We can’t do a lot about our state’s geography, but neither can we accept limitations on the educational options available to students in smaller school districts. We need a way to bring advanced-level coursework to every Missouri student who wants it. An innovative program called course access offers a possible solution to this problem, and it’s the topic of an essay by the Show-Me Institute’s Brittany Wagner and Michael McShane. To find out more, click on the link below and read the essay.

The post Course Access for Missouri Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Five states have adopted ESA programs, and more than 7,000 students currently have access to ESAs in Arizona, Florida, and Mississippi. Similar to the programs in other states, Missouri’s program would allow parents to spend ESA funds on services like private school tuition, tutoring, online courses, textbooks, curriculum, and education therapies. The graphic above shows how parents wanting to customize a kindergarten year for a child with autism might choose to spend the ESA funds that would be available to them under the proposed program.

A parent might spend $150 on registration and application fees, $5,000 on a year’s worth of tuition, and $1,000 on therapies, namely behavioral interventions, or arts classes geared toward children with disabilities. In this case, that would leave $658 in the account. When the child graduated from high school, the $658 plus other accrued funds could be directed toward college or other post-secondary programs.

In our current public school system, parents must fight to access the educational services that fit their child’s needs. Organizations like Missouri Special Education Advocates and MPACT provide advocacy and parent training services that help children reach their full potential in the traditional public school system. An ESA program turns a system where parents must fight for a limited number of services into a child-centered system where services reflect a child’s unique abilities.

The post Empowerment Scholarship Accounts: How Parents Could Spend Funds appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Before Arizona adopted its ESA program, Salima’s parents were not in control of their daughter’s learning. They wanted a small but inclusive environment for Salima, who has Down syndrome.

“We didn’t feel as though the teacher in the classroom, as well as the administration, welcomed the idea of inclusion,” reflected Salima’s mom.

Arizona legislators recognized that parents know best, so the state adopted the first ESA program in 2011. Salima and 760 other Arizona children received customized educations in 2014. Now, nearly 2,500 Arizona children are enrolled in the state’s Empower Scholarship Account program.

The table below shows how many children are currently using ESAs in Arizona, Florida, and Mississippi. Nevada and Tennessee will launch their programs in January 2016 and 2017, respectively.

ESAs place a student’s funding into a flexible-use spending account, like a health savings account, that families can then use on qualifying educational purchases. Missouri’s ESA program would have a slight wrinkle, as the funding for the scholarships would actually come from private donations to scholarship-granting organizations for which donors would receive a tax credit, but the logic is the same. The graphic at the top of this post explains the process.

A taxpayer makes a donation to a nonprofit organization charged with managing ESAs. That organization then puts money equal to no more than the state adequacy target into a child’s account. For the 2016–2017 and 2017–2018 school years, the state adequacy target has been set to $6,808. Parents can spend the account funds on resources like private school tuition and fees, tutoring, online courses, education therapies, and curricula. Upon graduation, leftover funds can be directed toward postsecondary tuition and fees. The state Department of Economic Development would offer up to $50 million in tax credits to taxpayers who make contributions.

Only qualified students would have access to the program. Qualified students include students:

• Who are identified as having a disability under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973
• Who are identified by a district as having a disability
• Who receive services from a district under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
• Who are or have been wards of the juvenile court and have been placed with permanent guardians
• Who attended a public school for at least the first 100 days of the prior school year
• Who are eligible to begin kindergarten 

There are surely parents in Missouri who, like Salima’s, are frustrated with public schools that don’t meet their children’s needs. An ESA would give those parents a chance to customize their children’s educations. For more information about how ESAs work in other states, view the Friedman Foundation’s interactive map. 

The post Here’s How Missouri’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Would Work appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As part of the campaign, the Department of Education has proposed a new regulation that would require all copyrightable intellectual property created with Department grant funds to have an open license. If the federal government pays for it, citizens (who actually paid for it) must be able to access it for free.

What would happen if public schools no longer had to purchase new textbooks every five to seven years? How much would schools save?

Though textbooks only make up 1 percent of overall education spending, over time, these costs add up. Between 2012 and 2014, Francis Howell School District in Saint Charles spent nearly $3.5 million on textbook purchases. Using open-source textbooks could cut expenses in half or more.

For example, a 2008 edition of a high school Biology textbook can be purchased for about $100 dollars. An Amazon Fire tablet with Wi-Fi goes for $49.99, and with that tablet the Kindle edition of CK-12 Biology can be accessed for free. CK-12 Biology is just one of hundreds of textbooks available to students at no cost.

In addition to reducing costs, digital textbooks provide differentiation opportunities for teachers. One study looked at the science performance of 1,651 high school students from three states. The researchers found that reading ability was just as important to a student’s state test score as the amount of science knowledge the student had.

With a digital textbook, the text can be manipulated to provide the same subject matter at multiple reading levels. Just as easily, the textbook can be updated throughout the year in response to new discoveries—how many students in Missouri would you think are using a textbook that says Pluto is a regular old planet?

I’m excited to see where innovation in the textbook industry takes learning in Missouri. I hope when it’s time for other school districts to enter the digital age, as Affton has, they are ready.  

The post Open-Source Alternatives May Disrupt Billion-Dollar Textbook Industry appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Today, more than half of all U.S. states have a private school choice program, but Missouri is not among those states.

It may be the fear of change that prevents opponents of school choice from envisioning what the current K-12 public education system would look like if replaced by a system of choice and competition.

As I found out in my search for the perfect preschool for my three-year-old son, if you want to see Friedman’s vision of a vibrant school marketplace in action, you don’t have to look much further than Missouri’s own preschool market.

In contrast to the increasingly standardized classrooms you might find in the K-12 sector, there are literally hundreds of options in early learning. This includes the Montessori approach, where children learn through their own experiences, as well as the Waldorf approach, where children are provided with a consistent routine in a homelike setting. There are language immersion preschools, religious preschools, and even preschools where children learn through nature, like the preschool program at the St. Louis Zoo.

Picking the right preschool requires consideration of a child’s strengths and weaknesses. My own son, for instance, could use some practice with early numeracy skills like counting, but he dislikes structured educational activities. For him, the play-based preschool approach is best.

Once I found a few preschools offering play-based learning in the St. Louis area, I had to find something in my price range. One of the arguments politicians often make for universal preschool or “preschool for all” is that preschool isn’t affordable for even middle-income households like mine. Therefore, they reason, it should be subsidized for everyone.

In reality, many preschools I found in the area were quite reasonably priced. When you consider that traditional public schools spend over $10,000 per student per year, the $3,500 tuition First Congregational Preschool charges begins to feel manageable.

Why the difference in costs? In the public school system, parents don’t pay for schooling directly and have little choice in where their kids go to school, so it shouldn’t surprise us when we see high costs and low quality. But in the private preschool market, competition (and picking up the tab ourselves) drives costs down.

This isn’t to say that squeezing $3,500 into an already-tight budget will be an easy feat. Obviously, it would be great to save $3,500 per year and send my son to the local school district tuition-free.

But then I remember a simple truth: making something free doesn’t make it quality. And as is the case with many parents, quality is my number one priority. Take Normandy School District: Would providing universal preschool fix the failing district’s problems? Or would it just add another grade onto an already failing school system?

Making preschool free for all could have other unintended consequences, like putting quality preschools out of business and diluting innovation in early learning with standardization and regulation.

Some policy leaders in Missouri and across the nation want to make preschool free for every child. But if we’ve learned anything from the failures of the K12 system, it's that we have to figure out how to leverage the marketplace that already exists, not destroy it. Efforts like Minnesota’s Early Learning Scholarship Program, for example, offer scholarships of up to $7,500 to low-income families to help them afford preschool options. Low-income children gain access to preschool, and the marketplace is preserved—it’s a win-win solution.

I am excited to send my son to a preschool that fits his needs. If Missouri wants to give low-income families that same opportunity, universal pre-K is the not the answer. 

The post Universal Pre-K May Destroy the Preschool Marketplace appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I remember my first visit to “the Mills” shortly after it opened in 2003. The 1.2 million square foot building was bustling with people. The line for Panda Express was more like that of an amusement park ride than a mall food counter.

Today, only 77 percent of the mall is occupied (the average occupancy rate for malls is 92%). “Ghost town” is the best way to describe what I saw during my visit last November. The stores I once frequented as a teen were gone—replaced by metal bars and “for rent” signs.

You could look at the decline of the Mills Mall as a sign of the times—malls are out, online shopping is in. In fact, survey data supports this conclusion. In 2014, 34% of Americans said they did more than half of their shopping online—a 99% increase from the 2006 shopping season.

It’s certainly true that digital retailers like Amazon have disrupted the shopping industry, but the decline of the Mills Mall signals more than just the need for mall rats to find a new place to hang out. The failure of the Mills exemplifies why governments shouldn’t use tax increment financing (TIF) as a mechanism for economic development.

TIF is a method of attracting businesses to blighted communities through government subsidies. In 2003, an $18.5 million TIF in conjunction with a $34 million transportation district helped fund the mall’s development. In a 2006 Primer on TIF, UMSL professor Kenneth Thomas pointed out a few problems with this instance of TIF use.

• The building of the Mills Mall displaced sales tax revenue from Northwest Plaza in St. Ann, a shopping complex nearby.
• The project was environmentally harmful—the mall and surrounding road system was constructed on top of a wetland.
• The median income in the community was $52,656—hardly blighted.

Hazelwood’s Economic Developer David Cox told the St. Louis Business Journal, “If the developers could have looked into a crystal ball, they probably would have built it smaller.”

But that underscores another problem with funding large development projects like the Mills—crystal balls don’t exist.

The construction of the Mills Mall had promised 3,000 new jobs. Only half that number was realized.

The Mills Mall points to a serious need for TIF reform in Missouri. Malls may, indeed, be on their way out. Inappropriate uses of TIF should follow suit.

The post St. Louis Mills Auctioned Off for 6 Percent of Its Original Cost appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Nationally, student debt totals $1.3 trillion—and more than one-fifth of borrowers are unable to make payments. According to Million Student March leader Keely Mullen, the solution is progressive taxation.

Free college! A $15 dollar minimum wage for campus workers! No more student debt! Thanks, one percent. . . . wait—where did you go?

There are realistic solutions to the rising cost of obtaining a college degree, but they don’t include simply pouring more tax dollars into a broken system.

One solution would be to lower the cost of college altogether. Both massive open online courses (MOOCs) and competency based education (CBE) offer opportunities for states trying to do just that.

Many courses that students are required to take are offered online in the form of MOOCs. MOOCs are courses offered over the internet to a large group of people without charge. Websites like Coursera offer classes in history, math, science, and engineering at low cost (and sometimes free). Allowing students to use free or low-cost services, especially when some of these classes would be big, impersonal lectures anyway, would reduce the number of courses for which students must take out loans.

Competency based education has similar potential to reduce the cost of college. Rather than basing course credit on the amount of time a student sits in class, CBE grants credit for courses when students demonstrate that they have mastered the coursework. This helps students progress more quickly through content they already know or can learn easily, and ultimately reduces the amount of time students need to complete their degrees.

Public institutions like the University of Missouri should embrace these alternatives. The best way to decrease student debt is to reduce the cost of the education itself, so students don't need to borrow so much in the first place. 

The post Million Student March Proposes Free College and Debt Forgiveness appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Ascension Parish, Louisiana, high-school students don’t have to wait until college to access technical education—they can take courses through their traditional public schools, as The Foundation for Excellence in Education depicts in a recently released a video titled “Course Access: Expanding Access & Equity in Louisiana.”

Course access (or “course choice”) allows students to direct funding to approved course providers outside of their traditional public school and to receive credit for classes they successfully pass. This allows students to customize their education while remaining in their home districts. Enrolling in welding courses has put students like Stormi Honeycut (shown in the video) on the path to high-paying careers without ever having to pay thousands of dollars to a technical college.

According to www.tech-schools.us, 69 colleges offer technical programs at 91 locations in Missouri. Some tech programs cost as much as traditional university education. Ranken Technical College in St. Louis, for example, costs $14,000 per academic year, which is impractical for many students.

If Missouri adopted a course access program, students could enroll in courses through approved technical programs at no additional expense to the students or taxpayers while still in high school. Funds would simply be redirected from what the school district already uses. By the time they graduated, students could be well on their way to a solid career in a trade.

When I first started at the Show-Me Institute, I told the story of my experience teaching in a low-income school district. I wrote:

…one day, I noticed a child staring out the window at the construction site adjacent to the building.  The student mumbled to himself, “if only school was doing construction work, then I’d have an A-plus.”

As a teacher, I learned that if students want to be welders, schools that want to make them into philosophers won’t help them, no matter how effective the teachers are. Imagine the reverse—we would surely oppose trying to make students who want to be philosophers into welders. Why don’t we recoil when folks try to make welders into philosophers? For students more interested in a vocational career than a philosophy degree, course access offers a path forward.

The post Debate Comment Sparks Discussion about Vocational Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Funds raised from the tax increase will be directed toward priorities such as hiring 16 new certified teachers to help struggling students and restoring technology and student club funding. Proponents of Proposition R say that without additional funds, home values will decrease due to declining academic performance. Opponents believe the additional funds won’t be used wisely, in which case the increased tax rate will lower the value of their homes.

Analysts at the Show-Me Institute have looked at how school quality and tax rates affect home prices. In Real Estate Assessment and Property Taxation, analysts demonstrated that the quality of schools and their related tax rates are capitalized into the value of property. As the video below explains, homeowners in the Clayton and Ladue school districts in Richmond Heights pay substantially more for comparable homes with better performing schools and lower tax rates.  

In short, homeowners and voters want to get the most bang for their tax bucks. The following data on school performance and school funding may shed some light on what’s going on in the district.

First, the graph below shows how Mehlville and the districts around it performed on the MAP test in 2015 in both math and science.

Mehlville doesn’t look great. In fact, the district has the second lowest math scores in the area.

But, if we look at a second data set—college readiness indicators like average ACT scores, college remediation rates (the percentage of students who enroll in courses they should have completed in high school), and the number of AP courses the district is offering—Melville is performing better than other districts in the area (see table below). 

Even with reports of losing teachers to neighboring districts, Mehlville is able to offer a large number of AP courses and prepare students for college at about the same rate as neighboring districts with more teachers and administrators (as our next graph displays).

The graph below presents teacher/student and administrator/student ratios. Mehlville has more students per teacher than Kirkwood, but fewer students per teacher than Lindbergh, even though both are better-performing districts. Mehlville also has the highest student-to-administrator ratio in the area.

Finally, relative to other school district property tax rates in the area, Melville has the lowest rate:

So what should we make of all of this? Frankly, it’s tough to say. In some ways, it appears that Mehlville is operating efficiently. With fewer teachers and administrators and a lower tax burden, the district is achieving about as well on several key indicators as other districts. In other ways, it appears that the district is lagging behind.

The real question is whether new dollars will do anything to move the needle on student performance. Simply hiring more teachers and investing in technology and student clubs doesn’t seem particularly compelling. What’s more, will raising taxes hurt Mehlville’s competitive edge in recruiting new homeowners? Without strong answers to these questions, it is hard to determine if taxpayers should get behind any effort to increase tax rates in the district.

The post Melville School District Wants to Raise Property Tax Rates appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Earlier, I wrote about Mehlville School District’s proposed property tax increase. Voters in both Melville and Kirkwood must decide whether they think additional funds will improve the quality of the districts. To make this decision, they should consider how the school districts are currently spending tax dollars.

A group called Tax Fairly opposes the tax hike. Information about their reasons for opposing the tax increase may be found here.

Tax Fairly points out that Kirkwood has the highest-paid superintendent in the state and the second highest-paid teachers in the state (only the Clayton School District pays more). Kirkwood School Board President E. J. Miller told the Post-Dispatch, “We want the best of the best. We think that to hire them and retain them, we want to pay them well.”

Proponents of Prop A believe the property tax increase is necessary due to increasing enrollment. A district-hired demographer estimated an enrollment increase of between 10 and 11 percent by 2019. To keep up with the rate of enrollment, the district would have to hire new teachers to keep class sizes down.

Tax Fairly disagrees with the district’s enrollment estimates. The group questions the methods used to determine 2019 enrollment. They point out that at least some of the rising enrollment the district has experienced has been due to transfer students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts. They also call attention to the fact that Kirkwood allows children of teachers in the district to attend the school tuition-free.

I want to add one wrinkle to this debate. The chart above provides teacher–student ratios for Kirkwood and the surrounding school districts (using Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Data). Kirkwood classrooms average 14 students per teacher, which is lower than most other school districts in the area. Perhaps it’s not Kirkwood’s teacher salaries that are driving costs, but the number of teachers they need.

Research shows that teacher quality is more important than class size, that is, class sizes could increase slightly and still maintain the same level of quality. In fact, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the desirable standard for student enrollment in classrooms is between 17 and 25 students, depending on the grade level, well above Kirkwood’s average.  Is the district operating as efficiently as it could? Arguably not.

Although many agree the district is performing well, a major concern for taxpayers is how the district will spend $10.4 million in additional revenue annually. The 2015–2016 operating revenue budget is $62 million. Is all of that new money necessary?

The post Property Tax Increase on Ballot in Kirkwood School District appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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P.S. 199 is a National Blue Ribbon Award-winner with high state test scores, strong parent involvement, a high percentage of white students, and a low percentage of students qualifying as poor. P.S. 191 is made up of mostly poor, Hispanic, and black students from the public housing unit across the street. Because of overcrowding issues, P.S. 191, which sits within nine blocks of P.S. 199, may enroll wealthier students if the districts are rezoned.

Parental response has been mixed. Some want to erase the boundaries between the two schools altogether, allowing for a greater mix of students at each. Others say they’ll move to another school district or send their kids to private school if their children are sent to P.S. 199.

The story of P.S. 199 and 191 may sound familiar to residents of Saint Louis County and City. Here students may live within walking distance of one school but attend another, because of where boundaries are drawn.

For years, numerous groups have advocated for a unified district in the Saint Louis area, but as SMI’s James Shuls has pointed out, this solution is too pie-in-the-sky to make a difference for students who need better education options today. As an alternative, the St. Louis Post Dispatch Editorial Board proposed an open enrollment policy last November. “Districts would agree to a set tuition amount that would follow any student who wanted to cross boundaries. Transportation would be provided for those below poverty level,” they wrote.

Open enrollment policies have become more common over the past several decades. In 1988, Minnesota passed the first mandatory open enrollment law. By 2013, 21 states had allowed students to transfer from their home district to another school district. Some of these states, like Missouri, only allow students to transfer if their current district is failing.

But there are many reasons why a student would want to transfer to another school district aside from poor student achievement. A student might just live closer to a school within another district (this example also applies to students who live in rural parts of Missouri).

Another way to create more options for students would be to allow charter schools to operate anywhere in the region, and allow students to transfer across district lines to attend them. For example, if a charter school opened in the Bayless school district in Saint Louis County, students in the Affton, Hancock, and Lindbergh districts could apply to attend.

In the upcoming legislative session, I hope lawmakers consider the alternative to unifying school districts—expanding the state’s open enrollment policy to include not just students in failing schools, but all students in the Saint Louis area and across the state. 

The post School District Boundaries Are an Issue Here, Too appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Recently, teachers at Grand Center Arts Academy have taken steps toward becoming the first charter school in St. Louis to unionize. Unionization in charter schools is uncommon. According to one survey, only 7 percent of charter schools were unionized in 2012. Last month, about 80 percent of the Grand Center Arts Academy staff signed cards indicating their desire to join a local chapter of AFT.

On the one hand, a union can give teachers a voice. A union that’s accountable to its members allows teachers to participate in the formulation and implementation of school policies. A good union can serve as a counterbalance to an administration that makes decisions without paying attention to the concerns of the people working in the classrooms.

On the other hand, restrictive components of union contracts can interfere with administrative decision-making, offering benefits to employees to the detriment of students. In the Fort Zumwalt School District, for example, the union contract provides guidelines for laying off teachers—last in, first out: new teachers are fired first, even if they are better teachers.

Unlike in traditional schools, families always have the option of leaving a charter school if it doesn’t live up to their expectations. Teachers can’t as easily leave a union. Once teachers unionize, it’s hard to de-unionize.

After an initial union election, no further elections are scheduled, no term limits are imposed, and the union stays in power indefinitely. New employees are forced to accept representation from a union they never had the chance to vote for. A 2015 American Association of Educators survey reported only 8 percent of teachers surveyed had voted for the union representing them.

As Al Shanker believed, charter schools should be laboratories for experimentation. So why not experiment with a new form of union representation in which teachers get to vote for their union in regular elections?

Regular union elections give employees the right to select a union to represent them for a fixed term. When this term ends, employees hold another election where they vote to keep their union, elect another union, or de-unionize the workplace all together. Union elections provide a distinct advantage over traditional union representation, where it can be very hard to remove a union from power if it doesn’t live up to expectations.

In Missouri, school boards get to adopt the labor policy for a school district. Confluence Charter Schools, which operates Grand Center Arts Academy, could set a labor policy that allows its teachers to unionize so long as they are allowed to vote on unionization every two years. This way, if the arrangement with AFT didn’t work out, or teachers wanted the services of a competitor like the National Educators Association instead, they’d have an established policy in place for making this transition.

Confluence has every reason to view the unionization of their teachers with concern. But they can also see it as an opportunity to advance the creative spirit of the charter school movement. And that benefits everyone.

The post Charter School Unionization: An Innovative Approach appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The benefits read like a laundry list of personal responsibility: more employment success, higher earnings, better health, greater education attainment, lower chances of incarceration, reduced likelihood of dropping out of high school, fewer teen pregnancies, and on and on.

Early education is good for business as well. Pre-K graduates show up on time, ready for work and with a temperament essential for work place success. They also possess confidence, curiosity and a greater sense of purpose, all of which will help the private sector’s bottom line…”

In short, next time I’m running late, I’ll just tell my boss, “Sorry, I didn’t go to preschool.” That ought to get me off the hook.

Preschool supporters like Schoemehl have good intentions, but often make the mistake of talking about preschool as if it’s some kind of cure-all. That just isn’t the case. While it’s true that preschool can offer some benefits for low-income students, creating a quality program is difficult. When preschool programs are constructed, they usually import some of the worst problems of our public K-12 system.

In a recent study, Vanderbilt University’s Peabody Research Institute performed an independent evaluation of the state’s Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN-VPK). TN-VPK offers a full-day prekindergarten option for four-year-olds. The program focuses on the neediest children in the state.

Despite previous findings that showed that the Tennessee prekindergarten program was successful in producing improvements in academic skills by kindergarten, Vanderbilt found that there were no statistically significant differences between TN-VPK participants and nonparticipants by the end of first grade. Brookings Institution senior fellow Russ Whitehurst called the results “devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.”

In his letter, Schoemehl wasn’t necessarily advocating for a state-based program, “If we want our children to grow into responsible adults, then our kids need better options and those options need to start at birth,” he said. Schoemehl is right about one thing—options are key.

A targeted, market-driven program could deliver at least some of the results Schoemehl discussed, though no preschool model is a silver bullet. Missouri already has a large private preschool market. A voucher program that allows parents to choose the option that makes sense for their work schedules and children’s needs is a far better method of expanding access to early childhood education than simply adding a grade to an already struggling public K-12 system.

The post Preschool: Silver Bullet? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Default Rates among Missouri Colleges and Universities appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

If there is any consolation, it’s in knowing I’m not alone. In fact, more than one-fifth of borrowers have proved to be less-than-savvy higher education investors—22% have loans in default or forbearance. The consequences of default are serious, including wage garnishment and a severe hit to credit scores.

Last month, the Department of Education released data on the default rates for colleges and universities in all fifty states and abroad. Before getting into what solutions policy leaders have proposed to lessen the burden of student debt, let’s look at student loan default rates in Missouri.

The table below shows the percentage of students by type of institution who entered repayment in fiscal 2012 and had defaulted by December 2014. The default rate for public two-year institutions or community colleges was more than double that of public four-year and private four-year universities. Private four-year universities had a lower default rate than public four-year universities by 1 percentage point. Special-focus colleges like St. Louis College of Pharmacy had the lowest default rates (with the exception of the Kansas City Art Institute, which had a default rate of 10.2 percent*). To view default rates for most colleges and universities in Missouri, click here. 

The pie chart below breaks down the students in default in 2014 according to the types of institutions they attended. This figure shows that public two-year colleges produce the most student loan defaults in Missouri (this trend is also apparent nationwide).

Why? The most common defaulters are students who attend college but do not graduate. These students  incur the debt, but don’t see any of the benefit, making it harder for them to pay back their loans. According to one study, the completion rate for students who start at two-year universities in Missouri is less than 40 percent. That’s a lot of students with debt and no degree. It’s a recipe for default. 

To combat default, some policy leaders, including President Barack Obama, have proposed further subsidizing higher education, but that skirts the real issue. What we should really talk about is how to make college less expensive in the first place and how to help more students graduate. The state could take several steps to do that.

First, it could work with schools to promote low-cost options. States like Texas and Florida have explored ways of reducing total costs to as low as $10,000. Inexpensive degrees that students successfully complete are an antidote to default; loans (if they are even necessary) have very low payments and degrees have high benefits.

Second, the state could make both costs and benefits more transparent to potential students so they can make informed decisions and exert pressure to keep prices down. The Department of Education created the college scorecard to help students make better choices about “where to study and how to maximize their investment.” The graphs below highlight four universities in Missouri, displaying the average annual cost of attending, graduation rate, and salary after attending. The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act of 2015, an update to the Higher Education Act of 1965, was referred to a congressional committee in May and requires universities to provide more accurate and complete data.

Finally, states could force colleges to have some “skin in the game.” Under such a plan, schools would be required to pay a portion of any defaulted government loans. This would push universities to accept only students who they thought would be successful, to work with students to make it through their studies, and to help place students in jobs that will earn enough to pay back their loans.

Lower-cost options, better information, and institutions with an interest in preventing loan defaults could go a long way to helping curb debt, defaults, and the $1.3 trillion problem they create.

*The default rate for the Kansas City Art institute was originally posted as 17.1%, which was the rate reported for 2010. The 10.2% rate is correct for 2012.

The post Student Loan Default in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Most recently, in a Post-Dispatch letter-to-the-editor, a Ferguson resident responded to my commentary about expanding access to public charter schools. “Charter schools can pick and choose whom they allow in, unlike the public schools who, by law, must take in everyone including troubled and handicapped students,” he wrote.

It is true that typically charter schools enroll a smaller percentage of students with disabilities than traditional public schools. Some, like the above letter writer, believe that means charter schools only accept the “crème of the crop,” taking away the “best and brightest” from traditional public schools. But that isn’t the case.

One report found that students with disabilities are simply less likely to apply to attend charter schools. This may be because parents prefer the resources their children receive at their local traditional public school. It may be because parents are counseled away from the option either by a charter school or the traditional public school their child attends. More likely than not, parents may be unaware that their child can even attend a charter school.  That’s selection on the parent’s, not the school’s, part.

If a critic wanted to find out about charters serving students with special needs, they would need to look no further than St. Louis’ own EAGLE College Preparatory School. In its application, the charter school outlines the types of services it provides to students with special needs. Today, the percentage of students with disabilities at EAGLE is 13 percent. The statewide average incidence rate of students with special needs is 12.69 percent.

When I visited EAGLE, I had the opportunity to speak with Regional Special Education Director Elisha Ferguson, who told me, “Charter schools have gotten a bad rap, because people assume they don’t offer these (disability) resources. It’s a lack of information”

According to Ferguson, all students at EAGLE receive small-group support. Even students without disabilities who have been identified as needing additional help receive special attention. This is in contrast to the complicated and time-consuming process parents, teachers, and students must go through just for a child to receive an individualized education plan (IEP). Federal law and implementing regulations do not set a timeline for the IEP process—in some cases it can take months before a child receives special accommodations.

At EAGLE, you can’t tell which child has a disability and which doesn’t—every child is treated as having unique needs. This is the exact approach that we should be supporting, not stifling.

It’s unfortunate that misperceptions about charter schools still linger in Missouri policy discussion. Falsehoods that are spread through a lack of information, or exposure to misinformation, add nothing to the conversation. In fact, they may be preventing some children from receiving a quality education.

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Most people might attend a school board meeting, but if you’re Eli and Edyth Broad and you’re fed up with the Los Angeles Unified School District, you would come up with a $490 million dollar plan to double the number of charter schools, challenge employee unions and charter school critics, and create 130,000 new quality seats by 2023.

The Broad Foundation plans to open 260 new charter schools over a 7-year period. A 44-page memo describing their plan outlines the growing demand for high-performing charters, describes teacher and school leader recruitment strategies, and calls for more charitable support for the new charters. L.A. Unified already has a large number of charter schools (they educate about 16% of the district’s total enrollment), but if everything goes as planned charter schools will reach 50 percent market share.

The LA Times reported:

Charters have proved popular with parents. The expansion campaign is shaping up to be something of a referendum on L.A. Unified's performance. The memo repeatedly criticizes the district for failing to prepare students for college and careers, robbing Los Angeles of a better-trained, smarter workforce.

"The opportunity is ripe for a significant expansion of high-quality charter schools in Los Angeles," the memo states. "Thanks to the strength of its charter leaders and teachers, as well as its widespread civic and philanthropic support, Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation. Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow."

In Missouri, only students in St. Louis and Kansas City currently have access to public charter school options. In 2014, public charter schools enrolled 29 percent and 42 percent of all public school students in Saint Louis and Kansas City, respectively. Still, a demand for more quality public options exists in both cities.

Time will tell if something like the Broad plan would be right for Missouri. Until then, here are some fixes to our current charter system, which require a little less heavy lifting:

(1)   Make it easier for charter schools to acquire abandoned buildings.

(2)   Allow charter schools to open statewide

(3)   Provide equitable funding for public charter school students.

(4)   Fast-track the process for quality charter school replication.

All four of these would cost a lot less than $490 million, and would do a world of good for students in Missouri.

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Tessera Hall will open to sixth- and seventh-graders, but will expand to include grades 8 through 12 in South St. Louis City during the 2016–2017 academic year. As the Post-Dispatch reported, a group of St. Elizabeth Academy alumni started working to build the school after St. Elizabeth closed in 2013.

Like the once private, religious De La Salle Middle School, which reopened this year as a public charter school, St. Elizabeth struggled with enrollment. Mike McShane, who recently joined the Show-Me Institute as the Director of Education Policy, wrote about this phenomenon in Sector Switchers: Why Catholic Schools Convert to Charters and What Happens Next. While charters like La Salle no longer deliver a religious education, access to public dollars allows them to remain open, ultimately carrying on their mission—providing a quality educational service to a low-income population.

Tessera Hall’s charter school application says it plans to recruit young women in low-performing schools like Roosevelt High School, where 70% of girls score below basic in mathematics. The application reads:

The proposed mission, curriculum, teaching methods and services of Tessera Hall Academy are designed to meet the particular needs of the adolescent urban girls of St. Louis by providing an inclusive and academically challenging experience in a safe, affirming, and empowering environment that enables these young women to achieve success in college, become civicminded leaders, and be resilient life-long learners.

I look forward to hearing more about the state’s second single gender public charter school, as well as other future charter school options. The Missouri State Board of Education accepts charter school applications up until the December board meeting.

Single gender or mixed, students need more quality educational choices. 

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