The Charter School Discipline Problem that Isn’t

Posted on by Michael Q. McShane

Mark Twain is credited with the saying, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

For years now, critics (and even some supporters) have known for sure that charter schools had harsher discipline policies than traditional public schools and suspended or expelled students at much higher rates. According to new research from Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, that just ain’t so.

Malkus used data on school suspension rates collected by the federal government to compare charter schools to the traditional public schools that surround them. As Malkin's graphic (above) shows, in most cases, there is no substantial difference in the rate of suspensions between traditional public schools and charter schools. In fact, while 17 percent of charter schools do see rates higher than neighboring public schools, 29 percent see rates that are significantly lower.

It’s time we put to bed the idea that charter schools are draconian institutions where the joy of learning is taken from students and where harsh punishment is meted out for the most minor of infractions. The data do not back that story up.

Unite the Region with a Sensible, Effective Transit Vision

Posted on by Graham Renz

In a recent Post-Dispatch column, Tony Messenger called for an ‘AND’ approach to transit planning in the St. Louis region. He thinks the region should collectively fund and pursue projects x and y, not either project x or y. In his view, that means regional leaders should unify behind efforts to expand MetroLink, St. Louis’s light rail system.

But the AND approach isn’t a simple matter of uniting the region for a common goal. Where MetroLink is concerned, the AND approach will benefit some at the expense of others. In more concrete terms: the City needs the County’s tax revenue if MetroLink expansion—in any direction—is going to be feasible. But the County has made clear it isn’t enthusiastic about funding the city’s favored north–south expansion. (Note: the County’s transit sales tax revenue is triple that of the City’s. See p. 67)

So, should the County and City just take their toys and go home? Of course not—the AND approach isn’t the problem. The problem is the goal the AND approach is supposed to achieve: a costly $2.2 billion expansion of the inefficient and underused MetroLink, which would mostly lie within City limits.

Recognizing this fact lifts the shroud of mystery surrounding regional infighting. MetroLink expansion is so expensive it would force the County to fund the bulk of a project that will primarily benefit the City. It’s so expensive that it creates an either/or approach to regional transit planning.

But what if, instead of an immensely expensive light-rail expansion that would require every tax dollar it could get its hands on, regional leaders invested in a system of bus-rapid-transit lines that could be constructed and operated at a fraction of the cost. That is, imagine a project that wouldn’t gobble up every last dollar the region has to offer, would actually serve regional transportation needs, and didn’t pit County against City.

If the region’s transit priorities were more in line with its resources, there might not be an either/or approach to transit in St. Louis. Messenger got things backwards: MetroLink expansion isn’t the victim of regionalism—it’s the cause of it.

So long as a costly MetroLink expansion is the goal, it doesn’t matter how well the region’s leaders get along. With the north–south expansion in particular, the City can win only at the expense of the County. That is an either/or approach. If leaders are to unite behind a transit plan, that plan will need to effectively serve all of the region’s residents at a price they are all willing to pay. 

Teacher Licensure Screens Will Not Improve Public Education

Posted on by James V. Shuls

The problem with bad public policy is that it often sounds like good public policy. These ideas have enough of a rational basis for us to buy into them. Upon closer inspection, however, we realize that they aren’t what we had hoped for.

This lesson hit home with me as I was reading about the new certification requirements for public school teachers. Missouri has long had certification requirements. For instance, traditionally certified teachers must earn an education degree, and they have long been required to pass a content exam. Over the past few years, however, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has revised many of the requirements, making it more difficult to become a teacher. Prospective teachers must take a personality inventory (which I’ve written about before), they must pass a more difficult content exam, and now they must also pass a performance assessment.

To many, these sound like good ideas because they are sprinkled with a bit of the truth. We want our public school teachers to be excellent. If we put these screens in place, we’ll get better teachers—or so the thinking goes. The problem is that while teacher licensure screens are an unproven way to improve teacher quality, they are a sure-fire way to shrink the teaching pool.

Take licensure exams, for instance. As I have shown in the journals Educational Policy and the Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, licensure exams are very loosely related to teacher effectiveness. Yes, people who do well on tests tend to be better teachers, on average, but there is considerable variation. In other words, some people who do well on a content exam are terrible teachers; while some who do poorly on a licensure exam are great teachers. Screens like this let in some bad teachers and keep out some good teachers.

In a recent working paper, “Can we simply raise the bar on teacher quality?” I show how simply making licensure exams harder will have a negligible impact on the overall quality of teachers in the field. Yet, as a result, we would reduce the number of teachers; further exacerbating teacher shortages. These shortages would do the most harm to disadvantaged schools attempting to compete for the limited supply of teachers.

Missouri’s newest test, the Missouri Pre-Service Teachers Assessment, seeks to move beyond testing only content knowledge. Here is a description of the test from the Southeast Missourian:

The first three parts of the exam are written, and the last has a video component, except in areas where shooting footage is difficult.

In the first part of the exam, student teachers are assessed on how well they know their students and the context of the school in which they’re teaching.

The second part tests them on how they plan to check whether their students have learned the information they taught.

In the third part…student teachers are judged on how they plan to teach their lessons, and the fourth part allows them to demonstrate how effective their approaches have been…

Once again we have put in place a policy that sounds like a good idea. In the end, however, it too will not likely have a positive impact on public education in Missouri.  The problem is that we simply cannot capture great teaching in one of these assessments. Think back to the best teacher you ever had. Would these exams make him or her stand out from his or her peers? Probably not. 

Licensure screens for teachers sound like good public policy, but they aren't. If we really cared about teacher quality, we’d be better off to open pathways into the profession, support teacher professional development, and get rid of bad teachers.  

Let Kansas City Be Kansas City

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

For our summer vacation, my daughters and I made a 4,000-mile trek through the desert southwest to San Diego and back. We drove through plenty of cities and towns, each very different from one another. Some were thriving, and some were struggling, but each had an independent identity. We saw the casinos of Las Vegas and the playful seals of La Jolla, California, and we stood on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. These places—both big and small—have their strengths, and they are playing to them.

What about us in Kansas City? To judge by city leadership, our biggest need is to look like other places—we are constantly mimicking other cities with convention hotels, streetcars, and entertainment districts.

In a speech at the KC Library in July 2015, (video here) professor Heywood Sanders discussed the folly of convention hotels and fielded a question about promoting Kansas City. The question-and-answer begins at about 49:49 and is worth hearing in its entirety, but in short he says:

Don’t do what everybody else is doing. Okay? Period.

There is an old saying that goes along those lines, “don’t think if you’re doing exactly the same thing that everyone else is doing except not quite as big or good or well, that it’s going to be any different.”

Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what Kansas City is doing: building the same things that everyone else is building, except perhaps not as ambitious. Proponents of the Jazz District, for all its many challenges, at least want to promote something that is unique to Kansas City. Let’s think about what we have that no one else has, and promote that.

In the coming months, the Show-Me Institute will be talking more about what Kansas City has to offer. It’s a worthy discussion, and it ought to be the first step in promoting ourselves rather than simply engaging in municipal me-tooism.

Uber and Kansas City Go at It Again

Posted on by Graham Renz

Kansas City hasn’t been the friendliest place for ridesharing/transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft. Although regulators in the city of fountains haven’t been as bad as those in Philadelphia who compared Uber to ISIS, they still managed to receive a ‘D’ in terms of their friendliness to TNCs.

First, the city and TNCs got into a bit of a spat. (Listen to Mayor James’s thoughts here.) Then a compromise was reached, allowing TNCs to operate in the city. But now the terms of that compromise are coming up for review, and guess what? The city wants more control, and TNCs don’t want them to have it.

The major proposed changes to the City’s TNC ordinance include: (1) eliminating a 30-day orientation period and replacing it with a 30-day temporary permit; (2) forcing drivers to acquire additional insurance and increasing the company’s permitting fee from $45,000 to $70,000; and (3) handing all background-checking duties to the city.

  1. The Star and regulators have cast a 30-day orientation period—during which TNC drivers can operate without a city permit—as a loophole for “dangerous” and “undocumented” drivers to “overcharge passengers or do something much worse.” While these worries are likely overblown, simply replacing the orientation period with an issued-on-the-spot permit is unlikely to threaten TNCs’ ability to operate in the city. In fact, if this measure were implemented, Kansas City would still be one of the easiest places to start driving for a TNC (compared to, say, Dallas). If this change assuages the concerns of regulators at little to no cost, so be it.
  2. Requiring extra insurance and increasing the fees TNCs pay to the city are a different story. In short, the heavier insurance burden forces TNC drivers to carry the same insurance as taxi drivers. It requires insurance to cover incidents even when, for example. a TNC driver is involved in an accident while providing a ride but not working through the ridesharing app. This, in conjunction with higher city permitting fees, will place a significantly greater financial burden on drivers and will likely keep many from entering the market at all.
  3. Lastly, and most controversially, handing background-checking duties to the city’s preferred vendor over those contracted by TNCs is complicated. This proposed change would keep driver information centralized and thereby prevent unqualified drivers from going from one TNC to another. But it isn’t clear that the vendors TNCs currently use for background checks are any less thorough than the city’s preferred vendor. If it came down to just this change, Kansas City regulators should ask themselves: is conducting their own background checks worth driving Uber and Lyft out of town for good? Although officials have public safety in mind, as my former colleague Joseph Miller has argued, they should let riders assess the level of “risk” they are willing to take.

So, overall, and unsurprisingly, city regulators are vying for greater control in a market averse to red tape. Not all of the proposed changes are onerous, but many would put additional barriers between consumers and service providers. Perhaps city leaders will learn how to get out of the way this time around.

To learn more about the proposed ordinance changes, and to leave your comments, click here. 

Recess-Something So Loved, Only Bureaucrats Could Kill It

Posted on by James V. Shuls

I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t like recess. As a former elementary school teacher myself, I can tell you that recess is a special time. Kids can run, play, talk with their friends, and just be kids; and teachers can have a few uninterrupted minutes to prepare for the next lesson or take a much-needed bathroom break (When else do they have time?).

Even the research literature is pretty positive about the benefits of recess. For starters, recess increases physical activity, which we know has many positive effects on a child’s health and well-being. Yet, recess is more than simply physical activity. It is a time of unstructured play, which helps children develop socially and emotionally. Moreover, numerous studies have found students are more on-task in the classroom when they have had recess.

With so much love for recess, it is puzzling that Rhode Island lawmakers recently felt compelled to pass legislation requiring 20 minutes of recess a day. Where had recess gone?

In fairness, recess hasn't completely been eradicated from schools. In fact, almost all elementary students in public schools have at least one recess a day. The minutes spent at recess, however, seem to be shrinking—thanks in large part to government policies. In an effort to improve public schools, lawmakers saddle them with rules and regulations.

First, states severely micromanage the calendar of schools. Some states stipulate the start and end dates and the required number of minutes in the school year (in Virginia, the law regulating the starting and ending dates even has an informal name—“The King’s Dominion Law”—after the mega-amusement park that fights to keep kids out of school until after Labor Day). With these regulations in mind, most school funding systems ensure that schools will not go above and beyond the minimum requirements, because they will not get additional dollars to support their efforts. In effect, the state has defined the length of the school year down to the minute.

Second, government agencies have placed an inordinate amount of pressure on schools and students to perform in tested subject areas. Following the infamous A Nation at Risk report of 1983, states began developing accountability systems based on academic learning standards, and schools were assessed via standardized tests. The accountability movement leapt to the national stage with No Child Left Behind in 2001. Tests give us valuable information, but they simply cannot capture everything we care about in education. Moreover, we don’t (and wouldn't want to) test students in every subject. As a result, things like art, music, and recess become “less important” in accountability systems.

With a fixed amount of time in the school year and increased pressures to perform on standardized tests, many school administrators have been motivated to shift instructional time to tested subjects, such as math and English language arts, and reduce minutes for recess.

Fortunately, there is a better way. Rather than build a system of rules and compliance, where we must regulate everything—including recess—we could build a public education system of choice. A system that provides administrators with the power to lead their schools and offers parents the ability to choose would be much more conducive to good decision-making. Just take a look at recess: the average third-grade student in a private school spends roughly 30 more minutes a week at recess than their public school counterparts.

Fewer regulations, more choice, more recess—now that's sound policy.

Welfare Reform: Time to Scrub Our Welfare Rolls

Posted on by Michelle Wickman

What if we told you that the state is cutting welfare checks to people who are living out of state, incarcerated or even deceased? A new state law has been passed to aid in the removal of ineligible recipients from welfare rolls. There's more work to be done in reforming welfare in Missouri, but this is a step in the right direction. 

Will TDD Funding Skate through Chesterfield?

Posted on by Michael Highsmith

At 7:00 pm tonight Chesterfield City Hall will be hosting a Council meeting to discuss, among other things, the extension of a 3/8-cent sales tax to help fund a new ice rink. The current transportation development district (TDD) was implemented 10 years ago, and tonight as a sign of public transparency the council is being asked to give a recommendation to the TDD board for or against the use of the TDD to fund something completely new—the ice rink. If I were a member of the Council, there are a few questions that I would like to have answered before making any decision:

1. Is it the city’s place to facilitate funding for a recreational and sports activity center like this? The trend in Missouri of developers asking for financial assistance for private projects merely shows that they are common—not that they are needed. Is the funding of an ice rink the best and highest use of taxpayers’ money? We understand the proponents are presenting the ice rink as a not-for-profit venture. Nonetheless, should Chesterfield ask the TDD board to extend a sales tax (effectively a tax increase) in order to fund an activity that is an easily excludable good—in other words, an activity that can be funded by user fees? Is this proposal highly regressive—does it shift the cost of a special activity away from taxpayers who are better situated to bear the cost, and on to lower-income taxpayers?

2. Why are taxpayers being asked to shoulder over 38% of the development costs for a new ice rink when the ice rink just down the road is being shuttered because it could not make a profit? With the Hardee’s Ice Plex set to shut down next spring and be taken over by Topgolf, what evidence do we have that a new rink down the street would fare any better than its predecessor over the long run? What is the return for taxpayers?

3. How does the voting process work for this TDD? Is it true that, if the TDD board votes in favor of the proposal, only residents in a few select subdivisions will be allowed to vote on extending the sales tax? Is it equitable for just a few Chesterfield residents to make such a determination when the sales tax impacts everyone who makes retail purchases in Chesterfield Valley?

4. Can we make an educated decision on this proposal with the information currently available? The proposal is asking for $10 million in public funds to be put toward the development of a $26-million facility. These numbers seem excessive for a program (TDDs) designed for the renovation of transportation-related infrastructure (unless there will be a street hockey program). Of course, the TDD may be much broader than that—which raises other questions. Hopefully, more details regarding the specific use of public funds and the precise benefits to the public at large will be disclosed. Otherwise, one is left to wonder about the decision-making process and its transparency. If I were on the council, I would keep in mind that the money being spent in the first instance belongs to the taxpayers.

 

 

If You Give a Developer a Subsidy

Posted on by Michael Highsmith

One of my favorite books as a child was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  “If you give a mouse a cookie,” the story begins, “he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.”  Before long the mouse receives a haircut, a nap complete with a bedtime story, and more. The lesson I took away was to be wary of open-ended gift giving.

A similar story has been taking place in the St. Louis area during recent years.   After threatening to locate its headquarters in downtown St. Louis back in 2008, Centene was given a $22 million cookie from Clayton.  Now it’s back for a $100 million glass of milk.

Currently headquartered in downtown Clayton, the healthcare giant is proposing a $772 million expansion along Forsyth Blvd.  Construction would include office space that Centene could use for its own employees or lease out to other businesses.   The expansion may benefit the city, but between Centene’s success, their reasons for expanding, and Clayton’s thriving downtown, it’s hard to justify asking taxpayers to contribute.

Centene is a rapidly growing enterprise.  In 2015 the company added 4,800 jobs nationwide and revenue grew 35% from $15.7 billion to $21.3 billion.  This fact alone shouldn’t deter incentives, but when we combine this fact with Clayton’s developmental success there isn’t much of an argument for the proposed property tax abatement.  Supporters of tax breaks argue they should be used if an area would otherwise lack investment, but in an area as affluent as Clayton potential investors have not been hard to come by. 

But if subsidies aren’t offered to the Fortune 500 company, isn’t it possible that it will pack its bags and move somewhere else?  It’s possible, but not probable.  Centene has spent millions acquiring land parcels along Forsyth over the past four years, so expansion has been on the horizon for a while.  What is much more likely is that without subsidies the expansion will not be quite as large, and perhaps it shouldn’t be.

Centene houses around 1,000 employees in Clayton and leases roughly half its office space to other companies.  The new plan is modeled on the same structure and would be large enough for 2,000 Centene employees and office space that the company could then lease out to increase its revenue.  There’s nothing wrong with a business diversifying its income portfolio, but the red flag should go up when this opportunity is only available with the help of taxpayer money. 

Tax breaks have become ingrained in our development culture, and they have created an unfair environment where some companies gain competitive advantages over others.  It does our community little good to continue this trend, and Clayton should decide if giving away a full glass of milk would benefit anyone.

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