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.   

 

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.

 

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