It is with deep sadness that I share the news of the passing of Joseph Forshaw IV, longtime member of the Show-Me Institute’s Board of Directors, former treasurer, and past chairman of the board.

Joe was more than a board member to us. He was a steadfast champion of the Show-Me Institute’s mission, a source of wisdom and clarity, an incredible mentor, and a man whose integrity and good humor strengthened everyone around him.

A lifelong St. Louisan, Joe brought to our organization the same qualities that defined his life: intellectual curiosity, disciplined thinking, and generosity of spirit. Before joining the Show-Me Institute, he served for 30 years as president of Forshaw of St. Louis, the family business founded in 1871. His deep understanding of entrepreneurship and free enterprise made him an invaluable voice on our board and a trusted adviser to our team.

Joe served with humility and conviction, and he cared deeply about Missouri’s future. He was an extraordinary mentor to many of us, always ready to offer thoughtful counsel, encouragement, and the perspective that comes from a life well lived. Whether asking the question no one else had considered or reminding us to stay focused on the people we serve, he did so with grace, steadiness, and genuine kindness. His presence made our work better, and his passion for ideas strengthened the entire organization.

I extend my heartfelt condolences to his beloved wife, Liza; their children Sr. Maria Battista, Juliet, and J. Alexander; his grandson Aidan; and the entire Forshaw family. Joe’s leadership, generosity, and friendship will be deeply missed.

Details about visitation and services can be found here.

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On July 10, 2025, Keith Kehrer and Derek Rose, lawyers from Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, joined Show-Me Institute Director of Research Susan Pendergrass for a presentation on how the MOScholars program operates, followed by a Q&A session.

In 2021, the Missouri General Assembly created the MOScholars program, allowing individuals and businesses to receive state tax credits for contributions to certified educational assistance organizations (EAOs). But what does that mean for your Missouri tax bill?

In this recorded webinar, you’ll learn:

• What the MOScholars program is and who it helps

• How Missouri tax credits work, and how you can direct your tax dollars

• What qualifies as an EAO

• What to do at tax filing time

• How your participation supports school choice in Missouri

The post The MOScholars Program: Why and How to Participate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

By God’s grace, all of our team members are safe and unharmed. Over the weekend, staff worked tirelessly to recover essential equipment, documents, and other critical items before more rain arrived. I am deeply grateful for their quick action and dedication during this difficult time.

We are now working to secure a new location and restore operations so we can continue to serve the people of Missouri. But today, our thoughts are with those in the broader community who are suffering far more. Many of our neighbors have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and, in the most tragic cases, their loved ones.

To those families and individuals affected, we offer our heartfelt condolences. The path to recovery will be long for many, and we are keeping you in our prayers.

As we move forward, the Show-Me Institute remains committed to our mission of advancing liberty and opportunity in Missouri. We are thankful for the support of our community and will continue our work with resilience and purpose, even as we begin to rebuild.

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On August 12, the Show-Me Institute and Show-Me Opportunity hosted a virtual event where Elias Tsapelas, director of state budget and fiscal policy at the Show-Me Institute, and Aaron Hedlund, chief economist at the Show-Me Institute, made the case for a Missouri Taxpayer Bill of Rights. The event explored the limitations of the current Hancock Amendment, proposed reforms to better protect taxpayers in the state, and more.

Download the full Missouri Taxpayer Bill of Rights Policy Brief Here

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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On December 7, 2023, Brenda Talent joined Mike Ferguson in the Morning on NewsTalkSTL to discuss the 2024 Blueprint: Moving Missouri Forward.

Download the 2024 Blueprint here.

The 2024 Blueprint: Moving Missouri Forward explores 16 policy areas in which common-sense reform could immediately and positively impact everyday life for Missourians. Issues covered range from education and health care to unemployment insurance and budget reform. Each article identifies a problem that affects the citizens of our state, provides background information and analysis, proposes one or more solutions, and then boils the solutions down into actionable recommendations. We believe that the proposals our policy team has assembled can put Missouri on the path to a healthier economy, a better public education system, and a more vibrant and flourishing civil society.

The post Brenda Talent: How to Move Missouri Forward in 2024 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Few would have guessed what 2020 had in store for us, and fewer still need the challenges of last year recounted in detail. Missourians have faced threats to our health and to our democracy, to our communities and to our safety, and indeed to the health and continuity of our social and political institutions. Missourians rose to meet these challenges—challenges often imposed by their own state and local governments—and they succeeded in spectacular ways. Yet there are more obstacles to overcome, more work to do, and more reforms to pursue.

Indeed, great progress can happen in the face of great adversity. With this in mind, we offer our own “State of the State” today, looking backward not only at what Missouri was and has been, but forward with hope to what it is and still could be.

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was the biggest story of the past year, and the public education system’s response led to many of the state’s most severe and costly policy failures. And yet, most of the problems in Missouri’s educational system were only aggravated by the pandemic, not rooted in it: the lack of transparency and accountability throughout the educational system, and especially at the State Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE); the inflexibility of the public school system, revealed in its inability to meet the individual needs of students; and the state’s failure to lead or even to follow other states in expanding charter schools and school choice.

The evidence is clear: wholesale reform must come to Missouri’s public schools. In the 2018–19 school year, less than half of Missouri students tested were proficient in Math and Language Arts. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—a Congressionally mandated nationwide assessment of education systems in America—Missouri 4th-graders have dropped from the top half of the country for reading and math in 1996 to the bottom half today.

These failures didn’t happen all at once, but 2020 forced the problems into the spotlight. Today, 27 percent of parents report that they feel their children are now behind academically, compared to less than 7 percent before last year. Nearly 3 in 10 parents no longer trust their public school system to make decisions that are in the best interest of their children’s education.

Facts matter, and the fact that Missouri parents are losing faith in Missouri schools should alarm policymakers.

How will Missouri meet this challenge? Now more than ever, it is critical that the legislature provide all Missouri students and their families with choices for their education. Parents must have the opportunity to educate their children in other ways if they believe traditional district education is failing them.

To deliver on its education promises to parents and children, the state must pass three key reforms.

First, the state must create education savings accounts (ESAs) that give parents flexible access to a portion of their children’s public education dollars that can be used for other educational resources better tailored to their children’s needs.

Second, the state must unleash the power of charter schools by removing restrictions that unduly restrict their creation and by implementing school choice reforms, like Missouri Course Access (MOCAP), that are already the law. Specifically, the state must designate MOCAP as an independent local education association or charter school and get districts out of the equation.

And third, DESE must finally be the adult in the room and hold schools and districts accountable for what they have and have not done throughout this pandemic.

Especially in districts that have been unable or unwilling to reopen for traditional learning, parents and kids must have the opportunity to go elsewhere to ensure their educational needs are met. These three reforms would help meet not only the challenges of the pandemic today, but the challenges of the modern economy for years into the future.

At the core of the pandemic has been, of course, a health care crisis, and fortunately some headway was made last year in the face of these health care challenges. Thanks to the hard work of Rep. Derek Grier and the support of other public officials and stakeholders, Missouri took an important step in 2020 and removed licensing barriers that prevented out-of-state licensed professionals of all kinds, and health care professionals in particular, from readily providing services to Missourians. Moreover, Gov. Mike Parson acted wisely in ordering the relaxation of the state’s telemedicine and scope-of-practice regulations to better meet the needs of medical management in response to the pandemic.

These supply-boosting measures should be made permanent this year, and they should be the starting point for other necessary reforms. Along with making permanent the state’s telemedicine and scope-of-practice reforms, legislators must repeal Missouri’s certificate of need law, which unnecessarily caps hospital competition in the state, and they should take steps to deregulate health insurance to ensure that Missourians have ample choice and reasonable pricing in their health insurance products. Further, Medicaid will pose a policy and budgetary challenge to the state in the years ahead; legislators will need to work earnestly to mitigate its damage to other state priorities.

Damage to the state economy can happen in other ways, too, and nowhere is this more clear than in the condition of Missouri’s roads. Missourians depend on our roads to get to their jobs and to get their children safely to school; indeed, Missouri relies heavily on transportation for economic growth. Transportation and warehousing businesses employ over 83,500 Missourians, and over $700 billion of products travel over Missouri’s roads and bridges each year. These numbers are only expected to rise, and we cannot let an asset as important as our roads deteriorate through neglect.

Unfortunately, the Missouri Department of Transportation, or MoDOT, says it only receives a little more than half of the revenue it needs to maintain Missouri’s roads and bridges, both now and in the future. Notably, Missouri’s gas tax has not been raised since 1996 and is currently the second-lowest in the country. Toll roads, which work for Missouri’s neighbors, are an option that should also be considered here. Increasing user fees—to make sure that those who use the roads pay for them—is the fairest and best answer to address Missouri’s infrastructure funding problems.

Yet not all state “needs” for revenue are created equal. While increases to user fees in transportation might happen without a tax reduction elsewhere to help resolve MoDOT’s structural funding problems, that carveout from the principles of revenue neutrality and overall tax reform should be an exception, not the rule.

For instance, Missouri remains one of a dwindling number of states that does not require a sales tax on all out-of-state purchases. While proponents suggest, reasonably, that instituting the tax would “level the playing field” for local businesses, it also would increase the tax burden on the people of Missouri. Businesses don’t pay these taxes; Missouri’s families do.

Accordingly, the discussion about a new internet sales tax should start with revenue neutrality as its goal. No time is a “good time” for tax increases, and legislators should not think that hiking taxes as a way to generate new revenue during a pandemic and economic downturn is “good timing.” Taxes should sustain services, not backfill shortfalls, and the state should not impose new taxes on suffering families to solve its temporary, though difficult, budget problems.

And while legislators are “under the hood” of the state’s sales tax system, they should advance an array of other important sales tax reforms.

Those reforms should include a sales tax cap that puts a limit on how many layers of local taxes can be piled on Missouri consumers; the repeal of dining taxes; the reform of special taxing districts so that such projects can’t be used as fiefdoms of the private sector backed by the taxing power of government; and the movement of tax increase votes to November elections to ensure the will of residents is best represented in these elections.

But if state government really wants to help smaller retail businesses—to “level the playing field,” as we’re told internet sales taxes would do—it should start outside the realm of tax policy, by protecting Missouri businesses from the sorts of destructive, asymmetric lockdown orders that have crushed countless entrepreneurs across the state during this pandemic. We see no reason based in public health for allowing casinos to offer blackjack at all hours of the day while restaurants can’t offer dining; nor do we understand why, if Walmart can continue to sell shoes, competing shoe stores cannot also remain open.

No doubt, government officials have had to make hard choices, but they shouldn’t make those choices on the back of small business and to the benefit of their larger corporate competitors.

At the Show-Me Institute, we advance government policies that expand freedom and enrich the lives of our citizens. We also recognize the obstacles erected by special interests inside government itself that, unfortunately, can stand in the way of the public interest. Whether called rent-seeking, cronyism, or soft corruption, such barriers to freedom and the free market are wrong and must be fought at every turn. We’re happy to continue this fight on behalf of Missouri taxpayers.

In closing, here in her 200th year as a state, we’re happy to report that Missouri is strong and her citizens are resilient.

But she can be made stronger and more resilient. Much remains to be done, whether in education, or health care, or transportation, or taxation, or the fight against cronyism. We are more determined than ever to continue our efforts to make our state better, hold our leaders accountable, and offer greater freedom and a better life to our fellow citizens.

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This position requires Crosby to leave the Institute’s board of directors and his role as its chairman—a loss for our organization, but a gain for our country. I will not attempt to capture everything that Crosby means to us, and has meant to us. I will only say that his deep intellect, thoughtful counsel, good humor, and earnest engagement will be missed in the halls of Institute. The IMLS receives a happy warrior for—and tenacious defender of—our country’s educational and research institutions.

Crosby, best of wishes on your new adventure, and know we’ll keep a light on for you here.

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In September, the reconstituted board announced that it was conducting a search to find a new commissioner. Like many, we hoped that the state would hire someone with a fresh vision and a vigorous approach to reform who would be determined to improve the performance of schools in Missouri.

The need for new leadership is undeniable.

When Dr. Vandeven was named commissioner of education back in 2014, the state’s education system had an ambitious goal: to have Missouri’s students performing among the best in the nation— “Top 10 by 2020.” Needless to say, that goal was never achieved. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” Missouri ranked 31st in 8th grade math in 2007 among the 50 states. Fast forward to 2017, and our ranking in the same subject and grade was 32nd.

During this same time, Missouri has had a revolving door of state standardized tests for students. According to a study published in Education Next¸ Missouri was the only state in the nation to actually lower proficiency standards between 2009 and 2017. Every other state is demanding more from their schools, while we’re asking for less. Why are we okay with that?

Not surprisingly, the Top 10 by 2020 goal has been quietly dropped. We have lost (at least) a decade in improving student outcomes, and we have no North Star.

During Dr. Vandeven’s tenure, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) began the process of revising the Missouri School Improvement Program (MSIP), the system used to accredit school districts. Today, out of 527 public school districts, not a single one is unaccredited and just six are provisionally accredited. DESE technically only accredits districts, not individual schools. Yet when the St. Louis Public School District became fully accredited, every school was given an enormous banner to hang outside with the school name and “Fully Accredited!” on it. What’s a parent to think?

There are far too many schools in Missouri with rates of proficiency in the single digits. DESE touts a high school graduation rate of nearly 90 percent, and then reports that fewer than 43 percent of graduates are college- or career-ready. Doesn’t every student deserve to have at least one high-quality option for their education?

It would be churlish to place the entire blame for this state of affairs on Dr. Vandeven, or any single official. Education is a complex process, educational bureaucracies are notoriously hard to change, and education in Missouri has been troubled for a long time.

But for precisely those reasons, we need to face the truth: Doing the same thing but expecting different results won’t work. During Dr. Vandeven’s tenure as commissioner, DESE made no real effort to provide parents useful information about how well our schools and districts were serving students. And DESE has stood firmly against any form of school choice for parents outside of Kansas City or St. Louis, regardless of how well (or poorly) students are being served by their assigned public school.

It is clearly time for a fresh look and a new approach at DESE. And yet last Wednesday, the board announced that the search for a commissioner was over, and that the new commissioner of education would be . . . the former commissioner of education, Dr. Vandeven.

We’ll have more to say about education in Missouri—a lot more—as state government prepares for the Legislature to reconvene in January. But for now, this much is clear:

If the members of the board, and the Governor who appointed them, had been trying to send the signal that they were satisfied with the status quo in Missouri; that they were throwing in the towel on real reform in the public schools and real options for Missouri families; that they were more interested in not making waves with the educational establishment than in making the lives of our children brighter—they made exactly the right choice.

The post One Step Forward, Two Steps Back appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Minimum wage
• Bryce’s Law
• Privitization of trash collection
• Missouri’s Show-Me Checkbook
• Child-support payment compliance
• Economic development subsidy research

Click on the link below to read more.

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• High school graduation rates
• Special taxing districts
• Legislative session recap
• Minimum wage
• Subsidy reform
• Course access

Click on the link below to read more.

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• A dubious commission to study charter schools
• Public-sector collective bargaining
• Missouri’s charter school environment
• Regulation of short-term rentals
• Medicaid costs
• Municipal spending transparency

Click on the link below to read more.

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