Private property rights have long been regarded as the foundation of a free society. Traditionally, the taking of private property by eminent domain has only been allowed for public use. But over the last 50 years, courts have increasingly allowed municipalities in Missouri to take property for private developments. Under the pretext of remedying “blight,” cities now condemn ordinary middle-class neighborhoods to make room for retail, corporate offices, and apartments. Proponents claim the practice promotes economic development, but the reality is just the opposite. The threat of eminent domain casts a cloud of uncertainty, discouraging owners from investing in their property. And many “redevelopment” projects do not create wealth; they divert jobs and revenues from neighboring jurisdictions. Some developers argue that the problem of “holdouts” — property owners who demand exorbitantly high prices — justifies the private use of eminent domain. But there are a number of other strategies developers can employ for holdouts. What they don’t mention is that simply the threat of eminent domain has often allowed them to obtain property at below-market rates. Some planners argue that eminent domain is needed for urban slums. However, if slum redevelopments are intended to help residents, permitting eminent domain is counterproductive. Eminent domain is often used to demolish low-income housing and replace it with more expensive housing. Many former residents are forced into even more squalid housing elsewhere. Last year’s eminent domain legislation did not provide adequate protections for property owners. Municipalities can still seize “blighted” property, and the definition of “blight” is so broad that almost no neighborhood is safe. Missouri needs a constitutional amendment prohibiting eminent domain for private use.

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The story is a “he said, she said” story in which city officials’ trumped-up allegations against Roos are reported alongside Roos’s responses. Since most readers don’t know any of the parties and aren’t going to do research for themselves, this gives the (erroneous, in my view) impression that there must be something shady about Roos or the Post wouldn’t have published such a critical article. Here’s an example:
 

Roos’ properties have drawn complaints for graffiti and trash buildup. This year alone, city inspectors cited Roos’ properties for several infractions, including broken or missing window panes, a collapsed fence, a collapsed porch, a partly collapsed wall and improper display of address numbers.

Even the “End Eminent Domain Abuse” mural, which can be seen heading north where Gravois Avenue becomes Tucker Boulevard, has been cited. Last month, the Department of Public Safety issued Roos a notice for having an “illegal sign” and ordered it removed.

Other than the mural, Roos says that the buildings cited by the city had the violations before he purchased them. Roos says his rental units are “decent,” though not glamorous.

“It’s ordinary housing,” Roos said. “But durable, safe.”

Is Roos is telling the truth that his citations are only for buildings he’s recently purchased? I’m willing to bet he is (which would be an effective rebuttal to Roddy’s insinuation that he’s a slumlord) but the reporter didn’t check, something I expect he could have done fairly easily. Instead, he just repeated Roddy’s allegations and left the reader with the impression that Roos is probably up to something shady.

The story also glosses over why Roos is running housing in slums in the first place. Like most cities, Saint Louis has a shortage of affordable housing. Low income people have difficulty finding housing that’s “durable, safe”—and affordable. Roos provides such housing. And having seen both his office and his home, I can say with confidence he’s not getting rich in the process.

So what does the city do to help out?
 

A city-backed commission, led by the Missouri Botanical Garden, used eminent domain to acquire nearly two dozen buildings Roos owned or managed in the McRee Town neighborhood.

That’s when Roos said he first became a “victim.” To hear him tell it, McRee Town, left alone, would have been the next Soulard.

Not so, says veteran Alderman Joe Roddy.

“It was a neighborhood in a free fall,” said Roddy, who cited the area’s high crime rate.

Today, the neighborhood is home to a suburban-style subdivision — Botanical Heights, with homes listing for more than $300,000 — which Roddy points to as evidence that eminent domain can work.

That sounds lovely except for one little detail: poor people can’t afford $300,000 homes. The city has “solved” the problem of poverty in McRee town by forcing the poor to move to a different neighborhood. I’m sure that counts as “progress” for Mr. Roddy, because now they’re probably out of his ward and no longer his problem. But it’s not progress for the city as a whole. In fact it’s the opposite of progress, because what affordable housing remains will be more expensive and more crowded than ever.

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As the Show-Me Institute’s editor, Eric will be in charge of maintaining the high quality of all of the Show-Me Institute’s publications, including our website and blog, our Policy Studies, and Show-Me Quarterly. He’ll also be writing op-eds and contributing to the weblog.

Where am I going? I’ll be doing technology policy research from home in Saint Louis as an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. I’ll also be helping out part time at the Show-Me Institute for the next few months to make sure the transition to the new editor goes smoothly. I’m also working on a study on eminent domain abuse in Missouri, which I hope to finish in the not-too-distant future. If you’d like to read more of my tech policy work, please check out my contributions to Cato’s blog and the Technology Liberation Front.

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We’ve also belated posted the Winter issue of Show-Me Quarterly, which went out to our sponsors last month. Click here to read about our recent studies on the income and earnings taxes, our various events on education policy, and a profile of the late, great, Milton Friedman.

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No doubt spending more on life sciences will lead to some beneficial science being done, and it may very well lead to important breakthroughs. But by itself, spending more money on biotech research isn’t likely to make the broader Saint Louis area a biotech hub. Carnegie Mellon is one of the best computer science schools in the country, but Pittsburgh isn’t known as a hotbed for tech startups. Nor are subsidies from the state of Pennsylvania likely to make it a hot technology area.

If government wants to make Saint Louis the home of the biotech industry, the best way to do that is to make it hospitable to industry in general: cut taxes and red tape, provide good infrastructure, and then get out of the way. That might spur the growth of the biotech industry here in Saint Louis. But it might also spur the growth of all sorts of other industries as well. After all, the whole reason we have a market economy rather than running our economy using Soviet five-year plans is that government officials don’t know what’s needed and where the economy is headed. If they can’t run the economy as a whole, why should we expect they’d be any better at picking what Saint Louis’s next hot industry is going to be?

The reason, I suspect, is that when you cut taxes and thereby spur the creation of a lot of small businesses, you don’t necessarily get to attend a big ribbon-cutting ceremony and take credit for it on the evening news. So even if tax cuts and deregulation are better for the state’s economy than “targeted” economic programs, they’re not as good for the career of the politician in question. So instead, politicians focus on high-profile projects that make good photo-ops, regardless of whether they’re good policy or not.

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The proposal would offer incentives for teachers to specialize in the most needed areas, particularly science, math, special education, and English as a Second Language. It would also offer bonuses to teachers for student performance. By the same token, those teachers that do not meet performance standards would receive professional development training; those failing more than once would be fired. Setting benchmarks that reflect a teacher’s performance and are not tied solely to the performance of each individual student is the key to making this system of compensation work. Such a rubric would reflect the unfortunate reality that some students simply don’t want to learn, and avoid blaming the teachers for those student’s failures. This will create a pay structure that acknowledges the reality faced by teachers in the public system; a structure that encourages innovation and emphasizes performance.

The plan also calls for state-funded pre-kindergarten education for all children between the ages of three and five, as well as tax credits to private donors who fund after-school enrichment programs. Both of these ideas are good on the surface, but the devil is in the details. A robust pre-school market already exists, and any attempt to require such additional schooling should take advantage of that market. It would be highly inefficient to build separate infrastructure for a network of new, state-funded, state-administered preschools. Rather, a practical approach would be to give every child a voucher to attend the existing preschool of their parents’ choosing. This method would place responsibility for kids’ educations squarely on the shoulders of parents, getting them involved in the education process early and hopefully keeping them involved throughout. If necessary, minimum performance standards could insure that preschools are optimally preparing student to enter kindergarten in the public system.

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On Jan. 19, St. Louis County Circuit Judge James R. Hartenbach agreed to allow Centene to use condemnation to acquire the properties. The owners say their properties are not blighted and should not be condemned. In a nonbinding referendum, Clayton voters expressed opposition to the use of eminent domain to benefit a private development.

Robert J. Schenk, a spokesman for Centene, said, “The properties that are the subject of litigation are still a critical part of the overall project. Without those properties, the project will not occur.”

Schenk said, “The developers are busy working to ensure that the project can move forward as quickly as possible as soon as the litigation question has been addressed.”

The properties in question are just a couple of blocks from our offices, and I’ve walked by them numerous time over the last two years. If they’re “blighted,” then every neighborhood in the state is blighted. Even more outrageous, these properties aren’t even essential to Centene’s new headquarters, they’re slated to be used for upscale retail establishments. Apparently Centene simply didn’t feel that the businesses currently occupying the space were high-class enough for its employees and clients to patronize, so they asked the city to bring in new, ritzier businesses.

In short, what is happening is precisely what Justice O’Connor predicted in her dissent in Kelo:

The logic of today’s decision is that eminent domain may only be used to upgrade?not downgrade?property. At best this makes the Public Use Clause redundant with the Due Process Clause, which already prohibits irrational government action. The Court rightfully admits, however, that the judiciary cannot get bogged down in predictive judgments about whether the public will actually be better off after a property transfer. In any event, this constraint has no realistic import. For who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive possible use of her property? The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.

But what about last year’s eminent domain legislation? Wasn’t it supposed to protect property owners? The legislation did substantially increase protection for farmers. But for the rest of us, all it had to offer was modest increases in compensation. The legislation left in place the absurdly lax standards for “blight” that essentially allows municipalities to condemn any property they want.

The post Eminent Domain Abuse in Our Back Yard appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This myopic battle is anchored in fear. Its proponents fear that perfectly defensible programs for poor kids may metastasize into something bigger. But dread of what the future may hold is a mighty poor argument for denying a quality education to kids right now. It is not just the corporate tax credit they are fighting against. Last year, the state Legislature approved, and Napolitano signed, bills creating education voucher programs for disabled kids and children in foster programs. Those programs also are tied up in court by many of the same opponents.

Voucher programs traditionally have had a tougher time in the courts than tax-credit programs, so the future of these valuable tools may be more in doubt.

It would be a shame to see such programs flounder on the specious fear that if you give vouchers to disabled kids, or to kids at the rocky bottom of life’s well, that public education itself will crumble.

Simply put, it won’t. Education choice strengthens the underlying system. Someday, with luck, opponents of reform will figure that out.

Sadly, defenders of the status quo here in Missouri seem to be even more entrenched than they are in Arizona.

Hat tip: Cato

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The state school board in Jefferson City was a scene of pandemonium on Thursday, as angry Saint Louis residents protested a vote that would lead to a state takeover of the troubled city school district. Both sides in the debate make good points. On the one hand, state education officials are concerned about a dysfunctional school district that has been failing to provide kids with an adequate education. On the other hand, some Saint Louis residents are understandably worried that without local representation, the district will not be responsive to the concerns of the district’s students and their parents.

State officials would do well to consider an alternative that could address both concerns: mayoral control of the Saint Louis school district. If Mayor Slay were given the authority to appoint the entire board, he might be able to provide the consistent, disciplined leadership that the city’s schools require. And because Mayor Slay is elected by Saint Louis voters, mayoral control would make the district more responsive to local concerns than state control.

However, as Rick Hess wrote in a recent study for the Show-Me Institute, mayoral control should be approached with caution. Mayoral control advocates can point to some important success stories, but there have been some failures as well. Hess’s research suggests that mayoral control should only be pursued if the mayor is willing to invest significant political capital in school reform efforts, and if civic leaders in Saint Louis are willing to hold Mayor Slay accountable for the results of the reform effort. Without an engaged mayor and committed civic leadership, mayoral reform will be a cure worse than the disease.

One of the biggest problems facing the Saint Louis school district is unstable leadership. Nearly every school board election in recent years has brought renewed chaos, as different factions jockeyed for control. The state take-over will represent the sixth leadership change in as many years. It’s not surprising that none of the six superintendents who preceded the state takeover were able to turn the district around. Most of the superintendents had only months to implement their reform strategies before school board elections or shifting political alliances led to their ouster.

The state takeover may bring greater continuity of leadership. The board nominated Rick Sullivan, an executive with McBride and Son, as the district’s chief executive. He will supervise the district along with individuals selected by Mayor Slay and Aldermanic President James Shrewsbury. This configuration should give school officials more time for their reform efforts to bear fruit.

On the other hand, critics point out that Sullivan is not a city resident, and that the new governance arrangement will provide parents with little influence over the direction of the district. Moreover, there is no guarantee that this three-person governance panel will show more leadership coherence than the school board it replaces. In 2000, the Washington, DC, school board was re-shuffled to include four members appointed by the mayor and five members directly elected by voters. This fractured leadership structure has not worked very well. DC Mayor Anthony Williams described it as “trying to drive a car with one pedal.” Similarly, under the state take-over plan now under way, control over the district will be fractured among the governor, the mayor, and the president of the board of aldermen—three politicians who may have divergent views on how the district should be governed. Mayoral control could address both of those concerns, giving the district unified, coherent, and stable leadership under an elected official chosen by Saint Louis voters.

However, mayoral control will only make sense if Mayor Slay is willing to step up to the plate and make education reform a focus of his administration. And given the structural limitations on the power of the mayor in Saint Louis, the business community and other civic leaders must be willing to provide strong backing for the mayor’s reform efforts as well.

Children in Saint Louis have waited too long for competent leadership. Mayoral control should be explored as one way to achieve effective school governance. However, any further governance changes should be made cautiously, because the last thing Saint Louis school children need is yet another ineffectual leadership change.

Timothy B. Lee is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute.

The post Mayoral Control Could Help City Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Critics point out that Sullivan is not a city resident, and that the new governance arrangement will provide parents with little influence over the direction of the district. Moreover, there is no guarantee that this three-person governance panel will show more leadership coherence than the school board it replaces. In 2000, the Washington, DC, school board was re-shuffled to include four members appointed by the mayor and five members directly elected by voters. This fractured leadership structure has not worked very well. DC Mayor Anthony Williams described it as “trying to drive a car with one pedal.” Similarly, under the state take-over plan now under way, control over the district will be fractured among the governor, the mayor, and the president of the board of aldermen?three politicians who may have divergent views on how the district should be governed. Mayoral control could address both of those concerns, giving the district unified, coherent, and stable leadership under an elected official chosen by Saint Louis voters.

However, mayoral control will only make sense if Mayor Slay is willing to step up to the plate and make education reform a focus of his administration. And given the structural limitations on the power of the mayor in Saint Louis, the business community and other civic leaders must be willing to provide strong backing for the mayor’s reform efforts as well.

Here is the PDF of our recent study on mayoral control by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

The post Mayoral Control Means Local Control appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Beyond the waste of police resources, the proposal also worries me because it gives undue discretion to police officers. There are far more people not wearing seat belts than the police could possibly pull over, so the police would have a great deal of discretion about who to target. Moreover, even if someone is wearing a seatbelt, it’s not that easy to see it in a moving car, so a police officer could easily claim he thought someone wasn’t wearing a seat belt and pulled them over to check. That, in effect, means that the police would have an excuse to pull over anyone they like. That kind of arbitrary discretion in the hands of government officials is worrisome because it opens the door to abuses of power like racial profiling.

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But for some reason, they still insist that the federal government should continue providing funding to the states even after the other red tape is repealed. This doesn’t make any sense to me. The money came from Missouri taxpayers in the first place. What’s the point of sending it to Washington, where the federal bureaucracy can skim off a share, before sending it back here? That doesn’t make sense. Instead, Congress should repeal NCLB entirely—funding included. It can use the savings to cut taxes or reduce the deficit. And then, if Missouri policymakers decide that Missouri’s schools need more money, we can levy taxes here at the state level for that purpose. That way, every dime will stay here in Missouri, and Missourians will have complete control over how it’s spent.

As the editorial puts it:
 

Next week, voters all over the Ozarks will practice the ultimate in accountability when they go to the polls and elect school board members and say yes or no on various bond issues. Some school districts and school boards will get a pat on the back for a job well done. Others will be told to go back to the drawing board.

It’s a system that puts accountability in the hands of those who know the most about what’s really going on in schools.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Congress should cut the federal education budget so that Missourians will have full control over education spending in Missouri.

The post Local Control and Local Funding appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It’s important to keep in mind that if Missouri refuses to implement REAL ID, there’s very little chance of negative repercussions for Missourians. In theory, we won’t be able to use our drivers’ licenses to board airplanes, but it’s extremely unlikely that the Department of Homeland Security would actually blacklist an entire state from air travel. More likely, if Missouri refused to implement REAL ID, it would provide a powerful signal to Congress that the American people don’t want a national ID card.

The post The REAL ID Revolt appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are two well-established nationwide school voucher programs, one in the Netherlands, the other in Chile. The first was created in 1917, the second in 1982. In both cases, the supply of private schools rose dramatically to meet demand. Roughly three quarters of Dutch students are now enrolled in private schools. In Chile, private sector enrollment doubled within the first decade and passed the 50 percent mark in December of 2005.

Sweden and Denmark enacted voucher programs more recently, and both are seeing the creation of new private schools as a result. Swedish private sector enrollment rose from 1 percent to 10 percent of the student population in a decade, and continues to rise. I discuss this issue at greater length in my chapter in the Cato book: What America Can Learn from School Choice in other Countries.

Turning to Mr. Rotherham’s assertion, I pointed out at our forum that there are vibrant, unregulated, rapidly growing education markets all over the world. In some areas, such as the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, these are niche markets ? mainly after-school tutoring. In other parts of the globe, particularly South Asia and Africa, they are mainstream elementary and secondary schools.

It’s frustrating that special interest groups in Missouri spend so much money opposing a school reform strategy that worked so well around the world.

The post School Choice Successes Abroad appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Education specialists continue to debate whether kids really get a better education under such arrangements, whether any academic gains will be permanent, and how much credit mayors should get for the successes.

Kenneth Wong, a Brown University education professor, examined test scores of the 100 largest school districts from 1999 to 2003. He found that students in mayor-controlled school systems often perform better than those in other urban systems. Test scores in mayor-run districts are rising “significantly,” he says.

However, Wong says in his study that “there is still a long way to go before (mayor-controlled) districts achieve acceptable levels of achievement.”

On the other hand, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, says his review of previous studies finds that it’s “inconclusive” whether mayors can raise test scores more than elected school boards.

Solid data on student achievement have not been collected long enough, Hess says. And test scores also are up in Houston and other cities with elected school boards, he points out.

The story also highlights an important point about our study: some people have inaccurately described the study as a strong endorsement of mayoral control, but in fact, the study’s findings are more nuanced. Hess concludes that given the chaos now plaguing the school district, mayoral control is likely to be better than the alternatives. However, he makes it clear that how mayoral control is implemented is a lot more important than whether to implement it. Switching to mayoral control carelessly, or without the strong backing of the mayor and civic leadership, would be worse than not switching at all, as the examples of Washington DC and Los Angeles illustrate. The point of Hess’s study was not that we should switch to mayoral control at any cost, but rather that we should only switch to mayoral control if the city’s civic leadership are committed to expending the political capital required for it to be effective.

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The case strikes me as a tricky one. Obviously, school officials need some ability to prohibit disruptive behavior by kids under their care. It presumably wouldn’t be constitutionally protected for a kid to run up and write “bong hits 4 Jesus” on the chalkboard in the middle of math class. But on the other hand, it is appropriate to place some restraints on school officials—who are, after all, agents of the state—to ensure that they don’t abuse their authority to quash the expression of views with which they disagree.

The fundamental problem here is that we’ve got government officials running school systems. There’s no good reason to organize our education system that way. If we had government-run grocery stores, we’d have First Amendment cases about whether grocery store employees could talk about politics in check-out lines. Luckily, we don’t do that. We give poor people food stamps and let them shop at the private grocery store of their choice.

Likewise, if we had widespread school choice, in which schools were run by private individuals and parents decided where to send their children with the help of state-funded vouchers or tax credits, the First Amendment issues in education would be far less acute. Schools would have a variety of policies with regard to political speech in school, and parents would be free to choose a school whose attitudes were in line with their own. Sure, there would still be occasional controversy within a given school about where to draw the line, but those controversies would no longer require the Supreme Court to step in and resolve them.

This is a point we’ve made before: the reason public schools invite so much controversy is that we’ve got a monolithic, one-size-fits-all education system. Decisions about how to run schools (whether the subject is evolution, sex education, prayer in schools, free speech in schools, or anything else) should be up to parents and teachers, not school district bureaucrats or the United States Supreme Court. We all have strong opinions about these subjects (personally, I wouldn’t want to send my kid to a school that taught “intelligent design” or abstinence-only education), but living in a free society means respecting the rights of parents to choose schools whose curricula are consistent with their beliefs and values, just as we allow parents to choose what their kids will eat and whether they go to church.

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The current system acknowledges the fact that most shoppers going to the Galleria don’t live in Richmond Heights. It also benefits the business environment in our area by rewarding non-retail economic development. If Webster Groves attracts a new corporate headquarters, that would clearly generate significant new sales taxes for the area based on the new jobs and employees brought to the region. Why should a neighboring A city with significant shopping, such as Brentwood, keep all of the sales taxes generated within Brentwood by the new employees of that Webster Groves company? Eliminating the pool contributions of A cities would further press all cities to search for ways to increase sales taxes and grow retail development at the expense of other modes of the economy, such as finance and manufacturing, which generate the salaries used to go shopping in the first place.

That pressure to increase the retail economy, as opposed to other types of development, is one of the main reasons behind the eminent domain abuses we have seen in recent years in Saint Louis County. It is not a coincidence that all of the controversial eminent domain actions in Saint Louis County have occurred in A cities such as Sunset Hills, Manchester, Rock Hill and Clayton. Residential areas such as the one at issue in Sunset Hills have more tax value to B cities, where a city’s population is a significant factor in the amount received from the pool.

It’s a great article, so you should click here to read the whole thing.

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Regarding “School tax credits die in state House” (March 8): Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton, R-Marble Hill, never ceases to amaze me. His support of a Missouri House bill to give tax credits to send urban kids to private schools is a slap in the face to the rural school districts he is supposed to represent. The article said that this bill could cost the state up to $40 million in tax credits.

As House speaker, it is a testament to his poor leadership that 35 Republican representatives voted against the bill. Thank goodness the bill was defeated. I live in Mr. Jetton’s district. The only good thing about that is that he is term-limited and cannot serve another term as a state representative. Maybe next time around we can get a representative who cares more about the needs of rural schools than making a career in politics.

There are several problems with this argument. First, the state of Missouri spends about $5 billion per year on K-12 education each year, so the $40 million price tag amounts to less than one percent of the state budget. I wonder if Mr. Page writes letters to the editor every time the legislature spends $40 million in an effort to help inner-city kids.

Second, if the author’s point is that rural taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize the education of inner-city kids, he’s long since lost that battle. The state already pays significantly more per-pupil to the Saint Louis and Kansas City school districts than they do elsewhere in the state. Saint Louis receives $5500 per pupil from the state, compared with only $4200 per pupil for the author’s hometown of Fredericktown.

Most importantly, the author fails to consider the fact that the cost to the state of his program would be far less than $40 million. It’s true that the HB808 would issue up to $40 million in tax credits. However, many of the scholarships distributed as part of the tax credit program would go to kids who otherwise would have gone to public schools. Some (or depending on the details, potentially all) of the costs of the tax credit program would be offset by savings due to the fact that the state had to educate fewer kids through the public schools. So the true cost of the tax credit program would be substantially less than $40 million.

If the author is truly worried about threats to his pocketbook, he should be writing letters to the editor about the so-called adequacy lawsuit now wending its way through the court system. That could mandate billions of dollars in additional spending. And worst of all, it would require that all of the money be given to the same public schools that have squandered so many millions already. If there’s one thing that’s worse than being forced to pay for the education of other peoples’ kids, it’s being forced to pay for an ineffective effort to educate other peoples’ kids.

The post A Mean-spirited Letter on Parental Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are a couple of problems with this. In the first place, taking kid a out of a bad school and putting her into a better schools does solve a problem: it gives that child a better education. It’s downright bizarre that Lewis doesn’t even acknowledge this. Even if all parental choice did was help a few kids get into better schools, that would seem like a major argument in favor. Helping some kids is better than helping no kids.

But in fact, the argument for choice is a lot stronger than that. Because choice is a way to “fix the system.” The fundamental problem with “the system” is that public schools are monopolies, with no accountability to the vast majority of parents who aren’t wealthy enough to take their children elsewhere. As anyone who has studied economics will tell you, monopolies routinely deliver an inferior product at high prices.

Lewis says that “to really turn things around would take a few years.” What he doesn’t point out is that pundits have been saying this for decades. Over and over again, the public school bureaucracy has insisted that if we just give them more money and “a few years,” they’ll turn things around. Over and over again, we’ve poured more money into urban schools, only to see things continue to get worse. “We just need more money and more time” might have been believable in the 1980s or the 1990s, but in 2007, it doesn’t pass the straight face test.

Most importantly, the kids who are in failing schools today don’t have “a few years” to spare. Every year we wait for the public schools to fix themselves is a year that tens of thousands of kids miss out on the opportunity to get a great education. Poor kids need help now, in 2007. Parental choice is one of the few reforms that promise to bring them help immediately, not at the end of yet another 5-year plan.

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