Reducing Mandatory Minimums

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

In the 2017 legislative session, we published posts in favor of reforming mandatory minimum sentencing and expanding parole. Those measures are back in this session, perhaps with more support, and we’ve submitted testimony in favor of both.

The case is fairly straightforward, and our testimony is brief. Because Missouri’s incarceration rate is so high—8th in the nation—we are on course to need two more state prisons at a cost to build and operate of $485 million over the next 5 years. Giving judges the flexibility to avoid mandatory sentences where there are extenuating circumstances will not only save taxpayers money, but also reduce the burden on individuals trying to piece together their lives.

What’s Going On with High School Graduation Rates in Missouri?

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

If you google “What is the value of a high school diploma?” you get some pretty inspiring results: “Though it may seem like a cliché, the value of a high school diploma cannot be overstated. Graduating from high school offers tangible career benefits as well as intangible value to the holder.” Or: “A high school diploma is more than just a piece of paper. It’s a promise we make to our children: put in the hard work to earn one, and you’ll be on the path to achieve your goals in life.”

I guess it’s good news that Missouri’s graduation rate in 2017 was nearly 90 percent—higher than the national average. But have we really put those students on the “path to achieve their goals in life”? Or has a high school diploma become little more than a participation trophy?

Consider that in 2017, the percentages of Missouri 11th-graders who scored Proficient or above on the state assessments were 35 percent in English/language arts, 15 percent in math, and 20 percent in science. And, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), just 42.5 percent of 2017 graduates were “College or Career Ready”—meaning that they met or exceeded the state standards for the ACT, SAT, COMPASS, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) or they received and industry recognized credential (IRC).

This is backed up by a 2011 study commissioned by the Missouri Department of Higher Education, which found that 64 percent of Missouri students who were first-time undergraduates at public two-year institutions took at least one remedial course, including 56 percent who needed remedial math. At public four-year institutions the numbers were better, but still one in five students took at least one remedial course. Taking remedial courses is expensive and discouraging.

Recently, stories of “graduation rate malfeasance” have surfaced in nearly 10 states. Nationally, graduation rates are at an all-time high even as rates of proficiency have stagnated or declined. What good is it to increase graduation rates if academic performance and college readiness aren’t improving?

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, moves much of the responsibility for school accountability back to states. ESSA required states to submit accountability plans that include graduation rates as a measure of school quality. Most states are now implementing their approved plans and, sure enough, graduation rates are taking off. Does that mean we’re holding schools more accountable? Probably not.

As was pointed out in a recent essay by the Show-Me Institute, accountability plans—even the most complicated ones – can be toothless, gamed, and even ignored. Missouri has an opportunity to design and implement an accountability plan that gives parents meaningful information about how their child’s school is performing. They can also give parents options when their child’s school doesn’t measure up or isn’t a good fit.

A high school diploma should be more than a piece of paper. Missouri’s education system is responsible for doing more than just issuing diplomas – they should be making sure that there is something behind the diplomas they issue.

Without Consequences for Failing Schools, Students Lose

Posted on by Emily Stahly

A high-school diploma is supposed to mean something. A student who earns one should be ready to attend college or a trade school, or to start working right away. But a diploma’s value depends on the quality of the school that stands behind it. And down in the bootheel of Missouri, Hayti High School’s class of 2019 has gone all the way from kindergarten to its junior year in high school without ever attending a good school by the standards set by the State Board of Education’s (SBE).

In statewide testing, less than half of the students in the district scored proficient or advanced in English and only about a third scored proficient or advanced in math. The latest average ACT score was 16.5, nearly five points below the national average of 21. Has the Hayti School District sufficiently prepared the class of 2019 to succeed after graduation?

Hayti has been provisionally accredited for over a decade, but that does not necessarily mean the state has taken adequate steps to make sure the district improves. The state monitors provisionally accredited districts, but there are few real consequences if their performance stagnates—and the SBE has been quick to upgrade districts even before sustained progress has been made. Unfortunately, the Missouri School Improvement Program is a series of graduated but mostly meaningless interventions.

My recent essay for the Show-Me Institute, “Accountability in Missouri’s Public School System,” goes into greater detail about our state’s struggling districts and argues that if accountability is defined as tangible consequences for district and school personnel, the state has been at best inconsistent in holding districts responsible for poor performance.

Some examples: Jennings and Caruthersville, both formerly provisionally accredited, were reclassified as fully accredited by the SBE even though they failed to meet the academic goals the districts set themselves. Not far behind Hayti, Calhoun R-VIII, and Hickman Mills have been provisionally accredited for 5 or more years.

Unaccredited districts also have been let off the hook despite a lack of significant progress. The SBE voted unanimously to classify Kansas City as provisionally accredited even though the former Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Commissioner said the district had not established a “consistent trend of improvement.”

Two other once-unaccredited districts—Riverview Gardens and Normandy—failed to meet most performance targets set by the state before the SBE granted them provisional accreditation. In the case of the St. Louis City School District, its scores in all performance areas had not improved significantly . . . but it was unanimously approved for full accreditation.

These examples call into question the commonly held assumption that the state holds traditional public schools accountable. One could argue that the 1993 transfer law—although separate from DESE’s Missouri School Improvement Program—is the best form of accountability for districts. When students have the right to leave for a better school, unaccredited districts must improve to avoid having to pay other districts to educate their students.

Now that there are no unaccredited districts in Missouri, however, students in districts like Riverview Gardens and Normandy no longer have the right to transfer. Before thinking of this as a cause for celebration, we should recognize that this creates a trap for students whose districts are performing just well enough to prevent triggering the transfer law, but not well enough to provide a genuinely good education.

Families should not be waiting years or even decades for schools to make small gains or else become unaccredited so that students can transfer out. Under the current accountability system, the kids are the ones who face the consequences—whether they have to take remedial classes in college or cannot get a well-paying job—not the district or school leaders. Our accountability system is failing, and students deserve better than being forced to stay put in poorly performing schools.

Tell Me Something I Didn’t Know: We Don’t Need a Task Force for Facts about Charter Schools

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

Yesterday I wrote about the latest delaying tactic proposed by opponents of charter schools in Missouri: a bill to create a task force to study various questions regarding charter schools—questions that could be answered by spending an hour on the internet researching what we already know about charters.

That was my initial reaction to this political attempt to deny Missouri parents public school choice, but there is so much more to be said.

Charter schools are no longer a new thing. They’ve been established for decades in many different forms in many different states. Initially, they may have been experiments that policymakers either chose to, or were forced to, accept in their public school districts. Today, they are an established sector of public schooling that continues to build on what early pioneers accomplished. Millions of U.S. public school students have spent their entire K-12 educational experience in charter schools, and more than 1.5 million public school students have received their high school diplomas from charter schools. A wealth of research, experience, and anecdotal evidence has shown that charters are a good option for many families and a vital option for families who live in failing school districts and don’t have the ability to move.

I’ve stood beside parents when they were fighting, with limited means but great determination, for their kids to have a chance for a decent life. Because that’s what this issue means for them—quite literally. Charter schools, without question, have made great strides in educating students who had been dismissed for decades as too difficult to educate. For low-income students of color in our worst-failing urban districts, charter schools are a lifeline.

Too many kids grow up, often without fathers, in tough neighborhoods that have abandoned properties and high crime rates. But if they can go to a good school, with principals who are allowed to keep order and teachers who have freedom and incentives to tailor the curriculum to the needs of their students, they have a chance. Cynthia Brown, a parent of a student at North Side Community School in St. Louis—a charter school that was opened in one of the highest-need neighborhoods in the city—put it this way, “It’s setting a stage for a change. When you have children who are being brought up right, being educated right, the outcome is much different. There is so much turmoil in St. Louis. A lot of it has to do with the lack of education.” The students at North Side Community School are twice as likely to be proficient in reading and three times as likely to be proficient in math than as peers at other high-poverty elementary schools in St. Louis.

The good news is that these charter schools are helping families change their trajectories. Many of them will make it out. We know that. Nine of the largest charter school networks in the nation that serve disadvantaged students and have enough alumni to track have college graduation rates that are three to five times the national average for low-income students. Not only are these students off the street and out of jail, they are starting their adult lives with college degrees.

And don’t think for a minute that these successes are only happening in poor, urban districts. Hundreds of public school districts in the U.S. are using charters as a tool in their toolbox—when enrollment is growing faster than they can add buildings, when enrollment is declining and their small-town school might be forced to close, and when parents seek unique educational programs that their public school district cannot or will not offer. Last year, five of the top ten high schools in the U.S., according to US News, were charter schools. These are five highly rigorous, suburban high schools with long waiting lists.

And yet, opponents have continued to trot out the same tired arguments for decades. Charter schools don’t cost more than public schools; typically, they cost less because charter school students only get, on average, about 78 percent of the funding that traditional public school students get. And they produce more bang for the buck. Charter schools don’t cherry pick or discriminate. They don’t charge tuition. They don’t teach religion.

To those of us who work in this field and have seen the same excuses for all these years, it’s clear that  where charter schools aren’t made widely available, it’s because they threaten a powerful establishment. In these places, charter schools might be reluctantly allowed to compete with the poorest performing schools, but they are barred from competing elsewhere, lest they expose the “good” schools as really just mediocre or worse. They threaten the public school monopoly because, if forced to compete, the monopoly may lose market share. Charter schools are agents of change, and in some places, the public education establishment, all its talk notwithstanding, is viscerally afraid of change.

This isn’t the case everywhere. In many districts, charter–district collaboration has led to increased funding for all schools, sharing of best practices and professional development, unified data and information systems for parents, and improved outcomes for all students—charter and traditional alike. While détente is possible, collaboration, as it turns out, is even better.

But, unfortunately, not for the parents and students in Missouri.

In Missouri, every time someone makes a real proposal to expand charters, the threatened interest strikes back. The public employee unions lean on liberal lawmakers from the urban areas, while school superintendents and school board members and “public spirited” corporate types lean on conservatives from the suburbs and the rural areas. Wealthy and middle-class parents—the kind of people who would insist on change if their kids were at stake—make their own arrangements for their own families and stay out of the debate. And most elected officials aren’t willing to buck the tide—not when the only real interest on the other side are marginalized people who may not vote at all and, if they do vote, probably won’t figure out who is blocking their chances anyway.

So the politicians vow to study the problem, or cite canards about charter schools in interviews with reporters who don’t know anything about the subject, or pass legislation purporting to make charters widely available while regulating them in a way that ensures they will never open.

But we’ll keep fighting. We’ll keep making the arguments; we’ll keep recruiting a few precious champions, whether liberal or conservative, and we’ll keep trying to persuade the other lawmakers to do what’s right. And we’ll keep helping parents demand what they know they deserve—high-quality education for their children, regardless of where they live.

License Reciprocity Proposal Could Be A Major Reform, But Vigilance Will Be Necessary

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

It may not be the sexiest topic, but licensing reform is a big deal for providers and consumers in lots of industries. The economics are straightforward: Government restrictions on the supply of service providers tend to push up the cost paid by consumers for that service and tend to decrease access to it. Licensure can also harm practitioners who are qualified for a job but not allowed to do it. We’ve talked about these phenomena in many contexts, particularly for electricians, hairbraiders and doctors.

Fortunately, legislators are starting to have regular, and serious, debates about licensing issues. 

One bill in particular, already passed by the House, could go a long way toward unwinding some of the problems imposed by a patchwork of licensing regimes nationwide—by accepting professional licenses obtained in other states here in Missouri. I say it “could go a long way” rather than “would,” for two reasons.

First, the law won’t apply to professions governed by “the state board of registration for the healing arts, the state board of nursing, the board of pharmacy, the state committee of psychologists, or the Missouri dental board.” That reads like a carveout for state professions with formidable lobbying arms, which is to say that while it’s probably a rational political consideration, it isn’t justified on policy grounds. Alas, it is what it is.

Second, and more subtly, for the professions that would be impacted, a lot still depends on the Boards that govern them. According to the text, a Board “shall” issue a license in reciprocity with another state, but only

if it determines that the licensing requirements in the jurisdiction that issued the applicant’s license are substantially similar to or more stringent than the licensing requirements in Missouri for the same occupation, profession, or activity . . .

That the same Boards which historically have helped to lock out competition are also empowered to determine the grounds of licensing sufficiency could be a problem. I can imagine some Boards left unchecked simply determining that Missouri’s standards are pretty much above everyone else’s standards—beating back reciprocity that way. Even examination requirements that could be met by other states’ licenses might still be imposed by these Boards “if [a Board] determines that waiving the requirements for the applicant may endanger the public health, safety, or welfare.”

Again, the devil is in the details, but it is often the details that determine whether a law is effective or not. Whether Boards will adhere to the intent of this reform is a huge concern here.

License reciprocity would be good for pracititoners and consumers alike. Hopefully this reform would bring about meaningful reciprocity. But if it doesn’t, in practice, deliver reciprocity for all of the professions it contemplates bringing reciprocity to, this incremental reform will have to be revisited to ensure its intent isn’t subverted.

Paralysis (of progress) by analysis (of what we already know)

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

Parents in Missouri who want to choose a high-quality school for their children, regardless of where they live, were dealt yet another potential setback last week. The Chairman of the House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee introduced House bill 2531, which proposes a 17-member Charter School Task Force to study charter schools, with a December 31, 2019 deadline to present their findings. This bill, if passed, will result in over a dozen professionals—all but two of whom have no connection to Missouri charter schools—taking nearly two years and spending time and resources, to write a paper that doesn’t need to be written. Charter schools have been around for nearly 30 years and enroll over 3 million students. They are not exotic new things that must be studied for the next 22 months.

Researching the issues described in the bill isn’t a job for a “task force.” It’s a job for Google:

  1. What is the mission of charter schools? Actually, there was originally more than one.
  2. How are charter schools funded? Here is a detailed state-by-state breakdown of charter school funding compiled by the Education Commission of the States.
  3. What is the “overall functioning” of charter schools? I’m not clear what this means, but charter schools function like all public schools, except they use time, talent, and technology in more innovative ways.
  4. What is the academic performance record and what are the accountability standards for charter schools? Here is some information on charter school academic performance, including charter school students in St. Louis and Kansas City. And charter schools are held to the same accountability standards as traditional public schools, except that they are also accountable to their sponsor and to their parents.
  5. What are the demographics of students attending charter schools? Here they are, including the enrollment and retainment of students with disabilities and students who are English language learners.
  6. What are the governance, management responsibility, oversight responsibility, and sponsorship for charter schools? Fortunately, there is an outstanding organization, the National Association for Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), that can provide volumes of information on each of these topics.
  7. What fiscal responsibility do charter schools have? The National Conference of State Legislatures has already done substantial work on this.  

Twenty years ago, charter schools were new and untested, but since then, they have been studied exhaustively. Now it’s time to give more parents in Missouri a chance to choose them. In fact, in a 2014 survey, one in six Missouri parents indicated that a charter school would be their first choice for their children if they had access to one. Do those families and students really need to wait another two years for this latest delaying tactic to run its course?

A cynical person might think this is no more than an effort to avoid political responsibility. If the Chairman is determined to deny parents the ability to choose a charter school—which this bill is clearly designed to do—time and resources could be saved by simply stating that position. A lengthy study of things we already know won’t provide anything except political cover for those whose hostility toward charter schools wouldn’t yield to evidence anyway. Parents and students in Missouri should at least be respected enough to be told the truth.

Would Trump Banish Sunlight to Protect American Jobs?

Posted on by Andrew B. Wilson

As president of the most powerful country in the world – and a man with the utmost confidence in his own judgment – would Donald J. Trump dare to tell the Sun, that fiery ball at the center of our solar system, “You’re fired”?

It seems so, if we take him at his recently tweeted word (“Trade wars are good, and easy to win”) and take the liberty of injecting him into the center of the argument found in the “Candlemaker’s Petition,” a satire of protectionist tariffs written by the great French economist, Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850).

In this classic economic parable, published in 1845, the manufacturers of “candles, tapers, lanterns, and street lamps” join forces with the producers of “tallow, oil, resins, and alcohol” in demanding protection against a powerful foreign competitor – namely, the sun. They ask for a law ordering their countrymen to keep all windows and doors covered during the day. Their petition states:

We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced.

Even in pre-electrical days, if a government were to order everyone to switch from sunlight to candlelight, it might create a number of jobs in candlemaking and related industries. However, it would also impoverish a far larger number of people by forcing them to replace a free and plentiful resource with an inferior yet costly product. In this case, the money people would spend on additional lighting products would raise profits for candlemakers – but as a needless expense for everyone else, it would lower disposable incomes and reduce productivity across the board (forcing even candlemakers to work in poorly lit conditions).

The same logic applies today if the president proceeds with plans to slap a 25-percent tariff on steel imports, along with a 10-percent tariff on aluminum imports. Above all, such duties would hurt a thousand or more people for every one they help – limiting choice and pushing up prices for most consumers, while imposing a significant burden on steel-dependent industries that employ 6.5 million people, or close to 50 times the number of U.S. steelworkers (140,000).

In the opening words of his essay, Bastiat paid mocking tribute to politicians opposed to free trade, saying:

Gentlemen: You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and have little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

Free markets and free trade come down to the same thing: voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. It makes no difference whether that happens within a country or across national borders. In the absence of job- and growth-destroying government coercion, the buyer or consumer holds the upper hand. In a competitive marketplace, unless buyers agree to part with some of their money for someone else’s product, there is no trade and there are no transactions.

With his recent tweet, President Trump seems not (or pretends not) to understand that basic idea. Let’s hope it is pretends.

Car Wars II: Revenge of the Cronies

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Back in 2014 I wrote on this blog and at Forbes about a legislative attempt to force companies like Tesla to sell cars through a middleman in Missouri. At the time, I wrote that “Missouri should not be out protecting businesses and business models, especially when doing so is clearly against the interests of consumers.” And so it remains today, as a new effort is afoot to force car manufacturers to hire middlemen to sell their vehicles.

As famed economist Milton Friedman (and others) have emphasized again and again, being “pro-business” is not the same as being “pro-market” or, in this case, pro-consumer. If consumers want a more personal touch with their car buying decisions, then there will be a market for the car dealership experience. And if they just want an electric car direct from the manufacturer, shouldn’t they have that option, too?

I won’t belabor the point too much since this is well-trod ground, but I do want to highlight this video featuring Friedman, and the Friedman quote below, to reiterate the problem here of playing favorites against consumer interests.

You talk about preserving the free market system. Who has been destroying it? The business community must take a large share of the responsibility. You must separate out being pro-free enterprise from being pro-business.

Missouri should take Friedman’s point to heart and let consumers decide for themselves what they want from their car-buying experiences.

 

Helping Ex-offenders

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

I recently had the opportunity to testify on behalf of SB900, a bill that would remove some barriers to hiring ex-offenders. As with the Ban the Box initiative—which may not actually be helping people—this is an effort to make sure that those who have been convicted of felonies are given a real opportunity to become productive, tax-paying citizens. Unlike the case with Ban the Box, the barrier is the government itself.

Under current law, the Missouri Lottery Commission is prohibited from licensing anyone who has been convicted of any felony from selling lottery tickets. This means that these men and women—regardless of the type or severity of their crimes—are effectively barred from working at many convenience stores and gas stations. If this bill is adopted, employers have more flexibility in hiring. While they are not required to hire convicted felons, they are not barred from doing so either.

Research shows that ex-offenders who are unable to find employment are more likely to re-offend. A 2014 study by the Indiana Department of Corrections concluded that the ability of an offender to find work after prison was “significantly and statistically correlated with recidivism, regardless of the offender’s classification.” A 2016 study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research concluded that:

In 2014, overall employment rates were 0.9 to 1.0 percentage points lower as a result of the employment penalty faced by the large population of former prisoners and people with felony convictions. For men, their employment rate was 1.6 to 1.8 percentage points lower.

These barriers to employment are significant. A survey of The National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction database, a project of The Council of State Governments’ Justice Center, shows 221 mandatory barriers to employment in Missouri due to a criminal conviction. While some of these make sense, others do not.

Common-sense reforms can remove unnecessary legal barriers to ex-offenders becoming productive members of our communities. What’s more, they amount to the government cleaning its own house rather than trying to pass the buck on to businesses.

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