More Education Options, Please

Posted on by Michael McShane

There was an interesting story from KMOX this week profiling a family who chose a parochial school this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When their local public school said that their son would be working on virtual schooling from home all day while they were at work, the family instead decided to send him to a private school that is offering in-person instruction.

Families need options, now more than ever.

It seems perpetually lost in the debate that different people are experiencing the pandemic differently. There are families who need to take serious precautions. They or their child might have an underlying health issue that would make contracting the coronavirus dangerous. They may have frequent contact with elderly friends or family who might be at risk of complications should they catch COVID-19. Allowing them to use virtual education for the duration of the pandemic is the appropriate and fair thing to do.

Other families, however, are making a different calculation. They are looking at research that, at least to this point, shows little risk to children, particularly young children, and are weighing this very small risk against the serious risk of learning loss from a semester or year of low-quality online instruction. The parents might be young and healthy, with little contact with vulnerable people, and believe that they can use in person education safely and appropriately.

I wouldn’t tell either of these families that their decision is wrong, because each has to weigh the risks and benefits that apply to their particular circumstances. But we must always remember to look at both sides of the ledger: the coronavirus absolutely poses risks, but so does a year of lost schooling.

Our education system needs to support families, whatever decision they make. This means having both online and in-person options available to them. We need to support schools that want to open for in-person instruction and make sure that they have the capability to operate safely. If traditional public schools are choosing to delay opening or are opening solely as online schools, we need to support families that want to do something else.

Missouri Tells You What to Do 94,000 Times

Posted on by Corianna Baier

Ninety-four thousand is an absurdly large number. Can you imagine doing something 94,000 times? Well, Missouri tells us what we can and cannot do 94,000 times in state regulations. Does that make Missouri seem like a place promoting civil and economic freedom? Does that sound like a state where you want to buy a house, or start a business, or earn your living? To me it doesn’t, and that’s a problem.

The Mercatus Center’s latest version of its State RegData project analyzes state-level regulations by running a program that counts the number of times the words and phrases “shall,” “must,” “may not,” “required,” and “prohibited” appear in each state’s regulations. These words usually translate to regulatory restrictions, as these phrases, when included in regulations, typically tell you what you can or cannot do.

These words appear 93,915 times in Missouri state regulations, which translates to roughly 93,915 regulatory commands in our state. That’s almost 94,000 times where the state is telling you what you can and cannot do!

As you can imagine, some of these 94,000 regulatory restrictions seem inconsequential, unnecessary, and even ridiculous. A retailer may not participate in the sales tax holiday unless more than 2 percent of its merchandise qualifies for the tax holiday. The dental board may not issue any temporary license to practice as a dental hygienist in Missouri, though many other licensed occupations allow temporary licenses. The possession or use of beer bongs is prohibited on some rivers in Missouri but not others. Is this really what the state needs to be regulating? These are just three of the 94,000 instances where Missouri controls the actions of its citizens. To make matters worse, this number only includes state-level regulations; regulatory restrictions can be placed at the county and municipal levels, too.

Regulations are more often than not just red tape that Missourians must fight through to live their lives, and 94,000 pieces of red tape sure is a lot to fight through! Missouri saw some regulatory reduction during the “No MO Red Tape” initiative, but generally bureaucrats are much quicker to add regulations than to take them away. Regulations compound to suffocate businesses and workers, controlling what they can do and taking their resources. Why is Missouri making it harder for Missourians to run businesses, earn a living, and live productive lives?

SMI Podcast: Chris Pope – A New Plan for Medicaid

Posted on by Show-Me Institute Staff

Listen Here

Read Chris’s full report: A Plan to Make Medicaid Fair, Focused, and Accountable

Chris Pope is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he was director of policy research at West Health, a nonprofit medical research organization; health-policy fellow at the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce; and research manager at the American Enterprise Institute. Pope’s research focuses on healthcare payment policy, and he has recently published reports on hospital-market regulation, entitlement design, and insurance-market reform. His work has appeared in, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Health Affairs, US News and World Report, and Politico.

Pope holds a B.Sc. in government and economics from the London School of Economics and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from Washington University in St. Louis.​

What to Expect When You’re Expanding

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

Earlier this month, Missouri voters decided it was time for the state to expand Medicaid. Our state’s elected officials now have roughly ten months to iron out all the details before expansion goes into effect next July. With so many important decisions on the horizon, here are some questions for policymakers to consider.

What should Missouri’s version of expansion look like? States across the country have been given flexibility in implementing Medicaid expansion, and Missouri should take advantage of this. Seeking the appropriate federal waivers to tailor expansion coverage in such a way that it best meets the needs of Missouri’s recipients, while also protecting state taxpayers, should be a top priority.

What needs to happen prior to July 1, 2021? Expanding Medicaid will likely require significant changes to the current program. First, the state’s Medicaid agency will surely need additional resources to handle the extraordinary influx of new enrollees. At a minimum, this would include computer system upgrades and increased staff. In addition, state laws and regulations will need to be updated to accommodate the new expansion population.

What is the plan for covering the costs? One of the biggest concerns with Medicaid expansion is the cost and corresponding impact on the state’s budget. Policymakers will need to decide how to pay for the already skyrocketing costs of the current Medicaid program, while also figuring out how to budget for the potentially hundreds of thousands of new recipients. In such uncertain budgetary times, how Medicaid is funded could have significant impacts on other state funding priorities.

How will accountability be encouraged? Medicaid expansion will grow Missouri’s budget by billions of dollars over the next few years. It will be more important than ever that state taxpayers know how their money is being spent. Before the expansion proposal is implemented, policymakers should establish accountability metrics to help ensure each tax dollar is being put to good use.

Voters may seem to have the final say on a matter, but the passage of Medicaid expansion means we’re now entering the more complicated process of actually implementing the policy. Over the next ten months, our elected officials should carefully weigh every available option, because the decisions made will surely impact Missourians for years to come.

Is It Just Me?

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

For many Missouri students, the much-anticipated start of the school year has been a bust. Thousands of parents who were expecting to have a safe place to send their children learned very late in the summer that their district is sticking with virtual education for the time being. If these parents can’t afford to pay someone to look after their children and help them with their homework, what are they to do?

In some states—Oklahoma, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, to name a few—governors ve used flexible federal stimulus funding provided through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) to directly help these parents. In South Carolina, Governor McMaster created the Safe Access to Flexible Education (SAFE) grant program for low-income students. Students who apply can receive up to $6,500 to help them pay tuition at a private school. Oklahoma’s Governor Stitt used GEER funds to create the Stay in School Fund, which gives low-income parents $6,500 to keep their children in private schools.

These seem like great ideas that are addressing an immediate need. In a perplexing move, Missouri’s governor has dedicated $15 million of the just over $54 million in GEER funds received to a Transportation Supplement Grant program. This money will eventually go to districts to cover additional COVID-related transportation costs. Other than PPE and cleaning buses more often, I can’t imagine what these costs would be, especially when so many districts are all virtual. But maybe it’s just me. Districts can request reimbursement for any COVID-related transportation costs between now and September of next year and they have until September of 2022 to make the requests.

The Secretary of Education sent a letter to every governor with the following guidance:

This extraordinarily flexible emergency block grant empowers you to decide how best to meet the current needs of students, schools (including charter schools and non-public schools), postsecondary institutions, and other education-related organizations in your State so that faculty continue to teach and students continue to learn. My Department will not micromanage how you spend these funds, but I encourage you, at a time when so many school boards, superintendents, and institutions of higher education have had to close their brick and mortar campuses for the balance of the school year, to focus these resources on ensuring that all students continue to learn most likely through some form of remote learning. They and their families are depending on your leadership to ensure that they don’t fall behind.

We have thousands of desperate families with immediate needs, and yet we’re putting millions of dollars in emergency relief into an account so that two years from now districts can request reimbursement for face masks and bus cleaning? I don’t get it.

This Is School Choice

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

What is school choice? Many believe it’s a way to get disadvantaged children out of terrible schools. But in 2020, it’s pretty easy to see that it’s much more universal than that.

Parents who work outside the home and just found out their schools will be all virtual this fall know what it feels like to need another option for their own children. Parents who bought expensive homes in top-notch school districts who just found out their district is staying virtual for the fall are quickly getting up to speed on not getting the education they thought they had locked in. Parents who are scraping together funds with their neighbors to hire a teacher for in-person teaching are finding out the meaning of having to pay for school choice. Parents of children who can’t participate in their district’s in-person or hybrid plan are discovering the obstacles of enrolling their children in a virtual program of their choice. Parents of special needs children who haven’t received services for their disability in six months are desperate for school choice.

The term “school choice” has been around for decades. But parents who were able to move to the school district of their choice have tended to struggle with the concept. Letting children from other districts enroll in their district could water down the value of the house they bought. Letting children use public money to attend private schools hurts public education. Charter schools are fine for inner city children, but we don’t need them in our “good” suburban school districts.

School choice isn’t just for other children in the 2020–21 school year. It’s a palpable need for scores of Missouri children across the spectrum of community type and socio-economic status. Any parent who wants “A” for their child but lives in a  district only willing or able to offer “B” this fall needs school choice. It doesn’t matter how good your school is or how expensive your home is.

Parents in our lowest-performing districts have always known this. The “B” that their districts offer is a low-quality and sometimes even dangerous education experience. The “A” that they want and need is a safe space for their children to thrive. I would urge all parents to remember this shared experience. To remember the feeling of finally learning how your district’s hybrid plan was to work, only to have it thrown out the window for all-virtual. Remember the frustration of receiving long emails from your district about their plan, only to read “this is all subject to change” at the end. Remember finding a micro-school option for one of your children, but not the other. Remember hoping your boss will understand.

School choice is simple. It means making sure that no parent is stuck with only one option when that option is unacceptable.

Green Energy’s Environmental Impacts: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Posted on by Jakob Puckett

The Missouri Renewable Energy Standard requires that at least 15 percent of Missouri’s electricity from state-regulated electric utilities (such as Ameren and Evergy) come from green energy sources by next year. There has been some movement to increase this, as at least one member of Missouri’s Public Service Commission—the body regulating electricity in Missouri—supports raising the requirement. Further, an initiative petition that circulated earlier this year proposed increasing the requirement to 50 percent by 2040.

While such goals are often introduced as environmental necessities, a new report from the Manhattan Institute calls for a reality check on the environmental impact of such green energy goals. The report highlights “the inescapable reality that every product and service begins with, and is sustained by, extracting minerals from the earth.”

But what does this have to do with green energy? While wind and sunlight are renewable, wind turbines and solar panels are not. Further, energy-storing batteries require large amounts of non-recyclable materials. In fact, all three are quite resource intensive and producing them can have serious environmental consequences.

The report notes that, compared to a natural gas plant, wind and solar power plants require 10–15 times as much steel, concrete, and glass to generate the same amount of energy. Manufacturing a single 1,000-pound electric vehicle battery requires mining, moving, and processing 500,000 pounds of materials.

These machines wear out, too. Wind turbines and solar panels last between 20 and 30 years, and electric vehicle batteries last around seven.

Those concerned about large amounts of unrecyclable waste should be equally concerned about the afterlife of these machines. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, current solar growth policies will result in roughly 51–67 million tons per year of unrecyclable waste by 2050. While not a perfect comparison, this is nearly twice the current annual level of unrecyclable plastic waste. If wind energy grows as the International Energy Agency predicts, turbines will contribute another 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastic waste by 2050. Lastly, the Manhattan Institute report calculates that more than 10 million tons of batteries per year will become unrecyclable waste by 2030 under current projections.

None of green energy’s environmental drawbacks change the fact that fossil fuels negatively impact the environment as well. However, every energy source has environmental impacts, and currently there is no magic bullet for truly “clean” energy production. As Missourians are asked to support green energy programs at the state and federal level, they should recognize the tradeoffs involved. While green energy’s environmental impacts may be out of sight, they should not be out of mind.

Cato’s Michael Cannon Visits the Podcast

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Last week, Stuart Butler of the Brookings Institution joined the Show-Me Institute Podcast to talk about his views on health care reform in the United States. Though we disagree on some points, Stuart provided a valuable and interesting perspective on what the future of health care should look like in this country.

This week we have a new batch of health care perspectives. Yesterday we brought the Cato Institute’s Director of Health Policy Studies Michael Cannon onto the podcast and asked him many of the same questions we posed to Stuart, and I think our listeners will be intrigued at how markedly different Michael’s views are. Click here for that podcast, and be sure to subscribe to the channel to be notified of this content every time we add something new.

Subscribing is especially relevant now, because tomorrow we will welcome the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Pope to the program and will release that podcast shortly thereafter. Like Stuart and Michael, we’ll ask Chris many of the same questions so that our listeners can easily compare the different perspectives emanating from the market movement on issues like Medicaid, private insurance, and state-based health care reforms. Stay tuned and smash that subscribe button.

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