The figure below shows the rapid growth of the 4dsw since the 2010–11 school year.

Source: DESE

Missouri is not alone in this phenomenon. The 4dsw is increasingly popular across the country, especially in rural districts. Even though 36 percent of Missouri school districts use a 4dsw, they cover only 13 percent of students because rural districts are smaller. However, it is notable that the Independence School District in Kansas City, with over 13,000 students, is also on a 4dsw.

Districts typically adopt a four-day calendar in hopes of improving teacher recruitment and retention and, in some cases, reducing costs. In 2024, Senate Bill 727 included a modest financial incentive for districts to have at least 169 instructional days to encourage districts to remain on a five-day schedule. Nevertheless, the use of the 4dsw continues to expand.

My colleague James Shuls and I authored a series of papers examining the effects of the 4dsw on academic achievement, district finances, teacher retention, and parental satisfaction:

• A Systematic Literature Review of the Four-day School Week
• Five for Me: A Survey of Missourians Regarding the Four-day School Week
• Longer Days and Fewer Total Hours: Examining the Four-day School Week in Missouri

Across these reports, we found that the 4dsw was harmful for student achievement, with stronger negative effects for non-rural students. We found that the 4dsw either had no meaningful effect on finances, or that a decrease in costs was almost entirely offset by a decrease in revenues. For teacher retention, the results were mixed. We found that parents had a slight preference for the five-day school week (with those using a 4dsw as the strongest supporters, and those concerned about childcare as the strongest opponents).

Since our papers were published, several newer studies have been published, though the number of rigorous, quantitative studies on the effects of the 4dsw is still limited.

A 2024 study from the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) found “small negative or statistically insignificant effects on teacher recruitment and retention outcomes.”

Similarly, a 2025 CALDER study used Missouri data and “found no evidence that the 4dsw improves teacher recruitment or retention,” despite educators and school leaders believing it does. My colleague, Cory Koedel, was one of the study’s coauthors and wrote about the findings in greater detail here.

The 4dsw is not a loophole that saves money and improves teacher retention at no cost to students. In fact, the available evidence suggests that, on average, it is harmful to students while nothing changes for retention and finances.

This does not mean that a 4dsw could never be successful. A district that adopts a 4dsw as part of an innovative educational model could potentially unearth new benefits. However, that is not why most districts switch. School leaders and policymakers should familiarize themselves with the research and approach the continued expansion of the 4dsw with greater skepticism.

The post The Continued Growth of the Four-Day School Week in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There is a lot of ongoing discussion about eliminating personal property taxes. There have been bills introduced to eliminate them. It’s a major topic of debate around the state, particularly in St. Charles County.

Personal property taxes are the taxes levied on your car, boat, livestock, business equipment, farm equipment, and more. (Thanks to data centers, the business equipment part has become much more important in the past year or so.) Missouri indeed taxes personal property more than most other states. I am perfectly fine with eliminating the tax. But people should understand that if personal property taxes were eliminated, the Hancock Amendment would allow local governments to then raise real property taxes by the amount lost in personal property taxes.

So, if the state eliminated all personal property taxes statewide, it would likely end up as a revenue-neutral switch where we taxed land and buildings slightly more and taxed mobile assets not at all while removing a tax that most people find particularly annoying. I think that would be a modestly beneficial switch; I just don’t want to sell it as a tax cut.

But could counties on their own eliminate personal property taxes? Yes, every county and taxing district in the state could eliminate personal property taxes if they wanted to. They just don’t want to and I understand why.

Currently, St. Louis County is the only county that is required to set different tax rates for different classes of property. RSMo §137.073 requires every local government within St. Louis County (including cities, school districts, streetlight districts, etc.) to set a property tax rate for each subclass of property. This means that there are different tax rates for residential, commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, and personal property. The requirement to break down the tax rate by subclass was originally intended for the entire state, but eventually the rest of the state was given the opportunity to opt out if their county commission chose to, which every county in the state did. As a result, the rule currently only applies within St. Louis County and (for an unknown reason) the city of Gladstone in Clay County.

In the rest of Missouri, every government with property tax authority sets one tax rate, which is then applied to all subclasses of real and personal property. There are a few exceptions to this (primarily cities that have never taxed personal property, such as Independence), but almost all governments outside of St. Louis County set the same rate for all real and personal property. But here is the key: Any county in Missouri can adopt different tax rates for different property classifications whenever it wants to.

County officials could require all the taxing entities within their county to set different rates, and then county officials could set the county rate for personal property at zero. But county officials could not tell other taxing districts within the county to apply those new, variable rates. Would any of them choose to set the personal property tax rate at zero? Well, let’s just say that since this switch was made in St. Louis County, I know of no taxing entity that has voluntarily set the personal property tax rate at zero (other than some municipalities that don’t have property taxes at all, such as Chesterfield, or had never set a personal property tax, such as Westwood).

What would happen if a county set its personal property tax rate at zero and no other governments followed? In St. Louis County, the county portion of the tax bill is about five percent. It is a largely similar percentage around Missouri (varying slightly, of course). If St. Louis County government set its personal property tax rate to zero tomorrow, the average car and boat owner would see a five percent reduction in their annual car or boat tax bill. That assumes no other local taxing districts got approval from voters to raise their rates at the same time, which would more than offset it.

The fact is that unless school districts agree to also lower personal property tax rates, any attempt by counties to end personal property taxes will produce underwhelming results. I still think it would be a good thing. We should tax fixed assets like land and buildings instead of mobile ones like cars. It would be a general improvement in tax policy and remove a minor annoyance for most people (i.e., their annual car tax payment).

Let’s just not pretend it would be a large tax cut.

The post What If You Eliminated Personal Property Taxes and Nobody Noticed? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

If passed, HB 2872 would have created a mandatory third-grade retention policy for students who could not read effectively and established an enforcement mechanism to align Missouri’s teacher preparation programs with the science of reading.

One of the reasons cited by opponents of the bill was that we needed to wait and let Missouri’s 2022 early literacy reforms take “full effect.” The earlier legislation had some positive aspects, but HB 2872 would have filled important gaps that are clearly seen in a new 2026 report from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

The NCTQ report evaluates colleges and universities across the United States on how effectively their curriculum addresses the five core components of the science of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It also considers whether programs teach practices found to be ineffective, such as the three-cueing method.

Among the 50 states, Missouri ranks 44th in addressing the core components of the science of reading, with an average of just 2.3 out of 5.0 components. Half of all states scored 4.0 or higher, while often-praised Mississippi scored 4.7.

Even more alarming, Missouri ranks 2nd in the nation, behind only Maine, in teaching ineffective reading practices. Our participating programs taught almost four times more ineffective practices, on average, than the national average.

These results suggest Missouri cannot afford to simply wait for our prior literacy reforms to “take effect.” Today’s students in Missouri’s teacher preparation programs are the teachers of tomorrow’s children, and many are not learning how to teach reading correctly.

Nearly half of the universities in Missouri evaluated by NCTQ received an “F” in teaching the science of reading, including Northwest Missouri State University, Truman State University, and Missouri Southern State University. By comparison, 73% of Mississippi’s programs received an A and none earned an F.

It’s also concerning that 52 percent of Missouri’s programs either refused to participate, provided heavily redacted materials, or were otherwise unresponsive to the survey. These institutions partner with the state to prepare future teachers, and there should be transparency about how they train teachers.

The success stories of early literacy reforms are well known. Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Indiana have posted meaningful gains in reading achievement after implementing reforms, while Missouri continues to slide in national rankings. We fell from 27th to 38th in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2013 and 2024.

In 2023, Indiana required teacher preparation programs to be aligned with the science of reading and prohibited the use of the three-cueing method. Any unaligned program loses the right to be called “accredited.” In a previous NCTQ report from 2023 based on data from before Indiana implemented reforms, 33 percent of Indiana’s programs received an A+ or an A. In 2026, 96 percent received an A+ or A.

The reforms in HB 2872 were modeled on Indiana’s policy and would have helped ensure that future Missouri teachers are trained in the science of reading. Early literacy reform would have built on past successes and helped more students become confident, capable readers. All we can do now is try again next year.

The post Missouri Missed an Opportunity on Reading Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The city is suffering under a $55 million operating deficit. The mayor pointed out in a 2023 budget letter that “The demands of a City this size in square miles and infrastructure age far exceed affordable options for residents and available resources.”

What to do? The answer is obvious: dedicate more public tax dollars to private corporations. And not just baseball, but women’s soccer, too!

Kansas City leaders are once again proposing public subsidies for a sports facility. This time, the beneficiary is the Kansas City Current and the continued development of the Berkley Riverfront.

According to reporting by The Kansas City Star, the city may create a new tax-increment financing (TIF) district and issue up to $235 million in bonds to support expansion of CPKC Stadium and surrounding development. The project would increase stadium capacity from 11,500 to 18,000 seats and add parking, retail, and mixed-use development to the riverfront.

Why? Why is it the responsibility of taxpayers to fund this? Projects like this can be good. They can even be great! But it’s not on par with, say, public safety or infrastructure, or education—which will all lose money because of the subsidy.

Supporters of the proposal point to the team’s success. Lucas told Fox4 that Kansas City must position itself for future events such as a potential Women’s World Cup and noted that there are limits to what an 11,500-seat stadium can host. He also emphasized that the proposed financing would not come from the city’s general revenue fund.

Let’s be careful about that last point. TIF does not create money out of thin air. Without a deal, the Current owners would pay taxes on their development—just like you and me. The proposal is to change that and let them keep that money. Money that we are told the city doesn’t have enough of.

Perhaps the most revealing thing is that Lucas can’t even be bothered to make a coherent defense of this spending. When asked about public subsidies for the Current, he told Fox4, “We’ve been through this before with another professional team that plays in Kansas City.”

But in an April 17, 2026, live interview with the Kansas City Stack Substack, Lucas said about public financing for a Royals ballpark: “this is like the incentive arrangements that we’ve done in other places. Probably the most stadium-like discussion is the stadium we built on the riverfront for the Kansas City Current. That, of course, was an incentive arrangement where you had votes at city council at one of our incentive agencies, that being the Port Authority, and you had state participation. I expect that to be the same.” [3:36 mark]

In other words, we’re giving public money to the Current because we’re giving money to the Royals because we gave money to the Current. That’s his argument.

I was reminded recently of other reporting from Fox4 in which Lucas defended himself for accepting secret gifts from the Royals, among others, to pay for tuxedos and trips to the Super Bowl. He said, “my goal is always to save taxpayer dollars.”

Lucas may have lots of reasons for accepting gifts. But given his willingness to spend public funds on stadiums, it’s hard to believe he cares about saving taxpayer dollars.

The post Kansas City Mayor’s Circular Reasoning on Stadium Subsidies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As an adult, I don’t have much trouble adjusting my sleep schedule when I need to wake up early. I just go to bed earlier the night before.

Teenagers, however, don’t seem to work that way. Adolescent sleep patterns are biologically different, making it difficult for them to compensate for early wake-up times. As a result, one of the most effective policies for improving student outcomes in middle and high school is delaying school start times. A recent NBER study provides the latest evidence. The authors examine a California law requiring middle schools to start no earlier than 8:00 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Most schools were affected. After the policy was implemented, total sleep duration increased by an average of about 40 minutes, and the share of students sleeping at least eight hours per night increased by 13 percent.

The effects on academic achievement were substantial. Math and English test scores increased by 0.08 to 0.10 standard deviations—roughly the difference between having a highly effective teacher rather than an average one. These gains are larger than what we would expect from any feasible class-size reduction in middle or high schools.

The study also examined mental health outcomes. While those estimates are less precise, the results suggest improvements in mental health, particularly for boys.

This new NBER study is not an outlier. It adds to a large body of well-identified research reaching the same conclusion: when schools start later, teenagers get more sleep and perform better.

The policy implications are straightforward, though implementation is not always easy. One concern is that parents cannot always shift their work schedules, especially when younger children need supervision before school. But for families facing this challenge, before-school programs can help fill the gap.

Another concern is transportation. Many districts stagger start times so buses can serve multiple schools, meaning some students must start early. Yet this is ultimately a scheduling problem. Districts could shift the entire school day later, allowing students to start and finish later while still leaving plenty of time for after-school activities and family dinners.

The evidence is clear that teenagers benefit greatly from delaying school start times. Missouri school districts should carefully weigh the trade-offs and consider practical adjustments to give our kids more time to sleep.

The post Teenagers Need More Time to Sleep appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The upcoming release of the movie Supergirl got me thinking about another Superman-related film—one without laser vision or chiseled jawlines.

Waiting for Superman, released in 2010, follows families hoping to use lottery systems to get into a charter school. These families were stuck in failing public schools and desperate for a way out. Parents profiled in the film cried tears of joy when their children “won” the lottery and were so disheartened when they didn’t.

Its message was simple: droves of students are stuck in failing public schools and are waiting desperately for someone to help.

Missouri has been content allowing students to wait for Superman (or Supergirl now). My colleague, Susan Pendergrass, describes the problem well:

For years, the education establishment in Missouri has relied on a predictable playbook. Whenever state test scores drop or national rankings look bleak, we are told that the data don’t capture the whole picture, or that a new bureaucratic report card will soon show things are turning around. We are urged to wait, to invest more taxpayer money, and to trust the system.

But each year, more students move through the system either underprepared or unprepared. Thankfully, there are proven policies that can help.

Charter schools, open enrollment, and education savings accounts (ESAs) give parents choice, which in turn fosters more competition. With increased competition and accountability, schools are incentivized to innovate.

But Missouri parents have significant limits on choice.

Charter schools face a quasi-ban across the entire state, except in the St. Louis City School District, the Kansas City 33 School District, and all school districts in Boone County. (A charter school does operate in Normandy Schools Collaborative due to an accreditation provision). Missouri does not have open enrollment, and the ESA program reaches only a fraction of the state’s more than 900,000 students.

This needs to change.

Also concerning is Missouri’s reluctance to embrace comprehensive early literacy reform.

When Waiting for Superman was released in 2010, Mississippi ranked 48th in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Louisiana ranked 47th, Tennessee ranked 38th, Indiana ranked 27th, and Missouri ranked 31st.

Since then, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Indiana have implemented serious early literacy reform. They all recognized teaching children to read is a serious undertaking that requires serious solutions.

Success has followed. By 2024, Mississippi had risen from 48th to 9th in fourth-grade reading. Louisiana climbed from 47th to 15th. Tennessee improved from 38th to 23rd. Indiana jumped from 27th to 6th. Do those states have more work to do? Of course.

But while they’ve shown improvement, Missouri has fallen from 31st to 38th, as 42% of our fourth graders scored below basic on the reading portion of NAEP.

There was a clear opportunity to pass early literacy reform to mimic the successes of these other states with House Bill 2872. But opponents in the Senate argued that Missouri should allow the state’s 2022 early literacy reforms (Senate Bills 681 and 682) to take full effect. In other words, keep waiting.

Superman does not exist, and neither does Supergirl.

But policymakers do.

Missouri students cannot afford to spend another year waiting. There are proven reforms that can expand educational opportunity and improve outcomes. This year, Missouri chose not to pursue them. For the sake of our students, that needs to change next year.

The post Waiting for Supergirl appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Kansas City Star recently published a story examining the city’s gun violence problem as Kansas City hosts matches during the World Cup.

The article raises a legitimate concern. Kansas City, Missouri, suffers from far too much violence. Recent shootings have again drawn national attention to a problem local leaders have struggled to address for years.

The Star largely frames that problem through the lens of Missouri’s gun laws. Missouri allows permit-less carry. It broadly preempts local firearm regulations. Legislative efforts to tighten gun restrictions have gone nowhere, even after highly publicized tragedies such as the Chiefs’ Super Bowl rally shooting.

Reasonable people can conclude that these policies contribute to violence.

But if we are serious about understanding why Kansas City experiences so much violence, there is an obvious question that deserves attention:

What about Kansas? The state line is not hundreds of miles away. It is literally a road.

Kansas has permit-less carry. Kansas does not require firearm registration. Kansas does not impose waiting periods. Kansas does not require universal background checks for private firearm sales. Kansas broadly preempts local governments from adopting their own firearm regulations.

In other words, Kansas and Missouri have remarkably similar firearm laws, yet the outcomes on violence are very different.

The Star notes that Kansas City, Missouri, averages roughly 30 homicides during June and July, compared with four in Kansas City, Kansas. That is a remarkable difference. Accounting for population, Kansas City, Missouri, still experiences roughly twice the homicide rate of Kansas City, Kansas.

If neighboring jurisdictions with similar firearm laws experience dramatically different homicide rates, serious observers should be interested in what else might explain the difference. They should certainly acknowledge it.

The question is not whether gun laws matter. The question is whether they are sufficient to explain the difference in homicide numbers. The Star asks the first question. It largely ignores the second.

The post If Gun Laws Explain Kansas City’s Violence, What Explains Kansas? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At the Show-Me Institute, we spend a lot of time analyzing the systemic, high-level benefits of educational freedom—how it spurs competition, how it affects state funding formulas, and how it drives long-term accountability. But sometimes, it is important to look past the research and focus on the immediate, practical reality confronting parents.

Why do families need school choice? The answer is straightforward—a single, zip-code-assigned school cannot possibly be everything to every child. And when a school fails a student, that student needs a lifeline. A recent iteration of EdChoice’s long-running Public Opinion Tracker survey shows that roughly one in four parents indicate that they have had to switch their children’s school at some point.

When you dig into why these families are switching, the reasons are straightforward. Parents pull their children out of schools because of unfortunate, everyday problems that directly impact a child’s well-being and future.

The four most common reasons parents choose to leave a school are:

• Academic needs not being met: The child is either falling behind without support or completely unchallenged by a rigid, one-size-fits-all curriculum.
• Bullying: The learning environment has become unsafe, hostile, or emotionally damaging.
• Difficulty with teachers: Friction or a lack of connection with educators that derails the learning process.
• Excessive stress or anxiety: The school environment actively harms the child’s mental and emotional health.

As a parent of three children who had no publicly funded choice, I have witnessed or experienced all of these. Missouri families who face these issues have very few options. If you have the financial means, you can pay private school tuition out of pocket or pack up and move to a different neighborhood. But if you are a lower-income or working-class family in Missouri, you are trapped unless you live near a charter school in St. Louis, Kansas City, or maybe one day Boone County (charter schools are now authorized to open there, but none have yet). Many families have to watch their children suffer through chronic anxiety, falling grades, or safety concerns because an arbitrary residential boundary says there is no other choice.

This is precisely why educational choice is so vital. It isn’t about dismantling public education. All parents need some form of agency when their children’s current school simply isn’t working. When a child is facing bullying or their academic needs are being completely ignored, a family cannot afford to wait five or ten years for the school to change. They need an option right now.

The national data show that school switching is a normal, healthy mechanism for families trying to optimize their children’s upbringing. It’s time to ensure that every single family in Missouri, regardless of income, has the flexibility to make that switch when their children’s future depends on it.

The post This Is Why Missouri Families Need Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s say this is an April election. What happens in the initial petition process is not that the City Council just sits around and twiddles its thumbs, right? We can pass ordinances just like broadly the public can through an initiative petition process. All of these words I’m saying is, no, this will not thwart development of Kansas City Royals stadium.

We’ve actually thought about all of this. We’re going to get the necessary deals done expeditiously to make sure that the Royals can be prepared to open the stadium by opening day of 2030. That requires, I think, dirt moving really by the end of this year at least on the demolition process or very early in 2027. And if you’re looking at it, it takes about 30 days to the election authorities anyway to get the election certified. So, you know, this is not a threat to that.

He made similar comments to The Beacon. It seemed weird to me that, once a petition has been validated, a legislative body like the council could just rush through all sorts of things before the vote, and then tell petitioners, “Hey, sorry. You’re too late.” I’m not alone in thinking this; Dave Helling wrote something similar on the Kansas City Stack.

And, if one cares about the Missouri Supreme Court, the court thinks similar conduct at the state level is weird, too. The Supreme Court didn’t just find it weird—it found it unconstitutional!

In February 2015, the court ruled in Earth Island Inst. v. Union Elec. Co. that the state legislature cannot tweak things to effectively eviscerate a pending vote. They wrote:

The only issue is whether the legislature may negate in advance an initiative petition that has been approved for circulation but prior to the time it is adopted by the people at an election.  It may not.  If a proposed initiative is adopted by the people at an election, then a statute enacted by the legislature during the interim between the initiative’s approval for circulation and its passage is impliedly repealed to the extent of any conflict between the two measures.

It would seem that if such a petition can repeal “a statute enacted by the legislature during the interim between the initiative’s approval for circulation and its passage,” then won’t it repeal a contract or financial agreement enacted by a city council in the same circumstance?

That same decision cited an earlier 1922 Missouri Supreme Court case, State ex rel. Drain v. Becker:

There, while the proposed referendum was pending but before it had been voted on by the people, the legislature purported to repeal the legislation that was the subject of the referendum and to enact a new statute that retained the essential terms of the former legislation. It then argued that this new statute could take effect, regardless of what the people voted on the matter referred, because it was later adopted and was not itself subject to the referendum.

This Court properly rejected this attempt at an end run around the referendum. It held that, once the right of referendum has been invoked, the legislature “is divested of all power in regard to the matter referred until the action of the people has been exercised by a vote upon same.”

That last sentence is the kicker. The court has held that, pending a vote of the people, the legislative body is powerless on that particular matter. So yes, Mayor Lucas, the council may be twiddling its thumbs while the petition process plays out.

The real impact of the petition, however, may not be on the council. I can easily imagine an attorney for a builder, lender, or investor advising their client to steer clear of the project until the petition matter is resolved either by a vote of the people or by months or years of litigation. What company wants to find itself attached to a financing package that voters may yet reject? And the city would be foolish to sign contracts that it may not be able to live up to because of the results of a vote.

It would not surprise me if, despite his dismissive language now, Lucas and the current council vote to put the petition on the ballot themselves, arguing that any delay will just add to the cost of the project. They’ll count on the Royals and their supporters to fund another political campaign. The question then becomes: Are John Sherman and the Royals ownership willing to risk another election defeat?

The post No, Kansas City Cannot Rush Royals Financing to Beat a Petition Vote appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Doug Burris, retired Justice Services Director and Chief United States Probation Officer, about criminal justice reform in Missouri and St. Louis. They discuss Missouri’s risk-based approach to sentencing and supervision; why building more prisons may not reduce crime; low violent-crime clearance rates in St. Louis; the case for bail reform and expanded electronic monitoring; the Safer Supervision Act before Congress; and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Welcome to the podcast, Doug Burris, who has been in and around criminal justice reform. I know you’ve been making a lot of pushes nationally, and you’ve worked within Missouri. What I want to talk about today is that in St. Louis city and county, folks are really celebrating this reduction in crime. Murders are down, and therefore we are on the verge of solving this issue. But it doesn’t feel that way to people who live there. I know you ran the county jail for a while and you’ve been closely involved in what’s going on there. What is your perspective on the St. Louis region in terms of where things stand today, in the middle of 2026, when it comes to criminal justice reform and identifying and clearing crimes?

Doug Burris (00:57):
Well, first of all, Susan, thank you for having me as a guest on your show. It’s greatly appreciated. I’m such a fan of the Show-Me Institute. To answer your question, there has been some progress, but I think what we have done is taken baby steps and we still need to walk and then run. There’s much work that needs to be done. I think the state of Missouri as a whole has been a great example of what can happen when criminal justice reform is done correctly. What was done with the Department of Corrections with prior work, including House Bill 1525, allowed for focusing on more high-risk cases and moving low-risk cases through the system quicker, getting them productive and out once they are. That’s what should be done more at the federal level, following what the state of Missouri did, and also at the local levels in the city of St. Louis. I think that’s exactly where we’re headed.

Susan Pendergrass (02:00):
So what did happen at the state level in Missouri? How did they shift their focus? It sounds kind of strange, but to make this system more effective and efficient, you need to find and lock up violent criminals, but people who are not violent criminals who commit a crime could be dealt with differently. What did Missouri do specifically?

Doug Burris (02:01):
Well, Missouri led the way for the rest of the country, as did Texas, where they implemented various reforms. One was making sentencing decisions and supervision decisions based on a risk level, where they had risk assessments that followed the science of criminal justice on who needs to be the most supervised and frankly the longest incarcerated, as opposed to the exact opposite. I’ll give two extremes of the situation. At the federal level, we have a grandmother who continues to cash her dead husband’s Social Security check, and that person ends up on federal supervision on the same caseload as a violent child predator. It’s really not necessary to have that woman on supervision when the real focus should be on the violent person. There is the Safer Supervision Act that’s before Congress right now, and we’re really hoping that gets passed so there will be more emphasis on supervising the people who are at highest risk, using risk assessments as a tool to determine that.

Susan Pendergrass (03:45):
And how long has Missouri been doing this? Do we know anything about how it has impacted the size of the prison population?

Doug Burris (03:53):
That’s a fantastic question. It’s been in play for about five years now. What has happened is the population of both the prisons in Missouri and the people on supervision has decreased, but the crime rates have not gone up. The same thing has held in Texas, which has done it for just a little bit longer than Missouri. So following the science really does work. And it’s at a considerable expense. It’s about thirty thousand dollars to house someone in a Missouri prison, and in a federal prison it’s over forty-two thousand dollars. It might be cheaper to send these people to college than to send them to jail or prison. And of course there might be more good done too, because there have been all kinds of studies showing that people who get an education or vocational training have drastically lower recidivism rates. That’s what we really need to be focusing on, and not the grandmother I talked about earlier.

Susan Pendergrass (04:58):
Well, it seems to me that a lot of states, including red states, are moving toward the idea of just building more and bigger prisons and locking everybody up, because if you want to show that you really care about crime, you demonstrate that you are ready to lock everybody up. But that’s not effective or efficient, right?

Doug Burris (05:21):
No, that’s exactly right. And unfortunately we’re seeing that in our neighboring state of Arkansas, where they’re constructing a new prison expected to cost one billion dollars to open the doors. One billion dollars. And then to operate it, if their annual rate of housing someone in prison equals Missouri’s, it will cost about a hundred million dollars a year to operate. And again, we’re going to have people in there who could be supervised in the community or given opportunities like drug treatment, job training, and education, things that will have people contributing to the tax base rather than taking from it.

Susan Pendergrass (06:03):
How do you convince people that a risk assessment is going to work when they want all the criminals off the streets?

Doug Burris (06:10):
Well, it’s twofold. One is we have to educate people that putting someone in prison is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars every year, and in the end they may come out more angry and less able to adapt to the community. The other thing is to follow the science. Look at what Missouri has done and what Texas has done, where they have lowered the prison population and crime has actually gone down. This is something other states should be following as well. We can’t keep everyone in prison forever. We just can’t afford it. And not only that, but it’s also inhumane. The cost would be astronomical if we start keeping people in prison for low-risk crimes that in some cases have no victims.

Susan Pendergrass (07:10):
A couple of things came up in the last legislative session. Governor Kehoe passed a violent crime clearance rate grant program, but the legislature hasn’t funded it. What are your thoughts on that?

Doug Burris (07:27):
When it comes to violent crime, I’m all in favor of keeping the most violent people in as long as possible and perhaps even for life. The question is where can we find ways to save money with those who aren’t violent? That’s what we really need to be focusing on. When you’re supervising a violent person but you also have nonviolent people on your caseload, it really just doesn’t make sense.

Susan Pendergrass (08:01):
Well, I was just thinking specifically about trying to direct some funds toward clearing crimes, because even though murders are down, clearance rates on murders are still pretty low in St. Louis, in the thirty to forty percent range. I would think that the same people who are interested in locking everybody up would like to clear more of these crimes. If you look at carjackings, most of those go unsolved. Maybe one in ten is cleared. While we focus on risk assessment, which is a great idea, there are other things we could be doing, like working harder to clear the crimes that are committed.

Doug Burris (08:39):
Absolutely. That makes complete and total sense, because when you’re talking about the worst of the worst, they don’t commit one crime and then never do it again. This is an excellent idea for putting resources toward making the community safer.

Susan Pendergrass (08:56):
Another thing that came up in the last legislative session was DNA testing people who are arrested, running their DNA and then disposing of it if they don’t match anything. I don’t think that went anywhere. I know there are a number of bills that have moved through trying to make Missouri a safer place. It wasn’t a really productive legislative session in 2026 in Jefferson City. A lot of things didn’t happen, but things are being attempted. What about St. Louis specifically? Having run the jail in the county, what do you think needs to be done there to improve residents’ feeling of safety?

Doug Burris (09:38):
I think more resources need to be directed at the court level, first of all, and at the investigative level like you talked about. But there are people in jail awaiting trial who have not been found guilty for three to five years. Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a place where you don’t see the sun for three to five years? You don’t feel the sun on your face or the hug of a loved one. I saw some of those cases where people were headed to trial and after three to five years the case just goes away. I think we need to really focus on giving the courts resources, and that includes both prosecutors and public defenders. Public defenders have some of the highest caseloads in the nation here in Missouri. If someone is innocent or can be dealt with quickly and given a path to become a productive citizen, that’s what we really should be focusing on.

Susan Pendergrass (10:37):
What about the bail system? Does that need reforming?

Doug Burris (10:41):
Yes, I really think so. That’s one of the things some other states have done that has shown incredible results: using a risk assessment at bail. The federal system does that currently, and I think it’s still underutilized. There are things that can be done with that risk assessment in terms of supervision strategies, but I think the judge needs to know the absolute risk of that person and what can be done to address it when making a decision on bail.

Susan Pendergrass (11:14):
Can’t we put more people on monitoring? I hate to suggest everyone gets an ankle monitor, but can’t we monitor more people while they’re awaiting trial rather than having to house and feed them?

Doug Burris (11:31):
Yes, absolutely. That’s an area that needs to be expanded. In the St. Louis County jail, for example, which is the largest jail in Missouri, there are three hundred people in custody right now who are low risk. We’re spending about a hundred and twenty dollars a day to keep them in jail, potentially for years. Low-risk people, if you follow the science, can typically be supervised in the community.

Susan Pendergrass (12:06):
So do you think that if we were to implement all of these reforms, do a risk assessment on every person charged, only lock up the violent criminals, and let people await their trial at home, that St. Louis would feel more safe or less safe?

Doug Burris (12:07):
Well, I think with proper supervision you’d have to do it right. You just can’t let everyone out. Utilizing the risk assessment would really be the key, because someone may be charged with a low-risk crime this time, but they could be on parole for a prior murder or rape or something along those lines. That’s why you really need to look at the risk assessment to determine the appropriate strategies for releasing people.

Susan Pendergrass (12:42):
Yeah. This just seems to be a growing sector of our economy and a growing slice of the budget pie. Missouri has budget problems. We’re putting so much money toward this idea of reducing crime, and for some reason people still just don’t want to walk to their car alone at night. I know there’s a lot of general public disorder in St. Louis, graffiti, homelessness, panhandlers, that also contribute to it. I wish I could understand a reasonable, cost-effective approach to

Doug Burris (13:26):
Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (13:37):
improving those conditions, because I know other cities have and I believe St. Louis can do it, but we have this reputation of being a crime-ridden city, and I think that’s so unfortunate.

Doug Burris (13:47):
Right. I completely agree with you. The truth is the answer isn’t to lock everybody up. The United States has the second highest rate of incarceration on the planet, only behind North Korea. The Department of Justice reports that if incarceration rates remain the same, one out of every fifteen adults in the United States will serve a prison term. One out of every fifteen. And that’s a prison term for a felony conviction, not a jail term for a DUI or a bad check. The costs are astronomical: thirty thousand dollars a year to house someone in a Missouri prison, paid for by the taxpayers. There have been proven strategies for getting people in and out of the criminal justice system. Ninety-three percent of those who remain employed on supervision successfully complete supervision. Those who remain unemployed throughout their supervision have a more than fifty percent failure rate. Getting people a decent job where they can care for others and find meaning is really one of the keys to lowering crime.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45):
Yeah. And there are public-private partnerships, and partnerships through religious organizations and other programs that have been shown to work, if we would free them up.

Doug Burris (15:13):
That is so true. Chuck Colson’s old organization, Prison Fellowship, is one of the best with the programs they offer in prisons and to people when they get out. It has proven, particularly in Iowa, to show drastic reductions in recidivism.

Susan Pendergrass (15:25):
Wow, that’s great. So I’m surprised to hear that Missouri has led the way on prison populations. I thought there was consideration about building a new prison, but I believe it’s not happening. Is that right?

Doug Burris (15:55):
Yes, that’s exactly right. Our prison population has actually decreased in the last few years.

Susan Pendergrass (16:03):
Wow, that’s really surprising to me. But good to hear. So what are you looking for the governor or the state legislature to do in the coming years?

Doug Burris (16:12):
I think they should build on the reforms that have already been proven to be successful. The one thing you mentioned that I think is frankly brilliant is the idea of working to close open violent crime cases, because on the violent cases, the chances are it’s not one crime they committed and then they go to work the next day and never commit another crime. I think that would be something fantastic for the state legislature to do.

Susan Pendergrass (16:37):
And at the federal level, what are you hoping to see done?

Doug Burris (16:46):
The Safer Supervision Act, as I mentioned before, is actually a bipartisan act, but it’s being led by the right right now. The conservatives are the ones who have introduced it into Congress. The Department of Justice is in favor of it. It would make the assessments we talked about more prominent, and it would also give people incentives to do things right, like getting a college education or a good-paying job and paying off restitution, where they can get off supervision earlier. That makes complete sense. But also, almost everyone convicted of a federal crime now is given supervision, like the grandmother I mentioned earlier who cashed her dead husband’s Social Security checks after he passed. This would allow for a more

Susan Pendergrass (17:33):
Mm-hmm.

Doug Burris (17:42):
thorough assessment at the time of sentencing, for the judge to not put people on supervision who don’t need it. That would clear up resources so more time could be spent on the people who really need to be supervised, as opposed to those who don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (18:01):
Yeah. A lot of the sentencing reform we hear about involves mandatory minimums, which force judges into incarcerating people whether they want to or not. I assume that’s not something you would support.

Doug Burris (18:16):
No. I worked in the federal system for twenty-three years and saw the damage that mandatory minimums have done. For instance, with crack cases, I saw a judge sentence someone who was selling five grams of crack. A gram is equal to about a sugar packet you put into your coffee, and five grams carried a mandatory five years. And then you would have people with no mandatory minimums who robbed a bank and did a shooting receive lower sentences than drug cases. Thankfully there were two reductions in the crack mandatory minimums, applied retroactively. Over 23,000 people had a resentencing, and when they were released, they did not offend at higher levels than those who served their full terms. That was money well saved. The judge has a better idea on sentencing someone when they have all the facts of the case before them, rather than relying on a statistical report done ten years prior that says, because he was convicted of this crime, he gets this sentence.

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Yeah. Right. Well, I’m relatively new to this area, but I think it’s all pretty fascinating. We struggle enough to get people to live in our cities, and if they don’t feel safe, that’s not going to help. I look forward to learning more about this area of policy and following more closely what Missouri and St. Louis specifically are doing. I would like to have you come back and talk about it again when there are real policies being considered, because it’s not going away and there’s a lot to learn.

Doug Burris (20:11):
Well, I appreciate it. I enjoyed my forty-year career in the criminal justice system, and hopefully I’ll be the only guy you’ve ever met who has been in more prisons than John Gotti.

Susan Pendergrass (20:16):
Hopefully. Thank you so much, Doug. I really appreciate it.

Doug Burris (20:27):
Thank you, Susan. It was a real honor.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Risk, Reform, and Public Safety in Missouri with Doug Burris appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to The Kansas City Star, the city has not yet formally applied for funding under Missouri’s Show-Me Sports Investment Act. State participation is a central piece of the financing plan, and city officials are already considering ways to secure up to $600 million in local support.

Negotiations of this scale are complicated. City, state, and team officials may simply still be working through the details. But the delay raises an obvious question. If the public financing package is as straightforward as supporters suggest, why are the numbers still unavailable? (The same could be asked of the Chiefs deal in Kansas.)

One possibility is that the arithmetic is becoming more difficult as officials move from press announcement to actual financing plans.

When the stadium was announced, the Royals indicated that roughly 60% of the project’s estimated $1.9 billion cost would come from public sources. That implies well over $1 billion in taxpayer support. Yet the Show-Me Sports Investment Act places meaningful limits on state assistance. As I noted previously, available estimates suggest the state’s contribution may be closer to $250 million than the much larger figures that have circulated publicly.

If state support is lower than hoped, the remaining public contribution would need to come from Kansas City taxpayers through various tax diversions and subsidies. It won’t be cheap.

The political environment may become even more challenging if voters get a chance to weigh in. Opponents of the project have submitted signatures seeking a public vote on the city’s participation. That effort remains uncertain, but financing proposals acceptable to elected officials may not be acceptable to the public—as we learned in 2024.

To make matters more confusing, the Star previously reported:

Mayor Quinton Lucas told reporters that the city has projections for how much tax revenue a new stadium could generate based on what Kauffman Stadium in the Truman Sports Complex produces now — which city officials say is roughly $5 million a year.

That $5 million is currently going into the city’s coffers and used to fund police, infrastructure, and other public goods. Moving the team downtown and then returning that money to the Royals is not a wash—it’s a $5 million hit to the budget each year. And that does not include the cost to the city if the stadium fails to generate enough money to cover the bond payments—because the city will issue the bonds and back them up.

This project is bad for taxpayers and bad for the city. The delay from the city and the state in providing financing details suggests that elected leaders are beginning to understand exactly how bad it will be.

The post Kansas City Mum on Royals Ransom appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Cory Koedel, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, about Missouri education policy following the 2026 legislative session. They discuss the governor’s A to F letter grade executive order, why literacy legislation failed to pass, leadership turmoil at DESE, Show-Me’s latest Report on the effects of open enrollment, the case for expanding charter schools in Missouri, and more.

The post Missouri’s Stalled Education Reforms with Cory Koedel appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When Missouri and Kansas agreed to a border war truce in 2019, the agreement was widely celebrated as the end of an expensive and counterproductive competition.

After spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars moving jobs back and forth across State Line Road, both states agreed to stop subsidizing the relocation of existing employers within the Kansas City region.

The agreement, which consisted of legislation on the Missouri side (which sunset last year) and an executive order from the Kansas side, was a good idea. But I argued at the time that Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s executive order contained a glaring weakness. Specifically, I questioned how Kansas would define “net new jobs” and whether companies could continue receiving incentives by combining a relocation with a modest expansion.

Seven years later, Governor Kelly has provided the answer.

Defending Kansas’s $125 million incentive package for Lockton’s new headquarters in Leawood, Kelly argued the deal does not violate the border war truce because “We will not incentivize the move of current jobs. If a company is going to move and expand, we’ll talk.”

That is almost precisely the scenario I described in 2019: “Could a growing Missouri firm already planning to make a few new hires take that plan to Kansas and seek incentives—using those ‘net new jobs’ as leverage?”

The company is expected to move roughly 1,500 existing jobs from Missouri to Kansas while adding approximately 500 new positions. Under Governor Kelly’s interpretation, those additional jobs are enough to distinguish the project from the type of incentive-fueled relocation the truce was intended to prevent.

But the transaction looks familiar. Thousands of jobs move across the state line. Taxpayers provide substantial subsidies. Public officials attend a groundbreaking and celebrate job creation.

The fundamental question is whether those additional jobs would have been created anyway. It is a difficult question to answer from the outside, yet the system incentivizes businesses to claim the growth is due to the incentive.

A real economic border war truce is worth crafting. But unfortunately, the 2019 truce isn’t that.

The post The Border War Truce’s Predictable (and Predicted) Problem appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The St. Louis Public Schools District (SLPS) routinely overspends its budget. A recent state auditor’s report warns that continued deficit spending could push the district’s reserve fund below the 3% threshold—the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s formal marker for serious financial stress. In fact, the district was already downgraded from accredited to provisionally accredited by the state school board over its financial troubles.

Yet even as enrollment declines, budgets tighten, and accreditation hangs in the balance, SLPS continues to fumble basic asset management. The district has failed to sell six long-vacant school buildings in north St. Louis, many of which have sat empty for nearly two decades. It is now moving forward with plans to demolish them. So, instead of aggressively pursuing sales and accepting realistic offers, the district is preparing to charge St. Louis taxpayers for million-dollar demolitions.

This pattern is not merely troubling. It is mind-boggling, especially for a district with only 18,284 students still enrolled — a drop of more than 97,000 students since its demographic peak of 115,543 in 1967.

To be fair, selling these properties is genuinely difficult. St. Louis has suffered decades of population loss, concentrated poverty, and economic decline, making redevelopment of large, aging, and often deteriorated historic buildings a tough sell. Attracting private developers willing to take on major rehabilitation projects in these neighborhoods is no easy task.

But that reality makes the district’s track record even more damning. In one case, it seems that SLPS didn’t even bother to respond to offers on a building:

Benjamin Anderson said that he has tried to buy the 133-year-old Euclid School in the Fountain Park neighborhood for three years—he even had the property under contract for $200,000 at one time—but he couldn’t get the district to respond before the contract expired.

“They completely ghosted us,” Anderson said Friday.

The building is now slated to be demolished.

Many of these schools are among the city’s most architecturally significant buildings. Symbols of inertia and vanishing civic pride, they are simply left to decay while the district explores expensive demolition using insurance funds and city taxes. Critical resources that could support classroom instruction are thus directed toward tearing down infrastructure.

The challenges at SLPS underscore a deeper failure of accountability. When a public school district cannot control costs, manage its real estate portfolio effectively, or adapt to enrollment reality, students and taxpayers bear the costly burden of that failure.

The post A Failing Grade in School Management appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Birth rates have been declining in the United States for decades, and there is little indication that the trend will reverse anytime soon. This poses challenges for many of our institutions that were built on the implicit assumption of continued population growth. Social Security is the most prominent example. Because the program relies on taxes paid by current workers to fund benefits for retirees, it depends on a steady influx of younger workers. Social Security is in trouble, and its day of reckoning is not far off.

More quietly, schools across the United States are struggling with declining enrollment. After decades of needing more—more buildings, more teachers, more staff—we’re entering an era where we will need less of all these things.

In Missouri, public school enrollment has declined about 4 percent since the turn of the century. The decline has been even steeper in many urban areas.

The enrollment decline is not a temporary phenomenon. Demographic projections indicate the trend is likely to continue and, in many places, accelerate. And unlike forecasts of the weather or stock market, demographic projections are highly reliable. We know what is coming.

Yet many districts continue to operate as if enrollment will rebound. This is understandable. School closures and staff reductions are politically difficult and often deeply unpopular. However, delaying these decisions does not change the underlying demographic reality.

Preparing for continued enrollment decline means consolidating and, in some cases, closing schools. It also means aligning staffing levels with student enrollment. With limited resources available for public education, maintaining excess capacity spreads those resources too thinly, undermining educational quality.

The demographic writing is on the wall. One way or another, our school system will need to respond. Districts that plan proactively for declining enrollment are likely to navigate the transition more successfully than those that postpone difficult decisions until circumstances leave them no choice.

The post Declining Enrollment Will Force Hard Choices in Missouri Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Tim Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about why American culture may be making it harder to have and raise children. They discuss the long-term consequences of the declining U.S. birth rate, how intensive parenting culture may be driving childhood anxiety, the “travel team trap” and the arms race of youth sports, what cities and communities can do to become more family-friendly, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Tim Carney. Thank you for joining us. You’re a senior fellow at AEI? I listened to a podcast the other day with a demographer from the University of Pennsylvania, and it was really good. I think they have a pretty strong department. He said that the United States reached peak child in 2012 or 2013, and basically

Tim Carney (00:06): That’s about right.

Susan Pendergrass (00:24): numbers have been going down on babies ever since. We definitely see that in Missouri. That was our biggest kindergarten cohort, and numbers are going down. I have five grandchildren under the age of five, and it seems to me this is going to be the policy conundrum of their generation. What do you think?

Tim Carney (00:44): It is certainly the biggest story of the next thirty years, policy, cultural, economic, everything. Another way of putting it: the number of births in the US peaked in 2007. Those kids born in 2007 either graduated last year or are graduating this week. Colleges know this very well. They’re all bracing for it. What about ten years from now when the workforce starts significantly shrinking?

Susan Pendergrass (01:03): Yeah.

Tim Carney (01:11): What about the towns that are built around a public school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and those start shrinking? Particularly in rural places, they’re seeing consolidation, two different public schools or two different Catholic schools consolidating. Can schools adjust to being small? How much is this a self-reinforcing spiral? When there are fewer kids, people aren’t used to seeing kids around. Yes, absolutely. It’s the biggest story of the next thirty years.

Susan Pendergrass (01:37): In your new book, Family Unfriendly, I think it’s interesting to juxtapose these two things. At the same time, we’re making it so much harder to raise kids in our culture, and we’ve raised the expectations for each and every one of them so high that people who are considering having kids find it daunting. It used to be, when I was young, people had six or seven kids and just hoped for the best. Everyone did okay. But now every child has these insane expectations, and I sympathize. If your child doesn’t roll over by six months old, they need occupational therapy now. That did not used to be the case. Doesn’t that work against it?

Tim Carney (02:12): Yes. A lot of economists have been praising quality over quantity parenting for years. Isabel Sawhill is an economist I’ve worked with for years, but I think she’s dead wrong when she says this is good, that people are choosing fewer kids so they can invest more in each one. That sounds right, but then you realize

Susan Pendergrass (02:33): Okay.

Tim Carney (02:53): the American Pediatrics journal says the number one cause of the epidemic of childhood anxiety we’re facing right now is lack of unsupervised play. So parents who are giving their kids the best of everything, making sure they’re not just wandering around the neighborhood, making sure they’re safe and busy with violin lessons and enrichment activities and a special private pitching coach for softball, that’s supposedly high-quality parenting. But it comes with low-quality results, which is very anxious kids, as well as stressed-out parents. People ask how my wife and I do it with six kids. I like giving answers about the special cool systems I have, but the real answer is a lot of times we just don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41): Yeah. I feel like I’m probably going to say a lot of unpopular opinions on this. I never liked elite sports or travel sports, but I see travel sports going nationwide now. People from Texas are going to Florida, going to California for travel sports, which I always thought was kind of insane because it didn’t work for my family. We would normally have tournaments at Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. I also see kids being absorbed into the adult world more. Craft breweries have children trying to find something to do there, which is not a very normal environment for them. High-end restaurants have little kids in them, and I just feel like that takes away from the time when they’re supposed to just be kids.

Tim Carney (04:28): I actually think mixed-age mingling is something we need more of. Sometimes when I need to get work done, I’ll go to the local craft brewery to get away from my kids, and then somebody else has all their kids there. But those kids aren’t asking me any favors, so I’m fine with it. I think it’s good that we’re building places for parents to bring kids. The way I put it, though, and again

Susan Pendergrass (04:35): Okay. Yeah. That’s right.

Tim Carney (04:58): my local brewpub allows for this, but we need places where parents can bring kids and ignore them. I brought my kids to the brewery on a cold winter day when they couldn’t be outside because it was ten degrees and forty-mile-an-hour winds. I start the book with a story, in contrast to

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

Tim Carney (05:27): high-intensity travel sports, of a program that we saw and then emulated in the Catholic parishes when we lived in Maryland, which was called Friday Night on the Field. There was T-ball and coach-pitch baseball, so this was kindergarten, first grade, second graders. Maybe 10 percent of the dads were coaching. The rest of them, if they were there, were hanging out with other dads. And the kids who were older

Susan Pendergrass (05:53): Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:56): were running around or playing wall ball. The kids who were younger were on a playground. When my wife found out what was going on there, she said, you are bringing all six of the kids to this while I stay home and rest. So I brought the kids there. I maybe had a baby in my carrier, ignoring the other four while one of them played T-ball. And that was exactly what suburban parents needed. Not this high-intensity mom and

Susan Pendergrass (06:08): Yeah, sure.

Tim Carney (06:22): child attached at the hip, but the whole family is there, it’s mixed age, and the children have freedom. This is a really important part of it in so many ways. One, that childhood is expansive and not just intensive. Two, that raising kids isn’t this hyper-intensive, constant thing. There was a commercial I cite in the book about Mother’s Day and how we need to honor mothers more. But it goes way overboard. It says they pretend they’re hiring for a job, and the requirements include you’re never allowed to sit down and you don’t get to eat meals until all of your colleagues are out for the evening. Being a mom is exhausting, and there are days where you don’t sit down, but come on. This is just not true.

Susan Pendergrass (07:00): The hardest job in the world. Yeah. I have three kids that are pretty close together. It was rocky there for a while, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a practical matter, how do you change culture? If the prescription is to back off on intensive parenting, it feels more like an arms race where people say, maybe I don’t even agree with it, but if every other kid is going to Kumon Math, my kid has to go to Kumon Math. What do you do?

Tim Carney (07:36): It’s a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. I discuss it particularly in sports. In chapter one I call it the travel team trap. The reason it’s a trap is you get stuck without wanting to. I know lots of people whose kid just wants to play JV baseball, but the coach says they have to play fall baseball too. But I’m a football player. If you’re saying I’ll miss some reps and the other guys might get ahead of me, well

Susan Pendergrass (07:57): Yeah.

Tim Carney (08:05): that’s one thing. But then the coach says you’re shirking if you’re not playing year round. We have sought out schools and programs that explicitly do not do that, but we had to seek them out. It’s harder to be a backup point guard on a varsity basketball team if you’re going to play three sports, so you might get cut from the team. To some extent the parent is just saying, I really just want them to make the team, and that’s why I’m doing this.

With the academics, there’s a similar dynamic. We put our daughter, who was struggling in math, in a remedial program, something like Kumon. When we showed up, we realized, this was in Northern Virginia, specifically McLean, which is a wealthy area. Nobody else there was remedial. Everyone else there was an A student whose parents wanted their third grader

Susan Pendergrass (08:52): I see. Okay.

Tim Carney (09:03): to be at the sixth-grade level so they could get into Thomas Jefferson, the special super-magnet high school.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08): Yeah. If kindergarten is the new second grade and preschool is the new kindergarten, where does it end? I just feel like we’re overwhelming parents. You said it’s raising anxiety in kids. It’s definitely raising anxiety in parents too. It’s making people not want to be parents. It feels very stressful right now. There are books and apps, and there’s even a book on how to be a more free-range parent, which is strange to me. Does somebody need to be told how to do this? You just let them go outside.

Tim Carney (09:46): No, it does take work. And another thing is, to quote what a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. Being free-range is easier when other people are doing it. We used to back up to a big playground, and nine times out of ten my kids were the only ones there unsupervised. I actually got an email from a neighboring parent. It wasn’t criticism. It was saying your kids are great and it’s great that you let them run free, and asking if I could talk to them about letting their own kids run free. If you’re in a neighborhood where there are kids but they don’t come out, you might have to build organized activities. We didn’t do that growing up. We just played stickball. My mom wouldn’t organize it. We did it on our own. But now parents might have to be more involved. It’s a little bit of labor, but you connect the families, connect the kids, build the trust.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (10:44): The community, and we talked about policy. I’m in DC. Everybody wants it to be a federal bill, this or that. The fact is it’s a cultural thing, as I said, and the community is going to have to have these organic, or sometimes deliberate and intentional, structures to help parents raise kids. The more parents who are walking around the neighborhood, the safer the neighborhood is. The more parents making it clear that their kids are going out and should come home when the streetlights turn on, the more that’s known, the safer it is. Remember when you and I were young, other people’s parents would correct us when we were wrong? Now, I have close friends I know I can do that with, but a lot of parents say they’re terrified of correcting someone else’s kid because they’ve been screamed at by the other parents. Your kid was

Susan Pendergrass (11:25): Mad at us. Yes.

Tim Carney (11:41): about to shove gravel down the throat of her two-year-old sister at the playground. And that’s my job too, if I’m right there. That social trust and community takes work. There are people who say it takes a village, and they can’t find their village. You have to build your village. I’m one of those conservatives who really believes that.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54): Are we willing to do the work? Do you see people doing it?

Tim Carney (12:09): We’re too individualistic, and that’s part of all of this. But I’m also one who believes the burden is really on you. You can’t wait for somebody else to do it. You build the community, and then you can sit back and bear the fruits of your labor as a neighbor yells at your kid so you don’t have to.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): You’ve also talked about building family-friendly communities. There’s a conundrum we face in Missouri: no one wants to live in downtown St. Louis. A lot of cities face that, and St. Louis is probably at the forefront. We’re in the top five for cities in decline, and St. Louis and Pittsburgh are going to serve as examples, because

Tim Carney (12:28): Yes. Mm-hmm.

Susan Pendergrass (12:53): we hit that death spiral with more deaths than births a while ago, and all of our demographic trends are going to be out ahead of everyone else. People are going to look to us. But parents don’t want to raise their kids in the city of St. Louis. And if you don’t have children, you just keep getting older. Tell me a little bit about what has happened to make cities unfriendly to families and what they could do to change it.

Tim Carney (13:19): I’m a believer that we need all of the above. I’m very pro-suburbs. That’s where I raised my kids, that’s where I went to high school. But before high school I grew up in Manhattan, and I’m very pro raising kids in cities if you can do it. The number one thing is crime, or crime and disorder. You saw this a lot during the 2020s when people would say, who cares if people are hopping over the turnstile, so what if people are smoking pot, that homeless guy sleeping on the corner isn’t going to do anything. All those little things that adults can, maybe they shouldn’t but can, turn a blind eye to are disturbing to kids and disturbing to parents. Crime and disorder needs to be put in its proper place.

But then also, this is something where liberals tend to be better than conservatives: walkability and public amenities. I don’t mean my ability to walk to work or to my favorite cocktail bar. What I really mean is my ability to walk my baby in a stroller somewhere nice, and my eight-year-old and ten-year-old’s ability to walk together to a cool park, and more importantly to walk together to their friend’s house. Cities can actually do that better than suburbs to some extent, because they can put in those amenities, which are playgrounds, parks, and other things. That means traffic. Cars have to slow down. This is something I’m really studying now at AEI. The federal government has a walkability index, and it’s laughably bad. It’s published by the EPA, so it doesn’t actually show you

Susan Pendergrass (14:45): It’s about car exhaust.

Tim Carney (15:10): whether your kids can walk somewhere without getting run over by a car. We’re trying to see if there’s a way to improve this. That’s part of the built environment. That’s explicitly a government duty. Are the roads too wide? Are the cars too fast? Are there crosswalks? Are there trails? Because once you can let your kids walk around without getting run over by cars and without running into meth heads, their childhood is so much better. And your family life is so much simpler.

Susan Pendergrass (15:41): What about safety? I think it was you mentioning something like setting up safety zones within which families could have some reasonable degree of comfort that police respond and that crime is being attended to.

Tim Carney (15:58): A big part of raising kids, in my view, is you want to give them a sort of walled garden and let them be free in that garden. Every year that garden gets bigger, and at some point you realize the walls are gone and they’re out in the world. For me, this was a back campus at St. Bernadette’s and St. Andrew’s, the parishes where we had these programs. The kids were running free, but unless there was a kid who was going to run into traffic, and there are those kids, and probably some of your viewers and listeners have one who they know is a flight risk, in general they were going to be safe. When I would leave my kids alone in a museum, I tell the story of my son Sean, who three times I’ve totally lost him, but it was always in a botanical garden or a museum or someplace similar,

Susan Pendergrass (16:33): Yeah.

Tim Carney (16:55): where someone would say, hey, who are you with, four-year-old? And then slowly expanding that realm of freedom. You can walk around the neighborhood but can’t cross over Route 50, and then slowly it gets bigger and bigger. Community norms are really what make that possible. That two-year-old shouldn’t be walking down the street alone. That six-year-old is fine.

Susan Pendergrass (16:57): Yeah. Who are you with? But haven’t we kind of ruined that with the twenty-four-hour news cycle where everybody believes their children are at risk of being abducted by a stranger at every moment?

Tim Carney (17:35): Yes, and this is part of the problem I run into. When I say we need to let kids be free to run around like we Gen Xers were, people say it’s so much more dangerous now. It’s not. Statistically, almost the whole country has gotten over the violent crime wave that came with the George Floyd unrest and COVID lockdowns. That caused a spike in all the cities, and every place in the country right now is much, much safer than it was in 1984 when I was six. By a long shot. Every parent’s worst nightmare is their child getting abducted by a stranger. These cases happen, they end up in the news, and so we all think they’re happening all the time and all around us. Evolutionarily, we don’t have a brain that can understand a country of 340 million people.

Susan Pendergrass (18:08): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (18:32): So if there are three major cases a year and people talk about it for a few weeks, it seems like there’s some kid who got kidnapped half the year. It happens fewer than a hundred times a year. If you see numbers saying children are abducted ten thousand or a hundred thousand times, those are bad situations, but they’re not stranger abductions. In almost every case, the boyfriend goes off with the kid without the mom’s permission, or the grandparents have custody and then the mom comes and takes the kid. These are not good situations, but they’re not a kid who was left alone at a playground and then shoved in the back of a white van.

Susan Pendergrass (19:20): To the extent that we could bring any of that back, and this is where I’m a little pessimistic, I think kids learn decision-making in a way that isn’t being taught now, so that we end up working with people who never made an independent decision in their life. I certainly was out and got hurt and had to figure out: am I hurt enough to go home? Am I hurt enough to keep going?

Tim Carney (19:37): Ask a boss who has hired somebody right out of college recently. Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (19:45): Got a flat tire or whatever, we had to make decisions on the fly. I just don’t think we’re building that type of independence and resilience into our kids, and it’s a loss at the global level.

Tim Carney (19:58): Absolutely. Employers should all really be getting behind what you and I are saying right now, because if they want to hire a kid out of high school or college who can make a decision. I always remember the time I used to mow lawns in high school. Once I showed up at a lawn across town, used his mower, and it just didn’t start.

Susan Pendergrass (20:05): Yes.

Tim Carney (20:21): He was not home. He had a number on the fridge. I called and said, Mr. Zellinger, your mower’s not starting. And he said, good news is I don’t come home until Monday. So you have between now and then to get the lawn mowed, and I’m confident you’ll figure out a way to do it. It wasn’t an assignment. It was a responsibility. The best way to give your kids a responsibility that’s not an assignment they can just beg out of is to let them be free. And all of a sudden they’re like, wait a second.

Susan Pendergrass (20:40): Yes. Right.

Tim Carney (20:51): I need to be there in twenty minutes. How do I make that happen? Or I’m lost, how do I get unlost? And again, the children suffer. It’s not just that they go through life happy and dumb. They end up more anxious because life will inevitably bring them these problems. There is an epidemic of childhood and adolescent anxiety, according to

Susan Pendergrass (20:56): Yeah.

Tim Carney (21:19): HHS, and it’s caused by the fact that kids don’t have enough freedom in childhood.

Susan Pendergrass (21:29): I want to circle back to actionable items. What can we do about it, realistically?

Tim Carney (21:33): On the parental freedom side, there’s not that much the government can do except build better sidewalks, crosswalks, and pathways. Housing reform is interesting here. I’m a big believer in suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be more dense. One thing that’s really freeing is when you can buy a house in the neighborhood you want to live in,

Susan Pendergrass (22:01): Yeah.

Tim Carney (22:01): because your mom lives there and you have grandma to babysit. That’s a huge predictor. So many people in Washington think everybody needs universal daycare paid for by the government. Most people want mom to work a little less and grandma and grandpa to chip in, with neighbors to fill the gaps. More housing is what enables that to happen. But for the most part, we need more robust community institutions and more robust community connections. And every parent out there has to think: maybe I’m going to be the one who does this. There’s a field across the street from your house. Start a soccer league, bring food, run a grill. This is exactly what we did with T-ball. Throw in some money to pay for it. Buy the burgers at Sam’s Club or Costco and feed everyone. Bring your six-year-old to play soccer. This is not his or her path to a college scholarship. It’s a fun thing for the families to do. But you have to start it. We started it because we saw somebody else had started it. A lot of this is going to be on an individual level. On the policy side of supporting families, there’s a lot of debate about a child tax credit, a baby bonus, universal child care, and requiring employers to give parents parental leave.

Susan Pendergrass (22:58): Yeah. A lot. Leave.

Tim Carney (23:22): I write about that a lot at AEI. AEI scholars disagree about it. In the book, what I argue is we need a child tax credit, and it needs to be a little bigger. A family of eight making a hundred thousand dollars should not be paying the same taxes as a family of two or three making a hundred thousand dollars. That should be reflected in the tax code, because this isn’t just some consumer thing. It’s not like saying, I bought a Tesla, I deserve a tax credit. It’s saying, we’re eight people, we need to eat eight people’s worth of food, and the tax code should reflect that. But on the other programs, forcing employers to offer certain benefits or creating government-run childcare, I don’t think any of that works.

Susan Pendergrass (24:02): I mean, the Nordic countries do all of it and they have population decline.

Tim Carney (24:05): They have worse population decline than we did. There was a slight uptick, and one of the arguments I make is that subsidized childcare is not really a family subsidy, it’s a work subsidy. Notice who’s lobbying for it as these things bubble up. It’s going to be the Chamber of Commerce. I’m fundamentally a family guy. I think we need work. Part of fulfilling our human dignity is doing work. But that doesn’t always have to be paid work. In the book I defend stay-at-home moms and dads. I really think our society should be oriented around families. Now that’s a little heretical these days because, well, what if you choose not to have a family? Fine. There have always been people who chose not to have families. But that doesn’t mean families can’t be the central organizing principle of our culture.

Susan Pendergrass (25:04): More people now are choosing not to have families. And a lot of cities are pursuing those people, the childless professionals with Top Golfs and loft apartments.

Tim Carney (25:10): I quote a local official in Family Unfriendly saying families are a cost and businesses are an asset. Families come in, they pay income taxes and property taxes, but then they require sewage, they require schools, they complain that the playgrounds and the sidewalks are in bad shape. Businesses are mostly revenue. Washington, DC has explicitly said they don’t just want anyone to move in. They want the college-educated 22-to-28-year-old, meaning a person who gets to spend every dime of disposable income in the restaurants and bars and shops in DC. And if you look at the housing being built in Falls Church, right near me, it’s all studio and one bedroom, because that’s what the local government wants: more singletons who go out and spend their money. Sometimes we do things that are really bad for the economy. My wife makes homemade dinner. We almost never go out. A lot of our activity doesn’t involve paying anyone. The kids are just playing wiffle ball. All of that is horrible for the economy.

Susan Pendergrass (26:19): Yeah. Falls Church used to be such a big attraction for young families because of the schools. I’ve seen the shiny buildings going up recently, and I’m shocked by it. That’s interesting to me.

Tim Carney (26:44): I think it’s good to build more housing. But if it helps boomers sell their single-family homes to move into apartments, then it frees up family housing. This is a really complicated thing. We need more housing, but so many of the YIMBYs just want massive apartment buildings with as many apartments as possible, and that’s family unfriendly. What we really need, in my opinion, is slightly more dense suburbs,

Susan Pendergrass (26:54): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:14): a starter home that somebody can buy. That’s basically impossible to build, especially in a high-cost area like this, or in the nicer suburbs around St. Louis and Kansas City. You’re not going to build them because of the regulatory overhead. If I build a single-family house and sell it for two hundred thousand dollars, that’s not worth it. I’m either going to build a McMansion or an apartment building.

Susan Pendergrass (27:26): They’re not building them. No. They’re doing the six hundreds. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:41): Getting rid of a lot of the regulations that make it impossible to build a starter home is one of the best things that states and counties can do.

Susan Pendergrass (27:49): I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it. It’s a thorny issue. Countries that have really tried their best to encourage people to have more children haven’t been successful. This is going to be one of the biggest policy conundrums of the next few decades. The earlier we start talking about it, the better. I’ve been talking about it for at least five years in Missouri. We just had our smallest high school graduating class two years ago. People ask, where did the people go? They didn’t go anywhere. The babies haven’t been born, and we need to get used to it so that we can start thinking about how to solve it. I love a lot of your ideas. We have to think about solutions to this because if it feels overwhelming to have children, then people won’t have them.

Tim Carney (28:41): That’s exactly right.

Susan Pendergrass (28:42): Family Unfriendly. And your other book was Alienated America.

Tim Carney (28:44): Family Unfriendly. And Alienated America, which is about the collapse of community, which is upstream from this problem.

Susan Pendergrass (28:53): Lack of social capital and all of that. I think these are going to be some of the most important issues we can think about going forward. I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it.

Tim Carney (29:00): Thank you, my pleasure.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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Life comes at you in waves. You graduate high school, watch friends start careers, get married, and have kids. Then social media shows you their children repeating the cycle. As a member of the Pacific High School Class of 1999, I didn’t expect to reach the retirement wave so soon.

Yet a recent post stopped me: a high school classmate, still in his mid-40s, announced his retirement after 25 years in Missouri public schools. Most recently a principal earning roughly $130,000 per year, he is now eligible for approximately $71,500 in annual (with cost-of-living adjustments) pension benefits for the rest of his life. He can also continue working and earning additional income.

He is retiring at exactly the age when most professionals hit their career peak—when experience, leadership, and judgment are most valuable. And that’s the problem.

Missouri’s Public School Retirement System (PSRS) is pushing talented educators out of the classroom at the very moment students and schools need them most. This isn’t just a fiscal issue. It’s a direct loss to Missouri’s school children.

My classmate is doing exactly what the system incentivizes him to do. The “25-and-Out” provision hands him a guaranteed lifetime annuity worth over $3 million in today’s dollars. He’d be foolish not to take it. But Missouri schools are left without a proven leader right when his institutional knowledge and expertise could have the greatest impact.

This is the perverse reality of the current defined-benefit system. It encourages strong teachers and administrators to leave mid-career, creating turnover, knowledge gaps, and disruption for students. Districts then spend time and money searching for replacements, often settling for less experienced candidates.

Reform is long overdue. What could Missouri do?

• Raise the minimum age or service requirements for unreduced early retirement.
• Adjust benefit formulas for new hires to match longer careers and lifespans.
• Offer new employees a hybrid or defined-contribution plan with portability and shared risk.

Current retirees and vested members should be protected. But going forward, incentives should align with what’s best for students. Competitive benefits matter, but not at the expense of keeping great educators in our schools during their most productive years.

The post Life Comes at You in Waves—And Sometimes It Brings Early Retirement appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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While guest-hosting Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, Patrick Tuohey is joined by Elias Tsapelas to discuss the Missouri legislature’s effort to begin eliminating the income tax. They break down why Missouri’s tax climate is holding back economic and population growth, how a gradual phase-out could work, and why concerns about sales tax rates may be overblown.

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On June 5, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, guest-hosted Mundo in the Morning on KCMO Talk Radio, where Terrence Wise of the Missouri Workers Center announced the organization had collected over 4,500 signatures, more than double the roughly 2,000 required, to force a public vote on any taxpayer subsidy of the proposed downtown Royals ballpark. The city clerk has 10 days to validate the signatures, after which the city council has 60 days to act, with a public vote expected in November.

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