But this situation isn’t the result of immutable laws of nature. It’s a choice made by policymakers who single out education for “protection” against the market forces that we take for granted when we choose to purchase anything from a car to a hamburger. Putting power in the hands of the consumer has paid off in countless aspects of our lives, and it explains why new and better products are constantly being introduced. Why wouldn’t we expect educational outcomes to improve in the same way if families rather than bureaucrats were put in charge?

This essay explores the potential of free-market forces to improve education in Missouri in three ways: by increasing the variety of offerings available to students (in terms of both curricula and educational approaches); by using competition among educational providers to improve the quality of education; and by facilitating the spread of successful models so that the benefits of innovation are enjoyed by all students.

Click here to read the full report.

The post Why Markets Matter in Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks to Mike McShane and Rick Hess about their new book Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College.

In Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College, Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane argue that America has too long suffered from the absence of a robust, coherent, and principled conservative vision for educational improvement. The problem? The right has too narrowly focused on school choice, campus speech, and shrinking Washington’s footprint, while the left has sought to subsidize and supersize the status quo. The solution? An education system imbued with shared values, respectful of family ties, and equipped for the challenges of the 21st century.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Getting Education Right with Mike McShane and Rick Hess appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Discovery School has an amazing story. When the coronavirus struck in March of 2020, the Discovery Center, a children’s science museum, worked around the clock to transform into a licensed childcare center to continue students’ education even if their schools were closed to in-person instruction. Every member of the team agreed to work in person instead of working from home. By August, it had cultivated a community of learners who wanted to keep the good times going. The Discovery Center leased and renovated a building that used to be part of Everest College and created a space for children to do their virtual learning in small learning pods. By January of 2021, it was ready to launch a standalone school. It currently operates as a private school for students in Springfield. The STOP award created an informative webpage on the school, and it is worth checking out.

Simply by being named a finalist, the school is guaranteed at least $250,000 in prize money. The full prize will be announced December 14th at Forbes’ annual 30 under 30 event.

The post Innovative Springfield School Up for $1 Million Prize appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Anyway, when the average person reads that headline, what do you think they see? It is most likely that they would think that Missouri is second to last of all the 50 states in what it spends on education. That would be a perfectly reasonable reading of that particular arrangement of words. It would also be wrong.

The article covers a report released by the Missouri Auditor’s office that examined spending trends in Missouri and compared them to other states around the country. Did that report find that Missouri was second to last in the amount of money that it spends? It did not.

In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2020 Missouri was 27th in school spending in the United States, with $11,249 in current spending per pupil per year. Importantly, this is not adjusted for cost of living. Even without that, Missouri is right in the middle of the pack.

No, what the auditor’s report did was look at the percentage of student funding that comes from the state and then compared that to the percentage of funding that comes from the state in other systems around the country, using data from a report by the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union.

Now, we can set aside for a moment relying on the NEA, which has an obvious vested interest in increasing school spending. But we can still ask what, if anything, we should do with this information. Show-Me Institute analysts have been arguing that Missouri’s funding formula is broken for years. Reforming the funding formula is part of the 2022 Missouri Blueprint. Updating the formula to accurately measure local property tax wealth and thus local effort would be a huge improvement, as would treating charter schools better and providing more flexibility to parents as to where their children can take their funding. That said, using contrived statistics packaged deceptively to make that point isn’t right.

How much we should spend on schools has become a terribly muddled question. When polled, 58 percent of Missourians say that we should be spending more on education. That is, until they are told how much we actually spend. Then it drops to 32 percent. (Interestingly, it drops to 31 percent among school parents.)

Reports like the one from the auditor’s office do not help educate Missourians as to how much we actually spend and how that money is being put to use. It makes the worthy cause of funding formula reform more difficult. And that is a shame.

The post Missouri Is 49th in a Meaningless Statistic! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the most common concerns with private school choice programs is the impact that they might have on traditional public schools. It’s all well and good for the students who get to use a voucher/scholarship/ESA, but what about those children left behind in public schools?

Well, a team of economists from Northwestern, UC-Davis, and Emory University set out to answer that very question. Using detailed records from 1.2 million students from the 2002–03 school year to the 2016–17 school year, the researchers were able to link school attendance to standardized test scores, student behavior, and absenteeism. They used a variety of measures of competition to determine how much “pressure” the Florida school choice program put on public schools as it grew and matured. They have written up the findings in a very user-friendly way in the magazine Education Next.

What did they find? I’ll let the authors say it themselves.

We find broad and growing benefits for students at local public schools as the school-choice program scales up. In particular, students who attend neighborhood schools with higher levels of market competition have lower rates of suspensions and absences and higher test scores in reading and math. And while our analysis reveals gains for virtually all students, we find that those most positively affected are students with the greatest barriers to school success, including those with low family incomes and less-educated mothers.

You just love to see it.

The post School Choice Shines in Florida appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the 2021–22 school year, 39 percent (yes 3-9 percent) of education dollars will be spent on pensions. While education spending has grown 17 percent since 2000, teacher and administrator pension costs have risen 458 percent. 458 percent!

When the pension part of the state spending pie grows, the other slices of the pie shrink. That means that money that could be going to today’s teachers is going to yesterday’s.

Pensions are a perfect storm for governmental jiggery-pokery. The bill for bad decisions doesn’t come due for years after most of the people making decisions are out of office. The benefits are clear to those receiving them but are opaque to taxpayers (who tend to focus on metrics like teacher salaries, not total teacher compensation). Legislators can hide behind actuarial alchemy to obfuscate the magnitude of their decisions. Everyone wants teachers to have a safe and solid retirement, so quibbling with how much is spent can come off as teacher bashing.

Thankfully, Missouri is not nearly in the dire straits that Illinois is. Now, Missouri pensions are unfair. They invest in riskier assets to chase higher returns when they are underperforming. And, they are a bad deal for most teachers. But Illinois still serves as a cautionary tale for us.

And ballooning pension costs are bad for everyone (except, to be fair, those who are receiving them). It is bad for current teachers and students, who miss out on funding that could be used to support them. It is bad for current legislators, who have less money to spend on higher education, healthcare, roads and bridges, and more. And it is bad for future teachers, students, and legislators, who will be hemmed in by the decisions that their forebears made.

The great political philosopher Edmund Burke argued that the social contract is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Irresponsible pension policy violates that social contract and should be roundly criticized. Well done to the good folks at Illinois Policy for doing so.

The post Why We Need to Take Pension Costs Seriously appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But a new analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NACPS)  argues that not all schools saw drops in enrollment. In fact, across the country and in Missouri, charter schools actually saw increases in attendance.

The report’s authors worked with state data (and state education agencies) to examine enrollment trends in both traditional public and public charter schools. For the nation, they found a 3.3 percent decline from 2019–20 to 2020–21 in enrollment in traditional public schools, a similar trend to what the federal government’s data wonks found. But for charter schools, they found a 7.08 percent increase during that time period, representing some 237,311 students newly enrolled in charter schools.

In Missouri, while only finding a 0.1 percent decrease in enrollment in traditional public schools, the authors found a 3.5 percent increase in charter school enrollment.

Now, caveats are in order. Data on school enrollment is fluid right now. Sources conflict (as we see in the differences between what the feds counted in Missouri and what NAPCS did). Online learning, in both the traditional public and charter sectors, messes with the numbers as students move between modalities. I will be much more confident with another year of data.

That said, what NAPCS reported does align with a lot of what we’re hearing anecdotally. Lots of families were frustrated during the pandemic and were looking for other options. Charter schools are one of them. Especially in places where charter schools found ways to either be open in person or to provide a quality virtual option while their neighboring traditional public schools did neither, charter schools were an attractive option. We shouldn’t be surprised if families took advantage of it.

The post New Data Show Charter Enrollment Increased During Pandemic appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As more than a year has passed since the first bill’s passage, and almost nine months have passed since the second, we can start to figure out how the money is being spent. A new report from the American Enterprise Institute crunches the numbers and tells us the answer: it isn’t.

The first relief bill—the CARES Act passed in March of 2020—allocated $13.2 billion for K-12 schools. The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA), the second bill, was signed into law in December of 2020 and allocated another $54.3 billion. The third bill, the American Rescue Plan (ARP), was passed in March of 2021 and allocated $122 billion.

According to the AEI report, to date only 70 percent of CARES Act dollars have been spent, and a mere 7 percent of CRRSA dollars have been spent. (Not enough time has passed to know how the ARP dollars have been spent.)

Missouri has spent 84 percent of its CARES Act dollars but 0 percent of its CRRSAA dollars. If we combine the total dollars, it means that Missouri has only spent 16 percent of the money it received in the first two relief bills.

As it turns out, reopening schools was not nearly as expensive as some school advocates said it would be. State and local tax coffers were not hurt nearly as much as some had predicted. Some money was necessary, but it was a fraction of what Congress allocated.

And here comes the kicker: The real money is in the ARP, and it is just starting to show up. If schools haven’t spent down the funds from the first two bills, and schools start back up without the need for any additional pandemic-mitigation measures, the money from the ARP is just going to start piling up. Ultimately, the report estimates that between $78 and $123 billion of the coronavirus education funds will be spent on non-pandemic related expenses. And it isn’t just AEI making these predictions—the Congressional Budget Office (quoted in the report) predicted that only $6.4 billion of ARP dollars will be spent in 2021, and the rest will be spent over the next seven years.

The bottom line: If we hear from K-12 school leaders about underfunding at any time in the near future, we should know that they are misrepresenting reality.

The post So about that Coronavirus Money . . . appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There is good news and bad news here.

The good news is that for the first time, many of these families decided to take their children’s education into their own hands. They recognized the limitations of the traditional school system and opted for something better. According to the Census Bureau, homeschooling is up substantially, including in populations not traditionally thought of as homeschoolers. Some recent research on families who homeschooled and who personalized their children’s learning during the pandemic showed the benefits that they saw for their children and for themselves. Insofar as the pandemic helped spur people to rethink education and usher in the year of educational choice, the long-term effects will trend positive.

The bad news is that many traditional public schools are going to struggle in the short and medium term. As children filter back into schools this fall, they will have had vastly different experiences during the past year. Some will have accelerated, with more attention from their parents and creative out-of-school learning opportunities. Some will have declined, with low-quality remote learning stunting their development and disconnecting them from learning. Some will be a mixed bag. Teachers are going to have to figure out how to teach to all these different students at the same time.

As noted, the largest declines in enrollment came in kindergarten, where parents appear to simply be holding back their students for a year until school can return to normalcy. That is going to create a bubble of students that will work its way through the education system for the next two decades. Will schools have to operate extra classes each year as these students progress from grade to grade? How about college applications, with all these students applying at once? And what happens when they all hit the workforce when they graduate? The echoes of the pandemic will reverberate for multiple school years.

The post Missouri K-12 Enrollment Declined 3 Percent this Year appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That is what was proposed in Senate Bill 315 this year. Luckily, it did not make much progress, but it exists as an important historical artifact that school choice supporters should remember, as its various planks are sure to emerge in the future.

Under the bill, charter schools, which can now be authorized by universities and the Missouri Public Charter School Commission, would only be authorized by local public school districts. In order to operate, charter schools would have to prove not only that they would meet the needs of their students (which they must do now) but that they “meet those needs in a manner that improves the local public school system.” What’s more, all existing charter school contracts would transfer to local school boards once they expire, so not only new charter schools but all existing charter schools would come under local district control.

The whole point of charter schools is to offer students a public education separated from the local school district’s oversight. If folks wanted to send their kids to a district school, they would send their kids to a district school. This bill would be the death knell for alternative forms of public education and a slap in the face to the more than 25,000 children and their families who have chosen charter schools.

Public school districts struggle enough to manage their own schools. Why on earth do we think they could take over the management of Missouri’s 66 charter schools? If the Kansas City and St. Louis districts were knocking it out of the park, you could understand the argument for giving them more influence over charter schools. They are not knocking it out of the park. How about we encourage them to get their houses in order before taking over any other schools?

The key to understanding this bill is following the money. Let’s look at the bill description text: “Charter schools may be authorized or expanded only after a district has assessed the impact of the proposed charter school on local public school resources, programs and services, and other elements set forth in the act.” As Hamlet said, there’s the rub. This bill is not about what is best for kids; it is about preventing per-pupil funding from following them to the schools that actually educate them. It is about protecting school district coffers.

Rather than work to provide a better education for students, districts are trying to snuff out their competition. It is shameful and wrong.

They didn’t succeed this year, but supporters of charter schools must remain vigilant because their opponents have shown their intent.

The post Remember This: The Charter School Destruction Playbook appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed by Congress in 2015, districts are now required to report spending at the school level. Unfortunately, those data can be hard to find, and aren’t available in an easy-to-access, user-friendly way. That is, until now.

Project Nickel has created a searchable database of school-level spending. You simply type the name of your local public school into the search bar, and you can find out how much it spends.

What you find might surprise you. Border Star Elementary, a beloved Kansas City public school, spends $21,982 per student per year. Sumner High in St. Louis spends $17,580. I could go on, but I recommend checking it out yourself.

To answer the question that will inevitably arise: The primary reason that different schools, even within the same district, spend different amounts of money is teachers. More senior teachers make more money than more junior teachers, so schools with higher concentrations of veteran teachers will spend more per student, on average. It is worth thinking about why some schools seem to collect large numbers of veteran teachers while others do not, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.

The post How Much Does Your Local Public School Spend? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I wrote my first piece arguing for education savings accounts in Missouri in the fall of 2015 and first testified in favor of them during the 2016 legislative session.

Before me, James Shuls was advocating for school choice (and wide, garish ties, it appears) back in 2012.

In fact, the Show-Me Institute has been advocating for school choice since its inception, and finally, at long last, an education savings account bill is headed to the governor’s desk.

It is a time for celebrating. This is a huge win for Missouri’s children. Thousands of students will have access to educational opportunities that they would not have had without the creation of this program.

At the same time, this is just the beginning. We know that the educational establishment will do everything that it can to torpedo this program. Even though its funding is a fraction of a fraction of total school spending in Missouri, and even though piles of federal cash are being shoveled into public school districts, we are going to hear that this program is the death knell of public education and that it must be stopped at all costs. Expect administrative chicanery and legal trickery.

It is now incumbent upon advocates to do the hard work of making sure this program is successful. That means recruiting donors to fund the scholarships. That means making families aware of the opportunities available to them. That means working with schools and other educational providers to open seats to eligible students. That means constant vigilance for administrative malfeasance. It will be arduous and complicated and frustrating. And it will be worth it.

Here’s to a new day for education in Missouri. ‘Ere, the sun rises!

The post The School Choice Victory in Missouri Was a Long Time Coming appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fact #1: Our economy and society are increasingly bifurcating along educational lines.

Fact #2: People with bachelors’ degrees are doing much better than people without them.

Fact #3: Not everyone can or should earn a bachelor’s degree. (Okay so this one is part fact, part opinion)

A recent paper by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that while racial gaps in life expectancy are narrowing, the gaps in life expectancy between those with bachelor’s degrees and those without them are widening. And, tracking the last two decades of unemployment data shows that every time there is an economic contraction, those at the lowest end of the educational spectrum are hurt substantially more than those with college degrees. This is reflected in the completely different pandemic experience of more-educated Americans who were more likely to have jobs that could be performed remotely and less-educated Americans who had jobs that had to be performed in person.

If our society continues to cleave along educational lines, there will be serious negative consequences for our politics, communities, and economy.

It is tempting to respond to this problem by saying “Okay, well then everyone should get a bachelor’s degree,” but we know that many good jobs don’t require bachelor’s degrees, many people are unable or unwilling to engage with college-level work, and college is increasingly expensive.

The real question is: Is there another way?

A recent working paper published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University may offer a better way forward. Researchers from Rice University and the RAND Corporation examined occupational credentials—post-high school certifications that denote skills or knowledge relevant to a particular field.

The authors found that certifications increased the probability of employment for workers without a bachelor’s degree by 37 percent. As they put it, “this suggests that occupational credentials act as an important signal to employers in the hiring process, especially for those with less than a bachelor’s degree.” This, as one might imagine, also translates to higher earnings.

It is increasingly clear that students need some kind of post-high school education to access more stable, more rewarding, and more remunerative jobs. Creating quality certification programs and helping link students to the training that they need could go a long way in bridging the educational divide.

The post Are Occupational Credentials the Answer to Educational Polarization? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Those of a certain age in Kansas City might remember the landmark Missouri v. Jenkins case that wound its way through the courts during the 1980s and 1990s. The decision led to direct oversight of the Kansas City public schools by a federal judge and billions of dollars in spending,  but the key indicators that the case hinged on—student academic performance and racial segregation—barely budged.

I can’t do the whole story justice here, but I can highly recommend University of Colorado professor Joshua Dunn’s outstanding book on the case: Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins.

Here is a brief excerpt from his conclusion, which might give us pause today as we think about the new spending heading our way:

Many of the problems afflicting urban education can be traced to school districts’ political and institutional arrangements, which give incentives to school boards and superintendents to institute quick reforms that do not challenge established interests. The KCMSD is no exception. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a new superintendent would come in with a “new” plan to rescue the city’s schools. The plan would fail. The school board would fire the superintendent and then commission a study to come up with another plan. That plan would fail as well. Missouri v. Jenkins was the continuation of this failed policy strategy by judicial means. Even with the aggressive oversight of a federal judge, the KCMSD’s problems persisted. A dysfunctional organization given all the money it asks for will likely use that money in a dysfunctional way. Fixing the “root causes” of the problem—poor administration and poor instructions—should be the place to start.

The post Repeating School Spending History appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The online survey, conducted by Change Research, surveyed 614 St. Louisans in February of 2021 and asked them a battery of questions about their opinions on education in St. Louis.

Some highlights:

1. 57 percent of voters in St. Louis say that public education is on the wrong track.
2. 87 percent of voters earning less than $30,000 per year say that education in St. Louis needs to change “somewhat” or “a lot.”
3. 92 percent of voters who earn between $30,000 and $50,000 say that education in St. Louis needs to change “somewhat” or “a lot.”
4. 90 percent of voters say that it is “somewhat important” or “very important” that parents be able to pick their children’s school.
5. Charter schools have a 21-point favorability advantage over traditional public schools in St. Louis.
6. Interestingly, when asked about some basic facts of charter schools (respondents were asked whether statements such as “charter public schools are free” or “charter public schools are public” were correct or incorrect) lower-income St. Louis voters were more likely to get the answers right than higher-income voters.
7. 58 percent of respondents disagree with the statement “Public district schools in St. Louis are serving Black students well.” Only 25 percent of respondents agreed.
8. 39 percent of voters said that they were more likely to support a candidate who supports opening more charter schools while only 26 percent said that they would be less likely to support a candidate who supports opening more charter schools.

Voters know the score. Public education in St. Louis is not working for thousands of families. Parents should have more choice in where their children attend school.

That said, it is quite interesting that higher-income St. Louisans were more likely to not understand basic facts about charter schools. It would be a shame if their ignorance created political headwinds for solutions that their lower-income neighbors want and need.

How will this sentiment translate into policy? We don’t know. But, hopefully, civic leaders will respond to the needs and wants of their voters.

The post St. Louis Voters Support School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the most interesting questions the Census Bureau asked concerns homeschooling. Surveys from EdChoice and others have found huge bumps in the favorability of homeschooling during the pandemic, but have those opinions translated into parents actually taking the leap and homeschooling their children?

According to the Pulse Survey, yes. Yes they have. When asked in late April and early May of 2020, 5.4 percent of American families responded that they were homeschooling their children. By late September and early October, that number had more than doubled to 11.1 percent. And just to be sure, the Census Bureau made clear in its questioning that “homeschooling” meant homeschooling, not simply students working remotely while still enrolled in their traditional school.

The Census Bureau broke down the findings by state, and in Missouri the percentage of families homeschooling nearly doubled, from 5.9 percent in the spring of 2020 to 10.9 percent in the fall. That means that more than 1 in 10 Missouri school children were homeschooled at that time.

The survey also found fascinating trends related to race, with huge increases in homeschooling from Black families (from 3.3 percent in the spring of 2020 to 16.1 percent in the fall), and Hispanic families as well (from 6.2 percent in the spring of 2020 to 12.1 percent in the fall). In fact, expressed as a percentage of all families, homeschooling is now more popular among Black and Hispanic families than among White families, only 9.7 percent of whom were homeschooling in the fall of 2020.

If these trends hold, they represent a sea change in the educational landscape of Missouri and America writ large. We’ll be watching for later iterations of the survey to see if they do.

The post Homeschooling in Missouri Nearly Doubled in 2020 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

School choice legislation is under consideration in the Missouri legislature, which means it is time for the same misleading argument against the effort to be trotted out—school choice programs “defund” public education.  If the voices of the educational establishment are to be believed, allowing even a small number of students to find an educational option other than the traditional public school that they are residentially assigned to will lead to larger class sizes, decreased offerings for students, and lower teacher pay.

None of that is true. In fact, it is a veritable pinata of falsehood and unclear thinking that can be whacked from many different angles. Here are four ways in which this argument is wrongheaded.

First, it is important to think about how schools are funded. A large portion of funding comes via local property taxes. This funding stream flows into schools regardless of the number of students that attend them. A levy is instituted against the value of homes and property in an area and sent to local school districts. If 10 or 100 or 1,000 students leave, local funding is untouched. Don’t believe us? Check your property tax bill.

Schools also receive funding from the state on a weighted, per-student basis. This is where the second bit of slippery thinking comes in. Rather than being punished for students leaving, there are multiple provisions in both the current formula and in several of the proposed pieces of school choice legislation that hold districts harmless. This means school districts may continue receiving funding for students they are no longer educating. For instance, if 100 students decided to move from the Rockwood School District to the Wentzville School District, the state would still send funding to Rockwood for those students for two years while also sending money to Wentzville. That’s under normal circumstances in the current state law. The school choice bill that passed through the Missouri House of Representatives goes even further, allowing school districts to receive funding for five years after a student leaves one of its schools.

But beyond that, the third bit of slippery thinking is based on the premise that students leaving schools is akin to “defunding” them. This way of looking at the issue ignores several key facts. When students leave, yes, some portion of the money allocated for them leaves as well (after a period of time), but the district no longer has the obligation to educate them. Both the revenue and the expense leaves. Critics are only looking at one side of the ledger. By this logic, parents choosing to homeschool their own children “defunds” education; so does the student who moves. Do we think that a student “defunds” the Blue Springs school district when they move to Lee’s Summit? Should we bar families from moving? Taking that logic to its conclusion leads to absurdity.

Some people will acknowledge all that we have pointed out and yet still claim tax credit scholarships “defund” public education by reducing the amount of general revenue. This brings us to our fourth point. And we have to be clear here: the state does not spend any state tax money on a tax credit scholarship program. These programs are funded by charitable donations which receive tax credits. Tax credits, whether for development or for charitable endeavors, can lead to a reduction in general revenue for the state. That part is true, but when is the last time you’ve heard the complaints that low-income housing tax credits “defund” public education? This argument suggests that any program which could potentially impact education funding is actually “defunding” education. Money that goes to roads could instead be going to schools. Was the expansion of Medicaid a massive $9 billion effort to defund public education? Again, this is absurd.

Particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, there are important debates to be had about the shape and nature of our public school system in Missouri. These debates will benefit from clear thinking and facts, not misleading and tired rhetoric.

The post No, School Choice Does Not Defund Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Titled “Myth or Measurement: What Does the New Minimum Wage Research Say about Minimum Wages and Job Loss in the United States?” it surveys the existing research on the effects of the minimum wage.

What does it find? According to the authors:

Our key conclusions are: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults as well as the less-educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly-affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.

Labor economics isn’t my field of expertise, but from an outsider’s perspective, raising the minimum wage doesn’t look good!

The post New Summary of Minimum Wage Research Shows Negative Effects appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has been similarly concerned with American schools teaching students a form of civics that is “participation-centric.” It is of course important for students to learn how to vote and how to contact their elected officials, but, as Hess argues, this is the easy stuff of civics education.

As Hess puts it:

A participation-centric approach to civics education is insufficient because it emphasizes what citizens must do to get their way but slights the reality that we frequently won’t get our way—and can even give students the sense that it’s somehow illegitimate when we don’t.  In a nation as sprawling, dynamic, and diverse as ours, it’s a sure thing that many citizens won’t get their way—even when everyone is engaged and operating in good faith. Civics education must help students understand this reality and the safeguards that protect us when we don’t get our way.

Today’s election is a great opportunity to reinforce this idea. Very few people, anywhere, will cast a ballot in which every single candidate, ballot initiative, or constitutional amendment they select will win. Everyone will be a mix of disappointed and satisfied.

So what can teachers do? They can explain that our Founding Fathers anticipated this very thing. They can explain how our American system diffuses power both horizontally (among the branches of government) and vertically (among the federal, state, and local governments) so that no one group is ever entirely in control. This allows the various factions (as James Madison called them) to keep each other in check and work out their differences in a variety of different venues. They can tell students that are upset with the result of the federal election to look at what is happening in their state or local community, or vice versa. Teachers can explain that even if their preferred candidate did not win, our system of government has safeguards built in to protect them and that there will be more elections in the future, and more chances to have their voices heard.

Elections are about more than winning. They are the process by which a free people adjudicate their differences. If we focus too much on the result of elections, we risk delegitimizing the process. If we erode the norms and values upon which elections are built, we risk losing the means of maintaining a representative democracy.

The post Election Day Is a Great Day for Civics Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Building on the success of his coding club, he decided to start a micro-school in his own home in Mesa, Arizona. He wanted students as engaged in their normal schoolwork as they were in his coding club. He convinced six of his friends to “enroll” their children and used online resources and a pedagogical model that focused on student engagement and project-based learning to create a nurturing school environment. He loved it. The kids loved it. Their parents loved it. And he realized he was on to something.

That small group of families in his home became the basis for the Prenda Microschools (if you want the whole story, I spoke with Smith on my podcast Cool Schools earlier this summer). There are now more than 400 such schools, each enrolling between 5 and 10 students in someone’s home, in a public library, or a host of other spaces. Prenda was already growing before the pandemic, but social distancing requirements and lackluster responses by local school districts drove up demand.

This growth put Prenda in the crosshairs of the educational establishment. In a bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal, leaked documents show the opposition research that the National Education Association (NEA) has completed on Prenda and Smith himself, and it is wild. The NEA admits that micro-schools are popular, that kids learn well in them, that they solve some of the problems that homeschoolers face, and that some of Arizona’s school choice programs “alleviate some equity issues” as lower-income families can participate.

Perhaps more troubling, the dossier also features Mr. Kelly’s address and a picture of his home.

Let’s be clear. While Prenda is growing, and exciting, it still only enrolls around 3,000 students. In Arizona alone, there are almost 1.1 million public school students. That means that the NEA created opposition research on a school network that enrolls less than one third of one percent of Arizona’s students. Its enrollment is a rounding error in the education system, and yet the NEA went through all of this effort to develop a plan to snuff Prenda out, admitting in the process that it is popular because it is good.

I would love to say that I’m surprised by this development, but I’m not. This has been the standard operating procedure for teachers unions for decades. They brook no dissent. They fight hammer and tongs against every potential option that they do not control. And good people like Kelly Smith get caught in the crossfire.

More to the point, does the NEA in Missouri keep dossiers on private school leaders? On charter school educators? Does the union keep pictures of their houses on file?  Might be worth asking sometime.

The post Teachers Unions Set Their Sights on Micro-schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.