Who’s Afraid of Charter Schools?

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board wrote a fearmongering editorial about charter schools becoming a potential option for suburban parents. Much of the information was misleading and some of it was just plain wrong. So I decided to write an alternate version, with all the facts.

Charter schools could be coming soon to a suburb near you, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Before the Missouri Legislature expands the charter school experiment beyond urban districts in St. Louis and Kansas City, lawmakers must consider the risk it would pose to some of the strongest public school districts in the state.

Charter schools could be coming soon to a suburb near you, and that’s a great thing. As the Missouri Legislature considers making it easier to expand the charter school experiment beyond urban districts in St. Louis and Kansas City, lawmakers should think about the risk that sticking with the status quo poses to parents in public school districts across the state.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Rebecca Roeber, R-Lee’s Summit, would allow charter schools to expand into St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson County and cities like Columbia, Jefferson City, Springfield and Joplin.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Rebecca Roeber, R-Lee’s Summit, would make it easier for charter schools to expand into St. Louis County, St. Charles County, Jefferson County and cities like Columbia, Jefferson City, Springfield and Joplin by allowing groups other than the local school board to sponsor them.

Proponents have long insisted that the greater choice offered by publicly funded but privately run charter schools improves students’ education options. But charter school performance data over the past 20 years hasn’t yielded consistently positive results.

Proponents point out that the greater choice offered by publicly funded but independently run charter schools improves students’ education options. And charter school performance over the past 20 years has yielded consistently positive results both for the students who attend them and for the school districts in which they operate.

Like it or not, the flight of middle-class families to the suburbs has contributed to higher performance rates for suburban public schools. It’s far from clear whether the demand exists for new education alternatives outside urban areas.

Like it or not, the flight of middle-class families to the suburbs has contributed to higher performance rates for some students in some suburban public schools and lower performance rates for others. Regardless, it’s clear that the demand exists for new education alternatives in all types of school districts.

Roeber’s bill wouldn’t add additional funding to public education nor adequately address the lack of accountability that has been among the biggest complaints about urban charter schools. Charter schools that fail to meet the same educational standards as the local public school district can still be renewed for three years under her proposal.

Roeber’s bill wouldn’t add additional funding to public education. It would simply shift control over a student’s education funding to a public charter school, if their parent so chooses. If there is no demand for charter school in a district, there won’t be one. Charter schools that fail to meet the same educational standards as the local public school district can still be renewed for three years under her proposal, if the school has the support of the local community.

Some high-profile disasters have resulted from lack of oversight and accountability for charter schools. In 2012, Missouri shut down six Imagine charter schools in St. Louis. Students consistently performed worse on state tests than those attending St. Louis Public Schools while Virginia-based Imagine reaped huge profits from a real estate business

Some high-profile disasters have resulted from charter schools opening that shouldn’t have. In 2012, Missouri shut down six Imagine charter schools in St. Louis. And they should have been shut down because students consistently performed worse on state tests than those attending St. Louis Public Schools, while Virginia-based Imagine reaped huge profits from a real estate business. Unlike some local school districts with dismally low test scores, these schools are no longer serving students.

Last month, an investigation by Kansas City’s WDAF-TV found that then-Attorney General Josh Hawley secretly settled a lawsuit with a charter school the state accused of stealing nearly $4 million in taxpayer money.

Last month, an investigation by Kansas City’s WDAF-TV found that then-Attorney General Josh Hawley secretly settled a lawsuit with a charter school the state accused of stealing nearly $4 million in taxpayer money. Of course charter schools don’t have a lock on financial fraud, but when it’s discovered they’re closed.

About half of the 30-plus charter schools that have opened in St. Louis since 2000 have been shut down for academic or financial failure. That’s hardly a success model worth emulating.

About half of the 72 existing charter schools in Missouri performed higher than their district’s average on standardized tests in both reading and math. While some have been shut down for academic or financial failure, others have achieved a success that’s worth emulating.

Nationally, the picture looks even worse. The federal government has wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or opened and then closed because of mismanagement or other reasons, according to the Network for Public Education advocacy group.

Nationally, the picture looks even better. Over 7,000 charter schools are now serving nearly 3.2 million public school students in all types of districts. The federal government has helped most of these schools open through a grant program that charter school founders can tap for planning and implementation. While some of these schools did not ultimately open, and others have since been closed, research has shown that the time and money spent on planning is well worth it. We now know that charter schools that start strong, stay strong, and those that start weak don’t make it.

Parents in the districts targeted by Roeber’s proposal owe it to their children to scrutinize charter schools’ performance record and the ways they can weaken their traditional public school systems.

Parents in the districts identified in Roeber’s proposal owe it to their children to demand access to charter schools so that they can find a school that fits the unique needs of their child.

For decades, lawmakers touted charter schools as a way to help students trapped in chronically low-performing districts. But a conservative political movement is afoot to weaken public school education and divert resources to alternative institutions, including private ones.

For decades, lawmakers touted charter schools as a way to help students trapped in chronically low-performing districts because they work. But a political movement is afoot to return to the public education monopoly of the last century (or protect it where it still exists). The charter school sector has created thousands of unique and innovative alternatives and parents want them for their own communities.

The performance record of charter schools is far too spotty to merit expansion beyond urban settings. Roeber’s bill proposes a potentially bad fix for something that might not even be broken.

The demand for charter schools and the long-term impact they make possible merit expansion beyond urban settings. Roeber’s bill proposes letting parents, teachers and communities across the state decide if charter schools are right for them.

 

The Hidden Cost of Medicaid

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

Medicaid continues to consume a greater portion of Missouri’s budget, and the costs may be even higher than advertised. As lawmakers in Jefferson City continue putting together the state’s budget for the coming fiscal year, the version recently passed by the House includes less funding than the program typically requires.  And while I am generally supportive of measures aimed at lowering Medicaid costs, budgeting gimmicks should not be mistaken for true cost-saving reforms.

I’ve previously written about how the Medicaid program is expected to consume over 37% of Missouri’s budget this year, but in reality that number is likely closer to 40%.  When you see people writing or talking about the Medicaid budget, the numbers cited are normally those from when a given budget was originally passed. But for the last few years the legislature has been choosing to “set aside” some Medicaid funding when passing the budget, and opting to authorize those funds later in the year in what is called a supplemental.

None of this means that Medicaid recipients are at risk of being denied services, or that providers may not be paid, but simply that the program is not receiving all of its funding at the beginning of the year, as is typical for most state programs. Accurately predicting future health care costs is a notoriously difficult exercise, meaning the Medicaid program could easily require supplemental funding whether the original budget includes all the estimated costs or not. But shouldn’t we still try to accurately assess the cost of programs and budget accordingly? In order to get an accurate depiction of the program size, Missourians now need to look at end of the year Medicaid costs instead of the originally passed budget. The table below reflects how Medicaid funding increased during FY2018.

Total State Medicaid Appropriations

 

FY2018 upon Budget Signing

FY2018 w/ Supplemental

Percent Increase

General Revenue

$2,151,134,911

$2,279,436,520

5.96%

Federal Funds

$5,719,624,416

$6,049,570,336

5.77%

Other Funds

$2,781,427,284

$2,946,326,336

5.93%

 

 

 

 

 

Total

$10,652,186,611

$11,275,333,192

5.85%
         

Arguments for delaying a portion of Medicaid funding are not necessarily without merit. Delaying full funding reduces the risk of appropriating more funds than the program needs, and could even incentivize the department to find ways to provide the same level of services with less money. Any efforts that put downward pressure on Medicaid costs are certainly commendable, but work to actually reform the program still needs to be done. For those of us already worried about rising Medicaid costs, it’s bad news that costs are even higher than they seem.

 

Do Charter Schools Take Districts’ Money? Only If You Think Children, and the Funding That Comes With Them, Are District Property

Posted on by James V. Shuls

*See footnote

How would you respond if you stumbled across a headline that asked, “How much do farmers markets cost Walmart?” It’s a ridiculous question. It presupposes that the customer belongs to Walmart; that any time the individual chooses to buy cucumbers from a local grower or salsa from an aspiring entrepreneur, he or she is “robbing” the dominant grocer. That’s just absurd. Yet this is the standard frame we use when talking about education. We blithely assume that education is wholly different from any other field.

Consider, for example, a recent headline on the Education Writers Association’s website: “How Much Do Charter Schools Cost Districts?” It’s the same question, and it is just as absurd as when talking about groceries. Worse, it is unethical, because it dehumanizes children, reducing them to economic units. In this formulation, neither they nor their parents are individuals with aspirations, endowed with free will and the ability to act in their own self-interest; they are a mere funding stream for public school districts.

This type of headline is all too common. Most people wouldn’t even bat an eye at it. But this isn’t just semantics. It gets at the heart of the way many people view public education.

It is only in education that we presume the customer is the rightful property of a specific supplier and therefore “costs” the supplier when he or she goes somewhere else. Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with the public education system in the United States: We presume the tax dollars that fund a child’s education belong to the public school district and the child belongs in a public school seat.

If, heaven forbid, parents want to use those education funds at a charter school or a private school, they must prove that “choice” works. We demand that school choice programs justify themselves by increasing student achievement on standardized tests, or increasing graduation rates, or fixing decades-old segregation issues. We would never ask the farmers market to prove its tomatoes are bigger and juicier than Walmart’s as a condition of operation.

It doesn’t stop there. A few years ago, one writer went as far as to say, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school.” You can almost hear Snowball from Animal Farm repeating the mantra, “Four legs good, two legs bad.” It’s us versus them. We treat public education as if it — the system, the school district — were the ultimate good to be served. Just google “school vouchers” and look at the images. The internet is replete with political cartoons that characterize school choice programs as systematically dismantling traditional public schools, brick by brick.

Challenges to this concept are not new. In his 1958 book, Freedom of Choice in Education, Father Virgil Blum wrote that “our educational policy must be philosophically based on the dignity and transcendent value of the individual, on the integrity and freedom of the human person; it must be legally based on the Federal Constitution, recognizing the individual student clothed in all his constitutional rights.” We are no closer to that reality today than we were 60 years ago.

Our commitment to educating every child, regardless of wealth or ability, is a reflection of our highest and noblest ideals. What we do today in our public education system is a feat that was almost unthinkable even 100 years ago. Yet in the process of building that system, we somehow lost our purpose. Instead of the system serving the children, we now insist the children must serve the system.

If we are ever to change this, we must first change how we talk about public education. We can’t presume, as the author of the Education Writers Association piece did, that children and their funding inherently belong to the public school system. Do public school districts have less money when a student goes to a charter school or a private school? Absolutely — as they should. This is what happens in any industry when customers choose to spend their dollars at one place instead of another. More to the point, it is what happens when students leave a district school for any reason.

In the final analysis, we must realize that public education is not about the school system, but the students that it is supposed to serve. They have value. They have worth. They should have choices.

*First posted at the74million.org, found here.

 

Free Your City and the Growth Will Follow

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

One of the difficult things about public policy is convincing policymakers that they really don’t need to “do something” to solve a problem. The unparalleled economic success of the West—along with the unprecedented recent progress in eradicating poverty around the world—is due to unleashing the power of free people trading freely. This is true across continents as well as within cities. According to a study of economic freedom and population growth in the United States: “Simple statistical analysis indicates that metropolitan areas with higher economic freedom tend to have higher per capita incomes and faster population growth, which mirrors such prosperity metrics found in research on nations and states.”

The study found Missouri’s top two cities to be middle of the pack when it comes to economic freedom; of the top 52 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) Kansas City and St. Louis ranked 24th and 22nd respectively. Note that these are measurements of the city and the several counties around them, and so the policies of suburban communities like St. Charles and Johnson County are contributing to the whole.

The freedom index looked at three areas, each with three measures. Below are the three measures for each category, and St. Louis and Kansas City’s ranking in each category:

Government spending (Kansas City ranked 16th, St. Louis 20th)

  • General consumption expenditure by government as a percentage of personal income
  • Transfers and subsidies as a percentage of personal income
  • Insurance and retirement payments as a percentage of personal income

Taxation (Kansas City ranked 30th, St. Louis 20th)

  • Income and payroll tax revenue as a percentage of personal income
  • Sales tax revenue as a percentage of personal income
  • Revenue from property tax and other taxes as a percentage of personal income

Labor market freedom (Kansas City ranked 32nd, St. Louis ranked 33rd)

  • Minimum wage (full-time income as a percentage of per capita income)
  • Government employment as a percentage of total state employment
  • Private union density (private union membership as a percentage of total employment)

All the urban core areas studied likely scored worse than the larger MSA they were in due to higher sales, property and income taxes, lower incomes, greater government employment and the resulting higher costs of public pensions.

The irony of municipal public policy is that cities are filled with the doyens of “do something.” They argue that cities must increase taxes here and there to fund programs that do this and that to solve real and imagined problems. But the real success is not in top-down command-and-control economies but rather in open and free economies where the people are free to earn and invest. It’s true of nations and it’s true of cities.

 

Moving School Board Elections On-Cycle is Good for Democracy

Posted on by Michael Q. McShane

This week, the Missouri House Education Committee debated a bill that would move school board elections to the November general election date. Right now, many school districts elect their board members in April.

As this pithily-titled piece from the Brookings Institution argues, moving elections on-cycle will both drive up turnout and minimize the effect of organized interest groups. As the author writes:

By exploiting the occasional episode in which a change in state law forced localities to move their elections “on cycle,” [UC Berkeley Political Scientist Sarah] Anzia is able to provide some pretty rigorous causal evidence that off-cycle elections decrease voter turnout and equip organized interests (e.g. teachers unions) to obtain more favorable policy outcomes. Anzia’s findings mesh nicely with other work done by University of Pennsylvania Political Scientist, Marc Meredith, who found that when school boards are given the authority to choose election dates for raising revenue (e.g. bond elections) boards will “manipulate” the timing of elections in predictable ways to ensure an electorate that is most favorable to increased school spending.

That is why I was so surprised when the Missouri School Boards Association announced that it “strongly opposed” the bill. Why would that be? Why would the organization that represents school boards want to drive down turnout in the elections that elect them? I guess they’ll have to answer that one.

A common argument for keeping elections off-cycle is that it somehow keeps politics out of education. That is simply wrong. Schools are a huge state and municipal expenditure and are tasked with imparting skills and knowledge onto the next generation of citizens. Every day, we hand over our state’s most precious resource, its children, to schools. We live in a diverse state where different people have different views about what that education should look like. Any system that we devise to try and manage that will be political.

If education is going to be political, the best thing that we can do is try and make sure that as many of our fellow citizens as possible have the opportunity to make their views known. Moving elections on-cycle allows that to happen.

 

Transparency Measure Passes State House; Attention Moves to Senate

Posted on by Philip Oehlerking

If municipalities can levy taxes, then taxpayers should be able to see exactly how that money is being spent. That principle is now one step closer to becoming law.

Following last week’s successful perfection vote, the bill requiring cities to submit their spending records to the state cleared another hurdle by being voted out of the Missouri House this morning. The reform is now on its way to the Senate. The bill will help bring transparency to municipal spending, an aspect of government that is the focus of the Show-Me Checkbook Project.

Kudos to the leaders of the House for getting this bipartisan legislation out of the chamber! We’ll keep you posted on the bill’s progress as it works its way through the Senate.

 

Is St. Louis Successful?

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

What makes a successful city? Recently, the Show-Me Institute, in collaboration with the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, sponsored an academic research seminar to explore that question. The event featured presentations from prominent researchers and thought-provoking discussions among attendees representing over forty different universities and think tanks across the country.

So how should cities measure success? Typically, city success is characterized by periods of sustained growth, whether that growth is in population or employment. Booming local economies bring businesses to an area, and those businesses bring more people to a region who can then contribute to the same economy. The idea seems simple, but not every city is going to have a booming economy. So what can struggling cities do to turn things around and grow their economy?

Figuring out how to attract new residents and businesses is something cities of all sizes across the country struggle with. Aaron Renn, of the Manhattan Institute, argued that cities should take steps to harness their unique characteristics and build a more desirable brand. Gary Ritter, of St. Louis University, explained that quality schools are essential to the recruitment of businesses and their employee’s families, but also help adequately train the workforce for the emerging jobs in that city’s economy. Howard Wall, of the Hammond Institute at Lindenwood University, asserted that rapid population growth for cities over an extended period of time is rare and quite difficult, and that perhaps St. Louis’s success has been hampered by its previous growth.   

Eileen Norcross, of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, discussed some of her research surrounding the rise and fall of historically successful cities. She found ultimate success for older cities was tied to how it responded to the decline of the local manufacturing sector.  Despite her assertion that regulatory and institutional environments are more important for prospective businesses, many of these cities spent incredible sums of tax payer dollars to lure businesses without otherwise addressing the business environment. In the end, those moves hurt the city’s long-term financial health without providing the desired opportunity for future economic growth.

While there doesn’t appear to be a silver bullet for city success, the seminar provided a variety of ideas for research and reform, including occupational licensing, regulatory changes, and tax policy.

 

Welcome to the Club, New Mexico!

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

After years of positive reforms that seek to improve one of the lowest performing school systems in the nation, New Mexico’s newly elected leadership has decided to turn back the clock. Letter grades that were easy for parents to understand will be replaced with “text labels” that aren’t. Schools will now be rated as Targeted Support School, Comprehensive Support School, More Rigorous Intervention School, New Mexico Spotlight School, and Traditional Support School. Guess which one’s best? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? The answer is New Mexico Spotlight School—because that makes so much sense to parents.

And guess who also eschews letter grades for schools? Missouri. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) recently released the list of Targeted Schools (pretty bad) and Comprehensive Schools (the worst of the worst). Seemingly, this is to be compliant with the federal law to release the list of the lowest five percent of schools in the state in terms of performance, although neither list quite matched that mandate in numbers.

As I converted the PDF lists of Targeted and Comprehensive Schools to an Excel file that I could use (meaning merged with performance and demographic data), I kept having to remind myself which list had 64 schools and which had 323. Targeted and Comprehensive don’t carry much meaning to me. At least these 387 schools got some sort of label. The other 2,200 or so purposefully aren’t “labeled.” Rather, they get a score between 0 and 100 that reflects the number of possible points that a school received (with tons of extra credit points available) divided by their possible points. Parents in the state have been trained to look for the number 70, because that’s the threshold for accreditation.

So, which Missouri schools are doing well and which are doing poorly? Maybe ask your neighbor or the parents on the sideline at this weekend’s soccer game. They probably have some sense of what “most” people think are the “good” schools and which ones to avoid. They may be right, they may be wrong. I don’t recommend turning to DESE to figure it out.   

 

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