Residents are asking why.

The answer, at least in part, is Missouri’s Sunshine Law. Smith and Goldman’s reporting found that Belle, another small Missouri town, has seen the once-free cost of producing public records rise sharply since it began contracting with Lauber. Alderwoman Rebecca Withouse has been pushing the town toward more openness on her own, trying to make records easier for residents to get without paying attorney fees. Nathan Nickolaus, an attorney at the firm, told the Missourian that an increasing volume of open records requests is part of what’s driving the cost, and that many small towns simply lack the staff to fulfill the requests without outsourcing the work. (The dramatic increase in the number of records requests in Sedalia has been driven in part by citizen opposition to real abuses of power over the last few years. More details are provided here and here.)

This is a real tension, and Missourians who care about open government should not wave it away. The Sunshine Law exists because taxpayers have a right to see what their government is doing, and that right shouldn’t depend on the size of the city. But when a town of 20,000 people is paying half a million dollars a year in legal fees, much of it tied to records requests, something in the system is broken. The law is functioning as intended—it’s the capacity to comply with it that’s failing.

Part of the problem is structural. Missouri’s smallest cities and towns often have no in-house attorney, no records clerk, and no dedicated compliance staff. When a Sunshine Law request arrives, towns often hire whatever legal help they can afford. Firms like Lauber have built a business model around exactly this gap. The arrangement isn’t necessarily predatory—someone has to do the work—but it does mean the cost of transparency in a small Missouri town scales with legal billing rates rather than with the actual complexity of the records involved.

The Show-Me Institute has documented this problem before, and the numbers get worse than Sedalia’s. In 2018, Institute researchers sent Sunshine Law requests to cities across the state asking for basic spending records. Battlefield billed $35,000 and Hollister billed $25,000 for records that Springfield, a far larger city, and Strafford, a far smaller one, handed over for free. The ability to produce a checkbook register has nothing to do with city size. It has to do with whether a city’s leadership wants residents to see how their money is spent. Missouri courts have recognized how far this can go—Rudi Keller wrote for the Columbia Daily Tribune in 2019 that a Boone County judge ruled that the University of Missouri’s demand for more than $82,000 to fulfill a records request amounted to a de facto denial, not a fee.

Small, struggling towns deserve some benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are simply receiving more requests as residents want more visibility into local government. A town that has historically operated with little scrutiny may find that its first real exposure to the Sunshine Law is uncomfortable. But there’s a difference between a town facing legitimate scrutiny and a town being structurally unable to respond without hiring outside counsel for routine requests.

If the goal is government transparency rather than legal billables, Missouri lawmakers and municipal associations have better tools available. The Missouri Municipal League could develop shared records-request templates and training so small towns aren’t paying attorney rates to answer routine questions. The legislature could examine whether some categories of Sunshine Law compliance could be standardized in ways that reduce the volume of one-off requests requiring individual legal review. And towns themselves should be asking whether a records clerk, even a part-time one, would cost less over a year than the current pattern of per-request legal bills.

Missourians should take seriously the problem that small towns are struggling to comply with the burdens of being open. The current model of outsourcing routine compliance to law firms billing by the hour is an expensive way to deliver necessary transparency. Sedalia’s residents are right to ask where the money is going, as are the taxpayers of a town paying outside counsel to handle a request that should take a few hours.

Missouri’s small towns didn’t create the Sunshine Law’s compliance burden, and taxpayers shouldn’t need to fund a cottage legal industry just to see what their government is doing.

The post Small Missouri Towns Are Paying a High Price for Open Government appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

1. The “Seven Sisters” colleges merging their women’s studies programs, or
2. Seven cities in St. Louis County merging their fire departments?

You could understandably guess A, but since I am writing about it you probably know it is B.

Olivette, Clayton, Richmond Heights, Maplewood, Webster Groves, Shrewsbury, and University City have launched a study to consider whether merging their individual fire departments would be a beneficial move. (As an aside, it is worth noting that University City has four streets named after a “Seven Sisters” school.)

The economic and political science literature on local government mergers is cautious. In one major literature review of studies of municipal mergers from dozens of counties, the author came to a few primary conclusions. First, cost savings from mergers do happen, but they are usually much smaller than predicted. Second, public services may be improved through having greater municipal resources, but this often results in a larger bureaucracy that limits potential cost savings. (The third main conclusion doesn’t apply in this instance.)

One of the main reasons cost savings are smaller than predicted is because governments rarely have the willingness to fire employees in mergers, so redundancies are maintained at first. Cost savings tend to come from attrition as redundant positions are not filled over time. That is indeed what happened when several fire districts merged in Oregon in the 1990s, where all reductions in employment came through attrition. But over time, there were some cost savings.

Another reason why local government mergers don’t save as much as promised is that everybody is moved up. If City A pays trash collectors more than City B, and City B pays their clerks more than City A, both sets of employees get moved up to the higher salary spot. That could certainly happen here. For these seven cities, the lowest median fireman salary is in Shrewsbury, at $83,668. The highest median salary is in Maplewood, at $117,873. Do you think the combined department will have a median salary closer to Shrewsbury or closer to Maplewood after negotiations with the union? According to the story in the Post-Dispatch, the union certainly likes its odds here:

There’s another reason the union supports a regional fire department — bargaining power.

Instead of negotiating seven separate contracts, which has sometimes led to conflicts between firefighters unions and city administrators, the union would negotiate just one contract with the fire authority. And it would have a chance to standardize pay and benefits.

The main reason I am supportive of this effort to study the merging of fire departments is because of what it is not. It is not an attempt to merge the fire services into a new, independent fire district. That has also been proposed, and it would be a terrible idea. The various firefighters’ unions prefer fire districts because they are easier for the fire union to control, although unions are certainly influential in cities with fire departments, too. Fire districts elect their board members in April elections that get very little attention, and their board members are only concerned with managing the fire district. Union support for these obscure votes is vital. With municipal fire departments, the local races, particularly the races for mayor, get more public attention. More importantly, the revenues and costs of operating the fire department must be shared as part of the revenues and costs of operating the entire city. Elected officials in a municipality have to operate the fire department within the overall revenues and budgets of the larger city. If these cities merged into a shared fire department, the cities would still be funding the departments. That’s a good thing.

Overall, I think there is reason to be optimistic about these proposed changes. If I have to pick between a regional fire department or a new fire district, I’m going with the department.

The post Seven Sister Cities in St. Louis County Considering Merging Fire Departments for Mutual Support appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many states are considering whether to follow their path, including Missouri.

The retention component of these literacy policies is often controversial. Critics worry that it amounts to “punishing children.” But it is no kindness to promote a child through school who cannot read. Indeed, research shows that, at least in the early grades, retained students benefit tremendously in terms of on-grade academic performance when they are held back.

The debate also tends to focus narrowly on the students who are retained. However, new research in several states (including Michigan and Ohio) suggests that these policies produce broader benefits by affecting the much larger group of students who are ultimately promoted. This is because it turns out that students benefit from just the threat of retention, even if retention doesn’t actually occur.

Why? The answer is a bit uncomfortable: Weak reading skills alone do not seem to motivate schools and parents to make literacy a top priority. The possibility of retention, however, creates a clear incentive for everyone to intervene earlier and more intensively.

Writing on recent changes that weakened Ohio’s grade retention policy at the Fordham Institute’s Gadfly Daily, Vladimir Kogan provides a nice discussion of the value of the grade-retention threat. He writes: “Although much of the debate about retention laws has focused on impacts on students, the new evidence suggests that benefits come primarily from changing the behavior of two sets of adults—parents and educators.”

The evidence that early-grade retention can benefit retained students is already strong. This newly emerging evidence that these policies also improve outcomes for many students who are never retained only strengthens the case for reform.

Missouri lawmakers should consider such evidence as they consider literacy reform during the 2027 legislative session. During the 2026 session, they failed to pass literacy reform. Another year of inaction would mean that another cohort of children will pay the price for Missouri’s weak literacy policies.

The post The Value of the Threat of Grade Retention appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As I stressed in my first piece on Flock, there may be no clear “right to privacy” on public roads, but that doesn’t mean average American citizens should be tracked as we simply move around doing our daily business. Police have abused and will likely continue to abuse these systems. One police officer was recently fired in Joplin for doing so.

The risk, however, goes beyond bad law enforcement actors misusing the system. Concerns about constant government surveillance are legitimate. Surveillance equipment such as this was used by police around the world to enforce authoritarian restrictions during COVID. We shouldn’t have to give up our personal liberty—and that liberty includes the right not to be tracked by the government without a warrant—under the guise of safety.

Thankfully, people are starting to push back against Flock and similar police surveillance equipment. I don’t believe our state or our country should become a vast surveillance society (assuming we are not already there), even if it makes us “safer” in some ways.

The pushback against Flock has come in many forms. There are websites devoted to exposing and opposing it. John Oliver’s HBO show just released an episode dedicated to the issue. There have also been numerous acts of vandalism against Flock equipment. (Note: I do not support vandalism.)

Several Missouri communities have recently ended their Flock camera contracts. The towns of Weston, Seneca, Louisiana, and Bolivar have cancelled, or are in the process of cancelling, their Flock contracts. The Dutchtown CID in St. Louis did the same. I hope that this is the start of a major policy shift against the cameras.

Much more to come from me on this topic. The solution to crime in Missouri does not have to be a vast surveillance system watching every person in the state.

The post Update on Flock Cameras in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

#1: It should be difficult to fire teachers, and their pay should primarily depend on how long they have worked.

#2: It should be difficult to fire teachers, but better teachers should get paid more than worse teachers.

#3: Being a teacher should be like any other job, where better teachers get paid more and worse teachers can be easily fired or get paid less.

Sixty percent of participants agreed with position three—teachers should be paid like any other job. This is surprising because of the outcry usually associated with weakening teacher labor protections and awarding teachers merit pay.

However, paying teachers like other professionals is reasonable, and this type of pay structure could be beneficial to students, teachers, and principals alike.

How could Missouri move toward a pay structure that most voters prefer? An initial challenge is measuring teacher quality—if better teachers are to be paid more, we must be able to identify them. There have been plenty of teacher evaluation systems where the evaluations are unhelpful; nearly all teachers are rated as exceeding expectations, and there is not meaningful differentiation. But there are also exceptions. A notable example is right next door in Tennessee: The Tennessee Educator Accelerator Model (TEAM).

TEAM calculates a rating for each teacher on a 1–5 scale based on announced and unannounced in-class observations, academic growth data, and student performance data. A holistic system like TEAM would be a fair way to rate teachers, and principals could use the ratings to inform teacher pay in their schools.

Twelve years ago, a ballot initiative in Missouri on this topic was soundly defeated (the initiative did have other controversial items attached to it). But two years ago, the Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 727, which allows for pay differentiation for teachers in hard-to-staff subject areas, like special education or physics, and those teaching in hard-to-staff schools.

This was a big step in the right direction, as noted by the blue ribbon commission assembled to tackle Missouri’s perceived teacher shortage. One member of the commission stated:

The biggest surprise to us businesspeople serving on the Blue Ribbon Commission is the lack of flexibility you all [the board] have for meeting high-need positions, it’s unbelievably inappropriate in today’s highly competitive market.

Paying all teachers the same, regardless of subject or school, was a longstanding policy that Missouri policymakers were right to reconsider and change. We need to continue that momentum and consider merit pay next.

The post We Need to Reconsider How We Pay Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At first glance, the concern seems straightforward. Since the government is the single largest purchaser of health care in the country, hospitals operating on thin margins could understandably struggle if they were paid less by Medicare or Medicaid. The first question, though, is what exactly is being cut.

The OBBB does not reduce the payment rates hospitals receive for treating Medicare patients or Medicaid patients who remain eligible. Instead, it implements community engagement requirements for some able-bodied Medicaid enrollees beginning next year, while changes to the provider tax financing system (explained more here) would not begin until 2028 at the earliest.

So, what are hospitals worried about? A recent KY3 report in Springfield provides some context. A spokesman for the Missouri Hospital Association explained that Medicare and Medicaid reimburse hospitals for only about 80 percent of the cost of providing care, describing the gap between costs and payments as “pretty enormous.” Mercy’s Sherry Clouse Day added that if someone loses Medicaid coverage under the new community engagement requirements, they may still seek care without insurance, leaving the hospital to absorb the cost.

That certainly could happen. But it assumes not only that a significant number of people will lose Medicaid coverage because of the new requirements, but also that many of them will become uninsured rather than finding work and obtaining employer-sponsored insurance or coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

That raises another question, though: If hospitals are already losing money treating Medicaid patients, why would treating fewer of them threaten their financial stability? Missouri hospitals already receive billions of taxpayer dollars every year through supplemental Medicaid payments and provider tax financing precisely because lawmakers recognize that Medicaid reimbursement often falls below the rates paid by commercial payers.

For those who have followed Missouri’s Medicaid debates for a while, this type of argument should sound familiar. Hospitals made similar claims during the campaign to expand Medicaid, arguing that adding more people to the program was necessary to protect rural hospitals. Today, even a policy change that doesn’t obviously reduce what hospitals are paid is being treated as a threat.

None of this is to say that lower Medicaid enrollment couldn’t result in less government money flowing to hospitals. But ultimately, hospitals are the only ones with a complete picture of how public dollars and other revenues from commercial payers affect their bottom line. After years of hospitals opposing efforts to bring greater transparency to their prices and financing, it’s fair to question yet another claim that a Medicaid policy change would threaten vulnerable hospitals. Before lawmakers accept those warnings, they should make sure there’s sufficient evidence to support the claim.

The post A Curious Hospital Argument appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are several cities and counties seeking to have new taxes or bond issues approved by voters on August 4. These include several major bond issues in Kansas City, a countywide use tax in St. Louis County, and sales or property tax increases in cities throughout Missouri, including in Hazelwood, Lee’s Summit, Ash Grove, and many more.

I’ll begin with the one local issue that is being voted on statewide (for various reasons that I won’t get into): Should the Jackson County assessor be an elected position? This is a pretty easy answer. Yes, it should be elected. Jackson County reassessments have been a disaster for over a decade now, and taxpayers have every right to be angry. Jackson County voters held the county executive responsible for it by recalling him, but being able to hold the assessor directly accountable is even better. St. Louis County changed its assessor from appointed to elected almost twenty years ago, and in my very informed opinion, the assessment process has improved since then. (Here are a few pieces on the general question on which positions should be elected and which should be appointed.)

St. Louis County has a countywide use tax on the ballot (again). A use tax is simply a sales tax imposed on goods you purchase online or through a catalogue and have delivered to your home. Municipal use taxes in Missouri actually predate the internet, but unsurprisingly most cities didn’t enact them until online shopping took off over the past fifteen years or so.

My view is that use taxes are a good way to expand the tax base, level the playing field for businesses, and raise local revenues. However, the last point is key. They should not be used simply as a way for cities to get more revenue, whether they need it or not. Cutting other taxes after the use tax is imposed—especially if you have a particularly harmful tax—is a great way to achieve the above benefits without a tax windfall for the county or city.

St. Louis County is having budget difficulties now, so I would understand primarily using the use tax money to address those issues. However, it would be even better if county leadership would agree to cut—at least in part—other taxes. I would suggest reducing the St. Louis County commercial property tax surcharge as a great place to start.

Kansas City is seeking approval for some substantial water and sewer bond issuances—about $750 million worth of each. There is nothing wrong with cities issuing bonds for infrastructure uses. It happens all the time, and there is a huge market for municipal bonds. If Kansas City is going to own and operate its water and sewer systems, it should invest in the system to prevent it from decaying, which is what happened to the water system in St. Louis. If that takes revenue bonds or price hikes, then so be it. (Note that these bonds will not, at least for now, require a tax increase.) So while I have no argument against approving these bond issues, I would also be remiss if I missed this opportunity to repeat that Kansas City would be even better off if it privatized its entire water and sewer system.

Remember, August 4 is a party primary election day, but you can always ask for a non-partisan ballot if you wish to vote on local ballot issues like these without voting in a party primary. The more you know . . .

The post Local Issues on the Ballot in Missouri This August appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On July 22, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed a lawsuit against Kansas City for violating anti-discrimination laws. A copy of the suit is available here.

For some background, I recommend you read my June 18 column for The Kansas City Star. In short, I detail a city council session in which the city’s own consultants report that after reviewing seven years of contracting data, they could find no evidence to support the need for the city’s race- and sex-conscious contracting preferences. In fact, the consultancy’s director of research told the council bluntly, “You just don’t have the factual predicate” required to continue such set-asides.

What that really means is that the city has no defense against a lawsuit.

Members of the council were not pleased with the report’s findings. They could have viewed this as a huge victory for Kansas City—having reached a point where such discriminatory programs were no longer necessary. Instead, council members chose to question the results and the methodology. Mayor Lucas even offered a novel legal theory: “The courts suck.”

We know that column, the only reporting I have been able to find about the consultants’ report, played a role in Hanaway’s suit because she tells us so. Not only does the lawsuit track with what I wrote, including Lucas’s petulance, but she explicitly cites the column in the suit’s footnotes.

Following up on my column, on June 26, I spoke with Lee’s Summit–based civil rights attorney Jonathan Whitehead on KCMO Talk Radio’s Mundo in the Morning. Whitehead details the legal history regarding race- and sex-based discrimination, the rules it put in place for allowing such programs, and how the findings in Kansas City may put the city in legal jeopardy.

As with the Star column, you won’t find any such in-depth interviews on the topic anywhere else.

The post Show-Me Institute Shines Light on Kansas City’s Discrimination Policies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to the Kansas City Business Journal, the revived program could help finance an expansion of CPKC Stadium, a possible new Royals ballpark, and billions of dollars in additional development connected to Kansas City’s Power & Light District and St. Louis’s Ballpark Village.

There are other provisions in the bill, including incentives for converting vacant office buildings into housing and programs tied to designated “innovation zones.” But the return of MODESA deserves particular attention because Missouri taxpayers already have some experience with the program. In Kansas City, that experience includes the Power & Light District.

Kansas City helped champion the original MODESA program in 2003, when downtown was struggling and city leaders were looking for ways to encourage investment. The program allowed new state tax revenues generated by qualifying developments to help finance projects, including public infrastructure associated with Power & Light.

The new version could be even more generous. The Business Journal reports that MODESA could redirect 50% of incremental state sales and employee income taxes generated by qualifying projects for as long as 30 years. For certain projects, that figure could rise to 70%. Local governments also would be required to provide substantial matching incentives.

Supporters believe the program can unlock investments that otherwise might not happen. The Cordish Companies, for example, says the legislation could help support $2.5 billion in new investment in Missouri, including an expansion that could “basically double” the size of the Power & Light District.

Perhaps. But before Missouri helps double the size of Power & Light, it is worth looking at how the financing of the original project has worked.

The district undoubtedly helped change the face of downtown Kansas City. It brought restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues to an area that badly needed investment. But it didn’t create new investment—it merely redirected economic activity at bars and restaurants from elsewhere in the city to downtown.

We know this because data provided by the city’s Regulated Industries Division shows us that the number of liquor licenses and employee cards required of bartenders and waitstaff remained flat after Power & Light opened. Despite new shops downtown, there was no growth citywide.

To make matters worse, the district has not generated enough revenue for Cordish to cover its debts. Because then-Mayor Kay Barnes was foolish enough to put taxpayers on the hook for debt payments, Kansas Citians have been paying out about $12 million each year over and above the tax revenue we divert back to the developer.

Kansas City is considering using the revived MODESA program as part of financing packages for an 18,000-seat expansion of CPKC Stadium and potentially a $3 billion Royals ballpark development at Crown Center. The city already has signaled its willingness to consider as much as $235 million in local incentives associated with the current project and $600 million for the Royals.

The state incentives are not insignificant, either. According to the Business Journal, the fiscal note for HB 3231 estimates the legislation will cost Missouri more than $62 million annually once fully implemented in 2034.

As Missouri leaders take on the task of cutting spending so that they may reduce and eventually eliminate the state income tax, these types of subsidies are not a sign of fiscal seriousness.

We’ve been here before. The effort failed. Why are we doubling down?

The post Missouri Doubles Down on Failed Economic Development Scheme appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri received a “B” on a national report card evaluating state policies on cell phone use in schools. This grade, available at phonefreeschoolsreport.org, places Missouri in the top half of states.

The primary reason for Missouri’s strong grade is its bell-to-bell ban on student cell phone use during the school day. State law also protects school employees from liability when they act in good faith to enforce the policy.

Missouri fell short of an “A” grade because students are allowed to store their phones in an accessible place during the school day. Only four states received “A” grades—Indiana, Kansas, North Dakota, and Rhode Island. They all require phones to be stored in an inaccessible location.

Overall, Missouri’s “B” grade is good news. Our lawmakers deserve credit for moving early on an issue where both common sense and research point in the same direction. Removing phone access during the school day is a straightforward solution to the obvious distractions that students’ devices bring into the classroom.

That said, our policy can be improved. When phones remain within arm’s reach—inside backpacks or pockets—there is temptation to use them. Requiring inaccessible storage would make enforcement easier and reduce classroom disruptions further. It would also align Missouri with the strongest policies in the country.

Missouri has taken an important step toward phone-free classrooms. Strengthening the law to require inaccessible storage would help get the most out of our students during school.

The post Missouri Earns a “B” on Cell-Phones-in-Schools Report Card appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Imagine getting a large one-time bonus, then using that money to buy an expensive new car. There are some obvious parallels to Missouri’s budget.

Shortly before the June 30 deadline, Governor Kehoe signed Missouri’s more-than-$50-billion budget for fiscal year 2027, which began on July 1. He also issued about $53 million in vetoes and more than $400 million in spending restrictions. While the vetoes are generally in line with recent years, the expenditure restrictions are much larger than have been necessary in more than a decade. The restrictions also indicate that the governor believes the legislature approved roughly $400 million more in spending than projected state revenues can support.

Unlike a veto, a spending restriction doesn’t permanently eliminate an appropriation. Instead, it temporarily withholds the authority to spend it. Missouri’s constitution requires the governor to keep the budget balanced throughout the fiscal year, so if projected revenues won’t support all the spending approved by the legislature, the governor must reduce authorized spending through vetoes, restrictions, or a combination of both. The difference is that vetoes are permanent unless the legislature overrides them, while restrictions can be lifted if revenues improve. The governor then decides which restricted appropriations, if any, are ultimately released.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the governor’s budget signing was the explanation he provided for this year’s actions. Kehoe reiterated something he’s said before: Missouri has a spending problem rather than a revenue problem. He also said the state needs to reduce its reliance on what are called general revenue pickups. General revenue is the state’s primary operating fund, supported largely by income and sales taxes. A general revenue pickup occurs when a temporary funding source disappears, leaving general revenue to cover an ongoing expense. That’s exactly how temporary spending becomes a permanent obligation.

The governor’s explanation reflects two concerns I’ve written about repeatedly. First, Missouri’s spending has been growing faster than its revenues. As the auditor has highlighted, between fiscal years 2020 and 2025, general revenue collections increased 45.8 percent. During that same period, general revenue spending increased 53.4 percent, more than double the rate of inflation.

Second, lawmakers treated the surge in temporary federal COVID relief and an extraordinary period of state revenue growth as an opportunity to expand ongoing commitments. As those temporary dollars disappeared, the state became increasingly reliant on general revenue pickups, shifting costs that had once been covered by other funding sources onto Missouri taxpayers.

Remember the car? If soon after your purchase you found you couldn’t afford your new car, nobody would say you had an income problem. They’d rightfully say you spent too much. Missouri’s budget shouldn’t be viewed differently. The good news is that Governor Kehoe’s actions indicate he has correctly identified the problem. Now it’s up to lawmakers to get serious about solving it.

The post New Budget, New Problems appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Most schools embraced digital learning during and after the COVID pandemic, dramatically increasing students’ screen time during the school day. Combined with the long hours many children already spend on screens outside of school, the result has been an unprecedented amount of daily screen exposure.

But people are starting to push back. More than half of states have policies that limit or fully ban cell phones in schools. And many states and school districts have also enacted, or are considering, policies that limit screen use for instruction. Patrick Johann recently reviewed an instructional-use screen time policy adopted by the Los Angeles Unified School District, which is scheduled to take effect this upcoming school year.

Missouri is part of this broader trend. Last year the state banned cell phone use during the school day, and lawmakers debated the Student Screen-Time Standards Act during the 2026 legislative session, which would have curbed screen use for instruction. The Student Screen-Time Standards Act didn’t pass into law, but similar legislation will almost surely be introduced in 2027.

The rationale for cell-phone bans is that cell phones are a distraction. For laws that limit screens for instructional use, the idea is that screen-based instruction simply does not produce as much learning as face-to-face teaching. Technology offers many benefits, but it has been unable to replace the human interaction that many students—especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds—need to thrive in school.

If we had a robust market for school choice, I would welcome schools that make technology central to their instructional model. Some students will undoubtedly flourish in those environments, and technology can support a level of personalized instruction that is difficult to achieve in a traditional classroom. Alpha School is an interesting model with promising early results.

But in states like Missouri, where most students are still required to attend their residentially zoned public school, school districts should not use learning models that don’t benefit most students.

A recent article at The74 discusses an unlikely ally in all of this: students themselves. The article explains how many students describe their relationship with technology in terms that resemble addiction. The author writes:

They don’t want to be on their phones eight or nine hours a day. They don’t want to use AI to complete their assignments and short-circuit their ability to learn and grow. They know their attention span is stunted. But in so many circumstances, they simply can’t resist.

When the pandemic hit, schools shifted quickly toward technology-based instruction. It all happened very fast. However, as is often the case in such circumstances, the pendulum may have swung too far. Perhaps the clearest sign is the growing consensus for a course correction—from parents to teachers to policymakers and, increasingly, to students themselves.

The post Technology and Our Children: “They’re almost like addicts” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The federal government will roll out a new tax-credit program in 2027 to expand school choice. Taxpayers will be able to receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations of up to $1,700 annually to a scholarship-granting organization (SGO) in Missouri—or any other participating state. The SGO then distributes scholarships to families seeking alternatives to their residentially assigned public schools.

In a previous post I wrote about the new program, focusing on the challenge of deciding which educational expenses should qualify for scholarship funding.

Over at Education Next, Rick Hess has a thoughtful piece on other aspects of the program. As both a school choice advocate and an advocate of fiscal responsibility, he opens with a concession, acknowledging the potential loss of tax revenue the program could create at a time when the federal debt is growing rapidly.

He then makes what I think is the right point: While it is unfortunate that the federal budget is off the rails, it is hard to get too worked up about this program when (a) it is a drop in the bucket compared to our broader fiscal problems, and (b) so much of our debt-financed spending benefits older Americans. If we’re going to keep borrowing, why not direct at least a small share toward expanding opportunities for children?

I share Hess’s bottom-line sentiment. I wish the federal government managed its finances more responsibly. But since that does not appear likely anytime soon, investing a bit more in the children who will ultimately inherit—and help repay—that debt seems sensible to me.

Turning to the program itself, Hess raises an important practical concern. Even though this is a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, which means it is effectively costless for taxpayers to participate, we should not assume it will be widely used. Many taxpayers may be unaware the credit exists. Others may doubt they’ll actually receive it or may not know how to make a qualifying donation to an SGO. Even modest uncertainty or inconvenience can discourage participation.

These are legitimate concerns. The new scholarship tax credit has the potential to generate substantial resources to expand school choice, but realizing that potential is not automatic. As Hess puts it, “I don’t put a lot of stock in the casual assurance that taxpayers will jump through hoops to give money away simply because, as one very prominent champion explained to me, ‘It’s a good thing to do.’”

Hess’s piece points to one of the program’s biggest implementation challenges. Helping taxpayers understand the credit—and making participation as simple as possible—could make an enormous difference. Show-Me Institute analysts will certainly be doing our part, and I hope many others will as well.

The post How Much Will the New Federal Scholarship Tax Credit Boost School Choice Funding? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

If you sat down and intentionally tried to come up with the worst tax policy you possibly could, you would want to include the following elements:

• Raising taxes on some people, but not all people;
• Replacing charitable giving with mandatory taxation;
• Creating another obscure taxing authority with little to no oversight;
• Creating services with the new tax that benefit people who specifically do not pay for those services; and
• Directing the entire program of new services at people who are exempt from the tax, and who also happen to be the wealthiest group in society.

This would be about as bad a tax policy program you could imagine, and, voila, this is exactly what voters in St. Louis County get to decide on in November.

Many Missouri counties have a property tax that funds senior services. However, almost all of them passed it before the senior service property tax freezes were put into place, so at least senior citizens paid the taxes that funded the services. That is not how it works in Jackson County, which adopted the tax freeze and then passed the senior service tax in 2024, and is not how it would work in St. Louis County if voters approved this tax. Senior citizens who get the services would be exempt from paying the new tax if they own their home. Yes, seniors who rent would possibly pay the new tax through their rent payments, but keep in mind that many seniors who don’t live on their own live in senior communities, which are sometimes non-profits (entirely, or in part) that also won’t pay the new tax.

It is bad enough that seniors now vote, thanks to the freeze, on tax increases that they don’t have to pay. But to create a new fund specifically to fund senior services from a new tax they (mostly) won’t pay is truly entering the tax policy Twilight Zone. (Note that seniors who own their homes will be exempt from this tax if it passes. People saying it won’t apply in this instance, such as in this story, are wrong.)

The post The Senior Services Tax Proposal in St. Louis County Is as Bad as It Gets appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Economic development incentives are usually sold as investments. The state offers tax credits, cash grants, or other subsidies to persuade a company to expand or relocate. If the deal works, supporters claim, taxpayers get jobs and the state or local economy is strengthened.

I’m skeptical of those claims. Back in 2017, I wrote:

What’s more, studies in Missouri and across the country have noted that these programs do not help create jobs or spur neighborhood investment in the aggregate. Often they simply enrich political cronies.

A new study concludes that some other beneficiaries of large incentive programs are lobbyists.

Instead of asking whether subsidies create jobs, the authors ask what happens to businesses’ behavior after states begin offering exceptionally large incentive packages. Their answer is striking, if not surprising: Businesses appear to devote more resources to lobbying government.

The study, recently published in Small Business Economics, examines more than 40,000 state economic development awards made between 1997 and 2019. The researchers identified the point at which a state first awarded what they call an “extraordinarily large” incentive—defined as more than 3,500 times larger than that state’s historical median award—and then compared those states with similar states that had not yet crossed that threshold.

Rather than counting announced jobs or measuring state economic output, they looked at employment in the lobbying industry.

The reasoning comes from economist William Baumol’s distinction between productive and unproductive entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are talented at recognizing opportunities. Sometimes those opportunities involve creating new products or better ways of serving customers. Sometimes they involve obtaining advantages through government. Public policy can influence which of those activities becomes more profitable.

The authors found that after states began offering these unusually large subsidies, employment at lobbying firms increased by roughly 3.6%. Those gains were concentrated in state capital counties, where lobbying activity is naturally centered. They also found lobbying employment became more geographically concentrated around state capitals after these awards.

The study is not claiming that lobbying is improper. Businesses have every right to petition government. Instead, the paper documents something more modest—and perhaps more important. When governments begin offering extraordinarily valuable subsidies, businesses respond by investing more heavily in political activity.

Several Show-Me Institute researchers reached a similar conclusion in 2018 when they examined the relationship between subsidy awards and political contributions in Kansas City.

If winning a government incentive can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, devoting additional resources to influencing government becomes a rational business decision.

That makes perfect sense if you’re running a business. But is it where we want to invest our resources as a state or community? Shouldn’t that entrepreneurial energy be going toward making our lives better rather than thinking up new ways to squeeze tax dollars out of government?

In politics, we often argue about how best to solve problems. That is good. It is when we ask how government can best solve problems that we invite all sorts of additional problems. This study tells us what we likely already know: When you start handing out lots of money, you encourage more people to ask for it. We may be creating jobs—but it’s likely not the jobs you were hoping for.

The post What Happens after States Hand Out Massive Corporate Subsidies? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
So great to be joined today by Professor Joe Haslag of Auburn University, formerly of the University of Missouri. You’re an expert on all things economic in Missouri, and you have a new paper for the Show-Me Institute about the Missouri economy. A lot of people when they think of the economy only think of the national economy and not the fact that states have economies too, with GDPs and all kinds of things that influence them, and not all state economies are the same. One of the things I was struck by initially in the paper is that Missouri is ranked 44th for GDP growth. What do you think is going on with that? Why has Missouri fallen so far?

Joe Haslag (00:52):
We couldn’t answer that question in half an hour, Susan. That’s a big one.

Susan Pendergrass (00:55):
Yeah, well let’s just give it a shot. Why have other states’ economies grown faster than ours?

Joe Haslag (01:03):
Well, Missouri has not been a center of innovation, and those things are hard to pin down. There are states that have grown really fast. Since air conditioning has become more accommodating and cheaper, we’ve seen some growth in the South, and there are states like Florida and Texas that have opted for faster growth and attracted a lot of people. So there’s always this question of are you talking about just the total economy and how it grows, or are you talking about the economy per person? Both matter and both are relevant measures depending on the story you’re trying to tell. At the heart of it, though, where growth comes from is not just from adding a bunch of people. If that were the case, we would have grown during the Middle Ages just from population growth. It’s not just about adding people and workers, it’s about the productivity of those workers, how much each one can produce. We’ve seen innovations: the tractor was an innovation compared to the horse and plow, and computers were an innovation compared to adding machines. And when you say 44th, that’s one of the critical things. Missouri is also 44th in the average rate of productivity growth per worker. We just haven’t been a source of super

Susan Pendergrass (02:26):
Sure.

Joe Haslag (02:54):
strength in that area. And I still say “we” because I was born in Missouri and spent a major chunk of my professional career at the university there. Until we change, and it’s hard, what you’d like to say is is there an easy path? Can we just do X, Y, and Z and guarantee it? No. There is no one thing that fits all. But what we do see is that people respond to incentives. What you’d like to set up is a business environment, a tax environment, and other kinds of settings that just make people take some chances. Some are going to pay off and some are going to fail, and you recognize that, but over time you see faster growth in those places.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41):
Yeah. You talk specifically about states in terms of labor productivity. States that invest in certain sectors of the economy, particularly construction, where productivity may be growing faster than other sectors. Is that something Missouri should do? Should we be placing bets on labor sectors?

Joe Haslag (03:57):
That’s a great question. The evidence in this paper is that industrial policy is not something that works very well. Trying to pick winners and losers is exactly the kind of thing we saw in the failed experiments of the USSR and some other places. We all talk about China’s explosive growth for a couple of decades. That wasn’t part of the planned economy. That was coming from the part where they just let loose their entrepreneurs and gave them the right environment, that word again, where they could take chances and succeed. So yeah, picking an industrial policy, there’s just no evidence that growth in one sector’s labor is going to give rise to faster productivity growth.

Susan Pendergrass (05:10):
Okay, so let’s look at a different lever that we’re talking about a lot in Missouri right now, which is reducing or getting rid of the income tax. It feels like a lot of states are trying to do it. And what if all the states around Missouri did the same thing? Would that have an impact on how much our GDP benefits from it?

Joe Haslag (05:29):
Sure. I mean, if we, first of all you said something interesting at the beginning. We think about the national economy, but you can draw borders around any area you want, a state, a city, a metropolitan area like St. Louis, and ask how they’re doing. One of the things that is remarkable is the biggest metropolitan area in Missouri has been stagnant for four or five decades. The population in the St. Louis MSA has been about two and a half million people for at least thirty or forty years. Where they live on the Missouri side or the Illinois side may fluctuate, but the total hasn’t changed. And the city of St. Louis proper has this weird status. Missouri has a unique thing where the city of St. Louis is its own county entity. And the city of St. Louis is

Susan Pendergrass (06:05):
Yeah. Right.

Joe Haslag (06:25):
almost becoming a ghost town. It went from a million people in 1900 to somewhere around 300,000 right now.

Susan Pendergrass (06:32):
Yeah. And they of course have the earnings tax. I can definitely see the counterfactual to this argument. I know people who live in states where they keep raising the income tax and piling on other taxes, Oregon comes to mind, and people are leaving. And we know that Texas and Florida, like you said, people are moving there and they don’t have income tax.

Joe Haslag (06:50):
I think it’s more to it than just the income tax rate, but the income tax rate is part of this package of incentives. Alone, the income tax is a pretty powerful thing, because it changes the returns to every kind of business activity, every kind of trade where we’re exchanging work or productivity or investment for something. Getting rid of the income tax, and there’s a piece in the paper where there’s actually an estimate, a projection of how much, based on the evidence across the country, getting rid of Missouri’s income tax would add to the growth rate.

Susan Pendergrass (07:32):
And how much would it add to people’s pockets?

Joe Haslag (07:33):
Well, the growth rate is about between a

Susan Pendergrass (07:35):
I mean, this is a number that people have been talking about in Missouri the last year. We get rid of the income tax, everyone will have $2,800 or $2,900 more. And your estimate is $2,900?

Joe Haslag (07:39):
Right around $2,900. And it takes a few years to get there, but the point is you get an immediate pop and then faster growth for the rest of the time.

Susan Pendergrass (07:57):
And you have a similar estimate if we improve our labor productivity. How do we go about doing that?

Joe Haslag (08:02):
You create incentives. Productivity still comes from what human beings do, what men and women in the labor force do. My incentive to innovate in a state where the income tax rate is eight or nine percent is a lot lower than it is in a state where it’s one or two percent,

Susan Pendergrass (08:06):
Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Joe Haslag (08:29):
simply because I get to keep more of what the risk produces. We often talk about business as us versus them. But at the heart of the matter, there are people out there saying, I want a better standard of living for myself and my family, and I’m willing to take some risk. I may start in my basement, or in an office with just two or three people. But if my idea is a winning idea, those people who started with me, the people I employ as I expand my business, sure, do I benefit? Yeah, I do. But I also took a lot of risk to do that. I could have fallen flat on my face and come away with nothing.

Susan Pendergrass (09:05):
Yeah. I think you make that point quite well where you talk about dividing up the pie versus growing the pie. You could grow the size of the pie and everyone could theoretically get a bigger slice of it. And I think that’s where people assume everything is fixed. In fact, in the data you were analyzing, we have both the Great Recession and COVID bookending it, and that has to have some impact on Missouri’s long-term growth trajectory, right?

Joe Haslag (09:26):
Yeah, it’s harder to discern. The financial crisis cleared out a bunch of stuff where people had taken risk, some of those were financial risks, and it spread to a bigger group of people. The Great Recession

Susan Pendergrass (09:48):
Did it muddy things up at all?

Joe Haslag (10:09):
It goes back to the idea of creative destruction. Sometimes you have a big destruction and it creates an opportunity for lots of creation. Did the financial crisis of 2008 give rise to the AI expansion? It might have sped it up.

Susan Pendergrass (10:12):
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Haslag (10:26):
I don’t know for sure, but I think COVID probably had some impacts on that as well. Since we couldn’t be with one another and couldn’t get those spillovers from working together, we relied on computer hardware and software to do those things for us.

Susan Pendergrass (10:36):
Yeah. It was an engine of change in education because people started tutoring and teaching online, realizing you could get a tutor from across the country. It really opened up a lot of interesting new things that I’m not sure have completely sifted out, and I assume that’s true throughout the economy. In a lot of ways, necessity being the mother of invention, it increased productivity.

Joe Haslag (11:16):
No doubt. But I also think that what we’re seeing is the call by so many corporations across the country that, sure, you’ve worked five days a week remote for a couple of years, but we really want you to come back. We think it’s in our best interest as a corporation, for our shareholders, for those folks to be back in the office. Maybe four days a week instead of five, but there’s something about being together that creates possibilities for innovations as well. I’ll tell you a quick story. The semester after the University of Missouri got off of any sort of

Susan Pendergrass (11:38):
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Haslag (11:55):
remote or semi-remote teaching, I was teaching an undergraduate class. That class is typically between 60 and 80 kids, an advanced course, mostly juniors and seniors. You can tell with senioritis, somewhere about 12 weeks into a 16-week semester, you’re down to somewhere between 60 and 70 percent attendance.

Susan Pendergrass (12:11):
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Haslag (12:19):
That first semester back, it stayed close to 90 percent the entire semester, simply because they were dying to just be in the same room with each other. They recognized that there were spillovers from being in the classroom.

Susan Pendergrass (12:27):
Right. That’s interesting. So if you were given a magic wand and you wanted Missouri’s GDP growth to not be 44th, to be maybe top 25, what would you do with the Missouri economy to really kick-start it?

Joe Haslag (12:52):
I think two things. The easiest one is on the policy front: we just let the returns go back to the people. The tax rate in Missouri, I wouldn’t say it’s an abomination, but I just don’t think it’s been very helpful. But on top of that, our K-12 education, and this is going to appeal to you, has been an issue. We don’t have much competition. But I’m also going to put in a plug: I think Missouri has almost turned its back on higher ed.

Susan Pendergrass (13:20):
Yeah. You say this in the paper. Our educational attainment is tanking, right?

Joe Haslag (13:36):
Yeah. We just don’t have a commitment to it. The question I think would be most interesting is what would the St. Louis economy look like if Wash U wasn’t there? Wash U is an engine of innovation. There’s a lot of great things going on at the med school and the engineering school, and I think it’s just teaching people to learn how to think. Now those people end up going all over the world, but if there was a commitment to, I mean, the University of Missouri has lagged behind some of our Midwestern counterparts. Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin are all suffering from the same straitjacket, which is that the amount of state funding they receive is down. But I’d also say Missouri is sort of doubly hurt because the state gives the university system whatever money they’re going to give, but then the university system is also controlled by the state in terms of how much they can raise tuition. So there’s no freedom to test what the market forces would look like. And at higher ed, maybe more so than K-12, spending per student at K-12 is not always the recipe for predicting success. However, at higher ed, because there are market forces that tend to work at a different level,

Susan Pendergrass (15:08):
It is not. Yeah.

Joe Haslag (15:19):
money and innovation tend to go hand in hand. Higher ed seems to be going through some sort of shift right now, and I’m not sure I understand exactly what’s going on with it. But if you were to tell me what the two big policies would be, I’m not saying the state of Missouri should spend more on higher ed, but they should loosen the purse strings and let those institutions compete with the market and see what they could do.

Susan Pendergrass (15:31):
Yeah. I think it’s one of the easier parts of the budget to cut. And as our revenue is going down, there seems to be a larger group of stakeholders in K-12: there are 520 superintendents and school boards. That’s a tougher one to cut than higher ed, and I feel like they’ve taken budget cuts.

Joe Haslag (15:55):
And maybe it’s not that the state should be paying the university systems more, but they should let them go. Let them set tuition rates at whatever they think is right. And if it doesn’t work and they fail, then you end up looking more like the University of Idaho than the University of Michigan in terms of how you’re contributing to the state economy. But

Susan Pendergrass (16:22):
Yeah.

Joe Haslag (16:37):
I think there are opportunities to exploit there and we just can’t seem to. There also seems to be this weird critical mass that’s important in higher ed. You have to have a bunch of people together who are all pulling the wagon in the same direction.

Susan Pendergrass (16:42):
Yeah. Well, we also have declining enrollment. Fewer kids coming up. I think we had our largest graduating high school class last year or the year before, so that’s going to make it tough. So just to clarify,

Joe Haslag (16:59):
Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (17:03):
if Missouri were able to move its income tax rate down close to zero, you, based on your research, feel confident that Missourians would have more money in their pocket?

Joe Haslag (17:12):
More than confident. I think it’s unambiguous. The math is pretty straightforward. If you have a hundred-dollar paycheck and your taxes go from five percent to two percent,

Susan Pendergrass (17:15):
Okay. You heard it here.

Joe Haslag (17:35):
it was my pleasure. Susan, it’s always good to see you and cross paths. I wish I could be there on the ground and have all those conversations I had fifteen years ago when we were talking about this. Thanks for your service.

Susan Pendergrass (17:44):
We’ll welcome you back. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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Have a safe and happy Fourth of July from all of us at the Show-Me Institute.

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One of the items vetoed was $2 million for Missouri’s Violent Crime Clearance Grant Program. That was a disappointment. I’ve written previously about why improving violent crime clearance rates is one of the smartest public safety investments Missouri can make.

Even so, I understand why it was vetoed. Missouri cannot continue expanding government..

Spending restraint means worthwhile programs will sometimes be cut. The question isn’t whether every veto was perfect. No governor gets every decision right. The question is whether Missouri is finally willing to reverse a spending trajectory that accelerated during the years of extraordinary federal COVID aid and continued even after those dollars disappeared.

I hope lawmakers and the governor revisit the Violent Crime Clearance Grant Program when Missouri’s finances allow. Public safety is government’s first responsibility, and I continue to believe this is a high-return investment.

But spending restraint only works if programs with genuine merit are still subject to scrutiny. If every worthwhile program receives an exemption, then spending never declines. The test of fiscal reform is whether Missouri begins living within its means and creates the conditions necessary to reduce the tax burden on its citizens over the long term.

The post A Disappointing Veto, but the Right Fiscal Direction appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about Missouri’s education leadership shake-up and what comes next. They discuss how to find the right commissioner of education, why outside reformers tend to succeed where insiders struggle, what the dismantling of the US Department of Education means for state accountability systems, why public complacency about poor academic outcomes persists, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much, Andy Smarick, for joining once again on the Show-Me Institute Podcast. We love having you on and I appreciate you taking the time. You’re a busy man, so it’s really wonderful to have you back.

Andy Smarick (00:06):
I love being here. It’s a treat. Thank you for having me. I always like talking to you, but also anytime I get to talk about state-level education policy, it’s a treat.

Susan Pendergrass (00:19):
Well, I know that you have experience serving on a couple of state boards, both K-12 and higher ed. Just to bring you up to speed on what’s happening in Missouri: we have a relatively new governor, about a year in, and we had a state board of education where people stayed in expired seats, rubber-stamped decisions, and were very complacent, I feel comfortable saying. Our governor shook up that group and appointed new people who came in and said, what do you mean we don’t have bylaws? It was like, this is bananas. At the same time, the governor issued an executive order requiring letter grades on schools and districts, new school report cards. I don’t know exactly how everything went down, but our Commissioner of Education resigned, our Deputy Commissioner resigned, and our president of the state board of education resigned, all in about one week. So we are now straightening things out and there is a new board president. But this new, relatively new board now has the task of finding a commissioner. The way things have happened in Missouri is we always get a new commissioner from the ranks of the state education agency, maybe from the legislature, always from Missouri. Just a real this-is-how-we’ve-done-it mentality. And we have not been big reformers. No Chiefs for Change in Missouri. Like a lot of states, our reading scores for young kids are tanking, forty percent below basic for third and fourth graders. We have a state accountability system called the Missouri School Improvement Plan in which 516 of our 520 districts are fully accredited and about four are provisionally accredited, none unaccredited. So we have this meaningless accountability system where every district is fully accredited, even St. Louis, which I can’t even go into. So here we are, and I want to know a few things from you. Number one, if you were on the Board of Education in Missouri, how would you go about finding a new commissioner? What would you look for? And then later I want to get into what’s happening at the national level. We are not doing well academically, we have never had a bold reformer in charge, we keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. What would you do if you were in their spot?

Andy Smarick (02:59):
So in education, I’m going to wind up to this answer, so just bear with me for a second. Conservative can mean two different things. One is the traditional conservative view, which is to preserve, to stand athwart big, swift, dramatic, perpetual change. You’re trying to keep things the way they are because there’s a lot of wisdom that has gone into it and people are accustomed to it. In education, there’s also this other right-of-center conservative view, which is we have to be much more open to choice, competition, accountability metrics, and so on. And it seems that Missouri has been one of those very red states that has tended to believe in the first kind of conservatism: protect our traditional school districts, protect the hierarchies we have, protect the tradition of you grow up as a professional, as a teacher, then a superintendent, then maybe go to the state education agency. A lot of people believe that’s the way to do it.

There probably is an ethic among a lot of people to keep it that way. The only way you get out of that is if there’s a recognition among leadership that we can’t continue to preserve the status quo, that we have to change some things. That is a big step for a place that has elevated the idea of preserving for a very long time. If they get to that step, then they have to do the very tough things, which is start to pull out the Jenga pieces of that conservatism. The most important one is having board leadership and having a state superintendent who come from outside the state, and then having a board chair or board president who is not going to just do what the staff of the state education agency says or what the district superintendents say. We saw this work quite well about fifteen or twenty years ago. There was a big movement nationwide in educational reform led at the state level, and a number of states chose out-of-state superintendents and commissioners of education who did a terrific job of shaking things up and advancing a bunch of important proposals. The downside is a lot of them were so brash and so young, and I have to say so cocky, that they made unnecessary waves and kicked a lot of people in the shins in the states where they landed. So my view is a place like Missouri should pick someone from out of state for a state chief, someone with a long track record of success, but someone who isn’t so green as to think he or she knows everything. Someone with enough humility and enough time on task to know what they don’t know, and who can come in and be bold enough to make some changes, but not think that everyone in the state is a dummy who needs to be ignored. That’s how I would think about it. And if you have a board chair and board membership who get all of this, it makes things a whole lot easier. But that might be the hardest part of all. Who is your board president? Who are the board majority going to be? They have to be the ones with the backbone.

Susan Pendergrass (05:57):
Yeah. I feel like we’ve had people come in and say, well, I’m only the commissioner, it’s not my fault that the kids don’t read. And then people say, well, we’re a local control state, so it’s really the local guys’ fault that the kids can’t read. Then the legislators are like, well, who’s supposed to be making sure the kids can read? And technically, kind of they are, but them plus the board, and there’s just fingers pointing every different direction with nobody really taking responsibility. If we had the capacity for hard things, we would not have all of our districts be fully accredited. There’s even pushback on the letter grade idea because folks will say, well, then the teachers in those F schools feel bad and the parents feel bad and the kids who go there feel bad. I’ve seen some states change it to colors or something where nobody feels bad. I’ve also heard folks say it’s racist because a lot of the D and F schools enroll large percentages of students of color. So there are just all of these reasons to resist. It’s going to happen because there’s an executive order, but I feel like we’re going to have a hard time finding somebody who’s willing to do those things.

Andy Smarick (07:17):
Well, your state, like every other state, has a state constitution that makes the state ultimately responsible for education. Your state, like others, has both tradition and some laws that give a number of powers to local districts. The weird thing, and I’ve seen this in a lot of different states, is the state government ends up in a very weird position. The state can get sued and state leaders can get criticized if kids aren’t learning, because the state actually has constitutional authority to make sure kids are learning. But as a matter of practice, and often of state statutes, a lot of this power is delegated to districts. States then try to recapture some of that power through the accreditation system. It’s the way the state can say, okay, districts, you have the power to do these things, but we’re going to hold you accountable for results and we’re going to accredit you or not. And then it turns out it’s virtually impossible to take away the accreditation of these districts because of legislative pushback, and the state typically doesn’t have the capacity to run a district if it does take away accreditation. It just becomes a complete hot mess. That’s why you need state leadership who has some experience but also some backbone to say, this is how we’re going to thread the needle of state authority, state responsibility, local control, and still making sure that kids learn. This is not easy, other states have gone through it, but it isn’t the kind of thing that someone who has lived in Missouri all their life and grown up professionally there can do easily. It’s going to be hard for that person to get out of that box. Having someone from the outside who can start to do some bold things, including hiring smart, tough lawyers, having board leadership who’s going to stick by it. But I just want to emphasize this point: every state I ever talk to begins by saying, well, you know, we’re a local control state, our districts have all the power. Everybody says that. Go back to your state constitution. The state is the one that’s going to be responsible. And if the state has the backbone, it can do a whole lot. But whether it has the backbone is the operative phrase.

Susan Pendergrass (09:41):
Yeah. So about seven years ago we developed our own school report cards with letter grades, called MOSchoolRankings. I’ll just plug it. It was with GPAs, and this year for the first time I just took the GPAs and converted them to letter grades because folks found GPAs tricky. I put up the methodology. I took all the data from our state education agency, DESE, and just tried to make it a map you can zoom in and out on, easier to navigate. And my thinking is you have to do these things, make sure you say how you do it, and then people can argue with you and debate whether it’s right or wrong or good or bad. And many people have. A lot of people don’t like that the average is a C. I’m open to discussing why the average should be anything other than a C, but you have to at some point just make the move and then be confident enough in what you did that you can defend it and change it if people point out flaws. But this is where I think we struggle at DESE. They struggle to just put that out there because they worry about every negative outcome and consequence. And it’s like, yeah, but at some point to not do it is worse than to do it.

Andy Smarick (11:10):
For sure. And I’ve gotten to the point of realizing that if you have been in a system at different ranks for thirty or thirty-five years, all of your friends, your reputation, your pension, your income, everything about your identity is wrapped up with that system. Expecting these folks to suddenly turn the corner and say, you know, we’ve messed up, tens of thousands of kids are not learning right now today in classrooms, and we have to start holding the adults accountable for that, including teachers and principals and local school board members and local superintendents, and we have to be courageous about it. That’s asking a lot of people who are of, by, and for the system. It can be a whole lot easier if you just get someone from the outside with the courage to do it.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54):
Yeah. So can you think of an example of a state that has done this well?

Andy Smarick (12:02):
Definitely during the late No Child Left Behind era and then the Race to the Top era, a number of states found people from outside. Tennessee was famous for this. Arne Duncan ended up going to a couple of different places, including Rhode Island. New Jersey ended up picking Chris Cerf. There was a movement where probably ten or fifteen states did this quite well. My state, Maryland, brought in the superintendent of Mississippi after Mississippi had had so many gains, so she could carry some of those especially reading reforms to our state. This is not uncommon. Texas did something like this for a while. Louisiana became very famous during the John White era for doing this. But in all of these cases it began often with a governor, and then some members of a state legislature who said, we just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve done in the past. We have to do things differently. Once the governor says something like that, he or she can appoint people to the Board of Education who will do things differently, and the legislature, at least his or her party, will start to fall in line, and the media then starts to understand how serious it is. It is hard to do this without the governor leaning forward and giving the blessing to the bureaucracy to do things differently. So the question for you is, is your governor going to spend any political capital on this and say things are messed up and we have to do things differently?

Susan Pendergrass (13:29):
I don’t know. I hope so. But I haven’t seen evidence of that. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that they’re looking more internally than externally. However, I just want to add one wrinkle to this context that we’ve been thinking a lot about at the Show-Me Institute. If you’re following the US Department of Education, I believe you used to work there. Is that right?

Andy Smarick (13:54):
Yes, back in the day.

Susan Pendergrass (13:55):
Last week they moved the Office of Special Education over to the Department of Health and Human Services. They moved the Office of Civil Rights over to the Department of Justice. The building where the Department of Education used to be is now vacated. All those people are over at an old Department of Energy building. It’s a significantly reduced staff. Without touching the Every Student Succeeds Act, they are effectively dismantling most of the structure over there, at a time when the current president said that sending education back to the states was one of his priorities. I’m particularly concerned that at a time when Missouri has this vacuum, we could be looking at the apron strings being cut, states being told to sink or swim from the federal perspective. You don’t have to maintain the accountability systems. The Secretary is encouraging states to submit requests to waive parts of the law. I don’t really know exactly where it’s headed, but that concerns me. Do you think they’re going to let off the gas on mandated accountability systems in exchange for flexibility?

Andy Smarick (15:15):
Such a good question. To begin with just some editorializing: it is astonishing that Congress has allowed this to happen. In general I’m a big fan of decentralizing education power to the states, but that they’ve been able to administratively dismantle a department without Congress doing anything about it is just shocking to me. Even members of the Republican Party twenty years ago, let alone forty or sixty years ago, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the legislative branch to create departments and fund departments, would have been appalled at this. There would have been unanimous consent to stop this from happening. So that says a lot that Congress has just sort of excused itself from the discussion. It has been remarkable the extent to which that building where we used to work, and the thousands of people there, is just empty, and they are handing off all the tasks to other places. I don’t know how this is legal, but I guess they’re figuring out a way to do it.

Now, the people who are leading this from inside genuinely believe that education will be better off if Uncle Sam isn’t meddling in it so much. That requires a theory of action, or at least a theory, that the reason why things are bad is that Uncle Sam is causing them to be bad, as though if Uncle Sam backs up there’s going to be a sunnier future ahead. Or it requires believing that it is just morally wrong for Uncle Sam to get involved, and whether states sink or swim after he gets out, that’s up to them. That’s a theory, it’s an ideological approach, and they have the right to pursue it. Donald Trump was elected and he gets to hire who he wants to. But then, to your point, it starts to implicate the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still requires the federal government to do some things related to state accountability systems. And if you believe you have the power administratively to undo a cabinet department, I suspect you probably believe you have the power to ignore some federal accountability provisions and just allow states to do what they want. So we’re going to be left in this position of saying, all right, the federal government is getting out of the business of accountability, therefore the states need to do it well. And then anyone who cares about kids learning will ask, okay, are states going to do this well? And so I turn to you as a state leader. Is Missouri going to

Susan Pendergrass (17:23):
Yeah.

Andy Smarick (17:47):
kick butt and take names?

Susan Pendergrass (17:48):
I’m concerned. I mean, No Child Left Behind was difficult and a lot of people didn’t like it, but test scores went up. Strict accountability, test scores went up. As we backed off, the Race to the Top era with waivers, and then Every Student Succeeds, which allowed more waivers, states were able to lower a lot of bars. Some states raised bars, like you mentioned, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some states are doing a great job, especially with early literacy. Others are not. And so Missouri, I think of it like this: you have a college student and you’re paying all their bills. You’re writing the checks, ordering their textbooks, doing all that work. Then one day you say, you know what, instead of that, I’m going to give you $3,000 a month: you pay your rent, your utilities, get your own books. There are going to be kids who step up and do fine. And there are going to be a lot of kids who take that $3,000 and immediately go to Cancun. We know this. It kind of depends on what you’ve done with the kids so far. And I feel like we have lulled the states into a feeling of compliance. If we just tell you how we spend our Title I dollars, fill out this form, and report that our test scores keep going down, no one cares. There’s no stick. They don’t withhold the money. We just say our test scores this year are lower than last year, and they say, good to know, here’s your

Andy Smarick (19:14):
Yep.

Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
check. So if that’s how you were raising your kids so far, why would you expect them to step up and become suddenly responsible?

Andy Smarick (19:31):
Okay, I have to admit that I have learned a hard lesson in my years doing education policy, which is that I was wrong that the political system of its own volition will always push for big action to make sure schools are great. I believed that if we had accountability systems showing that schools were underperforming, there would be a perpetual energy within the public to say we have to fix this, that it was just a matter of making the knowledge available and then everything else would take care of itself. It turns out it just doesn’t work that way. You need leaders at the top to constantly push and say, we are not doing well enough, we have to do dramatic things to make sure kids are going to be better off. Otherwise, No Child Left Behind is in place for a while and then people get sick of it. Or you have some interesting testing regimes and then there’s pushback to that, or just resistance to Uncle Sam in general. And people like the two of us say, but kids aren’t learning anything anymore. We are seeing a cratering of student learning since the peak of No Child Left Behind’s learning gains. This is horrible. Kids just aren’t learning anymore. The Andy of twenty years ago would have assumed the nation would revolt and say, how dare we do this to our schools and our kids, we have to do something differently. Instead, I don’t want to say it’s crickets, but there has not been a major wave of energy to change things again. The only way to do this is for governors or presidents to say this is not good enough and keep pushing. It is the ultimate dog that didn’t bark. The story is why something isn’t happening. If things are so bad in student learning, why is there not a dramatic energy within the public to do things differently? So maybe I look to you. In Missouri, are people just satisfied? Do they just not want the hassle?

Susan Pendergrass (21:28):
Why do you think? Yeah, they are like, we love our schools. All the time: we love our schools. We love, love, love our rural schools. It’s hard, kids show up with a lot of baggage, it’s just hard. But we love our schools. God forbid we have tiny districts getting below fifty kids. We love it. There isn’t an appetite to say, well, thirty-some percent of our rural high schools don’t offer calculus, and we don’t think we need it. It’s like, well, those kids are going to join a world where a lot of other kids had access to these things. It’s just, I don’t know the word. Complacency for sure. And it gets exhausting to continue to talk about it because it feels like

Andy Smarick (22:20):
Yeah. So this is why it can feel that way. And listen, if I were a state superintendent, based on the things I have learned, I would always begin a big reform movement by saying, first, all of the things you just said, but sincerely, because I believe this. I would say I love our public schools. I know how much they do for kids. I know that we love our teachers. I know that these schools are part of the community. I know that they help shape young people in ways beyond reading and math scores. I know that we love to go to these sports events. I know that we love to go to our fifth-grade graduation. This is an important strand in the fabric of our community. We love these schools, we love our teachers, we need to protect them, and we have to do better. What I found in that previous movement of big, dramatic out-of-state actors who came in and took over is they were awesome at the we-have-to-do-better part and absolutely lousy at the we-love-the-schools-and-teachers part. And that just caused a lot of anger. It was toxic in the long run. It is so important to a state to hear the we-love-our-schools message. That’s why they end up picking leaders, board presidents and superintendents who are of the system, who sincerely love their schools and say that. But they’re bad at the second part: we have to do things differently. The key to leadership right now is finding someone who can say both. We love these schools. We love public education in our communities. But Lord, our kids deserve a whole lot better than this. We have to do some things differently. That’s a rare leader.

Susan Pendergrass (24:00):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end, because what else can you say? That’s awesome. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to find out soon, and not just Missouri. Many states have the same problems. I would love to have you come back again, Andy. We love having you.

Andy Smarick (24:16):
I love getting emails from you or Zach asking me to come on. I’m happy to give my bad opinions on anything.

Susan Pendergrass (24:23):
No, you have such a good, crystallized view of these things, and your experience on state boards is invaluable. I do appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy and hopefully you’ll come back soon.

Andy Smarick (24:40):
Whenever you call. Have a great summer.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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