What Does the Research Say about Earning Industry-Recognized Credentials?

Posted on by Emily Stahly

As we learn more about the effects of industry-recognized credentials (IRC) for high schoolers, the more impressive these credentials appear to be. 

IRCs are awarded by third-party industry organizations and certify that students have mastered skills needed for a particular job such as a welder, automotive technician, certified nursing assistant, or software developer. Recent research from ExcelinEd shows that, in addition to improving employment prospects, earning an IRC is associated with increases in graduation rates, college enrollment, and earnings.

In the study, which was released this month, researchers looked at outcomes for hundreds of thousands of students and found overall positive outcomes for IRC earners. In Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky, earning an IRC was positively associated with graduating from high school on time. Students in Florida and Kentucky who had earned an IRC were more likely to receive an associate’s degree if they enrolled in community college. The researchers also observed up to a 12 percent boost in wages for full-time workers after high school in Florida and Indiana.

The only potentially negative effect the researchers observed was that credential earners in Kentucky were less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree if they enrolled at a four-year college or university. One possible explanation they provided is that “the opportunity cost of each additional year of education is higher for credential earners than non-earners.” In other words, students just may not have thought it was worth finishing a bachelor’s degree and would rather be working.

Unfortunately, high schoolers in Missouri earn only about 8,000 IRCs each year, meaning that only a small fraction of the over 180,000 high school students who participate in a career and technical education program earn an IRC.

Some states have enacted policies that reflect the value they see in credential-earning, and Missouri should take note. For instance, Florida implemented a bonus program for teachers awarding them $25 or $50 for each student who earned an IRC. During the 2007–08 school year when the program started Florida high schoolers earned only 803 credentials total. Last year, they collectively earned over 121,000 IRCs.

Missouri policymakers have already shown a willingness to invest in our workforce—the legislature just passed Fast Track this session to help adults who want to pursue degrees in high-demand fields—but are they funding programs that are proven to work? Clearly, financial incentives have worked to get more students IRCs in Florida, and students have benefitted. With such a payoff for a relatively small investment, teacher bonus pay looks like a win-win-win for the state, teachers, and students.

Listen to our podcast on this subject here.

Building Bike Lanes to Encourage Cycling Is Not Sound Policy

Posted on by Kelvey Vander Hart

Cycling advocates in Kansas City have been looking for any good news to help trumpet the $400 million-dollar plan to expand bike lanes. BikeWalkKC seems to think it has found one such bit of good news when it comes to daily rider counts on Armour Boulevard:

The increase from 7 to 44 people on bikes might not seem like much, but it’s still early days and Armour is a short corridor that does not yet connect to any other bike lanes or trails. Upcoming projects like Charlotte/Holmes and The Paseo will start to create a network out of isolated pieces of infrastructure.

BikeWalkKC boasts that this is a 600% increase in daily cyclists on Armour. That is true but underwhelming. We’re talking about 44 cyclists in a metropolitan area with more than two million people.

How do we know 44 people a day are now using the Armour bike lanes? The post didn’t say. I followed up with an employee from Kansas City Public Works, who confirmed that BikeWalkKC was using data from its one-time departmental bike counts. No one knows if 44 riders is a one-time phenomenon or a daily occurrence.  

Bike advocates claim that building infrastructure will create demand. Patrick Tuohey talked about this assertion in an earlier blog post, citing the demand analysis BikeWalkKC published to support this project. The analysis was performed without any current cyclist counts. A demand analysis that doesn’t bother trying to measure current demand to help gauge future demand seems more like guesswork than rigorous assessment.

Building bike lanes and hoping that demand will follow is not sound public policy. Data actually shows a downward trend of bike commuters in the United States. Only about 0.1 percent of Kansas City’s metro population commuted by cycling in 2014, and recent data from Public Works suggests that number has dropped even lower.

“If you build it, he will come” was an effective line for a movie, but that idea doesn’t translate to municipal policy. Kansas City has more pressing needs, and better ways to spend taxpayer dollars.

USDA Moves to Kansas City, Gets Incentives

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Alex Muresianu of Reason wrote recently about the USDA moving 550 positions from the Washington, D.C. area to the Kansas City area. This was a good move for the USDA because of the cost savings to the federal government:

The USDA’s cost-benefit analysis found that shifting these two agencies to Kansas City would reduce costs by 11.3 percent, saving taxpayers roughly $300 million (in nominal terms) over the next 15 years. These savings stem primarily from the fact that Kansas City has dramatically cheaper real estate than D.C., as well as marginally lower cost of living. The USDA’s report noted that the median sale price of a home (a major factor in determining cost of living for employees) in Kansas City is $205,400, compared to $420,000 in D.C.

This isn’t a surprise to me; I moved to Kansas City from Washington, D.C. in 2005. Nor should it surprise anyone who read our paper on the competitive advantages of the Kansas City region, as the paper mentions low cost of living as a major advantage for Kansas City.

While we don’t know exactly were in the region the USDA will locate, it was disheartening to read in The Kansas City Star that $26 million in “unspecified” incentives were part of the deal. The authors reported:

Greg LeRoy, executive director of the watchdog group Good Jobs First, accused the USDA of engaging in an Amazon-style selection process that made states compete for the jobs with incentives.

“It’s outrageous that the USDA would run an auction. This is the extreme version of privatized behavior by the federal government. Uncle Sam has no business running auctions, dangling jobs on state and local taxpayers,” he said.

LeRoy said the final competition the USDA is setting up between Kansas and Missouri is reminiscent of how corporations set municipalities against each other after a region has been selected.

“This is classic site location consultant chicanery…This is an ugly, extreme version of Uncle Sam imitating Jeff Bezos. Yuck. If I were a Missouri or Kansas taxpayer, I would never stand for this. And as a federal taxpayer I’m cross-eyed.”

It’s a shame that the USDA encourages such behavior. It’s a shame that the Kansas City region plays ball, and it’s a shame that we’ll now fight among ourselves for the specific USDA location.

I discussed this topic with Pete Mundo this morning on KCMO Talk Radio. Click here to listen to the segment.

Why Are Other Organizations Doing DESE’s Job?

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

“Kind of crazy.” That’s how the director of school improvement for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) describes the Missouri accountability and reporting system for Missouri schools. And I don’t disagree. Navigating the DESE school report card website to figure out how a particular school is doing is challenging and kind of crazy.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The Data Quality Campaign gave our neighbor Illinois high marks for their school report card website. Their report cards are parent-friendly and go beyond the federal requirements for what must be included. The same analysis found that Missouri report cards have so much technical language that they are written at a 17th-grade level. That means you have to be a year or two into graduate school in order to fully understand them.

Fortunately, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has built a website that is easily searchable with a nice display of information that may be of interest to parents and other stakeholders. Of course, the site only has information on the schools around St. Louis, not the whole state.

The St. Louis University School of Education has also launched the PRiME Center to provide education data to those who are interested in it. So far, they have built education profiles for St. Louis,  Kansas City, and the entire state. And here at the Show-Me Institute, we have been busy building datasets and analyzing Missouri education data so we can better understand how schools and districts actually perform.

According to Wikipedia, the purpose of a state education agency is to [be] “responsible for education, including providing information, resources, and technical assistance on educational matters to schools and residents.” So why are the media, universities, and non-profits doing the job that should be done by DESE?

We discussed this topic in a recent podcast. Listen here.

An IRC Bonus Pay Program Would Benefit the Ozarks

Posted on by Abigail Burrola

A survey released earlier this year suggests the Ozark region has a workforce problem. The survey asked businesses in the Ozark region questions about the state of the workforce in the area, and a majority indicated they have difficulty finding applicants with the relevant knowledge and skills to fill jobs. 

If employers are looking for a more skilled workforce, getting more students to earn industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) would be a step in the right direction. IRCs are credentials awarded from industry groups after passing an exam, allowing the bearer to demonstrate proficiency in a specific field. Earning an IRC is a great way to jump immediately from high school to a job.

85 percent of businesses responding to the workforce survey said they have some or considerable difficulty finding applicants with an IRC (only around a quarter of respondents said IRCs were not applicable). According to the survey respondents, IRCs are the most challenging type of educational attainment for employers to find in prospective employees, even including postsecondary degrees.

The variety of survey respondents is also notable. Responses came from a number of industries including healthcare, education, manufacturing, construction, and finance. This is good evidence that the problem of IRC scarcity is widespread and not just confined to pockets of the Ozark economy. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has approved 81 types of IRC exams; only 16 of those exams were completed successfully by an Ozark student. In total, a mere 470 IRCs were awarded to high school students in the Ozark region in 2017. If each IRC was earned by a different student in the graduating class, then only 8 percent of Ozark graduates would have an IRC. The real number is likely even lower than 8 percent, because one student can earn multiple IRCs.

The survey responses make it clear that there’s unmet demand in the Ozark region for students graduating with an IRC in hand. One way to increase IRC attainment is to offer a financial incentive to schools and teachers. An IRC bonus pay program would give teachers financial compensation for each of their students that earn an IRC. Florida implemented an IRC bonus pay program and saw an explosion in students earning IRCs.

The Ozark region has a workforce problem that IRCs could help solve. It’s time to get creative in finding ways to prepare students for life after high school.

 

Subsidies Still Don’t Grow the Economy

Posted on by Show-Me Institute Staff

Kansas City has been spending loads of money on economic development subisides for years. But instead of actually spurring economic development, these subsidies often just move economic activity from one place to another, as Patrick Tuohey mentioned in this post from two years ago:

https://showmeinstitute.org/blog/subsidies/kansas-city%E2%80%99s-economic-diversion

Patrick mentioned this idea again in our latest podcast with Dr. Susan Pendergrass. They discussed Patrick’s latest report on Kansas City’s flawed 2018 economic development study. You can find a link to the study (with supporting documentation) and the podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/show-me-institute/smi-pod-designed-to-be-worthless-the-incentive-study-that-wasnt

https://showmeinstitute.org/publication/subsidies/kansas-citys-2018-study-economic-development-incentives

School Choice Legislation and “The Valley of Death”

Posted on by James V. Shuls

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

From “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

On a warm evening at the end of May, I sat in a cramped office in an industrial park. It was after work hours, so there wasn’t much commotion at the truck rental or plumbing supply businesses located across the street. The building was not much to look at, but what was going on inside was priceless.

The room was packed full of parents and school children who were itching to get out of the uniforms they had been wearing all day. We were gathered that evening for our school’s “spring sharing,” where students display their artwork and offer recitations. Hearing my four-year-old and six-year-old recite poetry from memory filled my heart. But nothing could top my feeling of pride when my 13-year-old took the floor with his classmates.

They began with the “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” from Shakespeare’s Henry V. That speech has long been one of my favorites. Next, in a choral performance, the students recited “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem depicts a military blunder from the Crimean War, a battle few today know anything about. There was my son, reciting every word.

Weeks earlier, my three boys and I went on a school trip to Kansas City. While visiting the World War I museum, we stood on the glass walkway above the 9,000 poppies, each representing 1,000 military personnel who died in the war. The children, led by their teachers, joined together in reciting “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae.

Some may ask, “What’s the benefit of having children memorize poems and speeches such as these?” Anyone who heard the voices of 30 children honoring the fallen soldiers understands the importance.

At our kid’s previous school, they attempted to teach kids character skills directly. Our first grader once brought home a coloring sheet with a superhero wearing a cape emblazoned with the word “Yet!” They were trying to teach perseverance and grit.

While these are wonderful traits to teach to children, we learn much more from the lessons of history, from the beauty of poetry, and from the trials of those who have gone before us than we will ever learn from a coloring page. Our new school is exactly what my wife and I had been looking for. To us, this is what education should be.

Few, however, will get to experience this type of education in our state—our school is a private school.

Indeed, many in the public education lobby have been patting themselves on the back for preventing school choice policies from passing this past legislative session. Charter school expansion never received a vote, and Empowerment Scholarship Accounts legislation was filibustered on the Senate floor.

It’s sad that people are excited about denying parents a chance to find a school that is the perfect fit for their family.

It still isn’t clear today who was responsible for the failure in the charge of light brigade—it seems that miscommunication led 600 men into the valley of death. We have no doubt, however, who blocked school choice legislation in Missouri because they won’t stop applauding themselves.

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