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.   

 

Municipal Checkbook Legislation Perfected in the House

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

The movement toward greater spending transparency in Missouri local government reached a milestone this week. A law requiring cities to submit spending records to the state was perfected in the Missouri House of Representatives—the furthest such legislation has gone to date. Perfection means that the bill, as amended, has been finalized by the entire chamber. Clearing a “perfection” vote is important because it often approximates whether a bill has enough support in the chamber for passage. My colleague Philip Oehlerking and I have been big proponents of ensuring that the public has access to this information, and the perfection of this bill is an important step in that direction.

And to be clear, the movement of this bill is part of a larger spending transparency reform arc. Last year the state began publishing its own spending online in a more digestible format, and legislation passed in 2018 now requires school districts to publicize similar spending details of their own. We’ll keep you posted on where the municipal spending bill goes, and whether cities will have to join other government units in Missouri in sharing their spending with the public. Such a requirement is long overdue.

If government can spend your money, they should be able to tell you where they spent it. And if they can’t, or won’t? That’s a problem.

 

Should Taxpayers Pay $10 Million To Reduce Streetcar Waiting Times?

Posted on by Kelvey Vander Hart

Is reducing the time someone spends waiting on a streetcar worth a $10 million-dollar price tag? The Kansas City Streetcar Authority certainly thinks so—they just spent taxpayer money on two additional streetcars, each costing $5 million.

These additional streetcars will be added to the current fleet of four that travels the two-mile loop from Union Station to the River Market. While the fleet currently has four streetcars, only three are usually in use; the remaining streetcar is brought out only during busy occasions. The two streetcars that were just ordered would increase the normal number in use from three to four.

Mike Hurd, the marketing director for the Downtown Council of Kansas City, explained the purchase:

We have so many times of the year that we have big events going and the current rotation of streetcars really is not enough to handle the demand. So being able to add streetcars and still being able to keep the service free is just fantastic.

Hurd’s comments need a correction. While the streetcar may not charge a fee to riders, it is not a free service—it is paid for by taxpayers. Instead of receiving funds from a small user fee, the Kansas City streetcar is funded by special taxing in an area called a transportation development district (TDD). Researchers at the Show-Me Institute have written frequently about these districts, and previously explained how a TDD is created.

The taxing rates within this TDD are not going up to pay for these new streetcars. Instead, the official position is that the KC Streetcar Authority will be using existing funds saved  from previously received TDD income. This raises a question: If the Authority is able to save more than $10 million dollars from this TDD, doesn’t that indicate that the district tax rate is higher than needed to fund normal operations?

Additionally, no data has been released to confirm wait times will be significantly reduced by adding two new streetcars to the fleet. If the goal is to add an extra streetcar to the daily rotation and hold two back for special events, why not test the idea by running the current fleet of four streetcars on a daily basis and measuring the results? It appears Kansas City officials are touting an untested solution to a potentially nonexistent problem, and using taxpayer dollars to bring it to life.

If there really are $10 million dollars in excess funds, maybe the Streetcar Authority should lower the tax rates in the TDD. Instead, residents are being asked to pay for expensive additions to an already expensive scheme. Is that really a good idea?

 

Yes, the Mayor’s Pre-K Program Is a Voucher

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

As Kansas City considers expanding pre-K on the April 2nd ballot, two things about the research should be made clear: pre-K programs often do not have the long-term results supporters claim they do, and the programs that do show results cannot be scaled up for an entire city. These facts aside, there is one good thing about the Mayor’s proposal: it’s a voucher. Mind you, the word voucher never appears in the Mayor’s 70-page implementation plan. The Mayor argued in an American Public Square panel discussion that his proposal was not a voucher. He said:

A voucher would be . . . taking public money and pouring it into a non-public entity. But pre-K doesn’t work like that and this tax doesn’t work like that. It’s not a voucher. What we are doing with pre-K instead of pouring money into [schools] from the public trough is we’re pouring more money into all of the [schools].

The mayor seems to think that money raised through a three-eighths percent sales tax is not the “public trough.” But his is a distinction without a difference; a program does not need to spend particular tax dollars in order to be considered a voucher.

It’s true, however, that many voucher programs use education dollars. National Public Radio, in an explainer piece on vouchers, said only that they are state dollars taken from “what the state would have otherwise spent to educate” children. Ed Choice, an organization that supports education vouchers, described vouchers as coming from “funds typically spent by a school district.”

Regardless of the tax source, vouchers are simply public dollars made available to families to offset the costs of the school they choose for their children, essentially functioning like a scholarship. Those public dollars can be raised from property taxes as in the case with local school funding, income taxes as in the case of federal programs, or sales taxes as in the case with the Mayor’s pre-K program. But they are all voucher programs.

It is understandable why the Mayor, in pitching his program to the education establishment, wants to avoid the term. Vouchers, and programs like it, have become toxic among public school bureaucracies since it would break their monopoly on public dollars for education. This is the main reason the public school districts in Kansas City oppose the Mayor’s proposal, but giving parents the power to choose which program is best for their kids is the strongest aspect of his plan.

Mayor James should be congratulated for recognizing and answering the demand for more and greater parental involvement in their children’s education. School choice is the trend in Kansas City and, despite its other significant shortcomings, his pre-K voucher program at least respects that.

 

 

Arizona is Pushing Universal Licensing? Yes Please!

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

If you’re licensed to fix hair, or fix plumbing, or fix ankles in another state, it’s sort of silly that Missouri would start with the presumption that you can’t fix those things in our state, too. Missouri has made positive strides on licensing in the past, but there’s plenty more that could, and should, be done.

And that’s why it was exciting to see Arizona take a big step toward that ultimate policy goal of greater licensure reciprocity, by putting forward “universal licensing” legislation. From the Reason write-up:

A bill introduced Monday in the Arizona General Assembly would allow anyone with an occupational license from a different state to automatically qualify for the same license in Arizona without having to retake classes and pass tests again—though they would have to pay a fee to the state board that administers the license, and would have to demonstrate that they were in good standing with the licensing authorities in their previous state. So-called “universal licensing recognition” would make it easier for licensed workers to move to Arizona and would do away with time-consuming and expensive requirements for license-holders who want to move across state lines…

Arizona already recognizes licenses from beyond its own borders for military families, and the new bill would extend that same privilege to other workers.

Last month the bill passed out of the Arizona House on a bipartisan vote, and it’s now before the Arizona Senate for further consideration.

The Arizona bill could go further in its reforms than it currently does. First, the bill’s provisions apply to “a person who establishes residence in [Arizona]”; incidental contact by an out-of-state practitioner, as might happen in a telemedicine context, isn’t enough to enjoy the licensing relief of the bill. Second, the bill still allows Arizona regulators to impose some financial and examination burdens on these workers, so time will tell whether the regulatory state in Arizona will be defanged here, or whether in practice these licensing boards will just get more creative in enacting barriers to professional entry.

Arizona’s bill is an incremental reform, but as increments go, it would be a pretty sizable chunk of better policy. It will be interesting to see if the bill becomes law, and if it does, how many states follow suit shortly thereafter. Missouri policymakers should keep a close eye on this legislation. It isn’t perfect, as I’ve noted, but it could be a good starting point for truly universal and reciprocal licensure reform.

 

Kansas City’s Pre-K Bait and Switch

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

On the April ballot, Kansas Citians are being asked to vote on a three-eighth cent sales tax to fund a universal pre-K program. But the benefits being promised to Kansas City voters are not from the type of program Kansas Citians are being offered. Proponents may be promising voters a Lamborghini, but their car lot is filled with mopeds.

Supporters for the value of pre-K point to a single preschool program, the HighScope Perry program in Ypsilanti, Michigan that ran from 1958 to 1962. The participants had been tracked over 40 years and the resulting data provide much of the basis for what supporters claim is the benefit of pre-K.

The Mid America Regional Council (MARC), which will administer the Kansas City pre-K program if approved by voters, claims in its 2018 “Status of Children and Families” report that (page 45):

Research shows that every dollar invested in early childhood education saves up to $13 in future social costs, leading to lower crime rates, fewer adults on public assistance, fewer teen pregnancies, and a stronger, more prepared workforce.

Mayor Sly James’s pre-K Implementation Plan for pre-K similarly claims (page 44):

. . . the public benefits accrued over time from children who attended HighScope Perry Preschool program in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at a rate of 13 to one.

These returns seem too good to be true. And they are. The 13-to-one return comes from a single study of the HighScope Perry plan published in 2005, which claimed:

For the general public, higher tax revenues, lower criminal justice system expenditures, and lower welfare payments easily outweigh program costs; they repay $12.90 for every $1 invested. However, program gains come mainly from reduced crime by males.

The HighScope Perry study was of 123 “low-income African-American children who were assessed to be at high risk of school failure.” Only 58 were randomly assigned “to a program group that received a high-quality preschool program at ages 3 and 4.” The high-quality program included:

  • Two school years of preschool running October through May;
  • A center-based program for 2.5 hours per day with “4 teachers for 20 to 25 children”;
  • Home visiting for 1.5 hours per week; and
  • Group meetings of parents.

Only 39 of the participants in this study were male (see footnote 3 here). In other words, Mayor James and MARC want voters to believe that a small-scale, intensive two-year education program conducted with 39 high-risk boys can be extrapolated to the more than 6,000 children in Kansas City.

Even other proponents of pre-K are more restrained in calculating possible returns. Economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman wrote in a 2017 research summary of that same HighScope Perry program (emphasis added):

Every dollar spent on high quality, birth-to-five programs for disadvantaged children delivers a 13% per annum return on investment. These economically significant returns account for the welfare costs of taxation to finance the program and survive a battery of sensitivity analyses.

As I pointed out in a recent American Public Square panel discussion about pre-K in Kansas City, the program Kansas City voters are being asked to support is nothing like the HighScope Perry program Heckman analyzed. The plan being put before voters does not have anywhere near the 5 or 6 to 1 ratio of child to teacher, will not include home visits, will not be two years, and will not spend as much per child as HighScope Perry did.

A recent blog post discussed the unimpressive findings on pre-K programs such as Head Start that more closely resemble what Kansas Citians are being offered. But using HighScope Perry’s results to pitch pre-K for all in Kansas City is nothing short of a bait and switch.

 

 

Pre-K in Kansas City Likely Won’t Deliver on Its Promises

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

In a recent post, I pointed out that the pre-K program being presented to Kansas City voters is significantly different than the programs whose results they point to. We very likely won’t see the 13-to-one dollar return on investment for pre-K claimed by Mayor James and the Mid America Regional Council (MARC). We probably won’t even see the 13 percent annual return projected by economist James Heckman. The research on programs like the one being proposed in Kansas City—such as Head Start and the Tennessee state volunteer pre-K program—suggests these programs are large, expensive, and absolute failures.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched the Head Start program in 1965. It was expanded in 1981 and now has a $9 billion budget. Operated in Kansas City since 2005 by MARC, the program works to provide:

Comprehensive, high-quality birth-through-five early education services that facilitate healthy development including physical and social/emotional development and prepare children for school success.

Is it working? No. According to HHS’s own 2012 report, “after the initially realized cognitive benefits for the Head Start children, these gains were quickly made up by children in the non-Head Start group.” The report indicates this finding is similar to other studies published between 1995 and 2010. 

A 2013 story in The Washington Post is a pretty even-handed write up of the value of pre-K. The author points out that extrapolating findings from the HighScope Perry study (an influential pre-k study of a small group of children in Michigan) to larger populations like Kansas City’s is highly questionable. In discussing the fade out of any initial Head Start benefit, the author wrote:

Some Head Start supporters, like Danielle Ewen, formerly of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), argue that this says more about K-12, and that what’s likely happening is that poor quality public schools are actually reversing Head Start’s gains.

If this is the case, children in the Kansas City Public School District can expect to see no long-term benefit whatsoever. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points not only to research on Head Start, but to large scale pre-K programs such as the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K (TVPK) program. In those follow-up studies, children in the control group soon outperformed those who received the preschool benefit.

Using the state test data and the full randomized sample, the evaluators report negative impacts for reading, math, and science scores at the end of third grade for children assigned to TVPK. The negative impacts on math and science are statistically significant and substantive: children randomly assigned as preschoolers to TVPK had lost ground to their peers who had randomly not been offered admission to the pre-K program.

Whitehurst revisits this in a 2018 paper in which he writes:

Unabashed enthusiasts for increased investments in state pre-K need to confront the evidence that it does not enhance student achievement meaningfully, if at all. It may, of course, have positive impacts on other outcomes, although these have not yet been demonstrated. It is time for policymakers and advocates to consider and test potentially more powerful forms of investment in better futures for children.

As we wrote in a previous post, policymakers in Kansas City may not be interested in confronting such evidence. This is especially true of Whitehurst’s observation that direct aid to families, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), “produced substantially larger gains in children’s school achievement per dollar of expenditure than a year of preschool, participation in Head Start, or class size reduction in the early grades.” 

Designing public policy is not easy. Neither is delivering effective education on a large scale. But we need to rise to the challenge of both. As it stands, the proposal of pre-K in Kansas City is unlikely to lead to significant long-term benefits for the children involved, especially if they matriculate into underperforming K-12 schools. A program with questionable efficacy that taxes the very low-income families it is meant to help seems, on balance, to make this plan more harm than help.

 

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