After 50 Years, Low-Income Students Are Still Being Left Behind-When Will Enough Be Enough?

Posted on by Emily Stahly

As part of the War on Poverty, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration pushed for comprehensive education legislation that became known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When signing the bill into law in 1965, Johnson stated, “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than five million educationally deprived children.”

But has education policy in the last 50 years closed that gap? Not even close. Back in the 1970s, students from poor households were as much as three to four years of schooling behind their wealthier peers. Fast forward to 2015, and that gap has virtually stayed the same despite pouring billions of dollars into the education system. Isn’t it time for a new approach—shouldn’t we start giving parents the power to control education dollars?

According to a recent study, there has been a persistent gap in academic achievement between low-income and high-income students for decades. What’s more, student performance overall hasn’t gotten better; any gains seen in earlier grades dissipate by the age of 17 when students are preparing to go to college or enter the workforce

This is despite numerous local, state, and national efforts to provide quality education for low-income kids. In the last 50 years, we have provided services to students with disabilities, evened out school funding between rich and poor districts, instituted a number of accountability systems (Missouri’s accountability system is in its sixth iteration since 1991), and increased funding overall. In fact, the report notes, “Overall school funding increased dramatically on a per-student basis, quadrupling in real dollars between 1960 and 2015.”

To show just how bad the achievement gap between high- and low-income students is in Missouri, check out the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Beginning with 2005, the data points represent the percentage of 8th grade students in Missouri who were at or above grade level in math and reading, separated by eligibility for the National School Lunch Program (which is for families with incomes below 185 percent of the federal poverty line).

8th grade math proficiency

8th grade reading proficiency

For low-income 8th-graders, only 16 percent were proficient or advanced in math in 2017. The number for reading is hardly better, with only 22 percent of students considered proficient or advanced. Compare that to students who were not eligible for the National School Lunch Program: 42 percent of these kids were at least proficient in math and 47 percent were proficient or advanced in reading. And the gap in both subjects has gotten larger since 2005.

What are the consequences of this failure? As I discuss in my two recent essays, “Intergenerational Poverty in Missouri” and “Creating Pathways for Self-Sufficiency,” quality education and the ability to move up the economic ladder are closely linked. How can Missouri expect to break cycles of poverty if it can’t even educate low-income students well?

Meanwhile, charter schools and private school choice programs are providing opportunities unmatched by many traditional public schools. Graduates from IDEA Public Schools, a charter school network founded in the impoverished Rio Grande Valley in Texas, have a 100 percent college acceptance rate and half of the class of 2012 acquired a bachelor’s degree within six years after enrolling in college. In Florida, tax-credit scholarship recipients have higher college-going and degree completion rates, and charter school students score higher on tests than students in traditional public school students.

So where do we go from here? Should we be satisfied with reforms that just tinker around the edges of our education system and increase spending indefinitely for programs that are failing? Or should we allow more competition and innovation through choice that will make schools more responsive to families of all economic backgrounds? Based on the failure of the education bureaucracy to close the gap in the last 50 years, it seems Missouri’s best option is to start trusting parents. 

 

Texas Advancing Its Own Checkbook Transparency Legislation

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

It appears that local government transparency measures are catching on across the country! The latest example comes from Texas. The Houston Chronicle has the details:

Governments would no longer be able to keep secret the amount of taxpayer funds spent on concerts, parades and other entertainment events if a bill advancing in the Texas House is passed into law.

House Bill 81, sponsored by Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, would require that information to be available to the public.

The bill, which cleared a key vote in the House on Wednesday, was prompted by the city of McAllen’s refusal to release records about how much it paid pop singer Enrique Iglesias for performing at a holiday concert. News reports later showed the city lost more than half a million dollars on the event. [Emphasis mine]

The proposal appears to be but a slice of a larger transparency push in the Lone Star State. Later in the article, Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, made that clear, and also made a policy point that we often make—that if governments can spend it, they should report it to you:

“Taxpayers have an absolute right to see how their money is spent, whether on small projects or large ones,” Shannon said. “This, along with other transparency proposals at the Capitol, will help repair and strengthen the Texas Public Information Act.”

Our own work showed that some Missouri cities are willing to charge the public thousands, and even tens of thousands of dollars, to see what they’re spending the public’s money on. That is bad policy and completely contrary to objectives of good governance. Cities already have to file financial reports with the state that are based around their revenue and spending practices; it is altogether reasonable that the underlying transactions that form those reports be made available to the state and the public.

 

Electricity Choice Would Be Good for Missouri Consumers

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Whether it’s buying a car or choosing where to go for dinner, Missourians like having choices—but when it comes to electricity, Missourians are left with few. In fact, currently those of us who want electricity from the grid must get it from a single monopoly utility provider.

But that may soon change. Senate Joint Resolution 25 would finally give Missourians a choice about choice, at least for our electricity. The legislation authorizes a statewide referendum on electricity competition that should spark a much-needed conversation about the benefits of reforming the state’s 100-year-old regulatory structure and requiring those that provide our power to compete for customers rather than letting them take Missouri taxpayers for granted.

For most of the 20th century, every state operated under an electricity system similar to Missouri’s. Local monopoly utilities provided power to customers and were heavily regulated by state utilities commissions. Electricity rates were set based on the utilities’ expenses (plus a return of profit), leading to a situation where the more a utility spent, the more money it made. This system encouraged wasteful spending and discouraged innovation, but since every state had the same system, it was hard to compare what was to what could be.

Beginning in the 1990s, however, a number of states began to restructure their electricity markets, allowing for greater competition. Today, more than a dozen states have adopted some form of choice for electricity.

And the results have been positive. From 2008 to 2016, the average price of electricity decreased 8 percent in states with competition, while rising 15 percent in monopoly states. Unfortunately, Missouri has gone in the wrong direction on this front; electricity rates in the Show-Me State increased by nearly 40 percent between 2008 and 2016. While Missouri once had among the lowest electricity rates in the nation, today electricity rates in Missouri are above the national average.

Lower electricity prices nationally have translated into billions in cost savings for consumers. For example, one recent study found that the introduction of electricity competition in Illinois resulted in $37 billion in consumer savings from 1998 to 2013. Another study found $15 billion in savings for electricity customers in Ohio over the course of this decade.

The fact that competition leads to cost savings for consumers shouldn’t be surprising. One of the chief ways businesses attract customers is by offering better quality services at a lower price than their competitors. Businesses under competition are constantly looking for new ways to improve their products or make them at a lower cost, and that applies to hamburgers, to health care, to schools, to electricity . . . to just about everything.

By contrast, when utilities are shielded from competition, they tend to resist innovation and are slow to adapt to changed circumstances. In the coming decades we are likely to see major changes in the way the electricity system operates. New technologies will give consumers much greater control over where they get their power and how they use it. Competition will help ease this transition.

Missouri itself increasingly faces competition from states such as Illinois, which can offer businesses the advantages that electricity choice provides. It’s time for Missouri to think seriously about whether to join more than a dozen other states and allow electricity competition. It would be good for the state, good for our businesses, and good for our families.

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.

 

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