medicaid by reducing opioid prescriptions, back surgeries, and other treatments. After some pushback, DSS incorporated those assumptions into its fiscal note, estimating nearly $12 million in state general revenue savings during the first two full years.
Eight years later, the department could not point to hard evidence that those savings occurred. Unfortunately, determining whether the savings actually materialized isn’t as simple as comparing the estimate with what the state ultimately spent.
Missouri’s DSS knows exactly how much Medicaid paid for chiropractic care. What it can’t directly observe is what Medicaid would have spent on those same patients without the benefit. The department noted that 97 percent of recipients who received chiropractic care did not have back surgery. But that doesn’t tell us how many would have needed surgery otherwise, or how much the state actually saved.
Projected savings like these can make a program appear much less expensive when lawmakers are deciding whether to adopt it. Every bill that receives a hearing in Jefferson City gets a fiscal note estimating what it could cost or save the state. Once the bill becomes law, however, the budget process does not routinely require anyone to go back and see how those estimates held up.
This issue is not unique to Medicaid. Tax incentives, for example, are often justified by projections of jobs, investment, or economic activity that would not otherwise occur. Simply counting what happened afterward tells us no more about an incentive’s effect than the absence of back surgeries tells us how much chiropractic care saved Medicaid.
In this case, it took lawmakers eight years to revisit the assumptions behind chiropractic care’s fiscal estimates. As our elected officials look for ways to rein in state spending, going back through other fiscal notes and comparing what programs were expected to cost or save with what actually happened would be an obvious place to start.
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