On March 17, 2022 Senator Jim Talent and Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano joined us for a virtual event to discuss the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what it means for The United States, China, and more.
Download the podcast version of the event:
It’s past time the Missouri Senate steps up to the plate and delivers for Missouri Parents. The House has done its part—two very important bills that support the rights of parents to choose how and where their children are educated have passed through House committees and a full House vote. They’re now in the hands of the Missouri Senate, which has been debating and arguing about education issues since early January, but not passing legislation for the governor to sign.
House Bill 1552 will finally fix the glitch in funding for public school students who choose a charter school rather than their assigned public school. Now known as the Charter School Funding Act, this bill would give charter school students access to the same funding streams as their non-charter school peers. In addition, it would send state aid to charter schools directly from the state, rather than routing the state money through the district in which a charter school is located. This funding change becomes critical when a district’s state aid amount is insufficient to cover the number of students in charter schools, as is currently the case in Kansas City. Charter schools can’t open or expand if the pot of money is limited. St. Louis is getting close to that point but isn’t quite there. The bill gives St. Louis Public Schools five years before the funding changes take effect.
House Bill 1814 would allow Missouri families to choose a school in a district other than the one in which they live. If a family owns property (such as a second home or a farm) in a separate school district from the one they reside in, the family can send up to four children to that district. More importantly, the bill also allows families to cross district lines for any reason, provided that the district they seek agrees to accept transfer students. Not only does this greatly expand options for Missouri students, but it also gives districts an incentive to work to attract students and their state aid dollars. Many states have similar policies and the data show that it is most often rural students that take advantage of such programs
Missouri families have had a rough couple of years. In person versus virtual, mask and vaccine requirements, curriculum content, to name just a few issues, have parents wanting more than just one assigned choice of school. It’s time for the Missouri Senate to follow in the House’s footsteps and put these options on the governor’s desk.
In this report, Susan Pendergrass presents a detailed look at Missouri’s rural high schools, with information about student demographics along with key indicators like student/teacher ratios, teacher experience, and per-student expenditures. Perhaps most importantly, the report compares schools across several measures of academic performance broken down by subject matter, school locale, and income level of students. Click here to see the full report.
Find more on the performance of schools in Missouri at MoSchoolRankings.org
Have you ever wondered: Do the narratives continually pushed by defenders of the status quo in education actually hold up? Are they fact or just plain fiction? Is the proverbial sky falling in education as opponents would have us believe?
On March 9, 2022 EdChoice’s Jason Bedrick, Director of Policy, and Mike McShane, Director of National Research, joined us for a virtual event to challenge these narratives and share their published papers on two specific topics. Bedrick’s Who’s Afraid of School Choice? follows up on some of the dire predictions that school choice opponents have made over the years and sees how little they match reality. McShane’s The Accountability Myth attacks head-on the argument that public schools are accountable while private schools are not.
A group of home construction, realtor, and trade groups has launched an effort to consolidate the various building codes within St. Louis County. There are good arguments in favor of this effort, as well as legitimate concerns that need to be considered.
The arguments in favor of this effort are clear to see. From the press release:
The study [a study issued last October by St. Louis REALTORS] found there are at least 42 building code books used across 89 jurisdictions in St. Louis County. Together, the codes that were counted had a whopping 809 chapters, totaling about 17,000 pages.
42 different codes governing the work of plumbers, electricians, contractors and other professions is a lot. A contractor can be working on projects in neighboring cities and have different codes to follow. Admittedly, those codes are usually very similar. But there are differences between codes, and those differences undoubtedly lead to confusion and higher costs in construction in St. Louis County.
While the benefits of this change are obvious, the concerns are more nuanced. Interest groups use codes to advance their goals, which in most cases is profitability and higher pay. Unions use codes to limit competition. Industries use codes to require people to use items that are profitable to sell. In 1999, the Pipefitters Union tried to dramatically tighten the St. Louis County mechanical code for the benefit of its members by excluding competing unions and non-union workers. It failed the first time but succeeded in 2010 at getting those laws changed. More recently, the sprinkler industry has unsuccessfully attempted to use codes to mandate sprinklers in new homes. There is now a ban on such a requirement in Missouri. A sprinkler requirement would be great for the sprinkler industry, but it would increase the price of new homes. These kinds of decisions should be up to the home buyer, not the sprinkler industry.
Those are just a few examples. My concern is not that we would have fewer codes in the county. Some type of simplification could be beneficial. My concern is that a comprehensive code system would be used by interest groups for their own benefit at the expense of taxpayers and consumers. It is easier for an industry to capture one code than many codes.
Hopefully, the beneficial aspects of this proposal can be accentuated, and the risks reduced, because there are parts of this proposal that are genuinely needed. If codes are consolidated in St. Louis County, it would be imperative to have the boards that oversee the codes represent the public and not interest groups.
A one-size-fits-all approach to public policy is rarely the best option. This is especially true when the topic is something as complicated as affordable housing. Recently, I wrote about the lack of sufficiently affordable housing in the St. Louis region and how it can be a difficult issue to solve. One thing I didn’t discuss is the lack of evidence suggesting that the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) could meaningfully improve the region’s housing affordability.
St. Louis has a very specific housing affordability problem. There are plenty of places to live, but there aren’t enough places with rents low enough to be affordable to those making less than 30% of the area’s median income (AMI). Affordable, per the report’s definition, also means only spending 30% of your income on housing. For St. Louis, a family of three making 30% of the area’s median income earns approximately $23,000 per year ($76,000 (the St. Louis AMI) X 30%). So, an affordable place to live for that family would be approximately $560 per month. ($23,000 X 30% (to find what yearly rent is considered affordable for them) / 12 (to convert to monthly rent).)
Despite being Missouri’s primary tool for addressing housing affordability, the LIHTC program is ill-suited to address the described housing affordability issue in St. Louis. The first and most obvious reason is that LIHTC is an already expensive way to subsidize the development of new housing
Another supposed benefit of LIHTC developments is that they come with rent controls. Remember, LIHTC developments, in exchange for ten generous years of tax subsidies, agree to set aside a portion of units for those with low incomes. The most common arrangement for LIHTC developments is for 40% of the units to be reserved for those earning below 60% of the AMI. But the rents for the LIHTC units are not based on the income of the potential residents; rents are set based on the income in the surrounding area (the AMI). Because of this, even LIHTC-subsidized housing would likely not be affordable enough for the family mentioned above.
To use some numbers to illustrate this example: As explained above, rent needs to be no more than 30% of your income to be considered affordable, and LIHTC units considered “affordable” can be reserved for those making 60% of the AMI. So rent for that “affordable” unit in a LIHTC development will be 18% of the AMI (30% x 60% of AMI). Based on the $73,000 AMI in St. Louis, this means that the monthly rent for a family of 3 in that LIHTC unit is about $1,100 per month ($73,000 x 18% / 12). But as was described above, a family of three in St. Louis making 30% of the AMI needs rent to be about $560 per month to be considered affordable—and the cost of the LIHTC unit is nearly double that figure. Because of this, LIHTC tends to offer little to no help to the poorest residents.
Housing policy is incredibly complicated, but it’s time to stop thinking of LIHTC as the answer to every problem. St. Louis may have an affordability problem, but LIHTC is clearly not the best solution.
One of the biggest shortcomings of Missouri’s Sunshine Law is that—apart from local governments giving incomplete answers or overcharging for requested documents—it can be hard for the public to get any response to Sunshine Law requests. The two biggest reasons for this are (1) it’s hard to compel action from government, because the consequences for Sunshine violations are so weak; and (2) sometimes contact information for a local government can be outdated as staff churns, so requests are sent but never actually received.
That’s where House Bill 2873 (HB 2873) comes in.
HB 2873 would create permanent email accounts with the office of the Secretary of State (SOS) where Sunshine Law requests can be sent to local government at all times. For example, Battlefield, Mo., might be “[email protected],” or Clay County might be “[email protected].” The simplicity of the system is its advantage. Residents wouldn’t need to track down everchanging contact information for a city or school district, because these permanent email addresses will always work. Moreover, the Secretary of State would retain a copy of all requests to ensure compliance from local governments. Local governments wouldn’t be able to plausibly deny that a request was lost within the recesses of the Internet.
What if a local government already has an active Sunshine Law email address? The proposal contemplates this, too, allowing local governments to have requests sent to the new SOS accounts forwarded to an existing contact point for Sunshine Law requests. Alternatively, they could manage such requests within the state’s own email system like you or I might with our work email, or with web email. Importantly, as soon as an email request was received by the email address hosted by the Secretary of State, the three-day clock for a response required under the law would start ticking. However local government chose to field these requests, they couldn’t simply ignore them or act like the email was not received. Indeed, the state would know better.
Also included in the bill is a fix to something we encountered on a handful of occasions during our Show-Me Curricula project. Some school districts claimed that the schools they manage were not covered under the Sunshine Law. This is, of course, nonsense, but HB 2873 strengthens language around who precisely is subject to the state’s public transparency requirements, specifically around schools.
Along with the Parents’ Bill of Rights and mandatory transparency provisions dotting a handful of legislation, HB 2873 stands as one of the most important transparency ideas of the 2022 legislative session. The bill would act as a check against local government Sunshine Law failures. It leaves no flexibility for schools to deny transparency requests made under the law. I look forward to its hearing and hope that it will pass either on its own or as a prioritized amendment before the end of the session.
Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) are special taxing districts that are funded by a sales or property tax (almost always a sales tax) to subsidize certain public improvements within a defined area. Show-Me Institute researchers have identified many problems with CIDs over the years, but one big issue is that Missouri won’t release certain tax information about some smaller CIDs, even though they are government agencies and all of their money is public money!
The state’s department of revenue previously determined that for the smallest CIDs—CIDs that only have a few parcels and property owners—releasing tax information is the same as releasing an individual’s personal tax information. So, as you can see in this report on CIDs from the state auditor, certain CIDs have their information redacted, as if secret details from the Gulf of Tonkin are buried in Missouri CID reports or something.
Senate Bill 1066 has been introduced to address this issue and clarify that all CID revenues, which, if I didn’t make this clear enough the first time, are all public tax dollars, can be collected and shared by various state agencies. This is a good bill for government transparency, something that has long been important to the Show-Me Institute.
How affordable is housing in St. Louis? A recently released report graded the region on just that, and the results were not good. Overall, the report’s authors gave St. Louis City and County a “C” grade. But for residents with the lowest incomes, St. Louis received an “F.” By most metrics, St. Louis normally ranks pretty highly in terms of affordability, so such a poor performance warrants further investigation.
First, there’s the question of what makes housing “affordable.” Academic research on housing (and this report) typically defines “affordable” as housing where the resident spends less than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. This is a key point, because instead of affordability being solely measured by the price of housing, it is also dependent on the income of the people who live there.
Tying affordability to resident income also helps researchers explain how a region can be affordable for some but not all income groups, which is exactly what the report shows for St. Louis. For the wealthiest in the region, finding an affordable place to live is easy—St. Louis earns an “A” grade for this demographic. There’s also sufficient affordable housing for those making around and somewhat below the area’s median income (AMI). The same cannot be said for those making less than 30% of the AMI, which represents a family of three making less than $23,000 per year in total.
One problem with tying affordability to income is that it’s yet another imperfect measure for gaining insight into what residents find affordable, especially for those with lower incomes. For example, if you don’t have a car or another means of transportation, housing that’s miles away from your place of work that costs 30% of your income is likely not affordable once you account for daily commute costs. Or, if your income is low enough to qualify for other government programs (food stamps, housing vouchers, etc.) paying more than 30% of your monthly income may still be affordable for you despite what the income guidelines suggest.
So, what does it mean for a region to have an affordability problem? According to the report, you have to look at the number of people earning different incomes and compare that to the number of housing options that would be affordable for them. For example, the wealthiest St. Louisans have an enormous surplus of affordable housing options. But the poorest (<30% AMI) face a shortage of approximately 35,000 units, which is why St. Louis received an “F” for this group. To put this in context, affordable housing for the family described above would mean a 2–3-bedroom residence that costs (with utilities) less than $560 per month, which is understandably hard to find. Given the limitations of the income figures provided above, it’s hard to tell whether this estimated shortage is under or overestimating the housing affordability situation in St. Louis.
Perhaps the toughest question is what should be done given all this information. At the very least, before our elected officials start talking about solutions, they should get a better grip on the extent of the problem.
