Shoring Up School Choice Laws

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

Missouri families need access to multiple options for their children’s education, and this need has only become more pressing since the COVID-19 pandemic. Two options—charter schools and virtual learning through the Missouri Course Access Program (MOCAP)—are already available to some Missouri families. However, it has become evident that the laws governing these options need to be amended to ensure that families can access them as intended. House Bill (HB) 1552 is nearly through the Missouri House and Senate, and is intended to fix some of these problems. Let’s look at what’s in this bill.

Charter school funding – Current Missouri law requires districts to share their state aid with the public charter schools within their borders, based on the number of public school students who choose to attend charter schools. However, lawmakers didn’t anticipate what would happen if the number of public school students in charter schools was so high that a district’s state aid wasn’t enough to cover the charter school students, as is currently the case in Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS). Over half of the public school students in Kansas City have chosen charter schools, and the funding for those students equals the entirety of KCPS’ state aid and more. If more public school students choose charter schools, the pie will not get bigger. Rather, each public charter school student will receive a smaller slice of state aid from the district.

Secondly, under current law, public charter school students do not have access to the same sources of local funding as their counterparts attending a district public school. Local aid for non-charter public school students includes property taxes, merchants’ and manufacturers’ taxes, financial institution tax revenues, all city sales tax revenue, payments in lieu of taxes, and revenues from state-assessed railroad and utility taxes. HB 1552 would correct these imbalances by requiring that the state provide the difference between the amount available through a district’s funding and the amount charter school students are guaranteed to receive The state would make up the difference in funding.

MOCAP access – The Missouri Course Access Program, or MOCAP, became accessible to all Missouri public school students at no charge beginning in fall 2018. However, the legislation that made MOCAP available to Missouri families has several shortcomings. The first is that students must receive permission to attend MOCAP from their local superintendent. In far too many cases districts have refused, and students have had to sue to enroll in MOCAP. Second, funding for MOCAP students flows from the state, through the student’s local district (or charter school), and out to MOCAP. This establishes a slight financial disincentive to allow students to enroll, because it creates the perception that the district has to “pay” for the student’s virtual education. Finally, the state assessment scores of MOCAP students are incorporated into their local district’s (or charter school’s) test scores, which are used for accountability purposes and, in the case of charter schools, count toward charter renewal.

HB1552 addresses these shortcomings, but only for students who choose to be full-time virtual students, not students who just take a virtual class or two. Under HB1552, parents and students would be able to apply directly to full-time virtual providers, the test scores for full-time virtual providers would be considered as a separate school, and funding for full-time virtual providers would come directly from the state.

Students choosing to attend charter schools or enroll in MOCAP are public school students and should not be treated differently than their peers who attend their assigned public school. HB1552 would correct several shortcomings in the laws governing how these important educational options.

Parents’ Bill of Rights Law Passes the House

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

This week, the Missouri House of Representatives gave initial approval to a Parents’ Bill of Rights bill, the culmination of months of hard work by members across the chamber. The bill is a bit of a mash-up of reforms relating to school transparency and instruction—eight amendments were added to the bill after the title was expanded, each from a different House member—but the final legislative product is one that parents and reformers can get behind. The Missouri Independent has more details on the bill:

The bill . . . aims to “to empower parents to enforce” rights laid out in the bill, like knowing what curriculum is being taught and allowing parents to visit schools to check on their children. . . .

An amendment added to the bill [] would prohibit teachers or students from being forced to adopt ideas in violation of sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such as concepts that individuals are inherently superior or inferior based on their race, ethnicity, color or national origin or “bear collective guilt” for the actions their ancestors may have committed in the past. . . .

Other provisions included in the bill require that public school employees’ salaries be included in the state’s accountability portal, allow for lawsuits if school boards fail to follow requirements that allow for public comment and directs the state education department to develop a database for schools to post their curriculum and professional development materials every six months.

The bill also requires that districts post their curricula on their websites, one of many ideas that overlaps with the Show-Me Institute’s Parents’ Bill of Rights published last year. If this bill is passed, it will go straight into law. This is in contrast to House Joint Resolution (HJR) 110, which would first go to voters, but would also have the benefit of entering the Missouri Constitution.

It’s been a slow process, but it is good to see some of the legislative logjam in Jefferson City that’s bedeviled lawmaking for over three months finally making its way down the river. I look forward to testifying on this legislation in the Senate and hope these reforms complete the legislative process and become law. Onward.

Medicaid’s Volatile Upcoming Year

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

As Missouri’s legislators begin crafting next year’s budget, one of the biggest questions they’re facing is how much the state’s Medicaid program is going to cost. Because Missouri’s budget is constitutionally required to be balanced, the size of Medicaid will directly impact our state’s ability to pay for other funding priorities.

It should be no shock that the past two years have been tumultuous and expensive for Missouri’s largest government program. Medicaid fulfilled its role as the state’s health coverage provider during a global pandemic, and on top of that, Missouri also adopted Medicaid expansion. These two factors have the potential to swing state Medicaid spending by billions of dollars.

Today, Missouri’s Medicaid program enrollment sits at the highest point in state history, which as I’ve written before, is in large part because of COVID-19. Fortunately, there’s hope that the federal state of emergency for the pandemic will end in the next few months. Such a move would represent a green light for states to begin once again checking whether program enrollees still qualify for the services they’re receiving (one of the conditions of receiving stimulus funds for Medicaid was not removing anyone from the rolls for the time being).

This is important because enrollment is the single biggest driver of Medicaid spending, and there are many reasons to believe that there are large numbers of ineligible enrollees right now. According to the Urban Institute, more than 350,000 current enrollees could lose coverage if the state starts checking eligibility again. To put that number in context, even if you assume the monthly cost of coverage for these enrollees is $400 (it’s likely higher), this is saying the state may be spending $140 million per month on people who don’t qualify to receive services!

It should not be controversial to insist that state tax dollars only pay the cost of health coverage for those who meet the qualifications to receive it. In normal times, federal law requires states to check eligibility regularly to ensure funds aren’t being wasted. Federal law also requires those who are qualified to receive benefits regardless of any administrative difficulties. This is a problem for many Missourians right now, as the wait time for application processing far exceeds what’s allowed by federal law. (It should be noted that those who are eligible for coverage when they apply will have their qualified costs covered retroactively once enrolled regardless of processing time.)

To summarize: There’s an enormous backlog of current enrollees whose eligibility needs to be checked, and once an eligibility check is completed we will likely see a major decline in total enrollment. But there’s also a sizable backlog of applicants who are waiting to be enrolled—and once that process is complete, total enrollment will increase.

The good news is that the governor and legislature appear to recognize the enormity of the task ahead; both have included increased funding to help reduce the administrative backlogs in their budgets. It’s anybody’s best guess how much Medicaid enrollment will fluctuate over the next year, but there are potentially billions of reasons that state taxpayers should care about enrollment numbers.

Podcast: Raises for Teachers, Billions for Meta, and a New Stadium for the Chiefs

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Patrick Ishmael, Susan Pendergrass and Elias Tsapelas join Zach Lawhorn to discuss the Missouri budget, a massive tax incentive deal in KC, the possibility of the Chiefs moving to Kansas, and more.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on Sticher 

Listen on SoundCloud

In Another Grinding Legislative Session, Missourians’ Priorities Getting Ignored Again

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

After countless hours of debate and filibuster, the Missouri Senate finally passed a version of a redistricted Congressional map—a regular and expected exercise required of legislatures after each Census. That redistricting debate is still not over, but the slow and plodding pace on this relatively simple piece of legislation is indicative of both the House and Senate’s failure to get much done this year. Coming into 2022, a lot of leading Missouri politicians talked a good game about getting freedom-enhancing priorities passed for the public, but so far that talk has amounted to just spending billions of dollars of federal money. Not much extra freedom there.

What’s the cost of this legislative inaction been so far? From failing to establish a parents’ bill of rights to making no progress on reforming taxes, priorities of all sorts are increasingly in peril as the end of the session draws ever nearer with each passing fruitless legislative day.

Congressional maps are only part of the problem, of course. The main problem is that the Senate supermajority, bizarrely, cannot agree among themselves on what major legislative priorities to pass and when to test the commitment of the minority to a filibuster of the majority’s plans. Bills are filibustered. Resolutions are filibustered. The journal (!) is filibustered. And economic freedom and school choice and transparency and tax reform go by the wayside.

The result is that instead of fending off just one faction of filibusterers, the Senate now has two sizable filibustering factions: the liberal minority and, now, the conservative caucus.

It’s easy to dust off the old saw that this is just how the Missouri Legislature operates, but years of rewarding filibusters in the Senate has invited more of them and made filibusters the norm rather than the exception to managing legislative business. You’d be forgiven if you thought the legislative priorities of Missouri’s conservative supermajority were a bit unclear, especially in contrast to states like Arizona and Florida that committed to transparency in curricula and acted at the first opportunity. If not getting things done in 2022 is the intent of representatives and senators, well, mission accomplished. But I don’t think that was the deal taxpayers thought they were making with their elected officials when they put them in office.

Whatever the majority’s objectives might be for 2022, the clock is winding down on them. Missourians deserve far more than has been delivered by the legislature, and so far, the session has been a giant disappointment.

“Sunrise” Study Questions Legitimacy of Occupational Licenses

Posted on by Corianna Baier

If occupational licenses are meant to protect consumers, should licenses be created at the behest of lobbyists instead of consumers? And should these licenses get created despite initial reviews that recommend against the creation of a new license?

A new study from the Institute for Justice finds that even though these things shouldn’t be the case, they are. Institute for Justice researchers studied 397 sunshine reviews (reports used by legislators that evaluate the need for new occupational regulations) from 15 states conducted from 1985 to 2017. They found that occupational licensing lobbies have driven the push for 84 percent of sunrise reviews and about 80 percent of these reviews declined to recommend licensing. What’s problematic is that legislators enacted licensing more often than recommended—twice as often as recommended in the reviews. These stats don’t instill confidence that occupational licenses were enacted to protect consumers, as is often claimed.

Missouri doesn’t require sunrise reviews and therefore wasn’t included in this study, but it does make one question whether Missouri’s occupational licenses were created under similar circumstances. Were Missouri’s various occupational licenses truly created to protect consumers? And are they still serving that purpose? We should have the answers to these questions.

A five-year sunset for all occupational licenses would give lawmakers new opportunities to assess the validity and necessity of occupational licenses. These licenses make it harder to get a job, which reduces supply and raises prices for consumers. Through a sunset process, unnecessary regulations (or even unnecessary licenses) that do not serve the purpose of protecting consumers can be identified and eliminated. A sunset provision would go a long way in supporting workers and consumers.

Only Days Left to Replenish Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund

Posted on by Corianna Baier

The April 1st deadline is fast approaching.

As a reminder, states have the option of using stimulus funds to replenish their Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. However, if the funds are replenished after April 1st, 2022, states will be subject to a maintenance of effort requirement for unemployment benefits through 2024. On its face, such language could limit the ability of states to take any action to reduce weekly unemployment benefits or reduce the number of weeks of benefits available until after 2024.

This is quite the string to attach. Who knows what the next two years will hold and whether states will want to adjust their unemployment benefits? There’s still time for lawmakers to act and avoid having their hands tied by this rule.

Read more about this issue here.

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