A Lesson on Early Literacy from the Magnolia State

Posted on by Abigail Wagner

If I polled one hundred Missourians on which state they thought had the best early literacy policies in the nation, I’m almost certain most of them wouldn’t immediately say “Mississippi.” Mississippi has long been at the bottom of the pack when it comes to reading performance, while Missouri has consistently floated in the middle. However, in 2013, Mississippi brought in a dynamic state superintendent of schools, Dr. Carey Wright, who has emphasized a science-based approach to early literacy and taken a tough stance on promoting struggling readers to the next grade level.

In the years since Wright’s appointment, Mississippi has reversed its last-in-the-nation status with an impressive increase in the percentage of its fourth graders who can read at grade level. In 2013, only 21 percent of Mississippi fourth graders achieved a score of proficient or above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), well below the 2013 national average of 34.8 percent. By 2019, Mississippi had improved that by a whopping 11 percentage points, a magnitude of gain that is rare on NAEP. In just six years, Mississippi fourth grade reading scores were equivalent to that year’s national average of 34.6 percent.

While scores have only just hit the average mark, Mississippi’s literacy growth in 2013 to 2019 exceeded that of every other state by seven points. During the same time period, Missouri continued to tread water. Our fourth-grade proficiency rate actually decreased by one point, from 35 to 34 percent. So, what did Mississippi do differently?

In 2013, along with appointing Wright, Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), requiring third graders not reading at grade level by the end of a school year to remain in third grade for intensive reading intervention. This requirement stems from research showing that students learn to read in kindergarten through third grade, then read to learn from fourth grade onward. Because of this, third graders who can’t read proficiently are four times more likely to fail to graduate from high school than those who can. Mississippi’s retention of students with literacy deficiencies gives them another chance to reach this important milestone and ensures that students are fully prepared to hit the ground running in fourth grade.

Missouri has already made some progress on this issue. Governor Parson signed SB 681 this spring, which requires reading intervention for struggling K-3 students. The new law, however, doesn’t require that third graders who demonstrate reading deficiencies be retained, and early research suggests that Mississippi’s strict enforcement of its retention policy may have played a major role in the NAEP score increase. If that proves true, Missouri lawmakers should consider taking a page out of Mississippi’s book by requiring that students read proficiently before starting fourth grade.

Legislature Squanders Health Care Opportunity

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

As has been discussed on this blog multiple times over the past few weeks, Missouri’s 2022 legislative session was largely a disappointing one. For me, the biggest letdown was the legislature’s failure to capitalize on the momentum for health care reform.

Since long before the COVID-19 pandemic began, my colleagues and I have written about the insufficient supply of health care providers in Missouri and offered a bevy of reforms that would help address the situation. Then, once the coronavirus arrived in the spring of 2020, Governor Parson waived a variety of laws and regulations that were needlessly inhibiting health care professionals from practicing in our state. While this was a positive step, waivers only offer temporary solutions to a permanent problem.

For the nearly 20 months after the waiver was first issued, state health care supply grew because of the reduction of unnecessary burdens. Thousands of Missourians tried telemedicine for the first time. Advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) were allowed to navigate freely across the state to serve patients that needed care. And licensed health care providers from other states were allowed to come to Missouri and easily begin providing care.

While the services described above may not sound out of the ordinary, none of them were allowable under Missouri law prior to 2020. Telemedicine was largely restricted to patients and providers who had met previously in person. APRNs were only allowed to practice medicine within 75 miles of a collaborating physician. And finally, state professional registration boards were not required to recognize the licensure of many practitioners from other states, or at least not without first requiring them to clear too many unnecessary hurdles. Fortunately, Missouri’s legislature acted on that last item and approved interstate license reciprocity in 2020, which drastically improved the licensing process for out-of-state professionals interested in working in Missouri. Unfortunately, easy access to telemedicine and APRNs remained reliant on emergency waivers.

As I wrote less than a month ago, I was optimistic going into the 2022 session that reform was on the way. Missouri was turning the corner on COVID-19, and Governor Parson allowed the emergency order for the pandemic to expire, along with the health care waivers. Rarely is the opportunity for legislative action so apparent and uncontroversial; the legislature simply needed to enshrine the popular status quo from the past two years into law. Instead, health care reform was another victim of this year’s legislative dysfunction, leaving any hope for action once again to the future.

Centene Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

Posted on by David Stokes

There are numerous flaws in the ongoing subsidy-driven economic development strategy employed in Missouri. In this post, I want to focus on one of those flaws. Businesses often overstate the importance of subsidies in their decision-making process. After all, it costs nothing to make such a claim, and if the tax subsidies, credits, and abatements are there for the taking, why not ask for them? All a company has to do is say that “but for” the subsidy, it wouldn’t invest in the area. Easy enough, right?

Analysis of what companies actually do, as opposed to what they say they require, tells a different story. Shockingly—I know this is going to stun many of you—those same companies often don’t need the subsidies as much as they claim. Here is an article that discusses one study out of Texas:

Nathan Jensen, a University of Texas at Austin professor, analyzed businesses’ applications for school property tax relief. His findings suggest that just 15 percent of participating firms needed the incentives in order to make an investment in Texas. Furthermore, many of the other firms were uncharacteristically open that incentives were not a necessity.

Just fifteen percent. And sure, Amazon received substantial subsidies when it decided to build its sought-after second headquarters in Virginia, but it received far fewer subsidies there than had been offered by other states.

Which brings us to Clayton, Missouri and Centene. Several years ago, the City of Clayton passed an enormous incentive package for Centene as part of its major expansion plans within the city. From a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on the topic:

Clayton and state officials signed off on a sizeable incentives package: $75 million worth of property and personal tax abatement over 20 years in Clayton and tens of millions more in state incentives, most of which would be dependent on the number of jobs Centene would add in the region.

Not surprisingly, “ . . . Centene said then that it could not build the project without public subsidies.”

But that was 2016, when it was time for asking. Now it’s 2022, and it’s time for doing. And Centene has changed its mind. The company is not going to build many of the parts of the proposal that justified the tax incentives, including a civic auditorium in downtown Clayton (emphasis added):

“A civic auditorium is no longer in Centene’s plans regardless of any incentives to proceed,” the company said in a statement to the Post-Dispatch.

Centene almost certainly didn’t need the tax subsidies in the first place, and it threw in the civic auditorium promise as a political victory for the local politicians who like to delude themselves as to their own importance in creating downtown Clayton.

As long as Clayton holds firm and takes back the subsidies now, fairness demands we give the city some credit here. But the precedent has been moved further along by the subsidies Clayton gave out in 2016, and that part of the damage has already been done—all over tax subsidies that were likely not needed in the first place.

A SCOTUS Victory for Private School Choice

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

Once again, the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld a parent’s right to choose a religious private school, even if the tuition is being paid for with public dollars. The Carson v. Makin case arose from a town tuitioning program that has been in place in Maine since the 1800s. Town tuitioning allows small, rural towns that don’t have the resources to support their own high school to pay tuition for high school students to attend private schools. Maine parents had been able to choose a religious or a secular school until 1981, when choosing a religious school was banned.

Similarly to the Trinity Lutheran Church case in Missouri and the Espinoza case in Montana, the court held that allowing students to take their public dollars to a religious school of their choice does not establish an official state religion any more than using a Pell grant at a religious university does. The ruling does not require states to fund school choice. But, if they have a school choice program, they may not exclude religious schools from participating.

Beginning this fall, qualified Missouri families can apply for an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) to be used to pay for, among other things, tuition at a private school. Five of the six approved Education Assistance Organizations (EAOs) that will be disbursing the scholarships are religious. The latest Supreme Court ruling should put to bed any questions as to whether anyone should take issue with that.

Missouri Forgot Its Umbrella

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

Anyone familiar with Missouri weather knows that regardless of the day’s forecast, you should probably still be prepared in case it rains. Well, it’s sunny right now in Jefferson City as Missouri’s government remains awash in cash (as evidenced by the legislature’s recent passage of by far the largest budget in state history), which means this past legislative session would have been the perfect time for our elected officials to prepare for the next rainy day. Instead, Missouri legislators are betting we won’t be needing an umbrella.

As I wrote nearly a year ago, Missouri is not prepared for the next recession, and the inadequacy of the state’s rainy-day fund is a big reason why. That’s also why my colleagues and I included rainy-day fund reform as a top priority in our 2022 blueprint. Missouri’s rainy-day fund has serious problems; it’s too small, too hard to access, and it’s too hard to restore funds once they’re used.

Missouri’s rainy-day fund has two big problems: it ranks in the bottom half of states in available savings, and complicated rules make it difficult to use. As a result, it’s never once been called upon for budget stabilization purposes. When a recession hits, and state tax revenues decline, it’s helpful for governments to have some funds set aside to help plug the immediate shortfall to avoid unnecessary interruption in services until revenues rebound. Today, Missouri’s fund has around $385 million, which would only cover approximately one third of the revenue shortfall our state experienced during the Great Recession of 2008. And without a robust rainy-day fund, states are left to rely on relief from the federal government to keep them afloat.

State lawmakers had a unique opportunity this year to fix what’s been broken since Missouri’s current rainy-day fund was created in 1999. State tax revenues were up and there were more federal relief funds available than could reasonably be put to good use. This meant that for the first time in a long while, there was ample money available to invest in Missouri’s financial future. There were even efforts by the governor and the Missouri House to create a new fund, but they ultimately fell apart toward the end of this year’s legislative session.

Rising inflation and the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate the importance of governments preparing for rainy days, but also the risks associated with overreliance on federal funding to keep our collective heads above water. As the price of gas and other goods continue to soar, economic forecasters are now warning of a potential downturn in the near future. It is unfortunate Missouri’s lawmakers didn’t seize this year’s opportunity to get a better umbrella, because the chances are we’re going to need one sooner rather than later.

As Kansas City’s Streetcar Expands, Its Buses Suffer

Posted on by Quin Rizer

On Wednesday morning, The Kansas City Star published a detailed report on the city’s suffering bus system. Riders complain about a lack of service and dependability and report that buses are often late, arrive infrequently, and sometimes simply do not arrive at all. Kansas City Area Transit Authority (KCATA) officials state that service decreased because of the COVID-19 pandemic and has not returned to its pre-pandemic levels because of staffing and funding concerns, in addition to decreased ridership. The Star piece quotes experts who argue that increased service and dependability are the keys to increasing the usage of public transportation.

Meanwhile, the KC Streetcar Authority has broken ground on a 351 million-dollar expansion, financed by $171 million in federal funds, with the rest coming from a new transportation development district (TDD). This special taxing district will levy a 1% sales tax on areas around Main Street, generating millions in revenue to maintain the streetcar’s “free” admission status.

As Show-Me Institute analysts have argued in the past, the KC Streetcar has failed to generate economic growth and raise property values and does not improve Kansas City’s transit system as a whole. Throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at expanding the streetcar not only continues to grow a poor transit system but also neglects the more valuable bus system. Between 2016 and 2020, buses were the primary form of transportation for about 8,500 commuters in the Kansas City metro area. In contrast, there were only about 250 commuters in the entire metro area who got to work using the streetcar. In addition, the KCATA has an annual operating budget of $57.6 million, which is only about a fifth of what is being spent to expand the streetcar.

Kansas City’s MAX bus system is supposed to be a form of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), but with buses only coming every half hour on two of the three MAX routes, it fails in this respect. These routes need more frequent service, which means more buses and more drivers. Instead of continuing to pour money into an overpriced, ineffective streetcar system, Kansas City should consider diverting funds to its buses, which could be improved at only a fraction of the cost of current streetcar spending.

Politicians like grandiose plans, shiny new objects, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and spending exorbitant amounts of other people’s money. What their constituents need is a bus system that runs effectively so that they can schedule their day properly. Politicians seek the former at the expense of the latter, and it ends up hurting the very people they most often claim to be helping.

Attorney General’s Office Starts a Curriculum Database of Its Own

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

When I started the Show-Me Curricula Project, I had no illusion that schools and districts would happily provide their teaching materials to me for publication. That clarity comes from experience; similar projects I’ve spearheaded for the Show-Me Institute for city checkbooks and local collective bargaining agreements showed that Missouri’s subsidiary governments were consistent . . . ly disinterested in telling the public how they were using the public’s money and authority.

The reason the state bureaucracy resists transparency is simple: the Sunshine Law in Missouri (and elsewhere) is pretty weak, local government officials know it, and many of our state and local officials are reluctant to share information about government operations if they can avoid it. Mandatory document reporting and spending transparency resolve this kind of problem, offering notice to bureaucrats and penalties for noncompliance. I’ve pushed for that reform for a few years now and will continue to do so until it’s passed.

Of course the ideas of “mandatory reporting” and “mandatory transparency” are predicated on active policing of those laws by public officials, like an attorney general or auditor. So I read with great interest an article announcing that the state attorney general’s office had launched a transparency portal of its own showcasing what the office had found in district curricula:

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt subpoenaed seven school districts Wednesday for information on surveys given to students, and also launched a portal which gives the public access to “objectionable teacher trainings and assignments” uncovered through parent submissions and open records requests. . . .

As part of the Students First initiative introduced by Schmitt in March, the attorney general’s office also launched a transparency portal to compile parent’s submissions and open records requests sent to school districts.

The Students First initiative, launched by Schmitt in March, is designed to “increase transparency in Missouri’s schools” and “ensure a quality education for Missouri’s children by uncovering and eliminating curriculum and policies and practices that prioritize politics in the classroom instead of student education and success.”

You can find the attorney general’s transparency portal here.

It has been remarkable to see how resistant many school districts have been to transparency even when the inquiry has come from a state office, but I think that’s emblematic of a state governing culture that holds good governance and transparency in fairly low regard. That the attorney general’s office has had to sue districts to get documents is a testament to the need for transparency in all facets of government, and I’m glad the attorney general and his office have taken steps to increase transparency while a bumbling state legislature struggles to catch up.

Is a Scooter Ban the Answer in Saint Louis?

Posted on by Abigail Wagner

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a piece on Tuesday morning titled “With scooters gone, St. Louis police say weekend was relatively calm downtown.” That headline seems to indicate that scrapping Bird and Lime electric scooters will solve the ongoing issue of violence in downtown Saint Louis, which has recently been linked to large groups of young people riding recklessly through the streets. In response, city officials have gradually tightened scooter restrictions in the area, first instituting a 7 p.m. curfew in May, then implementing a total ban on June 6th.

Saint Louis Alderman James Page suggested in the Post-Dispatch article that the ban may last about two weeks. City leaders should take that time to ask themselves several questions about how best to manage this unique mode of transportation.

First, how will a scooter ban impact law-abiding residents and visitors? The fleets of young people roaming the streets on weekends may be an issue, but they are far from the only ones in the market for cheap, short-range transportation. With gas prices reaching historic highs and continuing to rise, some city dwellers find scooters a less expensive alternative for short trips. For those who rely on public transportation, scooters also address the “last mile problem,” eliminating walks from transit systems to a destination. Some visitors who choose not to drive in the city rely on scooters as well; previous Post-Dispatch articles include photos of businesspeople scooting to conventions.

Second, if new city­-level regulations are under consideration, will they be the best solution to the youth scooter problem? Lee Foley, Lime’s director of community and government relations for the Midwest, has already put forward several possible restrictions the company could implement on its own units. These include requiring ID to restrict rider age, reducing maximum speeds, and limiting the Group Ride feature that allows one rider to activate multiple scooters. City leaders already plan to discuss solutions, likely including these options, with scooter companies in the weeks ahead.

Saint Louis officials are right in that they cannot continue to allow roaming youths on scooters to monopolize downtown police attention. However, they might want to consider the negative impacts of a long-term ban and the possibility of private solutions before instituting any new and permanent regulations.

More of the Same in Springfield’s New Buc-ee’s CID

Posted on by Abigail Wagner

The Springfield City Council just repeated an all-too-common Missouri mistake. The council passed a bill creating a new community improvement district (CID) off I-44. Bill 2022-124 subsidizes the construction of a new Buc-ee’s gas station in the area by hiking the sales tax Buc-ee’s consumers pay by 0.625%.

Like most special taxing districts in Missouri, the Buc-ee’s CID will use public funds for private infrastructure. The new sales tax rate at Buc-ee’s will only benefit the company itself—the tax dollars collected at the gas station will mostly go toward constructing the building, access road, and parking lot. From its first day of operation, corporate welfare will support the business one Springfield resident referred to as “a beaver Walmart.”

Most residents of Springfield will have no say in this matter. The city drew the boundaries of the CID in such a way that all voters are excluded—only the city council got to vote on this. Show-Me Institute Director of Municipal Policy David Stokes called this “tax gerrymandering” in his testimony on this issue. In addition, four out of the five members of the Buc-ee’s CID board are listed as “Owner Representatives,” leaving only one seat for a citizen to provide a public perspective. Even once the CID is in effect, most of Buc-ee’s customers will likely have no idea about the extra hit to their wallets, since the CID Act doesn’t require any posting of added sales taxes.

Years of writing and research from Institute analysts on CIDs prove that proposals such as these are nothing new. Private developers use the public’s money to subsidize corporate interests with almost no public input. This process with special taxing districts has played out countless times before, both in Greene County and around our great state. You can see for yourself just how widespread CIDs are in Missouri by following the link to this interactive map from the Missouri Department of Revenue. Hopefully Springfield, and cities across the state, will soon learn that this isn’t a mistake worth repeating.

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