It’s Easier to Prepare Someone than to Repair Them

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

We have a workforce problem in Missouri. There are thousands of middle-skill jobs that we can’t fill. Companies are reluctant to locate here because they can’t find employees with the skills they need. At the same time, labor participation rates continue to decline. Sadly, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) reported that in 2017, just 42 percent of high school graduates left school college or career ready.

If we had just $10 million to spend on fixing this situation, would it be better to ensure students are career ready before they graduate from high school, or put that money towards those who were part of the 58 percent and have not been successful? To be certain, both are important. But which is the better investment? I think the former.

One of the most high-profile bills in the 2019 legislative session awarded corporate welfare to General Motors. Tacked on to that bill was a measure spending $10 million to create the Fast Track workforce development program. The program will cover tuition for Missourians who are at least 25 years old, make less than $40,000, and want to go back to school to pursue a degree in a “high demand” field. Students are allowed to transfer and can take up to one year off. And when they’re finished, they must remain in the state for three years and be employed full time within twelve months. If students don’t comply with these requirements, the grant will then convert to a loan.

Missouri community college tuition averages $5,750 for in-state students. If a student qualifies for a Pell Grant, most of that cost would be covered. Pell Grants are generally awarded to students with total household incomes below $20,000, which means Fast Track would primarily cover people making between $20,000 and $40,000. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that a typical Fast Track student received a quarter of their funding from the program and finished their program in two years, which is an extremely conservative estimate Under this scenario, the program could serve a maximum of 7,000 students. It’s a lot of money to put toward a complicated program that likely won’t be able to serve many students and may or may not result in a more skilled workforce in Missouri.

What about the first option—improving the career readiness of our students before they leave high school? One proven way to do this is to create financial incentives for career and technical education (CTE) teachers who make sure their students are career ready. These are students who earn an industry-recognized credential (IRC), such as the Automotive Service Excellence credential or the Certified Nursing Assistant credential. At a cost of just $500 per credential-earning student, with some of that going to the district, some to the CTE student, and some to the teacher, $10 million could improve career outcomes for 20,000 Missourians each year. States that have implemented programs like this have seen exponential growth in the number of students who leave high school with an IRC in hand.

Giving CTE teachers an opportunity to earn a few thousand extra dollars each year is a simple and direct way to improve our workforce. Creating a new government bureaucracy to manage a complex new government program very well may not be.

 

When Will Kansas City Officials Address Bike Lane Safety Concerns?

Posted on by Kelvey Vander Hart

Kansas City is spending a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars on the installation of bike lanes around town, including $700,000 to install the 3-mile stretch along Armour Boulevard alone. There are currently plans in place to spend an additional $400 million on a massive bike lane expansion.

The expenditure is questionable when you consider that less than half of one percent of the city’s population currently uses the bike lanes. Even worse, the bike lanes might be introducing a new set of safety risks.  

Drivers have had concerns about the safety of Kansas City’s new parking-protected bike lanes since the pricy installation began, including complaints about limited visibility and dangerous intersections. If 311 complaints about near-misses and crashes weren’t enough, a near-fatal accident seems to have highlighted the problems.

A crash occurred on May 11 along Armour Boulevard after a driver whose view of oncoming traffic was obstructed by the bike lane was struck by another vehicle. Her Chevy Suburban was flipped on its side, and a responding police officer told her family members that they likely would have been planning their daughter’s funeral if not for the size of the vehicle she was driving.

This driver was lucky that she was in such a large vehicle, but what if that had been a smaller car? Or, even worse, what if that had been a cyclist crossing through one of the intersections or into turn lanes? Limited visibility is not just a problem for cars; it poses a major risk to cyclists in certain sections of the lane.

In response to the accident, a spokesperson from Kansas City Public Works stated:

[W]e plan to make sight line adjustments and add vertical delineators as part of the [safety] pilot here in a few weeks. We are still working on timing and date details. Depending on neighborhood feedback and the impacts of the pilot location, we will coordinate with the Parks Department to make those modifications along the corridor.

Really? It is going to take a “few weeks” to install a No Parking sign (“vertical delineator”) at a dangerous intersection in the wake of a serious accident. I probably shouldn’t be surprised, considering that the promised pilot program to investigate and address safety programs along the route has been delayed for months.

Safety improvement plans are all well and good, but shouldn’t a problem as obvious as lack of visibility have been addressed before the city started funneling money into this project? If taxpayer money is going to be put toward infrastructure like this, all elements need to be thoroughly considered in advance, including the safety risks. Will the city address these concerns before they spend money on lane expansion? I hope so.

 

Missouri Education Spending Continues To Grow

Posted on by Michael Q. McShane

Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released the Annual Survey of School System Finances. It provides detailed spending figures for states and large school districts across the country. The numbers from this week reflect spending in fiscal year 2017.

Missouri’s education spending has continued its upward march. Current spending is up 2.7% from the year before, to $10,589 per student. This is roughly in line with previous year-over-year increases (which were 1.6%, 2.7%, 2.9%, and 1.7%, respectively).

When looking at the total revenue figure, which is a good way of looking at the total amount of money that schools spend (not just on current expenses), Missouri schools received $12,492 per student.

Every time I see spending figures like this, I have to ask myself, where does all of this money go? If you think of a class of 18 students, those children are generating over $190,000 in current revenue alone. How much is the teacher getting? Less than half?

The Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board took to its pages earlier this year to decry low teacher salaries that haven’t even kept pace with inflation. But no where in there did they try to square the circle that spending is actually up! Its just that the new money is not making it to teachers.

Looking at a slightly longer time horizon, Missouri per student spending is up 33% since 1992 while teacher salaries are down 4%. This is largely because both the number of teachers and the number of staff members in Missouri schools have grown substantially faster than the growth in students. While the student population is up 9% over that time period, the number of teachers grew 28% and the number of all other staff grew 24%.

These are policy decisions. We can make different ones.

Our education system has become bloated with bureaucrats, administrators, and non-teaching staff that are sucking up money that could be going to the people who are in the classroom every day doing the hard work of educating children. If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged about that.

Bottom line: we are spending enough money to adequately compensate teachers. We just aren’t spending it on them.

 

School Choice Fails, While Corporate Welfare Succeeds in the Missouri Legislature

Posted on by James V. Shuls

No one enters the legislature saying, “I’m going to be the champion of corporate welfare.” Many, however, do say they want to be a champion for children.

Yet in the 2019 Missouri legislative session, neither the House nor the Senate passed a single school choice bill. Reform for Bryce’s law, which would provide assistance for special needs students to attend private institutions in order to receive specialized instruction, never made it out of committee. A bill to create Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, which would allow school children to pay for tutoring, tuition, or other education services, was filibustered on the Senate floor. And charter school expansion, which would have extended educational opportunities outside of St. Louis and Kansas City, never received a vote on the Senate floor.

Critics said these programs lack accountability, fail to improve outcomes, and take money away from public schools.

At the same time, the legislature pushed through a gigantic corporate welfare bill for General Motors—a bill that would take money away from public schools, has little accountability, and is based on an idea (placating companies with massive subsidies) that has a track record of questionable results.

Why is it that school choice bills have such a tough time passing, while subsidies for big business see such little opposition (except from some of those same school choice supporters)?

The answer is quite simple—organization and power. The education establishment is organized and on message. Through the halls of the capitol, lobbyists for the teacher’s unions, the school administrator’s associations, and the school boards’ association walk in lockstep. They have a clear constituency with concentrated interests. Ask any politician and they will tell you the education lobby is one of the strongest in the state.

And what of the reformers? They seem to be a ragtag bunch, dispersed throughout the state. There is no single group bringing them all together. There is no widespread coalition, just a bunch of individuals who think kids deserve to have educational options.

School choice proponents may never have the kind of power that the education establishment and big business have. That doesn’t mean that legislators shouldn’t do the right thing. If they say they are champions of children, then they should champion children and the policies that give them educational options.

 

KC’s economic development study parroted exactly what the city wanted

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

The following commentary also appeared in the Kansas City Star.

Businessman John Wannamaker famously quipped, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The same may be true for Kansas City’s economic development incentives, but when the City Council sought to study their effectiveness, the folks who benefit from the current system had their own ideas.

Kansas City leaders have been enriching politically connected private developers through a seeming endless stream of taxpayer incentives. Politicians and developers alike claim the subsidies are necessary to revitalize downtown Kansas City. This is debatable. Though taxpayers have subsidized new restaurants and bars, data from the city’s Regulated Industries Division indicate that the number of liquor licenses and health cards has been flat citywide. Subsidies didn’t create businesses or jobs, they merely moved them. And thanks to generous incentive deals, they moved to areas where they don’t contribute to the tax base.

Likewise, the city has given generous subsidies to companies to build their headquarters here; this includes H&R Block, which, rather than actually adding jobs just moved them from elsewhere in the region. Kansas Citians recently learned the subsidies to hotels are so big and numerous that the market is overbuilt—causing the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau to fret that hotel room rates may crash! Meanwhile, all these subsidies direct money away from a school district in which 90 percent of children qualified to receive free or reduced-price meals.

Worse, none of these subsidies appear to be helping Kansas City’s economy. A recent report from the Brookings Institution ranked Kansas City 78th out of the top 100 metropolitan areas in economic growth—a score that is likely padded by the growth of Johnson County, Kansas.

In the face of public unrest over Kansas City’s subsidy culture, the city council called for a study of incentives and their impact. As reported in the Star, the city awarded the study contract to a trade group sponsored by developers and their lawyers. The resulting study, if one wants to use that term, contained so many methodological lapses that a reader could be forgiven for thinking they were intentional. When the report was presented to the council, it was clear that it did not deliver on its basic purpose: helping policymakers adopt better policy.

From my own investigation into the study process—using the open records law to examine the proposal and bids received, draft reports, and emails—it is clear that the incentive report relied greatly on individuals and organizations with interests in maintaining the current system. One email from a development financier made explicit that the study needed to politically protect the subsidies against the interference of “citizen petitioners.” That note was dutifully passed on from the head of the organization that vets subsidy applications, to the city employee overseeing the study, to the vendor writing it. And when the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce drafted a statement opposing an effort by those same “citizen petitioners” to cap tax-increment financing incentives, they cited the study’s findings. The report seems to have accomplished its mission.

The way this study was undertaken should outrage everyone in Kansas City, especially the councilmembers who called for it to be written. The council should retract the study, investigate how it was conducted, and act swiftly to hold individuals and organizations accountable. A new, independent study is needed.

Moreover, the system by which Kansas City awards such subsidies is in need of overhaul. Taxpayer funds should be protected against self-interested developers, attorneys, and consultants, as well as the organizations they fund. Taxpayers have sacrificed too much—and seen too little return—for mere half measures.

The Governor Threatens to Break a Promise

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

The last day of the legislative session is here, and news tends to progress quickly, but one of the fastest developing items is the state’s low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program. The governor apparently intends to restart the program, even without reform. While a charitable read is this is the governor’s way of leveraging the legislature into passing a bad bill, it is still galling.

The reason? It would break one of the first promises the governor made when he came into office. To quote the governor from just nine months ago (emphasis mine):

As a member of the Commission, I am committed to considering current federal tax credit applications, but until substantial reforms are enacted, state tax credits will not be issued.

The legislative session ends at 6 p.m., and the governor’s plans for the LIHTC should be clear shortly thereafter. If the legislature passes a bad bill and he signs it, it will have been a farce of a reform, but the onus of that failure will be shared with the legislature. Alternatively, if the governor does restart the program without legislative action, that’s a very, very different scenario.

The program is shuttered. If the program isn’t significantly reformed, it should remain shuttered. At one point, the governor would have found that uncontroversial, but here we are.

 

What’s the Rush to Restore the LIHTC?

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

As this year’s legislative session draws to a close, our lawmakers in Jefferson City are again acting as if any unspent money will burn holes in their pockets. Before passing the largest budget in state history, members of the House of Representatives jumped at the chance to potentially restart Missouri’s low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program. Despite the LITHC’s heavy cost to Missouri taxpayers, many of our elected officials appear content carrying water for special interests as opposed to truly helping the state’s many low-income individuals.

During the debate on the House floor, several legislators discussed the program’s benefits for communities and low-income individuals alike. It bears repeating that individuals can support increasing the supply of affordable housing without supporting the LIHTC. The LIHTC program is notoriously expensive given its low return on investment. One legislator commented that the last year the Missouri program issued credits, the state’s investment of more than $160 million only resulted in around 1,000 low-income developments. When combined with the federal portion of the credit, taxpayers are on average subsidizing each new development to the tune of at least $320,000. If most Missourians wouldn’t spend that amount on their own homes, why should they be expected to subsidize that amount for others?

Additionally, multiple legislators discussed the reform efforts as a way to improve the program’s efficiency. While it was good to hear legislators admit many of the faults of the program outlined in multiple auditor reports, their “reforms” are not enough. If policymakers accept the program is currently ineffective and inefficient, why not consider a different program that could work even better? As I’ve said before, the LIHTC program is far from the only way to improve housing options for Missouri’s low-income population. And even if it was, why wouldn’t lawmakers discuss including a provision that guarantees the program is revisited in future years to ensure newly added reforms offer measurable improvement?

Of course, the best outcome for Missouri taxpayers would be to leave the state’s LIHTC program dormant. This would save more than a billion dollars over a decade. With such little time left remaining this legislative session, why are lawmakers rushing to restart the LIHTC program when there is still a better deal for taxpayers to be made? Every bad idea deserves an endpoint; let this year be the LIHTC’s.

 

CTE in Missouri Is Not Aligned with Needs of Students or Employers

Posted on by Emily Stahly

Missouri students are potentially missing out on thousands of job opportunities because the career and technical education (CTE) programs in our high schools are not properly preparing them. While earning a credential or license can give high school graduates a jump start on college or a career, very few are earning credentials for jobs that pay well or that are in demand.  

During the 2017–18 school year, over 180,000 high schoolers in Missouri took at least one CTE class, but fewer than 28,000 concentrated (taking three or more classes) in any one area. What’s more, fewer than 8,000 students earned an industry-recognized credential (IRC), a signal to employers that the student has mastered some set of skills. Many Missouri students—especially those not interested in going to college—could benefit from earning an IRC and leaving high school career ready. 

A recent report from ExcelinEd shows that there are thousands of well-paying jobs that could be readily accessible to Missouri’s high schoolers if they were earning the right credentials. According to the report, Missouri met only one out of five indicators of a quality CTE program.

To put in perspective what kind of opportunities students are missing out on, let’s take a look at careers in just two industries. In 2018, some 617 students in Missouri earned an Automotive Service Excellence Certification. But there were over 3,600 job postings requiring that credential, and these jobs paid over $15 an hour last year. The unmet demand is also apparent in digital designing. There were over 3,300 job postings for Adobe Certified Associate and Adobe Certified Expert credentials each—again, these jobs pay at least $15 an hour—yet there were only 146 Missouri high school students who earned an Associate credential, and none received the Expert credential. Perhaps not enough students are interested in these careers to meet the demand, but are they even aware of these opportunities?

One way to improve awareness and options for students is through teacher bonus pay. If CTE teachers have skin in the game—for instance, $50 for every student of theirs who earns an IRC—they would have an incentive to get more students that could excel in a particular field working towards earning an IRC. Florida has such a program and students there earned over 140,000 credentials during the 2016–17 school year. Overall, one in six Florida high school students earned a credential, compared to just one in twenty high school students in Missouri.

Like many states, Missouri has a workforce problem. But with some simple changes, which other states have implemented successfully, we could increase the number of students earning credentials, while aligning those credentials to the job market. Good information paired with the right incentives can help move Missouri’s CTE in the right direction. 

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